Part of Ralph Agas’s map of Oxford, 1578 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the days before mobility scooters, it was the ornaments and the net curtains, running in ribbons along the terraces of St Thomas’ Street, that betrayed the presence of its aged population. Smoke and hops wafted through the gate of the Lion Brewery and over the west of the city, though no-one crossed its silent threshold, and John Coombe House, my home for the year, had dipped more than a toe into the parish church’s ancient bone-yard. A headstone, bearing the sorry tale of childhood mortality in the Pumfrey family, leered at my window. In the city library, maps showed that this silent, mouldering backwater that connects the castle to St Thomas’ church had once been Oxford’s main thoroughfare. Now it was a powerful expression of the passing of time.

The derelict (and now demolished) Tricorn Shopcentre, Portsmouth (Photocredit: Johnfield1)

Formerly, a collaboration between Tamar Yoseloff and the photographer Vici MacDonald, charts London’s glorious dereliction. The collection is structured as a sonnet corona, indicating not only her affection for urban decay but also, through the recycling of lines from the first 13 sonnets in the final poem, the transformative power of the city. The opening sonnet, Capacity, presents the despair of poverty, or addiction: ‘Fat chance you’ll ever break out of here, / this depository for great mistakes / you’ve made your home. Just enough room / for a bed and a stool, a cell of sorts, / for a man of thin means. Lean times’. The ironic ‘fat chance’ of the expansive first sentence is in tension with the meagre fragment of ‘Lean times’. London is a city of contrasts and even somewhere as iconic as Westminster, the privileged few in the Abbey cloisters are living a spit away from deprivation. The sheltered accommodation of the poverty trap is presented as providing a stability worse far worse than prison: at least prisons are designed to hold humans. Depositories provide secure, windowless storage for superfluous objects. Yoseloff’s volta makes an unexpected appearance at line six, suggesting that, in the big smoke, uncertainty and change are the only certainties – for ill, or good. ‘But I’m a girl who’s capable / and culpable, who knows the value / of a pound. You can’t resist the give / of my carapace, my caterpillar lips, my capacious thighs’. The use of the second person makes this poem feel less lonely and hopeless than MacDonald’s accompanying photograph of Capacity House, an ugly mailing house tucked away behind Tower Bridge. However, the extended sestet throws the first line into uncertainty: ‘Fat chance you’ll ever break out of here’. Why isn’t this voiced in the first person plural? Is it poverty he’s escaping from, or a relationship? The speaker’s ‘carapace’ and the ‘caterpillar lips’ lend the poem’s sexual images a repellant quality and evoke the easy come, easy go relationships of the street.

Doors eschews the obvious subjects of crumbling Brutalist architecture and the end of Britain’s love affair with concrete. Instead, Yoseloff trains her gaze on terraced housing. ‘Rows and rows, either side of the street, / stretching ahead of her, like mirrors / in mirrors. Behind each, a different shade / of carpet; the fine dust of misery’. This first quatrain is outstanding. The repetition of rows and the thinness and meanness conjured by ‘stretching’, creates the faceless cynicism and hostility city dwellers feel when someone has the temerity to knock at the door. ‘Mirrors in mirrors’ suggests infinity and economically conveys the scale, the Sisyphean toil, that the Jehovah’s Witnesses face as they attempt to deliver ‘The Good News That No One Will Hear’. Yoseloff’s line break at ‘shade’ also invites the reader to see the street as populated by ghosts: shadows flitting behind frosted glass but never seen. Across the line break, shade is reconfigured and pokes fun at our uniform lack of imagination, as we paint our walls with endless variations on magnolia and carpet our floors with symphonies of beige.

Ghost sign, vacant commercial property, Market Square, Banbury (Photo credit: johnfield1)

The found X-Zalia Night Cure revels in the advertising of yesteryear that, somehow, defies death, clinging to the sides of buildings and bridges: ‘for cuts, wounds, bruises, scratches, / burns or scalds, eczema, rashes, / any break or wound in the skin, / diseases caused by insects, vermin; / catarrh, rose cold, colds in the head, / influenza, poisoned blood, / piles, fistulas, leucorrhœa, / hives, shingles, diarrhœa’. The comic rhyming of leucorrhœa and diarrhœa highlights the outrageousness of the advertisement but also has an elegiac quality, as poetry flakes from our walls and leaves us poorer.

Given that the whole collection clocks in at 196 lines, Formerly achieves an impressive range. The seamier side of our great capital, the ebb and flow of its buildings and people, is captured in its lyricism, ugliness and brutality. Formerly is an intricate love letter to London and Vici MacDonald’s photographs form a rich counterpoint.

Buy Formerly from Hercules Editions

• Tamar Yoseloff blogs here
• Vici MacDonald blogs here

Demonstration outside a fast food restaurant (Photo credit: peoplesworld)

It’s just easier to think in shorthand. Certain brands – political, commercial, or artistic, trigger knee-jerk reactions of love, or loathing. And so it was that I entered a MacDonald’s restaurant for the first time since MacBirthday parties. I expected to loathe it, hoped even. The objective was to help some teenagers with Down’s Syndrome to order drinks of a hue which the day centre had decreed to be free of a forbidden colourant (and to get the right change which, it seems, can be quite an issue if you have Down’s). We’d hardly sat down before staff gathered for a hushed confab at the till, and they were definitely looking our way. Typical. Then a woman, who turned out to be the manageress, came to the table, asking whether we’d like to see how Big Macs are made, and soon my group was in the kitchen, being proffered with drinks and food. I had assumed that I knew how a busy, indifferent world works, but that afternoon revealed a hitherto unseen vista of human kindness. When I walk past those golden arches, arches with the power to trigger a range of emotions, I remember those young people – and the manageress of MacDonald’s, Fleet.

