Poetry by Heart is a recitation competition which launches in British schools this month. The competition, funded in part by the Department for Education and run by The Poetry Archive, is the UK equivalent of Poetry Out Loud, the US’s national recitation competition and requires entrants to memorise two poems: one pre- and one post-1914.

Critics of the competition will find plenty to dislike here: poetry recitations are an annual event in many prep schools and, for some, this will look like central government aligning British education with the values and practises of the independent sector and of a bygone era; of the 130 or so poems in the anthology, many were written by canonical figures like Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, which, some would argue, have nothing to say to students living in a multicultural society; giving half of the anthology to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries gives them undue weight; the judging criteria, with marks awarded for physical presence, voice and articulation, dramatic appropriateness, level of difficulty, evidence of understanding, overall performance and accuracy, turn poetry, a fugitive thing, into a tawdry performance like Strictly Come Dancing; the website’s presentation, biographies and prompt questions makes the anthology look like the pre-digested literature doled out by examination boards; being asked to learn a poem off by heart and to suffer the horror of public performance will be enough to put droves of students off poetry for life.

However, the anthology is an interesting beast and even the pre-1914 section avoids the usual list of dead white men with the inclusion of poems by Katherine Philips, Anne Finch, Charlotte Smith, W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Dunbar. The poems themselves are superb and, looking at the list, I quite fancy learning Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale and Arnold’s Dover Beach just for the pleasure of it. The post-1914 section is bang up-to-date with poems by Paul Farley and Jacob Polley, for example. This move has been criticized by detractors because no-one should be forced to carry the work of poets yet to stand the test of time around in their heads and into their dotage. This is a fair point and one detects Motion fearing that a larger pre-1914 section would signal to a new generation of readers that today’s poetry is all washed up. This second half of the anthology looks like an appeal to the new generation to give poetry being written now a chance. I think that this was the wrong move: the likes of Shakespeare and Keats are being read today for a reason. Michael Gove said that ‘To know a poem by heart is to own a great work of art forever. Andrew Motion is a hero for ensuring more children than ever will carry poetry with them all their lives’. If I had the choice of owning a couple of works of art, knowing that I had to live with them forever, I would prefer to live with Raphael, Caravaggio and Goya than Emin, Hirst and Whiteread purely because they withstand repeat viewings better. My own head is filled with Shakespeare, mainly because the pre-2000 A level allowed few texts into the examination room, meaning that my generation knew their King Lear and As You Like It better than anything, even if they later studied English literature as undergraduates. Living with King Lear for the best part of twenty years has continued to bear fruit. Do all the poems in the anthology promise such a dividend to the students who graft to learn them?

Nevertheless, I think that Motion is right. The school curriculum and, within this, the English curriculum, is rammed to the gunwales with content, which means that teachers have to zip through poems, delivering their exegeses with authority and finality and the beleaguered students, knowing what’s good for them, learn this for their examination, or regurgitate it in their coursework. Asking students to learn the material is subversive. It sneaks it under the wire in the dead of night and, as a poet, Motion knows that once the words are lodged in the fertile earth of the mind, they will take root and grow.

Motion said that ‘Poetry by Heart is the best thing that’s happened for poetry in schools for a long time: a way for pupils to have serious fun while they extend their reading, deepen their powers of appreciation, and memorize beautiful and intriguing poems which will enrich their lives for ever’. He’s right. All that schools have given to poetry, and to students aged between 14 and 18, for the last umpteen years is a wearying list of the same old names and an unrelenting diet of examinations and assessments. Poetry by Heart is a brave start and I look forward to seeing it take root deeply enough to resist the attempts at weeding that a change of government inevitably brings.

Related articles

• Pupils compete in learning poetry (bbc.co.uk)
• Government backs drive for young to learn poetry by heart (guardian.co.uk)
• Teenagers to recite Ozymandias off by heart in schools (telegraph.co.uk)

It began as an idle thrumbing, blending with the shiver of the branches. The path ahead looked the same as the path behind: horticultural order and beauty in full summer bloom. However, with each foot forwards the noise grew in substance until it felt as if the world itself vibrated in sympathy. Against my face, against the skin inside my clothes, I felt its power. And then I realized in horror that this was the sound of millions of bees; that, a hop over the wall, was an apiary comprising a dozen hives. Placing another foot deeper into the solid sound was a physical impossibility. Walk curtailed, my pulse regained its equilibrium but I’d never think of monasteries in quite the same way again.

In  Bee Journal, Sean Borodale records his experiences as a newbie beekeeper and the poems were written in the moment, at the hive, over 14 months. In 27^th May: Geography, Borodale initially appears to use the bees as a vehicle to present the concerns of our society: ‘Bees in the roof, bees on the walls / stitching the house in a net of flightways, / just like surveillance, just like snoopers / in the open air’. ‘Surveillance’ and ‘snoopers’ remind us of anti-terror legislation and the government’s recent draft Communications Data Bill. This hive actually has bugs in its roof and walls, reminding us of the ruthless realpolitik of the animal kingdom. Successive stanzas open with the phrase ‘they rig it’ conveying the time, effort and skill required to create the mental flightways which link hive to landscape. Borodale’s image also romanticizes the bees’ activity, as they become mariners mapping uncharted shores and the collection of nectar and pollen reminds us chests laden with booty. Yet, despite the police state that Borodale invites us to imagine, apian society is also fragile. ‘You are a brain in impermanence, / coding, knowing, keeping / the latitude and longitude of this, our house; / each bee a synapse slowly forming on arrival’. Together, the bees form the electrical impulses of a single brain: the hive. This reading has both pagan and Christian associations. In Romans, Paul writes that ‘So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members of one another’. St Ambrose uses the bee as metaphor to elaborate on Paul, describing the hive as the church and the bees as the faithful.

