Recent Publications: Modern Poetry In Translation & Sherlock Holmes Is Like...

I've recently had a couple of essays (or, a review and an essay) published in print, which for me at least is less common these days, and is always a special delight. (It's not as good for sharing widely, but it has a little extra gravitas and permanence.)

My review of a translation of Benjamin Fondane's Ulysses (translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, Syracuse University Press, 2017) appears in 'In a Winter City' (Modern Poetry in Translation, No. 3, 2018). I cannot deny that I am very excited about this. On social media I often see people talking about their "dream journals" for publication: Modern Poetry in Translation is mine. Hopefully I'll get one of my own translations in there some day. I also love Fondane, and it was a privilege to review this excellent translation from the original French. You can access a full table of contents, buy a print copy, subscribe to the journal (which I highly recommend) and read a few of the poems here, but the review and most of the issue is only available in print or by a digital subscription. The focus of this issue, which my review sits outside of, is Hungary and Ted Hughes. It's 20 years since Hughes died, and as one of the founders of MPT, he dreamed of a Hungarian issue but didn't edit one in his lifetime.

The essay is non-poetry, but I am also proud of it - and oddly enough, I managed to quote Ted Hughes in it. It's entitled 'Tinker Tailor Sherlockian Spy: George Smiley', and it appears in Sherlock Holmes Is Like, published by Wildside Press. Edited by Christopher Redmond, this book contains 60 essays comparing Sherlock Holmes and characters of fact and fiction ranging from Loki to The Beatles (and everyone between that you can think of). As I'm quite immersed in spy literature, especially John le Carré, these days, it was a natural choice to pick le Carré's master spy George Smiley for this commission, especially as le Carré has often spoken of the inspiration he found in the Sherlock Holmes stories from a young age. You can buy the book directly from the publisher or from the other usual outlets. Authors weren't paid, and royalties go to the Sherlockian charity The Beacon Society.

Encounters: Joseph Brodsky, Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort

Joseph Brodsky c. 1973, University of Michigan. Photographer unknown



Today was UNESCO World Poetry Day, which doesn't really mean all that much because every day can be World Poetry Day, but I still approve of a day officially for poetry. A good time was had by all poetry folks on social media, for sure, and some were able to go to special readings and other events marking the occasion.

I wanted to share an anecdote which I suppose has something to do with poetry's reach. I recently wrote here about the poetry reading that I went to featuring Clare Pollard, Fleur Adcock and Michael Symmons Roberts. After that reading I was able to chat with David Harsent and his wife, the actress Julia Watson - I had a good reason to do so, as they have LAMDA connections and helped us with some matters relating to development of a new publication. They were lovely and it was a great pleasure particularly as David Harsent is one of my favourite poets.

Before the reading, though, I had an equally interesting encounter. I was hanging about sipping my glass of wine and trying to look nonchalant when I realised that I was inadvertently (well, sort of) eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation between a Russian lady and a gentleman. They were talking about Joseph Brodsky and the Russian lady was recalling moments from interviews she'd conducted with John Le Carré and Derek Walcott about Brodsky (and other matters, apparently - there was some discussion of Derek Walcott's cat.) I was slightly agog, particularly given that John Le Carré and Walcott are two of my literary heroes. So by the time I admitted to them that I was completely eavesdropping, and the gentleman wandered off, I was able to slip into a few minutes of conversation with this interesting lady. I asked her about her writing and work and she told me that she had written many books about Brodsky. She then mentioned that her husband was the late Daniel Weissbort. I was a bit dumbfounded - Daniel Weissbort died only a few months ago and I had read many tribute articles and obituaries. He was the founder of Modern Poetry in Translation, along with Ted Hughes. She herself was Valentina Polukhina, not only a Brodsky expert but a major scholar and advocate of Russian literature for English speaking audiences. I told her that I didn't know a lot about Brodsky but that I adored Mandelstam, and she said "The advantage of Mandelstam is that he has been translated by many different people, so you have a lot of choice." I also told her, quite sincerely, that I would rather read Modern Poetry in Translation than most journals dedicated to contemporary English-language poetry, and she seemed happy about that. When we introduced ourselves, she said to me that the name Clarissa was also found in Russia, but that it was considered quite aristocratic.

