The Soviet Briar: poems of Vladislav Khodasevich
June 30, 2016 June 30, 2016 martyn crucefix contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, Great War poetry, poetry, Russian poetry, translation, writing	Akhmatova, Angel Classics, Boris Pasternak, David Cooke, London Grip, Mandelshtam, Michael Wachtel, Modernism, October Revolution, Peter Daniels, Pushkin, Robert Frost, Symbolism, The Kenyon Review, Tsvetayeva, Vladislav Khodasevich
In the light of recent political events in the UK, it seemed important to be thinking about wider perspectives this week – Europe, Revolutions, the role of poetry. The poems of Vladislav Kodasevich came easily to mind and I have wanted to praise Peter Daniels' translations of them for a while now.
What emerges from Peter Daniels' Vladislav Khodasevich: Selected Poems (Angel Classics, 2013) is a vivid picture of a poet who was, both by temperament and historical circumstance, very much an individual. From a Lithuanian Polish background, coming to creativity at the fag end of Symbolism, witnessing Russia's revolutionary year of 1917, going into permanent exile in 1922, Khodasevich (1886-1939) was perhaps inevitably a writer with little sense of belonging, of sure identity. It's no surprise that he plays with images of doubles, often standing outside himself, then counters such doubts with rather grandiose claims to his poetic vocation.
The consequent difficulty of pigeon-holing him as a poet is one of the reasons why he is less well-known than his more familiar contemporaries – Mandelshtam, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva and Pasternak. He is also difficult to pin down because he is "a modernist, but with a classical temperament" (Daniels' Preface). In a period when others were tearing up rule books (poetical and political) Khodasevich harks back to the "eight little volumes" of Pushkin's works. Amongst the ruck of Symbolists, Acmeists, Futurists and Cubo-Futurists, Khodasevich's poems mostly retain traditional forms and he proudly declares: "I grafted the classic rose / to the Soviet briar bush" ('Petersburg'). Such formalism presents great challenges for the translator, of course, with Khodasevich flaunting his conservative and poetic concerns – "O may my last expiring groan / be wrapped inside an articulate ode!" – and, like many before and since, he argues such formal frameworks are paradoxically the way to find release. (Carol Rumens has discussed some formal aspects of a Daniels/Khodasevich poem for The Guardian). Curiously, his last ever poem was in praise of the iambic tetrameter, the classic metre of the Russian tradition:
Its nature is mysterious,
where spondee sleeps and paeon sings,
one law is held within it – freedom.
Freedom is the law it brings . . .
Vladislav Khodasevich
If Khodasevich uneasily straddles a variety of poetic strategies, there is a fascinating parallel to this in his views on self and society. The self is at one moment urged to "be a star that breaks away from the night" but in the next is "grunt[ing] to yourself, / looking for spectacles or keys". This "usual self" is preoccupied with tarnished spires, the tops of cars, old iron eaves, and in 'Berlin View' sits shivering and sneezing in a café, surrounded by "plate-glass" reflections of itself. A couple of years later, at what seems a Dantesque 'mid-point' in his life, Khodasevich stares hopelessly into a mirror: "Me, me, me. What a preposterous word! / Can that man there really be me?" This is the Modernist side of the poet, observing from "the gutter", watching a sordid Parisian cabaret, a dismal demi-monde of "tinselled chaos". Yet the poem quoted here – 'The Stars' – goes on to suggest our gaze may sometimes incline upwards, "from the horizon to the stars" and – at least on occasions – we are aware of a "starry universe in glory / and the primordial loveliness".
Khodasevich and Nina Berberova, Sorrento, 1926
This suggests Khodasevich was still enough of a Symbolist to see the poet's role as seeking out such "loveliness", the transcendent within the quotidian (as Michael Wachtel's Introduction defines this key Symbolist intent). This accounts for Khodasevich's repeated images of stars often unseen above us (but still there) and also of the flourishing of seeds in the earth as an image of personal and social growth. The title poem of The Way of the Seed (1920), in rhymed couplets, describes the traditional sower, with seed gleaming golden in his hand, but scattered into "the blackness of the land". There it finds "its moment for dying, and for growth". Latterly, the poem suggests this is also the path of the "soul" as well as "my native country, and her people". This nicely sums up Khodasevich – the progressive conservative, these organic and traditional images of the farmer absorbed into bold ideas of growth and change incorporating both a dying back and re-birth. A similar pattern is reflected in 'Gold' – a coin is placed into the mouth of a corpse, buried, and after many years, in the unearthed skull, the coin is found again, rattling: "the gold will flash in the midst of bones, / a tiny sun, the imprint of my soul".