Bubbles – Sir John Everett Millais (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In her prose poem, Bubbles for Reuben, Chrissy Williams presents her reader with a slice of summer: ‘Amanda blows bubbles for Reuben who chortles under the catkins. Jim watches from his chieftain’s seat, made by a woodworking friend who only just realised his wife is a whole person separate from their life together. Bubbles drift towards Jim in a cloud and his face blinks through them’. The prose poem form lends the scene the quality of a snatched Polaroid, as things as fragile as an English summer day and a lungful of soap bubbles are sketched on the page. The chieftain and his seat suggests a fulcrum, something sturdy and dependable, the still point in the community. The fact that the seat is wooden contributes to this sense of rootedness and its status as a gift lends Jim a certain authority. However, his epiphany throws his world, and ours, into uncertainty. Suddenly, ‘it’s Jim who is moving, rushing through the sunny air’ and we think again about the significance of those bubbles.

A lazy day at the beach in Irrational Games’ Bioshock Infinite (Photo credit: JBLivin)

In Flying Into the Bear, Crissy Williams delights us with the unexpected, challenging our assumptions by snatching moments of beauty from surprising places. The title Robot Unicorn Attack, for example, wrong-foots those who think that the tabloid press tells us all we need to know about video games. ‘Attack’ plays to preconceptions about the nature of video games while the first line enacts a metamorphosis, as the simile incarnates the abstract in our mind’s eye: ‘Possibility bursts like a horse / full of light, accelerating / into a star. Explosion. Hit / <X> to make your dreams / crash into stone’. This is perfect for video games, as there is no horse, just lines of code flying through a hot processor at breakneck speed. This poem also informs our reading of the collection’s title. In Penned in the Margins‘s anthology, Adventures in Form, Williams’s poem ‘this is love’ is coded in HTML: ‘<p><a href=”www.cupoftea.uk.com”>this is love</a></p>’ demonstrating that new skills are required to read the subtext of our age. Like the violent title, the line break at ‘Explosion. Hit’, goads the reader into associating video games with physical violence but the following line undermines this, reminding us that this is virtual world in which even defeat is a choreographed, aesthetic experience and simply a matter of perspective.

Into the woods (Photo credit: kern.justin)

Flying Into the Bear offers the reader a virtuoso range of forms. In The Lost, Williams offers something akin to a sonata, as her epigraph, the opening lines of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, offers the exposition: ‘Nel mezzo del cam min di rostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita’. The succeeding lines, culled from eight translations, riff with this material, creating something which feels like a dark version of Frost’s The Road Not Taken. ‘At one point, midway on our path in life / When I had journeyed half of our life’s way / Halfway along the road we have to go / I came to in a gloomy wood / In the midway of this our mortal life’. As we attempt to construct a text from these fragments, some roads become metaphorical, while others feel more literal. The ground shifts beneath our feet, creating something hypnotic, desperate and full of regret.

It is easy to see why Chrissy Williams was anthologized in a number of sections of Tom Chivers’ Adventures in Form, and Flying Into the Bear is an exuberant, dynamic collection in which little is as it first appears. The unexpected transforms the prosaic into something altogether more memorable.

• Chrissy Williams blogs here.
• Chrissy Williams’ Tumblr account.

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• Liberating Constraints – Tom Chivers’ Adventures in Form

BLW Telegram Table (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When my phone buzzed on that July morning, its screen read SOMETHING’S HAPPENED. DON’T WORRY. I’M OK. The brevity of text messages usually adds to their throw-away quality, but this one might as well have been wirelessed from an ocean liner, holed below the water-line. And the exhortation not to worry? Well, that had me worried. Break-time reconnected me with the world beyond the classroom and the talk was all tubes, buses and bombs. My girlfriend worked at the Royal Middlesex and travelled on the Piccadilly Line. It remained impossible to contact her for several hours. That evening, with no way to travel to work in the immediate future, she was driving to mine down an empty M40. The roadside matrices read: MAJOR INCIDENT IN LONDON TURN ON YOUR RADIO – a scene from a science fiction movie. The day’s sickening events reminded me of the fragility of our lives and dreams and, as my girlfriend travelled westwards, I knew that I wanted to share my life with her, and I knew that I had better get on with it.

Old gate latch (Photo credit: deflam)

Fiona Moore’s opening poem, Postcard, is spare and haunted. ‘Three days, and already I could write / a dissertation on the fastenings of gates’, she writes. The caesura after ‘Three days’ makes the first line falter before it has even begun. The pause also serves to highlight the phrase, which conjures thoughts not only of death, but also of resurrection. The poem then launches into a series of careful observations of the fastenings of gates. Each appears to have been seen for the first time and to have been created for an absent man, as one has a ‘bolt with a spring that’s always too strong’ and there’s an ominous note in ‘the double gate’s hard-edged central loop // with its guillotine rise/drop’. Having spent the last few years living on a farm, I smiled at ‘the frayed / Gordian knot of orange nylon twine, avoided // by climbing at the hinge end’. However, there’s something raw in this image: the knot suggests a problem too difficult to undo without a knife, without a painful wrench and, as a response to the death of a loved one, this poem is loaded with unresolved grief. Each stanza comprises a couplet, suggesting togetherness, yet the walk is solitary, and the presence of the lost other is palpable in the unfamiliar gate fastenings.

