Reading List: October 2014
The Reading List is a feature of Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog. This month contributors to the October issue share some books that held their interest.
Liz Berry
I became a mom for the first time earlier this year and I’ve loved reading poems which explore experiences of motherhood in its many forms. Kathleen Jamie’s beautiful collection Jizzen (the Scots word for childbed) moves from conception to arrival and is full of tenderness and magic; her sequence of poems called “Ultrasound” is extraordinary.
I was also very moved by Julia Copus’s The World’s Two Smallest Humans, containing a lyrical and intensely personal sequence about IVF. Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers and Carrie Etter’s Imagined Sons are both brave and unusual collections exploring adoption.
Fiona Benson’s recent debut collection, Bright Travellers, shortlisted for many awards already, is beautiful and her poems about miscarriage, loss, and motherhood are brilliant and heartbreaking. In a raw poem about the endless cycle of newborn feeding and changing, she writes: “It was always like this / a long line of women / sitting and kneeling, / out of their skins / with love and exhaustion.” How true that felt!
James Brookes
I feel I suffer from an embarrassment of riches when so many fine poetry books are appearing in the UK; it feels heartening to say I’m looking forward to the second installment of the Faber New Poets series just as much as I am new books from Penned in the Margins or Nine Arches (especially Dorothy Lehane’s Ephemeris). The only trouble with this is fearing what I’m missing; Jemma Borg’s The Illuminated World (Eyewear) and Liz Berry’s Black Country (Chatto & Windus) are two excellent ones that I have managed to catch.
The book I’ve been most glad not to miss—and I wish was more widely known in the UK and elsewhere—is Peter Davidson’s The Palace of Oblivion (Carcanet, 2008). It’s an exquisite baroque masterpiece of a debut book and I’m as likely to keep returning to it as I am to the collected work of Christopher Middleton or Geoffrey Hill, which I hope tells you as much about the quality of the book as it does about my own proclivities.
Given those proclivities, and in the furtherance of a foolhardy project, I’m reading Tacitus’s Agricola and Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae—respectively, the chief accounts of the Roman empire’s occupation and withdrawal from the British Isles. Both seem immensely and distressingly relevant to catastrophes around the globe (as, I imagine, they always have done and will do).
I would readily admit to being too insular in my reading and don’t spend nearly enough time with poetry in English from beyond these islands. I was lucky indeed, then, to be introduced to Allan Peterson’s work at the Cuisle Poetry Festival in Limerick in 2010 and I’m currently working my way back through Anonymous Or (2002), All the Lavish in Common (2006), and Fragile Acts (2012) while waiting for a copy of his new collection Precarious to cross the Atlantic.
Sophie Collins
The Men by Lisa Robertson, first published in Canada in 2006, but recently released in the UK for the first time. A+++
Rachael Allen’s Faber New Poets 9 pamphlet, just out this month. A very exciting thing.
The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed. Chapter titles include “The Contingency of Pain,” “The Performativity of Disgust,” and “Shame Before Others.”
In the Frame, an anthology of essays on women’s ekphrastic poetry, published 2009. Includes texts that focus on Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Cole Swensen, C.D. Wright, and Anne Carson, among many others. Such a brilliant intervention within a mode not only dominated and arbitrated by male writers and theorists (like every other!), but by the male gaze, to an extent that significantly surpasses other subgenres. I’m currently holding this book hostage from the library.
The Albertine Workout, Anne Carson. I saw her read the whole thing (minus appendices) on a recent trip to New York.
Matthew Francis
At any given time, I’m reading one book on my own and another with my wife; we have a domestic ritual of reading to each other over a cup of tea in the early evening. At the moment it’s Irving Finkel’s The Ark Before Noah, an account of his discoveries about the Babylonian Flood legends, which include the revelation that the Babylonian Ark was round, a supersized coracle.
On my own I’m reading Burrard Inlet, a collection of short stories by a young Canadian writer, Tyler Keevil. Tyler is a student of mine, and this is the third book he has published while still enrolled on his PhD. They’re stories of the Canadian outdoors, often about young men doing difficult and exhausting jobs, like planting conifers in a forest or working on an ice-barge. Though I’ve known Tyler’s writing for years, the story “Carving Through Woods on a Snowy Evening,” about the search for a missing snowboarder on Christmas Eve, took me aback with its haunting atmosphere and the brilliance of its descriptive prose.
