A poetry prize that we are lucky to have in the UK is the Michael Marks Awards. Founded in 2009, it now has four categories recognising small-press excellence: Poetry Pamphlet; Publisher; Illustrator; Environmental Poetry Pamphlet. This year’s shortlists have just been published, with the winners to be announced in June.

The only shortlisted title that I currently have on my shelves is Hugh Foley’s Recent Poems (The Fair Organ), which is a pamphlet in the tradition of small, simple printed objects that I particularly enjoy as a way of reading poetry: a paper-wrapped, pocket-notebook of 28 pages, stapled and hand-stamped on the back with the publisher’s logo (I wrote about my own small-press experiment with this format here).

Of course, the downside of reading this way is that wafer-thin publications easily get lost at the bottom of the book-shelf food chain, pressed flat by the paperbacks and hardbacks they can sometimes end up tucked inside. Recent Poems resurfaced during a recent reading-pile sift, and this was the poem that I remembered and I turned to first:

As Foley says in an interview on the Michael Marks website,

I wanted to capture something more like an outside to language, especially thinking about my daughter who was at that time not in the world of language at all. I wanted to think about what really struck me.

https://michaelmarksawards.org/shortlist/hugh-foley/

In a statement about “The Importance of Poetry Pamphlets”, the Michael Marks Awards observe:

Traditionally, pamphlets have provided a vehicle for new writers to emerge, as well as offering established poets a focused, short structure that is ideal for exploring themes […] Historically, and still, often small presses have been labours of love, individually crafting each pamphlet.

This got me thinking about which pamphlets on my shelves I value not only as short and portable early gatherings of poems that later have ended up in “full” books, but specifically those which are themselves my preferred (and sometimes only) way of reading a particular work. So for this month’s Pinks, here are half a dozen.

Ken Smith, Eleven Poems (Northern House Pamphlet Poets, 1964)

A proper old-school pamphlet: four slightly shiny sheets of paper, folded, stitched with thread, and “hand-set at the School of English, University of Leeds” — where Smith was taught by Geoffrey Hill, and co-edited Stand magazine. It was his first publication, and introduced a poet of the post-war generation whose work still deserves to be better known (not least by me). The first poem, “Means”, is one of the subtlest examples I know of that popular British sub-genre, The Poet Takes a Train:

Sylvia Plath (ed.), American Poetry Now (Critical Quarterly Poetry Supplement No. 2 [1961])

I wrote previously about the good ideas and good luck that made the Critical Quarterly Poetry Supplements the most successful survey of contemporary verse available to British readers for a shilling in the 1960s:

It was a particularly good idea to invite Sylvia Plath — who was just making a name for herself with her first collection, The Colossus (1960) — to guest edit a pamphlet of American poetry. Her introductory note says only that “I’ll let the vigour and variety of these poems speak for themselves”, and that’s what they do. As well as including the kind of confessional poets she would be associated with after Ariel (1965) — Anne Sexton and W.D. Snodgrass — there are other choices which suggest Plath’s interest in more experimental modes of free verse, such as Robert Creeley and Barbara Guest. Denise Levertov’s imagistic “The Five-Day Rain” in particular feels like a possible influence on the variable line, sharp enjambments, vivid colours and lyric cries of Ariel:

Peter Gizzi, A panic that can still come upon me (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006)

This fine, large, square pamphlet with its generous, decked-edged pages and spectacular, etched cover image of the sun — itself now sun-faded down the spine side from years of standing two inches proud of the shelf — is a portal that takes me back twenty years to the poetry reading in Brooklyn where it was launched. I had just discovered Peter Gizzi’s poetry and there he was in person, sending rhapsodic lines across the room. Here are the first ten — you can read the rest here:

Chloe Stopa-Hunt, White Hills (clinic, 2016)

A decade ago, the British small-press clinic produced an exemplary run of pamphlets by younger poets, each one uniquely designed to suit the work. One of the finest was Chloe Stopa-Hunt’s White Hills (2016), where each page holds a short, dark-bright lyric written with a ballad-like feeling for the edge of life and death. The two-part title poem occupies the centre spread; it begins “Across white hills the dying walk”, and ends:

Audun Mortensen, footballers who rhyme (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2019)

Sam Riviere’s If a Leaf Falls Press has been producing “limited-edition titles with an emphasis on appropriative and procedural writing processes” for the past decade. Many of these thin, stapled curiosities, wrapped in cream card, now interleave my modern poetry shelves. One of my favourites is Norwegian writer Audun Mortensen’s footballers who rhyme (2019) — not an idea to stretch to a book, but a lovely piece of contemporary nonsense verse to fill sixteen pages in deadpan unpunctuated sans serif:

Zaffar Kunial, Six: Cricket Poems (Faber, 2019)

The Faber and Faber poetry list is pretty much the opposite of a small pamphlet press, but they did a rare and elegant job with this mini-collection by Zaffar Kunial, which features cricket poems to be found in his two Faber books — Us (2018) and England’s Green (2022) — as well as original pieces from his time as poet in residence at The Oval. I’m particularly fond of Kunial’s distinctive and ongoing innovation with the rhyming haiku sequence, which here is used to locate the London cricket ground, overlooked by its famous wrought-iron Victorian gasholder, in time and space:

NOTES

I wrote more about Zaffar Kunial and the rhyming haiku here:

I haven’t included any pamphlets by the late J.H. Prynne in this list, partly because there are too many to choose from. You can see a gallery of pictures from an exhibition in Cambridge here: https://www.cai.cam.ac.uk/discover/library/online-exhibitions/poetry-jh-prynne

Welcome to a new selection of poems from my reading pile: seven pieces for the week ahead. As this series has become a regular feature over the past year, I’ve noticed how the season in which I’m reading affects my choices. Last time, it was still winter:

But there’s a bit more sunlight here, though I notice there’s also the distant noise of war.

Chen Yuhong is one of Taiwan’s most celebrated contemporary poets. Possible Paradise: Selected Poems (Carcanet) has been translated from Mandarin by George O’Connell and Diana Shi. Here, I particularly like “the concrete wall’s complete” as an image for the stillness of a Sunday indoors:

The new book from Bill Manhire, former (and first) Poet Laureate of New Zealand, is catchily called Lyrical Ballads (Carcanet). It came in the post on the first sunny day after weeks of rain, and this dark little duologue immediately made me smile:

Found in a Context of Destruction (Banshee Press) is Tim MacGabhann’s debut collection of poetry. The haunting title poem exemplifies his talent for lines of vivid density:

I’ve been looking forward to Imogen Wade’s debut, Girl, Swooning (Corsair) ever since she won the National Poetry Competition with “The Time I Was Mugged in New York City” — a very good poem which annoyed some journalists by being subtle:

Here is another poem from the book that I keep coming back to for its pay-off:

Last week I went to the launch of Prairie Oyster (Fleet), the first novel by my old friend and colleague, the poet Sophie Robinson. It really is a novel, not a prose poem, but I think an exception can be made for the first page:

For over a decade now, Keston Sutherland has been writing some of the most original prose poetry around. It’s simultaneous intensity and expansiveness means it’s not very suitable to sample for a short poems feature. But here’s the last page, anyway, of the first section of Jokes (The Last Press): a surreal, rambling symposium between various animals, a manager, and a speaker who hates hay (“I hate how it sticks its snout in”):

And finally, from the latest issue of , a poem for spring and all by the eighth-century Arabic poet Abū Nuwās, translated by James E. Montgomery, from a series of khamriyyāt (wine poems) subtitled “Sin”:

Basil Bunting’s long modernist poem Briggflatts (1966) was published sixty years ago this winter — first in Poetry magazine and then as a book from Fulcrum Press. It was subtitled “An Autobiography”, but Bunting denied that it was “a record of fact”, saying “the truth of the poem is of another kind”. Despite the often abstruse allusions, he also felt that “no notes are needed”. But he provided a handful nevertheless, on the grounds that “a few may spare diligent readers the pains of research”.

