Reviews
Ira Lightman and Peter Finch - Friday, May 9, 2008
Ira Lightman is no slouch when it comes to the art of Dada, which might be translated as making the best of your mistakes. He confessed to the audience that he had brought the wrong file to the reading. Never mind. He picked up his ukulele and sang to us. He read some brilliant work from the top of his head and chose at random poems from recent publications. It worked perfectly. What a breath of fresh air and always I felt in the presence of a mind happy to improvise as well as nail down. Ira has been a singer with a rock band in his time, which gave his ukulele songs a certain frisson of devil-may-care.
Honours were shared with Peter Finch. Together they delivered a homage to Robert Recorde, who invented the equals sign. The collaboration was first premiered on BBC Radio 3's The Verb to celebrate the 450th birthday of =. The poets made the sign stand up so that the = became ll and much fun was had with English words with ll and then Welsh ones. Peter, current chief executive of the Welsh Academi, gave full throttle to the Welsh pronunciation of the famous ll.
Peter has been described as funnier than most stand ups. His lugubrious poem about the state of the student home of his son had me crying with laughter. Excellent poetry and delivered with perfect timing.
A decent crowd appreciated the sense of adventure provided by Lightman & Finch. Boundaries were continually crossed and words were bouncing around the room. Behind all the impromptu performances one could detect razor sharp minds. Exhilarating.
Jackie Litherland
Kitty Fitzgerald and John Hartley Williams - Friday, March 14, 2008
Kitty Fitzgerald, novelist, dramatist, filmmaker, educationalist, poet, read to us from two works, Pigtopia and a work in progress, `The Intimacy of Strangers`, both novels. Pigtopia, published in 2005, has been an international success. It tells of the doomed relationship between Jack Plum, an older deformed man, Holly Lock, a young girl, and Jack`s alcoholic, TB-infested, mentally ill mother. Jack has completed the building of Pig Paradise started by his father complete with `Pig Plodging Pool`, a paradise he seeks to share with Holly. He speaks in Pig Language. Kitty knows a thing or two about pigs and three or four more things about humans, the latter derived no doubt from other elements of her non-literary career which ranges from Butter Maid, Wax Trimmer (what is a Wax Trimmer, Kitty?) to Art Lecturer. She says that once she had Jack`s first sentence, ‘Mam says Dad was Pigflesh and Pigmind', she could then hear Jack`s voice and was able to evolve Jack`s language. ‘Jack Plum`s patois slowly emerged and took shape a little like the difficult birth of a piglet.'
The content of Kitty`s work has been compared to a bewildering range of other great works and great writers. John Steinbeck, the film Babe, Harper Lee`s To Kill a Mockingbird and Animal Farm. Characters from Frankenstein`s Monster to Tracy Beaker amongst others.
In the first reading the strange seductive Pig Language dominated. This is not the language of thin innocence but a true rich hybrid where the whole is more than the parts. Kitty has said, ‘I wanted to draw readers into a world where pigsense has more value than human sense.' The critic Andrew O`Hehir has described Pig Language as ‘a species bridging combination of animal intuition and human wisdom'. After all the source of hybrid is hybrida, defined as ‘offspring of a tame sow and wild boar, child of a freeman and slave'.
In her second reading, a common language divides a patient suffering from a strange epilepsy-like disease from her baffled and baffle-making consultant. The patient won't be patient and won't be fobbed off by an impenetrable diagnosis of `Malformation of the Hippocampus`. This conjures an image of `Large Gay Mammals`, the patient says. The mutual frustrations of doctor and patient result in his flight with white coat tails flying and her reassertion of independence and sanity in the street life of the city. We were left anticipating further moves into the linguistic complexity of Med Language.
Listening to John Hartley Williams is like having a poetic Jack-in-the-Box in front of you. Trouble is, this is a special box. It is cool, urbane and elegant on the outside. He is, after all, a university lecturer, a renowned translator and reviewer, so show some respect please! Suddenly the Jack flies out, vivid colourful, explosive, surreal, funny, tragic, `in yr face`, and always from an unpredicted side of the box. You sit wide-eyed, startled, your senses sharpened. You laugh and yelp at the same time, just as the Jack-in-the-Box intended. John says, in the introduction to his latest volume Ship, that he is dithyrambic, meaning vehement and wild in character, and that his adversarial poetic stance requires him to camouflage himself. His publisher acknowledges this multiple poetic personality when he says: ‘John Hartley Williams may well contain several poets, all of them jostling for expression. These would include his younger self and many of his aliases, the lover, the satirist, the anarchist, the lyricist, the experimentalist, the saboteur.'