I’ve just unpacked my review copy of Bedouin of the London Evening, the collected poems of Rosemary Tonks, who died this year. Tonks’s heyday was in the 1960s, and I remember reading some of her poems a little later when I was still at high school. Largely forgotten since then, she became a cult figure when a BBC radio documentary in 2009 claimed she had vanished. In fact, plagued by health problems and personal unhappiness, she had retreated into obscurity, disowning her poems, which she would not allow to be republished in her lifetime. Her style, influenced by Baudelaire and Rimbaud, is distinctive, and I’m looking forward to the chance to reassess her work.
Amy Key
I just received my contributor’s copy of Women in Clothes, by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton (& 639 others). I was slightly dejected to find my contribution whittled down to a half-line about being half-drunk, but it’s a beautiful, generous book and an important project, I think. I’m editing a book of poems on female friendship (Best Friends Forever forthcoming from The Emma Press) and as part of my research I’m reading The Friend That Got Away by Elissa Schappell and Jenny Offill—it’s a book of real life stories of friendships between women that fell away or blew up.
I’m writing a piece on Rosemary Tonks’s Bedouin of London Evening: Collected Poems, just out from Bloodaxe. It’s completely thrilling to me, as until now I’ve only have a cobbled-together copy of her book The Iliad of Broken Sentences that a kind fan emailed me some years ago.
I saw Matthea Harvey read some of her mermaid poems when she was in London earlier in the year so I’m very excited that her new book, If The Tabloids Are True What Are You?, arrived a few days ago. The book under my pillow is Sara Peters’s debut collection 1996. It’s true love.
Caleb Klaces
Within Habit by Oli Hazzard is a beautiful, fastidiously designed book roughly the width and height of a road atlas, and there are lots of routes you could take through it. Each page presents two blocks of prose broken up in unexpected ways. Hazzard has done something peculiar with the poetic line, forcing breaks and absences to highlight leaps the mind habitually makes. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun being reminded of the predictability of my own thought.
Almost certainly less significant for British poetry, and not in fact poetry at all, is I, Partridge by Alan Partridge (played on screen by Steve Coogan), the movingly deluded adventures of a mediocre man. Alan never fails to have the last laugh, even when he has shot dead a guest on his short-lived TV chat show, and is crying. The footnotes, which tell you among other things when to play the next track of an accompanying playlist, read like the definitive end point of the literary footnote, and probably of postmodernism.
Roy Fisher’s 1966 prose work The Ship’s Orchestra has much in common with David Foster Wallace’s essay on cruising, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” There do not seem to be any guests on Fisher’s ship, though—just several bored musicians playing their instruments, and a troupe of actors playing the musicians. The pianist narrator’s actor “goes past, treading lightly, his big shoulders affable. […] He has useless-looking hands of course. Who will play for the soundtrack, will there be any soundtrack, etc. As well as his own breakfast, he has eaten mine.”
Hannah Lowe
I’ve just read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. I was struck by the sheer enormity of the narrative—it took ten years to write, and you can tell! It’s a wonderful, page-turning read as a whole, but my favourite section was the part set in Las Vegas—Tartt’s fantastic depiction of that landscape and milieu, and the relationship of two damaged, irreverent teenagers. Before that I read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which I’d never read before. I found the end almost unbearable—a 400-page build up to inevitable catastrophe.
Poetry-wise, I’ve been reading the Edwin Morgan: Collected Poems. What I love about Morgan is the range —from formal poetry to sound and concrete work. He was so modern! The collection From the Video Box is all about television—my favourite is No.25, a mediation on the televised world jigsaw championships. I’ve also been dipping into The Reality Book of Sonnets, an anthology of modern sonnets by poets who have really stretched and challenged the form. Lastly, there’s always a little magazine knocking around my house. Richard Price’s Painted Spoken is one, Tim Wells’s Rising is another. Both have been single-handedly and regularly produced for years, and are still free, or yours for the price of a postage stamp.
Kathryn Maris
I’m teaching an online course on “fragments” for the Poetry School, which has resulted in the kind of rereading that sets off mental fireworks, either because of illuminating juxtapositions, e.g. reading The Cantos alongside The Dream Songs and suddenly understanding how the latter wouldn’t have been possible without the former; or because, as with Sappho, I’ve lived a bit since college (hello, heartbreak!). Nuar Alsadir, who uses fragments masterfully in More Shadow Than Bird, introduced me to Kimiko Hahn’s The Narrow Road to the Interior, which, coincidentally, I read alongside a sloggy reread of Williams’s Paterson on which it seemed partly modeled. Newer poetry books I’ve read or reread in the context of fragments are Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities with its fragmented voice(s); Alice Oswald’s Dart and Memorial (fragmented epics); and prose poems by Carrie Etter (Imagined Sons), Rachel Zucker (The Pedestrians), and those contained in Great American Prose Poems edited by David Lehman. The course crosses genres so I’ve read some Lydia Davis (The Collected Stories), Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace), Adam Phillips (Monogamy), Katherine Angel (Unmastered), and books by former teachers Mary Ruefle (Madness, Rack and Honey) and Kenneth Koch (One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays).
