Volatile Rune

Interview with Fiona Sampson

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:07:00 +0000

My interview with award winning poet and editor of Poetry Review, Fiona Sampson, can be found on the Write out Loud website here

Time to eat fat....

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:42:00 +0000

February

By Margaret Atwood

Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,

a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.

If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am

He’ll think of something. He settles

on my chest, breathing his breath

of burped-up meat and musty sofas,

purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,

not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,

declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,

which are what will finish us off

in the long run. Some cat owners around here

should snip a few testicles. If we wise

hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,

or eat our young, like sharks.

But it’s love that does us in. Over and over

again, He shoots, he scores! and famine

crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing

eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits

thirty below, and pollution pours

out of our chimneys to keep us warm.

February, month of despair,

with a skewered heart in the centre.

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries

with a splash of vinegar.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining

and your small pink bumhole.

Off my face! You’re the life principle,

more or less, so get going

on a little optimism around here.

Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Margaret Atwood, “February” from Morning in the Burned House. Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Source: Morning in the Burned House (1995)

Source: Poetry Foundation

Stereotypes, schmalz - completely riveting: Steven Spielberg's 'War Horse'. A review

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:45:00 +0000

Not having read the book or, yet, seen the play, I was half-intrigued, half-nervous to attend a Charity pre-screening of Spielberg's 'War Horse' at the Odeon West End last night. The reputation of the strength of the original story and the play (still showing) are such that I knew it would not be possible to emerge from the theatre without having got through two or three boxes of tissues. And I admit it. I am bad at films about animals getting hurt.

First up, the Oscars for cinematography and special effects are surely spoken for and the year barely two weeks under way. The opening aerial shots of what was supposed to be Devon were so green gold and gorgeous - screamed England before the first world war - that I immediately found myself wondering why I didn't live there - even though I had no idea where 'there' was. Careful research, (today's Times actually) revealed that the location is Dartmoor. In today's urbanized, trafficky, overcrowded Britain, I didn't realise it was still possible to find such unmolested glory.

I know Steven Spielberg has done wars before. eg 'Saving Private Ryan'. But this war film isn't just about men blowing up stuff, mostly themselves. Mid way through the film, scenes of Joey the horse galloping riderless and in despair across the barbed wire of no-mans land on the Somme, doubtless mounted technical challenges beyond my ability to comprehend. Apparently 17 horses were used to play Joey (with various levels of equine make up) but even using 117 horses (presumably none of them was disposable, nor were their legs) these scenes represent a feat which must have raised all sorts of film making bars for the future.

So far so excellent. Acting. Well, everyone was superb. A stirling British cast being nothing so much as , stirling. Some of the characterisations however came dangerously close to crossing, not so much international borders, as borders between real and sentiment. For example, there is a scene where Benedict Cumberbatch playing an officer leading a cavalry charge gives the compulsory eve of battle speech. He doesn't quite cry God for Harry England and St. George, but you can see he is bursting to do so.

Some of the sub-plots are a bit thin. There is one such subplot involving a supposedly French grandfather and granddaughter which briefly made me feel I'd wandered out of the set of Warhorse and into the set of Heidi. And they talked English to each other as well as to the German troops who came to raid their farm for food.

This might have been acceptable in scenes between German and English characters, but when all the German characters were speaking English amongst themselves, it was irksome and faintly ridiculous, especially as the accents varied rather wildly.

Still enough whingeing. I was spellbound for the whole two and a half hours. I highly recommend this glorious schmalzy wallow to anyone who is prepared to spend the evening with their face perilously close to their hankies.

Dream Work

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:57:00 +0000

Mary Oliver is an American, Pulitzer prize winning poet who published her first volume of poetry in the 1960s and is still writing away. She has stated in an interview with Maria Shriver that she gets much of her inspiration from walking in the woods, loves Whitman, Rumi and Hafiz, Emerson and Shelley (after whom she named her dog, Percy).

She attended Vassar College in the mid-50s as had Elizabeth Bishop twenty years before her.

Wild Geese

(From Dream Work, Mary Oliver)

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dream-Work-Mary-Oliver/dp/0871130696/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325872551&sr=1-1

I love the clarity and simplicity of this poem which is not, of course, at all simple. Who could not read this and feel heartened?