Cuff-links (Photo credit: jronaldlee)

The careful structuring of these poems allows Moore to wrong-foot her reader with devastating results. The Shirt, for example, opens: ‘I didn’t find it for months, your shirt / bundled into a corner in the airing cupboard. / I shook it out. It had been cut / with long cuts, all the way up the sleeves / and up the front, so it looked like a plan / of something about to be put together. / They must have had to work so fast to / save you there was no time to unbutton it’. Again, Moore’s first line is raw, as her speaker uses the impersonal pronoun ‘it’ even before she uses the word ‘shirt’, either suggesting that this item of clothing has assumed totemic significance and has no need of a name, or that even saying the word shirt is difficult. Language is cruel, as the shirt requires the possessive ‘your’, though there is no you to own it. Dramatic as this symbol is, it feels positive, as plans and work imply creative acts. However, this shirt, itself hidden in a corner, demands that the speaker accesses the memory that ‘in three weeks the same thing / would happen to another shirt, a favourite, dull cotton whose thick weave made it look / as if all the pink shell-grains of sand / had come together on one beach’. This is when the poem hits the reader – with force. We were primed for some freak accident, a brush with death but now the effort and drama of our best medical care is revealed as a futile tug of war with death. The violence done to this shirt is more difficult to cope with, as this one is endowed with emotional significance. Its weave has been the subject of intense scrutiny: an eloquent expression of intimate time together, a complex symbol of love and loss.

Easter Wings, George Herbert (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1010101010… reads as a contemporary twist on George Herbert‘s Easter Wings. However, Herbert the Anglican priest has a font of faith to draw upon and so, as humanity reaches its nadir through its own deliberate fault and Herbert’s lines wilt in sin, God’s intervention allows ascent and Herbert’s lines grow like a poetic wing-beat. In Moore’s poem, no such possibility of redemption or resurrection is allowed and her lines shrink with mortal inevitability. ‘Your death works in binary mode / on/off, forget/remember – / a cold code to decipher, / too late for us’. We are a secular society and nowhere is the pain of a godless of the universe felt more keenly than in our attitudes to death. Reading Moore’s poem, I ache for Herbert’s eventual flight on Easter wings, but this is not for us.

Despite its personal impetus, The Only Reason for Time asks existential questions, and Moore’s poetry is honest and dignified. The humdrum details of domestic life are observed with precision and each note the collection strikes rings true. It takes no shortcuts and smoothes no corners. Yet, above all, this collection is testament to the endurance of the human spirit and, despite Fiona Moore’s restrained articulation of the pain of loss, something does come of nothing; these terrific poems, wrestled from the darkness, matter so much because the now is all we have and we need the inspiration to have the courage to love – and lose.

Buy The Only Reason for Time from HappenStance Press.

Read Fiona Moore’s blog, Displacement.

St Peter’s Basilica (Photo credit: Sarah Price Photography)

Training to be a priest in Rome, St Peter’s Basilica inspired awe and reverence. It wasn’t just because the dome soars to the heavens, shot through with shafts of golden light. No. A visit to the excavations below the Basilica, where I walked the streets of the Roman necropolis just beyond the site of Nero’s circus, was enough to make any faithful Catholic stop and think about the veracity of the claim that this church is built, both physically and spiritually, upon the bones of the martyred Peter.

Calla Lily (Photo credit: chiaraogan)

However, I was never quite able to look at the place in the same way after viewing the eight faces of the plinths on which Bernini’s great baldacchino rests. At first glance, each is carved with a relief of a woman’s head and a whole lot of scrollwork. However, viewed in sequence, you’ll see a woman’s face contorted in the agonies of childbirth and the scrollwork below… Well, that contorts and enlarges too – until a baby’s head pops out. There, as tourists gawp at the great baldacchino, and at the Altar of the Chair of St Peter, the Renaissance asserts its riotous secular carnality. Blink and you’ve missed it.

The Farnese Hercules (Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For many, the sonnet is love poetry, often presenting love as inexpressible, spiritual and immortal. In Pistol Sonnets, John Hartley Williams delivers something more carnal. In Naples, the reader is transported to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, but not in the rapt tones of the TV art evangelist. Although we have eyes, we fail to see the ‘Boys whiter than Venus / Girls with thighs like Zeus / The museum is bedroom / In which marble has fun’. Composed as a series of simple statements, this gender bending glam rock hedonism ought to be obvious to even the most simple-minded.  Yet, to the tourists, ‘Its cool and boring in here / The tourists look sick with innocence’. ‘Cool’ and ‘boring’ have a range of connotations: to the uninitiated, the marble might look cold, lifeless and dull, but cool also suggests stylish, classy sexual attractiveness. Suddenly ‘boring’ feels more virile than dull. As Williams moves into the sestet, a cruel line of dialogue satirizes the tourists’ tepid terms of endearment and itinerary-driven lack of spontaneity: ‘O look, dear, this is the Farnese Hercules’. Jupiter replies with contempt as an X-rated Ozymandias: ‘Yes, and I’m Jupiter / I’m the filthpot of the planets. Watch me / Sex a nymph’s stone crotch with my tongue’.

Stubble (Photo credit: far closer)

This sets the tone for much of Pistol Sonnets: a warm-blooded and often unsettling experience in which desire and sex keep the world spinning. The Bastille, whose Sadean title evokes male dominated sexual violence, presents women as sacrificial, as martyrs at an auto-da-fé: ‘Between your legs is a field of razed stubble / They have set light to you, burning you off / The smoke of your scarred skin fills my nostrils’. Again, Williams plays with uncertainty as ‘razed’ evokes images of destruction and mutilation, as well as shaving. Either way, the woman’s body has been appropriated to satisfy desire. However, at the volta the tables turn and, like Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, she is able to use desire as a weapon. ‘What excites me / Is the drawn sword of your satisfaction / Your implacable withholding of basic supplies / The curved block of your sex / The falling blade of your sighs’.