It was a lovely, striking encounter. A couple of days ago, the fantastic lyrikline website of international poetry in translation shared a blog post with readings by Brodsky - they shared a number of great poets reading their work, leading up to World Poetry Day. His reading of his poems in the original Russian is absolutely hypnotic. Also, I wanted to highlight these selections from his 'Part of Speech', which was translated by Daniel Weissbort.

Vasko Popa: "A Universe Passing Through a Universe"

Plaque at Vasko Popa's house in Belgrade.


I started reading Serbian poet Vasko Popa's poems late last year, and my rather unacademic commentary on his work is that it has absolutely blown my mind. I may have encountered him before, particularly since his poem 'Belgrade' ("White bone among the clouds/Bone of our bones") has appeared in recent years as one of London's Poems on the Underground. He was largely new to me, though, and I was swept into a world of Serbian folk mythology and historical archetypes, surreal and disturbing parables and games, and sardonic, funny commentaries on human nature.

Ted Hughes was a huge fan of Popa, and in a famous introduction to Popa's work, he commented: "It is the Universal Language behind language, and when the poetic texture of the verbal code has been cancelled (as it must be in translation, though throughout this volume [Anne Pennington's] translations seem to me extraordinary in poetic rightness and freshness) we are left with solid hieroglyphic objects and events, meaningful in a direct way, simultaneously earthen and spiritual, plain-statement and visionary." This is a very good point of entry into Popa's work, and it says much about why I'm becoming so obsessed with Eastern European poetry; the way in which it can be both corporeal and spiritual, prosaic and mystic, is absolutely remarkable to me.

Vasko Popa's most famous translator is Serbian-American poet Charles Simić, but so far I've mostly read Anne Pennington's highly regarded translations. You can read her translation of 'The Little Box' here:


THE LITTLE BOX (Vasko Popa, translated by Anne Pennington)


And here you can listen to Popa reading his poem 'Poetry Reading for the Gastarbeiters' in the original Serbian, although you will need to track down the English translation elsewhere - perhaps in the collection published by Anvil Press Poetry.

"Sweet Fire the Sire of Muse": Gerard Manley Hopkins Turns the Volume Up to 11

TO R.B. (Gerard Manley Hopkins)


The fine delight that fathers thought; the strong
Spur, live and lancing like the blowpipe flame,
Breathes once and, quenchèd faster than it came,
Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song.
Nine months she then, nay years, nine years she long
Within her wears, bears, cares and moulds the same:
The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim
Now known and hand at work now never wrong.
Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this;
I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
O then if in my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss
Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.


Gerard Manley Hopkins seems to be at or near the top of a lot of people's lists, whether of favourite poets, or most influential, or whatever list they choose. I find him amazing, but frankly overwhelming - his poetry is so intense both sensually and spiritually that I get overloaded quite quickly when I read him. His poetry, almost unrecognised and unpublished in his Victorian lifetime, was very innovative for its time and has gone on to be massively influential. I hear echoes of him in so many poets. Ted Hughes's 'The Hawk in the Rain' descends in a straight line from 'The Windhover'. Dylan Thomas also reminds me very much of Hopkins (though I'm equally unprepared to comment on either of them.)

I came across this poem, 'To R.B.', quite recently and loved it. R.B. was the poet Robert Bridges, who I recently crossed paths with as he edited an anthology of heroic poetry during World War I which Mallory took with him to Everest. Robert Bridges was a close friend of Hopkins and encouraged his poetry, and later edited and published collections of Hopkins' poems after his death.

