Jeanette Winterson / Alice Oswald

 

Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald

Jeanette Winterson

March 11th, 2004

Alice Oswald is making a new kind of poetry. There is nothing fancy about it – she is doing the job, simple and enormous, of re-working the model for the twenty first century.

Of course she is not alone in this task, but she is in the front rank of writers, in poetry and prose, who are not content to work only with what exists already. Form and language must move forward, and there is nothing artificial about this. It is the job of writers to make sure that we do not speak a living language and write a dead one.

Oswald’s first volume of poetry – The Thing in the Gap-Stone Style, won the Forward Prize in 1996, and introduced us to a voice as distinctive as it is familiar. Familiar because her work is saturated by both the Classical and the English tradition, and distinctive because she sounds like nobody else. Her words come in fresh combinations. Her lineage is impeccable.

If Ted Hughes re-invented the Pastoral with his extraordinary poem, Thought-Fox, Oswald is Hughes rightful heir. She is a Nature poet, a spiritual poet, with the wildness of Hughes or John Clare, or Traherne. She turns the countryside into an inner landscape, a place not at odds with the more fashionable beats of the city, or a clichéd antidote to it, but as something which I can only call authentic desire. This is not the Nature of footpaths and theme parks, but the open space and untamed life that waits for us to find it again. Oswald finds it again – for poetry’s sake, and for ours.

She is not anti-Modernist – she has taken Modernisms fragments and rubble and found a way of chipping at them with different tools. It is as though she has made peace with what is, and now is making it new. There is no Oedipal slaying of the past, rather she re-births the past so that it is not lost.

Dart, is a poem about the river where Alice Oswald lives. She trained as a Classicist and now she works as a gardener on the Dartington Estate in Devon. Her note to the book tells us that for the past two years she has been recording conversations with people ho live and work on the river, to make what she calls ‘a sound map’.

Dart is a long poem – 48 pages – and it uses prose as well as poetry for its effects. This collision of writing has no slackness or jumble in it; it is a determination to use whatever is to hand to make the shape she wants – ‘The estuary’s my merchant. I go pretty much the length and breath of it scrudging stuff for some tiny stretch of wall. Looking for the fault lines and the scabs of crystals and the natural coigns which are right-angled stones for corners.’

Her quick descriptions are accurate and beautiful – ‘I knew a heron once, when it got up/Its wings were the width of the river.’ Eels are ‘bright whips of flow’. She finds ‘ duck’s nest in the leat with four blue eggs.’

This moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep, is a celebration of difference – the great variety of the natural world, and the escapes of the human spirit. Tamed by industrialisation and information, a part of us is still uncatchable as water.

Oswald stands in the flow of humanity, sieving us through language – ‘all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus, whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,/driving my many selves from cave to cave.’

My three recommendations are:

The Thing in the Gap-Stone Style – Alice Oswald

How to Read a Poem – Ruth Padel

The Hawk in the Rain – Ted Hughes.

http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/journalism/alice-oswald/

Jeanette Winterson

BOOK OF THE DAY

Useless Magic: Lyrics and Poetry by Florence Welch – review

Pop’s high priestess bares her soul in this candid collection charting her transition from wild child to grownup

Emily Mackay

Tue 10 Jul 2018

Y

ou’d think, after four hugely successful albums, that Florence Welch would know her own voice. Yet the Florence + the Machinesinger’s first lyrics and poetry collection is all about learning to speak. “What would I say / If it was just me / Not full of choirs, singing fucking constantly,” asks Song, its tricksily named keynote poem.

It makes sense. “Force of nature” is a cliche that Welch’s powerful voice often inspires, but it has a grain of truth: a song, for her, is something that blows through her from elsewhere. “I am a conduit but totally oblivious to its wisdom,” she says in her preface.