"White in the moon the long road lies"

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:49:00 +0000

'The Anthologist' by Nicholson Baker is a treat. A lovely comfy roaring log fire with too much wine and cake treat. I am only sorry that I bring you these pearls of wisdom too late for the aforementioned festive season but hey, yuletide comes round with monotonous regularity so there's always next year.

This beautiful narrative is just sufficiently intellectually engaging to satisfy people like myself who feel reading is only reading if its poetry or about poetry, or has p somewhere in the title, yet not so much as to make you reach for your Norton Anthology for a bit of light relief. But at the end of the day it's a novel. A fiction, with a hero and some love interest and many obstacles, some of which come in the form of floorboards.

It's a story about a man called Paul Chowder who's trying to write the introduction to a poetry anthology - not just any poetry but (schlock horror) rhymed poetry. Just that. But he's also suffering, this guy because he's blocked, sick and his girlfriend's left him and everytime he's takes up position on his white plastic chair in his office in a barn (a real barn with straw not a fake designer one with a jacuzzi) pen in hand, nothing happens.

And as every writer knows, when nothing happens, it happens with a vengeance.

It is, says Paul C, like looking at death.

What I love about poetry, the writing of it, the thinking about it, the reading of it, is that it is impossible to pin down and massively resists generalisation. So do poets lord bless us every one.

There are so many great thoughts about the writing process itself:

"Rhyming is the genius's version of the crossword puzzle - when it's good. When it's bad it's intolerable dogwaste and you wish it had never been invented. But when its good its great. It's no coincidence that Auden was a compulsive doer of crossword puzzles and a rhymer, and a depressive, and a smoker, and a drinker, and a man who shuffled into Louise Bogan's memorial service in his bedroom slippers."

Or this:

"...never think, Oh, heck, I'll write that whole poem later. Never think, First I'll write this poem about my old orange life jacket so that I'll be more ready to confront the more haunting, daunting reality of this poem here about the treehouse that was rejected by its tree. No. If you do, the bigger theme will rebel and go sour on you."

Amen to that!. But this is not just a book about poetry, it is about life lived in pursuit of some nebulous literary goal. It questions gently the possibility of 'creative writing' as a taught subject and like all the best icebergs it wears its luminosity very, very lightly. You do not even have to be particularly interested in poetry to read it. You only have to be interested in life and the living of it, the affairs, loves and deaths of some of the New York literati of old, and to be aware that for those who nail their colours to the literary mast, it's all a serious business and the stakes are very high for those who fail. Not in terms of money - for most of us that is never an option anyway - but in terms of mental health. Underneath all the jokes there's some serious subtext. Or underneath all the subtext there's some serious jokes. Whichever you prefer.

And oh, I forgot to say, it has a happy ending. And Simon Schama has given it the thumbs up on the dustjacket.. You want more?

----------------------------------

Title: "White in the Moon the Long Road Lies", A.E. Housman

Bah humbug!

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:42:00 +0000

It took me all weekend, but I finally got my tree up!

Power to Alice Oswald

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:47:00 +0000

T.S. Eliot prize nominee Alice Oswald has withdrawn from contention for Poetry's most coveted prize (swiftly followed by fellow nominee John Kinsella) in protest at the sponsorship by Aurum, a hedge fund management company. It looks like this will put pressure on the remaining contenders to make a decision.

Oswald stated in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/dec/08/writers-prize-sponsors-ts-eliot-prize)

that poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions. Oh how I heartily agree.

In response to this announcement the Guardian asks whether writers can afford to worry about ethical sponsorship?

My contention is how can they afford not to worry about such matters? A culture of independent art and sport should be the mainstay of any country which professes itself to be free and democratic. Sadly sport has long since sold out. Literature cannot and must not follow.

Power to Alice Oswald I say for the courage to stand up.

Fire!

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:14:00 +0000

Next door are having building works done. This is an understatement. I should in fact say next door are creating a paean (defined by wikipedia as a song or lyric poem expressing triumph or thanksgiving) to greed and vanity by doubling the size of an already large house, cutting out all our light, views, airspace, breathingspace, treespace, dog barking space in the process.

You name it, their cutting it out. Don't ask me how they got planning permission as this is the written word and libel actions may yet abound in this sunny corner of downtown South West London full of unhappy people with space issues.

