tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-309601642024-03-08T00:47:27.878+00:00Ben Wilkinsonpoet | critic | writer Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comBlogger297125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-38139014023892134222022-02-25T18:16:00.012+00:002022-03-10T20:03:52.318+00:00Same Difference publishes with Seren<p> </p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Same-Difference-Ben-Wilkinson/dp/1781726485/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="1742" data-original-width="1099" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEisyapjnkCI1KY9tSurPNsFAMkwJawyiBTqRrlfYdb4wBOw3h2m09VdREeCwjmeUGdeoHHe5NILuhc5UHsbh8e-RZQz1KkOnY-hy9q8_rG0xSeqZGsLtVUSd4o7eN3rn_lZQscQ98bbeH4CkbqTOsjbF0W0a6sk1Tl6xPj_6oQgMPc4sWZhtRI=w405-h640" width="405" /></a></div><br /></div></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span><i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">from the publisher:</span></span></i></h3></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> <br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">This
ambitious new collection from poet and critic Ben Wilkinson finds its
author experimenting with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue.
Carefully crafted yet charged with contemporary language, the book brims
with everyone from cage fighters to boy-racers, cancer patients to
whales in captivity.<br /><br />Several poems unpick the preconceptions and
prejudices that can inform so many of our encounters – with the world,
art, and one another – while others take a sideways glance at everything
from male depression to the history of meat-eating; from the philosophy
behind athletic competition to surreal yet familiar emotions.<br /><br />Notable
here are poems that wrestle with the mystery of failed and successful
relationships, both providing moments of transcendence and despair.
There are well-observed pieces about sport, particularly the rewards of
running, from a noted devotee.<br /><br />Wilkinson has also been deeply
inspired by the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96), ‘stepping
into the shoes’ and finding affinity with that poet’s astringent tone
and ruthless clarity, borrowing his ‘punchy and musical’ phrasing. These
add to the volume’s tonal and imaginative range.<br /><br />While empathetic and often moving, <i>Same Difference</i>
is a collection that seeks to undermine the confessional mode, keeping
the reader on their toes and asking just who is doing the talking. It is
also formally elegant, often using traditional rhyme and metre to weave
its arguments.<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Colloquial,
straight-talking, ‘less deceived’ than Philip Larkin, Wilkinson brings a
spiky 21st-century realism as well as formal adroitness to the
contemporary lyric. In </i>Same Difference<i> he further expands his
range with an interwoven series, ‘After Verlaine’, in which he discloses
the French poet’s capacity for ‘hard thinking’ and accesses a newly
sensuous and shadowy depth in his own imagination.</i> –<b>Carol Rumens</b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b> </b> <br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">Same Difference<i>
is pitch-perfect. The poems and sonnets are remarkable for their
emotional truth and craft; the versions of Verlaine are exquisite
echo-chambers of the originals; and the dramatic monologues are utterly
compelling.</i> –<b>David Morley </b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b> </b> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The
range of this book is far-reaching and restless - its territory the
shifting ground upon which is built the idea of a self - offering us the
chance to think again about the intricate, sometimes delusional,
stories we tell ourselves, ones that Wilkinson, here and with great
clarity and verve, tells for us.</i> –<b>Greta Stoddart</b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b> </b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b> </b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1781726485/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="232" data-original-width="480" height="111" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhNifKTUZATwzHj9CNY7ntwfTZaGogV3t3s0cuT9NP6Psjba-8w1CAIRGFlPYbXZXcJc_K-ViW2vhv4lTxhX48B23gw5V8G5ndCjbUD5HexGLnpewnBla1yG2QPJ-wkRVdml3_eg3SJdnTINLN7YbANh_9JUYT2KPOjYJoaoeurwy15S66PJNA=w228-h111" width="228" /></a></div></b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><b><br /></b></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/same-difference" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="34" data-original-width="119" height="57" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi5QrpCyftef8uDxZvwtJ3uA2b7JwnjkzWflFRIV4W3zF45_Fwiwsa3aIcJ_BOXJ3AKQ3eXPWua-zbJ4mWmh9zGrXNxjKLCKKT5WYBz5qUpy_InaigFW60PGANGUPXYCLAJFsNgqvH_Iz-Sb-vQi4ry68r_L23rFiTjG2R1T__y8MVyAg_tSQ0=w200-h57" width="200" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Or buy a signed copy direct from the author via PayPal</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span></div></div>
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Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-54297037390242144442021-06-07T17:03:00.004+01:002023-05-22T15:49:44.452+01:00Don Paterson: Writers and their Work (Liverpool University Press, 2021)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYyNskETnR_apOys9G7S4WvbFRXo0hV3em6vp68wDeT-nyVV_81syJ1a6g0L6LJGEFCHOrqdT9rfkrN8MJrVMQ9LL2XxHXGKCss4VDvDS7u9pCnbxXk-6sk8TUVyqPTyYz1uPAqQ/s2048/Don+Paterson+%2528LUP%252C+2021%2529%252C+cover+design.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1324" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYyNskETnR_apOys9G7S4WvbFRXo0hV3em6vp68wDeT-nyVV_81syJ1a6g0L6LJGEFCHOrqdT9rfkrN8MJrVMQ9LL2XxHXGKCss4VDvDS7u9pCnbxXk-6sk8TUVyqPTyYz1uPAqQ/w259-h400/Don+Paterson+%2528LUP%252C+2021%2529%252C+cover+design.jpg" width="259" /></a></div><span style="font-size: large;"><b><i> </i></b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>Don Paterson: Writers and their Work</i></b> (<a href="https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781800855373" target="_blank">Liverpool University Press</a>, December 2021, hbk; December 2023, pbk) </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div><p><span style="font-size: large;">Don
Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular
writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a
dedicated readership and most of Britain’s major poetry prizes,
including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in
every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first
comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a
modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of
form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, in pursuit of
poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Drawing on a wide range of
commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to
collection, providing detailed analyses of the poems framed by
theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students,
specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry alike, it
presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p>Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-3424550598281849872021-03-05T12:00:00.000+00:002021-03-05T15:48:06.666+00:00Review: Fiona Benson's Bright Travellers<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Never mind movements, schools and styles: fundamentally, there are two types of poet – those who see spirits, and those who just drink them. As Sean O'Brien noted when reviewing her Faber New Poets pamphlet in these pages in 2009, Fiona Benson is a sober, contemplative sort. But as her first full collection <i>Bright Travellers</i> reveals, she is as much drawn to the metaphysical as to the mystical, treating the poem as a kind of secular prayer.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2014/5/21/1400667754319/Fiona-Benson-011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2014/5/21/1400667754319/Fiona-Benson-011.jpg" height="192" width="320" /></a>The opener, "Caveat", may be a terse appraisal of the cactus, its "moist heart" and "store of water / held beneath its spines" a working model of life's resilience in the face of inevitable hurt. But, elsewhere, a poem such as "Lares" is a full-blown hymn to the "small ghost" of a bird, conjuring this "noosed spirit of the eaves" as gatekeeper of a hidden world beyond our everyday outlook. Benson often draws on personal experience in her writing – wading "thigh-deep in pollen" with her husband in summer's "glaze of heat"; the love for her baby daughter that will "ride on" – but she rarely trades in simple anecdotes. Instead, her poems make a bid for what Michael Donaghy called the "alchemical payoff", mixing solemn scrutiny, intoxicating lyricism and a dark imagination in pursuit of the strangeness beneath the habitual.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">One stylistic habit is her musing on a pivotal subject – a pine cone, say, or a "feral" rose – in the hope that, like a horse's skull placed in the corner of a room by guitarists, it might offer wider resonance through the poem's music. That rose, for instance, becomes no less than "its own lantern / hung above the garden", "ventricles and channels / charged with light, // its scarlet bell streaming, / as if it were Christ's sacred heart / radiating flames". As a concentrated, image-driven expression, this feels Romantic in origin, but in both theme and style it more clearly recalls Sylvia Plath, who emerges as a guiding hand in the dark. Comparisons between Plath and modern-day female poets are frequently dubious, of course – the work of lazy critics – but where Benson is concerned, the affinity is plain to see. Her obsession with animals, the wild and corporeal, with ghosts and with history's chasms; the handling of painful human emotion through naturalistic conceit; the searing imagery and singularly heightened register: all bear the hallmark of that most nihilistic and paradoxically tender of poets. When she muses on the vulnerability of a pine cone's needles, blown on the wind, it is hard to hear anyone else in the lines "one day / my daughter also / will travel far from here".</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">To dismiss Benson as a fine imitator and acolyte of Plath, however, would be to give her poetry short shrift. For one thing, there is a tranquil, Zen-like quality to some of her writing, measured lines and diction unspooling with an ease removed from the edgy, angular style employed elsewhere, acknowledging "our place // beneath this infinite sky / in a wind that knows we are mortal, porous, / a beautiful trick of the light".</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/covers/2014/5/20/1400582417406/Bright-Travellers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/covers/2014/5/20/1400582417406/Bright-Travellers.jpg" /></a></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">A sequence of poems on parenthood and the pain and grief of miscarriage demonstrate Benson's ability to handle emotionally difficult and evidently personal subject matter with poise, grit and feeling. Here, avowedly maternal poems such as "Childbed" and "Cradle Cap" are full of praise and wonder for the newborn, but in its clinical yet candid tones, "Breastfeeding" is the most powerful piece. "Lost / to the manifold / stations of milk, / the breast siphoned off // then filling", the poet tells of how "you get down on your knees / at the foot of the change-mat", to clean off the "yellow curd / of the baby's shit". "It was always like this", the poem declaims, "a long line of women / sitting and kneeling, / out of their skins / with love and exhaustion." When Benson crafts her poems out of blood and muscle, memory and music, they stay with you. The pared-back tercets of "Sheep" develop a haunting parallel, in which the creature is seen "bedded in mud and afterbirth, / her three dead lambs // knotted in a plastic bag". "I can't not watch", implores the speaker, before telling of her own hurt and anguish, "afraid to look down / for what I might see". It is a brave and determined poem, one that bites and stings as the best poems can, and sometimes must.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">"Love-Letter to Vincent", though, is the book's most sustained achievement. In these dramatic monologues Benson ventriloquises the prostitute-lover of the tortured Van Gogh, taking the titles of his canvases as a stepping-off point and framing device to paint portraits as intelligent and touching as they are visceral and grim. Though occasionally overblown – Benson has a tendency to reach for the intensifying adverb when a quieter, less cluttered phrasing would serve better – there is a good deal to admire: the smart riposte to masculine ignorance of female suffering that is "Still Life with Red Herrings"; the sun-lit sanctuary of "Yellow Room at Arles", where art becomes a means of preserving the past as a talisman against the future; love pitched against life's vicissitudes in "Self-portrait with a Bandaged Ear". "Here, whatever sorrow waits for us, is hope", ventures one poem, while another, written in the blaze of those famous sunflowers, declares: "Most of us are not this brave / our whole damn lives; / teach me to admit / a touch more light". <i>Bright Travellers</i> is a book of poems that balances its florid excesses with toughness, perspicacity and, above all, heart.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">first published in <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/23/bright-travellers-fiona-benson-review-poetry-collection" target="_blank"><i>The Guardian</i></a></span></span><br />