The poem itself is pretty stunning, an inspired ode to inspiration. I must confess that the line "Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this" had me picturing Hopkins as the lead singer of...well...a hard rock/metal band with almighty riffs, bombastic tunes, and exceptionally good lyrics. Couldn't you just hear Robert Plant, Axl Rose, Freddie Mercury, Matt Bellamy, Sammy Hagar, Geoff Tate...er...(someone please stop me...) belting out those lines?

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.

Thomas, Frost, Farjeon: The Dark Earth and the Light Sky

"He looks on English things impatiently, but also as a lover might look upon his beloved for the last time. He seems always conscious that a world is coming to an end, though he never says so, it is his tone and it is the tone of his poems; which has taken us fifty years to hear." (P J Kavanagh)

"He is the father of us all." (Ted Hughes)


Last night I went to see The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, a play at Islington's Almeida Theatre about World War I poet Edward Thomas (Pip Carter), his great friends and poets Robert Frost (Shaun Dooley) and Eleanor Farjeon (Pandora Colin), and his wife Helen Thomas (Hattie Morahan). It was written by Nick Dear and directed by Richard Eyre. The play is just ending its world premiere run in London, and it has been extremely well reviewed. I found it to be one of the most powerful and moving plays I have seen in the last few years.

I think the first poem I read by Thomas was probably 'Rain', and probably some years ago. While beautifully written, it remains one of the most suicidally depressing poems I have ever read, and it didn't exactly encourage me to read on in his body of work. However, his name is one which recurs the more you delve into English and British poetry. Witness the quotation from Ted Hughes, above. Many great poets, including the likes of Dylan Thomas, Auden, and Heaney, cite him as an enormous influence, or even a catalyst for their own writing. At the same time, he is not exactly a household name, although I think he is now being studied for GCSEs or A-levels (unfortunately, this may not endear him to a future generation of young readers.)

I booked my ticket for The Dark Earth and the Light Sky several weeks ago, when I realised that it was a) about poetry and poets, and b) was likely to sell out because of how well it has been received and because the Almeida is a small theatre. I gradually, started reading a few more of his poems, and discovered that my initial impressions of him were very limited and rather inaccurate. I had seen him as a poet very much of his time, and mainly pastoral. (I also knew that while he was considered a "war poet", and he died in the war, his poems weren't mostly about the war.)

What I found when I actually bothered to read the poems properly was that Thomas was indeed heavily influenced by the pastoral, and in many ways his language was of its time. However, the shifting perspectives and emotions, the dreamlike blurring of times and places - these are all very modern, very powerful, and sometimes rather shocking. You may start reading one of his poems thinking that it's a nice but slightly depressing piece about the countryside; only to end up gasping for breath, sucker punched by a daring but accurate emotional shift, or a perceptive leap which you would never have thought of but which rings entirely true.

The words "extreme vision" came into my mind when I read some of his poems. He pushes the possibilities of what I would call the "alternative seeing" that poets possess, to their uttermost limits. English poet and critic John Lehmann called it an "intensity of vision" which outstripped that of most of his contemporaries. He chose to write with a vocabulary and apparatus of maps and places. Robert Macfarlane wrote: "To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. These traverses - between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal - occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events."

The Dark Earth and the Light Sky also employed shifting perspectives. We don't hear much of Thomas's own interior dialogue, except when he addresses the mysterious "other man" who seems to have governed some of his most important decisions. We see Thomas through the eyes of his passionate wife Helen, who loved him unconditionally and was nearly destroyed by the coldness and animosity which were part of his ongoing depression. These scenes were often painful to watch, as was the confrontation between Helen Thomas and Robert Frost, who felt that Helen had betrayed her husband's memory in her frank memoirs. Frost mainly saw Thomas as a remarkable poetic talent, but also reflected on his depression and said: "He didn't want to die, but he didn't want to not die." The shape of their friendship was carefully depicted in only a relatively small number of scenes. I was astonished by how much of the play involved discussion of the craft of poetry. Thomas, consumed by self-loathing, was convinced he couldn't write; Frost encouraged him by pointing to his remarkable nascent talent, and describing poetry as essential, more important than the patriotism engendered by the war, "a momentary stay against confusion." Meanwhile, Eleanor Farjeon nursed an unrequited (?) crush on Thomas and delighted the audience with her vivacity. The interactions between these individuals and Thomas, and their direct addresses to the audience about the man they knew, build up a more complete, rounded picture of a poet who still remains elusive in many ways.

