Ted Hughes's 'Full Moon and Little Frieda' - A Full Moon In March

Moon photo © Chris Turner


As I waited for the train tonight in the deathly late-March cold, the full moon hit my eye rather in the manner of a big pizza pie. Given that March seems to be associated with madness anyway (mad as a March hare?), I suppose we will just have to see how things go.

The Guardian recently did a good series of poetry podcasts, featuring well-known poets reading and discussing favourite poems. Simon Armitage did a podcast on Ted Hughes's famous 'Full Moon and Little Frieda', and you can listen to it on this link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2013/feb/18/ted-hiughes-simon-armitage-poetry-podcast

There are a number of Ted Hughes poems which I prefer, but 'Full Moon and Little Frieda', written for Hughes's daughter, has a beautiful innocence to it which I like (although the bleak image of "a dark river of blood" is also Hughesian - his depictions of nature tended to be red in tooth and claw.)

I love the idea of the interaction between the moon and the child - "The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work/That points at him amazed." It seems to me unique among his poems.

Just as I was finishing writing this, the phrase "a full moon in March" went through my head. As I couldn't place it, I turned to Google, which obligingly reminded me that it was the title of a play by W B Yeats and sometimes the (inaccurate) title of one of his poetry collections. Yeats also wrote a number of poems about the moon. All things are interconnected, indeed.

The T S Eliot Prize for 2012: Same Shirt, Different Trousers

On Sunday night, I attended the T S Eliot Prize readings for the best 2012 poetry collection, at the Royal Festival Hall on London's Southbank. Apparently there were over 2000 in attendance.

I thought that this year's lineup was exceptional, and I will write more about that, and about the evening. First, though, I started to reflect on my own history (such as it is) with the T S Eliot Prize. It turns out that I have now attended the readings five times, in my seven and a half years in London. This will be the twentieth time that the prize has been awarded.

The first two readings which I attended were in 2007 and 2008, and they were still at the Bloomsbury Theatre, which meant that attendance would have been around 500. Three years ago, the T S Eliot Prize took an enormous leap forward when it took over the Royal Festival Hall for the readings, and (so far) they have been there ever since. I'm not sure what happened in the interim; poetry became much more fashionable, or the 2011 reading with Seamus Heaney in attendance gave the event a big push...or something. I have mixed feelings about the change. Basically it is a wonderful thing for poetry, but those first two times at the Bloomsbury felt like something truly unique and special, as though I'd been admitted to an exclusive club. (I realise that saying this won't help with the niche/ivory tower reputation of poetry consumption, but it's still true.) This was even though at the time I didn't quite realise how significant the T S Eliot Prize was. Many consider it to be the world's most important poetry prize.

My first T S Eliot Prize reading was in January 2007, for the 2006 collections. This was the year that Seamus Heaney won for District and Circle, but sadly he couldn't be in attendance as he had just suffered a minor stroke. I remember being quite disappointed by that (and worried!), but I have since managed to see him read three times; once when his collection Human Chain was released, once for the 2010 prize (when  he was beaten by Derek Walcott's White Egrets, one of my favourite collections by anyone ever), and once at Poetry Parnassus in 2012.

I certainly have a few piercing memories of the evening, though, one of which is of Sean O'Brien reading Eliot's 'Marina' ("What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands..."). I wasn't very familiar with the poem at the time and it has since become one of my favourite poems. I will never forget that moment. It was either the same year or the following year, also at the Bloomsbury, that I realised that Valerie Eliot (T S Eliot's widow) was sitting in the row right behind me. I managed to not to stare at her like a ninny, but I definitely quivered a bit.

Last year I felt that the event was dominated by the controversy over Aurum's sponsorship of the prize, and I didn't think that the list of nominees was so outstanding. At least, the readings didn't make as much of an impression on me as they sometimes have. My personal choice for the winner would have been David Harsent for Night - I find his work quite amazing - but the winner was John Burnside. It was a good shortlist, but perhaps not great.