Bunting’s notes were titled “Afterthoughts”, and most relate to the Northumbrian landscape and language of his early twentieth-century youth, where the poem is primarily set (Briggflatts, the Quaker meeting house of the title, is actually over towards the west in Cumbria, but Bunting saw this as part of the old Northumbria). He had returned to North East England after travelling widely, and wrote the poem in his sixties, filling notebooks on the train as he commuted to his sub-editing job on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.

Like T.S. Eliot’s Notes to The Waste Land, Bunting’s “Afterthoughts” have the air of a riddling hermit guarding a magic portal. The first warns that “the Northumbrian tongue” may sound strange to non-natives, and that “Southrons” — those from the south of England — “would maul the music of many lines of Briggflatts”. Further on, we are told to “piece […] together” the story of the Viking king, Eric Bloodaxe, “from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the Orkneyinga Saga, and Heimskringla, as you fancy”. By the time we get to the word “skerry”, Bunting’s only comment is “O, come on, you know that one” (it’s a small rocky island, covered at high tide). “Scone”, meanwhile, is singled out so that we can be told to “rhyme it with ‘on’, not, for heaven’s sake, ‘own’” (on the question of whether to apply jam or cream first, however, he is silent).

I had a new experience of Briggflatts recently when I read it alongside the much more extensive annotations that have been available for the past ten years at the back of Don Share’s excellent edition of The Poems of Basil Bunting (2016). One of the things I appreciated about how Share lays out these notes for the reader is that, as well as interleaving Bunting’s original “Afterthoughts”, he also uses bold type to pick out everything the poet said elsewhere about the poem: interviews, letters, conversations. So it’s possible at a glance to follow an extended authorial commentary on particular words and lines. Here are a few moments that illuminated for me how the poem is, in fact, a record of facts — specifically, of things Bunting himself had noticed.

Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.

The poem begins with this sonorous address to a bull in a field by the River Rawthey, which runs near Briggflatts. The way that the first word of the poem, “Brag”, pararhymes with the first syllable of the title, signals the intricate sound patterning that will characterise the poem. In the last interview he ever gave, Bunting remarked that “a great deal of what people goggle at in Briggflatts is merely an undisciplined and indiscriminate use of Cynghanedd” — the Welsh poetic technique of line-enclosed consonance and rhyme which, as Bunting noted, employs “rhymes that don’t have the same vowel, only the same consonants each side of it, and funny things like that”.

In another interview, he commented on the realism of his depiction of the bull itself, which might seem a little Disneyish with its tunefulness and twinkling toes:

The bull I noticed one day in a farm near Throckley where I was living at the moment; and, you know, it struck me, at once, nobody had noticed the bull has a tenor voice. You hear of the bull bellowing and this, that, and the other. But in fact he bellows in the most melodious tenor, a beautiful tenor voice. In spring, the bull, does, in fact, if he’s with the cows, dance on the tips of his toes, as part of the business of showing off, showing that he is protecting them, you see. He’s not really doing anything, but he sees somebody walking by the hedge and he begins to dance at once, just to demonstrate to the cows what an indispensable creature he is. It is delightful, and it bears such a, a strong resemblance to the behaviour of young men in general and… well… all creatures.

Another character in Part I of the poem is a stonemason carving a gravestone — the acoustic antithesis of the proud bull. The poet is intimately interested in his business:

A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter

[…]

Rub the stone with sand,
wet sandstone rending
roughness away. Fingers
ache on the rubbing stone.

In an interview, Bunting stated that this figure was based on the father of his first love, Peggy Greenbank — to whom Briggflatts is dedicated, and who is its emotional core. Writing to his friend Louis Zukofsky as he began the poem, Bunting said that he was concerned with “Peggy Greenback and her whole ambience […] and what happens when one deliberately thrusts love aside, as I then did — it has its revenge”.

Elsewhere, in an interview, he was also keen to emphasise that he wasn’t the kind of poet who just stands around making notes about other people’s manual labour:

I’ve rubbed down gravestones and that’s how I know how it feels to rub down a gravestone. And how your fingers ache on the damn job… and so on. I take care not to write anything that I don’t bloody well know. And that is something that I think is different from how a lot of poets write. If I write about how it feels rubbing down a gravestone, well I have rubbed down a bloody gravestone.

The interweaving five-part structure of Briggflatts represents Bunting’s long-held ambition to write a poem based on the compositional form of the sonata. This preoccupation also means that musical perception of sound is a recurring theme. Part II begins with the young poet taking in the cacophony of life in 1920s London, as he

counts beat against beat, bus conductor
against engine against wheels against
the pedal, Tottenham Court Road, decodes
thunder, scans
porridge bubbling, pipes clanking

Here the bus “conductor” is elevated to a musical role, his rhythm counterpointing the other moving parts of a bus as it reaches its stop (“Tottenham Court Road!”). In September 1928, Bunting had written a music column for a London magazine, The Town Crier, in which he commented on many of the same things more sardonically:

The sounds that are supplied to Londoners gratis — to wit, motor-horns, accelerating buses, back-firing exhausts, drays, newsboys, street-organs and drunks, all restlessly modulating on a pedal-point of rubber-on-asphalt […] The Traffic Symphony is not unstimulating to a country hearer; but after the seven hundredth and thirtieth repetition [that is, every day for two years] one prays for a transport worker’s strike, a long one, or to become temporarily deaf.

Part V of Briggflatts opens at the dark end of the year, “solstice past”:

Winter wrings pigment
from petal and slough
but thin light lays
white next red on sea-crow wing,
gruff sole cormorant
whose grief turns carnival.

In a lecture, Bunting noted the presence of the cormorant in the illuminated manuscript of the Lindisfarne Gospels — created on the Northumbrian coast in honour of St Cuthbert — which was another structural model for his interlacing poem:

I have tried to suggest, in my poem Briggflatts, how the light reflected from the water at certain times does seem to clothe the cormorant’s shining body in a variety of colours — I have seen it quite often in quiet harbours about dawn.

The juxtaposition of “white next red” here with “grief turns carnival” suggests the etymology of “carn-”, from the Latin caro (flesh), which makes it cognate with “incarnadine” (make red). Elsewhere in the notes, Bunting comments on his image of “sunset the colour of a boiled louse” as referring to “the cochineal”, source of

the most beautiful of all the red dyes [It is] salutary to remember that one of the loveliest colours we possess comes from the louse.

This mood of seeing beauty in everything informs the final part of Briggflatts, which Bunting said reflected the spirit of “St Cuthbert in love with all creation” (according to the legend, Cuthbert shared his food with birds while living on the Farne Islands).