Peter Daniels at Khodasevich's grave
It is in such longevity, such insightfulness that continues to be true, that Khodasevich finds reasons to celebrate the poetic vocation. Though the names of the dead who fell at the Battle of Khotin (1739) are forgotten, "the Ode upon Khotin" by Lomonosov is still recited. 'Ballad of the Heavy Lyre' opens with Khodasevich in the Soviet-run House of the Arts, surveying his life and finding it "worthless, a quagmire". But eventually verses burst from him till "a galaxy streams at my head" (those stars again) and a heavy lyre is mysteriously thrust into his hands and, in the final line, he understands this is the lyre of Orpheus. Written in 1921, this poem foreshadows Khodasevich's departure from the Soviet restrictions in the following year with hopes (one imagines) of further freedoms to be enjoyed.
I was especially interested in the seven substantial blank verse poems Khodasevich wrote in a brief period between 1918-20 (David Cooke's review of the book for London Grip makes the same observation). These in particular bring to mind the modernist-conservatism of Robert Frost (whose two first books were published in 1913 and 1914) and it's astonishing that Khodasevich did not pursue these successful experiments with a less formal verse that seems an ideal vehicle for his quiet observational voice, his sense of the mystery or beauty that lies beneath the ordinary, his observations of a provisional self often encountering an unstable, uncertain world.
'An Episode' appears to record, moment by moment, an out-of-body experience Khodasevich had in 1915 (these blank verse poems are always keen to name times, places, people). At one moment, he sits before a shelf of books, at the next he is gazing at himself as if looking at "a simple, old, old friend". The transitional moments are evoked through the marvellous image of feeling like a "diver, plunging to the deep, [hearing] / the running about on deck and the shouts / of the sailors". '2nd November' describes the aftermath of revolution – again the precision of street names, people's responses as they emerge into the smashed and bullet-scarred streets makes this read as a very contemporary poem indeed. The narrator watches a neighbour, a joiner, building a coffin and painting it: "under the brush / the boards were turning crimson". But the golden seed in black earth comes to mind again as a child is observed – a "four-year-old, chubby, in a flap-eared hat" – who manages a smile as if listening to Moscow's "beating heart, / the moving fluids, growth" though for the narrator even Pushkin's beloved works, on this occasion, fail to alleviate the shock of political change.
The unresolved tensions Khodasevich manages to hold together in these blank verse poems create a very modern impression. Another child appears in 'Midday', the narrator sitting in the most ordinary street scene, recalling a visit to Venice, fleeting glimpses of those "incandescent stars" once more. 'An Encounter' drops the star images for a more conventional image of beauty or inspiration, a "lovely English girl" glimpsed in Venice with its "black gondolas, / the fleeting shadows of pigeons, and the red / flow of the wine". The extraordinary poem 'The Monkey' replaces the stars and the girl with the bizarre image of a tame monkey in a "red skirt", led on a chain by an itinerant Serbian man (a much inferior translation of this poem by Alex Cigale can by read in The Kenyon Review). After a drink of water from a bowl, the monkey offers "her black and calloused hand" with such "nobility". It's the realism of the setting – the heat, the cock crow, the dusty lilacs – that enables Khodasevich to anthropomorphise the animal to such an extent and get away with it. It becomes another epiphanic moment in which the transcendent emerges from the quotidian. Here, a great chain of brotherhood seems implied and this makes the final line all the more devastating: "That was the day of the declaration of war".
The two most Frost-like of these blank verse poems describe respectively a derelict house and a couple of neighbours chopping wood. 'The House' leads to reflections on transience, whether for a "palace" or a "shack", the sudden advent of "war, plague, famine, or civil turmoil". Such contrasts are again viewed from an Olympian height, an aloofness which has more negative capability about it than unfeeling Modernist cynicism. An old woman appears, scraping a living, and rather than pass judgement on her or her fate, the narrator joins her in stripping useful materials from the ruined house: "in pleasant harmony / we do some of the work of time". A green moon rises ambiguously over the scene, casting light over a "tumbled" stove. Khodasevich's rich embrace and acceptance are also evident in 'The Music' as two neighbours chop wood. One suddenly claims to hear music but try as he might the other cannot hear it. In 'Mending Wall', Frost's narrator likewise teased his farmer/neighbour and drew from him an old saying: "Good fences make good neighbours". Khodasevich's poem yields only a sense of earthly work well done together, the remoteness of the sky (from which perhaps that music fell), the clouds passing onward as "feathery angels", or perhaps they are really no more than clouds.
