A Double Version: Lavinia Greenlaw

I’ve neglected this blog for the past month while I’ve been pleasantly overwhelmed with other poetry stuff: some great poems have started to come in for Rewiring History (and there’s still time to submit yours up until the 30th June); work on November’s poem/painting collaboration with artist Nick Maitland is progressing apace; and I’ve been busy revising the libretto for a children’s opera with composer Philip Sunderland (who has also just won an Olivier award for conducting ETO’s Paul Bunyan – congratulations, Philip).

The flip side of all this activity is that I’ve built up a backlog of books to review, and Lavinia Greenlaw’s A Double Sorrow is the one that’s been tugging at me most insistently. Continue reading →

Performance Poetry (5th century BCE)

For me, poetry is made from sound and only truly exists when it is performed (even if the performance comes from the silent voice in our own heads). This isn’t to downplay the importance of syntactic meaning, visual form or any number of other elements; but at its heart poetry is a form of spoken music (something I’ve argued before and will no doubt do so again).

I came across an interesting variation on this after meeting up with my former headmaster a few weeks ago. David Raeburn knows more about Greek tragedy as living, performed drama than anyone else I know. Continue reading →

Rewiring History

I’m excited (and mildly daunted) that next week we’ll be opening submissions for Other Countries, the anthology that Claire Trévien and I are co-editing as part of the Rewiring History project. Continue reading →

Folding Time: Jenny Lewis

I enjoyed Jenny Lewis’s Fathom very much. When I organized a multi-poet reading in Jericho last year I was delighted that Lewis agreed to take part, and her performance of Gilgamesh’s lament will stay with me for a long time. In person I found her charming, humble, smart and funny, so I have to admit to being predisposed to like her latest collection, Taking Mesopotamia, before I’d opened it.

In the event, “like” doesn’t begin to do these poems justice. Continue reading →

Close Reading: Words at Sea

Andrew McNeillie’s latest collection, Winter Moorings, was published a little over a week ago, and for my money is his strongest since the Forward-shortlisted Nevermore. The new collection takes risks with form and subject matter, including a number of successful longer pieces that riff on older poetic models (the discursive “By Ferry, Foot and Fate” tugs towards the late eighteenth century, while the experimental voice-play “An English Airman’s Death Recalled” dances elegantly and eloquently around the early radio dramas of MacNeice and Dylan Thomas). But today I want to look at one of the shorter pieces, reproduced below by kind permission of the author. Continue reading →

Poetry & Opera

Last week my wife and I ignored the flooding to travel to Cardiff for the opening night of WNO’s La Traviata – a revival of David McVicar’s 2008/2009 staging as part of the 2014 Fallen Women season. It’s a powerful production: late 19th century realism playing out across Violetta’s fallen tombstone (enlarged to a scale that’s not so much memento mori as a reduction of everything else on stage to fleeting memento vivere). Continue reading →

Going Digital

In my day job (scholarly journals publishing) I spend a lot of time wrestling with the possibilities and challenges of digital technology. I don’t mean the basic migration of readers from print copies to online versions of the same material, but the ways in which digital technology is transforming how people read and what they publish. Continue reading →

A Tremulous Thread: Basil Bunting

When I first started reading and writing poetry in the early 1990s Basil Bunting was hard to stumble across. Anthologies like The Faber Book of Modern Verse included extracts from Briggflatts, and in Croydon public library I once found a scuffed volume containing the whole thing; there was a wonderful essay in Thom Gunn’s Shelf Life; but mostly it was as if Bunting – then only eight years dead – had been airbrushed out of the picture. Continue reading →

The Vitality of the Accident: Francis Bacon

On Friday my wife and I took advantage of the Ashmolean’s late-night opening for the final week of the Francis Bacon / Henry Moore exhibition. The evening slot allowed us to miss the daytime crowds and enjoy dinner in the restaurant afterwards (giving some much-needed time to digest what we’d just seen). The exhibition itself was excellent. Continue reading →

Sketching line-breaks, writing paint

Twelve years ago, the enviably-talented Nick Maitland suggested collaborating on a project: a sequence of poems (mine) and paintings (Nick’s) would co-evolve over a number of months, with drafts and sketches bouncing off one another. Half the fun would be plunging in without a clear plan and seeing where the thing took us. But we struggled to find the right starting point and nothing came of it. Continue reading →

Gareth Prior

Poet and compulsive reader