Shakespeare, Sonnet I (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Williams attacks the sensibilities of his gentle reader at every turn, mocking bardolatry in the same terms as his attack on gallery crawlers. In Guest List, the guests are dull and predictable: ‘Bankers with crocodile handkerchiefs / Teachers holding bitten-into apples / Neighbours for noodle salad / Cyclists with one clip too many / Then, of course, the lovers in bandages / And those truth-soured Judases, the poets // The ear-splitting obviousness of the latter / What makes them think we’ve not heard it before / Spouting rhymes as they corner the Queen of Occasion / Savouring each morsel of thee, thou, thine…’

It’s hard to disagree with Williams’ sentiments. Poetry was dark, sexy and dangerous way back when, so why shouldn’t it be now? This is a world-weary, noir collection of sonnets in which there is no easy correlation between desire and relationships. If Robert Browning were around today, then he might have been writing sonnets like these.

Buy Pistol Sonnets from Salt Publishing

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• Cigarettes and Alcohol – John Hartley Williams’ Café des Artistes

Norrington Room, Blackwell’s, Oxford (Photo credit: TonZ)

Today’s Guardian reports that Amazon Marketplace is hiking its fees up for third-party traders. In a piece published in the same paper this time last year, Tim Waterstone vented some serious spleen, charging Amazon with ‘build[ing their] brand on a reputation for absolutely rock-bottom pricing’ and that customers ‘Go and browse through all the books there, in Waterstones [...] then put them back on the tables (fingered and soiled) and order those [they] want from [Amazon]. Why pay more? Why worry about the consequences?’

What about the incomparable experience of buying from an actual bookshop? Hell, my two-year old loves our local branch of Waterstones so much that we’ve had a couple of the staff over for tea. Looking for some crime fiction for your mum when you never touch the stuff yourself? Why not try asking a human being? In a bookshop. Then there’s the serious stuff. I’ll never forget ordering a copy of Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur from Blackwell’s in Oxford and watching, slack-jawed as the sales assistant typed K-U-L-C-H-U-R unprompted into his database. Now, my teenage self had regarded this as a pretty exotic request and I left the bookshop humbled and impressed. These staff aren’t just retail sales assistants, they’re booksellers. There’s a difference. I still shop at the Oxford branch of Blackwell’s and their poetry section is like no other. Pamphlets by the likes of Nine Arches Press rub shoulders with Carcanet and Faber. If you’re seeking some inspiration, a new direction, then this is a one stop shop.

Then there’s the online experience. Publishers like HappenStance, Penned in the Margins and Salt would rather sell directly. If you take them up on their offer, you’ll find your books at your doorstep just as quickly as Amazon would have managed to deliver them (if not more so). Besides this, you’ll rest easy in the knowledge that your sale has actually helped to sustain a publishing industry that you value.

These publishers, and the many like them, represent the new face of publishing. They write blogs and seek to engage with their readers through the social media. This is tremendously important, as a community of readers isn’t necessarily found on Goodreads. The kind words and encouragement from indie publishers has been important to me when writing this blog.

A high street without the likes of Waterstones would be the poorer for it. I know a two-year old who regards the bookshop as the highlight of a trip into town, and I hope that bookshops last long enough for her to be able to remember them.

Bluebell (Photo credit: TimWebb)

On passing through Warminster on our routine pilgrimage to my granny’s house, I hoped for red lights and a short queue. For there, floating improbably by a pavement in the centre of town, was a pocket battleship, a corvette, or some such. Topiary’s never really grabbed me but, for a boy whose head was full of Commando comics, gardening never looked so cool. The ship’s curves and turrets had been rendered in privet and bouncing from the smokestacks were a few untamed sprigs. No lifeless architectural topiary here then, but rather the drama of a ship’s telegraph ringing full steam ahead. One day, as our car slowed, the ship was fuzzy and out of focus, largely reclaimed by the unruly and irrepressible surge of nature. The next time I looked, it had gone. I shivered as we passed death’s shadow.

Ghost ship (Photo credit: anguila40)

The Point of Inconvenience, A. F. Harrold’s collection of epistolic poems, is addressed to his late mother. In his first poem, If There Is A Beginning, Harrold searches for his first awareness of death which, like everything, must be experienced personally. My seventeen year old self shivered when reading Seamus Heaney’s The Early Purges, where the poet tells us that, ‘I was six when I first saw kittens drown’. However, the ignorance of city life does us no favours, and Harrold’s first flirtations with death were, like mine, largely experienced through pop culture’s lies: ‘It began with the death of Ben Kinobe – / though that turned out to be a cheat, a glowing ghostlife [...] It began with Frodo and Bilbo taking the ship into the West, / but more it began with Sam, left to watch them go, // left to turn around and go back home and just get on / with life’. Harrold’s short line is reserved for Sam’s life without Frodo, rather than for Frodo’s departure and the reader is invited to think again about death, as Sam finds himself the wrong side of the stanza break and far from his friends. Harrold unsettles us to great effect elsewhere in the collection and never lets go of his insight that death and dying are as much about the renegotiation of relationships as they are about physical processes. In Two Texts, the etymology of ‘patient’ is explored: ‘I open the dictionary when I get home, / to answer the question you’d earlier asked – // Why must the patient be so patient? / You’d rung your bell: an unanswered sound. // The word’s from French, go far enough Greek: / from pathos, to suffer.‘ Yet, a few poems later, in Hospice Song, the speaker asks, ‘You know there came a time I hated you? / When all my patient waiting seemed in vain?’