Thomas constantly looked back to pre-industrial times, and found himself trapped between a desire for the pastoral ("I remember when there was lavender on Lavender Hill," he says to his uncomprehending father) and a drive to become engaged with the real world, to prove himself worthy of England, to become "a conscious Englishman." This was what led him to enlist, at least in part. The scene where Helen and Eleanor go through Thomas's effects after his death at Arras in 1917 had me and, I think, much of the audience in tears.

The staging was very bare, but effective. One of the reviews I read suggested that in many respects this was a play that shouldn't have worked particularly well, certainly in structural terms, but worked extraordinarily well.

At the end of the play, Thomas steps forward and speaks this poem.



LIGHTS OUT (Edward Thomas)


I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends;
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

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.

National Poetry Day: 'Stars' by Keith Douglas

Milky Way photo by jurvetson. Used under Creative Commons license



Today is National Poetry Day in the UK, and this year's theme is 'Stars'. (It also happens to be a year to the day since I started writing this blog, but I think that may be a subject for another entry.)

Landlocked and lightbound in London, I don't see as much of the stars as I used to growing up in a small city/large town in Canada. When I am back in Canada and I see Orion (generally, the only constellation I really recognise...) and its attendant stars, a pang strikes me. I remember travelling to Australia and New Zealand and being confounded by how different the night sky was. Everything was in the wrong place (actually, I'd noticed that even on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico) and I could see the Southern Cross, which really was thrilling. In recent years, I have been stunned by the wash of stars across the sky in the Sahara and in the Western Desert in Australia. They were like sand and they made the sky white.

Stars can signify so many things. They tend to lead me to thoughts of the smallness of human beings and the overwhelming vastness of the universe; questions of faith and eternity. They can also instill a feeling of loneliness, or give life to striving and attainment. It is very much dependent on the context, like so many things.

I have chosen Keith Douglas's poem 'Stars' for this National Poetry Day. I noticed that the National Poetry Day website had featured this poem in one of its suggested lesson plans for teachers and students, but I had been thinking of writing about it for some time and this is the perfect moment.


STARS (Keith Douglas)


At first I thought that this might be a poem reflecting Douglas's experiences during World War II in the deserts of North Africa, but it is dated 1939 and he did not go to the Middle East until 1941. It seems that the hills he describes in this poem are English and that he was a university student when he wrote it. The poem is dedicated to Antoinette, with whom he was at Oxford and who was either a girlfriend or someone he pursued (I'm not quite sure about this.)

Poets often seem like prophets (or perhaps they are, at least occasionally) but this seems especially the case with Douglas. I could be projecting onto this poem but one could easily assume when reading it that he had already gone to the war. (Of course, whenever the poem was written during the year 1939, everyone knew that the war was coming or that it was going to last for some time.) He writes of the stars as a vast army "marching in extended order", as "comrades". It's easy to imagine the starry army above reflecting a human army below, and soldiers seizing moments of peace amidst death and darkness.

There could be something a little whimsical about this poem - "greetings of ethereal officers", and so on - but the final lines undercut it: "Yes, we look up with pain/at distant comrades and plains we cannot tread." Although Douglas was to write finer, more accomplished poems - he would only have been 18 or 19 when he wrote this - this is one of his truest and most distinguishing marks, and one of the hardest to bear: his brutal, unflinching honesty. When I read those lines I wonder at his state of mind. Knowing that his own death was coming, and soon, is a theme throughout his poems. It's hard to know if it was some sort of death wish, or just a stern realism about his situation, or something else. There is something in the conclusion of this poem that bears out Ted Hughes's comments on Douglas, in his introduction to the Faber Collected Poems. Hughes speaks of a "passionate, fatalistic outlook ...the gallantry a cool acceptance of the worst possible fate. The source of the stage-lighting of this whole performance is, perhaps, that thing difficult to face - a vision of his own early death, his own death already foresuffered."