John read from a selection of his works including Canada, Blues, Spending Time with Walter and Ship. He displayed the multifaceted nature of his poetic voice fully. In `Count Koff`s conducted tour`, a hay-fever-related meditation on bodily fluids, he left me feeling sticky. In `My Father was an Interventionist` we experienced through the eyes of a child and then an adult a tender picture of a father. `Bean Soup` took us into the cuisine and music of Yugoslavia via a poignant memory of a young man's escapades. I could taste that rich meal. `In Which He Imagines His Beloved is a Floating Restaurant` reveals a comic, jolly, thumpingly erotic lover:
I`ll stroll the deck of you,
stroke your polished side,
caress the workmanship of you,
catch the rising tide.
In `Dan Dare of the Cosmos Ballroom` we cross space to investigate the temptation of Dan Dare, a `comic hero` in more senses than one. Of course, inevitably, John has heard the voice of the Mekon, leader of the Treens, just as Kitty heard the voice of Jack Plum. He reproduced the whining high-pitched tone of the Mekon`s words of welcome to Venus with terrible stunning accuracy:
Welcome to the planet
humans dream of on their cold blue ball.
Welcome to the temperature of pleasant being.
Dispel colonial ideas.
We`ve been watching humans from afar.
How could anyone invent a game like cricket?
This was a sumptuous evening of subtle sounds superlatively read by both writers. A fine ending to a remarkable season of readings.
Keith Parker
Jo Colley and Nicholas Johnson - Friday, February 22, 2008
Jo Colley, in her latest collection Weeping for the Lovely Phantoms (Salt Publishing), creates a poetry of deep unease. This is poetry about individuals in collisions and breakings, often violent, often sexually charged, frequently sinister. In this work we often experience the paranoid moment before the dreadful event, as in `Welcome to the Hotel Caledonia`. Set in an environment where "Architectural gems grace the footpath", in this case Glasgow but it could be Tyneside, you wait in your hotel room:
With nowhere left to run
you sit on one of the twin beds
your back to the door.
Wait for the terse knock
the questions you can`t answer.
Dread the moment when
they force your pillowcased head
under the water for the final time.
What enhances the unease is the cinematic clarity of the form and image. There is no mistaking and hence no avoiding Charles Manson`s killer acolytes in `Make it a Real Nice Murder`:
They are his barefoot soldiers
his Vietcong spiked with methedrine
a distant twister coming up fast
through the peachy Californian dusk.
Jo pays homage to Hitchcock in the `Moving Image` section of the collection. Like Hitchcock she is the mistress of the anxious image, flicking from normalcy to threat, the vein of this sensibility. It surfaces again in the `Still Life` section of the book in what might appear at first glance as a perfectly innocent situation. In `Cherry Picker`, a poem about gathering a windfall of wild fruit, we begin with a superb image of cherries:
He can`t sleep for thinking of them - hanging
dark red, in fleshy clusters
their tight moonlit skins shine
bright enough for birds to see their faces in.
But not so simple, or perhaps appallingly simple, when he returns to the house he:
comes home laden
stained purple
sated.
I look and look again in my mind's eye at this purple stained man and shiver. Paul Summers has said that "Jo Colley`s poetic personas can tenderly act out the unpicking of their labyrinthine back stories". In ‘Cherry Picker' as in so many of these excellent pieces I see the movie of the labyrinthine story about to start as I take my seat and the lights in this poetic cinema begin to dim.
In the poetry of Nicholas Johnson we move from the cinematic to the operatic. In his reading we were served generous portions of his collections Pelt, Cleave and Show amongst others. Like any opera on first experiencing it you may not follow all of the plot or understand all of the words. You can always buy the script from Etruscan Books to study in depth later. This is poetry that pulls you initially into its sound. Soft West Country, flecked with dialect, a poetry of half distinct drifting voices, each firmly located but floating in a landscape, seascape, skyscape of images. Savour this from `Shore Body`:
But if you live above lines of the tide
Impaled on the sand, then you are
in the moist way above the hips a keen
swimmer, athlete, farm hand all-in; in your
own way one who jugs hedges
for sloes, berries, hazels, you may be a
soldier in the next war or the next
plague. There is a doubt-crest on the rooves
of stalls, talets, barns and that is
lit by meshes of the government-
-octopus. This is a tall year,
plentiful in cold winds rattling through
maize stalks, a wind cold and crisper,
drier that we knowed it a long time
This year must end in peril
Nicholas had difficulty getting the light to read his poems correctly positioned. He threatened at one point to perch the Colpitts table lamp on his shoulder like some illuminated parrot recently flown in from Blackpool. This difficulty, he noted, made him read more slowly than his normal fast pace. Colpitts' own perceptive poet critic S. J. Litherland urged him, in her vote of thanks, to pursue more `slow poetry`. It would allow us more easily to breath in his unique and charmed blend of landscape, voices and situations.
Keith Parker
Siobhán Campbell and Gillian Allnutt – Friday 8 February
Memorable is an overworked word at Colpitts these days. We’re having a brilliant year. Yet ‘memorable’ it has to be to describe the evening with Gillian Allnutt and Siobhán Campbell. The room was packed. All the chairs were used up. There was an air of expectancy. Siobhán wowed us with poems about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. She was worried about reading them, thinking them too harsh and stark for our audience. But clearly we were prepared to stomach the truth about violence. Siobhán was assured that she should continue.