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Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-75415371994594643452020-12-21T12:07:00.003+00:002020-12-21T12:09:23.669+00:00The NS Poem: Mam Tor<p> A new poem of mine features in the <i>New Statesman</i> Christmas issue, alongside two short poems by Alison Brackenbury and a new short story by Lawrence Osborne.<br /></p><p> </p><p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvPZ-THinV6z86J29nhXKOcmoNqNCzvi-Nz1cT9Vx4KUNL8wHzWQk8ane9dXGZiBSNtUsymDbtJ9HVroy7gFkpWlpK_ncP5tdm__B-4WPFfEg4IKDBMeUKB7JM74txRYXX-Iu3TA/s725/BW%252C+The+NS+Poem+9-12-20.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="725" data-original-width="570" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvPZ-THinV6z86J29nhXKOcmoNqNCzvi-Nz1cT9Vx4KUNL8wHzWQk8ane9dXGZiBSNtUsymDbtJ9HVroy7gFkpWlpK_ncP5tdm__B-4WPFfEg4IKDBMeUKB7JM74txRYXX-Iu3TA/w504-h640/BW%252C+The+NS+Poem+9-12-20.jpg" width="504" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>Read it above, or on <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/poetry/2020/12/ns-poem-mam-tor">their website</a>.<br /></p>Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-77215835393604381452020-06-29T16:15:00.000+01:002020-06-29T16:15:19.697+01:00"As if, with belief, we might achieve anything": from doubters to believers<br />
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Prior to this season’s emphatic campaign, Liverpool last won a title when I was five years old. Like many, I’m still processing the complex emotions associated with season after season of hope, belief, despair, frustration, vindication and determination that now, finally, have lead to the prize that has so long eluded a club built on winning in the decades leading up to my birth. From the outside, football can be — like so many things — caricatured, misunderstood, and easily dismissed. But it remains a guiding passion for many precisely because its twists and turns, tragedies and euphorias, reflect the human dramas of our own lives. As Bill Shankly quipped: football is not a matter of life and death; it is much more important than that. No one right now will understand that more than the two Liverpool captains pictured here. <a href="https://www.benwilkinson.org/2015/01/for-me-he-is-liverpool-steven-gerrard.html" target="_blank">Steven Gerrard</a> is a Liverpool legend for so many reasons: his devotion to his boyhood club despite the lure of silverware at other clubs through the 2000s and 2010s is exemplary in an era often defined by big money transfers and a lack of allegiance. Through grit and leadership, he dragged various sides to improbable victories, none more so than the European Cup in 2005, a night in Istanbul that remains the greatest Champions League final in history. But when he left Liverpool, the Premier League title famously remained the major prize beyond his grasp. He passed the captain’s armband to Jordan Henderson, a player who joined the Reds in 2011 and who, despite his athleticism, work rate and dogged commitment, was not always given the credit due in the years that followed. How times have changed. Now Henderson has grown into a fiercely disciplined and formidable midfielder, calm and collected. Until his interview on the eve of Liverpool’s title clincher last Thursday, of course. The tears and raw emotion showed how much it meant to him, and his understanding, alongside the fans, Stevie G and all those who identify as Reds, that this is a moment of incredible relief as much as giddy joy. My poem ‘Steven Gerrard’, below, is taken from the collection <a href="https://www.benwilkinson.org/2010/01/way-more-than-luck-seren-books-2018.html" target="_blank"><i>Way More Than Luck</i> (Seren Books, 2018)</a>: “as if, with belief, we might achieve anything". YNWA 🔴<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJGiPqzid_0mxrdwFwANWWlJ0aICEApsv1VA4H-Arc0g3WKbxYeE0SxNf0GL4e9Qx14xuyLrNTH0LXw2YITTKGRj1I6QKbM6e83d7yus2keilwuIJQS-xvevJ9VPfznOz5DiM-gg/s1600/Ben+Wilkinson%252C+%2527Steven+Gerrard%2527.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="856" data-original-width="856" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJGiPqzid_0mxrdwFwANWWlJ0aICEApsv1VA4H-Arc0g3WKbxYeE0SxNf0GL4e9Qx14xuyLrNTH0LXw2YITTKGRj1I6QKbM6e83d7yus2keilwuIJQS-xvevJ9VPfznOz5DiM-gg/s640/Ben+Wilkinson%252C+%2527Steven+Gerrard%2527.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-66639789465454915362020-05-29T22:57:00.000+01:002020-05-29T22:57:18.733+01:00A Poet's Guide to the Lockdown<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I recently wrote an article for the Boston-based running outfitters <i>Tracksmith</i>:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">As a poet who also runs, I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking and
writing about the connections between athleticism and art; how both are
competitive but ultimately solitary, joyful yet defiant, demanding
resolve and routine, but also reflection. So how can poetry, or simply
writing creatively, help a runner right now?</span></blockquote>
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You can read it in full on <a href="https://journal.tracksmith.com/a-poets-guide-to-the-lockdown" target="_blank">their journal</a>.<br />
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Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-90843347823265217992019-07-19T21:58:00.001+01:002021-03-05T15:32:12.351+00:00"Simple tokens of death": Salt by David Harsent - review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8410rO3WP8PMKywz_LhyNFhWXXVyTxSHOITXCQpJwMWp53LNfdmkgL2Ifm1d5EQ1AzKAw5LLAV6ZpUQRg2v_mE1aQMoDb0qjOkEWop6VSo9z0sSb6hne0GgdSu_PktFthxpOF8A/s1600/David-Harsent.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="681" data-original-width="968" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8410rO3WP8PMKywz_LhyNFhWXXVyTxSHOITXCQpJwMWp53LNfdmkgL2Ifm1d5EQ1AzKAw5LLAV6ZpUQRg2v_mE1aQMoDb0qjOkEWop6VSo9z0sSb6hne0GgdSu_PktFthxpOF8A/s400/David-Harsent.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">If poems are like other people’s photographs in which we recognise ourselves, David Harsent’s writing catches us at our most vulnerable, vicious and unnervingly visceral. Reading through his back catalogue gives you the measure of his oeuvre: <i>A Violent Country, After Dark, Dreams of the Dead, Mr Punch, Night</i>. Stalking through an often nightmarish territory of half-apprehended horror and bleakness, the narrators of his poems survey human fear and frailty against the backdrop of an elemental, unforgiving world. Like a scene from a Hitchcockian movie, the worst always seems to be held just out of shot, all the more present for its apparent absence. Redemption and absolution are rarely on offer. Harsent may have a beautiful technical facility for language, its measure, weight and texture, but the ends to which it is put are as black as a darkroom negative.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Salt</i> is Harsent’s first collection since <i>Fire Songs</i>, winner of the 2014 TS Eliot prize. Its poems form a strange sequence of sorts, though their author is resistant to such definitions: “the poems belong to each other”, we are told in a prefatory note, “by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes”. Fragmentary, fleeting and impressionistic, the poems in Salt are rarely longer than five lines, issued from an anonymous speaker who gives next to nothing away, just as the poems so often explore the apparent next to nothing – a moment, seemingly insignificant, is mined for its sudden significance, as revelation, brief history or omen. Take the following piece, quoted here in full:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">He untangled the thing that had snagged in her hair, his hand</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">through a spectrum, spectral, blurring, a rail of fingers,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">to lift the thing in her hair. It would rain that day, cloud low</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">to the hills, morning as nightfall, her window open to that.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">While Salt seems to mark a stylistic departure for Harsent – he has surely written nothing so sparing and eerily suspended – this thematic terrain is all too familiar. Delving into harm, hurt and danger, relaying our little human urges, grievances and tragedies: loss and pain skirt the edges of almost every poem, with the precise, unblinking eye of their shadowy narrator. “She turned towards him, then she turned her back”; “She thought that loss might be measured best in poundage”; “The door was open and the room was dark”; “Hanging rain on a slow wind, open your mouth, give up”: these are just a handful of opening lines at which the book might fall open.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiowA1zLOhbjVnAhRv9YByfq55fMQ7hzqGv3Fnv999R43h7wqd8X2VAOYb6qPMgCHa5cWHHn5wK6FxkS3EDHR190n5WhQPwHiqO9T05y9rMMsrQYbazkJ871gEWXXhVsfdpVCppRw/s1600/David-Harsent-Salt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="338" data-original-width="260" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiowA1zLOhbjVnAhRv9YByfq55fMQ7hzqGv3Fnv999R43h7wqd8X2VAOYb6qPMgCHa5cWHHn5wK6FxkS3EDHR190n5WhQPwHiqO9T05y9rMMsrQYbazkJ871gEWXXhVsfdpVCppRw/s320/David-Harsent-Salt.jpg" width="246" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">On the one hand, Harsent’s gift for conjuring an entire narrative in brief, gestural utterance pierces through the surface gleam of our petty but all too present human world with startling ease. But on the other, the poems’ seeming refusal to morally engage with the darkness and depravity they evoke will strike some readers as cynical, perhaps even irresponsible. “Sanctum sanctorum, bad breath, smegma, spillage and swill. / Diary of the suicidal child. Broken glass, graffiti, blood. / Ungovernable anger of the convert. Dogshit, the bloom on rot, / the locked book broken and burned”. More than one poem revels in this kind of grim list-making, an inverted litany in which we are challenged to hold our nerve as unblenchingly as the speaker. Is the poem’s suggestion that in such moments we might find our collective true measure? It is hard to tell.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Salt</i> is a more probingly intelligent and involving read when it variously collapses the boundaries between what keeps us clothed, fed and comfortable, and that looming world of genuine pain, horror and destitution to which we could so easily fall. As someone living in the midst of apparent regeneration in a northern city, I see shiny and brash building work occur next to abject poverty and abandonment every day. Harsent’s depictions of homelessness are all the more affecting for being so shorn of sympathy and political anger. “Smell of the alley you might have to come to: piss and piss and piss. / Might have to live in, might have to make your home: / piss and piss and everything you own.” As “rough sleepers turn away”, the narrator matter-of-factly states how we “go by, go by”, a devastating observation as much as a scornful imperative.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Contemplating “the swipe of the butcher’s hand”, the speaker of one poem asks: “What is it you lack / that you should think like this?” The question echoes throughout the pages of Salt. Salt itself tends to surface here as purification, just as “we scatter salt / over slugs to have them writhe in cleanliness, / just as we lavish salt on the flogged man’s back”. But no amount can cure the sorry depths and ills to which these poems bear witness.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">However we choose to see and feel and think (or not), Harsent’s poems suggest the unmentionable “stain that runs under everything” is here to stay. Sink to dreams, as the poems’ speaker sometimes does, and the nightmares resurface; turn away, and those “simple tokens of death” are still there, looming. As these poems flicker and shift, haunted by “the spectre of yourself” and a persistent feeling of resigned regret, the sense is of time’s inexorable demands, and the vast unhuman forces arrayed against us. Salt is Harsent’s most precisely bleak book to date, and makes for haunting reading.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">review first published in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/12/salt-david-harsent-review" target="_blank"><i>The Guardian </i></a></span></span>Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-80064000581098367142019-07-10T00:39:00.001+01:002019-07-10T00:39:52.018+01:00Two new poems on Wild Court<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbSaHPFeLLMuSYL67kC98_lqEIFymfJzsozyYFXo4MCf9BCMwOt5_cmsJA4a1GwreSpiZBTdnnE4Jr7Si0QPnZKIbghKvpzfKCBt2oOsEITTjAOXLYfWynM4KbDWPT9EjbsBGIxw/s1600/Nadal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1040" data-original-width="736" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbSaHPFeLLMuSYL67kC98_lqEIFymfJzsozyYFXo4MCf9BCMwOt5_cmsJA4a1GwreSpiZBTdnnE4Jr7Si0QPnZKIbghKvpzfKCBt2oOsEITTjAOXLYfWynM4KbDWPT9EjbsBGIxw/s640/Nadal.jpg" width="451" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Two new poems feature on <i>Wild Court</i>: one after a painting by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, the other after spending a good deal of my life watching too much tennis.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://wildcourt.co.uk/new-work/2531/" target="_blank">You can read 'The Flower Carrier' and 'The Champion' here.</a></span>Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-40366353097296916462019-06-13T13:37:00.003+01:002020-05-29T22:59:08.573+01:00The Nightingale: TLS Poem of the Week<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">My poem 'The Nightingale', a loose version after Paul Verlaine (1894-1896), is the <i>Times Literary Supplement</i>'s Poem of the Week.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Wilkinson’s quatrains, too, have more room in them for emotional explanation than </span>Verlaine<span style="font-weight: 400;">’</span>s terse couplets, which bite off each image and snap shut on any recollection of tenderness.</span></i></blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/poem-week-nightingale/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Read the full introduction by Andrew McCulloch, and the poem, here.</span></a> <br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> </span>Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-61670446943651583722019-01-16T13:26:00.000+00:002019-01-16T13:26:02.482+00:00God speed<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Duncan Hamilton</span><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Glory-Life-Eric-Liddell/dp/0857522590/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1547644749&sr=8-1" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">FOR THE GLORY</span></a><br />