That sense of sublime submission to external powers prevails in the manic lyrics of her debut album, Lungs – here intercut with paintings by Waterhouse and prints by Morris, and Biroed scrawls on Chateau Marmont notepaper – in which love is a cosmic cataclysm, a werewolf possession, a train hurtling towards you. Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) catches her quivering on the brink of global fame, “a rabbit-hearted girl / Frozen in the headlights”, sacrificing herself to a power that transforms her, only too aware that “it comes with a price”.

 

In Honeymoon, she feels the shells of those she’s hurt rattling behind her like Marley’s chains

On her second album, Ceremonials, she’s reconciled herself to that bargain, and become a semi-mythical persona, a floaty-gowned high priestess of catharsis (unlike many of pop’s posh set, the endearingly unedgy Welch has never tried to look like anything other than a privately educated art-school dropout whose middle name is Leontine). Oceanic feeling overflows in the likes of What the Water Gave Me, named after the Frida Kahlo painting, and making reference to Virgina Woolf’s suicide in the line “pockets full of stones” (Welch’s literary references led her fans to form their own book club).

By the time of her more naked third album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, she’s reined in the recklessness hinted at in Lungs’ Hurricane Drunk, and, on songs such as Ship to Wreck, is beginning to acknowledge that rather than being at the mercy of a vengeful sea, she may be the shipwright of her own self-destruction. Her most recent lyrics, on High As Hope, move even further from abstractions: instead of devils, demons, saints and stars, there is a frank admission in the opening lines of the lead single Hunger: “At 17, I started to starve myself / I thought that love was a kind of emptiness”.

Yet writing poems, Welch says, “has in many ways turned out even more exposing”. The first poem here, Song Continued, immediately begins to interrogate the difference. “This new voice, this ‘me’ voice / Is it conversational/ Confessional?” The poem debates which stories to give away, what face to present. Blackout-drunk tales for the addiction memoir age? An “aborted threesome”? She’s not entirely comfortable with these “muddy trinkets”, and mostly these poems find a more personal voice without trading revelations, continuing the movement towards the human scale charted in her lyrics. In Honeymoon, which makes reference to her song Shake It Out, she feels the shells of those she’s hurt rattling behind her like Marley’s chains. Catharsis, it seems, isn’t without collateral damage.

The new voice, in the end, emerges analytical, cooler, starker. Some of the final poems in the collection are entitled I Guess I Won’t Write Poetry and I Cannot Write About This, playing self-referentially with the strange, novel tone with a spare confidence.

Welch’s mother is a professor of Renaissance studies at King’s College London who worried about her daughter skipping university to focus on her musical career, lamenting “what a waste of a brain!” Both the lyrics and the poetry in Useless Magic validate Welch’s choice, offering a chance to appreciate on the bare stage of the blank page the fineness of her words. And like fellow poet-musician Nick Cave (thanked for “inspiration and encouragement” here), Welch has found a way for the song and the voice of the rabbit-hearted girl to coexist. As she says herself: “you can have everything”.

• Useless Magic: Lyrics and Poetry by Florence Welch is published by Fig Tree (£20).

THE GUARDIAN

Joss Stone / The Love We Had

Joss Stone

Joss Stone

 The Love We Had 

(Stays On My Mind) 

Lately baby, I've been thinking
How good it was when you were here
And it ain't the wine that I been drinking
For once I feel my head is clear

But early this morning, when I opened up my eyes
That old lonesome feeling took me by surprise
I guess you meant more to me than I realized
The love we had stays on my mind
The love we had stays on my mind

And lately girl, I've been remembering
The good times that we used to share
My thoughts of you don't have an ending
And memories of you are everywhere

But why should I tell you, it's not your concern
You win some, you lose some
Well I've lost and I've learned
It's just that I'm so lonely
With no place to turn
And here at the end, I find
Yes I do

The love we had stays on my mind
Girl, if you were nearer
If you had a mirror
Maybe you…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiOMUIBkE5c

Andrew Motion on how to write a love poem

Penning poetry for the one you love? Here are five basic rules by Britain’s former poet laureate

Andrew Motion
Wed 11 Feb 2016

T

raditionally, love poems were written in sonnet form, but they don’t have to be. Find the form that suits what you are going to say. It could be a haiku or even a limerick. Be true, be forthright, and don’t get caught up in other people’s ideas of what being in love is like, or some inherited ideal of a love poem. Concentrate on the realities of the person that you are dealing with. Don’t disguise them as some kind of ideal – they are going to want to feel that’s my poem, that’s my expression, that’s what we did together.