My recent off-duty reading has included The Smell of Hay, a collection of short stories by Giorgio Bassani translated by UK poet Jamie McKendrick; Outline by Rachel Cusk; and the proofs of a soon-to-be-released memoir by Suki Kim who, alarmingly, went undercover in North Korea posing as a missionary: Without You There is No Us.
Toby Martinez de las Rivas
I feel a little guilty that some of my recent reading hasn’t been of the most serious nature—then again, I’ve been hugely enjoying it, and I guess that’s what finally counts. Wordsworth Editions run a series called “Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural” which mainly features authors or stories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that have fallen out of favour and print. Two I recently picked up were Robert E. Howard’s The Right Hand of Doom & Other Tales of Solomon Kane, and W.H. Hodgson’s The Casebook of Carnaki the Ghost Finder. Both are terrific, if you like your tales with an otherworldly bent. Equally otherworldly, but also profoundly engaged with our own time is Alan Garner’s Thursbitch. That undoubtedly is a serious book.
As I live in Spain, books in English are a little harder to come by than they might otherwise be—but I was back in the UK over the summer and picked up Gillian Allnutt’s Indwelling. She is the most austere, sonically attentive of writers, whose poems are often so sparse they seem almost on the verge of disappearing. Completely original and, in her own way, radical—particularly in her will towards silence. Indwelling is a beautiful book beautifully presented by Bloodaxe with a striking cover featuring Cézanne’s La femme au chapelet.
Other poetry I’ve been reading lately includes The Sleeping Lord and other fragments by David Jones, Jack Clemo’s Selected Poems, Kings by Christopher Logue, and Soul Keeping Company by Lucie Brock-Broido. John Berryman is very rarely far away (particularly, in the last few days, his “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” in Love & Fame), and I have also recently returned to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets after an absence of several years.
Next up, I would very much like to get hold of anything by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, whose poems I first encountered in an article on recent American poetry by G.C. Waldrep—but it looks like Amazon or nothing.
Martin Monahan
I got a new job a few weeks ago. It involves a two hour commute both ways. Half an hour on a bicycle and an hour and a half on the train. This means I’ve been reading more than usual. Sprinting, in reading terms, rather than my typical dawdle. People always claim to be rereading something distinguished; I’m just reading. Indeed, if there has been a recent development in my reading it has been the decision to be more comfortable with stopping reading, at any time, on any line, once I’ve decided I do not like the book. I never used to do that. My reading for a long time was so pedantic. If a book was begun it was finished (even if it took years). And I would not feel a book was read until every piece of text in it was read: copyright, introduction, forward, bibliography, other books available from the publisher (“if you would like to order a book please cut-out the form below and send to Penguin Books Ltd, London, SW etc”). Not anymore. I used to feel that reading was a skyscraper to be ascended; now I see that it’s a taxi to be carted along in. This last month, I’ve stopped reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (p300ish); Petersberg (p84, this surely will have to be returned to); Amerika; The London Review of Books (which I always look forward to arriving through the letterbox so I can stop reading it as soon as possible); and a book of poems translated from French with a red and black cover, which I don’t now remember what it was called, that I left on the train, bookmark chopped at page 10. Maybe someone else finished it.
Pascale Petit
A book I keep rereading on my Kindle is When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz. I’ve recommended her to all my students, as well as Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion, which I discovered through Robert Peake’s Transatlantic Poetry series.
Among new British poets I’m impressed by Beautiful Girls from Melissa Lee-Houghton—a refreshing no-holds-barred approach to writing about mental illness. I also love Liz Berry’s Black Country, full of joy and light. I encountered Niall Campbell’s work when I judged the Poetry London competition, and will never forget falling for his poem “The Letter Always Arrives at its Destination,” now in his first book Moontide. A debut that’s different from anything else at the moment is Midnight, Dhaka by Mir Mahfuz Ali.
Collections by poets that I reread constantly include Coleshill by Fiona Sampson, All One Breath by John Burnside, Drysalter by Michael Symmons Roberts, and The Water Table by Philip Gross. I was at the Kings Lynn festival recently and listening to Hugo Williams read from I Knew the Bride was an intensely moving experience.