Yet, as well as the community, Borodale also observes the individual. In 26^th July: In the Garden, a bee is described with tenderness. ‘There it is: one pulsing abdomen; / light brown, familiar, gently striped. Tongue / at drinking water. // Frail, how it concentrates / not solely for itself. / It makes one part’. As the poem opens, the bee is described as ‘it’ but, as it ends, this idea of the bee working for others turns ‘it’ into ‘she’ and the bee is anthropomorphised into a mother. This differs in approach to someone like Ted Hughes, who insists on the spiritual, terrifying otherness of nature. Borodale the beekeeper is no impassive observer, alien and excluded from the hive he might be, yet he is intimately connected to the bees by his flightway of care.

10^th February: Queen, presents Borodale at the height of his descriptive powers: ‘How downy she is, fur like a fox’s greyness, like a thistle’s mane. / Wings perfect, abdomen subtle in shades of brittle; / her rear legs are big in the lens; / feet like hung anchors are hooks for staying on cell-rims. / Veins in her wings are a rootwork of rivers, / all echo and interlace. This is her face, compound eye. / I look at the slope of her head, the mouth’s proboscis; / her thin tongue piercing is pink as cut flesh, flash glass. / Some hairs feather and split below the head. / Those eyes are like castanets, cast nets; / woman all feral and ironwork, I slip / under the framework, into the subtle’. The writing is rich, as the dead Queen is presented as weighty, anchored to her hive by hooks as well as by the wings clipped by the DEFRA bee inspector. The ‘rootwork of rivers’ is a life-giving image which destabilizes our sense of perspective as to see a ‘rootwork of rivers’ is to view an aerial photograph of a river delta.

Borodale’s Journal uses shorter forms to great and sometimes devastating effect. The whole of 27^th July reads ‘Is she in?’ Borodale again plays with perspective, characterizing the beekeeper as the tourist, excluded, peering between the bearskins and through the railings to scan the roof of Buckingham Palace for the royal standard. This playful juxtaposition of large and small may have humorous intent but invites us to reconsider our assumptions, as the humble bee is vital for the pollination of our crops. Following January’s false spring and cold snap, Borodale is lost for words and, below the title, 24^th / 25^th January: Bees Die, sits a blank page as articulate as any poem on the subject of grief and loss.

Alice Oswald, in discussion with Naomi Jaffa at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, talked about experimenting with ‘blind field-note taking’, where she just jots down whatever she’s ‘seeing or feeling at the time, doing it very quickly’.  Her notes are prose but full of full stops and could easily accommodate line breaks. These poems feel a lot like that: fleeting, rough – honest. Borodale’s collection of plein air Impressionist poems have no time for elaborate, or even simple forms. Instead, Borodale works deftly with the tools of language and line break. However, even with this restricted palate, he’s able to achieve a lot and the collection’s overarching journal form, injects the drama of seasonal cruelty. Reading these poems, you’ll learn a lot about bees but, along the way, Borodale’s engaging language is a royal jelly.

Buy Bee Journal from Jonathan Cape

RELATED LINKS

• Sean Borodale’s website

As we’d travelled to Würzburg to visit friends, there had been no mugging up in a guidebook beforehand. It felt like a sleepier Prague: the finest buildings were Baroque confections of womanly curves kissed by gilt. The populace dined outside under the benign eye of the Marienberg Fortress, although it took a few days before we made it up the hill for the visit which, amongst other things, documented the state of the town after the fire-bombing it received on the 16th March, 1945. Like Coventry and Dresden, Würzburg post bombing had an air of nuclear apocalypse about it but, unlike Coventry, it was decided that the town’s pre-war Medieval and Baroque opulence should be recreated. The Grand Designs crowd might scoff at the dishonesty of projects of this sort but Würzburg enjoys a relaxed set of open spaces, whilst Coventry’s concrete brutalism is grittier, urban.

In My Father’s Eyes Were Blue, Antony Owen takes a long hard look at his home town and is troubled by the changes he sees. In The Second Destruction of Coventry, the smell of death visits Owen’s city again: ‘At City Arcade’s helm / an imprisoned Gypsy wind / swoops past a displayed massacre / of pork bellies and shop owners’. No-one managing a franchise for an international brand could be said to be a ‘shop owner’ and so the tail-end of a nation of shopkeepers are trapped in their businesses as the fire-storm of globalisation sucks the breath from their lungs where they stand. Owen’s a plain-speaking poet and his elegy to independent Coventry is reminiscent of Tony Harrison’s Durham, or even v.. ‘The truth is cold / as a lap dancer’s thigh. / The commercial harlot / in her blue and yellow robe / looks to her cowering pimps / with their open laptops / and Jerde logo pens / who bow to Starbucks / and close the shutters / of Barrington’s café / and Gemma’s wool shop’.

