Osip Mandelstam: 'The Admiralty'

This poem, 'The Admiralty' by Osip Mandelstam, appeared a few years ago as a Guardian Poem of the Week in a translation by Yuri Drobyshev and Carol Rumens. It describes the Admiralty building in St Petersburg, Russia.

Carol Rumens' comments on her work with Yuri Drobyshev, and on the poem, are as always very much worth reading, particularly because Mandelstam is a complex poet who apparently is insanely hard to translate well (although a lot of people have tried - this always makes me, a non-Russian-speaker, a little nervous when I read his work in translation.)

What I've found in my somewhat intermittent reading of Mandelstam over the years is that his poems typically have an extremely concrete, physical focus (like a close-up, almost through a microscope) which then explodes into a constellation of observations (whether temporal or more philosophical). In this poem, Mandelstam cleverly gives the authority of a "demi-god" to human craftsmen, including the ability to transcend space and time.

I visited St Petersburg, then Leningrad, in 1985. It was summer, my family was on a side trip of a few days from Finland, and I would have been either almost six years old or just turned six. It's rather mysterious to me now to think that I visited Soviet Russia a few years before the end of the USSR (when I read the recent biography of John le Carré by Adam Sisman, I realised that I travelled there before le Carré ever did).

While I was a fairly well-informed kindergartner, I don't think I knew much about Russia or its history. It seems, though, that my parents had grasped the effect that travel can have on a growing mind. I didn't know that some day I would read Mandelstam, or that more than 30 years later I still wouldn't have returned to Russia. I don't remember if we saw the Admiralty building. What I remember are images from somewhere between dream and reality, which I have carried with me my whole life since: the customs officer at the Finland-Russia border, a young man probably no more than 20 years old, smiling down at me as my parents lifted me up; the Winter Palace, carved from an iceberg and stranded on the edge of a square the size of a planet; crowds on a street and a kvass machine; the cake-yellow Summer Palace and a trick fountain in the shape of a little dog; a white cat delicately carrying a fish along the street; an oppressive red velvet dining room at the Hotel Evropeiskaya (yes, we actually stayed there on a package tour); hockey-playing bears at the circus on ice; a city outside of darkness, sailing on the edge of a world vaster than anything I knew.


Photo: Admiralty, St Petersburg by Dominic Sayers. Used under Creative Commons license

New Poems Published in Shot Glass Journal

Shot Glass Journal has published three of my recent poems, 'Lisbon', 'Dakar' and 'Kingdom'. You can read them here: http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/clarissa_aykroyd1.html

These all came out of trips I took in 2016 - 'Kingdom' was written after a trip to Finland, and I travelled to Portugal and Senegal a few months later.

I had thought to myself that perhaps one poem was more about the place, perhaps another was about the emotional state generated by it: but in fact, the two are often indivisible for me.



Photo by Clarissa Aykroyd: Lisbon, 2016

Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Moose': Nature, Childhood and Memory

Cow Moose Drinking From Pond, Alaska. Used under Creative Commons license


By most reckonings, Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet (and a great one), but she spent some of her early childhood in New Scotia and described her ancestry as "three-quarters Canadian and one quarter New Englander". The influence of such early memories can be enormous. This poem, 'The Moose', seems to me an especially strong evocation of Canada and the natural world, and of certain aspects of childhood.


THE MOOSE (Elizabeth Bishop)


I have never been to Canada's Maritime provinces, including those described in this poem, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The farthest east I have been is, I think, the town of Montmagny in Quebec, on the Saint Lawrence River east of Quebec City. Strangely, some of the poem's initial details seem more reminiscent of the Nordic countries, to me: the herring, the "clapboard farmhouses" and "twin silver birches". The "impenetrable wood" of New Brunswick is more familiar - there's a lot of that, all over Canada.

The coach-trip nature of the poem is quintessentially North American. The lines are quite short and there is a flick/flick/flick effect to many of the images:

One stop at Bass River.   

Then the Economies—
Lower, Middle, Upper;  
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth  
out after supper.


I have remembered, since childhood, catching glimpses of certain people and places on car, bus or train journeys and thinking: what is their life like, what is that place like? That person who I've just flicked past has a life and thoughts as full and complex as mine. These thoughts have always been a bit overwhelming, and usually not to be clung to for too long.