England is Finished: Sean O'Brien's 'Hammersmith' reviewed
June 21, 2016 martyn crucefix contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, writing	Aeneid, Christopher Marlowe, Cousin Coat, Dr Faustus, Hammersmith, Hercules Press, migration, Personal Identity, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Sean O'Brien, Virgil
In the week of the EU Referendum it seemed appropriate to review a beautiful little chapbook by one of the UK's most prominent poets, Sean O'Brien. Appropriate because it is a book exploring both personal and national identity, issues of migration and how new lives are begun in a new country. In particular it is a work always aware of the need for – and the difficulty of – pragmatism, honesty and truth in both personal and political worlds. Whether it is our own or our nation's past or future, the idealism or fundamentalism of the simplistically pure, clear and incontrovertible is a false god. Worship at such an altar is the old fearful yearning for security in a world that simply is both contingent and mysterious and can only possibly be faced with a sense of compromise, processes of negotiation.
Beside a photograph of his own 1952 birth certificate, Sean O'Brien's foreword to Hammersmith (Hercules Editions, 2016) ponders other people's interest in their family histories. Perhaps our ancestors "underwrite" our lives in a way we cannot do for ourselves – in ways religion might once have done. But O'Brien assures us the two cantos (of what seems to be a longer sequence of poems yet to appear) are more the "work of the imagination" than anything narrowly documentary. He alludes to Robert Lowell's dictum – "why not say what happened?" – only to dismiss it, suggesting Hammersmith aspires more to the condition of a dream or reverie.
If this is teasing, then it continues into the poem. With a neat circuitousness, O'Brien's rhyming alter ego, Ryan, wanders the streets of Hammersmith recalling his parents early days and places (days and places shared with O'Brien's own mother and father), yet his search is an endless deferral, not arriving at any clear goal, a sense of not belonging which (the Foreword has already told us) is precisely O'Brien's experience of London: "I never feel entirely present there". So the irresolvable uncertainty about one's true self is re-evoked here along with a scepticism about how far delving into ancestry can really help with it and this narrative set-up allows O'Brien to pursue the dream-like interweaving of reality and imagination which has become more familiar in his work since The Drowned Book (2007). It goes without saying that this fantasmagoric journey also takes the poet back to that post-war era that so fascinates him: "a place forever on the cusp of realising the welfare state" (from Ben Wilkinson's Guardian review of The Beautiful Librarians).
Mixing the personal, the historical and the political, most of the optimism of that earlier time has gone. Canto 1 opens dismissively: "England is finished". Initially this seems about to be cast as an epic/tragic moment as a rower in the University Boat Race catches a crab and, amidst allusions to the "fields of Hades", is compared to Palinurus, Aeneas' drowned steersman from Virgil's Aeneid Book 6. But within a few lines, the oarsman recovers and the incident ends only in petty recriminations and unsportsmanlike appeals to umpires – more comedy than tragedy, more satire than epic. The narrative voice concludes: "I'm losing my faith in this annual fiction". Like Aintree and Wembley, those great sporting occasions that at least gave the impression of a nation united, a clearer sense of self-identity and "name", the Boat Race too loses its power to inspire a faith in a certain type of Englishness, "a special and definitive order of reality" (Foreword).
Perhaps it's not wholly clear if this "order of reality" ever had any real existence and was lost, or whether the narrator lived the delusion of it briefly that was then corrected by his growing understanding of the significance of "class, the major stench of things". And perhaps this is why the poem swings from imagined images of the 1940s and 1950s Hammersmith to the wanderings of Ryan/O'Brien in more contemporary settings (another photo in the chapbook is clearly O'Brien taking a selfie reflected in an underpass mirror). Canto 1 now more securely pursues the past, describing a young woman (the future mother) as nurse, teacher, doing the "pallais glide". Such remembrance is labelled the "trap of elegy" at one moment. Ryan is caught in it and "Nor am I out of it" says another voice (O'Brien?) echoing Mephistophilis in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, that moment when he reveals the omnipresence of Hell.
What develops is a passage of a more documentary type (though no doubt the details are largely imagined) with an Irish ancestor stepping off the train at Euston, finding a room to rent: "Oh loneliness, your name is Hammersmith". But canto 1 ends with an outbreak of irregular rhyming (the poem is written in triplets throughout) which holds together, as if in successful solution, references to Aneurin Bevan and Stafford Cripps, the ill-fated groundnut scheme of the late 1940s, Caliban and Ariel and a (more personal sounding) naïve, nursery-rhyme passage about "the boy with the curly brown hair", who is perhaps the future father-to-be.