Nights at the Skydome presents us with a typical British Friday night. ‘Black cab cavalcades arrive: / dark vassals in dark vessels / dress cobblestones in H&M shadows, / alcoholic sonnets sounding / “I ‘ate paki taxi drivers”‘. ‘Cavalcades’ implies a procession, or raid, on horseback. Owen’s either suggesting menace, or cocking an ironic snook at the pub crowd. ‘Vassals’ and ‘cobblestones’ invite the reader who knows the city to imagine Spon Street: on one side of the road sit the tinderbox houses of Merrie England which miraculously survived the Luftwaffe’s otherwise successful razing of the city whilst, on the other, the arse ends of commercial developments, housing clubs like Lava & Ignite, moon at them. Würzburg and Dresden were painstakingly recreated but the architectural glories of Coventry are humbled and rendered absurd by their cheap brick bedfellows, a point which Owen makes in Spon End Subway where ‘In moth-dead flickers / Elizabeth shines / pillowed upon a suede quarry of indignity: / the purifier of conscience, / next to a beaker marked ‘McD’ / and a clown high on lows / with a name no-one knows’.

The final poem in the collection, Corner Shop: Quinton Road, covers the same ground as v.. In v., Harrison presents his infirm father trekking past the supermarket to the corner shop for a chat more than anything ‘but time also came and put a stop to that’. Owen’s pensioner waits every Tuesday ‘for the 9:12 to Quinton Road / to hear her name spoken kindly / by David in the corner shop. / Tesco is nearer and cheaper, / full of cantering blurs, / beeps and name-wearing do-gooders / who lower their tone for the palsied, / calling her ‘love’ if she’s lucky’. Again, Owen works with stark contrasts but these cannot be dismissed as simplistic as, sadly, he’s right: some towns fight the odds to protect their character from global brands but, in the process, turn themselves into the sorts of places visited by coach trips. Owen’s right to be angry too. The high street revolution isn’t just about where we buy groceries: it’s about budget pubs the size of warehouses; it’s about how the elderly interface with the world in a time of revolution; it’s about the erosion of local colour and culture. As Owen writes in Sunrise on the Slagheap, ‘Success is a haircut at Toni & Guy’.

• Buy Antony Owen’s The Dreaded Boy from Pighog Press
• Antony Owen at Ink Sweat & Tears

Alan Bennett‘s new play, People, closes with the line ‘Let lost be lost. Let gone be gone, and not fetched back.’ It’s easy to sympathise with his heroine, Dorothy, as the fresh pointing, brash signage, public conveniences and gift shop cut the heart from those remote spots which should be wild, mouldering and inaccessible to coach parties, although I’m thinking more English Heritage than National Trust here. Our sense of mortality should give us an icy squeeze when we catch sight of one of these places glowering from a peak above us. They are shrines to our absence and seeing our mathematics and reason reverting to rounder, organic forms and softer colours should both thrill and horrify us.

The elegiac Old English poem, The Ruin, which is probably about the crumbling splendour of the Roman baths at Bath is a fine ruin in itself. The manuscript is in the Exeter Book, fourteen pages of which are damaged by fire and the diagonal burn renders sections of the poem illegible. In Crossley-Holland’s and Mitchell’s translation we read: ‘Wonderful is this wall of stone, wrecked by fate. / The city buildings crumble, the bold works of the giants decay. / Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed, / Barred gates are gone, gateways have gaping mouths, hoar frost clings to mortar’. The scarring of the manuscript lends absolute weight to these words. The ruined poem thrills us as the Roman baths are viewed as ‘the bold works of the giants’ by the Anglo Saxons and we in turn view the culture which created The Ruin as dark, mysterious and alien.

In The Havocs, Jacob Polley’s The Ruin is a sensitive, fragile reworking of his Old English source material. His labial w and nasal m alliterate to the beat of a smith’s hammer,  creating an authentic Old English sound and feel. However, Polley’s Roman ’tile floors gleamed / with muscle girls and monster fish’ and remind us of bachelor pads decorated with the pneumatic bliss of lads’ mags. ‘Gleamed’ contrasts the shiny newness of the now with the mottled and scarred then and, although Polley never states it, his elegy invites us to see our materialism in the memory of a shiny, new Bath. By presenting the Romans as ‘men making merry, their shadows merging, / nimble as a change of mind, massive on the inner walls’, Polley uses the massive shadows to rework the giants of the Old English original, revealing the Romans as just men, no matter what awe their works inspired. Below the burn, the manuscript of the original poem reads that ‘Death struck down every valiant man’, their bravery in battle shown to be little use against the power of death. However, Polley’s version offers something more apocalyptic, as ‘Plague came, within / and without. No one, however high, whatever wit, / was spared. Here, wide open to the wind, is where / breath was fought for, where men raved’. Since the 1960s, the word rave has also meant a party with dancing and drinking and, in the late 1980s, it also implied the use of recreational drugs like Ecstasy, so the ‘making merry’ of Polley’s first part turns sour and the poem ends with the stark fragment, ‘But all such days are gone’. It’s a pleasure reading poetry like this. Sure, loose reworkings of Old English poems are nothing new: just look at Ezra Pound’s vital The Seafarer. However, Polley’s poem presents urban hedonism as susceptible to epidemic and there’s a worried glance to the future in this poem inspired by the past.