There is a blurring of place here which is both reassuring and disorienting. The child overhears her grandparents "talking the way they talked/in the old featherbed", which has a lulling effect (she doesn't fully understand the seriousness of the conversation, so it remains reassuring): she could be back at home, not on the bus. But the sudden appearance of the moose, while beautiful, is also jarring.

The moose is a reminder that nature will intrude anywhere it wants to; so far, the passengers have been cocooned in the bus, observing the natural world but not participating it, even able to imagine, half-asleep, that they're at home. The moose is enormous, ugly and beautiful at the same time, and it stops the bus. This poem is certainly a tribute to the animal world and to the Maritime provinces, but it seems to me that the moose could also represent the anarchic nature of artistic inspiration - or more broadly, it is the kind of event which is uncontrollable and which sets more things in motion than are evident at the time.

Bishop reportedly said that it took her 20 years to finish this poem. Childhood memories can sometimes be incomprehensibly enormous - like the moose. You never know what you will remember, and what you will forget. I have memories from the age of five, at least, which are extremely vivid, and it is not unusual for them to involve animals and the natural world. Other memories - which, when reminded of, I think I should have remembered - seem to have gotten lost, or at least buried.

In an unrelated-yet-related way, I realised the other day that I still remembered the Finnish word for moose - hirvi. Why I should remember this, when I either never knew or have long forgotten other (probably more useful) words, is beyond me. It's certainly true that a lot of my meager Finnish is child-Finnish - a lot of animal words, and food words. There's more there than I give credit for, I suppose.

The moose/hirvi thought may have been triggered by looking at some photos of the animal sculptures of Jussi Mäntynen, which for some other inexplicable reason I was doing recently. They are as beautiful and touching as I remembered. The art gallery in Turku features a small room containing many of his pieces. There was always something magical about it, for me. It was like an animal treasure house.

Adam Zagajewski's 'Autumn': "Blue Knives Glinting In Her Glance"

Victor Westerholm, Landscape From Rath, 1880. Ateneum, Helsinki


Although the weather is remarkably warm here in London at the moment, the autumn darkness is closing in. In that spirit, here's a grim, fierce poem on the subject by the wonderful Polish poet Adam Zagajewski.


AUTUMN (Adam Zagajewski, translated by Renata Gorczynski)


The painting above is by Finnish landscape painter Victor Westerholm. He was the director of the Turku Art Gallery, in my mother's hometown of Turku - a gallery which had a very powerful effect on me as a child. Westerholm was fond of painting cows, and this painting's lack of bovine presences seems ominous indeed.

This blog entry is mainly to tide you over while I prepare what is hopefully a stunning-to-reasonably-good post on Lorca. I had hoped to perhaps produce the Lorca post tonight, but I'm not quite there yet.

Dark Summer Poetry: Dylan Thomas's 'Fern Hill' and Celan's 'Night Ray'

It is hot, hot, hot in London and many of us feel as though this is our first real summer in years. Of course, it has come at a price like hayfever, Dante-esque Underground conditions and air conditioning breaking in selected public buildings just when you need it the most - but it's still pretty wonderful, all in all.

Two poems have come to mind tonight which are somehow appropriate to the weather and my frame of mind (relaxed and nostalgic, essentially.) The first is more obviously a summer poem than the second.


FERN HILL (Dylan Thomas)


'Fern Hill' speaks for itself: its vision of a rural childhood is ecstatic and specific, and sensually intense, as Thomas's poems are. Speaking for myself, I find it odd sometimes that I have so many childhood memories which are specific to the five physical senses. They are often so intense that I can remember textures as though I still felt them beneath my hands or feet. Perhaps this is normal, but for such an in-my-head person as myself, you wouldn't think so. I certainly know that I have more sensory memories of childhood - reams of them - than some other people I've compared notes with. (On the other hand, I often can't remember someone's name after I've been introduced to them three times, so on the whole my memory is nothing to brag of.) 'Fern Hill' also reminds me of idyllic summers in Finland as a child, perhaps made more idyllic by memory, but also coloured by loss after my grandmother died. It is in the end a poem about mortality.

The second poem is perhaps less suited to this season, but seems to fit. (There is an ad in the middle of the page which breaks the poem in half, so make sure you scroll down.)


NIGHT RAY (Paul Celan)


'Night Ray' is a dark, dark love poem. Not untypically for Celan, it is unclear whether this early poem is more a love poem, or an elegy. I suspect that more than being a summer poem, 'Night Ray' came to mind after I thought of 'Fern Hill' because each poem seems to faintly echo the other in the choice of imagery, and just possibly in some of the conclusions. Perhaps it's just me, but try reading 'Night Ray' and the last stanza of 'Fern Hill' alongside each other.