<i><span style="font-size: large;">The life of Eric Liddell: from Olympic champion to modern martyr</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">372pp. Doubleday. £20.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter Eric Liddell is a rare example of a consummate sportsperson who transcended sport. Duncan Hamilton’s portrait of one of Britain’s greatest track athletes serves as an important reminder of sport’s true value at a time when athletics is marred by scandal, big money and loss of perspective.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-size: large;">Liddell will be familiar to many through the film <i>Chariots of Fire </i>(1981). He is perhaps better known for the race he refused to run – the 100 metre Olympic heat in Paris, 1924, on the principled grounds that his Christian faith forbade him to compete on the Sabbath – than for the 400 metre final of those same Games, in which he defied the doubters to earn a spectacular win. Born to Scottish missionary parents in China, Liddell had no sporting pedigree. He did, however, study at an English boarding school that forged an indomitable character, before returning to Scotland, where the coach Tom McKerchar nurtured his sprinting talents at the University of Edinburgh. His running style, as Hamilton describes it, was one of “ungainly frenzy . . . rocking like an overloaded express train”. It didn’t take long for Liddell to start winning major races. At one meeting, he was clipped by a fellow athlete and fell in the early moments, only to stage a seemingly impossible comeback to breast the tape. Liddell had immense natural ability, but he also demonstrated the desire to push himself harder than any of his rivals, as though “sheer will was supplanting strength”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Olympic selection and glory awaited. But so, too, did Liddell’s entry into the world of preaching and mentoring as a Christian pastor. As Hamilton makes clear, anyone who met Liddell couldn’t fail to be struck by his quietly scrupulous and earnest character. McKerchar knew from an early stage that his pupil’s commitment to athletics was secondary to his commitment to the Church. After his Olympic win and university graduation, Liddell turned his back on competitive athletics in Europe, and, instead, took a modest teaching post in Tientsin, stating simply that “I believe God made me for China”.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-size: large;">What Hamilton succeeds in illustrating in <i>For the Glory</i> is the enriching relationship between sport and faith in Liddell’s life. He may have been forced to choose between the two in Paris, but throughout much of Liddell’s time, his running and his religious devotion went hand in hand. One of his favourite quotations came from training at Penn State University: “In the dust of defeat as well as in the laurels of victory there is a glory to be found if one has done his best”. For Liddell, as for most amateurs, sport was most of all about sportsmanship – fair play, honest hard work, a level playing field and a generosity of spirit.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-size: large;">Liddell’s own sporting heroes were not the most decorated, but those who had demonstrated exceptional resilience in the face of the odds. Much of For the Glory goes on to vividly document how the “Flying Parson” himself achieved this off the track in later life. <i>Chariots of Fire</i> captured the inherent decency of Liddell; Hamilton acknowledges the film’s necessary inaccuracies, part of its emotive portrayal of “the human condition in pursuit of its glories”. But the film’s action concludes before the unspeakable hardships that Liddell experienced while interned in a POW camp during the Japanese occupation. Through meticulous research and interviews with Liddell’s surviving fellow internees and family, Hamilton is able to show how Liddell saw his time in Weihsien camp, “a kind of cramped and squalid hell on earth”, as an extension of his original mission. Always willing to help others in whatever way he could, he became the camp’s moral compass and source of indefatigable hope, before his premature death caused by an undiagnosed brain tumour tragically denied him liberation and reunion with his wife and daughters.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-size: large;">While its descriptions of sporting greatness are worth savouring, <i>For the Glory</i> is most of all an inspiring portrait of a good man. Duncan Hamilton’s achievement is to disarm cynics in his measured and memorable account. He brings to life an unparalleled athlete, but more importantly, an inspirational man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">review first published in the </span><a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/god-speed/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;">TLS</span> </a></span>Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-81723909530740078542019-01-04T19:43:00.001+00:002020-05-29T14:27:49.257+01:00The Trouble with Poetry: Billy Collins's Aimless Love - review<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT9erIQ8kUSDg400bNempWXpcWT-j7TIlE0-_hJHn1U-1GIV6EVTSDS7yX7m-cFunKT5ORE-dzsVAYSdc8E94clZ_gcBbo38L0iImutCk3db4e4Vf0tqnRxAitO1D3k3ADPFBe7Q/s1600/Billy_Collins_2015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="309" data-original-width="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT9erIQ8kUSDg400bNempWXpcWT-j7TIlE0-_hJHn1U-1GIV6EVTSDS7yX7m-cFunKT5ORE-dzsVAYSdc8E94clZ_gcBbo38L0iImutCk3db4e4Vf0tqnRxAitO1D3k3ADPFBe7Q/s1600/Billy_Collins_2015.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size: large;">Dubbed the “most popular poet in America” by the <i>New York Times</i>, Billy Collins has won countless admirers for his chatty, witty, wholly dependable poetry. At pains to welcome the reader with avuncular charm, he writes lines that are more serious than they seem, though by how much, you’d be hard pressed to say. Wry and self-mocking, his favoured territory is the suburban everyday – a pop song stuck in your head; people-watching on public transport; a “perfect” spring day – though he is most at home striking a knowing and self-referential pose, “looking every inch the writer / right down to the little writer’s frown on my face”. ‘If This Were a Job I’d be Fired’, quips the title of one poem, its narrator swanning off having penned the most inconsequential of verses. Philip Larkin would have surely labelled him the “shit in the shuttered chateau”. But while some critics have called Collins a philistine, there is a productive quirkiness to his poems, finding surprise and profundity in unpicking objects, phrases and peculiar factoids. As a poet who is especially reader conscious, his writing is both unusual and praiseworthy for attempting to balance accessibility with intelligence, “picking up the phone / to imagine your unimaginable number”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Aimless Love</i> follows on from <i>Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes</i> (2000) as the second selection of Collins’ poems for a UK audience. It draws on his four collections published since then, alongside some 50 new poems. The poem ‘Aimless Love’ is as trademark a Collins poem as any, typifying what you may find to admire or dislike in his work, depending on your taste. It finds our poet wandering about, falling for just about every creature that meets his happy gaze, whether “a wren”, “a mouse / the cat had dropped under the dining room table”, or even a bar of “patient and soluble” soap. Some will gag at this kind of whimsical fancy, but it’s worth noting that Collins is rarely committed to a poem’s initial stance; the concept is simply the occasion to get things going. In this case, it turns out to be a reflection on love itself, imagining how it might exist “without recompense, without gifts, / or silence on the telephone”. “But my heart is always propped up / in a field on its tripod”, the speaker laments, “ready for the next arrow”. Though we calculate between its revivifying promise and its emotional cost, the poem suggests, most of us are victims to love’s unpredictable strangeness.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">What frustrates in Collins’s poetry is hardly this balancing act between the whimsical and the moving. Rather it is the kind of predictable laziness that creeps into many a gifted poet’s writing, not least after they have had their share of prizes, fellowships and, in Collins’s case, a publisher bidding war resulting in a six-figure advance. There are several gems collected in <i>Aimless Love</i> that everyone should read: ‘No Time’ is a bittersweet familial recollection reminiscent, in its brevity and precise imagery, of Tony Harrison; ‘Ballistics’ conjures a violent daydream that captures our petty enmities; ‘Writing in the Afterlife’ blurs the mythical crossing of the Styx with the “infernal process” of poetry itself, a purgatory where “not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens”. But for each of these inventive, crisp, clear-eyed poems, there are those that make for the poetic equivalent of art that matches the furniture: cosy, winsome, mild-mannered, and utterly forgettable. “If ever there was a spring day so perfect”, begins ‘Today’, before ambling about as if it were a sponsored ad for the great outdoors; ‘Cemetery Ride’ is schmaltzy and similarly meandering, as the poet writes of the ‘dazzling sun’, ‘blue sky’ and ‘sandy paths’: a ‘glorious April day’ to resurrect the dead, no less, and pop them in a bicycle’s ‘wire basket’. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Collins’s besetting sin, however, is surely his readiness to write about writing and the writing life. Whether it be an ‘Ode to a Desk Lamp’, ‘Lines Written in a Garden by a Cottage in Herefordshire’, or ‘Memorising “The Sun Rising” by John Donne’, “jotting down little things” in a “life of continual self-expression” comes far too easily, and it shows. A thin oeuvre is perhaps one of the few courtesies to the reader that Collins has overlooked; his prolific pen has produced some wonderful poems, but they risk getting lost amid the makeweight: “that winter I had nothing to do / but tend the kettle in my shuttered room” states ‘January in Paris’, and we know another bicycle ride is on the cards. “The trouble with poetry is / that it encourages the writing of more poetry”: this is a writer who knows what he’s up to, but in the end, the nudges and winks become tiresome. I find myself wishing for a little more “gravel in the craw”, as the poet once said – the acidity that surfaces in Collins’s poetry when he is on form. Take the “linkage between friendship and money / and the sweet primacy of one over the other” in the blunt reflections of ‘Lucky Bastards’, or the delicious lampoon of ‘Irish Poetry’, raiding its florid word-hoard to “whorl me into knowledge”. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Despite – or perhaps due to – his predictability, Billy Collins remains to Middle America what John Betjeman was to post-war England: popular, relatable, nostalgic, gently comic. His appeal on this side of the pond will likely grow with this latest collection.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">review first published in <i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/29/billy-collins-aimless-love-america-poet" target="_blank">The Guardian</a></i></span> </span>Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-13081990754871083232018-10-13T15:54:00.001+01:002018-10-13T17:17:23.837+01:00Way More Than Luck in The Poetry Review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Jade Cuttle gives her </span><span style="font-size: large;">verdict on <b><i>Way More Than Luck</i></b> in the latest issue of <i>The Poetry Review</i>, in a critical essay that takes in two other debuts: Richard Scott's <i>Soho</i> and Zaffar Kunial's <i>Us</i>. </span><i><span style="font-size: large;"></span></i></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZI6m00qmQF6E30Hwm86Sjk9yp-3b3Jh_6i0YJTNLCQzqKOMg81WWznq315v8FMcroabUmqYuijjrXieKHv1Cx2YXsCckqRQ3KePaiyjJhycrc8XKFPd2nq3iOooo99tSexTmWog/s1600/1083-Poetry-Review_Cover-RGB-300-w-shadow-546x800.