Reviews
Jenny Lewis and Valerie Laws - Friday, November 16, 2007
On Friday 16th November there was an excellent reading at Alington House, beleaguered venue in the heart of Durham. Two poets had come before a good Colpitts audience, numbering short of forty. Both read very attractively. VAL LAWS, well-known in the region, had come down from Whitley Bay.She read quite a tranche of new work, principally poems about pathology reflecting her placement at London's Museum of Pathology where she has a residency, along with a visual artist and funded by the Welcome Trust . The museum houses abnormal foetuses and other organs preserved in jars. There is a grisly Gormanghastly aspect to this subject matter but Val's poems express true compassion. This is an area bang up-to-date in the Genetic Age we are entering. She also read from her recent collection Quantum Sheep some feisty numbers (though that adjective must be reaching its sell-by date).
JENNY LEWIS has many connections with the North-East but lives in Oxford where she is involved with the MA in Creative Writing. Quite a struggle to get it officially accepted. Jenny herself trained at the Ruskin School of Art and is a painter as well as poet. She also holds down a day-job in the official nexus of Government in London. Her reading style is warm and calm and collected - from Fathom, her newest Carcanet collection and from new work. Not only new work but also her witty take/ take-off from Fire Extinguisher Instructions. This is a poem which has enjoyed study in many of the nation's schools and has been read on the radio by famous omnipresent Roger McGough - not only read by him but allegedly STOLEN and passed off as one of his best poems! We were told this theft occurred at Lumb Bank, where Jenny Lewis was a fledgling poet and he the tutor. You sometimes learn surprising things at Colpitts - and nearly every time you can bet on having an informal, warming evening. This reading by Val and Jenny was that par excellence.
Michael Standen
Michael Standen and Ian Horn - Friday, November 9, 2007
With the threat of Alington House's closure hanging over us like the sword of Damocles, it was a relief to have a full house for Michael Standen and Ian Horn. It gave us confidence for the future wherever we may find a home. Both poets are on Colpitts Poetry committee and have new books out. From Michael we have his Selected Poems Leaves at Midnight (Shoestring Press), and Ian's The Singing Ducks of Amiens is due from Mudfog on December 2. To say that both have a homely anecdotal tone is not to underestimate the wit underlying the sharp observations and story telling.
Ian gave us a preview of his forthcoming booklet. A miner's son, he lives in Shotton Colliery, a misnomer as the colliery is long gone. But that is the landscape that pervades his work: the loss of the pits, the new industries and lifestyles coming in, and the sense of roots and rootlessness. He has the authentic East Durham voice, understated with dry wit and deadpan humour. By staying put, as it were, he is speaking for his region at time of transition.
The persona he creates in his work reminds me very much of Chaucer's in The Parliament of Fowls, casting himself as the onlooker while others get on with life. Chaucer's very funny poem ends with the ducks upbraiding the eagles for going on too long with their courtly wooing. It is that tone of the down-to-earth mocking the romantic eccentric which Ian brings off so well because we know he has the romantic in him.
Mick was described by Jo Colley in Still Standen, a collection of poems celebrating his 70th birthday, as follows:
Happy Birthday Mr Treasurer
Mick Mick we don't mean Michael
Hits the groove like Hoagy Carmichael
He's a dude, he's a mensch, he's a real good egg
he's still standing on at least one leg
He's a poetry master he's an eminence grise
He's a subtle warrior who moves by degrees
It's all in the eyebrows, it's all in the look
He's a coiled spring with a handy cheque book.
Mick Mick and we don't mean Mike
Speaks in French which we kind of like
Handsome devil, a bit of a dog
In the Colpitts' wheel, he's a well oiled cog
We love him to pieces we love him to bits
If the cap says Maestro it certainly fits
So light the candles and cut the cake
Pour him a large one for goodness sake!