However I was approached by one of their very nice polite builders this morning saying that he understood that I had been complaining about their fire. Fire? I asked, not understanding but wondering if someone had had a go at burning down the paean to greed and vanity and already asking myself why I felt this unreasonable burgeoning hope. The evidence before my eyes tho was that the monstrous carbuncle remained intact, ready to burst forth from its monstrous scaffolding and gigantic bubblewrap to leer up and down the street into all eternity - and possibly even beyond if the owners have any say in the matter or enter into any Faustian pacts. You never can tell with people that build unreasonably large extensions.

And talking of Faust which we weren't I still wasn't sure what the fire was about. What fire? quoth I. I haven't complained about a fire. Many other things, yes. Endless drilling and noise both night and day. But fire, no. I am perplexed quoth I. What fire? I repeated.

This fire the man said as , turning, , he indicated a brazier behind where he stood in a old oil drum with all these poor Eastern European builders trying to warm their frozen hands in true Victorian Christmas card fashion. They lacked only greatcoats and the odd crutch or two and Dickens himself would have sent his ghost along to take notes.

It made me realise my good fortune. I only have to look at the monstrosity. I don't have to build it on the minimum wage with frozen hands.

I never complained about the fire, I said. But he clearly didn't believe me.

Poetic Places

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:04:00 +0000

I was lucky enough to hear Aeronwy Thomas on two occasions: the first time at a literary festival in Richmond. She was speaking about her father and mother and the extraordinary childhood she had had. Although I cannot now remember everything she said for it was many years ago, I remember the weather was terrible - snow , cold, you name it - but it hadn't affected the numbers of people that turned out to hear her speak.

The second time I heard her speak, she was reading her own poetry in the ridiculously humble environs of a pub near Kingston. Her last collection before she died in 2009 was entitled Shadows and Shades : Selected Poems (Poetry Monthly Press, 2009). An appropriate title for someone who lived her life in teh shadows and shades of not only her father's poetry, but the tempestuous and often drink sodden lives that both her parents lived.

I remember her poetry being clear and lucid in way that her father's was often not. Although a gifted writer and poet herself (She spoke fluent Italian, having lived in Sicily with her mother Caitlin, and later became a translator of Italian poetry) Aeronwy spent much of her life keeping her father's show on the road. She travelled all over the world as ambassador for his work and patron of the Dylan Thomas Society, and was awarded an Honorary Fellowship at the University of Wales, Swansea.

But in seeking the shades of the masters and particularly the places where their genius took root, we make use of those who knew them best and make shrines of the places where they lived and/or produced their greatest work.

For Dylan Thomas the Boat House at Laugharne was indisputably such a shrine.

In 'My father's places' (Constable, 2009) Aeronwy describes arriving at the Boathouse for the first time as a child:

"I can remember arriving on that first day, carrying our bags and hand-held belongings, toiling down the path from the walk above the Boat House. The pathway to the Boat House was too narrow for a car so we carried our bags over the uneven surface while we looked over the low cliff wall at the sand and water beyond. ... We walked laden with bags and books along the last stretch of the path, rough and natural under our feet, to our new home, a three-storeyed cottage called the Boat House.

It looked heavenly: a place to explore, to run around, where we would be living forever. It had verandas and balconies, water butts, stepped gardens, a large boat shed in the back yard, the harbour and a wall protecting us from the wilds of the friendly estuary beyond."

If this sounds impossibly romantic, it is. I have visited the house and the shed where Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood. It is all now preserved as a Museum; still it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to see oneself living and writing in such a place.

The book finishes with a final poem by Aeronwy. She says:

We were poor those days -

Though I can't remember being poor

in Laugharne, those balmy,

never to be forgotten days,

green and golden ...

Who would?

A warning from a poet

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 19:32:00 +0000

The poet Simon Armitage has gone on record to warn that e-books will lead to file sharing and freebies, with the result that the writing trade will suffer in the same way as the music industry has done. The evidence is staring us in the face and it is happening as we speak.

This means presumably that writers will not be able to make a living. Is that something new?

Ghost Songs

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:57:00 +0000

Review Gail Ashton's 'Ghost Songs' - (Cinnamon Press, 2007)

There are no lyrical ghosts in this collection, no floating spirits or homeless spectres but hard hitting, dislocated voices or endurance and unbearable experience.