Here are my five rules:

1 Speak from your heart. Poets have in their toolbox every trick of rhetoric and linguistic structuring - from alliteration to zeugma. The toolbox is there to be ransacked, but the strength of your feelings might be diverted if you get too tied up with technical stuff.

2 Simply to say “I love you” or “you’re beautiful” is not interesting. Remember William Carlos Williams’ advice about writing - there is no truth but in things. So be particular. Things have a fascination that abstractions don’t. A reader will be more likely to identify with your poem if there are references to personal situations or particular features - be it their body, attitude or behaviour.

3 A sense of humour is not at odds with passionate intensity. Catching the ridiculousness of a situation doesn’t betray the subject or misrepresent the strength of your feelings. And don’t shy away from flaws. The whole business of being attracted to people is connected to their imperfections.

4 Pay attention to rhymes and rhythms and the sound your words make. The sound of the thing is as important as the dictionary definition of the words.

5 Revise, revise, revise. Our first thoughts are almost never our best.

THE GUARDIAN

Illustration by Geroca

Poem of the week: Us by Zaffar Kunial

An only apparently informal riff on an only apparently straightforward concept of identity finds some sparky complications

Carol Rumens

Mon 2 Jul 2018 10.00 BST

Us

by Zaffar Kunial

If you ask me, us takes in undulations –
each wave in the sea, all insides compressed –
as if, from one coast, you could reach out to

the next; and maybe it’s a Midlands thing
but when I was young, us equally meant me,says the one, ‘Oi, you, tell us where yer from’;

and the way supporters share the one fate –
I, being one, am Liverpool no less –
cresting the Mexican wave of we or us,

a shore-like state, two places at once, God
knows what’s in it; and, at opposite ends
my heart’s sunk at separations of us.

When it comes to us, colour me unsure.
Something in me, or it, has failed the course.
I’d love to think I could stretch to it – us –

but the waves therein are too wide for words.
I hope you get, here, where I’m coming from.
I hope you’re with me on this – between love

and loss – where I’d give myself away, stranded
as if the universe is a matter of one stress.
Us. I hope, from here on, I can say it

and though far-fetched, it won’t be too far wrong.

The relaxed vernacular of Zaffar Kunial’s newly published first collection, Us, may at first conceal the precision with which his poems search the vexations of identity. The reaches of the search are exposed most plainly in the knowingly titled Self-Portrait as Bottom. Like the title poem, the self-portrait references Tony Harrison’s 40-year-old sonnet diptych Them and [uz], in which the sneering literature teacher told the working-class pupil Harrison, “You’re one of those / Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!”

Kunial’s speaker, unlike Harrison’s, doesn’t spit up furious “glottals”: more subtle and contemporary, he dispatches his gobs of spit “to a lab across the Irish sea” for the DNA ancestry test. The simply complex equation that he first announces, “50% Europe. / 50% Asia,” demands sub-divisions genetic and linguistic, leading to a surprising, tenuous ethnic link between the poet’s Kashmiri father and Midlands-born mother. Themes of disconnection are tacitly present in the title poem, this week’s choice.

“Waves” form a useful metaphor: the sea-like “undulations” of line one develop into the solidarity-asserting “Mexican wave” of stanza three. For the football supporter, such actions emphasise separation, too, “a shore-like state, two places at once” or a sense of solidarity cut in half: “… and, at opposite ends / my heart’s sunk at separations of us.”

