First published in the Times Literary Supplement
Dingy flats and rented rooms are Leontia Flynn's territory in Profit and Loss. Anyone who has spent the first decades of their adult life (Flynn points out: "these days we're classed as youth / till 44") in academe or poorly paid work will recognize the succession of neglected digs she describes with a comic sense of bravery. Several of the poems in the first third of the book use the same opening gambit: "I once lived in a house ...". The effect is sometimes curious ("I once lived in a house with rusted locks"), sometimes macabre ("I once lived in the house of an infamous death"), and, cumulatively, deadpan. There is a trace of the stand-up comedian's patter in the movement of Flynn's best verse. Her most surprising opening lines are understated, with a faintly amused delivery, and she is not averse to a bawdy punchline in poems whose titles, at least, give some warning: "The Day We Discovered Pornography in the Mail" and "The Vibrator". The ease with which she moves between registers is most impressive in the book's centrepiece, "Letter to Friends", a long conversational poem modelled on Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron". Her manner is airy, though rarely arch like Byron's or Auden's in his "Letter" - she has a knack for working clever rhymes into the ode stanza without sounding self-satisfied, often invoking brand names in pairs such as "artefacts" / "Filofax" and "Apple" / "grapple".
Despite the collection's grim settings and even grimmer context - "a scary month for news" from the banking crisis to "the Church of Rome, / its awful crimes" - Flynn often strikes an optimistic note, and that note rings true in some of her more inventive conceits. Flynn's line in "The Girl Upstairs" celebrates the fact that "the rising wind / rumbles the bins and makes the drinkers shout" and neatly absolves the loud culprits, even as she tells us she is the girl crying in the poem. Meanwhile her description of a "mid-price, brick mid-terrace" in "The Dream House" would be flatly sarcastic if its "loving grubby marks" were not transformed by her vision of "some mythic beast in a distant land" beginning its "trek towards their life".
Recommends: The Walking Artist
First published in Prospect (Issue 190)
Hamish Fulton: Walk
Turner Contemporary, Margate, 17th January-7th May
For Wordsworth, Dickens and Dr Johnson, walking was an essential part of creative life. But Hamish Fulton is not just an artist who walks: he describes himself as a “walking artist.” In 1973, he covered the 1,022 miles from Duncansby Head on the coast of Scotland to Land’s End on foot in 47 days. By the end of the trip he had decided he would “only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks.”
In the last 40 years, Fulton has climbed Everest, retraced Sitting Bull’s footsteps at Little Big Horn and walked 106 miles without sleep on Kent country roads. The walks, he says, shift “where the mind’s located,” like a form of meditation. His shows are typically minimalist: vast gallery spaces house photos from his journeys, alongside sketches and spare, haiku-like descriptions.
“Walk,” Fulton’s first solo show in nearly a decade, brings out the political dimension of his work, the Romantic idealist. In 2009, Fulton, who usually walks alone, began to choreograph walks in which hundreds of people took part—walking single file, a metre’s distance from one another, in silence. His slowed-down group walk in support of Ai Weiwei this year was collective action as art; its geometry is worth seeing this winter in Margate.
Review: Sidereal by Rachel Boast
First published in the Times Literary Supplement
The poems in Sidereal are full of people who cannot sleep. The opening lines of “Pinnacles” are characteristic of the exhausted wakefulness of Rachel Boast’s speakers: “And as there is no chance of sleep / you’ll spend the hours considering all the sounds / rain could be against the fabric of the tent ...”. Boast rearranges impressions and images like someone on the brink of sleep, merging Confucius, Canaletto and fencing terminology in another poem, but the effect is not dreamlike. She builds up “precision”, “skill” and “accurate intent” in the poem’s slender two-line stanzas until “you are ... / foregrounded in broad awareness”.
The attraction of night-time for Boast is, above all, the cosmos, and the parts of it which are not visible in sunlight. The epigraph from Samuel Taylor Coleridge strikes the keynote: “unmeaning they / As moonlight on the dial of the day”. It is fitting then that her collection takes its title from the sidereal day, which is based on the Earth’s relation to the stars rather than the Sun. She has a light touch with the technical language of astronomy, which she balances with conversational circumlocutions and anchors with plain, subtle rhymes. In “The Hum”, a poem about the process of writing, the effect is intimate:
Then in that way you have
When you persist, like a siderostat,
In fixing me in your view
What I’ve kept hidden becomes visible to you
A drawback of Boast’s sharp-witted, poised verse, however, is that she is too easily “habituated to the Vast”. The phrase, set in italics, is borrowed (again from Coleridge), and the feeling comes at several removes. Boast is most comfortable describing unwieldy emotions in the second person, as though addressing herself calmly. It is, perhaps, too easy to conclude “Agrarian Song”, a poem which captures the spirit of a warlike “god of the soil”, with a glance at the heavens: “Plant in me / the effort of your dark songs. / Constellate them”. But when the crotchety note of the long-term insomniac surfaces in her poems, Boast is more mischievous, even bracingly rude. She says “good riddance to the English apology” in the placidly titled “Peace and Plenty”: just what is needed to disrupt the solar system.