Hospital sign (Photo credit: BowBelle51)

Harrold’s observational skills are acute and although Larkin’s presence is felt (Ambulances is explicitly referenced in All Streets In Time), Harrold’s view of institutionalised care is even-handed. For example, in To The Consultant, he asks ‘how long ago did you set out / hand-wringing down antiseptic corridors, / through doors that swung as easily shut / as open, through doors that only let / those called by name inside …’ So, for Harrold, hospitals are both the alpha and the omega, whereas in Larkin’s The Building, the scale of the institution turns it into a cemetery. ‘All know they are going to die. / Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end, / And somewhere like this’. In Aubade, Larkin ends by observing that ‘The sky is white as clay, with no sun. / Work has to be done. / Postmen like doctors go from house to house’. Yet, in Doing The Sum, as he does the sum while ‘birds / peck seed from their feeder / and the postman whistles // somewhere nearby / on his slow way to me’, Harrold’s observational, journalistic style invites the reader to see postmen as postmen. However, this is impossible after Aubade, and engaging with this poem allows Harrold to have his cake and eat it: his poetry is bare yet, at the same time, symbolically rich.

Stratford Ferry (Photo credit: johnmuk)

The Point of Inconvenience is divided into two parts: the first runs to 53 poems, while Part II, the single poem Get Over It, is only four pages long and with this structural device Harrold reminds us of his first poem, If There Is A Beginning. It’s the living who are left with an offensive pile of worthless euphemisms and an unpalatable, unswallowable truth. It’s the living who feel trapped on the wrong side of the river. The poem mounts a sustained assault on the bankrupt metaphorical language of the everyday and, as Harrold finally abandons the poem’s couplet stanzas and rhetorical backbone, he rejects language’s capacity to articulate grief.

The Point of Inconvenience sees Harrold writing at full throttle. Some of these poems, read within the working day, stopped me dead in my tracks and have haunted me since.  He flinches at very little, confessing to feelings of selfishness and disgust which few would have the courage to air when faced with the cultural taboos surrounding death. Yet, at the same time, there’s humour here too – and a certain mundane, domestic honesty which makes AF Harrold utterly memorable. And finally, thinking about that private battleship steaming along the highway, it seems fitting to close with AF Harrold’s Summer Neglect:

Summer Neglect

Things go on growing in your garden,
but order decays. Borders grow old
and ragged, grow green. Thorny arms
reach out for ledges, for hands to hold.

Colour fades as leafy things spring up.
The human patterns grow rare. Thinking
gives way to nature. The pond evaporates,
a damp ring-mark on stones, daily sinking.

Reproduced with kind permission

• Buy The Point of Inconvenience from Two Rivers Press
• AF Harrold’s blog

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Stubber (Photo credit: jackmalvern)

Twice a day, I studied the cigarette stubber riveted to the melamine back of the bus seat. Ash threw the lattice filigree into relief. Discarded cans were lulled by diesel acceleration. Although the top deck was frowsy with children and dulled by winter, through the headphones of my Walkman, the effortless bend of David Gilmour’s guitar created a world of shimmering purity. That is, until Comfortably Numb’s furious outro withered like heated cellophane as the cassette eviscerated itself. Today, listening to the track in lossless fidelity, Gilmour’s guitar still unravels like jammed magnetic tape.

Slow dance (Photo credit: Homies In Heaven)

In Reckless Records, Williams’ speaker rediscovers the vinyl of his youth. ‘I wonder if this is my own copy / of A Swingin’ Affair! / which I took to a party in 1961 / and never saw again. / I was dancing with Belinda Davey, / the first one to speak to me / in that warm cheek language / of swaying on the spot / to ‘I won’t Dance’, / or ‘Nice work if you can get it’.’ The enjambed lines create an atmosphere of reverie and free association as one thought leads to another. Before too long, even the memory of unheard music has allowed Williams’ speaker to experience the ghost of physical sensation as the ‘warm cheek language’ is recalled. However, in this deceptively simple poem, Belinda Davey is an infatuation and not an enduring passion and the stanza break suggests that the estrangement suffered is from the intimately known music of our youth. ‘I lost touch with Frank, for a few decades after that’, Williams writes, as nostalgia gets the better of us all in the end and we make the mistake of returning, only to discover, like Shakespeare’s Duke Orsino, that the music ‘is not so sweet as it was before‘.

Facebook like button (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

The trick with nostalgic urges is to recognize that they are as pernicious and habit-forming as full-blown vices and should be resisted. In The Cull, from a sequence entitled Poems to My Mother, Williams’ keenly observed poem demonstrates the power of the pen, as ‘You sit with your address book / open on your knee, / gently but firmly / crossing out the names / of old friends who have died. / ‘I wonder what happened / to Kay Morrow?’ you ask. / ‘It doesn’t matter, / I never liked her really.’ / Your pen hovers briefly / over the head of the bridesmaid / we’ve heard so much about, / then slices her in two’. Like all cleaning, the Godlike mother starts with the clearly defined task of erasing the dead from the book of life but cleaning has a habit of going wrong: before you know it, the kitchen’s taxonomy requires redesigning before another rotting vegetable can be removed from the fridge, and soon the living also find themselves slipping away. The bridesmaid is not even granted a name, so far has her stock fallen over the years and the clinical stroke of the ‘cull’ reminds us that this is a necessary decimation of the ranks of addresses for the good health of those left. Curiously, this poem feels as relevant to the age of Facebook and Twitter as to the age of snail mail. Today, people worry about the possibility that the friend will observe their absence from the roll of honour and that they will take offence at the slight. So, we read tweets and status updates begging the fair weather friends to unfriend themselves in a bizarre form of suicide.