“Us” means “me” in many English dialects: Kunial hears it in his native city, Birmingham, in the shout of mixed aggression and curiosity, “Oi you, tell us where yer from.” In Harrison’s Them and [uz], the pronoun symbolises attempts by the ruling “educated” class to exclude him, but it belongs to the future poet’s own dialect, and he’s able to seize the language back (“RIP RP”) with a mature, furious confidence not available to Kunial’s persona, whose sense of language rights is less clear-cut. All the same, a quietly intricate assertion of language possession has been set in motion, as modest little phrases like “the one” and innocent-looking prepositions such as “from” are slotted quietly into different facets of emphases.

Difference and familiarity deftly combine in the idiomatic, euphemistic “colour me unsure”. Now the waves, as hand signals or undulations, fail to breach distance: the water seems too wide. The speaker hasn’t given up, though: repetitions of “here” demonstrate Kunial’s delicate sense of nuance, as if “here” were no less complicated a verbal sign as “us”, as if it could be transformed into identity-grounding solidity. The rough-breathing alliteration of “hear” and “hope” gasps uncertainty without checking the smooth rhythmic flow. That image of two shores, two sides, rescues from unlocatable abstraction, the territory “between love and loss”. “Us” may be the uncertain location of coupledom as well as community, and here, too, the speaker may somehow be undone, given away like a missed goal, “stranded / as if the universe is a matter of one stress”.

Kunial’s puns are never mere play, and here the key word, “stress”, is cleverly chosen. “Us” as a concept creates stress for those who refuse or are refused belonging. That the single-syllable, two-letter English word could sum up and unite the universe is pressed on the speaker by some further excited vulnerability of doubt and desire (“I hope you’re with me on this”). A couple’s “us” seems to extend to the hope, at least, of a broader collective identity.

The pronoun has meanwhile shed its italics. Even that typographical shift lends it a more neighbourly look. The resolution gracing this poem turns out to be temporary: the sequence immediately following on from Us, Ys (the last poem in the collection), painfully searches paths through childhood experiences of disconnection and separation. Us provides the collection’s title but not Kunial’s last word: the grit that originates and animates his calm and assured-seeming poems is identity, which consists of interestingly twisted strands of connection and disconnection. The two-letter word is less a sea-girt island than an undulating, wavily glittering continent. There’s a hopefulness about its utterance, even so.

Us is published this week by Faber & Faber. Kunial is currently poet in residence at Ledbury poetry festival 2018 (29 June to 8 July).

THE GUARDIAN

Andrew Motion / Ice

Ice Hands
by Adam Wignall

Ice

By Andrew Motion

When friends no longer remembered
the reasons we set forth,
I switched between nanny and tartar
driving us on north.

Will you imagine a human hand
welded by ice to wood?
And skin when they chip it off?
I don’t think you should.

By day the appalling loose beauty
of prowling floes:
lions’ heads, dragons, crucifix-wrecks,
and a thing like a blown rose.

By night the seething hiss
of killers cruising past –
the silence after each fountain-jet,
and our hearts aghast.

Of our journey home and the rest
there is nothing more to say.
I have lived and not yet died.
I have sailed in the Scotia Sea.

 

Cavafy / The Complete Poems / Review

Constantine Cavafy, around 1900

CP Cavafy: The Complete Poems – review

The Greek observer of human folly refuses to be entombed by his latest translator's academic thoroughness

Paul Bailey

Fri 31 May 2013

W

hen Constantine Cavafy died on 29 April 1933, his 70th birthday, his work was little known beyond Greece and Alexandria, where he spent most of his life. In 1935, with the publication of the first substantial collection of his poems, he began to receive the critical attention his genius merited. His foremost, lasting admirer was another great Greek poet, George Seferis, who observed: "Outside his poetry Cavafy does not exist."