I am still trying to figure out why Keith Douglas's poetry blew my mind so comprehensively when I started reading him about a year and a half ago. This really does not happen to me often with such speed and force, not since my teens. Hughes's introduction to Douglas touches on some of it. "The dominant component of Douglas's line," says Hughes, "suggests a masculine movement, a nimble, predatory attack, hard-edged with a quick and clean escape." I have a liking for poetry with a certain masculine and muscular quality to it, which also has something to do with my love of Louis MacNeice, among others (see "Manly Men" for more details - I should probably have a Manly Men tagline.) But I found this comment from Hughes's essay particularly haunting, as it reflects something that I quickly came to feel about Douglas: "The music is familiar and intimate, like the inner voice of one's own voice, yet a desolate sort of music, closer to the crying of a bird than to the massed organ tones of great abbeys audible in [Wilfred] Owen." This is spot-on. When I started reading Douglas, there were aspects that felt so close to my own perceptions and experience (and this in the work of someone whose life was very different from my own) that I couldn't understand it, and still don't entirely.

Anyway, I have departed from the original idea of this entry, the National Poetry Day theme of 'Stars'. There are a lot of great poems on the subject out there. This one is by a poet who, I suppose, fulfilled some of the star-related clichés about burning out rather than fading away. I am very glad to have discovered Keith Douglas, as sad as he sometimes makes me feel.

Have a great National Poetry Day!

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!

Poetry Parnassus, Katharine Kilalea and 'Hennecker's Ditch'

Poetry Parnassus is coming to London this summer, for a glorious week starting on 26 June, mostly at the Southbank Centre. It's all part of the Cultural Olympiad surrounding the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. I feel a bit like "forget the sports - bring on the culture." I'm a Canadian, so the Winter Olympics are more my cup of tea, and sport is frankly pretty disillusioning these days; will an entire weightlifting team or two get disqualified for steroid use? (As well as my disinterest in nationalism, which seems to be what it's mainly about, there is the fact that Canadians never quite recovered from the disgrace of Ben Johnson being stripped of his gold medal for 100 metres at the Seoul Olympics. I was eight or nine years old and like everyone else there, will never forget it...)

But an entire week of international poetry celebrations - now that is exciting. I've bought a few tickets for events and may buy more, and there are a lot of free events, too. Wole Soyinka and Seamus Heaney appearing at the same event; a Poetry Factory and Edible Poetry; Ted Hughes translated into French, Greek and Turkish; a Word From Africa event to finish off the festival with African poetry, music and performance; and that's only a few of the events. It is set to be the largest poetry festival ever staged in the UK, and I presume one of the largest ever in the world. I think that the presence of so many international poets, whose first language is not English, will be particularly important in proving that poetry is an incredibly living and powerful art form.

Poets from most of the Olympic countries will be represented at Poetry Parnassus, due to an unprecedented manifesto to bring poetic representatives from as many countries as possible. I was delighted to learn that Katharine Kilalea will be representing South Africa. She is a young poet (my age or a little younger, I think) who has lived in the UK for several years. I heard her read a few years ago at a Penned in the Margins event at Aubin & Wills in Notting Hill and she kindly signed her collection, One Eye'd Leigh, for me. I remember her as one of the most mesmerising poetry readers that I have heard. It's not quite accurate to say that she read, because if I remember correctly, she recited all of her poems by heart.