Finally, a little story Bunting told about the three-stanza Coda to his long poem. I like it because its mention of muddle and tax returns illustrates the chance nature of poetic composition, even in a work as carefully planned and polished as Briggflatts:

As for the Coda, you will never believe it, but this is the truth. I’d written three-quarters of Briggflatts, was busy in fact on the last part, when I had to turn over papers on my desk to get something for the bloody income tax commissioners, and on the back of an old bill I found a poem that I’d written long before and forgotten when I wrote it, which required three or four lines cut out, and with those three or four lines cut out it was the Coda, and obviously a part of Briggflatts.

Bunting commented on the Coda that it was “carefully arranged as far as vowel sounds go to be very singable” — perhaps by sweet tenor bulls. Here it is:

A strong song tows
us, long earsick.
Blind, we follow
rain slant, spray flick
to fields we do not know.

Night, float us.
Offshore wind, shout,
ask the sea
what’s lost, what’s left,
what horn sunk,
what crown adrift.

Where we are who knows
of kings who sup
while day fails? Who,
swinging his axe
to fell kings, guesses
where we go?

NOTES

Bunting’s reluctance to supply notes was also an expression of his belief that “poetry is written to be heard”, and that in his experience “it generally works all right if I do read Briggflatts with no explanation”. You can listen to him reading Part I here:

https://poetryarchive.org/poem/briggflatts/

More recordings of Bunting reading are available here (although some of the links no longer work):

https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bunting.php

Welcome to my occasional selection of poems from new books in my reading pile: seven pages for the week ahead. It’s not a “best of”, more a playlist of things that have stayed with me as I move between books at bedtime and then back into the world of winter in England this year. I’ll explain some of the reasons for my choices as we go.

Graeme Richardson is a very old friend, whose poems I have been reading for over quarter of a century, so it’s hard for me to sum up how I feel about seeing them in his first full collection, Dirt Rich (Carcanet). If you’d like to hear me try, come along to the online launch on 3rd February. One thing I will say is that some of the poems I find most moving are those that address the reality of parenthood, including its pain — still arguably an under-explored topic in modern poetry. I thought of this one recently as I played — possibly for the last time — in the snow with my youngest child:

In January 2021, during the second lockdown, I hosted an online discussion of the books on the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist that year. A poll at the end showed the audience favourite was the outsider choice: Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry). The judges agreed. Kapil’s sequence of vivid, compact free-verse poems about the violence of colonialism (figured as a house stay) is, to my mind, one of the best books to win the prize. A new book, Autobiography of a Performance (The 87 Press), presents extracts from all her work woven into scripts made with the multidisciplinary artist, Blue Pieta. Here is one of the sections from How to Wash a Heart:

Kapil fans will want to know that she has a new prose poem in Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority (Faber), the first anthology of nature writing by African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora poets in the UK, edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf. Another new poem in here that I enjoyed was Moniza Alvi’s “At Walberswick”, which considers the fact that some locals in the Suffolk coastal village claim to have seen two circus elephants ferried across the River Blyth, and yet no evidence for this newsworthy event survives. It is, of course, not only about that:

Christian Bök’s The Xenotext: Book 1 (2015) received a lot of publicity for the scientific experiment at the heart of it: “to encode a poem into the genome of a deathless bacterium, thereby writing a text durable enough to outlast any apocalypse”. More articles appeared when The Xenotext: Book 2 (Coach House Books) was published in Canada last year, outlining the successful result. There is more to Bök than a big idea, though: the poems composed around the necessarily slender “Xenotext” itself are panoramically imagined expansions of the concept, inscribed with a strikingly precise formality and vocabulary. Here is a section from “My Works, Ye Mighty”, which rewrites Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to give voice to the cosmic instinct to endure:

Another poet whose imagination is exercised by the infinity of apocalyptic visions is John Wilkinson. Many of my favourite Wilkinson poems, from Iphigenia (2004) to Courses Matter-Woven (2015), are cannonading sequences where an idea ramifies into verse paragraphs that feel like a rapid documentary montage of the present moment. So I was drawn to the final part of his new collection, In Abeyance (The Last Books), where the blandly disempowering phrase, “rest assured”, becomes the running motto of an extractive digital society of “neighbours” divided and controlled by fear:

I’ve always liked Tom Paulin’s poetry for the way it combines a political directness with a waywardness of voice which is itself a political position on the use of English. But I can’t pretend Namanlagh (Faber), nominated for this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize, is his best work. I think the poet himself knows this, though, which gives the poems a diffident charm: many are about recovering from depression through small moments of noticing. The final poem appeals to me because I once lived in a fly-haunted riverside flat by Folly Bridge, on the edge of central Oxford, a place that always seemed to be humming something about the Great Poets alluding to each other. I read Paulin’s poem as a stepping-away from taking all that too seriously, after a lifetime of teaching English Literature, at the “end of / National Poetry Day when words take off”:

(It was W.H. Auden, incidentally, who called Yeats “silly”, and in later life wrote a similarly light tribute to the poets who inspired him: “Fondly I ponder You all: / without You I couldn’t have managed / even my weakest of lines.” (“A Thanksgiving”))

Finally, a poem about Norwich, where I live now, from an exquisitely paced pamphlet, Anna Reckin’s Lavender and Other Colours (intergraphia). St Giles is a medieval church in the city, famous for the wisteria that flowers over its walls in spring. “graduated lilacs tonal parallel / for flint” are words I will remember when I see it again this year.

I spent some of this weekend in bed, feeling under the (cold) weather, so I thought I’d take the chance to put together another selection of a week’s worth of poems from my reading pile. My wintry mood, I realise, may show in some my choices…

Born in 1997, Iestyn Tyne is the youngest of six poets collected in Alcatraz: Poems from the Contemporary Welsh (Carcanet), a new anthology chosen and translated by Robert Minhinnick. This poem is from Tyne’s 2023 pamphlet Dysgu Nofio [Learning to Swim] (Cyhoeddiadau’r Stamp):

Matthew Francis’ The Green Month: Poems after Dafydd ap Gwilym (Faber) is a sequence of three-stanza poems freely adapted from the work of the great medieval Welsh poet. Each poem is “a snapshot of one of Dafydd’s themes”, and they all use what Francis calls a “tapering syllabic stanza […] in which each line is shorter than the one before”.

I went to the online launch of Joseph Minden’s Answerlands (Carcanet) this week, and was interested to hear how his second collection was informed by becoming a schoolteacher. Poems titled by date follow the school year, from September to July; it occurs to me that this short poem of tiredness falls around autumn half term:

I’m pleased to have got to know the poetry of Kyla Houbolt over the last couple of years, thanks to the advocacy of her publisher, Jordan Davis, of Subpress/CCCP Chapbooks. Quoted on the back cover of Houbolt’s last collection, The Ghost of It (2024), I admired “the wise surprise of scattered rhyme”. Here is a riddling one I enjoyed from Becoming Altar: New and Selected Poems (Subpress):

A couple of years ago, Joelle Taylor took part in the contemporary poetry archive project that I was involved in at the University of East Anglia. Her creative response to the project was “dust kings. tough kids”, a “queer crown of sonnets” written in memory of murdered butch women. Here is part of her note on the sequence:

While writing I stared at a cheap plastic snow globe that imprisoned a gold angel. Occasionally, gold glitter rained down on the angel. The snow globe was given to me in the early 1990s by my girlfriend’s brother, Richard. He was the first gay man I personally knew to die of AIDS, and he left behind him a collection of snow globes for the mourners to take home with them from his funeral. As I worked, I thought about the snow globe, about the idea of the vitrine in general, about emergency, about memory, safety, love, and friendship. This Crown of 15 Sonnets is written in response to the idea of the snow globe as an archive within itself.