The poems in Sidereal are full of people who cannot sleep. The opening lines of “Pinnacles” are characteristic of the exhausted wakefulness of Rachel Boast’s speakers: “And as there is no chance of sleep / you’ll spend the hours considering all the sounds / rain could be against the fabric of the tent ...”. Boast rearranges impressions and images like someone on the brink of sleep, merging Confucius, Canaletto and fencing terminology in another poem, but the effect is not dreamlike. She builds up “precision”, “skill” and “accurate intent” in the poem’s slender two-line stanzas until “you are ... / foregrounded in broad awareness”.
The attraction of night-time for Boast is, above all, the cosmos, and the parts of it which are not visible in sunlight. The epigraph from Samuel Taylor Coleridge strikes the keynote: “unmeaning they / As moonlight on the dial of the day”. It is fitting then that her collection takes its title from the sidereal day, which is based on the Earth’s relation to the stars rather than the Sun. She has a light touch with the technical language of astronomy, which she balances with conversational circumlocutions and anchors with plain, subtle rhymes. In “The Hum”, a poem about the process of writing, the effect is intimate:
Then in that way you have
When you persist, like a siderostat,
In fixing me in your view
What I’ve kept hidden becomes visible to you
A drawback of Boast’s sharp-witted, poised verse, however, is that she is too easily “habituated to the Vast”. The phrase, set in italics, is borrowed (again from Coleridge), and the feeling comes at several removes. Boast is most comfortable describing unwieldy emotions in the second person, as though addressing herself calmly. It is, perhaps, too easy to conclude “Agrarian Song”, a poem which captures the spirit of a warlike “god of the soil”, with a glance at the heavens: “Plant in me / the effort of your dark songs. / Constellate them”. But when the crotchety note of the long-term insomniac surfaces in her poems, Boast is more mischievous, even bracingly rude. She says “good riddance to the English apology” in the placidly titled “Peace and Plenty”: just what is needed to disrupt the solar system.
Recommends: Rabindranath Tagore
First published in Prospect (Issue 189)
Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Painter
Victoria & Albert Museum, 11th December-4th March, Tel: 020 7942 2000
The 150th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth this year has seen a resurgence of interest in his work. Yet two of his most prominent champions, Amartya Sen and Amit Chaudhuri, have complained that his poems—written in Bengali and difficult to translate—are under-read in the west.
Unlike his poetry, Tagore’s paintings do not suffer from the language barrier; he even declined to give them titles. An exhibition opening at the Victoria & Albert Museum in December offers another approach to this extraordinary figure, who had already won the Nobel prize for literature when he took up painting in his sixties.
Tagore’s early sketches—doodles he drew around the crossed-out words and revisions on his manuscripts—are some of his most immediate works. They show fantastical creatures, which he would later describe in a typically poetic fashion: “a bird that can only soar in dreams” or “a probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence.”
On loan from Visva-Bharati University, many of the paintings on show have never been displayed outside India, where Tagore’s work has been a major influence on artists such as Jamini Roy and Eleena Banik. This exhibition, one of only a handful in Britain since the 1930s, is a rare chance to appreciate Tagore first-hand.
Recommends: The Genius of Illumination
First published in Prospect (Issue 188)
Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination
British Library, 11th November-13th March 2012, Tel: 01937 546546
The illustrations in Henry VIII’s personal copy of the Psalms are as revealing as the annotations he made in its margins. On display at the British Library from November, the drawings show a stout, doublet-clad figure—indistinguishable from the Tudor king—doing battle with Goliath and posing as King David. Jean Mallard, the artist and scribe, clearly knew how to flatter.
