Photos from the Hidden Door Festival, Edinburgh 2010

Here are a few photos from the Hidden Door festival in Edinburgh. It was a huge affair with countless bands, poets, and artists combining for a feast of aural and visual art through an entire weekend. The Guardian presents a flavour of what was happening, and so did the Scotsman newspaper. The photos below (kindly provided by Andy Philip) are all from an installation built around my poem, 'The Organist'. It's a relatively new unpublished poem centring on the walk a minister makes to his church on a Sunday morning. Thematically, it deals with religious faith and emotion. I'm astonished by the artwork. Quite amazing to see the way someone (does anyone know who?) engaged with the poem, and it makes me want to do more such collaboration.

Fascinating, that pink hand daubed on the Bible, and the poem fragments scrawled on top of the cut-up Bible circles...

The words, 'My mind is his bootleg cathedral' and the other fragments come from the poem, which also features the hymn 'All Things Bright and Beatiful'. As for the bit in the middle, is that really what I think it is!?

Paper art, presumably more from the Bible, stuck to the walls

You could stand in the middle of all this and listen to me reading the poem, which is printed on the table below. Nice to see that someone actually did. Thank you!

A Scottish Seaside Town Holiday

I’ve been away for a week, on the west coast of Scotland. Not the glorious mountains of the north, but the faded seaside towns of the south, ‘faded’ in that people who used to flock to them every summer now go to Spain etc. They are quite nice places to hang about in, although I can see why people prefer to lie on a vastly overcrowded beach in the Costa Blanca heat under a parasol than a vastly overcrowded beach wearing two jumpers and a cagoule under a wind-shot umbrella. No danger of being lost in a crowd these days, mind you. In October, even jumpers offer no protection against the chill beach breeze, but we found near-deserted play parks (our eight-year-old and her friend were also with us), a horse-riding school that offered children half-hourly ‘led rides’, a ruined castle, a massive indoor soft-play area, an indoor pool, an interactive Viking museum, and of course there was also Nardini’s famous ice-cream shop. Too cold for ice-cream? Not at all. Don’t try to buy a pair of swimming trunks in Largs though. No shop sells them.

On the way to Greenock, I caught side of a sign shooting off to the right – ‘Loch Thom, 3 Miles’. The rain was bucketing down that day and the clouds were almost at ground level. The thought of veering off the dual carriageway to the site of one of WS Graham’s most famous poems was tempting nevertheless, but wandering around a loch in the mist and driving rain is only obligatory when you have no children. I’ll just continue to sense the loch only vicariously:

Before me. Here is the loch. The same

Long-beaked cry curls across

The heather-edges of the water held

Between the hills a boyhood’s walk

Up from Greenock. It is the morning.

The timing of the holiday meant that I missed Hidden Door, probably the most exciting cultural event to hit Edinburgh all year. I was ‘present’ through a new poem, ‘The Organist’, and accompanying audio and art installation. Last night, Andy Philip has sent me photos of it, which I will share with you on this blog later. However, I feel depressed that I couldn’t manage to get there, but waltzing off for a day in Edinburgh during my family holiday might have led to my mysterious ‘disappearance’ on my return.

The X Factor - 15 October 2010

I’ve decided to blog the X Factor live as it happens. I’ll update this post during the ads.

First up, Storm Lee, whom Simon Cowell last week described as a ‘failed rockstar’. He’s singing ‘Born to Run’ and sounds like a thin papercut of Springsteen. Awful song choice, badly performed, and the dancers and lights make it even more parodic. Cheryl Cole is booed for criticising him, but she’s right.
Marks out of ten – 3. My eight-year-old daughter gives it 9.

Treyc Cohen is up next, singing ‘Purple Rain’, a song I can’t stand. The audience are swaying away to it. Here come the vocal histrionics, which the song was built for. Yes, she can sing, I think I’ve got the idea. Bet the judges love it. Yes, they do! All of them!
I’ll look past the song as far as I can and give her 6. My daughter says 10.

Now, here’s Paige Richardson, who killed ‘Killing Me Softly’ last week. I’ve never been able to listen to that song without cringing since the ‘About the Boy’ movie. This week, it’s... oh what’s it called?... Apparently he has problems with his breathing, so they’ve given him a song where he can take lots of breaths between phrases. Crafty. He sang it OK though. I’ll give him 6 too. Daughter says 8. She is more generous than me...