That was in 1946, when several of Cavafy's friends and acquaintances were still alive. Yet the remark is not a harsh one, because the artist he was referring to was the least self-assertive of men. He worked for 30 years as a civil servant in the ministry of irrigation, sometimes making extra money as a broker in the Alexandria stock exchange. His lovers, golden youths who needed money to buy clothes, have all disappeared into the nameless history that accounts for the majority of the human race.

He was fluent in three languages besides his own – English, French and Italian – and enjoyed reading detective stories when he wasn't immersed in the classic Greek and Latin texts that had captured his quizzical and ironic imagination from an early age. In his 60s, he described himself, aptly, as a "poet-historian" and a "poet-novelist".

Daniel Mendelsohn, the latest of his many translators, has had access to Cavafy's 30 unfinished poems and four fragmentary pieces. This beautifully produced book is therefore as complete an edition as one can expect. Mendelsohn's scholarship is formidable. He produces mini-biographies of the emperors, mystics and martyrs who populate the ancient civilisation Cavafy captures with such beguiling immediacy. No previous editor or translator has been so thorough. It could be said, with a certain accuracy, that Mendelsohn is a larger presence here than his unassuming subject. He takes slight issue with WH Auden, who said that Cavafy survives translation, as very few poets do. Auden counted the Alexandrian as one of his main influences, and knew what he was talking about. Mendelsohn argues that the poems are more lyrical, more musical in their original form. This may well be true, but it's not just a matter of coincidence that Cavafy's poetic voice sounds much the same in the renderings into French, by Marguerite Yourcenar, and the English versions of John Mavrogordato, Rae Dalven, and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.

Let me cite two versions of a single poem "One Night", which was started in 1907 and completed in 1916:

The room was cheap and sordid,

hidden above the suspect taverna.

From the window you could see the alley,

dirty and narrow. From below

came the voices of workmen

playing cards, enjoying themselves.

And there on that ordinary, plain bed

I had love's body, knew those intoxicating lips,

red and sensual,

red lips so intoxicating

that now as I write, after so many years,

in my lonely house, I'm drunk with passion again.

That was by Keeley and Sherrard, writing under the benign guidance of the foremost expert on Cavafy, George Savidis. And this is how Mendelsohn renders it:

The room was threadbare and tawdry,

hidden above that suspect restaurant.

From the window you could see the alley,

which was filthy and narrow. From below

came the voices of some laborers

who were playing cards and having a carouse.

And there in that common, vulgar bed

I had the body of love, I had the lips,

sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness –

the rose of such a drunkenness, that even now

as I write, after so many years have passed!,

in my solitary house, I am drunk again.

It could be that Mendelsohn is more accurate than Keeley and Sherrard, but it's their interpretation I prefer. Their ears are attuned to colloquial English, whereas Mendelsohn's aren't. "Having a carouse" is as ugly as it is daft. I can't recall ever having had one. They opt for "intoxicating", which suggests delirious happiness, rather than the unromantic "drunkenness" he uses. That interfering exclamation mark spoils the look as well as the felicitous melancholy of the poem, as Keeley and Sherrard understood. Their edition of the collected poems, published in 1975, remains unsurpassed.

Those dates of composition demand some explanation. It was Cavafy's habit to set down a few lines on a sheet of paper and then place the sheet in an envelope for future inspection. He stored these envelopes in his cluttered apartment, opening them when he felt capable of bringing the half-poems they contained to a satisfactory end. This was his lifelong method. Whenever a poem was finished, he showed it to a discerning friend, not an editor or a publisher. What seems so spontaneous, on the page is the result of years of rewriting and rethinking.

It was EM Forster, who befriended him in Alexandria during the first world war, who said of Cavafy that he stood "absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe". He remained thus, this acute observer of human folly, throughout his heroically ordinary life. He celebrates homosexual desire in a way his near-contemporary AE Housman never could. Housman escorts the living to death, but Cavafy restores the dead to moments of sublime liveliness. This new volume is top-heavy with Mendelsohn's knowledge, yet Cavafy refuses to be entombed academically. He flies free, in his straw hat and his dapper suit, from even the worthiest explication.