“dust kings. tough kids” has now been republished as part of Maryville: 1957—2007 (Bloomsbury)— this sonnet stopped me in my tracks when I first read it:

Shane McCrae has written some of the best sonnets I’ve read in the past few years, using a distinctive gapped line to introduce a stop-start rhythmic and semantic tension. This is from Songs and Sonnets (Broken Sleep Books), a new chapbook “that confronts the psychic and political wreckage of contemporary America”:

Finally, I have just begun to explore A Letter to the Dead (Carcanet), the new Collected Poems of Lynette Roberts, edited by Patrick McGuinness and Charles Mundye. Roberts is fascinating mid-century figure, a true experimentalist always trying out new styles and forms. The manuscript of this poem indicates that it was written at her cottage, Tygwyn, in the village of Llanybri, which I once photographed in the snow:

NOTES

You can read the whole of Joelle Taylor’s “dust kings. tough kids” in the UEA poetry archive project report: https://contemporarypoetryarchive.omeka.net/items/show/11

I wrote more about Lynette Roberts here:

and here:

This week, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis was published by Faber & Faber. It contains uncollected and unpublished poems, and extensive notes on the writing and publication of Heaney’s twelve collections. For anyone who grew up reading Heaney, as I did, it’s an addictive, behind-the-scenes kind of volume. Here are some notes on what I’ve found so far.

There is, I think, a small anthology to be made of writing that responds to the coming of the tractor, and the change it brought to rural life by suddenly turning the horse “into something ornamental”, as the farmer and author Adrian Bell wrote in 1939. Edwin Muir’s “The Horses” would have to be in it:

We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.

Another candidate would be Heaney’s first poem published beyond student journals, “Tractors”, which appeared in the Belfast Telegraph on 24th November 1962. It observes the ungainly machines as they “gargle / Sadly, astraddle unfolding furrows” (the editors note that “gargle” was a verb Heaney liked to apply to tractors), and ends:

Do not ignore then
The melancholy spouts of tractors
That have never been broken in
And inspire no fear.

From the same early period, there’s also a sonically rich poem evoking the dealings of a farmer’s fair — “notes are crumpled / And crammed deep, the deal sealed with porter and gambles” — which ends:

Tractor fumes have not killed the sheep-reek,
And among these shepherds cheques are suspect.

There’s another uncollected piece here that would be perfect for another small anthology I’d like to read: poems about coins. “A Keen for the Coins” first appeared in 2001 in response to the introduction of the Euro as a currency. It laments the passing of the animal designs that were introduced for Irish coinage by a committee chaired by W.B. Yeats in the 1920s. With a characteristic Heaney flourish, the conclusion of the roll call squeezes the plant-meaning out of “mint” by coupling it with “field”:

O henny penny! O horsed half-crown!
O florin salmon! O farthing wren!
O hare! O hound! O snipe! O bull!
O mint of field and flood, farewell!

One of Heaney’s strokes of luck as a poet was to be taught in schools for decades. Next year, however, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of an incident that almost got him cancelled in the right-wing press. In 1976, an “outraged mother” from Suffolk wrote to her local Conservative MP, Eldon Griffiths, to complain that the “The Early Purges” had been set as an “unseen” poem that year. It describes the drowning of unwanted kittens as a coldly practical matter on the family farm:

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, “the scraggy wee shits”,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound

Griffiths contacted the Daily Telegraph, who obligingly ran with the headline “POEM FOR O-LEVEL ‘SICK’”, and — in a different kind of sic — identified the poet responsible as “Sean Heany”.

What I like most about this episode— apart from the fact that a secondary school exam board was willing to set an unseen poem that contained (as the Telegraph put it) “language not encouraged in most homes” — is the calm indifference with which the head of the exam board, Dr. F. Wyld, responded to the trouble-making politician:

Dr. Wyld said: “I replied to Mr. Griffiths pointing out that the function of examination boards is to examine. We try to test candidates fairly, without giving offence, and I am sorry that we seem to have given offence in this case.”

As for Mr. Heany [sic], Dr. Wyld said: “I have to confess that I have never heard of him. I gather that he is one of the modern poets.”

There are always going to be oversights in an annotated edition of this scale (over 500 pages of notes and commentary for almost 700 pages of poems). But there is one particularly curious slip here. In 2020, the critic Erica McAlpine published an acclaimed book called The Poet’s Mistake, which included a chapter inspired by the fact that Heaney’s poem “Wordsworth’s Skates” puts the Lake poet on the wrong lake:

Not the bootless runners lying toppled
In dust in a display case,
Their bindings perished,

But the reel of them on frozen Windermere
As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve
And left it scored.

McAlpine comments:

As readers of The Prelude may remember, it was almost certainly Esthwaite Water, near Hawkshead, where he went to school, on which Wordsworth skated as a child, not the much larger Windermere, which is farther afield and rarely freezes. […] Esthwaite—a small and relatively shallow lake—was frequently covered with ice, often for several weeks during winter.

So it is surprising to see the editors of The Poems of Seamus Heaney, who draw widely on Heaney scholarship, repeat the confusion in their note:

In a letter to Coleridge, 24 December 1799, Wordsworth writes that he has obtained a pair of ice skates and will use them the next day […] to skate on frozen Lake Windermere and “give [his] body to the wind”.

But there’s a twist, because the letter cited actually suggests that Heaney, his editors and McAlpine have all missed a lake. Heaney saw the dusty skates on display in the museum at Dove Cottage in Grasmere — and Wordsworth was writing to Coleridge shortly after moving into the same house. The letter ends by comparing the state of the ice on the lake at Grasmere with that of neighbouring Rydal Water:

The [Grasmere] ice had been so thin that the wind had broken it up, and most likely driven it to the outlet of the lake. Rydale is covered with ice, clear as polished steel, I have procured a pair of skates and tomorrow mean to give my body to the wind, — not however without reasonable caution.

Wordsworth’s intention “to give my body to the wind” on Rydal echoes the extraordinary lines about visionary dizziness in childhood from the 1799 version of The Prelude. Presumably it was the rhythmic memory of this passage’s iambic pentameter — and perhaps also the associative suggestion of the word “wind” — which led Heaney to the longer lake name (“the reel of them on frozen Windermere”). Here is Wordsworth:

… and oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round;
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a summer sea.

At the very end of The Poems of Seamus Heaney are twenty-five unpublished poems discovered among his draft papers. The first of them, “At Yeats’s Grave”, ends:

… under Ben Bulben in the August rain
One grave is much like others: suddenly there
I feared the trade itself might be all vain.