This year, however, the lineup wasn't just outstanding - it was really exceptional, perhaps the best I have experienced. (Although I hesitate to say that when two years ago both Heaney and Walcott were on the list.) I was already familiar with a few of the collections, but a few more in particular were revelations to me in the course of the evening.

Carol Ann Duffy introduced the readings, and as is traditional, she read a poem by Eliot. It was at this point that she paid tribute to Valerie Eliot, who died a few months ago, and who did so much for the Prize, and for Eliot's legacy and poetry in general. The poem chosen was 'Dedication To My Wife', most appropriately, and it was a very moving moment.

The host was poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan, who to me always seems just on the verge of losing the plot and then turns out to be terribly funny after all. I particularly enjoyed "I realised that I'm wearing the same shirt as I did at last year's readings, but I've changed my trousers. And that's like modern poetry. Continuity and change," as well as his comment that the readings from each poet would last about eight minutes "and they'll feel like longer, but in a good way."

The shortlist was as follows:

Gillian Clarke - Ice
Sean Borodale - Bee Journal
Julia Copus - The World's Two Smallest Humans
Jorie Graham - PLACE
Simon Armitage - The Death of King Arthur
Kathleen Jamie - The Overhaul
Jacob Polley - The Havocs
Deryn Rees-Jones - Burying the Wren
Paul Farley - The Dark Film
Sharon Olds - Stag's Leap

In brief: Gillian Clarke's images of snow and cold and myth build instant and complex ice palaces in my mind. Sean Borodale's bee poems (these seem to be fashionable in recent years) were tasty and evocative and he also had pretty great cheekbones. Julia Copus read a poem about her brothers which just about had me in tears. Jorie Graham couldn't be present to read but her publisher did a very credible job with her long lines and amazing stream-of-consciousness - at the end of 'Lull', I felt as though I'd been hypnotized and was waiting to be woken with a snap of the fingers. Simon Armitage gave a forceful reading of his adopted Arthurian tale, as well as a great argument for its modern relevance. Kathleen Jamie's nature poems, especially her small charming flower poem, were pretty much flawless. Jacob Polley gained the only spontaneous applause of the evening for the creepy 'Langley Lane' and I think he may have been the people's choice. Deryn Rees-Jones read her long and disturbing 'Dogwoman' sequence with incredible conviction and cumulative force. Paul Farley was fascinating and funny - I especially love 'Google Earth', and the poem about the Queen got the biggest laugh. Finally, Sharon Olds had everyone dumbstruck with the honesty and precision of her poems about divorce.

I managed to get several books signed afterwards, which was great. Chatting with Simon Armitage about Arthuriana was lovely. Paul Farley was definitely a bit hammered by the time I got to him, and thanked me with intense sincerity for coming. I said jokingly "you must be a bit tired of signing all these books." He looked me straight in the eye: "NO! NO, I AM NOT TIRED OF IT." I then realised that, a bit ominously, he had signed my copy "Clarissa's best love to Paul Farley" (at least I think that's what it says.)

I also bumped into George Szirtes and his wife Clarissa (yes!) - it was great to see them again so soon after George's reading in London in December, and to chat briefly. I'm sure I must have walked past a few dozen (if not a few hundred) well-known poets and bloggers, but I definitely recognised Daljit Nagra. And when I was getting my books signed, I realised that I was standing ten feet from Robin Robertson. I have had a creepy fascination with Robin Robertson ever since I worked for the publishing house where he is an editor, and our paths do seem to cross with mysterious regularity. (Stalker!)

As this post goes to press (or whatever), it has been announced that Sharon Olds is this year's winner. I'm very happy to hear it - she was probably my first choice. But honestly, on a list that strong pretty much anyone could have won and there could have been few complaints. I'm hoping for another T S Eliot Prize as impressive in a year's time.

Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop' and Writing Britain at the British Library

A few weeks ago, I finally went to the Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands exhibition at the British Library. It was in its final two weeks, so my friends and I got in just under the wire. I knew that I couldn't miss it, as I'd had this exhibition earmarked as one of my cultural highlights of the year for quite some time. Concentrating on the importance of place and landscape in British literature, Writing Britain featured so many of my absolute favourite books and writers that I wondered if I had been personally consulted on the exhibition and then fed memory-loss pills so that I would forget all about it. (I am not sure in what scenario exactly this would take place.) From Susan Cooper to Kenneth Grahame, from a Heart of Darkness graphic novel to a letter to John Betjeman complaining that the order of the stations in his poem 'The Metropolitan Railway' was wrong - this was very, very much my cup of tea.

Broadly, the places and movements featured in the exhibition included the following: rural Britain; the gradual vanishing of rural Britain due to the Industrial Revolution; industrial landscapes such as the coal mines of Wales and the Midlands; wild places such as the moors, and their interactions with humans; sacred places; London; the suburbs; rivers; and the sea. London is, as always, primarily a place of darkness, but a remarkably varied one, from Gautam Malkani's Londonstani to the original title for Eliot's The Waste Land, "He do the police in different voices", to Conrad's pre-Le Carré and Orwell vision of The Secret Agent and a city haunted by terrorism. The suburbs are both homely and threatening: the Metropolitan Railway invited middle-class commuters to embrace "Metroland", but in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, the suburbs are often settings for dreadful crimes (one of the manuscripts featured was 'The Retired Colourman', where Holmes investigates sinister doings in Lewisham.)

Many poets appeared in Writing Britain. Ted Hughes's collaboration with Fay Godwin, Elmet, was there; 'Belfast Confetti' by the wonderful Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson; a video about Simon Armitage's Stanza Stones project, which carves poems into the natural landscape of Yorkshire; Wendy Cope, Sean O'Brien, and many, many others. Also featured was the much-loved poem by Edward Thomas, 'Adlestrop', in manuscript and in a recording read by his wife. Here is the poem:



ADLESTROP (Edward Thomas)

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


'Adlestrop' gives me a strange feeling of looking in on - almost interrupting - something I find moving but don't entirely understand. I can't help wondering if you have to be English to entirely grasp its emotional import. It was written around the start of World War I - which killed Thomas, like so many others - and there is a sense that he is seizing a quiet, simple moment in the English countryside and storing it away, later to imbue it with even deeper meaning. It has also been pointed out that all the young men of some villages were wiped out in the war, and Thomas may have wondered what the fate of this place and its people would be.

I do think that British landscapes, whether urban or rural, are a palimpsest; their own self-contained beauty or terror, with the human traces which have defaced or celebrated them continually overlaid. I've said before that I tend to see places through a lens of literature and art, and this is particularly the case with Britain. Some of the landscapes are spectacular in themselves, but they tend to be understated, and not technicolour, like some other parts of the world. When you know about the great works of art or the acts of human endeavour that they have produced, the terrible or beautiful events and the echoes that they have left, these places have a hundred times more meaning.

The painting is The Hay-Wain by John Constable, one of the greatest of English painters, though I've always found it much easier to love JMW Turner.

Poetry Parnassus on Sunday: Turkish 'Hawk In The Rain', Odessa to Kazakhstan, Translated Wonders and Word From Africa

The above picture is the 'World Record' desk in the Saison Poetry Library, where poets had in the course of the week signed their names and hand-written copies of their poems for posterity.

My first Poetry Parnassus event on Sunday was the Ted Hughes Celebration, featuring Christopher Reid, Simon Armitage, David Constantine, Helen Constantine and a Turkish translator whose name I have regrettably forgotten (anyone remember?). I especially loved hearing 'The Hawk in the Rain' in Turkish: the percussive syllables seemed to work really well for that poem. There was much discussion of Ted Hughes's work on Modern Poetry in Translation, which David and Helen Constantine have been editing, and this was a bit beyond my scope but translation was obviously a strong focus of Poetry Parnassus so it was all interesting. I enjoyed hearing Paul Eluard's poem 'Poisson' (Fish) in the original French and then in Hughes's translation. The discussion about Hughes's translation of Ferenc Juhász's 'The Boy Changed Into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets' was totally fascinating; he didn't know Hungarian, but somehow just knew that a previous translation was inadequate, and made his own (again...without knowledge of Hungarian!) which is considered masterful. (Is this hubris, or prophetic poetic vision? Given that we're talking about Ted Hughes, it could easily be either or both).