The first group now take the stage, One Direction. To state the obvious, that’s not a good name for a group. This is bouncy pop stuff of a kind I never listen to, but they are making a good job of it. So young though and they look to have an average age of about 12. Was it a Kelly Clarkson song? Louis mentioned her. I wouldn’t know. Cheryl wants to “hug them in a nice way.” Simon says they are “the most exciting pop band in the country today.” He can’t be serious. There are plenty of groups playing in bars up and down the country tonight who will have more ideas and originality. But I’ll still give them 8 for the energy. Daughter says 10. I had a feeling she would like that one!

Cher Lloyd is this year's kooky contestant, the kind of person you don’t want to see moulded too much, so I hope she doesn’t get to the final. It is quite strange too. ‘It’s a hard enough life for us,’ she sings over beats and then raps in a curiously American accent. Odd dancing too, stamping about. Simon says, ‘I’ve seen the future here.’ Strange thing to say about a cover version, but she does seem fun. I’ll give her 8. Daughter says 9.

John Adeleye says he has to watch not to get too emotional in case he can’t finish the song. It’s a ballad. He’s a decent singer, but there’s nothing distinctive about him. Same with the song, could be anything. What is it? George Michael or something? I never know those things, unless I'm hearing a track John Peel played once on his radio show sometime in 1983. I might remember who played that one! Talented, of course, and he seems like a nice guy, but also forgettable. Better than Storm Lee though. I’ll give it 6. Daughter says 10! Shows how much I know...

Now we have Diva Fever. This is camp gay disco fun. A hilarious start – lots of men in swimming trunks and arms waving all over the place as a form of dancing. Barbara Streisland and Judy Garland are both referenced during the song. They made Louis smile. I’ll give it 8 as it was entertaining, and I'll award 10 to the choreographer. Daughter says 9.

Rebecca Ferguson next. She was one of the best last week, I thought. She is shy and the choreographer wants her to hoist her shoulders back and sing with confidence. Can she do it? Oh, it’s the Nina Simone classic, Feeling Good’. Now there is a song I like. She has a great voice, no doubt about that. Effortless, it seems. Danii M made a good point (amazing, I know) that she didn’t go over the top and try too hard. She doesn’t need to. I’ll give her 9. I’d give 10, but just in case someone does better... Daughter says 9 too.

Aiden Grimshaw is going to sing John Lennon. Hmmm. Depends what... He was really good last week too, so he has something to live up to. It’s ‘Jealous Guy’. It’s an intense, edgy performance, different from an average X Factor singer. But he muffed some notes, especially a big high note. Lacked the warmth of John Lennon somehow too. Louis liked it. Cheryl says it’s a shaky performance and is booed again (wasn’t she the UK's darling last year? How fickle is this country's obsession with celebrity!). Simon agrees with Cheryl. They are right. Aiden knows he’s messed it up, it’s all over his face. But he deserves to stay in, I think, as he has something. I couldn’t give that performance any more than 5 though. Daughter says 5 as well. She has suddenly become a tough customer.

Wagner is here! A born entertainer. Lots of fun. I'd never dream of buying a record by him though and can't imagine why anyone would. It's all in the live performance. A TV and stage career beckons. I'd say 7, daughter says 10!! She had her build-a-bear dancing to it, which might have influenced her appreciation.

Now it's Katie Waissel, my daughter's favourite. The judges want to see more of her personality and didn't like the fabricated image of last week. She looks like a typical X Factor hopeful this week! Oh dear... She sings the song adequately though and should get through. I'd say 6, daughter says 10 of course. She'd give her 11 if she could.

Another group now, Belle Amie. I keep thinking of the late TV botanist David Bellamy when I hear their name. Thoughts of the bearded one don't go with their image at all. It's most distracting. Go away, David! There is a Man City football player Bellamy, isn't there? On loan somewhere this year. A guy with loads of tattoos. Doesn't mix well with the girl group either. And they’re singing The Kinks! ‘You really got me’. Ouch. I really hate this. That’s what comes of hearing a song by one of my favourite bands ‘girl grouped’ with dancers and silly smoke and pained expressions. But Louis likes it. In fact all the judges like it. They are nuts. I’d give this 4. Daughter says 8.