As the editors remark, this was written in August 1964 after visiting the churchyard in Drumcliffe, Sligo, and “expresses an early uncertainty about the whole poetic enterprise relatively rare in [Heaney’s] writing”. It alludes to Yeats’ late poem “Under Ben Bulben”, the last three lines of which are carved on the Drumcliffe gravestone (“Cast a cold eye / On life, on death / Horseman, pass by!”), and which also commands: “Irish poets learn your trade”. If Heaney felt doubt in August 1964, though, he soon found a counterweight of determination, because in the same month he wrote “Digging”, the poem that would open his debut volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), by asserting his “trade”. And this too seems to have lines from “Under Ben Bulben” behind it. Compare Yeats’ vision of death giving rise to life —

Though grave-diggers’ toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscle strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

— with the end of Heaney’s poem on turning from his strong, turf-cutting ancestors to the life of the mind:

… the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

NOTES

I wrote about Edwin Muir, horses and tractors here:

And I wrote about poets and coins here:

It’s been a while since I put together seven poems from new books on my reading pile. The idea of these posts is that you might like to read one a day over the next week. So far this year I’ve done a month’s worth, all of which I’ll link to at the end. Here’s the harvest for early autumn.

From Foolscap Press in Salt Lake City comes A Walk in Winter — a small pamphlet, bound with yellow thread, by Tom Pickard, his syllables placed as precisely as ever:

I admire the controlled force of the short lines and internal rhymes that Sarah Howe uses here — in her second collection, Foretokens (Chatto) — to make a new poem “like rage” out of Emily Dickinson’s advice to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”:

I feel I’m going to be returning often to Steve Malmude’s Red Carpet (Carcanet), a gathering from seven decades of work which tends towards four tightly-packed quatrains as its preferred form for encrypted feeling:

In this poem from The Electron-Ghost Casino (Miami University Press), Randolph Healy also employs the foursquare form to make a lyric about the dark magic of sound (“exit like a frog in a frost” is from Keats’s letters):

I have some thoughts about the word that might unlock this riddle in Mona Arshi’s new collection Mouth (Chatto), but not a definite answer. I enjoy, though, how the riddle form leads to a zig-zag kind of poetic thinking around the idea of definition:

Fawzia Muradali Kane won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2023 for “Eric”, a prose poem. Her new book, Guaracara (Carcanet) puts prose to a skilful range of poetic uses, including this rapidly expanding paragraph of family history:

Finally, in Some Things I Do Know (Copper Canyon Press), Richard Siken pursues the relentless intensity of the one-paragraph prose poem to describe the experience of a stroke as the loss and recovery of order in language:

NOTES

Here are all the previous posts in this series — I’ll try to do one or two more before the year is out.

Eugen Gomringer died on 21st August 2025 at the age of 100. It seems appropriate that the life of the man known as “the father of concrete poetry” should have achieved the round number of a whole century, with all the simplicity and symbolism of its single line and two circles. Born in Bolivia and educated in Switzerland, Gomringer’s work embodied a modernising spirit of gleaming idealism and comic-strip humour about the world of international signs and logos in which we live. “Our languages,” he wrote, “are on the road to formal simplification” — a fact that the poet must work with. His poem “roads 68”, for example, composed in English, captures the monotonous phenomenon of the petrol station by repeating the names that loom up along the motorway in different combinations, then giving them a final, rhyming twist:

TEXACO and
ESSO

ESSO and
BP

BP and
SHELL

the common
smell

Mary Ellen Solt, the editor of an important early anthology, Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), summarises the defining moment of Gomringer’s life as follows:

In 1955 a Brazilian designer, Decio Pignatari, met Eugen Gomringer, a Swiss, who was Max Bill’s secretary at the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm, Germany. To their mutual delight and surprise, they discovered that they were also poets committed to a new way of making poems, which would free the poet from the line as his basic structural unit. Gomringer, working alone, called his new poems “constellations”; and Pignatari working with two other poets in Sao Paulo — Augusto and Haroldo de Campos — conceived of his poems as “ideograms.” […] The most important single aspect of the concrete poetry movement is that poets in many countries, speaking different languages, unknown to each other, began making similar innovations in structure almost immediately following World War II. […] They agreed to call their experiments “concrete poetry” in 1956 after Pignatari had returned to Sao Paulo. There are several significant areas of agreement in the thinking and practice of these poets. For instance: although both Gomringer and the Brazilians were working to bring poetry into new relationships with the other arts and advanced areas of contemporary thought, they saw their experiments as related to the mainstream of poetry. Gomringer wanted to rescue the poem from literary professionalism, for he saw that it had become accessible for the most part only to poets and critics […] So he gave up writing sonnets as beautifully irrelevant to the present reality.

Gomringer’s first manifesto statement, “From Line to Constellation” (1954, trans. Mike Weaver), explains how his early work was inspired by the “restriction” of language that he observed happening in the streamlined world around him:

Headlines, slogans, groups of sounds and letters give rise to forms which could be models for a new poetry just waiting to be taken up for meaningful use. The aim of the new poetry is to give poetry an organic function in society again, and in doing so to restate the position of poet in society. Bearing in mind, then, the simplification both of language and its written form, it is only possible to speak of an organic function for poetry in terms of the given linguistic situation. So the new poem is simple and can be perceived visually as a whole as well as in its parts […] It is memorable and imprints itself upon the mind as a picture.

One of the best descriptions I have read of how Gomringer’s poems work (or play) comes from Greg Thomas’s Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (2019):

Gomringer’s earliest concrete poems […] tend to rely on an impression of objectivity involving implied referential accuracy. Many of these poems employ a tiny lexicon of words, each imbued with a sense of precise aptitude generally enhanced by repetition. That impression of accuracy, coextensive with an impression of universal intelligibility, is often achieved by using words coherent across several different languages, as in Gomringer’s 1952 poem “Ping Pong”. Indeed, in this poem, the onomatopoeic title-words seem not so much multi-linguistic as meta-linguistic, foregoing semantic language entirely in order to relay the universal, differential structures of linguistic cognition from which specific statements take shape.

This nicely describes how concrete poetry verges on an abstract verbal art, concerned with the dynamics of relationship. But I think there is still an important element of semantic or referential content in “Ping Pong”: the visual 2-3-3-2 rhythm of its shape, made of overlapping lines on a diagonal axis, wittily suggests a rally across a table tennis table. Gomringer said of his word-shapes that “the constellation is an invitation”, and here the reading eye is invited to bounce around like a player at the table, or even the “o”-shaped ball itself. In this way, he hoped, the poet could “help” the reader to find the poetry in modern life through a new “kind of play-activity”.

(With its rubber bats and plastic ball, ping pong — the name was trademarked in 1901 — was a modernist sport which would achieve global reach. The International Table Tennis Association was formed in 1926, one year after Eugen Gomringer was born, and twenty years after Gomringer’s poem first appeared, the binary back-and-forth of table tennis, with its simple set-up and rules, would form the basis of a new “kind of play-activity” for humanity: the first commercially successful video game, Pong.)

Gomringer’s international modernism expressed itself visually in his signature use of Helvetica, the classic sans serif of the International Typographic Style which was being developed contemporaneously in 1950s Switzerland. Helvetica’s clean, light, rounded lines make for letters that might be inked on ping pong balls, evoking the world of public information and giving the poems a quality of positive innocence.