One of Kilalea's poems, 'Hennecker's Ditch', can be found on this link from a Carcanet Press blog (her publishers):


HENNECKER'S DITCH (Katharine Kilalea)


There is also an interesting commentary on the poem, which I remember as 'Dear Circus'. I won't attempt to add my own, as my analysis hat is not currently on (this is where I miss being a literature student). I do remember that it struck me as being very Waste Land, and when I asked her about this afterwards she confirmed the impression. I will never forget Kilalea's recital of the poem. She looked no more than 22, had her leg in a cast and kept her eyes fixed on her audience while leaning a little crazily on a crutch. It was pretty hypnotic. The poem itself is wonderful and evocative.

The Dark Poetry of Spain

In December, I spent two weeks in Andalucia, Spain with a friend. In terms of sheer well-rounded pleasure it was among the best holidays I've had. Years of living on chilly northern islands have definitely convinced me that there are advantages to chasing the winter sun. Here, it wasn't exactly hot (except for some particularly pleasant hours in the sun), but it was mild to warm and there were blue skies for at least part and often all of every day.

We stayed in Jerez de la Frontera, a little over an hour by train from Seville. It proved to be a perfect base - a lovely, friendly town well placed for day trips elsewhere; not too big and not too small; and home to the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art, where I spent several happy hours both at a show and on a training day, watching exquisite dancing horses and handsome caballeros. It really does not get much better. Elsewhere, we wandered Seville's ornate shopping streets; sat by the vast blue reaches of water on Cadiz's shores; had one of the best meals I've ever had on holiday, a stunningly artistic selection of tapas, in Puerto de Santa Maria; admired the vistas from Arcos de la Frontera, a medieval dream of a town; and drank a lot of delicious coffee.

I hadn't previously spent a lot of time in Spain, although I speak the language up to a point (I was pleased at how much I was able to use it on holiday, and how well I was generally able to get by) and have had some excellent friendships with Spanish people. I had already spent a week in Mallorca, but although there are flashes of Spanish culture, it is pretty touristy and you don't always know where you are. In 2010 I spent a few days in Madrid and a day trip to Toledo, and loved both. Madrid's Prado is hands down one of the finest art galleries I have ever visited, and I finally caught a tantalizing glimpse of the mystery of Velazquez's Las Meninas. Madrid is monumental but beguiling, dark but fun-loving - definitely a city I could revisit any time. And Toledo, a gemlike town, is truly the stuff of fantasy.

It may have been mere holiday-fuelled musings, but I concluded that Spain was probably where I'd chose to live if I had to go somewhere in southern Europe. I love the south of France but it is somehow a bit too Mediterranean for my taste. Italy is enchanting and rich and beautiful but I don't feel at all at home there or with the people. Spain has something in common with both but perhaps there is a little more darkness and solemnity, which has a certain appeal. Ted Hughes wrote of Sylvia Plath's reaction to the country:


Spain frightened you. Spain
Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light,
The oiled anchovy faces, the African
Black edges to everything, frightened you.
Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.
The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.

(from 'You Hated Spain', Birthday Letters)


I know that my experience of Spain is still fairly limited, but this seems pretty accurate: especially "Black edges to everything." The Spanish friend who took me to Madrid refused to go to the Prado with me; with a shudder, she said "Oh, I hate Spanish art...it's so dark." It's hard to argue with her "dark" assessment.

I knew that Spain had a rich literature, most of it not very familiar to me. But I was really delighted to find that they love and honour their poets. In Seville especially, and in other towns too, I came across many plaques dedicated specifically to poets. This one is dedicated to José María Blanco White - "a life dedicated to fighting intolerance." He moved to England and wrote a sonnet, 'Night and Death' (in English), which was dedicated to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and has achieved some fame.

I certainly realised that I don't know very much about Spanish poetry. I bought a book of Antonio Machado's poems, which seems beautiful, but reading poetry in Spanish is bound to be a slow project for me.