In First Bike, Polley covers similar ground, as, ‘There, at the bottom of the river. / Time slips. The leaves are the leaves / of woods long felled, gold still, like treasure. / The current turns one wheel as if // you had just laid it down to run / from year to year, from bright to shade, / across the bridge from being young / to here where you stand, unwise and afraid // in grown-up shoes’. However, with this more personal subject matter, mutability is projected onto the bike and away from the father, as if the idea of this were too painful even to contemplate. The current still idly ‘turns one wheel’, as if the poet is unable to accept the loss of childhood. There’s a troubling environmental subtext here too. In the developed world we all know that the title’s ‘first’ signals the beginning of acquisitiveness: first the bikes and then the cars. What, we wonder, is this bike doing at the bottom of the river? Is there no end to our irresponsible culture of consumption? As ‘The current turns one wheel’, I’m reminded of Thomas Hardy’s The Convergence of the Twain, where The Titanic’s boilers are turned ‘to rhythmic tidal lyres’ by the cold current passing through them. At once, Polley’s childhood bike transforms into a symbol of vaingloriousness, a vulgar display of consumption. Polley has raised the bar on Hardy here: it’s all very well for left-leaning poets to chastise the über rich, but we are all guilty of a consumption the like of which the planet has never experienced before. What are we doing about it and what are we bequeathing to our children?

This is not to say that the The Havocs is all doom and gloom. The poem Livings offers an engaging set of riddles which, like The Ruin, also draw their inspiration from The Exeter Book: ‘I am one who is many. My work is play. / I’ll die many times before I decay’. An actor, perhaps? The jargon of Renaissance would have us think that the paintings of the Renaissance were divine objects for veneration, still alive as changes to their chemistry cause ‘oxidizings – greens gone to brown / or black’. However, the poem’s scientific language is debunked at the end. ‘Rare the item that’s escaped abuse: / at Arezzo, the Magdalene fresco / appears superbly intact until / one notes the large disfiguring splotch / thanks to splashings from the font’. Our secular vaingloriousness is mocked as we are reminded of art’s ability to teach and inspire. The fresco’s disfiguring splotch is a wound sustained in the line of duty, saving infant souls. Like the burned and scarred The Ruin, one could almost say that the painting gains another layer of meaning from the splotch. Polley gently reminds us that we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Buy The Havocs from Picador

I was content to sit on the pebbles, lit by the heatless fluorescence of the winter sun and enjoying the gothic charm of a guano-stuccoed West Pier. From nowhere, a squall of starlings began their roosting ritual, swinging across the sky with mesmeric elasticity. The sun’s race for the horizon accelerated and, with it, the tempo of the dance. The frenzy reached its pitch and then, as water eclipsed the sun, the sky emptied of birds and light.

The Power, the first poem in Paul Farley‘s most recent collection, The Dark Film, opens with this moment. ‘Forget all that end-of the-pier / palm-reading stuff. Picture a seaside town / in your head. Start from its salt-wrack-rotten smells / and raise the lid of the world to change the light, / then go as far as you want: the ornament / of a promenade, the brilliant greys of gulls, / the weak grip of a crane in the arcades / you’ve built, ballrooms that come alive at night, / then a million-starling roost, an opulent / crumbling like cake icing…’ Farley’s language is direct and engaging, as the imperative ‘forget’ both empowers and disempowers, as our imaginations create the seaside town, but as a response to the will of the poet. In ‘wrack’, Farley provides a bass note deep enough to be felt rather than heard, as lurking around this word are punishment, enmity, worthlessness, evil and wrecked ships. Beneath the simplicity of the gulls’ greys and the amusement arcades lurks something indefinable. Nothing is quite as it seems in Farley’s world. We see ornaments but look closer. They crumble like cake icing. The concrete has cancer.

In Quality Street, Farley asks, ‘How many other kids would turn / themselves into a camera / replete with scrims and gels and tints / to see the world in new colours?’ Scrims and gels evoke the theatre and, like The Power, we are asked to consider differences in seeing. ‘The wrapper of a strawberry cream / unpeels a vivid red to dye / the evening bloody monochrome’. It might seem easy to dismiss Farley’s theatre of blood but, by the end of the stanza, a half rhymed couplet delivers a savage blow: ‘and when our sun becomes a swollen core / there will be other evenings like this to endure’. Christmas evenings of lazy excess, nursed through bad telly by the good offices of a tin of Quality Street are savaged by Farley’s black humour. Yes, a dog rifling the bins behind the maisonettes as we sit embalming ourselves with chocs really is as bad as the sun becoming a red giant in approximately 5 billion years time.

Poem after poem, Farley’s observational skills are perfect. In Saturday Irons he riffs on the relationship between the adolescent male’s interest in domestic chores and his interest in girls. Speaking as someone who dropped a hot iron onto my parents’ living room carpet as a boy, this one resonated. ‘Irons became attractive to the boys / who’d formerly paid them not the least attention, / except to spit on them when set to COTTON. / A scent hung in the hall: mainsails and sea-spray. / A bimetallic click. Things came to the boil // and so began the years of pressing creases / into a pair of slacks, or sharpening collars; / of green lights in the heels of ancient irons / meaning evenings were on; of fraying flexes / with a repeating diamond adder pattern’. Farley’s ‘mainsails and sea-spray’ reclaims the iron, a symbol of female oppression and used by The Women’s Press as their logo, as something manly, ship-shape and Bristol fashion. The tether of flex may have invited Farley to see the iron as an anchor but, having read his poem, I’ll forever see the dangerous curves at the iron’s prow as the ‘cleaving wing’ of Hardy’s Titanic. Chasms of time open up in Farley’s stanza breaks and, by the time we reach the final stanza, ‘The lights clicked off. Things shrank. The schools burned down. / The shirts were grown out of. Those irons sank / like dead-weights where they’d once steamed full ahead / across the wrinkled fabric of the world, / into the kitchen cupboard’s dark sea bed’. Farley’s ‘Things shrank’, is a precise observation of the tricks our minds’ pre-Copernican outlooks play on us: we project change outwards rather than recognising it in ourselves.