Mary Byrne is next. A 52-year-old Tesco worker. Or ex-Tesco, we can confidently say now. She got rapturous applause last week. She will do great in musicals and I’m sure people will buy her music too, however far she gets in the competition. She is a fantastic singer. Not my kind of thing, but there again not much in the X Factor really is. The entertainment isn't so much in the music as in the competition itself. She sang well again, just as we all knew she would. Rapturous applause again. It’s the Susan Boyle effect. People can’t believe that someone over 30 who doesn’t have a a plastic face and a stick-figure can sing on TV. Weird. Cheryl “respects her as a woman”. Simon says “it’s just right that someone like you should be in the competition.” They must be having a competition to see who can be more patronising. I’d say 8. Daughter says 10.

Closing the show is Matt Cardle. He’s come over to me so far as a good singer, but nothing special. He has a falsetto, which is fun. He has also played in bands for most of his life, so he’s not new to performing. He’s singing very well tonight, and it’s not an easy song to sing either. I don’t care for the gasping between notes. Represents ‘emotion’, I guess. He hit the high notes perfectly. I’d say 7 for that. Daughter says 8.

So that's it all over - results tomorrow. I'd say Storm should be deleted, without a doubt. If I was a voting man, which I'm not, I'd cast mine for Rebecca.

Two Things that are Important for Writing

Very interesting interview with Michael Hofmann from Stylus magazine, March 2009, which I missed completely at the time. A quick excerpt:

RL: So what things should a poet keep in her or his kit? You’ve thrown away the notebook…

MH: Which I regret. You should all keep notebooks. I think the two things that are important for writing… The contrarian Karl Kraus said that a writer who read was like a waiter who ate, as if there was something very distasteful and to be discouraged about that. It’s a wonderful witticism, but I do think that one has to read, that’s the first thing.

And the second thing is walk, which I suppose I took up from Mandelstam or Montaigne, pacing back and forth. It has to do with rhythm. The brain requires a jolt. You need to get away, especially from all the machinery in modern life. (Though nowadays you can take them with you.) Modern life throws more and more machines at us, and writing is something so old. If you want to write, you need freedom from machines. You have to listen to things in your head, and if you’re surrounded by machinery and gazing into a screen, you’re not going to be able to hear what’s in your head. So I would say walking and reading and silence, although I often would type with loud music going on. That has a sort of disinhibiting effect. I used to like that; I’d play very loud records and type.

Three From Shearsman

I’ve been looking through the Shearsman Press 2010 online catalogue recently and have been impressed with the variety there. Three books in particular caught my eye.

The first illustrates the power of an interesting review. On the Governing of Empires by Alasdair Paterson is billed as a poetic document for the “imperially and post-imperially inclined,” and you’ll see from the .pdf sampler how that looks in practice. I’d read James Sutherland-Smith’s review of the book about a week before and had reckoned that anyone who thought John Ash’s collection was terrific had to be worth listening to. The review didn't make me buy the book on its own, but it did lead me to investigate further and now I am going to buy the book.

Incidentally, speaking of reviews, The Opposite of Cabbage could really do with a few Amazon reviews. I’ve been told it really helps with sales and it’s languished without any Amazon reviews for its entire existence. If any of you who enjoyed the book would like to write a review at Amazon, I’d be very grateful. An Amazon review doesn’t need to be long or detailed. A sentence or two is fine, along with as many stars as you can bring yourself to give, of course. In fact, good examples can be found at the Amazon page of On the Governing of Empires – three short, pithy five-star reviews!


Anyway, back to Shearsman. The second title which drew my attention was A Curious Shipwreck by Steve Spence. Now, again, this illustrates the power of title recognition. If a book seems familiar somehow, if it’s been ‘talked about’, then even relatively marketing-resistant readers like myself will notice it before others, and this book had been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. So I clicked to read more. At that point, when I read about the book and read the .pdf sampler, the prize begins to mean sod all. I either like it or I don’t. In the case of this book, I felt naturally well disposed towards it. The first lines grabbed me and I liked the tone. I wasn’t quite sure always what was going on, but I still wanted to keep reading. The pirate theme was intriguing and, when I read Steve Spence’s interview at Stride magazine on the parallels he was trying to draw with contemporary culture, that got me more interested still.

The third book was Alan Wall’s Doctor Placebo. Why did I click on that? Was it something to do with the title, the cover, the blurb? I’m not sure, but I did click on it and found poems which made me think immediately of Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Mr Cogito’ (not the first time I’ve thought of Cogito when confronted with a new collection) – the searching character, the philosophical enquiry, the barbed sense of humour, the pointed ironies. I’m not sure whether this book has been published yet (due ‘October 2010’), but it looks exactly my kind of thing.