• Paul Bailey's Chapman's Odyssey is published by Bloomsbury

THE GUARDIAN

Juan Ramón Jiménez / Elemental Creature

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan Ramón Jiménez

‘Elemental Creature’

A member of the Spanish modernistas, Juan Ramón Jiménez published his first volume of poetry at the age of eighteen with help from the movement’s leader, Rubén Darío. Platero y yo (1917), a long prose poem about a man and his donkey, set near his birthplace of Moguer, Andalusia, made him popular in both Latin America and the United States. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Jiménez and his wife, the poet Zenobia Camprubí, fled the country. They began an itinerant life of exile that would lead them to Cuba, Florida, Washington D.C., and finally to Puerto Rico, where the couple settled in 1946. Jiménez remained there for the rest of his life, his lyrical and philosophical work influencing Puerto Rican writers such as Giannina Braschi, Manuel Ramos Otero and René Marqués. Among his best-known works are Sonetos espirituales (1916), Piedra y cielo (1919) and Voces de mi copla (1945). An advocate of what he called la poesía desnuda (naked poetry), Jiménez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956 for his poems “of high spirit and artistic purity”. He died two years later.

Identity and the construction/deconstruction of self was one of Jiménez’s most frequent subjects, especially in the collection Animal de fondo(1947), in which he explored the religious preoccupations that governed the last years of his life. He was also heavily influenced by the French Symbolists, including Valéry, Mallarmé and Rimbaud. Following their lead, he rejected naturalism and realism in favour of a poetry that could more easily accommodate dreams, visions and athletic leaps of logic. In “Elemental Creature”, for example, a seemingly disembodied voice speaks from what he calls “a depth / which is the sacred well of myself”, addressing a higher power that he alternately deems “you”, “Thou” and “god”. The point of the poem, however, is not to serve as a prayer, but rather to locate an awareness or “loving consciousness” beyond the physical. Jiménez insists that this god exists to connect the speaker not only to this higher plane, but also to himself: “You were, to make me think that you were you, / to make me feel that I was you, / to make me rejoice that I was I”. “Elemental Creature” refuses to offer the reader any certainties, even at the level of rhyme and metre, for as Jiménez wrote: “When one wishes to express something profound, one does not express it in jingles”. The poet, he suggests, must instead invent an entirely new language – more “elemental” – to address “the light of a conscience / greater than all the dreams”.

Elemental Creature

“My element is air” – I said –,
“I am a creature founded on air” – over the earth –,
now over the sea; having passed, like the air, through a sun
which high above is carbon, my outer self, and illuminates
with its coal my second compass of destiny.

But you, god, are also in this element
and you see this light, from another sphere projected;
Thou art and you are
the great and small in me,
in a proportion which is my own,
infinite toward a depth
which is the sacred well of myself.

And you were in this well before
with the flower, the swallow, the bull,
and the water; with dawn
a carmine arrival of renovated life;
with sunset a golden flight of glory.
In this daily well you were with me,
with me, boy, youth, man, and I was drowning
not knowing you, I was drowning not remembering you.
This well which was, just and nothing less
than the centre of the earth and its life.

You were in the magic well the destiny
of all destinies in sensuality beautiful
aware that to enjoy in the fullness
of loving consciousness
is the greatest virtue transcending us.

You were, to make me think that you were you,
to make me feel that I was you,
to make me rejoice that you were I,
to make me shout that I was I
in the element of air in which I am,
where I am creature founded on air,
with wings stilled in the air,
wings that move in the light of a conscience
greater than all the dreams
of eternities and infinities
which are later, no more than I am now, of the air.

Juan Ramón Jiménez
Translated by J. L. Gili (1957)

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