Reflections in a dark glass (Photo credit: Neil. Moralee)

West End Final begins by presenting a series of childhood vignettes and, amidst the domesticity, Gothic horror emerges. Williams’ eye is acute and his disarming economy concentrates the power of his words. The title, Ghost Train, for example, invites the reader to imagine the lurid dumb show of the end of the pier. What Williams’ terse lines and two quatrains presents us with shakes our preconceptions, as ‘We disappeared into tunnels, sucking sweets’. The sweets invite us to read this as a Just William moment but the word ‘disappeared’ hints at the horror of a permanent darkness. The second quatrain becomes a parallel train, reflected in the dark glass: ‘How long ago and far away we look, / sitting together there without moving / in the dark train / that is travelling beside our own’. The collection offers a few moments like these and Elsie Byers, in which an unlucky doll is buried in the garden, reads like an understated horror movie.

Junior School Punishment Book (Photo credit: theirhistory)

The childhood Williams presents is a dark one. A Suitable Cane, which begins with a child being sent to choose and buy the instrument with which they will be beaten, reminded me of Paul Muldoon’s Anseo. As the casual brutality of Muldoon’s school system creates Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward, the future IRA commander who has been ordered to cut for himself the ‘stick with which he would be beaten’, so Williams’ 1950s are tainted with a sickening connoisseurship, as Ollivander’s wand shop is crossed with the Marquis de Sade. ‘At Thomas’s I ask to see a selection / and the old gentleman takes down / various items for my approval: / the knobbly ‘School’ cane, / the curve-handled ‘Pop’ cane, / the straight but bendy ‘House’ cane. / I can’t make up my mind.’ The hushed gentility of a gentlemen’s outfitters is in dark, hilarious opposition with the debauched violence of the school Library, ‘a book-free zone, plastered with nude pin-ups / of French and Italian starlets’. Then, with a good sense of comic timing, Williams presents the reader with the next poem, ‘Slapstick’, where the speaker is ‘Grim-all-day’.

Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). The image on the cover is “Nan and Brian in Bed” (1981). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At the heart of Williams’ collection is A Pillow Book, a sequence whose title nods to Sei Shōnagon‘s tenth century collection of poems and court gossip. As the twelve numbered lyrics move full circle around the clock face, they convey a sense of inevitability and cyclic futility: the heat of passion becomes a memory. In number 12, the lover is finally eroded, remembered as a set of actions and not as herself at all. ‘Is that you over there / in your nightdress, / standing on one leg, / looking at the sole of your foot? // It must be you / because all your things are still here – / face creams and cotton buds, / cleanser and eyeliner, // scattered across the table / where you put on make-up / and do your hair’. In number 1, the lover told us that ‘I lie in bed, watching you / dress yourself in nudity’ and this passion, this deflated expectation haunts the room like the child eating sweets in the dark train in the tunnel. The lover must now be covered. Nudity was a costume donned for a performance but, now the show has closed, clothes are for keeping out the cold.

Reading Williams is a candid, intimate, unsettling experience. Our lives are theatre and, viewed up close and without stage lighting, the costumes and make-up reveal them to be a tawdry affair. Thankfully, Williams’s even-handed collection is shot through with a warmth and humanity which makes his bleaker moments bearable. Yet, even though my digital copy of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb is perfect, I know that David Gilmour’s exquisite guitar solo will never sound the same again.

Buy West End Final from Faber and Faber

Holbeck Cemetery, setting for Tony Harrison’s v. (Photo credit: Monkey Phil)

As BBC Radio 4 broadcasted a 25th anniversary version of .v, read by Harrison himself, the event rekindled the media’s interest in the poem, chiefly focused on the attacks on it by MPs and the media. One of the reasons given by Tony Phillips for commissioning a new recording of the poem was that it had lost none of its resonance: two of the 7/7 bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, had close links with Beeston – a spit away from Harrison’s Holbeck cemetery and Elland Road stadium.

Shop fire in the Party Superstore, Lavender Hill, Clapham Junction, England, 8 August, 2011 – part of the 2011 riots (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, the poem’s appeal today is broader than this. In November 2012, the BBC reported that the UK’s neets (young people not in employment or education) still topped a million. Harrison’s alter ego, the skin, rails at the desecrated graves: ‘Look at this cunt, Wordsworth, organ builder, / this fucking ‘haberdasher Appleyard! // If mi mam’s up there, don’t want to meet ‘er / listening to me list mi dirty deeds, / and ‘ave to pipe up to St fucking Peter / ah’ve been on t’dole all mi life in fucking Leeds!‘ In the Guardian, Shiv Malik writes that, ‘The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said Europe was “failing in its social contract” with the young and rising political disenchantment could reach levels similar to those that sparked North African uprisings during the Arab spring’. Although Harrison presents us with a lone skin, the poem’s celebrated and notorious imprecations do much of the work in presenting seething, barely repressed, apolitical anger. Malik’s political disenchantment would be easier to stomach. Government, although it wouldn’t like it, would at least be able to attempt to engage with it. Watching the family business at Reeves Corner, Croydon, burning felt more like the fall of Rome than the Arab Spring. It was for this reason that the riots of 2011 were so unsettling for those prepared to engage in the political process.

Tags in London 2011 (Photo credit: kami68k)

Faced with the desecration of Holbeck’s graves, Harrison either rapidly sinks to the Skin’s level, or has the wit to grasp that, in order to engage to the Skin in dialogue, he has to speak the same language: ‘But why inscribe these graves with CUNT and SHIT? / Why choose neglected tombstones to disfigure? / This pitman’s of last century daubed PAKI GIT, / this grocer Broadbent’s aerosolled with NIGGER?’ I’m reminded of Prospero, a Duke of Milan reduced to a foul-mouthed stick toting monster by Caliban’s obstinate refusal to play by his rules.