Forward Prize 2010 Results

I confess I had forgotten that the Forward Prize results were due yesterday. Possibly, that was due to a general lack of excitement over the shortlist for Best Collection. My feeling was that, of the shortlist, Jo Shapcott’s collection looked the strongest, but it was an absurdly conservative list – more on which later. Seamus Heaney won it, the first time he has won the Forward Prize, for Human Chain. I don’t want to say too much about the book itself, as it’s possible I might be reviewing it for a proper magazine. I wonder, though, how readers think it ranks alongside other Heaney collections.

Anyway, the shortlist contained collections by Lachlan MacKinnon (Faber), Seamus Heaney (Faber), Jo Shapcott (Faber), Fiona Sampson (Carcanet), Sinead Morrissey (Carcanet) and Robin Robertson (Picador). One of the judges said that “what we have got represents the quality and brilliant variety of poetry, and poetry publishing, in Britain today.” Of course, it does no such thing. In fact, it represents an incredibly narrow range of poetry and poetry publishing. It’s difficult to imagine how it could be any narrower!

I feel it’s vital, if such prizes are to retain any credibility whatsoever, that a far broader range of styles and publishers are selected. I don’t know how to achieve that, but there must be some way of breaking through the hegemony that afflicts UK poetry at the moment. I mean, I look at Poetry (Chicago) magazine and see a genuinely wide range of poetic styles – everything from Billy Collins to Ron Silliman. People on all sides of the various poetic divides can find something to moan about, which has got to be a sign of health! In similar magazines in the UK, the range is far narrower, apart from works in translation: it’s as though idiosyncrasy in work originally written in other languages is fine, but not in English please... Generally, the First Book and Best Poem shortlists (although not always the winners) have tended to reflect far greater range than the main awards. Could it be that judges feel under less pressure to make the obvious shortlist-choices in these categories i.e. in that they are not, as established poets, having to pick and choose among their equally (or more) established contemporaries?

In any case, Hilary Menos won the Best First Collection prize with Berg – you can read a few examples from it at her website – and Julia Copus won the award for Best Poem with An Easy Passage, originally published in Magma 45, edited by Clare Pollard.

Fife Bookfest

Including a poetry set from me, this Saturday:

Beta Band - Dry The Rain

One of my favourites by the Beta Band. Builds itself up really nicely to the conclusion which is as anthemic as they get. The horns in the studio version are missing but the bassline is great.

New Walk Magazine, Issue 1

The first issue of New Walk magazine is just out, and very interesting it is too. It really is wide-ranging: David Mason, Mark Ford, Alison Brackenbury, Tom Leonard, Peter Larkin, CJ Allen and Matt Merritt all thrown in beside one another, so you have a curious mix of styles and methods from full-rhyming metrical formalism to experimental modernism and everything in between. The editorial makes it clear that this is a deliberate policy.

There is a also a short story by Janice D. Soderling, a conversation between Alex Pryce and Gwyneth Lewis, and a batch of essays and reviews. And yes, my jaw dropped at the negative review of Mark Halliday’s HappenStance pamphlet, although the reviewer, Nicholas Friedman, succeeds in anticipating objections before they appear, for which he ought to be granted a degree of kudos – “Some may question the pertinence of a review that criticizes a collection for failing to achieve something – earnestness, for example – that it never claimed to achieve in the first place. “ Yes, they will, for certain... I’m not even convinced that earnestness is a virtue.

The magazine kicks off with three poems by me – ‘The X Factor’, ‘Online’ and ‘Soundings’. I was a little surprised the magazine chose to place these at the beginning, as they are strange, but maybe that was the idea. Matthew Stewart promises to review the magazine in the next few weeks, so you might get a fuller report from him.

"Derivative, Solipsistic or Lacking either Freshness or Ambition"

The 2010 Aldeburgh Poetry Prize shortlist has been announced (and nice to see Tony Williams flying the flag for Salt on that list). The comments by one of the judges, Neil Rollinson, will raise a few eyebrows:

“Most of the books I read were either derivative, solipsistic or lacking either freshness or ambition. There were, however, a few splendid books which were a joy to read and which I’d be happy to recommend to anyone.”

The Aldeburgh Prize is for first collections, but I suspect that comment could safely be extended to poetry books generally. Some of the collections that have most lacked freshness and ambition that I’ve seen recently have been by established poets. But do only a few new collections make it into a ‘joy to read’ category each year, or is he being harsh?