This typographical neutrality is integral to the ambivalence of his most famous work:

Many critics have commented on how this concrete poem from 1953 creates a conceptual puzzle comparable to John Cage’s 4’33” (1952) — a musical score which contains no notes, but nevertheless requires the physical presence of a performer. How silent can a man-made silence be?

Gomringer’s fourteen printed words do not collectively or individually convey their meaning as effectively as the one unprinted one implied by the blank in the middle. Should we read them aloud? If so, would it be soothingly (to a child?) or shouted (as a command?) And does the language we are reading make a difference? Gomringer originally composed the piece using the German word “schweigen”:

The more internationally legible (and mellifluous) “silencio” has become famous. But it seems to me a German reader would be likely to hear a historical allusion in “schweigen” to Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong II”, the brief and delicate lyric whose fame in Germany is comparable to Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” in England:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

[Over all the hill-tops it’s still, in all the tree-tops you hardly sense a breath. The small birds fall silent in the forest. Wait: soon you too will be still.]

“Schweigen” [be silent] is both the main verb and emotional centre of Goethe’s poem — an experience that Gomringer’s rectangle “imprints […] upon the mind as a picture”.

NOTES

I wrote about the history of concrete poetry in Britain here:

You can read a full PDF of Mary Ellen Solt’s anthology of concrete poetry here:

https://monoskop.org/images/5/5d/Solt_Mary_Ellen_ed_Concrete_Poetry_A_World_View_1970.pdf

And you can find her shorter overview (quoted above) here:

https://monoskop.org/images/5/5c/Solt_Mary_Ellen_1970_Concrete_Poetry.pdf

Various key texts by Gomringer can be found on the invaluable Ubuweb:

https://ubu.punctumbooks.com/historical/gomringer/index.html

Last weekend, I went to Ledbury, Herefordshire for the annual poetry festival that’s been running there since the Nineties. It’s hard to think of an English town with more poets literally written into it. Not only do they have John Masefield High School, named after the long-running Poet Laureate (1930—1967) who was born in Ledbury in 1878; they also have the Barrett Browning Institute, built to honour the town’s most famous Victorian poet, and now known as The Poetry House; plus every other street name seems to commemorate a poet connected with the area, from The Langland (Piers Plowman begins in the nearby Malvern Hills) to Auden Crescent and Frost Close.

I did a double take, though, when I saw the Day Lewis Pharmacy, just down the road from the Poetry House — surely not the family business of Cecil Day-Lewis (1904—1972), who succeeded Masefield as Laureate? I began to feel as though I had slipped into the kind of dream I have after reading too many anthologies before bed. Google told me there was a connection, but not via Ledbury: the Day Lewis Group, one of the largest independent pharmacy chains in the UK, was founded in 1975 by Kirit Patel, who named his business after the late laureate. There are now over 250 branches across England — but almost none where I live in East Anglia, hence my double take.

From East Anglia to Herefordshire is a long journey, so this week’s post is a selection of poems from new books that I enjoyed reading on the train, plus one that I was reminded of by another landmark Ledbury building. I was at the festival to talk about the excellent Ledbury Poetry Critics programme, whose latest report on diversity in poetry reviewing is now available: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/new-and-international-writing/emerging-critics/ledbury-poetry-critics-report-2025/. The next day, it was a nice surprise to learn that my anthology, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, was also knocking around town in the form of a handout for a workshop by the poet Caleb Klaces. So, as a prelude to the prose poems below, here’s my introduction in a nutshell:

One souvenir I brought back from Ledbury was a little Versopolis pamphlet by the Cypriot poet Alexandros Chronides. It contained facing-page versions of the same poems in Greek and English, but with a twist: the poems were originally written in English (Chronides studied Philosophy and Economics at Edinburgh) and later translated by the poet into Greek. I like the snack-like nature of this short piece:

Also on the Ledbury Poetry Critics panel was Isabelle Baafi, who took part in the scheme, and has just published her first collection, Chaotic Good (Faber). This unrhymed sonnet packs a lot into its long lines, comedy and tragedy counterpointed in the “maelstrom” of its compelling but unpredictable sound patterning:

One Ledbury event I enjoyed being in the audience for was a discussion by Kimberley Campanello and Philip Terry of their in-progress experimental translations of Dante. Campanello explained how her Divine Comedy will change all proper names to pronouns, bringing out the lyric in the epic. The final prose poem from her new collection, An Interesting Detail (Bloomsbury), also touches movingly on this idea:

I’m a fan of everything Will Harris has written, in verse and prose. So as I caught the branch line from Birmingham to Ledbury, heading into what might be called Deep England, it was a pleasure to read and re-read Speakee Stonehenge (Blown Rose), a prose poem sequence which brilliantly gathers and scatters ideas of national identity into “many dispersed points speaking” across its ingeniously interwoven paragraphs:

A pocket-sized publication that provided the ideal alternative to scrolling on my phone as I waited on platforms was the first issue of , a new print poetry magazine which is also on Substack. The reviews section is happily snappy and eclectic. Ira Lightman’s discussion, for example, of Lyn Hejinian’s uncollected poems — largely written before her great prose poem My Life (1980) — calls them “early bitty pieces” by “the widest eye of her generation”, but ends generously with a whole short poem “which may take some reader’s fancy”, as it did mine.

Finally, a poem that I liked when I first read it in Hwaet! 20 Years of Ledbury Poetry Festival (Bloodaxe), by the American poet Kay Ryan, who wrote it on the spot and read it at the festival in 2012. It’s about the posts that support the raised seventeenth-century timber Market House. John Masefield recalled in a poem on his early life in Ledbury how “a market building stood / Propped upon quarres of of chestnut-wood”. But he was wrong about the tree: it was later found the posts were made of oak. His use of the archaic word “quarres” though (“the carcass of a hunted animal”) suggests a metaphorical affinity with Ryan’s riddling image of an elephant tamed by the unseen violence of tools to a “patient beast” on “anchor stone”. There is always more to a Kay Ryan poem than its short lines and zigzag rhymes at first imply, and here I think it is the history of British imperialism through which the Market House has “stood and stood” — as a place where you might buy the wares of Masefield’s famous “Cargoes”.

NOTES

I wrote about my own experience of growing up in a small town that commemorates a once-famous poet here:

And I wrote more about Kay Ryan’s use of rhyme here:

As you may know, the word “anthology” comes from the Greek anthos “flower” + -logia “collection”. So it always seems appropriate that one of the reference works I consult most in midsummer — The Reader’s Digest Nature Lover’s Library Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of Great Britain (1983) — should contain a range of allusions to English poetry.

The lore of wildflowers is itself poetry scattered in waste places. Recently, for example, I learned that the yellow-flowered groundsel — a weed that gets everywhere — takes its name from an Old English kenning: groundswyle, “groundswallower”. And then there is the metaphorical vividness of folk names: the toadflax flower, for example, which opens when its sides are squeezed, has been variously called “lion’s mouth”, “devil’s head”, “weasel-snout” and “pig’s chops”.

But for this Pinks I thought I would pick some entries from the Reader’s Digest Field Guide which cite actual poems that, like wildflowers, might otherwise get overlooked.