Beneath this collection’s skin is a profound unease, of inquietude. We sense it in the change of perspective glimpsed through the wrapper of a strawberry cream and feel it in the low C of the sixty-four foot organ pipe of The Note Produced, ‘the low C, shuddering Jesus Christ, / the engine room that makes cathedrals / dive, dive, dive, fathoms of flue // that drill into the bedrock, shift / knuckles and long bones in the crypt’. In the war movies of childhood, the U-boat’s klaxon meant frenzied activity, red lights and death delivered by sound, by the depth charge’s concussive pulse. That pipe sits in isolation on the page in a stanza comprised of one couplet. It stands out. It doesn’t belong and Farley presents it drilling into the bedrock ‘and you can feel the bottom line / right where the ribs all congregate, / a shiver trapped and brought to life’. Paul Farley’s collection begins to look prophetic, as a ban on fracking for shale gas has just been lifted in the UK, despite the detection of two earthquakes near Blackpool in June 2011.

The Dark Film is a superb collection. Farley’s work has a memorable, baroque, metaphysical beauty, yet it’s accessible, deceptively simple and powerful. His lens magnifies the details of modernity and, at scale, the cracks he reveals are unsettling.

Buy The Dark Film from Picador.

Cleaning the roof of my narrowboat one morning, I slipped and cartwheeled into the Thames. Despite my love of rivers, I can barely swim and, clawing between the eider-down of silt and the surface, I was as certain as I have ever been about anything that this was it. The cold and the shock muffled my cries and, with my new perspective on the world, eyes struggling even for a view of a surface which now felt impossibly high, I felt the tug of the underworld. My mind was calm. Buses were rumbling over the bridge above while, below, I was drowning. How suddenly the day had shifted from domestic banality to this struggle! Later, my girlfriend would return from town and I would be gone. Feet planted on the riverbed, I knew I had one chance to get a grip on myself, kicked up, arched my back and did my best to relax.

In Misadventure, Richard Meier subverts expectations gloriously; nothing is what it seems and humour and darkness wait in attendance. In Canute explains, Meier plays with his reader’s previous knowledge of a king who taught his flatterers a lesson by demonstrating his inability to control the incoming tide. Yet Meier’s dramatic monologue presents a king who has a habit of throwing in asides which force us to read him as a tactless, heartless clot and not the wise king recorded by posterity: ‘Much later though, in Rome / (what a place! warm for one thing – / the Pope himself had asked / me there) and some way through / not so much a conversion, / more a kind of becoming, I wrote that letter home – ‘To the English people’: / apologising for all / the wars and shortages, / the maiming and the rape, / for the galaxy of taxes. / Everyone loved me then’. Meier’s humour is underplayed as the Danish Canute talks about the weather like a British tourist returning to the office after a package holiday, slipping in the fact that it was the Pope who had invited him with middle class self-consciousness. Meier uses this human vulnerability to squeeze even more horror out of the casual, systematic brutality so casually slotted into the banality like a twenty-first century My Last Duchess. The end of the poem presents a despot looking either for renewal, or oblivion in the rinsing rain. ‘But how to make that last? // Just once I managed it: / that notorious morning / throned there on the beach / as if to show those toadying / noblemen my limits / or else how I was sure / the tide would stop, that I, / Canute, could command the world … // when all I wanted was this: to prove myself / alive – to feel, in front / of witnesses, the water / rise, to embrace its cold, / to be above nothing, / level with the sea – ‘.

In the title poem, Misadventure, Meier’s everyman is easy to like. ‘Nothing again to show for his week’s work / he rises early on the Saturday vowing  / I will achieve one thing today / and drives up to the plant-hire by the station.’ We all feel, like Auden’s unimportant clerk from The Fall of Rome, like defacing an official form with ‘I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK‘ and, across the world, men take solace in their sheds and with their privet hedges. With his pressure hose, the man ‘draws // a line so clean, so neat, from one side to / the other, he’s a Moses’ and it would be easy to view the sentiment as hyperbole. However, anyone who thinks this has never experienced the glories of DIY, glories which leave the puniest of men feeling like an alpha male, no matter how fleetingly. Yet, as the water soaks into his clothes, a wave of weariness reminiscent of Macbeth’s returning were as tedious as to go o’er overcomes him and ‘he places / the nozzle in his mouth and pulls the trigger’.

Yet despite the darkness at the heart of this collection, it offers a direct, honest presentation of life, especially the lives of men. Meier’s sequence, Building Matilda, is the bloke’s take on IVF, the word ‘building’ presenting the miracle of life as another one of Kevin McCloud’s grand designs produced with the helping inspiration of a couple of jazz mags.