Tua Forsström's 'The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses'

Rose photo by cbransto



THE SNOW WHIRLS OVER THE COURTYARD'S ROSES (Tua Forsström)


I thought that I might be done with posting cold snowy poems for a while, but today it snowed in London, and apparently it was the coldest March day on record. So this poem still seems very appropriate, as well as interesting.

I am going to be very lazy and just say that the accompanying article by Carol Rumens on this link in the Guardian is informative and useful, and I have little to add to it regarding the poem. Personally I am interested in the fact that the author is a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet, given my partly Finnish background (my mother is a Finnish-speaking Finn, although due to her terrifying Nordic mastery of several languages, she speaks Swedish reasonably well too). Finland is an officially bilingual country, but not everyone knows this and it is occasionally difficult to convince people that a writer in Swedish may be a Finn. I have encountered this confusion with the work of Tove Jansson, the Finnish author who wrote her wonderful Moomin books in Swedish. As I recall, one very reputable publisher recently reprinted the Moomin books with a comment on the dust jacket that the author was from Sweden.

Anyway, I suspect that Swedish translates more effectively into English than Finnish does, as the two languages are far more closely related - although I speak no Swedish, so I'm just guessing at that. I have read some Finnish poetry translated into English - sadly, my Finnish was never good, but I still know a lot of words and I understand the shape of the language, and so I can discern a certain amount from facing translations. I've had the impression that Finnish poetry is difficult to translate simply from the fact that Finnish is an unearthly language, and most translations I've read have sounded prosaic to the point of being clunky. (Although I think the language has a prosaic quality, too. Hard to explain.)

It may also be interesting to compare 'The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses' to Louis MacNeice's 'Snow', with its similar central imagery.

Tomas Tranströmer Meets the Ska Spies in Brixton

A few months ago, I went with a friend who was in town for a few days to the Tomas Tranströmer event at the British Library. This wasn't just a simple poetry reading or discussion of Tranströmer's poetry; the poet himself was there. After suffering a stroke over twenty years ago, he has severely impaired speech and mobility and thus cannot read his own work. But being in the same small room with the 2011 Nobel Prize winner, celebrating his poetry - that was very special. There was discussion of his work, readings in Swedish and English, some of his favourite classical music, and a few poems set to music. The tickets were inexpensive, as they tend to be for such cultural events in London, and it was a pretty unique experience.

One of the poems that was read in both Swedish and English was 'C Major'.


C MAJOR (Tomas Tranströmer)


Krister Henriksson, who has played Wallander in the TV series based on Henning Mankell's books, was reading the poems in Swedish. As he read this particular work, the tone of his voice sort of...turned upward with an inflection that I vaguely recognise, perhaps as I'm half Scandinavian (although my Scandinavian parent is Finnish, and Finland is a somewhat different proposition from the other Nordic countries.) His voice definitely took on a humorous tone, but still in a restrained and slightly formal way - slightly self-conscious ("I know I'm being funny. Ha!"). At that moment, isolated chuckles rippled out around the room, obviously from the Swedes or fluent Swedish speakers. Some of the chuckles were pretty prolonged. When the poem was read in English, I was a little bemused. There was perhaps a gaiety and slight self-deprecation about it, but it was hardly a thigh-slapper. I sensed that this was a moment when something was lost in translation. I later described the poem (a bad idea, I know) and the reaction to my mother. She suggested that the Swedes were chuckling because "behind turned-up collars everyone was smiling." I thought that the narrator saw his neighbours in this way because he was so happy that he saw everyone else as equally happy, but she thought it had something to do with them being amused because, well, the narrator was being a bit silly, walking on air and all. I don't consider myself highly Scandinavian, but I spent a lot of time there as a child, and it's an influence, of course. When my mother described why she thought the poem got this reaction, my Scandinavian senses switched on again, and there was something there that I recognised.