Her poems have a wonderful clarity, a liquid quality which makes her subject matter even stronger. There is a direct gaze here which does not waver. They are beautiful poems with tough observations and the tension between the reality of violence in human nature and the aesthetics of her poetry is keenly felt. She sees that a general base code of bullying and brutality will allow for larger transgressions. Small acts of violence create a climate where killing becomes permissible.
It was a privilege to be at this reading. Both poets read in a very intimate way, sharing their deepest thoughts and feelings. Gillian Allnutt seems to have reached an accommodation with herself that allows a special kind of delivery. Sitting in the lamplight and candlelight, she read her poems as if handing out each word to the audience. I jotted down these thoughts at the time: her poems are no longer earthly: they meditate, they scorch our vision, like scripture, like the language of scrolls unburied from the hillside in fragments.
It was extraordinary to be there, as if eavesdropping on a performance that was so transparent and pure Gillian had become like a flame herself. It culminated in a wonderful poem about her mother, which is a Sestina. Something I only found out afterwards. Every moment of the poem was so lived, recalled, and memorialised that it was like travelling on a journey from breath to breath, waiting for the incandescence to burn us too. The poem is called Attenuation and if you want to carry it around with you, it is in her little pamphlet Hob Green. The key words in the poem are piano, heart, nocturne, turquoise, stone, wait. Never have I been so enchanted by the appearance of words in a dance.
Jackie Litherland
Hugh McMillan and Mike Barlow - Friday, January 18, 2008
The new year saw us back in the Ritson Hall, Alington House having been reprieved, largely through the efforts of Colpitts own Patty O'Boyle. The poets had been contacted after reviews in the magazine Other Poetry, an example of cross-fertilization in the grass roots! After a cliff-hanging moment around 8 p.m., an audience of some two dozen materialized and enjoyed a very strong reading from Hugh McMillan who had journeyed down from Ayrshire and Mike Barlow across from Lancaster. Hugh went first in each half and attacked with humour subjects not in themselves sources of hope. These included a childhood deserted of paternal presence, teaching in the target practice of modern secondary schools and the dreary side of urban Scotland. There was a fine directness and sympathetic poetic persona here. From his fourth collection (Strange Bamboo, Shoestring Press), the poem 'Marked' gives an account of marking 1000 exam scripts in a bar sustained by many pints and the colloquy he has with one Linn McGarr's brilliantly wrong answers to the History paper
and Trotsky, you say, overthrew Stalin.
Credit will always be given
to valid pieces of wishful thinking.
Mike Barlow won the 2006 national Poetry Comp and his work in Another Place (Salt Publishing) more tends towards the abstract than Hugh's and works from a less direct angle. It made an equally strong impression though. This reviewer remembers particularly the poem 'Rosie' about a work-horse relishing a task after semi-retirement and a poem where a social question to a colleague elicits the news that he has just lost children and marriage. The two are looking out of a window at the busy river scene and the poet who has suffered the same events cannot think of anything useful to say. The image of the two looking out of the window stirs with implication - the separateness of lives, the privacy of experience.
Michael Standen
Yana Glembotskaya and Oleg Burkov replaced by Tatyana Fedoseyeva, Vera Zhdanovich Svetlana Bershadskaya and Irina Graf - Friday 30 November 2007
Poetry is a land of forking paths luckily for Colpitts. It had seemed a dire moment when Andy Croft phoned us on the morning of the Russian reading of contemporary Siberian poetry to say both his Russian readers were still stuck in their homeland denied Visas by the British. Should we cancel? No was the brave decision as we sought replacements to read the work in the original at a late hour.
Then Michael Ayton, our convenor, came up trumps, not really an appropriate metaphor, as rescue came by way of his Russian speaking chess pal Ken Neat.
Ken introduced to us not one Russian but four he had recently met courtesy of Durham University. Tatyana Fedoseyeva, Vera Zhdanovich, Svetlana Bershadskaya and Irina Graf were all beautiful like muses and read eloquently and to give the evening a fairy tale twist: they all came from Siberia. One even had spangles in her hair. They could have stepped out of the pages Doctor Zhivago. It was a magical evening.
Tatyana tells me that she read first: the poems were ‘Last year I lived at the bottom of a bottle’ and ‘The snow was falling all night outside my window’. She was followed by Vera, Svetlana and Irina.
Andy did justice to the great poetry in the new Smokestack collection Permanent Winter and the Russians gave us a glimpse of the melody of the originals, the passion, the force and the nuances of the poets they selected to read. A small but rapt audience included the Prize-winning poet Gillian Allnutt who pronounced her fascination with Siberia and her satisfaction with the reading.
Jackie Litherland
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