Canto 2 opens (having caught the habit of rhyme from the end of the preceding Canto) with another vision of the transience of London life, especially for migrants: "no fixed abode, where is no stay, / Not known at this address, / Or never known, or went away, // Gone where the post eventually goes". This is both the contemporary figure's fruitless search for an ancestral past as well as the post-war migrant's experience where the world the nation fought for "admits / No Blacks and no dogs and no Irish". There are passages here out of Dante, out of Yeats in which spectral figures go dancing through London streets "into Ravenscourt Park" and beyond the District Line. Once again, Ryan/O'Brien re-surfaces with a fierce thirst for Guinness which might "re-enchant / A world that is always and only prose".
The earlier allusion ("where is no stay") to Robert Frost's comment that poetry can act as a "momentary stay against confusion" is repeated again in the context of what looks like suicidal thoughts, a personal as well as political history: "Here there is nowhere. Here is no stay". It turns out the Ryan character has an engagement to read poems to an audience but the tone here is angrily dismissive ("Who gives a fuck?") and heckled abuse from an audience is deemed appropriate somehow, the only thing to make sense "of a dying art". O'Brien's casting doubt on the efficacy – the very purpose – of poetry in the context of an ambitious poetic project like this might seem perverse but is perhaps just another de-stabilising element in the whole where past and present, political idealism and cynicism and failure battle it out across the fluid fields of the poet's observation, memory and imagination (and anyway, if this is the opening of a long poem, this may not be the last word on the subject).
The poet's heart seems most passionately engaged in passages concerning the mother figure, but Canto 2 ends, as did Canto 1, with allusions to the father. Like the son, he too seems to have looked always "for a sign", for meaning in the bewildering flood and flow of the city's life. What seems to be O'Brien's pessimism again re-surfaces: "You will fail / Like your father before you". The failure will be to "name" the waters (this leaves me thinking of Keats' epitaph: one whose name was writ on water). The father's ambition apparently yielded nothing more than a "suitcase – / Poems and politics, no fixed address" and later "Madness lay in wait". Yet the narrative voice offers up the idea of witness, even if this does not lead to reassuring certainty: "You will lower your face to the water, // And through it, and open your eyes." This is reminiscent of O'Brien's poem 'Cousin Coat' with its self-urging to "Be memory, be conscience, will and rage" and to remain "cold and honest", though since those lines were written in 1987 O'Brien's range has continued to widen so that honesty in terms of documentary/historical evidence now also has to face new challenges, new types of honesty with regard to the imagination, in part those in-filling processes of personal memory, the making-up of our own past which many of us hope "underwrites" the people we have become.
What Have I Been Reading: January – March 2016
June 15, 2016 martyn crucefix contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, UK poetry magazines, writing	Anvil Press, Bloodaxe Books, Choman hardi, Happenstance Press, Kim Addonizio, Robert Macfarlane, Stephen Payne, Ted Hughes, Tony Hoagland, Tracey Herd, Vasko Popa
Up-dated March 2016
Tony Hoagland's new collection from Bloodaxe introduces me to a poet I want to read more of (having missed him so far). Laugh-out-loud funny in the same breath as touching while being satirical and vividly descriptive of urban USA. Like Billy Collins, you relish the poem – then wonder how he managed to achieve it so apparently effortlessly.
I read with Tracey Herd recently at the StAnza Festival (see this post) and was impressed with the emotional honesty of her writing. This is her first book in almost 15 years and was short-listed for the Forward as well as being a PBS Choice.
In reviewing Choman Hardi's recent Considering the Women for Poetry London, I also went back to re-read her first book, Life for Us (both published by Bloodaxe). Her unsparing exploration of the plight and flight of the Iraqi-Kurdish people in the 1980s is poetry of witness of a high order. This is a body of work which is unique and deserves as much notice as we can give it.
Up-dated January/February 2016
Macfarlane's take on the significance of the loss of rural vocabulary and the danger that we will narrow our human experience as a result makes for powerful reading. Actually I found the word lists a bit dull (which I'm sure I shouldn't as a poet) but perhaps most important of all he directs readers to previously little known writers about landscape like Nan Shepherd, J A Baker and Peter Davidson.
Popa's unpunctuated, economical, elusive poems, many of them drawing on Serbo-Croat myth and legends, can be hard going. There is little sentiment or surface detail to hold on to. But reading them you hear where Ted Hughes found the idioms of Crow. Poems like little hard pebbles giving lessons to the more windy and verbose among us (I include myself of course).