Purple milk-vetch / Astragalus danicus

William Shenstone, the 18th-century poet and essayist who spent every penny he earned on landscaping his estate near Halesowen in the West Midlands, celebrated “the tangled vetch’s purple bloom” in his work Rural Elegance, published in 1750. Early summer visitors to the Breckland region of Norfolk can see Shenstone’s words brought vividly to life. Vast sweeps of purple, whose flowers look at a casual glance like those of clover, bring rich colour to the sandy hills.

Despite having grown up in the Breckland region of Norfolk, I’ve never been aware of the purple milk-vetch as a local summer sight (perhaps I mistook it for clover). I’d also never read the poetry of William Shenstone — and here I think I can be forgiven. The line from Rural Elegance arrives in the context of an argument about the beauties of art’s “spangled shore” overshadowing “the sincere delight” of nature:

Now landed on some spangled shore
Awhile each dazled maniac roves
By saphire lakes, thro’ em’rald groves,
Paternal acres please no more;
Adieu the simple, the sincere delight —
Th’ habitual scene of hill and dale,
The rural herds, the vernal gale,
The tangled vetch’s purple bloom,
The fragrance of the bean’s perfume

I probably won’t be reciting these lines by heart next time I roam the paternal plains of Breckland. But I was pleased to be able to read them on a remarkably detailed website called Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive, where, among other things, you can search for rhyme-pairs in the work of a particular poet. Shenstone, I find, was fond of bloom / perfume, using it not only for purple milk-vetch but lavender’s “spikes of azure bloom” which are used to give “kerchiefs clean” a “mickle rare perfume”:

https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/resources/rhyme-index/?aut=pers00035

Mugwort / Artemisia vulgaris

This dusty looking plant with its unromantic name seems ordinary enough, but it has often been written about by poets. For instance, Edward Thomas in “The Brook” described how “there was a scent like honeycomb / From mugwort dull”.

[…]

An old couplet tells of the plants medicinal properties:

If they’d drink nettles in March and mugwort in May,
So many fine maidens would not turn to clay.

I’m not entirely convinced by the claim here that mugwort has “often” been written about by poets — a search in the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive, for example, brings up nothing. (I suspect you might be able to find it mentioned somewhere in the prolific recent work of J.H. Prynne, which is absolutely abuzz with wildflower names. But I’m not combing through two dozen pamphlets to confirm this.) The proverbial couplet here, though, has a pleasing touch of Housman to it, and the Thomas poem, as always, is worth reading in full. In it, the “honeycomb” smell of the dull-looking mugwort marks a moment of imaginative transition into a more enchanted world:

There was a scent like honeycomb
From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome
Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft
A butterfly alighted. From aloft
He took the heat of the sun, and from below.

Read on here for the sound of “waters running frizzled over gravel”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53749/the-brook-56d2335518e67

River water-crowfoot / Ranunculus fluitans

The 19th-century Dorset dialect paid tribute to the river water-crowfoot […] He celebrated the plant in a poem which spoke of its small, fair face studding the River Frome with white. Concerned for the plant’s future, Barnes warned that it was in danger from the “water man”, who would wade the river with his deadly blade and “slay thee even in thy bloom”.

This Field Guide entry manages rather obtusely to summarise the poem without actually quoting any of the dialect lines that give it its distinctive voice (for wade / blade, read weade / bleade). But these are arguably the poetic equivalent of Barnes’ concern for the neglected beauty of the flower, and are not hard to follow when read aloud. The only word whose meaning may not be readily apparent here is “clote”, the local name for the yellow water-lily which grew on another Dorset river, the Stour:

O’ small-feac’d flow’r that now does bloom
To stud wi’ white the shallow Frome,
An’ leave the clote to spread his flow’r
On darksome pools o’ stwoneless Stour,
When sof’ly-rizen airs do cool
The water in the sheenen pool,
The beds o’ snow-white buds do gleam
So feair upon the sky-blue stream,
As whitest clouds, a-hangen high
Avore the blueness of the sky

You can read the whole poem here: https://www.andrewspink.nl/ranunculus/barnes.htm

Common forget-me-not / Myosotis arvensis

One day in medieval Germany, a knight and his lady were strolling along a river-bank. The knight bent down to pick a bunch of flowers for her and, overcome by the weight of his armour, fell into the river. As he was drowning he threw the posy to his beloved and cried: Vergiz mein nicht! — “Forget me not!”

From that romantic, tragic — and doubtless legendary — moment, the plant was known in Germany as the forget-me-not. […] The tradition took hold in France, where the plant was called ne m’oubliez pas, “do not forget me”; and aimez-moi, “love me”.

Then, in 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem based upon the incident in which the knight supposedly drowned. He called his verse “The Keepsake”, and in it he spoke of

That blue and bright-eyed flowerlet of the brook
Hope’s gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not!

This gave the plant its popular English name.

This is my favourite mention of an English poem in the guide. But there is a glaring error in it. “The Keepsake” does not seem to have anything to do with the Monty Python-esque legend of the knight falling into the river due to the weight of his armour. It’s a soliloquy of lost love in a summer landscape, written in Coleridge’s characteristically urgent and observant blank verse. Here are the opening lines:

The tedded hay, the first-fruits of the soil,
The tedded hay and corn-sheaves in one field,
Show summer gone, ere come. The foxglove tall
Sheds its loose purple bells, or in the gust,
Or when it bends beneath the up-springing lark,
Or mountain-finch alighting. And the rose
(In vain the darling of successful love)
Stands, like some boasted beauty of past years,
The thorns remaining, and the flowers all gone.
Nor can I find, amid my lonely walk
By rivulet, or spring, or wet road-side,
That blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook,
Hope’s gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not!

When the poem was collected in 1817, Coleridge added a scholarly note to the last line:

One of the names (and meriting to be the only one) of the Myosotis Scorpioides Palustris, a flower from six to twelve inches high, with blue blossom and bright yellow eye. It has the same name over the whole Empire of Germany (Vergissmein nickt), and, I believe, in Denmark and Sweden. ~ S.T.C.

The OED only cites one earlier instance of “forget-me-not” in English, from a sixteenth-century textbook which translates the French term. So it does seem likely that Coleridge was the source of its later popularity, although I wonder if Tennyson’s poem “The Miller’s Daughter” (1832) — the OED’s next citation — helped to consolidate this new, poetic folk name in the minds of Victorian readers:

So sing that other song I made,
Half anger’d with my happy lot,
The day, when in the chestnut shade
I found the blue Forget-me-not.

You can read “The Keepsake” in full here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29090/29090-h/29090-h.htm#stcvol1_Page_345

NOTES

Last year I wrote about how the foxglove is a favourite wildflower of modern poets:

Satire has a habit of being prophetic.

This week, I learned that the estate of Mary Oliver has launched an online shop selling clothing decorated with popular quotations from the late American poet, such as

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves

— and what soft animal wouldn’t love a Suddenly and Unexpectedly sweatshirt topped with a hat that will have strangers asking if your name is Mary Oliver?