I tend to read quite widely, and not always the very latest stuff, so I don't read all that many new collections in the year they are published . Basing it on books I'm asked to review, I suspect Rollinson is right. I don't often think the books are 'bad', but many seem a bit flat, and it's great when I get one that really bowls me over. On the other hand, collections I find really boring appear to be a 'joy to read' for many other readers: in fact, at Neil Rollinson's website, you can read excerpts from reviews of his own collections - intriguingly, both positive and negative reviews, which all goes to show... If taste was uniform (and uniformly refined), the job of publishers would be easy.

Nevada's Miss Breadlove

I was reading John Berryman’s Dream Song, 208 and came across these lines in the second stanza. Berryman is reading the TLS

Vozhnezsenky was good on watermelons

and Nevada’s Miss Breadlove outstripped the felons

to be crowned Narrative Poet Laureate of North America.

Groovy, pal.

That’s quite a title for Miss Breadlove! I googled her name to see what I could find, out of sheer curiosity, and turned up Mildred Breedlove, Berryman mischievously switching a letter in her name. Quite a story she has. It seems she was commissioned by the State Governor to write a poem about Nevada and she spent the next three years travelling about to research information for the poem. Must have been a generous grant!

When the book was published, she was indeed almost given the title Berryman relates in his poem – except it was ‘Narrative Poet Laureate of Nevada’, rather than North America – a minor difference, of course...

She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature (surely that can’t have been a serious candidacy?) and won a special award presented by the President of the Philippines (you couldn’t make it up). Finally, she got embroiled in some dispute over the book with Nevada’s officials and threatened to leave the state, as you can read in the colourful letter at the link:

“But the suppressing forces underestimated both the work and me. I do not crush easily. My backbone is made of forged steel, and I spit at tigers.”

I tried to find some of her poems online, but found nothing. The bio at the link tells us that her birth year and year of death are unknown (I suppose it is possible she is still alive). Has anyone read her poems? Was her Nevada any good? I certainly wonder why those who had commissioned it were so keen to suppress it.

Geoffrey Hill's 'Odi Barbare' Excerpts

Poetry magazine has just published a new batch of Geoffrey Hill poems, always an event, of course. Hill has never been easy reading, but his work often repays close attention. However, these new ones are hard-going, even by his standards. Let’s have a go...

The title, Odi Barbare (Barbarian Odes), is a reference to a work of the same name by Giosuè Carducci, a 19th century Italian poet. More on Carducci here – it’s an online translation from the Italian, so reads strangely in places. One interesting thing I learned from this article is that Carducci’s ‘Odi Barbare’ was an attempt to marry Greek quantitative metre with the rhythms of Italian (which would have seemed ‘barbaric’ to many Italians at the time). Now, Hill’s poems are in Sapphic stanzas, a Greek metre. In English, Sapphics tend to work as three lines of trochee, trochee, dactyl, trochee, trochee, followed by one line of dactyl trochee, but I imagine Hill is also trying to work in the Greek quantitative values with the accentual English feet. I don’t know if that’s what he is doing, but I’d be surprised if he wasn’t. Some expert on this ought to check, if it hasn’t already been done.

The first of the poems, number xxiv, starts with an image of going back to a beginning. I like ‘moves unlike wildfire’. We’re going to take our time and start with this rustic image of a ploughman in line 3, which is also a reference to Micah 4:3 from the Bible – “they will hammer their swords into ploughshares”, an image of future peace and hope. But in Hill’s poem, the ploughman simply hammers his ploughshare. It’s brutal reality, hard toil. The ‘durum dentem’ in line 3 is another great phrase – the durum conveys hardness, but durum is also a kind of wheat. ‘Dentem’ I’m not sure about – is it some kind of enamel, something toothlike? In any case, it also gives a picture of the plough, the teeth it uses to break into the soil. And in the fourth line, we discover it’s digging not into ordinary soil after all, but into Virgil, presumably representative of classical literature, knowledge etc

Just to dip my toe into the second stanza – Hill might be referencing this poem, Heavensgate, by Christopher Okigbo, which is apparently the greatest Nigerian poem of the 20th century. I think this might be the case not only because of the mention of Idoto Mater (Okigbo’s poem begins, “Before you, Mother Idoto/ naked I stand” - Idoto being goddess of the oceans) but also because of the reference to Igboland, which is part of modern Nigeria. Exactly how this relates to Greek mythology ("the great-/Stallioned Argos") is unclear to me. Neither do I really understand what’s going on in this stanza nor how it relates to the first, if at all.

