Katharine Towers – the floating man

Buy the floating man from Picador

Buy the Tallis Scholars’ recording of Allegri’s Miserere

Even plumbed through a car radio cassette player, the top C of Allegri’s Miserere stopped me dead. Some music has weight and gravity, sucking you in and, for its duration, it is the world.

In ‘Miserere’ from Katharine Towers’ first collection of poetry, she echoes the form of Allegri’s original through the ebb and flow of each stanza. ‘Never forget’, her litany reads, ‘Never forget that they are singing for mercy’. This is disquieting, as the beauty of the music compels the listener to do precisely that. The choir are singing Psalm 50 and, in Latin, the word ‘holocaustis’ (burnt offering) recurs. Post World War Two, the lyrical and musical content jar – the more you listen to the piece, the stronger the whiff of burnt flesh.

There can often be something quite unsavoury about choirs, especially their gentlemen. Take Christ Church Cathedral choir, Oxford: a couple of years ago, indulging in a spot of liturgical tourism, I watched a tenor leering and salivating over a pretty young lady in his eyeline – the music might speak of heaven, but the singers are all blood, boners and hormones. Towers knows a thing or two about choirs and has the insight to write ‘Never forget that plain song falls short / when God can be stitched in so many colours and threads / and the chalice of pride belongs to the voice / that descants bright C, and would have us believe / it is heaven distilled and dispensed’.

Bernard O’Donoghue – Farmers Cross

Buy Farmers Cross from Faber

The Divine Office, The Breviary, is a book endowed with magical powers. Take a friend of mine, watching his suitcase being turned over in the green channel at Dublin airport: ‘Terribly sorry, father’, said the official, clocking the breviary zipped into the leather covers favoured by the habitual reader, and closing the case (and this in the city that exhibits one in the National Museum of Ireland with a pistol shaped hidey-hole in its centre). Still, despite the Breviary’s effect on Eire’s customs officers, it never had much of an effect on me, despite a past life spent on my knees in houses, churches and, finally, seminary, praying to a mute god.

So, O’Donoghue’s latest collection has a special resonance, as the subject of one of the early poems, ‘Vocation’, went out ‘Each cold October morning […] and walked up and down, / like the horse-drawn seed drill quartering every inch’. O’Donoghue captures the mundanity, the sheer physical effort required to commit to a religious lifestyle that just doesn’t deliver the goods. The image of sowing seed bleakly echoes Mark’s gospel, the parable of the sower, but in Mark something always happens to the seed, even if unproductive or unfortunate. O’Donoghue’s metaphorical seed disappears into a void of futility, despite the methodical ‘quartering every inch’. There’s something ambivalent here though – we know that seed ought to germinate, so the sower must be left with the nagging suspicion that the problem is something that they have done wrong. The imagery of the poem is cold and bleak, but it ends with the subject ‘staring for inspiration / at the golden, unresponsive tabernacle’. It’s a hypnotic experience, sitting, or even lying on the floor, of a church, possibly in the wee small hours, watching the dull red coal of the tabernacle lamp in near darkness and waiting.

Farmers Cross explores, amongst other things, journeys, and it’s typically gentle and non-judgemental of Donoghue to leave this one in progress, despite the destination that his imagery points to.

Craig Raine – How Snow Falls

Buy How Snow Falls from Atlantic Books

‘I Remember My Mother Dying’, the second poem in this collection, is forensic and unflinching. Raine’s couplets, levelled at death and relationships, echo Pope’s gentle ironies but intensified until they possess sledgehammer force. Raine’s presentation of the living (his brother) unsettles the reader: drunkard, braggadocio, prodigal son. At one level, Raine’s no holds barred treatment of his family is courageous. However, the brother has no right of reply and, in the taut structure of the poem, his speech is heavily edited by the authorial voice, leaving one hankering after the other side of the story. It is when Raine describes his mother that he really jolts the reader:

two days before she died, a question:
would I pluck the hairs out of her chin?

There were none on the ward,
so I bought some tweezers down the road.