Addonizio can be verbose but what she evokes is a speaking voice, a chatting voice, driven on to revelation after revelation as if across a bar table littered with empties. She is a voice in your ear with all that implies about thrilling intimacy though on occasions I felt 'give me a break'.
Stephen Payne's poems emerge partly from his job as a Professor of Human-Centric Systems. He observes what people do and he wants to discuss it. He's looking for the patterns which present themselves 'beyond chance'. If that sounds a bit cool there is something of that here but the book overall is delicate, always thoughtful and often very moving.
What Have I Been Reading: October – December 2015
June 15, 2016 martyn crucefix Chinese poetry, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, contemporary French poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing	Agenda Magazine, Alan Brownjohn, Bertolt Brecht, Daodejing, David Constantine, Dorothy Yamamoto, Emily Grosholz, Hands and Wings, Julian of Norwich, Kate Foley, Katherine Gallagher, Maggie Butt, Penelope Shuttle, Rudolf G Wagner, Stand Magazine, Ted Hughes, Terry Gifford, Wang Bi, Yves Bonnefoy
Up-dated December 2015
Terry Gifford's Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes is a fantastic summing up of where Hughes' reputation now is, including articles by various hands on Hughes and animals, Plath, myth, feminism (it's complicated) and a clear account of the poet's fascination with Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate.
Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love – a book I've intended to read for decades and though I baulk at much of it still I love her focus on the visions taking place in "an ordinary, household light", her vivid descriptions and tentative, undogmatic prose. She also boldly talks of Christ as our mother: "Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For love."
Few poets can travel such distances with such ease and brevity as Penelope Shuttle. I saw her read at the recent Second Light Festival in London and picked up her Templar Poetry chapbook, In the Snowy Air. It belies it's rather Xmas-y title by being rather a hymn to London (with occasional snow showers) including the Shard, the Walbrook, the British Library and even Waitrose in Balham.
Hands and Wings: Poems for Freedom for Torture has been edited by Dorothy Yamamoto in support of the Freedom from Torture charity and includes work by Gillian Allnutt, Alison Brackenbury, David Constantine, Carrie Etter, Vicki Feaver, Pippa Little and Susan Wicks.
Up-dated November 2015
With the cold weather coming, Yves Bonnefoy's 1991 Beginning and End of Snow(Bucknell University Press, 2012) is an exquisite read in Emily Grosholz's translation, including an original essay by the poet on 'Snow in French and English'.
I'm convinced Bonnefoy's response to snow is not a million miles distant from the Daoist idea of the uncarved block and Rudolph G Wagner's second magnificent volume on Wang Bi's A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing is full of insights through its literal readings of the 81 chapters. I have been comparing his readings with my own new versions before going to press in the next few weeks.
Bertolt Brecht: Love Poems (Norton, 2015) is the first instalment in David Constantine and Tom Kuhn's project to translate anew Brecht's complete poems. Ranging from the delicate, literary, erotic and plainly pornographic, here's yet more evidence (should we need it) of Brecht's breadth as a poet. The Introduction also reveals that Brecht refused to award any prizes in a poetry competition he was asked to judge – because none of the poems successfully communicated anything of any value to anybody, they were all of no use.
Maggie Butt's new collection is published by The London Magazine and contains work from the period in which she also published the themed books Ally Pally Prison Camp(Oversteps, 2011) and Sancti-Clandestini – Undercover Saints (Ward-Wood, 2012). Though miscellaneous in nature, it is time that dominates this book – historical time in a variety of European locations and personal time in several moving elegies and acts of remembrance.
KG Confidential: a festschrift for Katherine Gallagher is a wonderful tribute to one of the great movers and shakers in poetry (in London and in her native Australia and in translation from the French). These tributes of poems or prose include contributions from Liz Berry, Jane Duran, Kate Foley, Mimi Khalvati and Les Murray.
Up-dated October 2015
Alan Brownjohn's new book is full of excellent poems, several of which (a few decades ago) would have been designated 'secret narratives'. The title poem, 'A Bottle', is a strange noir thriller set in some undefined coastal region, an enigma of messages, relationships, landscape and murder. Always surprising; no let up in vigour and inventiveness.
Kate Foley's 'The Don't Touch Garden' (Arachne Press) is a treatment of adoption to rival Jackie Kay's 'The Adoption Papers'. "Mirror, mirror, on the wall" the old joke says, "I am my mother after all". But which one? Brilliantly focused and carefully sequenced, these poems provide a thrilling and moving account of the processes by which any of us – adopted or not – become who we are.