My friend and I didn't feel that the evening was over after the Tranströmer event finished, so - as you do - we headed down to Brixton for some live music at Hootanannys. This is a famous live venue in south London - or just in London - and I'd been there a handful of times. They specialise in reggae and ska and they also serve some pretty decent food. The clientele is, to say the least, remarkably varied and bizarre. We had to fend off some pretty weird men. I think the most normal thing anyone said to us was "My friend used to work for the CIA" (or possibly "works for the CIA". I nearly said "Really? I love spies!" but fortunately bit my tongue just in time - saying that would probably have been a big mistake.) The spy theme continued when the hyperactive ska band on stage first played their own version of the Inspector Gadget theme, followed by a song which went "Double-double-double-double-double-O-SEVEN!" It was strange. And it was a true London night out: the contrasts will either finish you right off, or they will provide you with some of the most fun you have had all year.

Rudyard Kipling's 'The Way Through the Woods': Is There a Road?

THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS (Rudyard Kipling)


They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods ...
But there is no road through the woods.


I took the above picture on a visit home to Canada (not this year's visit, but the year before.) Not quite the English woods that Kipling was no doubt describing, but it seemed right for the poem, anyway.

I reminded myself of this poem when I was writing my last entry on Conan Doyle and mentioned Kipling. As I mentioned, I'm not a big fan of Kipling, but there is something that I really love and that touches me intensely, about this poem. I suppose that it could bear a variety of interpretations, but I really don't see it as a poem about ghosts. I do believe that places can carry imprints of past events, but mainly (for me) this is a poem about memory. In 'The Way Through the Woods' it could be either ancestral memory, or distant childhood memory - "They shut the road through the woods/Seventy years ago." It reminds me that Kipling was one of those writers (and simply one of those human beings) whose life spanned particularly changeable times; his dates are 1865-1936.

The poem also made me think of certain childhood memories, particularly visiting my grandmother in Finland, until she died when I was fifteen. I know very well that she is gone and that huge changes have taken place in the house and the woods and the roads where I used to walk. I've even seen some of them. But I also know that there are memories which are as vivid as present reality and that nothing can ever change those. "There is no road through the woods" - but there is, still.

Carolyn Forché, 'Travel Papers' and Poetry of Witness

The child asked if the bones in the wall
Belonged to the lights in the tunnel
Yes, I said, and the stars nailed shut his heaven

-Carolyn Forché, 'Curfew'


I started reading American poet Carolyn Forché's work only a few months ago and already cannot remember how I came across it (not a good indication for my memory). I think it is possible that I was browsing through poems about travel on the Poetry Foundation website and came across 'Travel Papers'. It is also possible that I saw her cited as a poet influenced by Paul Celan; or that I was tracing the term often associated with her work, 'poetry of witness'; or something else.

My discovery of Forché brought a sense of real excitement which comes only occasionally in my artistic experiences. I can describe this only with difficulty, but I suppose it is a combination of wonder and shock. Compassionate, tender, horrific, luminous, bleak; all of these words come to mind. Her most famous poem is 'The Colonel', which is representative of her subject matter if not so much of her style. It is a shocking piece about an encounter which Forché had during her time with Amnesty International in El Salvador, during the civil war. Apparently it is a kind of "found poem"; her publisher came upon it among her notes and thought that it was a completed poem, and they made the decision to publish it as such.

Many of Forché's poems describe atrocities, crimes against humanity, trauma and its aftermath. 'The Garden Shukkei-En' is about Hiroshima; 'Letter to a City Under Siege' is about the siege of Sarajevo; and there are many other examples. She has also edited Against Forgetting, a seminal anthology of poems by and about those who suffered through the terrible events of the twentieth century and survived or died. In an interview with Bloodaxe Books, one of her publishers, she commented on this area of poetics: "I read the poems for the mark of this extremity, for its impress, rather than for positions advocated or subjects addressed. I was interested in the legibility, in the poetry, of this experience, and also in the realm of the social, between the institutions of the state (and politics) and the private life of citizens. This is 'poetry of witness'."

This, to me, is a particularly compassionate, enlightening and useful approach to political poetry. It is not so much politics as testimony, as it encompasses a variety of experiences, even though these may conflict in terms of their political viewpoint. Such poems remind the reader that events which disfigure the world and its people have happened, continue to happen, and continue to affect us after they are apparently over. So far, I have read a fairly small number of Forché's poems, but it is very noticeable that they frequently see through the eyes of women and children, who constituted the majority of the twentieth century's war victims. It is always the innocent who suffer the most. This makes me think of the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes: "And I myself returned that I might see all the acts of oppression that are being done under the sun, and, look! the tears of those being oppressed, but they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power, so that they had no comforter." (Ecclesiastes 4:1).