His poetry is very much the man: ‘It's all in the eyebrows, it's all in the look': witty, laid back and elegant. I've always admired Mick's elegant turn of phrase, which I first met in the prose of his five novels and many short stories. He has transposed this style seamlessly to his poetry. It could be summed up as humorous with serious intent. In performance there is a smile always threatening to appear and yet the eyes can flash too with anger at indignities and injustices observed. The style is so well handled we might miss the adroitness of the mind that went into it. It is good to have the work in a Selected Poems so that the best of Mick's poetry is now in one volume. He has given us snapshots of his life in Durham and of his travels. Mick's highest accolade for anyone is that they are ‘a good thing'. His poetry and his life are certainly ‘a good thing': he's ‘a mensch', as Jo Colley says. Despite being suspicious of new trends in poetry, especially from America, and his own insistence of the eternal verities of the 1950s, it is obvious that his work has absorbed subtly the nuances of the present.
Jackie Litherland
Robert Gray 19th October 2007
The COLPITTS season started with a visitor from down-under, the artist and poet, Robert Gray. So wide and various is the literary world that it is always a pleasure to meet with new unknown-to-you's and find so much shared. Gray is not unknown in Australia or indeed in Japan. He was relaxed and charming with a fairly ample audience. He told us of getting to know difficult Patrick White, he told us of his father, colourful and also difficult. He read extracts of a biography of dad. Not as much of the poetry as we would have liked, but what we did get stays in the mind's eye with a cool unusual pictorial quality.
Luke Wright and Daljit Nagra - Friday, June 15, 2007
Luke Wright, one of the best practitioners of the current performance poetry scene came to Colpitts armed with an impressive attack of word play. His fast paced delivery delighted the regulars, in particular Barrie Ormsby a locally-based artist.
His topics included celebrity culture, pop-music, and shopping in Primark. Luke Wright is a young man still learning his trade with an abundance of energy that exploded around Alington House.
This was an exciting and entertaining performance. His debut book (Penguin) is due very soon.
Our other guest of the evening was Daljit Nagra. He brought an interesting British-Asian perspective and read from his highly acclaimed book Look we have coming to Dover! (Faber 2007) (which went on to win the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection). The hybrid language of stories about the aspirations and alienation of his parents’ generation was beautifully told.
It was a great night.
Ian Horn
Douglas Jones and Elizabyth Hiscox - Friday, June 1, 2007
We knew them as Douglas and Elizabyth, two delightful young Americans, poets-in-residence at St. Chad's College, Durham University. They were wonderful ambassadors for their country and poetry: a charming, clever, and beautiful couple. Yes, they were married too. We had an informal Indian meal with them, occasionally blasted by door openings of wind and rain. Not sure of what this pair from California and Arizona made of our English May and June.
Then onto their reading at Colpitts on June 1, when they became poets for us: Elizabyth Hiscox and Douglas Jones. Colpitts has had many magical evenings and this counts as one of them. Douglas is the more down to earth poet, writing of his country, the flora and fauna. Listening to him vast landscapes of America entered the room. It emphasized the different literary heritage of Americans, the legacy of Walt Whitman in particular. There was a comfortable naturalness to his poetry, shot through with strong clear images, almost filmic. By contrast Elizabyth is a cerebral poet that brought into the room the legacy of Eliot and Pound and dark ironic humour that reminded me of Kenneth Koch:
Theft
Imagine the sadness
of wanting something for yourself so badly
you would steal it, take it
from someone
someone you love -
dignity for example.
In the second half Douglas followed the fortunes of a Red-neck cowboy character. It struck me that we may share the English language but we live a world away. It made me wonder if English poets reflect our own country and culture without being aware of it. Historians may enjoy what we are preserving. It was inspiring to be in the presence of fresh talented voices from a truly different land and literary tradition from our own.
Their visit ended with a farewell Colpitts lunch around the kitchen table of Mick Standen, which can tell many a tale of poets there.
Ian Horn, Mick Standen and myself (Jackie Litherland) were joined by young poet Mark Cassell from Lanchester who is studying English at Leeds, which I always think of as Jon Silkin and Tony Harrison territory. Jon's ghost was certainly hovering over the table. We talked for seven hours of poetry and life. What else is there to talk about from noon to evening? I was reminded of a romantic vision of café society I had always dreamt of, either in Paris or Vienna, where poets used to drop in. This was even better. I hope Elizabyth and Douglas will return home to their work as creative writing tutors at Arizona University with warm memories of Colpitts and Durham, despite the weather.
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