It’s the kind of poem I’d need an expert commentary to get anywhere with. There just aren’t the hours in the day to do research into every word in every line. While there are some great phrases and interesting wordplay, there are also several convoluted sentences with deliberately mangled syntax, but not with the distinct voice of, say, Berryman, where you can virtually hear the poet’s voice addressing you.

Anyone for the third stanza?

Millions, or Perhaps Billions, or Trillions

You know those email scams, which spin some convoluted story and ask for your bank account details so that the emailer can supposedly deposit millions of pounds/dollars in it? Well here's one with a difference at Mark Doty's blog. A classic.

Publication Routes, First Lines and Literary Identity

Apologies for the relative lack of activity here for the last week or so, but that’s partly because I’ve been writing on other blogs. Firstly, an article on my route to publication for Mairi Sharratt’s blog, A Lump in the Throat. The article has a part 1 and a part 2. Secondly, I conducted an experiment on first lines and continuations over at the Magma blog. And thirdly, this morning, I wrote a long comment (sorry about the length) for a fine article by Claire Askew on literary identity. My comment is currently awaiting moderation, but the article and comments made so far are well worth reading.

Don't Sleep

No, don’t sleep while the governors of the world are busy!

Be suspicious of the power they claim to have to acquire on your behalf!

Stay awake to be sure that your hearts are not empty, when others calculate on the emptiness of your hearts!

Do what is unhelpful, sing songs from out of your mouths that go against expectation!

Be ornery, be as sand, not oil in the thirsty machinery of the world!

(from Dreams by Gunter Eich, in Angina Days: Selected Poems (Princeton University Press, 2010), translated by Michael Hofmann)

The Papal Tour

In the next hour or two, the Pope will pass within a few hundred metres of my house. I’m staying well away. I am no fan of Ratzinger/Benedict. As a highly intelligent young man, he was one of the architects of Vatican II which sought to change both the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church for the better. A few years later he must have had some kind of unfortunate ‘conversion’ experience because he has spent his life since trying to reverse everything that Vatican II might have achieved.

To an extent, he is more transparent that Pope John Paul II. JP II was an arch-conservative, but he was good with the public, so people tended to overlook the rigidity of his views. Benedict hasn’t a PR bone in his body, so what you see is what you get. On the other hand, JP II was very probably a compassionate, decent man in practice, despite his increasingly dogmatic views. Words like ‘calculating’, ‘ambitious’, ‘two-faced’ and ‘downright nasty’ could never have been fairly applied to him, but they don’t seem inappropriate for Benedict. It is shocking, of course, that someone who is supposed to represent Jesus might be associated with such words, but there is plenty of historical precedent for it.

On the ground, I am a committed ecumenist. It’s important to overlook the idiocy of leaders. Just as Americans were not all George W. Bush, so not all Roman Catholics, priests, and bishops are Pope Benedict. I don’t have any problem with him visiting the UK and couldn’t care less whether it’s counted as a state visit or not. The UK Government entertains many even more unsavoury characters, and my taxes pay for them whether I like it or not. But I do wish the RC Church would take a liberal turn in the near future, after Benedict has gone. Leonardo Boff, liberation theologian who was a thorn in the Vatican's side for many years (and has now left the RC Church), wrote on Ratzinger's accession to Pope in April 2005 - "I believe in miracles. Let's hope Benedict XVI becomes again the theologian I used to respect, who elicited hope, not fear." Sadly, the miracle hasn't happened yet...

Anyway, this is the poem I wrote the day Ratzinger was elected Pope, published in the now unavailable The Clown of Natural Sorrow:

THE INVITATION

The bell tolls. I slop my hair in shampoo.
On the radio Ratzinger breathes Latin like a bell
tolling. The letterbox clicks like a book snapped

shut. Blessed art thou, mother of God. An envelope
greys the welcome rug, the scrape of my name
in fading ink. Abortion a grave and sinful

mistake. Kate’s sloping script. ‘Papa Ratzi,’ a DJ sniggers
at his own wit. The time and date for the funeral,
the child’s name. Last scraps of Catholic hope. No

flowers. Donations to the hospital please. I shape my hair
with wax. Bells and smoke. The umbilical rope round
the tiny neck. The Pope is dead. Long live the Pope.