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="546" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZI6m00qmQF6E30Hwm86Sjk9yp-3b3Jh_6i0YJTNLCQzqKOMg81WWznq315v8FMcroabUmqYuijjrXieKHv1Cx2YXsCckqRQ3KePaiyjJhycrc8XKFPd2nq3iOooo99tSexTmWog/s320/1083-Poetry-Review_Cover-RGB-300-w-shadow-546x800.jpg" width="218" /></a><i><span style="font-size: large;">It's clear that the love of the beautiful game extends to Wilkinson's poetics, for he embraces a variety of forms and modes of address. From formally dexterous sonnets and sestinas, to epistles and endearing confessionalism, this is a book that likes to keep the reader's on their toes. Something Wilkinson does well is navigate the dark abyss of clinical depression [...] from "going about / the tedium that strings our lives / together: paperchain people, / baskets lined under strip-lights" ('To David Foster Wallace'), to shivering over a beige Cornish pasty, "ticking over / before some godforsaken motorway service station" ('You Must Be Joking'), there is tenderness and touching honesty to be found in the darker moments he describes. For this reason the collection's title is apt, for its scope reaches way beyond the boundaries of the football pitch and the fabled buzz of excitement, which rather serves as a backdrop against which the poet can stand and inspect the the state of his own thumping heart. </span></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The rest of the piece is available <a href="https://poetrysociety.org.uk/publications/51025/" target="_blank">in the issue</a>, and <i>Way More Than Luck</i> is available from <a href="https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/way-more-luck" target="_blank">Seren Books</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-More-Than-Luck-Wilkinson/dp/1781724253/" target="_blank">online</a> and in all good bookshops.</span>Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-29154959840631079452018-07-08T09:00:00.000+01:002021-08-08T13:02:59.281+01:00The Three Ages of Muldoon: Paul Muldoon's One Thousand Things Worth Knowing - review<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Back when <i>The Poetry Review</i> used to include caricatures, <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/paul-muldoon" target="_blank">Paul Muldoon</a> emerged from its pages as a rattlesnake. Sporting his trademark Dylan-esque barnet and NHS specs, his trickster’s tie wriggled from a hieroglyph-inscribed basket. The image sticks because it fits. For the past forty years Muldoon has danced to his own tune, snake charmer to slippery, sly, fun but also menacing poems, borne of precocious technical mastery and increasingly reckless imaginative abandon. Boyish wonder meets a cynical intelligence. Playfulness and seriousness blur to one and the same. In his best poems – and by now, the longevity of his 70s and 80s lyric masterpieces ‘Wind and Tree’, ‘Mules’, ‘<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/249792" target="_blank">Why Brownlee Left</a>’, ‘Cuba’, ‘The Sightseers’ and ‘Quoof’ seem beyond sensible question – the rhyming panache and lexical grace lure you in. But so too do the brevity, the deceptive clarity, the eye-widening exactitude. Form and flawless execution jostle with a beady-eyed mischievousness and darkness, unpicking favoured discomfiting themes: death, disappearance, sex, divisions both personal and public, and the sense that our pursuit of meaning is, finally, a flawed and laughable quest, though not without reward.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>One Thousand Things Worth Knowing</i> is Muldoon’s twelfth collection. It arrives midway through the poet’s sixty-fourth year, a year following one that began with the passing of Seamus Heaney, champion to the wunderkind Muldoon, and from whom the once protégé now inherits the title of Ireland’s greatest living poet. In truth, though, followers of Muldoon the pied piper have been pushing for his promotion for a while. When Stephen Knight called him “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War”, echoing Tim Kendall’s similar pronouncements, he sounded a degree of cautious deference to the old master, but the claim was clear. Even the most astute, punctilious critics have reached for superlatives in praising this <i>rara avis</i>: “among discriminating readers of new poetry, no one’s stock is any higher” announced Michael Hofmann. The acclaim rings true. Muldoon really is as good as he seems.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Or rather, he was. Like one of his own hypnotic narrative poems, there are a couple of twists in the strange tale of Muldoon’s fecund career. Since the early Noughties and the publication of his hefty <i>Poems 1968–1998</i>, Muldoon’s work has usually been divided into two – what David Wheatley, with pious irreverence, labelled the ‘Muldoon Old Testament’ of <i>New Weather</i> (1973) to <i>Quoof</i> (1983), and the </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">‘</span>New Testament</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’</span> of <i>Meeting the British</i> (1987) to <i>Hay</i> (1998). <i>Quoof</i> was arguably the high point of the early style, a book of pellucid yet complex lyric poems that conveyed both the tragic farce and violent horror of sectarian conflict during the Northern Irish Troubles, in a style as comically parodic as it was coolly matter-of-fact. It marked out the postmodernist Muldoon from his more genteelly Modern predecessors, and gifted him passage to the US, specifically the ivory towers of Princeton. From there, the magic mushrooms first gathered in <i>Quoof</i> met the acid trip of ‘Something Else Again’, a mid-life mantra that exalted a poetics of wild connection-making, paving the way for the cultural stockpiling and myth-kitty raiding that finds its apogee in <i>Madoc: A Mystery</i> (1990) and <i>Hay</i>’s ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’. The former, a reimagining of Coleridge and Southey’s thwarted ideal of an egalitarian utopia, is relayed from the perspective of a prisoner’s failing vision (geddit?) in the futuristic city of Unitel, with sections often randomly captioned after philosophers. Are we to take such bustling extempore as an opportunity for rewarding exegesis, or is Muldoon just taking the mick, leaving us high and dry, as he has confessed before, “in some corner at a terrible party, where I’ve nipped out through the bathroom window”? Whatever your verdict, there’s no denying such poems have earned an almost entirely academic audience. Schooled readers might think they’re in on the joke, that the red herrings of allusions and etymological conjecture are worth the price of entry, but to me, <i>Madoc</i> still looks like an overlong, winking yet all-too-literal illustration of the misguided search for “a moral for our times”, one that a younger Muldoon roundly mocked in ‘The Frog’. “What if I put him to my head / and squeezed it out of him?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Which brings us to what I’d like to suggest as the third age of Muldoon: the apocrypha to the two Testaments, which seems to bear the stylistic signature but far too little of the earlier understated brilliance, enough to make it suspect. In this often manic hall of mirrors where language and trivia run about, cartoon-like, to a soundtrack of canned laughter and the odd sentimental tune, things seem mainly to go from bad to worse, albeit by the perilously high standards of the Muldoon glory days. Starting with <i>Horse Latitudes</i> (2006) – though sparing at least the magnificent, witty, heartfelt ‘Sillyhow Stride’, a paean to Muldoon’s mother and sister, and his musician friend Warren Zevon, all of who battled with cancer – we arrive via 2010’s <i>Maggot</i> at this new collection.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfakksueJYU86GVxGmnrxkdhPdj6WNigvDVouido4oFfJBZpWwsFAe7MytewdaIo2caH6d-zxx4UYeEiFNgGEnGG7CxiIigDPhMn8hhq-pYmZsLvqqChxycJR_tSkhKsBu3sShjA/s1600/One+Thousand+Things+Worth+Knowing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfakksueJYU86GVxGmnrxkdhPdj6WNigvDVouido4oFfJBZpWwsFAe7MytewdaIo2caH6d-zxx4UYeEiFNgGEnGG7CxiIigDPhMn8hhq-pYmZsLvqqChxycJR_tSkhKsBu3sShjA/s320/One+Thousand+Things+Worth+Knowing.jpg" width="205" /></a><span style="font-size: large;">I’ve taken this review as opportunity for a detailed appraisal of the Muldoon back catalogue for three reasons. First, because I’d wager that anyone not wholly conversant with his poetry’s trajectory would struggle to make head or tail of <i>One Thousand Things Worth Knowing</i>; second, because I honestly can’t find anything like those earlier poems to amaze or admire in this new stuff; and third, because Paul Muldoon so rarely gets to any kind of point in this book I thought I’d briefly grant myself similar license. The collection opens with ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’, a 10-page piece in memory of Seamus Heaney, originally commissioned by Durham Book Festival. Adopting the legend of the eponymous Northumbrian saint, whose famous piety and diligence afforded him a Doctor Doolittle-like rapport with God’s creatures, Muldoon invokes some loose metaphorical comparisons with the late great poet. So far, so good. Until, that is, Muldoon’s hyperactive mind, limitless love of arcana, and growing distaste for anything so memorable as argument or cohesion drown the whole thing out with, it seems, whatever popped into his head while writing:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The way to preserve a hide is not by working into it Irish moss or casein</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">but the very brains</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">of the very beast that was erstwhile so comfortable in its skin.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Irish monasticism may well derive from Egypt.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">We don’t discount the doings of the Desert Fox</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">any more than Lil Langtry’s shenanigans with Prince</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Louise of Battenberg. The 1920s vogue for sequins</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">began with Tutenkhamen. Five wise virgins</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">– and so on (and on and on). If there is substance here – and surely there must be in an elegy for a departed mentor – the poem bombards you with so much disparate intellectual litter, you can’t hope to sift through it all to find it. Some will say this lack of any point is the point, that confusion is king, but when it sets the scene for an entire book, and when Muldoon has been up to this sort of zaniness for at least a decade, it all becomes rather mundane and forgettable. “When I glance / from my hotel window”, our poet observes, “even I discern / a possibility / I might too readily have spurned”. Surely not. Still, there’s always the trivia. Did you know that Roman women “let // their hair grow right down to their waists / for twisting into skeins” for catapults? What connects ‘Barrage Balloons, Buck Alec, Bird Flu, and You’? “Arthritis is to psoriasis as Portugal is to …”? “Wait. Isn’t arthritis to psoriasis as Brazil is to Portugal?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">As Muldoon merrily loses his way in <i>One Thousand Things Worth Knowing</i>, in overblown tour de force after tour de force, letting his brilliant mind and unrivalled ability with rhyme, form and syntax too often overwhelm the hope of poetry occurring, there is the sense that the genuine alchemist of our times has become content to produce fool’s gold. But then you can hardly blame him. Only one or two poets in any generation will ever know what it’s like to be so gifted that technique, capacity and sheer panache come to implode on themselves. The epigraph to ‘The Firing Squad’ is an excerpt from a letter by Robert Frost, dated 1916, in which he confesses that “the poet in me died nearly ten years ago”. Telling, you might think. There are many timeless Muldoon poems worth knowing, inside out and off by heart. But, for me, none of the like are in this volume.</span><br />
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review by Ben Wilkinson<br />
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<a href="http://poetrysociety.org.uk/publications/1051/" target="_blank">first published in <i>The Poetry Review</i></a><br />