Richard Meier sees the beauty of the everyday and in Da capo, the final poem in the collection, ”That’s strange’, I’ll think, some afternoons / and make to turn off the bathroom light / I’m all but sure I’ve not left on, // only to catch, for the umpteenth time, / the frosted windows splintering sunlight / like it’s hitting water’. At one level, the splinters and hitting make this into a violent image but perhaps the point’s the transformation of the intangible into the acutely physical. Besides, there’s a darkness in everything: the Thames is a beautiful body of water but she holds secrets. Misadventure is an assured first collection and in their simplicity and restraint, Meier’s words find power.

Misadventure won the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2012.

If you’re ever on the A34 near Basingstoke, then consider stopping at Burghclere. The main road is unchanged since painted by Stanley Spencer in 1930 and, behind the austere façade of the Sandham Memorial Chapel, is a floor to ceiling explosion of oil on canvas which masquerades as a miniaturized Camposanto. The altarpiece, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, shows the soldiers of The Great War shaking hands with one another and basking on the mud, as if they were in the sleepy graveyard in Cookham. Yet, for all the altarpiece’s somnolence, the effect of the chapel is overwhelming. It’s easy to become anæsthetized to the symbolism of the cross when deployed in its thousands. However, the soldiers’ laying down of their crosses turns them once again into the burden that the stumbling Christ dragged up the hill to Golgotha. And so Spencer’s vision of love is, at the same time, the memory of a thousand crucifixions.

In The Death of Harry Patch, Andrew Motion memorializes the oldest British veteran of The Great War. The title immediately destabilizes the reader, as the first verse presents the moment of the big attack in the vivid detail of the present tense. ‘When the next morning eventually breaks, / a young Captain climbs onto the fire step, / knocks ash from his pipe then drops it / still warm into his pocket’. The warm pipe echoes Orborne’s agonising wait in the dugout before the trench raid in RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End, fuelling our preconceptions of the deadly moment. However, not all is as it seems in this stanza, as the morning ‘eventually breaks’ implying that, unlike the countdown to an attack, this particular morning has been longed for. In the stanza’s final line, the young Captain ‘places the whistle back between his lips’, suggesting that this is where the whistle belongs. Instead of the sound of a whistle, Motion gives us ‘A very long and gentle note’ and the ‘hundreds and thousands of dead who lie there // immediately rise up’. One would expect the dread trumpets of judgement to signal Armageddon and this is why Motion’s ‘gentle note’ evokes Spencer’s sleepy home counties resurrection. ‘They have left a space / for the last recruit of all to join them: Harry Patch, / one hundred and eleven years old, but this is him // now, running quick-sharp along the duckboards’. Motion’s ghostly moment is pitch perfect, as Patch was our last link to what seems now like a distant past but, as the army is demobbed, Motion’s padre offers them not absolution and communion but ‘a wafer of dry mud’, the only appropriate symbol of the soldiers’ shared, bitter experiences on the churned ground of the battlefield.

Laurels and Donkeys, the first section of the collection, sees Motion ranging across the conflicts of the last hundred years, working to great effect with documentary sources as he did in The Cinder Path’s Coming in to Land. The decision to work with prose sources whose names are left until the acknowledgements allows the collection to give voice to the unknown soldier and the immediate, direct voices suggest the British Army’s continuity of service and sacrifice. Motion refuses to rework the material into a pleasing shape and leaves the men’s incredulity to deliver the shadow of an emotional impact. In The Vallon Men, for example,  we read that ‘On the gently sloping hill behind Norton Manor barracks, / home to 40 Commando, three trees, one for each marine, / have already been dedicated to the memory of those killed’ and, as fourteen more were planted, Motion ends the poem with, ”It was a very hard tour’, said Gavin Taylor, aged twenty- / eight and a father of three. ‘We have lost a lot of friends. / And we have seen a lot of things that are not ideal”.

The collection’s final section, Several Lifetimes, is also haunted and in A Glass Child, dedicated to Motion’s English teacher, Peter Way, the school children explore the spaces which the school would rather keep off-limits. ‘On the landing in the dormitory above the classroom / in the Old Labs that science had long-since abandoned // two school friends as restless as I used to be took turns / with me, climbing on one another’s shoulders and staring // through the trap-door everyone else had failed to notice’. That Motion labels the classrooms as science labs invites the reader to see the young poet as discovering Narnia while his peers pursue more Earthly activities. The glass child in the attic, living in the speaker’s imagination, also invites us to think of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel’s creation of the golem of Prague to stave off antisemitic attacks. Motion’s poem does not point to bullying but its language is one of exclusion, or exclusivity. As the speaker explored the dust in the attic, we read that Peter Way ‘broke into my head, and a light swung // over the lumber of knowledge I did not realise was mine’. The language is violent and intrusive but Motion’s geography is precise, as Way’s classroom is a floor below that dormitory in the Old Labs. The layers are aligned, inviting us to view  Motion’s awareness of the glass child as beyond his head, beyond his consciousness, perhaps? With disturbing precision the glass child, Motion and the school teacher combine. ‘Overhead in the attic I heard the child assemble himself / and pace softly to and fro across the creaking floorboards, // humming the high music that was like a finger rubbed / around the rim of a goblet. At an equal distance below me, // in the hushed classroom where a square of wooden desks / crouched in the moonlight, Peter Way moved very quietly // in rotation. He was expecting and answer from each of us, but first we had to guess his question. When it was my turn // I would think of nothing he had not understood for years’.

