Malcolm Lowry book: order your copy now!

Exciting news – Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, the new book on Malcolm Lowry which I’m co-editing with Bryan Biggs, can now be pre-ordered via Liverpool University Press’s website; click here. The book will be published in September to coincide with a festival and exhibition at the Bluecoat arts centre in Liverpool to celebrate Lowry’s centenary. It includes a wide range of creative responses to Lowry from writers and artists, and (we believe) demonstrates that Lowry and his writing are continuing to prove inspirational, a hundred years after his birth and just over fifty years after his death. We hope that the book will be something that anyone with an interest in Malcolm Lowry will enjoy – and that it will encourage readers to go back to Lowry’s own writings.

For a truly amazing blog on all aspects of the Lowry-world, visit Colin Dilnot’s site Malcolm Lowry at the 19th Hole (click here). Colin is a contributor to the book and lives on the Wirral, close to Lowry’s birthplace. He’s done an amazing amount of research into all kinds of Lowry-related things and his website is a treasure trove for anyone interested in Lowry, jazz, German Expressionist film, Wirral history, or almost anything else really.

Forthcoming readings and events

With apologies for the unconscionably long gap since my previous post, here are details of some forthcoming events I will be taking part in.

Manky Poets reading
I’ll be reading as part of the Manky Poets series on Friday 20 March at at Chorlton Library in Manchester. These events start at 7.30pm and involve open mic, plus guest poet, and beer!

Write Minds event
I will be promoting my book Telling the Fractures at this writers’ and readers’ fair, on Saturday 28 February at Nantclwyd y Dre, Ruthin. The event is being hosted by Denbighshire Library Service in partnership with Dee Rivaz of Bespoke Writing Projects and also involves talks by writers. Visit Dee’s web page (click here) for more details.

Poetry book now published!

My poetry collection Telling the Fractures is now available and looks fantastic thanks to Alan Ward’s photographs and book design. You can find out about it at the Axis Projects website – click here. You can buy it from the website by PayPal, or by sending a cheque (email alan@axisgraphicdesign.co.uk for details). Here are some comments on the book:

‘a fine collaboration’ – Jeffrey Wainwright
‘harshly beautiful’ – Michael Schmidt

Please check it out!

Exciting news! Readings and new book…

I am going to be doing two poetry readings in Manchester in May: the first, on May 17th, will be part of Chorlton Arts Festival. Details are still to be confirmed; keep checking the festival site at www.chorltonartsfestival.com. Then on Friday 30th May I’m going to be reading as part of a Poets and Players event at the Tai Chi Village Hall in Didsbury. This is going to be a really exciting evening, with Penelope Shuttle as the featured poet and Indian-inflected music from violinist Olivia Moore. Since Penelope is a poet who has inspired me greatly, and since I also love Indian classical music, I am looking forward to this evening hugely. For more info visit the Poets and Players website.

Finally and most excitingly, I have my first poetry collection soon to be published! Titled Telling the Fractures, it is a collaboration with photographer and book designer Alan Ward (click here for his website) and promises to look fabulous. We hope to have the book ready for the May readings. Watch this space!

Thin words and beds for one

Just before Christmas I was delighted to find in one of Liverpool’s very few secondhand bookshops the one-volume ’schools’ edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, the standard lexicon for ancient Greek. I’ve been enjoying myself randomly perusing its pages and coming across all kinds of intriguing words. It’s fascinating to see the range of compounds Greek can create using the same prefix, something that English doesn’t really do. For instance, the prefix ‘arti-’ meaning ‘just now’ can be used to create anything from the dramatic ‘artithanes’ (just dead) to the rather sweet ‘artigeneios’ (with the beard just growing) to the threatening ‘artichanes’ (just yawning/opening).

It’s also fascinating to see the ways in which an alien language uses metaphor. From the basic adjective ‘leptos’ meaning ‘peeled, cleaned of the husks, hence thin, fine, slender, delicate’, Greek makes the metaphorical jump to ’subtle, refined, ingenious’ and further to ‘over-subtle, quibbling’; ‘lepto-logeo’, literally ‘thin speaking’, hence takes on the meaning of subtle speaking, ‘quibbling’ or the wonderfully Victorian-sounding ‘logic-chopping’ (another delight of this lexicon is the archaic English employed in the definitions – this abridged edition dates from 1871). And there’s real black humour in the metaphorical meaning taken on by the compound ‘monoklinon’, literally ‘a bed for one only’: that is, a coffin.

(As a proud left-hander I was disappointed to see, however, that the ancient Greeks were not exempt from the seemingly universal tendency of languages to extrapolate from the literal meaning of ‘left-handed’ into a whole range of insults: hence, ’skaiotes’, ‘lefthandedness, awkwardness, clumsiness, stupidity’; ’skaiourgeo’, ‘to be left-handed in work, to behave rudely or indecorously’. Ah well.)

Poets and Players at the Whitworth Gallery

A friend and I enjoyed a fantastic event at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester on Saturday, the latest in the Poets and Players series. We enjoyed readings by four poets (Rhiannon Cree, Tim Phillips, Rod Riesco and Jeffrey Wainwright) interspersed with intriguing, funny and at times unnerving music-and-mime interludes from Chris Davies and Loz Kaye, who work with Horse and Bamboo theatre. All in the beautiful setting of the long room looking out over the winter trees, this was a thoroughly good way to spend a Saturday afternoon. As my friend commented (re the mime), ‘It’s great to be surprised.’ Visit www.poetsandplayers.co.uk to find out more about this series of events.