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<i> </i> Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-13560770753096903152018-06-08T16:25:00.000+01:002020-05-29T14:27:49.065+01:00"It's not what you think": Remembering John Ashbery (1927-2017)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">As our new century has grown ever more peculiar and unpredictable, there has been something strangely reassuring about the arrival of a new book of poems by that impish treasure of American letters, John Ashbery. Ashbery didn’t quite publish a book every year in his final quarter century, but the past score have seen some 13 surface, a rate of productivity that would have made Paul Verlaine blush. Which would be great if – as we expect of our most celebrated 'experimental' poets – the abstract wordsmith were breaking new ground. But if the past couple of decades of reading Ashbery confirmed one thing, it’s that the late great man settled into a style so impressively self-parodic he almost looked like one of his legion of poetic imitators. Just as global warming becomes ever more physically manifest and unignorable, the creeping sense that, towards the end of his life, Ashbery was knocking out complete nonsense and passing it off as poetry simply because he could, is a concern we can’t deny, however much we might want to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Yet, whatever your opinion of Ashbery’s work, it’s hard to argue with Stephen Burt’s claim that he will remain a hugely significant American poet, comparable in some ways to Old Possum himself. Like T. S. Eliot, to some he has proven a fecund source of near slavish inspiration; to just as many, a bête noire of obscurantism and wilful meaninglessness, as if the emperor weren’t even pretending to wear clothes. For the devout and detractors alike, the mythology has long been in place. It began with almost instant fame after W. H. Auden judged <i>Some Trees</i> (1956) winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, before the old master later confessed he hadn’t understood a word of the manuscript; led to the multi-award-winning ars poetica <i>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror</i> (1977), a brilliantly meandering narrative pointing up Ashbery’s obsession with creative self-reflexion, and abiding interest in both visual art and pop culture; and ends with the refinement and eventual plateauing of that style, into an apparent means of refracting the babble and chaos of our times. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If Ashbery can seem rather baldly mimetic – Robert Frost famously saw poetry as a momentary stay against confusion, rather than an opportunity to hold up a broken mirror to a broken world – to his credit, he has at least confessed to being as puzzled by his work as the rest of us. “I’m kind of sorry that I cause so much grief”, he once winked in an interview. Imagine that regret being tweeted, and you can almost see the hashtag #sorrynotsorry tacked onto the end. What really separates Ashbery from his repetitively ‘experimental’ peers and acolytes is his sense of humour. There has always been a cartoonish quality to his work, daring us to take him seriously at our peril, dangling poetry’s promises of truth and meaning in front of us, before snatching them away and dropping an Acme anvil in their wake. “Th- th- th- that’s all folks!” his poems often seem to manically announce, half-knowing we’ll be back for more of the brightly-coloured same. Perhaps some readers return to him because of the unlikely magnitude of his ongoing achievement. After all, it’s a feat to have written so much poetry that refuses memorability, meaning, conventional sense, even the pursuit of something resembling truth – in short, that refuses to be poetry as we know it. The stamina alone is commendable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Commotion of the Birds</i>, his final non-posthumous collection, arrives with a blurb that describes Ashbery as having written “more than twenty-six original books”, suggesting that even his publishers have lost count. It opens with the title poem, which is perhaps the book’s best, demonstrating as it does a playful, interrogative send-up of modernity and the laughable notion of progress. “We’re moving right along through the seventeenth century”, the narrator quips with typically deadpan humour: “The latter part is fine, much more modern / than the earlier part.” Then we get about as close as Ashbery comes to meditative thought:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Often it’s a question of seeming rather than being modern.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Seeming is almost as good as being, sometimes,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and occasionally just as good. Whether it can ever be better</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">is a question best left to philosophers </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and others of their ilk, who know things</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">in a way others cannot, even though the things</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">are often almost the same as the things we know.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">While this might seem unusual – it is one of only a few poems in the book that makes linear sense as a narrative argument – it is also fairly typical. Critics often like to compare Ashbery’s poetry to the visual art of the abstract expressionists, usually on account of his non-representational bent. But this misses a fairly major distinction, between the high seriousness of that art movement and Ashbery’s modus operandi of keeping seriousness in constant check, goofing around the minute you suspect a poem has even a whiff of conviction or sincerity. In gently accusing philosophers of a superior brand of knowledge, Ashbery isn’t even playing at being ‘some ordinary guy’, despite that collective first-person plural. How could he, when such poems are most keenly read by those who are – as the old phrase goes – too clever by half? It isn’t long before Commotion of the Birds settles into an all-too-familiar brand of Ashberyesque:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">His aunt was accepted.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">How cool is that?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">A new desire,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">plainer than I can doubt</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">lightens the cities of the plain.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">All is effulgent, sawtooth fronds,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">veiled undertones.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Then the question remains: What is it?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Leaving his shorts behind, he</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">hastened to rejoin the marchers up ahead –</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">a peanut pastime, pleats, tucks, and panels,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">unreinforced paint thinner.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So turn this off.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Poetry is often difficult because it wrenches language into new shapes; it wants to achieve the impossible, attempting to find words for the ineffable. Sometimes, in great poems, it manages to – breathlessly, brilliantly, unforgettably. But you can’t help but read many of Ashbery’s lines and despair at their wilful difficulty; admirers of his work will even cite it as a quality in and of itself, which does no-one any favours. I half fancy his select band of continually avid readers must either be academics who don’t much trouble to complicate literature with pleasure, or else those who genuinely relish the opportunity to tantalise their minds – and, dare I say it, hearts – with the poetic equivalent of an unsolvable Rubik’s cube. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The misconception of poetry as an infuriating puzzle – as if the author had deliberately withheld information to make life hard for us, rather than trying to approach a particular kind of clarity in writing about a thought, idea or emotion of exceptional complexity – is of course what leaves the genre so widely ignored among many intelligent readers. This isn’t quite Ashbery’s intention, but he makes you feel like it is, and then when you realise yet again the poem is another pomo joke at the expense of our naïve search for meaning or truth, you want to throw the damn thing in the corner, rather than applaud the umpteenth time he has flagged up the fundamental emptiness at the core of the consumer capitalist experience in precisely the same way. Take the opening two stanzas of ‘Cartoon Music’:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Why would she have said that,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">an undeserving egg, not to die for?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Rainbow pencils retracted.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Next, a group of officials withdrew support</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">of accident forgiveness, and I’m like </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Comrade Fuzzy, my gaydar’s</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">gone berserk the way it messes.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Or say the response is tepid,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">or buttered ramekins. Color me brain foolish,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">on eye-drops – the history of his hounding. There,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">it’s not creepy, but it is.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There are some typical Ashbery touches to admire here: the conversational provisionality; the deliciously authentic use of slang; that shoulder-shrugging ennui that gives his late work its elegiac note. But reading this poem is also typical of reading almost any poem in the book: you feel like you’re watching back-to-back cartoons in the early hours, alone, having smoked a considerable quantity of potent marijuana, i.e. kind of fun and zany at first, but very soon a senseless visual loop of slightly nightmarish yet remarkably dull qualities. “In these situations / I’m trying to figure out what is going on”, confesses the speaker in ‘Sitting at the Table’; so were we all, before we’d been led up the garden path one too many times. “Intelligence without understanding / is like constant frost”, ‘The Upright Piano’ tells us. Indeed. But hell would likely have frozen over before John Ashbery decided to offer his readers poems that provoke understanding, aside their obvious smarts. In the end, we must continue to read his poems like ice-skaters gliding across a strange and permanently frozen lake: wondering what it would have been to marvel at some depth or substance beneath, had it ever thawed.</span><br />
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review by Ben Wilkinson<br />
<br />Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-19323971494420298042018-01-21T18:50:00.000+00:002018-01-21T18:51:02.947+00:00Way More Than Luck: 27.2.18 - the launch<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-32437802485939519082017-12-16T20:16:00.002+00:002017-12-16T20:17:24.655+00:00Books of the Year 2017<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">If 2017 was a lean year for poetry, as someone has said, I can’t say I noticed. Daljit Nagra’s <i>The British Museum</i> (Faber) introduced a clear-eyed, politically incisive approach to the poet’s established facility for socio-cultural commentary, in poems as rangy and playful as ever. Among debuts, Kayo Chingonyi’s <i>Kumukanda </i>(Chatto) is every bit as good as I expected, from its unflinching negotiations with lingering racial divisions, to its playfully nostalgic hymns to mixtape assembly, as well as rap and hip-hop’s influence on the poet. Simon Armitage’s <i>The Unaccompanied</i> (Faber) also deserves a mention, negotiating our strange times through precise image-making, conversational wit and formal skill. For poetry pamphlets, business again is booming, with too many to list here (though The Poetry Business has the lion’s share; hence their recent Best Publisher win at the Michael Marks). But one that’s definitely worth seeking out is Al McClimens’ <i>Keats on the Moon</i> (Mews Press). McClimens’ is a casual, wry and chatty voice, uncompromising and guarded, but capable of strange tenderness. </span><br />
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Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-11671078206867831402017-08-02T09:00:00.000+01:002020-05-29T14:33:50.453+01:00Way More Than Luck (Seren Books, 2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">From the thumping heartbeat of the distance runner to the roar of football terraces across the decades, Ben Wilkinson’s debut confronts the struggles and passions that come to shape a life. Beginning with an interrogation of experiences of clinical depression and the redemptive power of art and running, the collection centres on a series of vivid character portraits, giving life to some of football's legends. By turns frank, comic, sinister and meditative – ‘the trouble with you, son, is that all your brains are in your head’ – these poems uncover the beautiful game’s magic and absurdity, hopes and disappointments, as striking metaphors for our everyday dramas. Elsewhere there are tender love poems, political satire and strange dream worlds, in an urgently lyrical book of poems that take many forms and modes of address: pantoum, sonnet, sestina; epistle, confession, dramatic monologue. All are united by a desire to speak with searching clarity about matters of the heart. <b><i>Way More Than Luck</i></b> is a book that shows how pain often comes to define our happiness; how we keep on in a world of chance, uncertainty and change.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>The beautiful game inspires some beautiful poems in Ben Wilkinson's terrific debut collection </i>Way More Than Luck<i>,
but there's far more than football to focus on here. For Jung,
Liverpool was the pool of life and this book is full of life too;
politically astute, well-made and formally experimental poems celebrate
even its sadness in fresh language, natural rhythms and subtle music.