There are ghosts of failed relationships, of depression - the voices that are hard to silence - but the author also uses described landscape to reflect human behaviour (geese on the wing lift/two fingers to the /sheen of water below) a landscape that hovers always on the edges of loss.

Thus, in Letter to Anne Sexton:

You know it well that story of depletion,

the muteness that springs

from knowing your own dislocation.

This is a collection that pulls no punches and tells it as it is. As in (Welsh Misery) we read of an impossible decision offered to a six-year old child.

are you stopping with

me or going with her

Short in line length and stanza, Ashton wastes not a word in getting to the point but perhaps the rhythm and musicality associated with 'song' has been sacrificed in defining such a hard reality in some of the poems.

There are plenty of ghosts in this collection but, it seems to me, fewer songs. Perhaps that is just a quibble about a word in the title but in a way in also sets up expectations that I felt were not quite met. There is great clarity and poignancy. But much darkness. A little, occasional, light would have been welcome too.

The Poetry Business

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:45:00 +0000

"One of the career milestones for very many poets of note has been winning the prestigious Poetry Business competition." — Anne-Marie Fyfe

Deadline: 29^th November 2011

The competition has had a long history of launching poetry careers and past winners include:

Jane Draycott	David Morley	Mimi Khalvati	Tim Liardet	Catherine Smith
Michael Laskey	Pascale Petite	Daljit Nagra	Kathryn Simmons	Patrick McGuiness
Our poets have won or been shortlisted for many awards including The Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Felix Dennis Prize and the Forward and T S Eliot Prizes. Christy Ducker, one of our winners from the 2010 competition was the Poetry Book Society’s autumn pamphlet choice.
And this year The Poetry Business is proud to celebrate its 25^th anniversary with the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, as competition judge.
We invite entries of 20-24 pages of poems and if the opportunity to have Carol Ann read a body of your work is not enough we will also reward our four winners with the following prizes:
§ Book publication for the overall winner and pamphlet publication for three first-stage winners § A share of £2,000 donated by NAWE § The winning collections will be launched at poetry readings hosted by The Poetry Business; and poems selected from the collections will be published in The North magazine. § One-to-one support from NAWE's *Compass Points* § A year's subscription to Ambit magazine § A free book from any publisher represented by Inpress
THE SHEFFIELD PRIZE All entrants with a Sheffield postcode will be automatically entered into the Sheffield Prize. The best single poem from each collection in this category will be considered for the chance to win £100 cash and publication in The North. The Sheffield Prize is sponsored by the University of Sheffield.
And, to celebrate the silver anniversary of the Poetry Business, the winner of the Sheffield Poetry prize will also receive a silver bookmark, engraved and hallmarked by the Sheffield Assay Office.
You can enter the competition by post, or if you prefer, you can enter online.
But hurry, the deadline is 29^th November (post) or 1^st Decemb

Europe's problems summed up

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:47:00 +0000

Pythagorean theorem: 24 words
Lord's prayer: 66 words
Archimedes' Principle: 67 words
Ten Commandments: 179 words
Gettysburg address: 286 words
US Declaration of Independence: 1,300 words
US Constitution with all 27 Amendments: 7,818 words
EU regulations on the sale of cabbage: 26,911 words

Mr. Fellowes - puhlease

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:15:00 +0000

Sunday nights have but one purpose in Maison Rune where Romance and Excitement abound, and Mr. Rune and I finished our tax returns especially early in order not to miss a single moment of our beloved ITV drama, Downton Abbey.

But Good Grief! Suddenly that which had been faultlessly scripted, performed, costumed set and shot, has descended into un grand fromage.

Not only does Matthew Crawley manage to get back from his fearless and heroic activities on the front in time for every episode - which is beginning to stretch even my credulity to its limits - but last night he walked in when Lady Mary was in the middle of her rendering of 'If you were the only girl in the world ...' when only 10 minutes previously the poor man had been missing in action, presumed, etc. So what's he doing wandering into the room finishing the verse 'and I were the only boy.'

O'Brien can't make up her mind whether to be as reliably horrid as she always has been or whether the war has wrought some degree of change so she's veering from one extreme to the other, one moment frantically defending a shell shocked servant, the next having a fat go at poor old Bates-y.

But then all the other servants are so busy being angelic, handing out food to lines of patiently queuing soldiers (apart from the maid who's pregnant - but this is a country house saga so there has to be a pregnant maid and it was never gonna be Anna) someone has to wave the flag for the dark side. Poor Thomas can't be horrid all on his own.