Agenda's 'Family Histories' issue has poems from Tony Curtis, Claire Crowther, Sean Street, Peter McDonald, Sheenagh Pugh, Maitreyabandhu and Danielle Hope, an interview with Robin Robertson and reviews of Abse, Hugo Williams, Sebastian Barker, Bryce, Liardet, McVety and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain.
The new issue of Stand has tributes to the late John Silkin from John Matthias and Anne Stevenson. I remember seeing Silkin selling Stand in the late 1970s on the campus at Lancaster University. This issue also has new poems from Muldoon, Mort, Valerie Jack, Sam Gardiner and (even) Martyn Crucefix.
What Have I Been Reading: July – September 2015
June 15, 2016 martyn crucefix Chinese poetry, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, contemporary French poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, translation, writing	Alan Murray, Bertolt Brecht, Carolyn Forche, Claire Crowther, Colette Bryce, Daodejing, Don Paterson, John Greening, Lee Harwood, Sheenagh Pugh, sonnet, Tao te Ching, Tim Liardet, Ursula K Le Guin, Yves Bonnefoy
Up-dated September 2015
Don Paterson's 101 Sonnets is certainly a varied selection of the form (it strikes me it would be a good, coherent text for students to study). The editor is never short of an opinion, ranging from the good sense of "Academics, in particular, have talked an awful lot of rubbish on the subject of rhyme" to the much more questionable "the whole point of [a] poem – that it should lodge itself permanently in our brains"
That the novelist Ursula K Le Guin should be a fan and translator of Lao Tzu's 81 ancient poems/chapters known as the Tao Te Ching is perhaps less surprising than the fact that her translation is one of the most enjoyable around (and I've been reading plenty of them in preparation for my version's appearance next Spring).
Two chunky collecteds have been pre-occupying me in the last month or so. Lee Harwood's Collected Poems is – by the nature of his aesthetic perhaps – uneven, but almost every page turns up new ways of writing and reading poetry: an invigorating pleasure.
I have blogged on Bertolt Brecht's Poems 1913-1956 before – in more recent weeks I have been tracking him out of Germany, to Denmark and hence to the USA. Extraordinary how contemporary most of these poems feel, though already 60 plus years old.
John Greening's anthology of poems about music, Accompanied Voices (Boydell & Brewer), is a lovely thing, full of variety, full of poems to be re-acquainted with from Hill, Hughes, Longley and Porter and brand new contemporary work including Stainer, Allnutt, O'Donoghue, Reid, Rumens, Shuttle and Greening's own little gem on John Field (being walked all over by Chopin).
I tweeted a couple of weeks ago that I found Carolyn Forche's second collection, The Country Between Us (HarperPerennial, 1982) in a Highgate secondhand bookshop and having raced through the poems before going away I'm now keen to get back to them for a more reflective read.
Tim Liardet's poem-sequence of self-portraits, The World before Snow (Carcanet) is actually motivated and (to some degree evokes) an illicit trans-Atlantic affair. The poems have the density and intensity of Liardet's previous work with an even greater fertility and fluency of imagination.
On Narrowness, Claire Crowther's third collection from Shearsman is a chewy, twisting, sometimes vertiginous read; that's another way of saying I don't know what's going on half the time. But the poems are confident in themselves and leap boldly from one image to another.
Up-dated July 2015
I find Yves Bonnefoy's writing unfailingly nutritious though sometimes wonder if his ideas are at least as exciting as the classically restrained lexis of his verse. Beverley Bie Brahic's 2013 translation of The Present Hour (2011) has Bonnefoy in sonnet-shaped Wordsworthian mood recalling his childhood, writing enigmatic prose pieces and a thought-provoking (because not always easy to follow) essay, 'In a Piece of Broken Mirror', once again discussing image, dream, reality and language.
Perhaps is Alan Murray's Acumen chapbook from 2013 and it quotes Nietzsche's observation that the word 'I' is the point at which our ignorance begins and several poems do press at the boundaries and mysteries of the self. Murray is a philosopher as well as poet and his colloquial, skilfully turned verse sounds Larkinesque in its precision and equivocations. Great to read poems unafraid of complex ideas.
Sheenagh Pugh's 12th book leaves Cardiff and Wales for the Shetland Islands. Wide skies, rough oceans, bright stars. But I share her obsession with the passage of time and there are some powerful poems here, though I find her historical delvings less enjoyable.