Federico García Lorca is one of the greats, and an Andalucian as well. From dipping into his poems a little, they immediately seem profoundly Spanish with their imagery of death, horses, idealised women, winding roads through dry landscapes, and music - this is a deeply and passionately musical nation. This poem, 'Romance Sonambulo', chilled me to the bone with its morbid imagery and references to the Civil War - a tragic event which ultimately caused his death, as with so many others. You can find it on this link both in English translation and in the original Spanish:

ROMANCE SONAMBULO (Federico Garcia Lorca)

I'm glad that Spain loves its poets. Another good reason to return and try to uncover a little more of the mystery.

Ted Hughes's 'The Thought Fox': The Wild Comes To My Doorstep

THE THOUGHT FOX (Ted Hughes)


The above link will take you to both an audio recording and a readable version of 'The Thought Fox' on the Poetry Archive website. The Poetry Archive (http://www.poetryarchive.org/) contains many audio recordings of great poems, including others by Ted Hughes.

We've established that London is the greatest city in the world (a friend agreed with me the other day that it's best compared to addictive and illegal substances, but that's another story.) However, it does have its downsides, one of which is that London dwellers tend to feel cut off from nature. The parks are magnificent, but unless you manage to spend a lot of time in Richmond Park - and I have still only been there once - you are likely to see a little less greenery than you should, and a lot less animal life. On my way to work on the Victoria line the other day, I met two delightful floppy-eared individuals - some kind of spaniel. I gave one of them the tiniest scratch behind the ears and was instantly confronted with swooning brown eyes and a full body lean against my legs. It was lovely and I felt a bit sad when I had to get off at Victoria. It says something when even a tiny bit of animal contact makes my day.

As always, though, London will mysteriously place something that you really need right on your doorstep. I lived in West London for five years and occasionally heard the rather terrifying scream of a fox somewhere outside my window, but that and one brief glimpse of a fox heading purposefully somewhere one morning was about it for me. Now I live in inner-city South London, and one of the most wonderful surprises of my new neighbourhood has been the regular fox sightings.

I don't know how many there are near my building, but there have to be more than just a couple. Certainly, I have seen two at a time on more than one occasion, and I am sure there are more. I always see them in the late evening, when I'm hurrying home from somewhere or other. I hope to see them and often I get a strong sense that I will see a fox - then it crosses my path, sometimes only a couple of metres away. I am sure it is confirmation bias, but it does seem occasionally as though I just know and they just know.

I have been an animal lover for a very long time and foxes have a special place in my heart for a few reasons. The sandy-whiskered gentleman of Beatrix Potter's Jemima Puddleduck gave me the creeps when I was small. A favourite book by Garry Kilworth called Hunter's Moon, in the vein of Watership Down, created a fascination in me for urban foxes. Now I have them living only a stone's throw away. On the night of the worst August riots in London, I was leaning out my window looking at the smoke rising from Clapham Junction, and saw a fox trotting calmly across the street in my eerily quiet area. It was strangely reassuring. When I see them as I walk home at night, they usually pause and give me a long look: something like "you move first - I was here before you." They are wild, bold and indifferent and it always gives me a thrill.

Ted Hughes's nature poetry is incomparable. Many or even most of his poems touch on animal life and the wild in some way. He seems to have had an instinctive understanding of how wild animals live their lives with innate purpose, separate from humans, unaffected by them in the normal scheme of things, but giving them delight. He also understood how memories of the wild can restore hope and energy in the sometimes soul-sapping urban environment. Other poets have recognised this: in 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', W B Yeats wrote:


I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.


Ted Hughes, however, went one better than this in his monumental poem 'The Horses':


In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place
Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.


'The Thought Fox' is a poem about the creative process: the mystery of it and the poem's inception from a combination of patience and inspiration. But it is also a poem about a fox; appropriately, a very beautiful and sly poem. The delicate animal movement of the fox, its precision and sensory perfection, comes across marvellously in the lines:


Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow...


The fox is "concentratedly/Coming about its own business", which is in this case also the poet's business of writing a poem. This is a wonderful description of the intent nature of the wild animal, its lack of interest in anything except the instincts which drive it - rather like the instincts of an artist caught up in creation.