Poetry at the.., and Three Books

It’s been a fairly busy few days with a few more to come, but I am at least reasonably on top of things. Poetry at the...GRV was excellent on Sunday evening. All the readers showed why they are seen as intriguing, distinctive voices. To people I’ve heard suggesting that too many contemporary poets sound similar to one another – well, you should have been there on Sunday evening to hear Eleanor Rees, Martin MacIntyre and Michael Pedersen. They are carving out their own territory and it was exciting to hear living proof of that on Sunday evening.

I’ve been reading three books simultaneously, all with a German connection:

Last night, I finished one, Cursing Bagels (can’t believe that £99 second-hand price-tag. I got mine for £3.50 about a week ago!) by Alfred Brendel. Brendel is a world-famous pianist. His poems have a light touch but they are also surprising in a similar way to those of Charles Simic. And the lightness is always in tension with darkness...

Then there’s Angina Days by Gunter Eich (translated by Michael Hofmann). The blurb says, “Eich was rivalled only by Paul Celan as the leading poet in the generation after Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht.” It’s certainly been an interesting read and the further into the book I go the more interesting it seems to get.

And finally, James Sheard’s Dammtor arrived in the post. The poems may be made in Keele, England, but they are distinctly European. I've only read the first four poems, so far, and those have certainly whetted my appetite for the rest. The good news for the people of Edinburgh (whether they yet know it as good news or not) is that Jim will be reading for Poetry at the...GRV on Sunday 10th October, as a special guest poet – part of a collaboration with Gutter magazine.

All three collections share dark humour and twisted imagination and aren’t afraid to tackle big themes, even if they each do so in radically different ways. I’ll try to say more soon.

Prefab Sprout - Elegance

One of my favourite Prefab Sprout songs. I believe the album sleeve was designed by Bloodaxe poet, Matthew Caley, whose enjoyable collection, Apparently, was published earlier this year.

Reviews and Newspapers

I was recently sent listings of what books were being reviewed in newspapers and a few top magazines. For the week from 16-23 August, here’s how it breaks down in terms of publishers:

Faber - 38

Penguin - 15

HarperCollins - 14

Bloomsbury - 11

Vintage - 10

Canongate - 9

Hodder - 9

Jonathan Cape - 8

Chatto & Windus - 8

Picador – 8

The single most reviewed book was a poetry book, which might briefly amaze you until you remember that Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain has just been published. It was reviewed 6 times in that week, in the Daily Telegraph, The (Glasgow) Herald, Independent, Irish Times, Sunday Times & The Times. This week, incidentally, it was reviewed twice in the same newspaper – The Telegraph, not content with one review, published reviews both by Nick Laird and by Adam O’Riordan.

The book which had the most written about it (in news articles, as opposed to reviews) was Tony Blair’s The Journey, with more than 60 articles covering its launch in various ways. It was also reviewed five times – in the Daily Express, Financial Times, Independent, Observer & The Times. Needless to say, it’s now number 1 in the Amazon Bestsellers list. That's notwithstanding the Facebook campaign urging us to place a copy of the book in the Crime section of our local bookshop.

Where are Salt, Bloodaxe, Carcanet etc? Well, nowhere in the papers. Exactly why the national press collude in the hegemony that afflicts British book publishing isn’t clear to me. Coverage doesn’t so much affect readers’ choices by argument as by appearance, so even a mixed or negative review can have a positive effect on sales (Tony Blair's memoir is a case in point). A book that’s seen all over the media countless times is almost bound to sell better than a book that fails to appear. As for the lack of space papers claim to have for poetry, perhaps the Telegraph might want to explain why it found two spaces for Human Chain and none for any other poetry collection. I know Heaney’s books sell extremely well and, as such, deserve to be reviewed, but not at the expense of everything else.

Reviews and Unseemly Praise

“Books are described as being ‘compulsively readable’ when they are merely ‘OK’; ‘jaw-droppingly good’ when they are actually ‘not bad’; ‘impossible to put down’ when they are really ‘no worse than the last three’. The same authors who mope and whine about a negative comment here and there are only too glad to accept praise that is not warranted, kudos they do not deserve. But how often does an author ever come out and admit that the praise showered on his book was excessive, inappropriate, ill-considered, unseemly or flat-out wrong? That’s the sort of thing that takes real moral fiber, real guts.”

(Joe Queenan in the New York Times 2008, quoted by Dennis O’Driscoll in The Dark Horse, issue 25)