I read a lot of non-fiction as well as poetry and the big hardback I took with me on my writing retreat in Paris was The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, in which Davi Kopenwana, spokesperson for Amazonian peoples, gives an illuminating first-hand account of life as a shaman. Finally, Snow Leopard: Stories from the Roof of the World, edited by Don Hunter, is a fabulous compendium of encounters with the elusive cats, and Douglas Chadwick’s The Wolverine Way is as close as I can get to the essence of wolverine-ness, apart from seeing them at Vincennes Zoo.
Sam Riviere
At the moment I’m enjoying reading/looking at these books/objects:
/pe(ə)r/ by Patrick Coyle
CUNNY POEM Vol. 1 by Bunny Rogers
Bildungsroman by Audun Mortensen
Quait an anthology of dicotyledons published by sine wave peak
Ruby Robinson
I’m memorising a translation of the poem “Table” by Edip Cansever (translated from the Turkish by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast) simply because it’s beautiful to savour and read aloud. 1001 Beers You Must Try Before You Die is on my coffee table; I enjoy observing others’ obsessions and learning from them. For a similar reason and because I’ve just taken up bodyboarding, I’m reading The Stormrider Guide: Europe (a surfing guidebook). Given I live 100 miles from the nearest wave, this provides excellent escapism!
Sam Riviere’s debut 81 Austerities is a kaleidoscope of images, observations, reflections, and comments on our contemporary era. To me, it’s another form of escapism in that it affirms the bewildering experience of growing up in an era of technological and communicational transformation, which seems also to have transformed the nature of consciousness itself. In a different vein, I’ve also enjoyed Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds, in particular the way individual poems are layered to create a rich coherent text, as layers and washes of watercolour build depth and shade in an image.
I’ve not read many novels recently but one that I feel has an important message about societal oppression and mental health is The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, by Maggie O’Farrell. I read a fair bit about psychology and neuroscience. A couple of examples of books I’ve found particularly interesting are The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, by Stephen Grosz, and The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, by Norman Doidge. Both authors are experts in the field of psychoanalysis and explore the effects of experiences on emotional wellbeing and brain structure and function. They also reveal the extraordinary capacity of the mind and the brain to heal, a critical subject for science and poetry alike.
Kathryn Simmonds
National Poetry Day is marked in Launceston by a celebration of Charles Causley, who lived and wrote in the town all his life. His poems have a feel for folklore and fancy, and since we moved here I’ve been getting to know his Collected Poems (1951-2000), many of which are rooted in Cornwall. By contrast, Lorraine Mariner’s second collection, There Will Be No More Nonsense, has the pulse of the city running through it; streets and trains and the stuff of modern life: “…I tweeted every thought / that came into my head / and my life became a strutting peacock / pecking at my heels.”
Following the birth of my second daughter a couple of months ago, I’ve been doing a lot of dipping: Kevin Barry’s short story collection, Dark Lies the Island, which is bleak and hilarious; Les Murray’s selected poems, and a recent addition, The Best of Poetry London. I also absorb the usual quota of picture books, as demanded by my three-year-old. Our latest acquisition, Julia Donaldson’s inspired Stick Man, (“Stick man, Oh stick man, beware of the dog”) sees Stick Man struggle through obstacles to get back to his kids and his “stick lady love.” The refrains take on a Kafkaesque edge when you can’t get them out of your head at three in the morning.
Lucid and learned, peppered with literary references, the essays of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, One Way and Another, are a treat. Who could resist the titles alone: “Narcissism, For and Against”; “On Being Bored”; “Judas for Now”? His essay, “Worry and its Discontents” is excellent: “As remote as possible from the forbidden, the worry, unlike the dream, is part of the routine, the predictability of everyday life.” And, “All of us may be surrealists in our dreams, but in our worries we are incorrigibly bourgeois.”
Claire Trévien
For financial reasons, I told myself to cut back on my poetry spending for a few months. Naturally, this means that I’ve received more poetry packages this month than previous ones. Here are a few highlights, categorized by the provenance of packages:
From Singapore: Echolocation by Mani Rao, published by Math Paper Press, which I keep returning to. One of my favourite discoveries this year.
From Wales: Jemma L. King’s The Shape of a Forest.
From England: Furies: a Poetry Anthology of Women Warriors, published by the fantastic folk at For Books’ Sake, with all proceeds going towards Rape Crisis. It’s beautiful inside and out (and yes, maybe this is a slight cheat, as I have one poem in it). Also, Chris McCabe’s indescribable Into the Catacombs and Mark Burnhope’s Species.
From France: I can’t really get enough of Vénus Khoury-Ghata at the moment.