As for Lady Sybil and the Irish Chauffeur! Not even the Dowager Countess would have a line for that one.

Tomas Tranströmer wins Nobel Prize for Literature

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:16:00 +0000

The Swedish Poet,Tomas Tranströmer. has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Report on the Guardian website here .

Melancholia

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:18:00 +0000

Written and Directed by Lars von Trier

If you go to see this film you will be in for a treat in the form of a surreal and visually stunning opening sequence, set to the Prelude to Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde'. Oh wondrous first ten minutes.

But then all goes black and a new title 'Justine' is blazoned across the screen a la 'Alexandria Quartet' style. Once the film proper starts, all your illusions will be shattered cruelly as were mine. What can I say? Great cast - Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland. Strange plot which involves a great many hours spent waiting for the planet (the Melancholia of the title - but this also is a pun on the depression suffered by the heroine) to collide with earth. In fact so many hours in which so little happens, that by the end I was hoping the damned planet would hurry up and crash into us so I could go home.

Such plot as there is contains too many inconsistencies. The poor heroine is so ill with depression she doesn't even make it through her own (rather awful) wedding intact. Yet mysteriously the groom doesn't seem to be aware of her illness. They can't have known each other very long. Meanwhile, her rather horrible boss is mercilessly pursuing her around the wedding banquet trying to extract a strapline for his latest advertising campaign. Do people behave like this ? Her mother is hiding upstairs (can't blame her) while her father (John Hurt, bless him) fills the pockets of his suit with silver teaspoons and calls everyone Betty, regardless of their name.

Wonderful imagery can take you a long way. But 2001: A Space Odyssey this aint and the film is too long for its limited script.

eg "Life is only on earth, and not for long."

Wow!

In a scene where the heroine, Justine, ( Kirsten Dunst ) starts beating her horse which has refused a bridge - of course its refused the damn bridge because the earth's about to expire and horses generally know these things - her sister shouts 'don't beat him' about six times in a monotone so irritating I was ready to beat them both, personally.

See it if you must but I recommend leaving after the first ten minutes

Troubadour Poetry Prize

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:40:00 +0000

For more information on this please see the Troubadour website

Announcing the £2,500 Fifth Annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize

Judged by Susan Wicks & David Harsent (with both judges reading all poems)

Sponsored by Cegin Productions

Prizes: 1st £2,500, 2nd £500, 3rd £250 & 20 prizes of £20 each
Plus a Spring 2012 Coffee-House-Poetry season-ticket
and a prizewinners' Coffee-House Poetry reading
with Susan Wicks & David Harsent on Mon 28th Nov 2011
for all prize-winning poets

Submissions: by Mon 17th Oct 2011

Judges:

- Susan Wicks has lived and worked in France, Ireland and America and has taught at University College Dublin and University of Kent; she is the author of five collections of poetry including 'Singing Underwater' (1992), which won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and 'The Clever Daughter' (1996), which was shortlisted for both T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and she was a Poetry Society 'New Gen' poet in 1994. A short memoir, 'Driving My Father', was published in 1995, she is the author of two novels, 'The Key' (1997) and 'Little Thing' (1998), and 'Roll Up for the Arabian Derby', her collection of short stories, was published in 2008. Her latest collection of poetry is 'House of Tongues' (Bloodaxe, 2011).

- David Harsent, a Visiting Professor at Sheffield Hallam University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published ten collections of poetry and several limited editions, and has received a number of awards, including the Eric Gregory Award, the Geoffrey Faber Award and the Cheltenham Festival Prize. His most recent collection, 'Night' (Faber, 2011) was a PBS choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His previous book, 'Legion', won the Forward Prize for best collection 2005 and was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His 'Selected Poems' was published in June 2007, and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

- Both judges will read all poems submitted.

That time of year thou may'st....

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 17:27:00 +0000

Its rune vacation time. Back in October.

Joy Change

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:43:00 +0000

Review of Joy Change, Judy Kendall (Cinnamon Press)

'We are never the turning tide, the deathless ones,

who live upon the edge of time, ablaze

with song, unravelling your dreams."

(Prologue to a Noh Play)

Once you get past the rather mundane title - taken from a misprint in a letter written about a job change - and the publisher's unfortunate choice of colourways for the front cover (pink and purple front/orange and blue back) this is a fine collection of poems.