UK Poverty Map, red highlights high regions of poverty, white highlights low regions of poverty based on national statistics data (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If Harrison is the Skin (and in the Radio 4 documentary on the poem, Blake Morrison points out that, in the draft, Harrison’s Skin was initially a punk) then redemption lies in education. In The Perfect Storm, published by Oxfam last year, the charity reports that, ‘The UK is one of the most unequal rich countries in the world, with the poorest tenth of people receiving only 1 percent of total income, while the richest tenth take home 31 percent’. Suddenly, Harrison’s poem of mid ’80s hardship and militancy looks prophetic. We need to protect the poor, protect public services and strive to do everything that we can to invest in the education of our young people.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Bloodaxe Books have linked to Richard Eyre’s 1987 film of v.
  
• Not in Education, Employment or Training: Europe’s lost NEET generation detailed (Guardian)
• Radio 4 courts controversy with broadcast of Tony Harrison’s v.
• Radio review: Tony Harrison’s V – Words that still shock when they cease to offend (Independent)

Rome – view from Villa Borghese (Photo credit: MsNina)

It doesn’t take long to contract cultural flu in Rome. ‘That fountain’s by Bernini, you say? Show me one which isn’t’. Prolonged exposure to a glut of high Renaissance culture can, at best, feel like snow-blindness, or, at worst, like a bender on fine wines. A couple of months into my sojourn in the eternal city, I was already hankering after a pint of bitter and had, from nowhere, developed a bizarre franchised junk food habit. So, the afternoon on which I walked off a few McCalories in the gardens of Villa Borghese was already a breath of fresh air. Families were out on bikes and the place was green. Green after relentless travertine and cobbles. Deep in the park is the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, and this whiteness was the plunge pool I needed, the Alka-Seltzer for my trompe l’oeil hangover. An abiding memory of the gallery is its collection of Lucio Fontana canvases. The knifed slashes are anything but simple and, as your gaze struggles to focus on their solid colours, they move like jaded Op art images.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1968; Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, 1967 (Photo credit: 16 Miles of String)

In Alchemy, Guggenheim Museum, Venice, Tamar Yoseloff presents Jackson Pollock’s 1947 painting of the same name. ‘Just when I think nothing can move me, / room after room of Tintoretto, Veronese, Bellini, / the Virgin granting me her doleful eyes, / her pearly tears, // I enter a cool white palazzo, / find his huge canvas, which shows me the truth / of water and fire, in this place / of canals and candlelight, a city he never saw’. The first stanza’s repetition, lists, end-stopped lines and abrupt termination convey the numbness we feel in the face of too much of a good thing. Besides, canals and candles are small and pathetic when compared with their elemental sources. Venice has been reduced to a cultural Disneyland. The stanza break dramatises the distance between Venice’s Guggenheim and the rest of the city’s art and culture.  Here we encounter Jackson Pollock’s Alchemy: oil, aluminum (and enamel?) paint, and string on canvas. Aluminium paint’s hardly a traditional artist’s material. It’s more suited to exterior paintwork and creates an illusory metallic effect. Have base materials been transformed into something precious, or is the preciousness an artifice? Perhaps it’s Pollock’s wrestling with the elements, a fight which links him to alchemists like Albertus Magnus and John Dee, that’s of real value. ‘And I stand before this picture, / the man who painted it / dead, like the masters shut away / in these palaces of art, their works their tribute; // wanting to pin beauty to the canvas, / dusty and flightless. But this picture lives, black / against midday sun, legions of day-glo tourists / bobbing along the canal, // and I feel tears / welling up before I can make them stop. I don’t know why; I’m tired, / vulnerable in my light summer clothes, // he and I foreigners to a faith / which isn’t ours: Christ on the cross, / the martyrdom of the saints, spelled out in / blood and gold’.

Jackson Pollock, Alchemy, 1947.
Oil, aluminum (and enamel?) paint, and string on canvas, 114.6 x 221.3 cm
Photocredit: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 150
© Jackson Pollock, by SIAE 2008

In a sequence of poems entitled The City With Horns, Pollock lies at the heart of  Yoseloff’s collection and her all American bars with their tawdry neon signs are in ironic dialogue with Alchemy’s Venice. The pluralized Springs undermines the power of the new beginning, like a smoker’s resolution to quit. Line breaks are used to devastating effect as Lee Krasner ‘cooked his dinners, meat and potatoes the way / he liked, table set with a gingham cloth, / china plates, picked wildflowers to cheer / the vase, binned his gin’. The reader hopes that the wildflowers will cheer the room, cheer Pollock, but Yoseloff’s break disappoints us, as her Pollock disappoints Krasner. There’s something sad about the specificity of ‘china plates’, as it suggests that other meals were eaten from paper or plastic and the internal rhyming of binned and gin makes this gesture sound too easy to be successful. As we reach the stanza break, the hope symbolized by the crockery is transformed. ‘He threw a plate // against the wall, it smashed into a hundred / spiky scraps’. It’s a pleasure to read Yoseloff. Her disciplined technique complements the wild machismo of her subject. Yet there’s delicious, outrageous black humour here too, as, in Cedar Nights, we read that ‘Kerouac baptised the ashtray with his piss, / Rothko gazed into his glass, lost / in a haze of smoke (later he would slit // each arm, two razored lines, maroon on white)’.

Rothko – Black on Maroon (Photo credit: markhillary)

Despite the shadow that Pollock casts over The City With Horns, the collection’s first part, Winter, offers some arresting, memorable portraits of urban existence and some beautiful language. In the sonnet, Stamps, which sits square on its white field, licked and applied, Yoseloff sees the stamp as an objet d’art. ‘Long after the letters they carried have vanished, / they flourish, unstuck from envelopes, edges / like stiffened lace, the watermark, a ghost of order’. In the world of email and printed postage impressions, the humble stamp is charged with romance and philately, once the preserve of children and obsessives, is recast as an instinctive desire to connect to a visible, tangible world.