Wilkinson is, of course, also a well-known critic and writers he admires
inform and are honoured in these pages, their various parts given unity
by carefully-developed themes and imagery all served up with relish and
humour. This makes for a very pleasurable as well as absorbing read
that we are way more than lucky to have in one volume.</i></span><span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">-- Ian Duhig</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>It's clear that the love of the beautiful game extends to Wilkinson's poetics, for he embraces a variety of forms and modes of address. From formally dexterous sonnets and sestinas, to epistles and endearing confessionalism, this is a book that likes to keep the reader's on their toes. Something Wilkinson does well is navigate the dark abyss of clinical depression [...] from "going about / the tedium that strings our lives / together: paperchain people, / baskets lined under strip-lights" ('To David Foster Wallace'), to shivering over a beige Cornish pasty, "ticking over / before some godforsaken motorway service station" ('You Must Be Joking'), there is tenderness and touching honesty to be found in the darker moments he describes. For this reason the collection's title is apt, for its scope reaches way beyond the boundaries of the football pitch and the fabled buzz of excitement, which rather serves as a backdrop against which the poet can stand and inspect the the state of his own thumping heart. </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">-- Jade Cuttle, <i>The Poetry Review</i> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Published by <a href="https://www.serenbooks.com/" target="_blank">Seren Books</a>, February 2018. <a href="https://www.benwilkinson.org/2010/05/poems.html" target="_blank">Click here</a> to read sample poems from the collection.</span><br />
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-More-Than-Luck-Wilkinson/dp/1781724253/" target="_blank"><img alt="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-More-Than-Luck-Wilkinson/dp/1781724253/" border="0" data-original-height="232" data-original-width="480" height="96" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqnSBhUvzBQ1FFZMxrRmjVeGtpw4PnwQcwmB_xQKHDQ4col6Jsug6kc8al6wZWiStOG12RAY1hU6Gg-UZCBiIfiBYRNDbch9bxh5nnOxYP-YhuEAELI5FPckGsUXo6_8cpSjDHHA/s200/amazon-logo_black_large.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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<br />Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-75193028376305101912017-06-01T15:45:00.000+01:002017-06-01T15:46:02.654+01:00"It must get easier over time though": Graft - a poem<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In my poem 'Graft', the opening line is just a bit of reported speech. Something I heard said a while ago, by someone who'd never run competitively before, and who figured - or maybe just hoped - that athletes must stick with the sport because it gets easier over time. The truth of course, as any dedicated runner knows, is that it never gets any easier. Just faster. From there, the poem picks up the idea and runs with it. Where do our assumptions about success come from? Our dismissals of achievement? Why bother with anything that comes easily? What is it to run, to compete, and why do we exhaust ourselves and define ourselves by this pursuit?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">first published in <i>METER</i> #02, published by Tracksmith. Poem forthcoming in <i>Way More Than Luck</i>, due from Seren Books in February 2018.</span><br />
<br />Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-52876612150040829812017-02-09T00:56:00.000+00:002017-02-09T00:57:47.622+00:00To David Foster Wallace<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.therialto.co.uk/pages/2017/02/08/to-david-foster-wallace/" target="_blank"><img alt="https://www.therialto.co.uk/pages/2017/02/08/to-david-foster-wallace/" border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtWauM33zHA43iUjAbVIZxkyWfBLrkh2xl1Ntdxzj7I5W1sRVx2ElMbZ0jAZbYA477-LkalgrdPfBBsdkI5KEe4Ci38fol962h3HjoYaOQJ1hXl7Pkr9K7gzzb_tXV08EmNGdsWQ/s640/this-is-water.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">My poem 'To David Foster Wallace', from the latest issue of <i>The Rialto</i>, is featured on the magazine's website. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Includes an incisive and attentive discussion of the poem's themes - especially the difficulty of writing about a writer of eclectic brilliance such as DFW - by Rishi Dastidar.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">You can read the poem, and the prose, <a href="https://www.therialto.co.uk/pages/2017/02/08/to-david-foster-wallace/" target="_blank">here</a>, or by clicking the image above. </span><br />
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Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-23027280686211715252017-01-10T16:30:00.000+00:002017-01-11T14:03:35.638+00:00Who will win the 2017 T S Eliot Prize?<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">My choice for the best book of poetry of 2016 would be Ian Duhig's <i>The Blind Roadmaker</i>. I said pretty much everything I wanted to about it in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/06/the-blind-road-maker-ian-duhig-review-poetry-collection" target="_blank">my <i>Guardian</i> review of it</a> earlier this year, printed below. But without very much encouragement, I could just as easily heap superlatives on it, so here we go -- it's funny, smart, generous, crafty and crafted, beautiful, wise, and the work of a poet who's not only mastered his trade, but possesses two rare qualities in complete abundance: humility and boundless curiosity. Duhig is the real deal, and deserves the accolade of the T S Eliot Prize more than any in my opinion; even in a year with a fair few worthy contenders. I'll be keeping my fingers firmly crossed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">As a dictionary plunderer who knows a lot about a lot of things, Ian Duhig’s eclectic enthusiasms and often laugh-out-loud wit make him poetry’s answer to Stephen Fry. Popular but complex, comic yet serious, no one could accuse his verse of being dull or predictable. “My experience of poetic ideas is that they don’t stand there waiting calmly until you’re ready to receive them,” Duhig once said, “you have to rush out and welcome them immediately.”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The presiding spirit of <i>The Blind Road-Maker</i>, his seventh book of poems, arrives in “The Ballad of Blind Jack Metcalf”, a hymn to the 18th-century Yorkshire civil engineer, blind from childhood, who learned to read by “feeling headstone faces”. Metcalf ends up figuring as a kind of alternative self to Duhig, having built the Leeds road on which the poet now lives. He is a man born in darkness who operates with remarkable determination and conviction, while the poet, in Duhig’s own words, “stumbles about in the light”, trying to make sense of an often chaotic world in apparently plain sight. Stood, as one poem has it, “In His Shadow”, Duhig demonstrates a refreshing and self-effacing respect for this almost folkloric figure: “Testing stones to bed his roads’ black tongues, / I heard how Jack rolled them around his mouth / ‘like new words’. But I wouldn’t know about that.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This being Duhig, though, <i>The Blind Road-Maker</i> isn’t solely a series of character portraits of “Blind Jack”, nor even the example of his eventful life. The original working title for the collection was Ashtrayland, a term lifted from Bernard Hare’s study Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, a tale of all-too-real anarchy and sink-estate poverty among the dispossessed youth of northern England. “Ashtrayland” is the eponymous Leeds gang’s name for England, a place whose history and culture they feel distanced and excluded from. As the “The Blue Queen of Ashtrayland” has it, “What the fuck’s the Holy Grail?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Resolving to commemorate and mythologise Britain’s underclass on their own terms, Duhig enables the excluded to claim a home in the language. They may not have a round table, settling instead to “hand round / White Lightning in two-litre flasks”, but through the poet’s words the “Queen” and “her knights” become the modern stuff of Arthurian legend: “Her hair glows, burnished as the gold / that trims her Nike cardigan; / Ionian white her Fila trainers”. Merging poetic balladry with unflinching realism, these lines tread expertly between bleak comedy and angry social commentary. Given that he spent 15 years working in homeless shelters and drug-addiction centres before becoming a full-time writer, it is no surprise that Duhig’s unpatronising sympathy and humanity shines through his verse. At the end of the disturbing “Ashtrayville”, the poem has the reader receive a “silent watch … for your long service” to an unnamed, derelict city, at which “you weep with pride. Then you just weep.” The compassionate political and social conscience that Duhig displays here is vital, an attitude our current leaders would do well to embrace.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If the poet’s interest in Metcalf and the characters of “Ashtrayland” is partly about singing songs of the forgotten and voiceless, much else in <i>The Blind Road-Maker</i> focuses on poetry as a fundamentally collaborative process, operating within the shared and ideally egalitarian medium of language. “The Plagiarist’s Song” unpacks the complicated layers of meaning in that term: “Plagiarus also means ‘seducer’”, we are told, before the poem points to “lip service as unpaid // as Hell or Dante’s debt to Ibn ‘Arabī”, only one example of the appropriation, incorporation, retelling and outright theft that not only defines, but to a large extent makes, our great global literary tradition. Where do we draw the line? As the poet writes of the folk singer Bert Lloyd, who deceptively invented the sources for his “traditional” songs, “Which line was written by Bert Lloyd / the song won’t care, of course, / … Ghost-writing for his unborn ghosts / perfected Bert’s own style”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In our self-centred age of attributed authorship and intellectual copyright, Duhig upsets the applecart by harking back to our folkloric oral traditions, and many a cherished modern example of literary cribbing and borrowing. His own such behaviour is a masterclass in modern parody and satire. The longest poem here, “Canto”, is a rollicking homage to Byron’s <i>Don Juan</i> that is as bawdy and provocative as the Romantic poet could hope, its highlight an unlikely fistfight between the poets Geoffrey Hill and JH Prynne. “The outcome of their contest’s undecided still, / being fought in an impenetrable fog”, scoffs our narrator, “is Prynne why now your average college nerdsworth / shuns Byron to study bloody Wordsworth?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Elsewhere in the collection, Duhig himself lays himself open to being accused of such abstruse meanderings through dense cultural, historical and geographical references. But it is his sense of humour, self-awareness and democratising attitude that steer his poetry clear of pretension. As he writes of a poetry workshop he once ran with old soldiers at Age Concern, “They’d lost that battle with the word, / believing too much better left unsaid”. Encouraging them to let it out “into words they feared betrayed it”, Duhig ends on a stark and humble note: “And I learned why they were right”. <i>The Blind Road-Maker</i> is a generous, smart and big-hearted book of poems, from a writer who truly values the whole of life as it is variously lived.</span><br />
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review by Ben Wilkinson<br />
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<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/06/the-blind-road-maker-ian-duhig-review-poetry-collection" target="_blank">first published in <i>The Guardian</i></a><br />