Judy Kendall captures the essence of the Haiku spirit as well as providing an insightful glance into modern Japanese culture seen from the view of an English schoolteacher including a lovely 'essay' written in English by a Japanese student. 'Japan is very comfortable to live/and Mount Fuji is great view/However we tend to use a lot of things which we do not realy (sic) need ... ' (The Small Country).

These poems frame a Japanese way of life rather as maple trees in a Hiroshige woodprint frame a view of the Tekona Shrine at Edo. Yet the writer has cleverly kept a balance between the 'outside looking in' view, and the idea of the insider looking out. For example: 'Everything is upside down in England./They print books from back to front, they serve soup/for starters, they overcook fish... . /

This results in a fine sense of a rounded experience of seeing two worlds living in harmony - albeit slightly bewildered harmony on occasion. There is a sense also that too much has 'gone before' for either of the worlds to contain the other and that they will be destined to swirl politely around each other.

The language and imagery of the poems evoke the spirit of Haiku, that is, an awareness of the moment as well as a celebration of nature's transcendent beauty. The poems form a wistful evocation of people, events, places; The Kimono Maker, The Festival of the Dead, The Taihen Dancer.

Tightly sounded, and with a profound sense of musicality, descriptions such as

early morning mist

the scent of burning cedar

sweeps the moss

(Eiheiji)

or,

... and then,

after a few hours'

woodsmoke-filled sleep

on the tatami straw

and a warming breakfast

of sweet okayu porridge

I would begin the climb...

(If I were a Kimono Maker)

... make this a collection which I can wholeheartedly recommend.

Who will speak for wolves?

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:11:00 +0000

A Review of 'Planet Dancing', Patrick McCusker, Open Gate Press (2011)

This book looks at conservation issues from a humanist point of view, its thesis that humans have become aliens on their own planet: detached from ancestral and ancient knowledge of the land; cast adrift in a sea of greed and ambition from the old anchors of faith, community, common concern and neighbourliness, in a complex world that has become technically beyond the understanding of most people.

Without exaggeration the author states: Most people no longer understand most things. It's not that we don't know the nature of quarks or genotoxins or the morphodynamic behaviour of beaches. We don't even know what's in the processed food we eat... we have traded understanding for comfort.

I confess to having started this book with little enthusiasm. More lists of problems faced by our dying planet and increasingly extinct species: executive homes in Australia built on the site of the nest of a rare bird thus making it even rarer; the increasing silence of the oceans 'the diminishing music of the sea that once pulsed with the choir of whales'; the wrecking of habitats; the political expedients that exploit our own tendencies to believe that conservation is someone else's problem or that anyway there is nothing much to be done. We assuage our guilt by dumping the day's newspaper in the recycling box. Such things are now widely known thanks to awareness raising of the various conservation lobbies.

Knowledge does not mean solutions: rather the opposite, common awareness of environmental issues can lead to what the author describes as a 'seeming inevitability' of the whole process. Nature, the author states, is in deep trouble.

What has to be recognised, and is recognised in the book, is that humanity is in deep trouble too - and the two things are of course connected. 'A billion people live on less than $1.25 a day'. In such a situation, wildlife conservation is low on the priorities list for a great many people.

So what can we do about it? McCusker does have ideas. A Nature Reserve funded by tiny cash donations from millions of children; a wilderness reserve jointly managed by the world's great religions; a children's world dance day for nature; and my personal favourite The Hundred-Million Dollar Club. If you want to know what this is, you'll have to read the book.

McCusker calls for us to take responsibility now to educate, to inform, the younger generation which will shoulder the burden of undoing the damage that we have done, for the nay-sayers to come up with ideas of their own (and act on them) and for everyone to recognise 'if we are to have any chance of making things better, change must happen within each one of us.'

Jane Eyre, Dir. Fukunaga

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:16:00 +0000

Sometimes when you love a book as I love this one, you don't want films, because they just don't reach the part that your own imagination can. So I went with a certain reluctance (but also slightly in shock horror mode that my youngest and his girlfriend hadn't read the book and didn't know the story. Ooops!).