I was at Radley College, Motion’s old school, a couple of weeks ago and I passed underneath the Memorial Arch, inscribed with the names of the school’s Great War dead. In the far right column, my eye was caught by the name of Patch. Now the humble Harry Patch left his school in Somerset in 1913, so it’s not him but I felt the echo of coincidence, influence and Motion’s own schoolboyish presence as he glanced at the same memorial day after day. The Customs House is a spare collection of poetry, yet it evokes time and place with precision. Motion allows voices to speak for themselves and shapes his material with the gentlest of touches. The results are as fragile and beautiful as cut glass.

Buy The Customs House from Faber and Faber

RELATED ARTICLES

• This Scepted’d Isle: Andrew Motion’s The Cinder Path
• The Customs House by Andrew Motion – review (guardian.co.uk)

3PTSDHV67UC4

With a jolt I realised that I was standing at the foot of my own grave. Sergeant John Field, 1803339, of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserves died at 22 on the 5th February, 1945. He’s buried in Botley Cemetery, Oxford. My name became a last word when read in the finality of Portland stone and I glimpsed my own internment through an impossible eye. A love of graveyards has diluted death, reduced it to a place of architectural and historical interest but, at that moment, its snarl had me quaking in my size eights.

In Richard Price, Katy Evans-Bush presents this uncanny moment: ‘Richard Price was born in 1723. / Richard Price is an American crime novelist. / Richard Price is a screenwriter. / He was the son of a dissenting minister. / He is the youngest Informationalist’. The poem works with found objects and the authority of the encyclopaedia seduces us with a misplaced sense of security before Evans-Bush’s sleight of hand leaves us disorientated in the company of a 63 year old American novelist and screenwriter. In the next line, her God hand resurrects the mouldering Price for a second time. Every line opens with Price’s name, asserting the stability and power of names while, at the same time, the name’s power to encapsulate us adequately is undermined. In this internet age, I’m all too aware of my national and international namesakes: John Field‘s a magician, a mind reader and an after dinner speaker. He’s the composer who invented the nocturne and a university lecturer. Yet, through the splicing of Richard Price’s various identities, we see their common ground and gradually become unsure which is which, like trying to follow the cups and balls magic trick. The void of space and time feels a little bit smaller and a little bit warmer.

In 1599: He Looketh Happily Across the Thames by Bankside, the archaic Elizabethan language in the second and final poem in the sequence creates a convergence of history. There’s another doubling as the Globe, nestled amongst the bear-gardens and stews of Bankside’s lawless liberties, faced down the Puritan city and St Paul’s. The cathedral was short on luck as in ‘AD 980, consumed by fire / (the records are unclear wherefore): / the Saxon church’s funeral pyre. // 1138, the same, / a new-built roof destroyed by flame: a century’s work, God’s little game’. The rhyming tercets keep the tone light and the caesura in a line like ‘a century’s work, God’s little game’ takes a gentle pop at humanity’s more grandiose moments but, over the water on Bankside, Shakespeare’s just as bad. ‘Come, shield your eyes and look across the tide, / God’s water dappled by agnostic air, / and see God’s cavity on t’other side! / Our merchant highway holds the ghosts aside. / My Faith! I think we be the winners here’. Well, winners until the thatch caught alight during a production of Henry VIII in 1613, anyway.

The collection is shot through with a mischievous iconoclasm, as Evans-Bush creates mashups of Captain Jack Sparrow and TS Eliot in the once read, never forgotten, The Love Ditty of an ‘eartsick Pirate: ‘It’s time we be goin’, me hearty, avast! / When the night’s nailed up its colours to its mast / Like some swab loaded to the gun’les’ and, in Intelligent Album Rock, we’re offered a concept sonnet. The final word in every line’s the same as the final word in the corresponding line of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues receives similar treatment. This stuff’s a joy to read (and especially aloud) and puts a flippant Byronic swagger back into the serious business of poesy.

As well as playfulness, Egg Printing Explained delivers moments of arresting beauty. In After the Gasometers, Evans-Bush imagines that, ‘If those were crowns, the kings / must have been stretched out underground / from Regent’s Canal to Stepney Green’ and suddenly the London landscape is transformed into something akin to The Valley of the Kings and even the pollutants of the industrial age are rendered beautiful as ‘a thick eiderdown of chemicals and dirt’.

Egg Printing Explained is a monster collection with a diversity of tone and subject matter. However, at its heart, shared experiences link humanity and its high and low culture. The sacred and the profane are shackled together, whether they will or not. This no nonsense honesty is refreshing to encounter and, when faced with Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, the three blunt lines of dear m magritte are easy to applaud: ‘it says it isn’t / a pipe / but it is’.