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Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-18937391888805284162016-09-27T09:00:00.000+01:002016-09-27T13:51:32.783+01:00 The Catch<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For you, the catch wasn't something caught:</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">not word or contender, attention or fire.</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Not the almost-missed train, or the sort</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">of wave surfers might wait an entire</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">lifetime for. Not the promise that leaves</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">the old man adrift for days, his boat</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">creaking, miles offshore. Nor what cleaves</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">the heart in two, that left your throat</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">parched and mute for taking pill</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">after yellow-green pill, the black-blue</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">taste the price you paid to kill</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">the two-parts sadness to one-part anger.</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">No. The catch was what you could never</span><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">let go. It's what you carried, and still do.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">poem by Ben Wilkinson </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> from <a href="http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/shop/860/for-real-ben-wilkinson">For Real</a> (Smith|Doorstop Books, 2014)</span></blockquote>
<br />Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-25583742214410205612016-05-20T14:08:00.000+01:002020-05-29T14:27:49.147+01:00"Squaring the Circle": Don Paterson's 40 Sonnets<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Don Paterson, illustration by Joe Ciardiello</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In <i>101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney</i> (1999), Don Paterson set about showcasing the sonnet’s rich history. But his anthology’s enduring popularity has had as much to do with its clever, entertaining and controversial introduction. Even at this early stage in his career as poet and commentator, Paterson is found arguing for the sonnet as “one of the greatest achievements of human ingenuity”, a “box for . . . dreams” which “represents one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take”. By turns convincing and indulgent, his thesis is grounded in the unifying and sense-making powers of rhyme and metre; the sonnet’s loose adherence to the proportions of the golden section; and his deep admiration for what the best sonneteers can do with this little “squared circle”, a resistant medium which allows poets to “trick a logic from the shadows” of unconscious thought. Much like his recent layman’s guide <i>Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets</i> (reviewed in the <i>TLS</i>, January 14, 2011), it makes for compelling reading, not least since Paterson’s fascination is also that of the practitioner. From <i>Nil Nil</i> (1993) with its studies in desolation and aftermath, to the serious play with personae in <i>God’s Gift to Women</i> (1997) and the existential hymns for the poet’s twin sons in <i>Landing Light</i> (2003), the sonnet abounds throughout Paterson’s oeuvre.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So a new collection comprised entirely of fourteen-liners comes as little surprise. Moreover, after the austere undertaking of Paterson’s last volume, <i>Rain</i> (2009), a bleak book that ingeniously examined the project of elegy, but also that of language and humanity, the poet must have been on the lookout for a more various way back into writing verse. And in <i>40 Sonnets</i>, Paterson certainly illustrates the form’s versatility. Delivering exactly what it promises, it is an especially slight collection, even from an author known for championing brevity. But where many of his contemporaries exhibit a worrying trend towards publishing books that far surpass 40 Sonnets in length, Paterson’s icy intelligence, imagination and painstaking craft make for disproportionately substantial reading:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I must quit sleeping in the afternoon.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I do it for my heart, but all too soon</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">my heart has called it off. It does not love me.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">If it downed tools, there’d soon be nothing of me.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Its hammer-beat says <i>you are</i>, not <i>I am</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">It prints me off here like a telegram.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">What do <i>I </i>say? How can the lonely word</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">know who has sent it out, or who has heard?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">From the everyday setting of an afternoon nap to intimations of mortality, “Here” offers a meditation on identity as linguistic gesture. Paterson delivers all this in crisp and exact language, finding heart-thumping end rhymes that feel anything but forced. It is this command of syntax combined with lucid philosophical thinking that has come to define Paterson’s poetry. A similar spirit of questing and questioning makes for some of the best sonnets in this book. “Souls” takes the numinous aspects of our selves and expresses them as an aberration from the physical, a world where “space is stone, and time a breackneck terror”; in “The Air”, the element we take for granted becomes a mysterious abstraction, “an empty datastream” that is “nowhere” and “never”, a powerful reminder that we are but a brief chapter in the universe’s narrative. Poems such as these have raised Paterson’s stature to that of one of the best English-language poets currently writing. If they sometimes exhibit a slight over-earnestness, and wear their author’s European influences too heavily for certain tastes (both Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke are lingering presences), they also demonstrate the rare value of a poetry of assertion and argument – poetry as a mode of knowledge, no less.</span><br />
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/40-Sonnets-Don-Paterson/dp/0571310893" target="_blank"><img alt="https://www.amazon.co.uk/40-Sonnets-Don-Paterson/dp/0571310893" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi66wnnAhqFTBvJLCmpC9bWGA5gfr59d0zG8yzhOjHs5W1cwtA4Shcn1LeHl0e1sUioNMV8dzE70MYCmswj_e5p8Z5Z-Q8-dUHCsDNkvoZ_303fhOWM4iD8SedtHd4Jm4h_6cLNzQ/s320/40+Sonnets.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the end, though, it is the variety and impressive consistency of 40 Sonnets that make it such a bravura performance. “The Roundabout” is perhaps the most beautiful of Paterson’s poems to his twin sons; “Funeral Prayer” is a warm, frank yet simple elegy that one can imagine being read at many an actual service. I defy anyone to read “Mercies”, the tale of having a pet put down, without a catch in the throat. There is also the welcome return of Paterson’s cutting sense of humour, which has been in rather short supply in recent times. “Requests” and “To Dundee City Council” are particular gems: both damning indictments of the artless and inept, the former addressed to a blathering poet on stage, the latter to a council presiding over a local library where “poor folks go to die / or download porno on the free wifi”. There are misfires too: “A Powercut” is the kind of workshopped list-poem that Paterson has, in the past, quite rightly dismissed; and exactly how “The Version” – a long-winded prose piece that meanders through its Borgesian conceit of artistic paranoia and forgery – constitutes a sonnet, is beyond this correspondent’s ken. Nevertheless, <i>40 Sonnets</i> remains an appealingly slender book of remarkable emotional, intellectual and tonal range, from a writer who shows that poetic form is precisely what you make of it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Ben Wilkinson is currently writing a reader's guide to the poetry of Don Paterson, due to appear in 2017. </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/" target="_blank">first published in <i>The Times Literary Supplement</i></a><br />
Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-26433893170128276982016-02-10T11:31:00.000+00:002020-05-29T14:27:49.202+01:00"Elegantly graceful, or decorative and over-designed": Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjliO7wFuegTYGslcsF0fSDqjwyR68ihRcZ6zrjC7GxThvX-Eqst-o9A1y92DXqbx8In4Vb2H8QefjmvaRQkETDbHSO9p-frD7AcGee6yDCTL5RfMv9jQ16nj3Ix6t_oPkc02t61g/s1600/sarah+howe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjliO7wFuegTYGslcsF0fSDqjwyR68ihRcZ6zrjC7GxThvX-Eqst-o9A1y92DXqbx8In4Vb2H8QefjmvaRQkETDbHSO9p-frD7AcGee6yDCTL5RfMv9jQ16nj3Ix6t_oPkc02t61g/s320/sarah+howe.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Poetry, as <a href="http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/r-s-thomas" target="_blank">RS Thomas</a> once claimed, is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart. The poet’s task is to find the effective middle ground; to perform that lyric trick whereby thought and emotion seem to effortlessly combine. Seek to provoke only feeling, and crude sentimentality ensues; indulge in the cerebral, and the poem might be interesting enough, but it will remain lifeless – a kind of versified intelligence. In <i>Loop of Jade</i>, Sarah Howe’s debut collection, winner this week of this year’s TS Eliot prize, the poet attempts to merge personal accounts of her dual Anglo-Chinese heritage with her scholar’s penchant for the intellectually abstruse. The result is a book of poems that are as playfully and frustratingly recondite as they are memorable and unusually affecting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“The twin lids / of the black lacquer box / open away”, writes Howe in “Mother’s Jewellery Box”: “a moonlit lake / ghostly lotus leaves / unfurl in tiers // silver chains / careful o’s and a’s / in copperplate”. This might seem an unassuming vignette with which to open a collection, but it sets the tone. An evocative box of trinkets is a good metaphor for Howe’s poetry, possessing as it does a well-wrought yet elaborate quality. Depending on a reader’s taste, these poems will seem either elegantly graceful, or decorative and over-designed. “Night in Arizona” is a prime example of the best and worst of this style. On the one hand, Howe’s musical gift for conjuring insistent rhythms evokes the claustrophobic heat of a motel room in the desert: kicking the bed sheet to the floor, the sound is “like the spilling of sand / from shovel and the night air blurs / for a second with its footfall”. But on the other, the preference for elevated diction in what is ultimately an account of mildly irritating sleeplessness comes to mismatch language and event: “the razory arms of a juniper rattling crazily / at the edge of that endless reddening haze”. In these more conventional lyric sections, Howe is at her best when she reins in linguistic excess. “Earthward” is a subtle meditation on watching “the shadowplay / of trees / against the blinds”, disturbing replicas that shake “with a gusting stutter / more restless still / for being not / the thing itself”. The effect is haunting and immediate, precisely because of the sparse diction employed.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Thankfully, <i>Loop of Jade</i> is itself restless. This is true of the poet’s journeys through the China of her youth and the clash of differing cultures apparent in her adult life, but also of its formal repertoire. The jewellery box opens on to various worlds – some real; some mythical; some deftly blurring the two – and Howe switches between shorter lyrics and longer narrative forms, keeping readers on their toes. In “(c) Tame”, one of a scattered sequence that takes its titles from a fictional taxonomy of animals, the historical Chinese custom of smothering an unwanted newborn girl in ashes is assimilated into a mythical tale of a daughter transformed into a soaring bird. This kind of symbolic metamorphosis strongly recalls another recent Chatto debutant, <a href="http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/liz-berry" target="_blank">Liz Berry</a>, the eerie exactitude of the poem’s narration, combined with its magic realist wavering between the brutal and the fantastical, makes for an imaginative dissection of masculine violence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixjl7tM9rkqW8k00UUAHtX-Pqk7zomVxDZyupsDUjco3m0fvVKkdcdjumTI_qcDjuG3zAiD7urSxFEedBwvSzdNRTfzi3HCtysqpHFPIP_dcS3nvNMw-61HQKmnG668pyKUZ2zMA/s1600/loop-of-jade.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixjl7tM9rkqW8k00UUAHtX-Pqk7zomVxDZyupsDUjco3m0fvVKkdcdjumTI_qcDjuG3zAiD7urSxFEedBwvSzdNRTfzi3HCtysqpHFPIP_dcS3nvNMw-61HQKmnG668pyKUZ2zMA/s320/loop-of-jade.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It is a shame, then, that too often Howe opts for an unconvincingly heightened and florid register – in “Pythagoras’s Curtain”, “cicadas … cadenza the acousmatic dusk”; “A Painting” lays it on thick with “the oyster-crust … of an unscraped palette – chewy rainbows, blistered jewels” – instead of working harder to write with the difficult clarity and complex simplicity of which she is capable. The most memorable writing in <i>Loop of Jade</i> tends to stem from this latter approach, and nowhere more so than in the book’s title poem. The Hong Kong of Howe’s early years is a fecund territory for a poet seeking to reconcile a quintessentially English life with a starkly contrasting eastern heritage; even more so for one fascinated by the linguistic and cultural collisions and confusions that define our increasingly global community. Though far from the most polished writing on offer here, “Loop of Jade” traces the poet’s background and China’s recent history through an unflinching, moving and minutely observed portrait of her mother, who tells vivid stories of her childhood with “a pause-pocked, melodic, strangely dated hesitancy”. In between revivifying these memories – of a latrine that sprouted “the glistening bodies of cockroaches, like obscene sucked sweets”, or being made to wash her hair with “a green detergent meant for scouring floors” – the poem relays the tragic Chinese legend of star-crossed lovers turned into butterflies in their premature deaths.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Weaving between the frank prose of memoir and a ballad-like lyric mode, Howe creates a nuanced metaphor for release – from tensions between the opposing worlds that the poet herself yearns for, turning to the transformative promise of poetry in reconciling the irreconcilable. Her fondness for lexicographical conjecture can feel trivial and slight. But whatever the subject, it is the poet’s gift for simile and metaphor-making that lends <i>Loop of Jade</i> its transformative scope, able to make a school memory of chanting the names of Hong Kong’s islands “strange again, like savouring / those New Year candies – small translucent moons / waning on the tongue”.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/12/loop-of-jade-sarah-howe-poetry-winner-ts-eliot-prize" target="_blank">first published in <i>The Guardian</i>, Saturday 16 January 2016</a><br />