TRAVEL PAPERS (Carolyn Forché)


'Travel Papers', which can be found on the above link, is a more restful poem about travel, memory, and the death of a friend; but it is also haunted by the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. It was published only a year ago and was written for Daniel Simko, a Slovak poet who emigrated with his family to the US after the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He died in 2004 at the age of 45. He wrote in English, as he was relatively young when he left his home country. Simko and Forché had a long friendship involving much travel and collaboration.

'Travel Papers' caught my eye in part because of its opening line: "By boat to Seurasaari...". Seurasaari is an island just outside the Finnish capital of Helsinki, famous as a beautiful park, for its collection of historic buildings, and for its red squirrels. My mother is from Finland and we spent part of every summer there visiting my grandmother in Turku, until she died in 1995. In the subsequent 17 years I've only been back once, a trip which did include a quick visit to Helsinki and Seurasaari.

(Incidentally, the painting which I have included with this entry is by the extraordinary Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela. It depicts Lake Keitele, which is in another part of Finland, but seemed to go nicely with this entry anyway. The painting is now in the National Gallery in London, where it has been hugely popular, and this blog can't convey its uniquely glowing quality. Gallen-Kallela is much less well known than he deserves to be - this painting, as lovely as it is, is far from being one of his greatest. However, this year a number of European galleries including the Musée d'Orsay in Paris will host an unprecedented exhibition of his work, which is a very good sign.)

A few lines in, Forché seems to make reference to the Biblical account of Elijah, who fled from Queen Jezebel and spoke with God on the mountainside: "And after the fire a still small voice." (1 Kings 19:12, KJV). The still small voice - the voice of God - is sometimes used by artists to represent the motivation for their artistic drive.


Still voice. Fire that is no fire.
Ahead years unknown to be lived -


Images flicker past as through the window of a car or train. Snapshots of violent death juxtaposed with the serenity of nature are appropriate for the work and preoccupations of both poets. The birch trees recur again and again, like a repeated theme in a piece of music. The sense of elegy throughout, particularly toward the end, is piercing. I found these lines, about the aftermath of shock on hearing of a loved one's death, to be familiar:


Hours after your death you seemed
everywhere at once like the swifts at twilight.
Now your moments are clouds
in a photograph of swifts.


I can certainly hear echoes of Paul Celan, one of the greatest "poets of witness", in the direct address to the you and the intertwined words. Some lines came back to me through this poem:


I am still writing with your hand,
as you stand in your still-there of lighted words.

(from 'Travel Papers')


I see you, you pick them with
my new, my
everyman's hands, you put them
into the Bright-Once-More which no one
needs to weep or to name.

(Paul Celan, from 'The Bright Stones')


I look forward to reading more of Forché's work and will try to seek out the Against Forgetting anthology, as well. I think that what she is trying to do in the realm of poetics is something essential.

"Oblique Light": Derek Mahon's 'Courtyards in Delft'

COURTYARDS IN DELFT (Derek Mahon)

                                          — Pieter de Hooch, 1659

(for Gordon Woods)

Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile —

Immaculate masonry, and everywhere that

Water tap, that broom and wooden pail

To keep it so. House-proud, the wives

Of artisans pursue their thrifty lives

Among scrubbed yards, modest but adequate.

Foliage is sparse, and clings; no breeze

Ruffles the trim composure of those trees.

No spinet-playing emblematic of

The harmonies and disharmonies of love,

No lewd fish, no fruit, no wide-eyed bird

About to fly its cage while a virgin

Listens to her seducer, mars the chaste

Perfection of the thing and the thing made.

Nothing is random, nothing goes to waste.

We miss the dirty dog, the fiery gin.

That girl with her back to us who waits

For her man to come home for his tea

Will wait till the paint disintegrates

And ruined dikes admit the esurient sea;

Yet this is life too, and the cracked

Outhouse door a verifiable fact

As vividly mnemonic as the sunlit

Railings that front the houses opposite.

I lived there as a boy and know the coal

Glittering in its shed, late-afternoon

Lambency informing the deal table,

The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon.

I must be lying low in a room there,

A strange child with a taste for verse,

While my hard-nosed companions dream of war

On parched veldt and fields of rainswept gorse.

© Derek Mahon, 2011. Taken from New Collected Poems, published by The Gallery Press. Used by permission of the publishers.