Haddon Hall in Derbyshire acts the part of Thornfield Hall (apparently not the first time it has done so according to the Sunday Times, Franco Zeffirelli and the BBC have used the location before). If you have to be Bertha Mason and you have to jump off anywhere - what more striking location to use than these splendid and terrifying crenellated towers? I couldn't fault the locations, not the gothic piles nor the brooding moorlands. If they're handing out Oscars for stunning locations and cinematography , this film is surely a front runner. You can feel the weather and the changing seasons, although given the average temperature of Yorkshire/Derbyshire in the winter, I was surprised at how many windows were open, affordingly delicate breezes for the ruffling of curtains.

I know the book well. Fine. Probably a lot of people in the audience know the book well. Especially women and those of a certain age who remember being spoonfed 70's feminist literary theory with an earmarked copy of The Madwoman in the Attic still buried at the back of the bookshelves somewhere

Now I am about to be nitpicking and uncharitable. This is a beautifully crafted film in all respects and the acting largely is perfectly poised. But I disliked the way the timelines had been hacked about. The film is shot mostly in flashback so that Jane meets St.John Rivers at the beginning of the film rather than, as in the book, near the end. I am not sure that is helpful for those who may not know the story, as the differences in Jane's appearance in her St.John Rivers days and her Thornfield days were minute, so that it was possible to lose your thread in the story as the film switched between the two.

The period at Lowood school has been drastically cut. We leap from Helen Burns' death to a scene where the grown Jane is leaving ( as a teacher of course but the film doesn't really show that) for a post as a Governess at Thornfield. Despite the 10 years that have passed in reality, other members of staff didn't look a day older.

And as I watched something dawned me that hadn't really dawned on me before. I cannot really lay this at the feet of the very talented Cory Fukunaga. And it was this, that Mrs. Fairfax is absolutely right. As a whole, men in Mr. Rochester's position are not given to marry the Governess.

On the whole this is a beautiful and brooding film of a beautiful and brooding story. Definitely see it. But read the book first.

'Listening to an Ashtray and the Sea'

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 14:44:00 +0000

A Review of 'Parallel to Red in Chorus', Alison Gibb

The Knives Forks and Spoons Press

With all the to-ing and fro-ing about poetry and poetics these days and who is and who isn't (published, I mean) and who gets prizes or shortlisted and whether you've won the Pulitzer four times, it is easy to forget why we write (yes) but also why we read and love poetry. In this, her first pamphlet-length poem about a remembered journey from London to Scotland, Alison Gibb, has come to remind us.

In his essay 'The Provenance of Pleasure' Poetry Review, Volume 101, Spring 2011, Maitreyabandhu states:

'We experience life whole. Thinking, feeling, acting, remembering, perceiving, sensing, etc. are experientially indivisible. But to think about them, we have to break this whole experience into parts. We tend to forget that this is what we are doing ... . Perhaps the power of poetry is to do with the sense that, at its best, it is the closest language gets to evoking the whole - the indivisible nature of being alive.'

Not only thinking, but language itself encourages us to divide the whole into parts. It's like trying to work out how much money it took to bail out the banks - most of us can only think about those sums in bits. The whole is too overwhelming, too risky, it threatens us with chaos , robs us of our safe narratives wherein all is structured and the good guys win in the end.

With overtones of the work of Lynette Roberts, Gibb's work follows in the tracks of J. H. Prynne and the avant-garde poetry of what came to be somewhat pejoratively known as the Cambridge School before the Cambridge Literary Review reclaimed the ground and carved its name with pride. And guys, I hope you're noticing this name 'Alison Gibb'.

As a modest dabbler in the grass roots of poetry and criticism I can assure you that if anyone thinks it's cold in here, baby it's freezing outside. Anyone who has ever brought a Prynne poem to a workshop had better bring a suit of armour and a couple of shields to hide behind because people get pretty upset when language doesn't abide by their preconceived notions of what it's there to do.

But for a glorious moment or two, in the pages of 'Parallel to Red in Chorus', we can forget about politics and temperatures and temperaments and tempers and enjoy.

Alison doesn't do safe. She does fully charged life, this poetry lights up with the metallic colours of electricity and a power that come straight from the national grid. The sound is mixed with the light and the landscape is mobile.