<br />Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-7658679993141713652015-11-17T20:35:00.000+00:002015-11-17T20:35:28.986+00:00The Perils of being a Poetry Critic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Burdensome artistically, exhausting over time, damaging to one’s reputation, the source of rebuffs both private and professional … poetry reviewing is an enterprise only a few people do credibly or well”. So Mary Kinzie declared in a letter to <i>Poetry</i> magazine, around the time I stumbled onto this strange path of poetry reviewing, nearly a decade ago. It’s a nifty quotation, and one I’ve gone back to over the years. The hours are long, the rewards are poor, and your typical response is the indistinguishable silence of the indifferent, agreed and aggrieved. That, and the occasional feeling – after a ‘mixed’ or ‘negative’ review appears in print – that somewhere out there, your name is being scribbled in a black book. If you’re really lucky, the poet in question – or their partner, or colleagues, or friends – may even take to social media with brimming ire. (Poets are ‘the irritable race’, as Alice Fulton once quipped.) Why bother? Why on earth did I start penning these things?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Because I’d just begun to take my own poetry seriously, and thought of reviewing as an overlapping endeavour. A way of stretching and questioning my reading habits, honing a sense of what I thought poetry was capable of, how and why poets succeeded or failed in their poems, and what I wanted for my own. Because, during my final year as an undergrad, immersing myself in new poetry instead of studying the things I should have been, I came across some of the most witty, smart, engaged and engaging prose I’d read, in the form of electric, genuinely discerning pieces by the likes of Ian Hamilton, Michael Hofmann, Ian Sansom – reviews as memorable as a good poem. Because I studied literature and philosophy at university, mixing a propensity to debate and argue with a desire to do so in crafted, perceptive, entertaining, even downright infuriating writing. No doubt, too, because in a fit of youthful hubris, I fancied myself as one of Kinzie’s ‘few people’. With a love of language, an analytical mind, and an (ahem) argumentative bent, I might be halfway decent at the job. (How little I knew. Truth is, reviewing is an art form in and of itself. As with writing poems, getting any good is a lifetime’s work.) And because, increasingly and ever more importantly, I believe in the necessity, as Douglas Dunn puts it, of “an honest, descriptive, detailed, clarifying criticism”. It keeps poetry healthy, and it’s poetry’s weedkiller. “No good growth without good gardeners”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the end, though, the real peril of being a dedicated poetry reviewer isn’t occasionally upsetting folk – that happens to anyone who lives an honest life – or unwittingly shutting doors on yourself. It isn’t publically broadcasting your opinions in a way that might make you wince, years down the line. It isn’t even, as Michael Hofmann once said, the knowledge that “a lot of the articulacy and connections and the nerves that might have gone on poems, have gone on these pieces”, though that can be a sorry thought. The real peril is more of a threat: that you might graft to become as astute a critic as possible, and the worst warnings still turn out to be true: that the critical culture is forever losing ground to a fast-food one, and that cash prizes, administered by a process marred with conflicts of interest, are the endgame of literary reception. But then, even as I entertain these thoughts, I console myself: through whatever affliction or vocational derangement, it was me who fell into poetry reviewing, not the other way round. The poet in me has no choice but to write poems; so too, the critic and his criticism. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Or so I tell myself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://newwalkmagazine.com/" target="_blank">first published in <i>New Walk</i> magazine, issue #10, Spring/Summer 2015 </a></span>Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30960164.post-16999132601650284602015-11-03T14:06:00.000+00:002015-11-03T14:06:57.211+00:00"Hymns to intimacy": Andrew McMillan's Physical - review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">‘What is masculinity if not taking the weight / of a boy and straining it from oneself?” In “Strongman”, Andrew McMillan takes his young nephew’s playful request to “benchpress him” like “his mother’s new lover can” as an imaginative springboard to some urgent personal and social concerns. It is typical of the poems in <i>Physical</i>. Adept at finding the surreal in the everyday, turning an ear to the lilt of conversation alongside serious (but rarely solipsistic) reflection, McMillan’s verse worries away at what it is to be human, to feel through both the flesh and our emotions, to lose and to love, but most of all, what it means to be a man. In his delicate, frank and piercing interrogations of maleness, this is a poet who looks to assess the state of modern masculinity. He does so in ways that few others currently writing are either willing or able to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“The men are weeping in the gym / using the hand dryer to cover their sobs”, begins one grimly comic dissection of male anger and anxiety: “swearing that they feel / nothing when the muscle tears itself / from itself”. Sorry scenes of guys bulking themselves up with bicep curls and protein shakes, “swearing” under their breath, are related with an insider’s perspective; the poem manages to steer clear of sanctimony even as it gently mocks, speculating at the compensatory nature of such actions. Similarly, the frustrated imagination of an unhappily married man is powerfully envisaged in “Things Men Take”, though here the tone comes closer to judgment as it seeks to expose and provoke, wondering at “the man who takes the image / of the blond haired girl in the lowcut top”. The effect is immersive, and the poem makes for uncomfortable reading.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7GNCN6lueRDZGmVw2k__8qFPJUqQOLLDr_t1XTjr61QwymyIzvmSdd8ukpT2gBRDBKf3tTKubIoDOWwcNZ-kLkTgKMDQ2X3uGxG0hWoYSkGr4xDwjM5U8HbXTmNScaT8p2ubfnQ/s1600/mcmillan%252C+physical.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7GNCN6lueRDZGmVw2k__8qFPJUqQOLLDr_t1XTjr61QwymyIzvmSdd8ukpT2gBRDBKf3tTKubIoDOWwcNZ-kLkTgKMDQ2X3uGxG0hWoYSkGr4xDwjM5U8HbXTmNScaT8p2ubfnQ/s400/mcmillan%252C+physical.jpg" width="265" /></a><span style="font-size: large;">Alongside these portraits of a heterosexual, damaged masculinity as witnessed, <i>Physical</i> also explores what it is to be a gay man. Some of these poems are couched in symbolism – or rather, unpick the euphemistic manner in which the homoerotic has been historically conveyed. “Jacob with the Angel” relays the biblical tale of the Israelite’s evening wrestle with an unknown aggressor, conventionally viewed as an allegorical contest between the flesh and the spirit. While preserving this interpretation, McMillan also opts to see it literally: “it just happens”, the poem says, with justified insouciance and a kind of take-it-or-leave-it, get-over-it attitude: “the way the weather / or the stock market happens / tangling in the unpierced flesh of one another / grappling with the shifting question of each other’s bodies”. In reimagining an iconic religious scene as a chance sexual encounter between gay lovers, the poem is something of a manifesto, declaring a commitment to truths both figurative and literal, to depictions of the vulnerably carnal, and to preserving experience and making meaning through verse. As the narrator concludes of Jacob’s request for ink and paper: “he says writing something down / keeps it alive”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In an age where poetic voice is often valorised above all else, it is worth praising the emotional force and cerebrally transformative capacities of a poet’s writing. Alongside the effortless scrutiny of the masculine, the way in which McMillan not only writes about the body, but actually writes the body itself, should be celebrated: I can’t think of any other poet who could make a poem about a trip to the urinals into a serio-comic hymn to intimacy that actually works, let alone close it with a confessional scene of sensual immediacy that moves and shocks. But since McMillan’s success with his imaginative materials seems particularly predicated on his poetic voice, it is worth noting that his unusual blend of influences – Mark Doty, John Riley and <a href="http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/geoff-hattersley" target="_blank">Geoff Hattersley</a> – makes <i>Physical</i> one of the most distinctively voiced debuts since <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/07/paper-aeroplane-selected-poems-1989-2014-simon-armitage-review" target="_blank">Simon Armitage’s <i>Zoom!</i> in 1989</a>. Where many male poets have an uneasy relationship with their poetic forebears, attempting to best them in a kind of literary one-upmanship, McMillan falls asleep with his hero Thom Gunn on his bed, “night after night / open at the spine”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The long poem at the centre of this collection, “Protest of the Physical”, is a <i>tour de force</i> in the true sense. Attempting to combine social observation with acknowledgement of various artistic debts, it is a jump-cutting song of love and hate to a post-industrial northern town, where the “lame arm of the crane circling / unstocked shelves of half built car park” is a metaphor for how “the day’s spent itself already”. But interwoven throughout is also a recurrent personal desire for escape: “I left you because man made fire / then carried / it across the plain”. Though the poem is similarly sprawling and sometimes overly scattergun, a contrast with Ginsberg’s “Howl” illustrates how McMillan yields a quieter music, for all his blend of vivid <i>Bildungsroman</i> and communal pulse-taking. In its ambition, however, it warrants the comparison.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Elsewhere there are poems that show McMillan’s extended gift for the comic, as in the brilliantly titled “The Fact We Almost Killed a Badger Is Incidental”. Conversely, “I.M.”, in which a bereaved electrician pulls out switch boxes that suddenly look like “intricate rooms in a doll’s house”, is as haunting as it is compassionate. Minutely observed, bold yet understated, moving and often profound in the same breath, <i>Physical</i> is a book everyone should read.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/05/physical-andrew-mcmillan-review-poetry" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;">first published in <i>The Guardian</i>, Saturday 5 September 2015</span></a></span>Ben Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11077824416777371117noreply@blogger.com