From the USA: I received several pamphlets from Dancing Girl Press which I am working my way through. A few highlights include: Shipwrecks of Lake Michigan by Kristy Bowen, The Way the Body Had to Travel by Emily Lake Hansen, Little as Living by Meghan Tutolo, Some Citrus Makes Me Blue by Megan Fernandes, and Her Disco by Lisa Fink. Beyond this press, I’m also reading Souvenir by Aimee Suzara (WordTech Editions).
Rory Waterman
I spent much of the summer wallowing in out-of-print books and articles by W.H. Davies, for A W.H. Davies Reader, which I’m editing. I have also read a lot of books for review, including a flawed but gripping biography of Vernon Scannell. A recent modernisation of Canterbury Tales had the one benefit of pushing me back to the real thing, and from there to other parts of the canon I feel sorry for not knowing better or, in some cases, for not knowing at all. (I’m not going to admit what.) The four books open by the bed at the moment make ostensibly uncomfortable bedfellows perhaps, though I hadn’t thought of that until now. They are: Imagined Sons by Carrie Etter, which I did not necessarily expect to be a book for me and which is; Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, which I am rereading partly because it confirms my faith in what matters and sharpens my resolve to ignore what doesn’t; The BFG by Roald Dahl (don’t ask), which is being held open at the correct page by a half-consumed bottle of frobscottle; and the Forward Book of Poetry 2015. Fall in, Ghosts: Selected War Prose by Edmund Blunden is open on p. 20 on my home desk, and will get finished, though term has now started. (I am guilty of what the Japanese apparently call tsundoku: buying books and not finishing them.) Next to it, or under it, are copies of the current PN Review, a few issues of the TLS, and the latest The Dark Horse, in various states of completion and dishevelment. Review copies of books wait in a little ordered pile at the back, beside a printed stack of new poems and commissioned articles for New Walk, the magazine I co-edit.
Tim Wells
The drinks list at Vout-O-Renees was, as ever, inspired. Carson never fails to deliver. Unusually I’ve been reading fiction; I was sent a proof of Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings” and loved it. It’s about the shooting of Bob Marley in 1976 and covers history and reggae, two of my loves. It’s a layered book that caught the pressure of the times and was written with heavy manners.
Chimene Sulyman’s “Outside Looking On” is a sparkling collection of London poems. I’ve been reading through eighties ‘zines; and catching back up with ranting poets of the early eighties, most of whom I used to gig with. I also read the long trousered rant “Listen, Little Man” by Wilhem Reich and took to the streets angry and swearing profusely. Good times.
“The Russian Anarchists” by Paul Avrich is a fascinating history of Anarchists before, during and after the 1917 revolution. In particular I found much of interest in the chapter about Machajski.
I was commissioned to write some poems about the life of British 70s porn star Mary Millington. That was interesting and in return was given a record of several of her stories, on blue vinyl, naturally. I enjoyed listening to that but not as much as the neighbours.
David Wheatley
Although the referendum on Scottish independence was lost, an autonomous Scotland (or at least Shetland) of the imagination is on show throughout Jen Hadfield’s Byssus (Picador). Hadfield writes radical and luminous landscape poems very much in the tradition of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Coincidentally, another installment of Finlay’s wonderfully quirky correspondence has been published as Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann, 1964-1969 (Wilmington Square Books), a book with much to tell us on the buried history of the mid-century avant-garde. Also active in the 60s was Rosemary Tonks, the Laforgue of London cafés, whose subsequent disappearance was one of the great literary mysteries of our time. Neil Astley deserves all manner of accolades for the detective work behind Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems (Bloodaxe); post-Movement British poetry will never look the same again. There are plenty of cafés in Patrick McGuinness’s Other People’s Countries (Jonathan Cape) too, a wonderful conjuring of the world-unto-itself of a small Belgian town in a mixture of poetry and prose. Also conjuring little-visited worlds for the Anglophone reader are two volumes of Irish-language poetry in translation recently published in the US, by two of the greatest modern Irish poets: Seán Ó Ríordáin’s Rogha Dánta/Selected Poems (Yale UP) and Máire Mhac an tSaoi’s The Miraculous Parish/An Paróiste Míorúilteach (Wake Forest UP). Still on Irish poetry, Alan Gillis has had a remarkable decade since his début, Someone Somewhere in 2004. His fourth collection, Scapegoat (Gallery Press), is by turns rambunctious, carnivalesque, affecting and barnstorming. And finally, it may be called Within Habit (Test Centre) but Oli Hazzard’s new book is well outside the habits and comfort zone of most UK poets. Innovative writing has been enjoying a welcome renaissance in British poetry, and this is compelling and memorable work.