Collette Bryce's ultra-brief outing (from 2014) into her childhood growing up in Derry during the Troubles is an object lesson in how to focus a collection (just 30 poems). She writes plain, rather withdrawn poems, but this seems right for the material which is therefore allowed to speak for itself.
What Have I Been Reading: April – June 2015
June 15, 2016 martyn crucefix contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, contemporary French poetry, contemporary German poetry, contemporary Swedish poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, translation, writing	Die Winterreise, Frances Presley, Ian Bostridge, Inger Christensen, Jaqueline Gabbitas, John Fuller, Lee Harwood, Mimi Khalvati, Robert Crawford, Schubert, Shearsman Books, Shearsman Magazine, Sue Boyle, T S Eliot, Ted Hughes, Tomas Transtromer, Wilhelm Muller
Up-dated June 2015
I've taken a while getting through the almost 500 pages of Ian Bostridge's fascinating musical, artistic, poetical, historical, political discussion of Schubert's Winter Journey.Taking Wilhelm Muller's poem sequence Die Winterreise, Schubert re-organised it (otherwise changing little) to produce his own Winterreise and, discussing this process and his own performances of the piece over many years, Bostridge touches on Kant, Goethe, Darwin, Friedrich, Alfred Hitchcock, and Aristotle'sMeteorology among others. The Muller text would make an interesting translation project.
An earlier post about the abecedary form lead several people to ask me whether I'd read Inger Christensen's 1981 sequence alphabet. Well I have now and it is just stunning. Based on the Fibonacci sequence and moving from A to N in alphabetical sequence too, Christensen writes fluid, Whitmanesque passages, laying aside 'either/or' for 'and', page after page of which reminds me of Rilke at his most passionate. This is a brilliant translation too by Susanna Nied. Christensen is a writer I need to explore more.
A few weeks ago I blogged on Lee Harwood's work which I was also discovering for the first time. Since then I have read Selected Poems published by Shearsman; and I have the Collected Poems waiting for the summer holidays too.
Sue Boyle is a poet I have followed since working with her as a tutor for the Poetry School. She has now published, Safe Passage, a first collection with Oversteps Books and I recommend it (though I confess to also being one of the blurbists on the back cover, where I quote one of her most interesting lines: "in seizing the unexpected lies the art").
Updated May 2015
I'm still working through Robert Crawford's magnificent biography of young Eliot up to The Waste Land. An almost day by day account of his youth, school and college days, Paris, Laforgue, Pound and Vivien Haigh-Wood. Particularly good on Eliot's philosophical reading and development which I'm loving.
Mimi Khalvati's The Weather Wheel consists wholly of 16-line poems – stretched sonnets or irregular ghazals – which seem able to encompass almost any mood, topic or subject matter. Particularly impressive is her desire to draw from the most ordinary of events lines which often soar to the complexly emotional and the (frankly) spiritual.
I'm also back re-reading Hughes because it looks like we'll be teaching this from September onwards – surprisingly not something I have done (except one or two isolated poems). I first read many of these poems at Lancaster University in the late 1970s and nowadays many of these early poems read like objects of nature themselves: fixed as in granite, awe-inspiring, part of the mental landscape I have lived in for years.
As my most recent blog recounts, I have been also re-reading Transtromer's work.
Up-dated April 2015
I've been reading two impressive contributions to the growing field of eco-poetics. Frances Presley's halse for hazel is a visually pleasing book from Shearsman (illustrations by Irma Irsara) and the poems encompass geographical, linguistic, political and environmental issues without strain.
Jacqueline Gabbitas' Small Grass gives grass a voice and runs with the idea with charm, cleverness and power: "From where I lie, I see man walking, / his legs sheathed in green, // I strop my edges. Soon, they'll cut through / fabric, the tissue beneath".
I've not always been an enthusiastic reader of John Fuller's work but the recent The Dice Cup is a book of prose poem sequences full of his characteristic erudition, wit and observation.
Lee Harwood is a poet who I've known of for years without really having read him much. I'd had him down as an English Ashbery/O'Hara and maybe I thought I ought to just go straight to the source. But Enitharmon's The Orchid Boat is wonderful; full of fluid, sensuous, intelligent poems that twist and turn and take the reader by surprise. Not as flip as O'Hara, not as self-regarding as Ashbery.
I confess to having a contribution in it but, apart from that, Tony Fraser's new issue of Shearsman (103/4) is full of delightful things from the likes of Zoe Skoulding , James Byrne, Rupert Loydell and Kate Miller, plus translations of Virgil, Ponge and Jansma.