'the buildings look like buildings but the light is elsewhere'

White layering different sounds on top of each other

Layering in bright daylight standing white sounds

And yes, it's difficult. And no, I can't tell you what it all means. The only punctuation is the natural pauses of the white space; there are many mixed ideas and numerical references - bulb wattage, prices, grid references, F-stops for the photographers out there. Much of the text is 'found' work ie extracted from other texts. But nevertheless poem represents a coherent journey, both for the artist and the reader. Interspersed with warnings about speed cameras as get such passages as these:

0.00 Start out on an unamed road

The same fine degree of wind sleet & dark

Exposure value according to whether you

Open up or close down one stop weather

Symbols are a great blessing for those who

Have no head for numbers ...

Above ground I'm not hearing sand

Listening to an ashtray & the sea

Blurred streaks & a small quantity of white

This poetry makes you slow down and notice the markers along the road. So yes, beware speed cameras, take the 2nd exit, and remember, 'the light comes from red Water...'

The road to perdition

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:11:00 +0000

Son of Perdition, The Chronicles of Brothers: Wendy Alec, Warboys (2011)

Philip Pullman used a knife. C.S. Lewis a wardrobe. Here in this novel 'Son of Perdition' by Wendy Alec the portal between worlds is a monastery in Alexandria.

The premise of the story is that Lucifer and several of his henchmen have broken free into the world of men through a weak portal (using electromagnetic pulse weapons as one does) and are wreaking their havoc on earth. Lucifer is planning his comeback and 9/11 is just one of his milestones on the road to Armageddon.

Through the medium of the Grand Druid Council of the Illuminati, a global warlock elite that has fingers in every single pie from banking to the military to telecoms to terrorism. Whatever evil is afoot, these guys are way past the hems of their dark flowing robes in it. Their objective? A New World Order in which Lucifer reigns supreme.

"He had only one alternative - to use these inferior beings. To beguile them and engage them in his master plan. Dark Slaves of the Fallen.

Mmm. So far, so Darth Vader.

The action moves between time but some is post third-world-war - supposedly a nuclear holocaust - but no-one seems to be unduly concerned about radiation. There are a huge number of characters and time shifts which make the story disjointed.

Despite all this, I did find myself compelled to keep turning the pages to find out what happens. The author seems well acquainted with expressing the workings of globalisation and there are some good pointers toward the toxic brew Society is stirring for itself by combining a diminishing code of morality, with spiralling technological capability.

For example, this is a telephone call, 2021 style.

"He dictated a number into the car's voice-recognition system. Like every vehicle in the European Union satellite footprint, it was linked up to supercomputer databases in Brussels which had universal access to all Internet servers, private records, and global satellite networks in the EU.

Five hundred million citizens personal data, accessible at the touch of a button. The 'superbeast' also recorded every citizen's personal ATM and debit card transactions within 57 seconds.

The robotic voice replied ... :'Julia St. Cartier. Current GPS location. New Chelsea, London, King's Road. Last purchase Starbucks. Item: Vanilla latte. Skimmed Lemon pound cake. Slice One. Purchase completed two minutes ago. Subject mobile. On foot. Dialling.'

Not exactly Orwellian style clairvoyance. Not even science fiction any more. Science fact. I presume the capability for this kind of surveillance is there already and it's only a matter of time before someone employs it. We have sleepwalked into this. The message is, if there is a secret Cabal - an Illuminati out there - we're certainly making it easy for them.

C.S. Lewis settled for the White Witch. Tolkein for Sauron. J.K. Rowling for Voldemort. Certain mechanisms are often employed in fantasy novels to use some kind of metaphorical substitute to represent the forces of good and evil, rather than traditional, biblical angels and devils . This is less to avoid the risk of offence I suspect, than to avoid the worry of supposedly omnipotent beings being stuck for solutions. Although Philip Pullman portrayed God as ageing and inept, his characters had other divine style interventions to support them.

Using metaphorical beings gives the author an escape route. The good guys win . End of. But where do you go after Armageddon?

No doubt we'll have to wait to find out. There is a sequel

due out in 2012. I am sure the author has something up her sleeve. I hope it's not a film.

Dispose of your books please or we'll turn you out of your flat

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:00:00 +0000

I've heard from a friend who has been informed by the Council (who house him) that he must dispose of his books which are considered to be a fire risk.

Our great and wonderful Councils - so committed to education and individual freedoms. Heartwarming isn't it.

Now you're telling me you're not nostalgic

noreply@blogger.com (Frances) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:50:00 +0000