By the time I was ten, and certainly by the time I had turned 20, my loving parents had dragged me through a great many of Europe's finest art galleries. I can only thank them, because this left me with exactly two choices: to hate art and to never set foot in another art gallery again if I could help it, or to love art and keep seeking it out for the rest of my life. Fortunately, the gamble paid off and I chose the latter. Given that I have ten left thumbs when it comes to anything like drawing or painting, my interest in the visual arts is purely second-hand (and, I admit, mostly confined to European art at least 150 years old), but at least I can appreciate it and I know what I like when I see it.

I think that the relationship between poetry and the visual arts is an uneasy one. It is difficult to convey the visceral impact of a great work of art using the written word, and I don't think that most paintings could incorporate the subtleties of a finely crafted poem. An outstanding exception is Derek Mahon's 'Courtyards in Delft'. It was inspired by the above painting by Pieter de Hooch, which hangs in London's National Gallery.

I racked my brains trying to remember when I first encountered Derek Mahon. Oddly enough, I think that his poem 'Ecclesiastes" appeared in an anthology which I used in my Canadian high school, but I don't remember studying it specifically. I probably started reading him more extensively when I lived in Ireland. I know that just before I moved from Ireland to England, I bought a copy of his new collection Harbour Lights, and by then I had already read at least some of his work. At any rate, somewhere over the years many of his poems got under my skin: the classics 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' and 'The Mayo Tao', as well as personal favourites such as 'Kinsale' and 'The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush'. He is one of the great Northern Irish poets of the latter half of the 20th century, along with Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. I have a theory that these Northern Irish poets and others are particularly memorable because they marry the Irish sense of mysticism to a more British formalism, but I'm not sure how far I would want to extend that idea.

I find 'Courtyards in Delft' particularly moving because it combines a loving (and slightly ironic) description of the painting with a more personal perspective, which could be very evocative even for someone who has not seen the painting. In his description of "Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile—/Immaculate masonry", he succintly captures the clarity and serenity of the Dutch Golden Age of painting, which also included the likes of Vermeer, van Ruisdael and Hobbema. Humorously, he then notes the lack of suggestive symbols which are often included in paintings of the era, hinting at adultery, scorned love and drunken revelry: "We miss the dirty dog, the fiery gin." One could argue that the painting is just a little too serene. In the next stanza, however, he points out:

Yet this is life too, and the cracked

Outhouse door a verifiable fact

As vividly mnemonic as the sunlit

Railings that front the houses opposite.

There surely are moments in life when we feel serene and at peace, and when we perceive the beauty and even the holiness of everyday objects and situations. By his use of the word "mnemonic", suggesting an aid to memory, Mahon moves into the realm of his own childhood memories.

The concluding stanza of 'Courtyards in Delft' is for me one of the most touching that I have encountered in literature. Amazingly, at one and the same time it extends the description of the painting, touches on Mahon's own experiences, and reminds me of my own childhood. He describes sensory memories, the fall of light, the wonder that a child feels at seeing "the ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon". This reminded me of the summers I spent at my grandmother's house in Finland: looking through the different panes of the stained glass window at a world in red, or yellow, or green; the smooth-rough feeling of cobblestones under my bare feet; the dusk at midnight.

Mahon, like so many of us who felt somewhat isolated and different, was "a strange child with a taste for verse" (or literature generally, in my case...it would be more accurate to say that I am now a strange child with a taste for verse.) The "hard-nosed companions" of his childhood in Northern Ireland were probably dreaming of a bitter local struggle that has never entirely ended, but the feelings that Mahon describes are universal.

I often go to look at this painting when I visit the National Gallery. I am not sure if it is the painting that leads me to read the poem, or the poem that brings me to the painting. Probably the latter, a little more. It is just another example of how one great experience in the arts will inevitably lead me on to another.

In fact, I believe that great art can be a catalyst for many of life's most essential experiences. There will always be those who suggest that if you spend a lot of time with books, you're not really living life, and that one of the proofs of their own (apparently) exciting lives is that they never crack open a book. To quote Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory: this is a notion, and a rather sucky one at that. Although I know that I am an unrepentant snob in this area, I feel that if you have no interest in literature, you should just own it, and you should also recognise that you are missing out on an important part of the human experience. At least in part, literature and the arts have led me to live in other countries, to travel, and to meet people with whom I would never otherwise have crossed paths. In many of these areas, there may have been even more crucial motives, but so often the arts are the impetus which set things in motion.