What Have I Been Reading: December 2014 – March 2015
June 15, 2016 martyn crucefix contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, poetry, teaching, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing	Agenda Magazine, Anna Robinson, Blake Morrison, Colette Bryce, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Emily Berry, George Oppen, Jonathan Edwards, Josh Ekroy, Mario Petrucci, Martha Kapos, Nathan Hamilton, Pascale Petit, Peter Robinson, Rose Auslander, Sylvia Plath, Tennessee Williams, The Book of Love and Loss, Volker Braun, Wislawa Szymborska
Too little poetry-reading time recently has meant I've been thinking a lot about two texts we are using for A level coursework at the moment:
Tennessee Williams' first great success, the autobiographical The Glass Menagerie, seems to strike chords in most modern teenagers and contains one of my favourite quotes: "I know I seem dreamy", Tom says to Jim the Gentleman Caller, "but inside – well, I'm boiling!"
This is being read alongside Sylvia Plath's only completed novel, The Bell Jar. Plath divides students every time – poetry or prose – my one observation is that with repeated teaching the book thins rather than deepens.
I've eventually got to read Colette Bryce's recent new book, many of the poems about her childhood in Derry: short, focused, honest and managing memorable things within a very narrow linguistic palette.
Anna Robinson's new collection also works within a narrowed range of language choices. She produces strange folk-tale-like poems, which keep rubbing their eyes, not sure whether what they are seeing is contemporary London or some mythic rural past. Mysterious poetry.
I've been dipping again into The Book of Love and Loss, eds., Rosie Bailey and June Hall (Belgrave Press, Bath, 2014), in part because I am reading from it at the end of next month at Heffers Bookshop, Cambridge.
Blake Morrsion's Shingle Street is his first full collection since 1987 and while there are flashes of the poet I once admired (I thought Dark Glasseswas very good) the book is full of rather dull thoughts – nature, ageing – and language that fails to lift off the page.
Up-dated February 2015
Jonathan Edwards' Costa Poetry prize-winning first collection from Seren is as accessible and diverting as the front cover would suggest and any poet inspired to write by the Simpsons is OK with me. Whether the jokes, caricaturing, a rather sit-comy stories survive repeated reading is something I'm still debating.
Rose Auslander's minimalist gems are hewn out of the silences associated with her suffering in the ghetto in Czernowitz (and influenced by her friendship with Paul Celan). I am pleased to be reviewing this refreshed collection from Arc for a future Poetry London alongside Volker Braun'sRubble Flora – see below .
Peter Robinson's most recent Shearsman collection continues his lyric exploration of the profundities to be found just beneath the surface of the everyday.
Mario Petrucci's Crib from Enitharmon extends his experiments under the influence of Black Mountain. Poems sometimes stunning and economical, at others too self-consciously aware of language as an object (blocking the reader's view). There's certainly not much else like this around British poetry at the moment.
Emily Berry's poems don't attend much to Glyn Maxwell's concerns with the tension between black ink and white space (see:https://martyncrucefix.com/2014/08/13/the-art-of-the-line-break/). The poetry is in the connections or lack of them and therefore leans to the surreal, with some palpable hits and other dead passages.
Up-dated January 2015
Patricia McCarthy's chunky Agenda issue on The Great War is full of fascinating original poetry, translations and essays on French, German and Italian war poetry and reconsiderations of Edward Thomas, David Jones and Ivor Gurney among others.
Josh Ekroy has been appearing on prize lists all over the place recently and his debut collection from Nine Arches Press is full of engaged, disturbing poems, capable of dealing with militarism and warfare:
I've been reading George Oppen's work via Louise Gluck's admiration for him; I'm still working on it . . . .
Debra Albery, an American friend who works at Warren Wilson, recommended this book of new poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt, full of the natural scenery of Vermont and fascinatingly eschewing all punctuation (like WS Merwin) to track the little manoeuvring negotiations of mind with world:
Wislawa Szymborska's chatty, deceptively easy-listening poems in this 2010 translation make poetry writing look easy and able to encompass almost any topic:
Nathan Hamilton's big baggy collection of new poetry from Bloodaxe:
Christine Keneally's comprehensive review of contemporary ideas on the evolution of language:
Martha Kapos' powerful new collection from Enitharmon:
Brilliant selected poems from German poet Volker Braun, translated by Karen Leeder and David Constantine (Seagull Books):
Pascale Petit's powerful and strangely lit memorial to her father (Seren):