The library’s first major exhibition of illuminated royal manuscripts—beautifully decorated, handwritten volumes collected by the kings and queens of England—gives a fascinating insight into their owners’ lives. Ranging from the 9th to the 16th centuries, the exhibition includes a parchment roll nearly five metres long, tracing the genealogy of the royal family back through William the Conqueror and the Anglo-Saxon kings. One of the most intriguing manuscripts is a 13th-century bestiary describing real and imaginary creatures, accompanied by moral lessons. A lion’s skull, excavated from the Tower of London’s moat, is displayed alongside it as a reminder that the king of the beasts had his place at court, among the exotic animals of the royal menagerie.
The manuscripts on show are remarkably well preserved, having remained hidden from view in private collections for centuries. This vibrant exhibition offers a chance to appreciate the beauty of the handmade book, but also to see some of the best surviving examples of medieval and Renaissance decorative art as art in its own right.
Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination
British Library, 11th November-13th March 2012, Tel: 01937 546546
The illustrations in Henry VIII’s personal copy of the Psalms are as revealing as the annotations he made in its margins. On display at the British Library from November, the drawings show a stout, doublet-clad figure—indistinguishable from the Tudor king—doing battle with Goliath and posing as King David. Jean Mallard, the artist and scribe, clearly knew how to flatter.
The library’s first major exhibition of illuminated royal manuscripts—beautifully decorated, handwritten volumes collected by the kings and queens of England—gives a fascinating insight into their owners’ lives. Ranging from the 9th to the 16th centuries, the exhibition includes a parchment roll nearly five metres long, tracing the genealogy of the royal family back through William the Conqueror and the Anglo-Saxon kings. One of the most intriguing manuscripts is a 13th-century bestiary describing real and imaginary creatures, accompanied by moral lessons. A lion’s skull, excavated from the Tower of London’s moat, is displayed alongside it as a reminder that the king of the beasts had his place at court, among the exotic animals of the royal menagerie.
The manuscripts on show are remarkably well preserved, having remained hidden from view in private collections for centuries. This vibrant exhibition offers a chance to appreciate the beauty of the handmade book, but also to see some of the best surviving examples of medieval and Renaissance decorative art as art in its own right.
The Salt Book of Younger Poets
Five of my poems are printed in the anthology. Four new ones: "The Winter Empress," "Mistakes in Closed Captioning," "Relics" and "The Wife’s Lament." "Apollo’s Hyacinths" first appeared in Pomegranate.
The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come.
N.B.: The Independent recommended that you buy a copy for your Valentine.
The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come.
N.B.: The Independent recommended that you buy a copy for your Valentine.
Review: Sandgrain and Hourglass by Penelope Shuttle
First published in the Times Literary Supplement
Penelope Shuttle invokes Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in an hour” in her title, Sandgrain and Hourglass. These poems of loss and mourning, following from Redgrove’s Wife, pay tribute to her late husband Peter Redgrove’s love of “the microcosmic – / sandgrains, water droplets / chips of granite . . . ” and range across continents, from Penzance to Baghdad, by way of meditations on “Distance” and “Telling the Time”. With a glancing comparison to Rembrandt, “the Master of the Small Landscape”, Shuttle also ushers in allusive worlds of painting, literature, hagiography and folklore, into which her grief expands. In “Gifts”, she offers to take the sufferings of the famously unfortunate upon herself, but at the same time enters into a competition, as though challenging them: “Take my breasts / St Agatha / Take my tongue Philomela”.
Anne Boleyn, John Milton and Hannibal Lecter – Shuttle’s pantheon includes those who inflict pain as well as those who suffer – are rivals too and therefore they provide her with a yardstick of sorrows. But grief proves the mother of invention in this collection, as Shuttle dreams up more devices for quantifying memories and auditing the past.
Penelope Shuttle invokes Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in an hour” in her title, Sandgrain and Hourglass. These poems of loss and mourning, following from Redgrove’s Wife, pay tribute to her late husband Peter Redgrove’s love of “the microcosmic – / sandgrains, water droplets / chips of granite . . . ” and range across continents, from Penzance to Baghdad, by way of meditations on “Distance” and “Telling the Time”. With a glancing comparison to Rembrandt, “the Master of the Small Landscape”, Shuttle also ushers in allusive worlds of painting, literature, hagiography and folklore, into which her grief expands. In “Gifts”, she offers to take the sufferings of the famously unfortunate upon herself, but at the same time enters into a competition, as though challenging them: “Take my breasts / St Agatha / Take my tongue Philomela”.
Anne Boleyn, John Milton and Hannibal Lecter – Shuttle’s pantheon includes those who inflict pain as well as those who suffer – are rivals too and therefore they provide her with a yardstick of sorrows. But grief proves the mother of invention in this collection, as Shuttle dreams up more devices for quantifying memories and auditing the past.
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