1840 Penny Black with red Maltese Cross cancellation (Photo credit: Wikipedia).

In the month that saw the discovery of the bones of Richard III in a Leicester car park, the couplets of Wish You Were Here remind us of our mortality and the fragility of our relationships. ‘Men are tearing up the pavement. / They unearth Roman bones, sometimes treasure, // sometimes just the dirt / on which all of this is built. // We pick our way through debris. I show you scars, // bomb sites and brownfields’. We are reminded of how quickly we enter this archeological landfill in The Sadness of the Scrapyard, where ‘A plastic arm, tiny fingers grasping / nothing. One shoe, the other / long missing.’ This chilling image presents a loss of innocence whilst alluding to something even darker. Yet, although it’s easy to characterize the city as a dark space, Yoseloff’s vision is more complex and, in Shadow, maternal ‘Towerblocks cradle us like bookends: / I’m a slim volume, you’re / leather-bound, slightly foxed.’

New York Street Scene (Photo credit: Rhys Asplundh)

In The City With Horns, Tamar Yoseloff’s vision is forked. Yes, we encounter addiction and destruction, but we also encounter beauty and humour. Her writing is disciplined, memorable and moving.

Buy The City With Horns direct form Salt

• Follow Tamar Yoseloff’s blog, Invective Against Swans.
• Fomerly, an elegiac pairing of Tamar’s sonnets and Vici MacDonald‘s photography, has just closed at The Royal Festival Hall. Check out the website and buy the book here.

]]> http://johnfield.org/2013/02/17/wish-you-were-here-tamar-yoseloffs-the-city-with-horns/feed/ 0 johnfield1 Rome - view from Villa Borghese Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1968... Jackson Pollock, Alchemy, 1947 Rothko - Black on Maroon English: 1840 Penny Black with red Maltese Cro... New York Street Scene http://johnfield.org/2013/02/04/and-god-created-woman-stephanie-leals-metrophobia/ http://johnfield.org/2013/02/04/and-god-created-woman-stephanie-leals-metrophobia/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2013 22:45:41 +0000 johnfield1 http://johnfield.org/?p=2231 Continue reading »

Jan Gossaert – Adam and Eve (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As the Authorized Version of the Bible came off the press in 1611, the poet, Aemilia Lanyer, was not prepared to take it lying down. Her outrageous Salve Deus Rex Judæorum mounts a robust defence of Eve and claims Christ for the girls. She writes ‘But surely Adam can not be excusde, / Her fault though great, yet hee was most too blame; / What Weaknesse offerd, Strength might have refused, / Being Lord of all, the greater was his shame: / Although the Serpents craft had her abusde, / Gods holy word ought all his actions frame, / For he was Lord and King of all the earth, / Before poor Eve had either life or breath’. In Lanyer’s poetic universe, women are the patrons and Christ is their object of desire: ‘So sweet, so lovely in his Spouses sight, / That unto Snowe we may his face compare’. Lanyer co-opts the language of The Song of Solomon, turning the saviour into a hottie passed around the group, just as poets like Donne circulated their women around their friends in the form of fair copies of their poems. It lifts the soul to know that Renaissance women fought back.

Eating apples (Photo credit: Ло)

Stephanie Leal’s Metrophobia treats the fall of (wo)man to a spunky franchise reboot. In ‘On the discovery of the Orgasm’ , we read that ‘[...] Adam ate the apple and thought of Eve’s red lips surrounding its skin; / breaking into the soft, fleshy sweetness, he thought of other places her lips had been’. Leal, like Lanyer, sees little strength in Adam who, at this defining moment in human history, has drifted into a reverie. After all, men think about sex 8 times a day according to Ohio State University. Leal maintains tight control of her apple eating image and, at this point in the poem, Adam thinks not of teeth but of the eroticism of the apple’s ‘soft, fleshy sweetness’. However, the sibilant quality of the language adds a serpentine subtext to the proceedings. Teeth may be unwelcome in the bedroom, but they’re buried in the apple and, in the brave new post-lapsarian world, Eve threatens the selfish Adam with terrible retribution. Leal’s rhyming couplets progress the story with the nod and the wink of the end of the pier show and set the reader up for the final blow with discipline and patience.

Native Americans swearing in for the American Civil War (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Boston Tea, Leal displays a similar affinity for the underdog. ‘Sixteen sips from Chinese porcelain / espy the arbitrary day, the decisive act. // History began mohawking the bay: / vulcanizing sand dunes’. At one level, this was a revolutionary act and the damaged cargo of tea, ‘mohawking the bay’ reminds us of the American symbolism of the disguises adopted by the revolutionaries. The leaves washed on the sand dunes have the power to violently transform the landscape, as the Roman god Vulcan was the god of lava and smoke. However, the ‘convulsing welkin / obscures feathered headdress. // The tea still washes up / on the shores of Boston; // nothing was damaged or stolen / except a padlock’. ‘Welkin’ is an essentially English, Anglo Saxon word for the heavens and suggests that, no matter what changed politically, North America was still subject to a continuity of religion and culture. ‘Nothing was damaged or stolen’ in a revolution as unrevolutionary as Egypt’s transition from President Mubarak to Morsi, whilst the Native Americans haunt the margins, obscured by the smoke drifting across the battlefields.

In Metrophobia, Leal experiments with a range of forms, moving from lyrical simplicity to cutting and pasting found objects (JM Barrie’s Peter Pan) via dense prose poems which reflect and refract the light like shattered glass. The poems are unified by a recurring suite of language and images which helps to create engaging points of contact between the fruit in the fridge and the fall of man, for example. This is a demanding, rewarding, refreshingly iconoclastic and earthy collection of poems for the way we live now. Aemilia Landon would be proud.

Buy Metrophobia from Penned in the Margins

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