Relatedly, Jeff Wainwright and I are going to be talking about his new Carcanet collection Clarity or Death! soon in the new year and the resulting interview will be appearing in PN Review. I’m really looking forward to this conversation because Jeff’s work is such a thought-provoking complex of language and ideas – it appeals to both the poet and the philosopher (or more accurately I should say to the student of both poetry and philosophy) in me.

‘Old, worn new’: celebrating Edward Thomas

Carcanet Press are hosting a celebration of the poet Edward Thomas at Manchester Central Library on Wednesday 14th November, to coincide with the launch of a new Carcanet book, Edward Thomas’s Poets, edited by Judy Kendall. The book contains poems and letters by Thomas, giving an insight into the process of poetic composition, alongside work by other writers who influenced and inspired him. I am a huge fan of Edward Thomas and will definitely be buying a copy of what sounds like an extremely interesting book. Keep an eye on www.carcanet.co.uk for more news about the book and event.

Having worked as a hack all his life, Thomas was inspired by the American poet Robert Frost in 1914 to turn his hand to poetry. He was killed at Arras just two and a half years later, in the spring of 1917. In the short period in between he produced an amazing body of poems. His writing is deceptively simple, beautiful and sometimes haunting. Possibly because he sensed that he would have only a short time in which to write, he seemed to go straight to the heart of the thing – the feeling, the mood, the experience, the encounter – every time. I love his poem ‘Words’, in which he calls humbly on ‘you English words’ to choose him, as a poet, through whom to speak – words that are

strange and sweet
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, -
As our hills are, old, -
Worn new
Again and again;
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove
That we love.

I can’t think of another writer who could use so few words so well to convey his love of the English language, of human life, and of the natural world.

Hopkins and ‘haeccitas’

…and in a nice instance of synchronicity, no sooner had I written the previous post than I came across Jeff Wainwright making exactly the same point, but with a rather lovely Latin word, in his book on Geoffrey Hill (Acceptable Words, Manchester University Press):

‘Just as Hopkins could not wholly accede to orthodoxy and school his eyes away from the intense “thisness”, haeccitas – in his own invented term, “inscape” – of the physical world, but sought the divine within it, so Hill’s own apprehensions of the individuated particularities of nature – “the despised / ragwort, luminous, standing out” [from The Orchards of Syon, XX) – form his own version of inscape which is an escape from dull determination’ (Wainwright, pp. 121-22).

I love the idea of the Jesuit poet trying to ’school his eyes’ away from the natural world but, thankfully, being entirely unable to, ’schooling’ his perceptions instead on the infinite variety and beauty of cloud-formations, sunsets, leaf-patterns and the like.

‘Worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie’

There must have been hundreds of poems prompted by the melancholy scent of autumn in the air (as it is at the minute, towards the end of August), but one of the best must be ‘Spring and Fall’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), subtitled ‘To a young child’:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, nor no mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

There are so many things so perfectly expressed here: what seems the simple sorrow of a child at the dying, falling leaves; the painful adult knowledge of the world’s ways, and of death, and the painful knowledge too that your child will come to know this in his or her turn; and the feeling that the child is actually suffering from a sadness she can’t yet understand or articulate; and the awful thought of the child’s own mortality as well as of your own. As well as somehow being able to condense what seems like the central sorrow of human life into fifteen short lines, Hopkins has the most extraordinary ability to make words do things that perhaps only D.H. Lawrence, subsequently, would dare to attempt. That amazing line ‘Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie’… and then the harsh, simple brilliance of ‘blight’ transferred from the world of plants to the human world at the end: ‘It is the blight man was born for / It is Margaret you mourn for’.

Another reason I find Hopkins such a moving and compelling writer (not just a poet – his prose journals are also extraordinary) is that despite his Christianity (he was a Jesuit priest, in fact), which in another writer might perhaps lead to a somewhat distanced view of the physical world as less important than the spiritual world or the world to come, he has such an intensely felt relationship to the natural world. For me, Hopkins and Lawrence – and in a different way, Edward Thomas – are the writers who express most powerfully and movingly the amazingness of the world – and of the fact that the world, simply, is.

Consolations of philosophy, poetry and cricket

I’ve just been reading Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, a sixth-century AD philosopher who held high political office but then fell fatally out of favour with his boss, King Theodoric. Written while he was in prison awaiting execution, the Consolation explores exactly the kind of questions you might imagine would suddenly seem particularly pressing: what is the nature of happiness, how come evil people seem to get rewarded while good people suffer, how can there be evil in the world if there is an all-powerful and all-good divine ruler, etc. Interestingly, it also alternates between poetry and prose, which is why I was reading it in the first place – as research for  reading Jeff Wainwright’s forthcoming collection, Clarity or Death!, which also uses poetry to explore philosophical issues…

Meanwhile I am also enjoying the Trent Bridge Test match. I’m not partisan so I don’t mind the fact that England are getting thumped; I just enjoy great games of cricket.