Every time a hair was plucked,
she sighed, almost like someone being slowly fucked

Sure, a poet might feel that they cannot afford a display of sentimentality when searching for the mot juste but, as a simile for a mother/son moment, this device smacks of sensationalism. However, Raine can, and should, be excused almost anything for presenting ageing and dying, the retreat of memory and medicalization of death. We find the smelly, messy, craziness of babies infinitely endearing whilst, as a society, shuffling inconvenient, bearded old women into the mercy of the residential care system. Raine’s language is calculated to make us flinch and boy does he succeed.

World Book Night

No collections of poetry are being given out on World Book Night 2012 – I guess that, once Heaney and Duffy were expended in 2011, nothing was left for this year. In the nation’s psyche, a biography or a novel constitutes a book. World Book Night is designed to promote the industry, like giving ciggies to kids. Sure, it’s commendable to give free Ishiguro or Donoghue to a stranger in the street. ‘You can’t make a gift of an ebook download, the volunteers will say with a nod and wink’. By all means sock it to Apple and Amazon. I want a bookshop in my town. But, for God’s sake, mix it up a little. The book is a many splendored thing, and the World Book Night list should have been better.

Olivia Cole – Restricted View

Buy Restricted View from Salt Publishing

Olivia Cole’s Restricted View explores, amongst other things, the pleasures and frustrations of perspective. ‘Breaking the Ice’, the first poem in the collection, suggests an awkward encounter, where the ice is slipped upon rather than broken, where the barrier between people remains. The collection opens with a quotation from Vile Bodies, inviting the reader to draw a parallel with the weary hedonism of Waugh’s Bright Young People, where Adam and his on/off fiancé Nina break up with the tersest dialogue in fiction. Cole’s internal rhymes hint at hidden agendas, at what has been left unsaid. Starting with this poem, audacious stanza divisions fracture sentences throughout the collection echoing the ‘stop start’ of the encounter.

The collection is not an emotionally cold one, however, and the next poem, ‘Between Some Acts,’ transports the reader to the Veneto, initially inviting us to consider the scene from the point of view of a statue of Victor Emmanuel. We are desensitised to these others in our public spaces, and it takes an arresting subversion of the rules of public sculpture like Gormley’s ‘Event Horizon’ (2007), gazing coldly from rooftops like snipers or extraterrestrials, to remind us that we are not alone. Cole sustains this theme throughout the collection, notably in ‘Ponte Sant’Angelo’, where copies of Bernini’s angels look down at us, jealous of their immured sisters’ Travertine purity, and projecting their insecurities and desires onto the public below. Cole’s tone characterises the angels, and the change in syntax suggests the dominatrix. ‘Get off the floor. I know it’s me/ out here, who makes you shiver.’

There’s humour throughout and, in the whimsical Frost inspired ‘Dress Not Taken’, the dress becomes a sublime conceit for the cyclic nature of life unrecognised in Frost’s original as, ‘Like all of the decades, they/ float back again’. This is delicious stuff, and Cole’s light touch ensures that her original air-blue gowns float in ‘the first fat polka dots of rain’.

Restricted View is accessible and unpretentious. Cole’s voice is engaging, skilled in ventriloquy. This languorous cosmopolitan collection would make a great summer read.

Copyright

The plan had been to present a poem, followed by a couple of paragraphs of thoughts. Yes, I confess that I’m an English teacher, but the point of the blog was to respond as a reader, as someone who read this stuff for fun, rather than offering the sort of autopsy that has some students head-butting their desks in frustration.

Things seemed to be going well. I was enjoying writing, but then I emailed the Poetry Archive asking for them to link to the blog. Although they wished me well, they said that they wouldn’t link to a site that used copyrighted material without permission. Now, I’d thought about this from the outset, and had only copied poems from sample materials made available online by publishers. I posted ISBN numbers beside book titles too, but that’s not the point, is it? Copyright is copyright, and I should have done more to link to publishers’ websites, and poets’ home pages.
So how do you present contemporary poetry to sixth formers? They won’t find much in most school libraries (for shame). Once Armitage and a handful of other names have been excluded, there’s little on offer in provincial bookshops either. Providing a link to a poem buried deep inside a publisher’s pdf hardly seems the way forward. You need the poem on the page to refer to.

So, I’m going to plough on without poems for now, and will work harder to promote publishers and poets. If and when I start reprinting material, rest assured it will be with permission.