Before the start of this session, I spoke briefly with Akerke Mussabekova, who was Kazakhstan's poet at the festival and the youngest poetic delegate, and who I'd also met on Friday night when she arrived for Continental Shift with Carmela from Poet in the City, who had recognised me from Poet in the City events (Carmela, I'm very impressed that you remembered me!!). Akerke Mussabekova was a beautiful and tiny woman, a little shy but obviously happy to be there, and judging from her poem in the World Record anthology which accompanies the festival, she is a very talented poet.

After this, the Maintenant reading was drawing to a close in the Clore Ballroom just around when I got there, and I had just bought Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing In Odessa when I realised (completely by coincidence) that he was taking the stage. I sat in the audience and listened in wonder as he read like a wild-eyed sing-song Russo-Ukrainian-American Yeats x 1000. I looked around and saw quite a few others with eyes popping out of their heads and jaws slightly agape. Afterwards, Kaminsky signed the book for me. He had a very warm presence about him.

Subsequently, I caught some or more of the Banipal, Modern Poetry in Translation and Poetry Translation Centre readings. The latter, in particular, really amazed me. Sarah Maguire quite correctly and bravely stated that the white-middle-class-ivory-tower air of poetry in Britain doesn't reflect the vital nature of poetry around the world, and she and others with the Poetry Translation Centre have worked hard to bring African, Middle Eastern and Central Asian poets to a wider audience. Reza Mohammadi's poems totally transfixed me - he writes in Dari (modern Persian) and is originally from Afghanistan. His delivery transported me to somewhere much more remote and magical than the Clore Ballroom (although it was pretty good this past week) - he had the intense eyes and precise yet sweeping gestures of a prophet. It was thrilling to hear the Eritrean poet Ribka Sibhatu, and I was especially excited about the poems of Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi from Sudan, which are exquisitely beautiful. He was also kind enough to sign the chapbook of his poems after the session. We learned that due to current unrest in Sudan, many of his friends have been arrested and if he were in the country, he would probably be in prison as well. It was another sobering reminder of what poets and their ilk may go through in other countries.

Word From Africa was a wonderful conclusion to the festival. Earlier in the week, in the Saison Poetry Library, I had stood a few feet away while a distinguished older African poet recited his poem for a video recording, in French - it was a lovely moment. I found out on Sunday night that this was Paul Dakeyo, who read some more of his work, and who is an African poetic legend from Cameroon. His poems were incredibly beautiful and moving and it was wonderful that I could appreciate the French.

Paul Dakeyo reading during Word From Africa:

There were poets from various African countries, and the Bajan-British poet Dorothea Smartt (pictured above with Paul Dakeyo), and poets of African extraction who'd grown up in Britain, and so on - it gave a fantastic variety to the mix. I was joined by some friends and had a drink with them, so I'm afraid we were a bit distracted at this point, and later we went out to find a pub showing the Spain-Italy Euro 2012 final (which was good fun, though football is not my thing - how Canadian am I?). But we returned in the end for some Afro-Caribbean music by a funky little band (whose name also escapes me - anyone?). There were relatively few poetry/music survivors around at that point, and some of us were very bad dancers, but it was great fun. I longed to see Seamus Heaney suddenly appear and start grooving in front of the stage. I can imagine it happened...

There were too many highlights to name from Poetry Parnassus. As well as some of those I've mentioned, I was delighted to meet Simon Armitage on one of the staircases and to thank him for the hard work he'd done to get this event together. He seemed pleased and said that they were all planning to collapse at the end of the day. Simon, thank you again, and to everyone involved and especially the poets.

This was one of my cultural highlights of my London years and in terms of where my poetry appreciation is at, I don't think it could have come at a better time. I have lots of reading and writing to do!