Buy Egg Printing Explained from Salt

Katy blogs at Baroque in Hackney and her website is here.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Lingerie in London – Me and the Dead by Katy Evans-Bush

Rush hour is cruel to those going nowhere. To stand frozen as the city wheels about, reconfiguring itself for dinners and duvets, is to feel exposed, even as the press of humanity ignores you. I’d been waiting for a friend who, having forgotten, had left me beached on the pavement where I met Helen. We sat on a bench, lit like film stars, as lesser mortals hastened from shadow to shadow. Helen was weathered, drunk and still gasping cider from an oversized plastic bottle. The smell of alcohol was toxic and, instinctively, I wanted to retch, to run into the night. However, once someone’s started gabbing I’m trapped until I can find a tactful exit – and Helen wasn’t stopping. She was certain that the drink would kill her. She wept for her family, for the children she had abandoned and pulled a religious medal from out of her clothes, asking me to pray with her. This was too much and I refused. Stung by embarrassment, she started to rearrange herself but my guilt was too much. And so she sat there like a child while I played priest, struck with stage fright.

Olivia McCannon opens her collection with Liverpool Echo, which presents a newspaper seller who’s as much a fixture as any litter bin, or lamp-post. ‘He’s not there any more, the man outside Marks and Sparks, / Twice a minute every day for years, he shouted – ‘C’o!‘ You need to be in empty, enclosed space to hear an echo and so the man’s echoes, which reverberate through the poem, suggest that, although he was physically present on the street with shoppers, tourists and workers, he was in fact alone. The walls necessary to generate an echo also suggest confinement; it may have seemed to those who walked past that he was in the open air just like them but, rooted to his spot, the nameless man was tethered by poverty. He was no ordinary street seller but a harbinger of death: ‘It was always winter and always dark, / His – ‘C’o! was church-loud, hollow and cold. // A blast of mist, shaped by his mouth’s warm hole / Into an O as irrevocable as crematorium smoke’.

Although the collection’s opening poems sound a knell with titles like City of the Dead and Dust, McCannon’s Jubilee Portraits steer a deft course between domestic warmth and a meditation on mortality, as her father’s photographs were ‘Taken fifty years ago in black and white, / Developed with the enlarger he made from a gunsight / On a ship in Kiel, waiting to be demobbed.’ That McCannon has to remind the reader that the photographs are black and white signals the technological revolution which divides the generations yet, even in these prints, actions are preserved in the present tense as ‘The top one shows she never swims, just paddles’. The sonnet’s concluding couplet revisits the ground of Liverpool Echo as the father, the photographer, is ‘The man who repaired the guns but didn’t fire them / The man who took the photos but wasn’t in them’. McCannon’s caesuras highlight her ambivalence, as the father is at once both active and absent, his passing marked by emptiness, like the absence outside Marks and Sparks.

In Exactly My Own Length, the bespoke qualities of the coffin present death more attractively, as the grave could lodge in ‘Say a sheltering hollow in the heather / Marked by a wind-quiffed hawthorn / Rounded, sweetened and softened / By clumps of sheep wool and droppings / Where the ground is still herd-warm’. However, the titular phrase, taken from one of Coleridge’s notebooks, evokes the cosy sleep of the living and the poet thinks that she’d ‘be happy to stop a while’ in such a place. This is either the lightest of ironies, or a humorous indication of the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. At this point, the poem darkens as burgeoning nature ‘is also the never-hoped-for / Slow-sucking bog on the darkening moor / That forces you to watch yourself slide / Feet first into its changeless archive / Of petrified time and trapped light’. Suddenly, the oblivion which swallowed the newspaper seller looks the better option, as at least his body is spared undeath and indignity which, given the collection’s final sequence of poems, begins to look like a metaphor for the way in which modern medicine desiccates us.

Although the closing sequence allows McCannon to explore her feelings on the loss of her mother, she evokes modern medical care with a precision which chimes with the reader. Landing Light’s title plays with associations, suggesting both the homely light at the top of the stairs and the technological precision of the night flight. ‘Transparent tubes and strings / Anchor you to life / Heavy machines and bags at the end of each / Whenever you move / I must stop them pulling out’. A ship should never be anchored to something moving: it risks both vessels and tears up the sea or river bed. Despite the mother’s fragility, death’s will to power makes light of the machinery, personified as ‘pulling out’ which, in turn, forces the speaker to struggle to stop it. There’s nothing dignified about the three-way struggle of this deathbed vigil.

In these final poems, language is stripped from the speaker. In Vigil, she becomes a pair of eyes flitting between objects in the austere room: ‘The bed / The twisted sheets / The chair by the window // The wind / The wind’ and Nothing I Can Do offers a gradually disintegrating litany of care and questions: ‘I don’t know what the answer is / I tidy the pills you’ve stopped taking / I make a hot-water bottle for your feet / I put on some music / I light a candle / I hold your hand / I weep / There is nothing I can do’.

A couple of weeks ago, Exactly My Own Length won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and it’s not difficult to see why. McCannon’s collection is a focused and spare exploration of our responses to loss. By working with a restricted palette, McCannon’s work gains intensity and a deceptive effortlessness.

Buy Exactly My Own Length from Carcanet

RELATED ARTICLES

• Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2012 – Winner announced

How many of my muses can you name?

Thank you to my brother, Peter James Field, for the banner which now graces the blog.

He’s a talented illustrator and, although most of his work is for UK and international newspapers and magazines, he also illustrates book covers. My favourite is his jacket for Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and his cover for Sandi Toksvig’s Valentine Grey was featured on BBC Breakfast last week. Well, the book was but Sandi was interviewed on the sofa with a huge projection of Peter’s cover over her shoulder.

If you’d like to commission him, contact Agency Rush.

• Peter’s website Peter James Field
• Peter’s blog