It’s not the first time that poets have been turned into merchandise — here, for example, is a Staffordshire pottery figurine of Lord Byron for your mantelpiece:

And if you search for him on Etsy these days, it turns out the first part of T.S. Eliot stood for “T-Shirts”:

You also really can now buy W.B. Yeats branded “Still Irish Water” — a tribute, perhaps, to the waterjet balancing a pingpong ball in a London shop window that he said inspired “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (the most famous “still Irish” poem of all):

The fact that such things now exist, though, send me back to the days when it was possible just to pretend they did. At its peak in 2015, the Irish Poetry Shop was a prolific online entrepreneur, posting images of unlikely poetry purchases on Twitter. After a brief boom, however, this satirical little start-up seems to have gone bust. Here are a few favourite products, which showcase what a one-stop Photoshop it was.

Mary Oliver, eat your heart out — the IRS clothing range was really down with (a couple of) the kids:

They also sold handy snacks to fill that gap between stanzas:

Practical tools to boost any poet’s career:

Light canonical reading:

Not to mention gift ideas for the Yeats fan who has everything:

And of course, as a global brand, the IRS accepted several currencies, including the American Muldoon:

So when I wrote a short critical book in a similarly irreverent mood for Rack Press the same year — The Whitsun Wedding Video: A Journey into British Poetry (2015) — I was pleased to get (anonymous) permission to use several Irish Poetry Shop images as illustrations, including this one, featuring a real quote from T.S. Eliot:

— which, in spirit, was not a million miles from this genuine photo I took in my local Waterstone’s:

You can read an extract from the “Mug’s Game” chapter here:

Finally, I recently rediscovered another pile of — what else? — unsold copies of The Whitsun Wedding Video. So in the spirit of monetising poetry for all it’s worth, I’d be happy to send one, including postage within the UK, for £5 via Paypal to jnoeltod@hotmail.com. Depending on demand, I may also branch out into baseball caps, porcelain figurines and spring water.

NOTES

Somehow, when The Whitsun Wedding Video appeared, I completely missed the fact that it improbably featured as runner-up to J.H. Prynne in the Best Critical Book category of the LRB Bookshop Poetry Awards 20215, as prophesied by, erm, Eliot and Ezra Pound (who also had the foresight to make R.F. Langley’s Complete Poems their Book of the Year). John Clegg’s lighthearted tale of an unlikely award ceremony begins:

We were hunkered down in a specially-constructed footnote under the bookshop, illuminated only by the glow of reputations and a single candle.

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/blog/2015/december/christmas-poetry-picks-2015

Welcome to another round-up of poems from books I’m reading, during which I think of myself as a kind of late-night poetry DJ, playing new tracks. As before, there’s one for every day of the week ahead. You can catch up on previous episodes here:

I included the first poem of Maurice Riordan’s sequence “The Idylls” in The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem because I liked its dry attention to the idioms of Southern Irish English (Riordan grew up on a farm in County Cork) and the poetry of conversational recollection. As Jack Underwood notes in his editor’s introduction to a new Selected Poems (Faber), “Riordan is a poet who […] enjoys a proper noun”. Here’s the fourth Idyll:

Don Mee Choi’s second collection Hardly War was published in the States in 2016, but it’s now been made available in the UK by the excellent And Other Stories (who also publish her translations of Kim Hyesoon). It’s a work in the documentary-collage tradition that has become increasingly important in American poetry: among other texts, the title poem draws on the words of Choi’s father, who worked as a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars. “A paper closet with real paper dresses in it” is, I think, her rewriting of Marianne Moore’s “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” as a metaphor for collage poetry’s layered textuality:

A new work of found poetry that I’ve been admiring is John Bevis’ A Surrey Naturalist, just published by the ever-interesting Uniformbooks. An author’s note explains how it works through the chapters of a single non-fiction book, Eric Parker’s A Surrey Naturalist (1952), extracting and compressing words and phrases into short poems. The following lines were made using the “cutout” technique, where words are framed on the page by a piece of cardboard with a matchbox-sized hole in the middle. Bevis quotes the American poet Jonathan Williams, who used cutouts to find “the fire-points, the garnet crystals free of their matrix”. I’m also reminded of the student in a workshop I ran recently about the related practice of erasure poetry, who said his uncle used to throw a slice of Swiss cheese on a book and declare the holes a poem.

I wrote last year about Sam Riviere’s Conflicted Copy (Faber), a book of poems made using an early version of ChatGPT:

The way Conflicted Copy arranged hallucinated text into verse left me with a sense of how Riviere’s writing often sounds as though it is listening to language as it passes through the mind onto the page. Mirrors for Princes (After Hours Editions) collects much uncollected work from the last decade and a half. There are longer, stranger poems here, but this quatrain catches that ironic listening quality, as the sound of “all morning” echoes (and slightly weakens) into “slight moral weakening”:

I’m reading Imogen Cassells’ debut Silk Work (Prototype) for review at the moment, and enjoying how her intelligently sound-led lines dip into dream-like pastoral landscapes. Here is a whole poem about such a place, which taught me the precise word serac: “a tower of ice on a glacier, formed by the intersection of crevasses”.

It’s very good news that Vidyan Ravinthiran has a new collection out, Avidyā (Bloodaxe). I thought his previous book, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (2019), was terrific. And I remember reading the last poem of Avidyā when it first appeared in Poetry magazine back in 2017. Now, its haunting final phrase, “the avid void of English”, resonates with Ravinthiran’s recently published work of critical autobiography, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir (Norton). In it, he describes how his childhood speech impediment, and the pressure in an immigrant Sri Lankan Tamil family to master received pronunciation, led to a love of dictionaries as a compensatory realm of rich English: “its capaciousness and acceptance of the foreign; an arena in which I could be confident of my originality, if nothing else”.

You can read an early version of the essay here: https://poetrylondon.co.uk/a-flint-holds-fire-vidyan-ravinthiran-on-growing-up-with-a-speech-impediment/

Finally, I’m honoured to have been visited by a “Book on Tour (without an author)”: Alice Willitts’ Kiss My Earth (Blue Diode Press). It came in the post with a card tucked into a pocket at the front, like an old-school library borrowing record, to fill in before posting on to a new reader. I’m still in the middle of its playful and painful imagining of East Anglian fen landscapes, now and in their underwater future. Here’s a poem about their past:

And now I’m off to dig for lions on my allotment.

I was very happy this week to learn that one of my favourite writers, Anthony V. Capildeo, has been awarded a prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for their poetry. Twenty years ago — when they were writing as Vahni Capildeo and I had a small poetry press called Landfill — I published their prose poem Person Animal Figure (2005), a sequence for three voices expressed through three typefaces. Typesetting a text is one way to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and my ongoing interest in the nature and history of the prose poem began with the making of this pamphlet.

Capildeo has since published many more books and pamphlets of poetry in both prose and verse, and this is the achievement that the Windham Campbell Prize recognises. Something that doesn’t yet exist, though, is a collection of their critical prose, which I admire just as highly. Their gift for fluent reflection on writing as a kind of thought woven into the wider business of living seems to me comparable to that of Virginia Woolf (who once wrote “the peculiar form of an essay implies a peculiar substance; you can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other”). So this Pinks is a selection of passages that I find particularly illuminating of their own poetry.

A recurring theme of Capildeo’s writing is multiplicity of identity and voice, not as an abstract ideal but as a cultural inheritance: a way of life and a world of sounds. This is from their introduction to a selection of work in the Carcanet anthology New Poetries VI (2015), edited by Michael Schmidt and Helen Tookey:

The question of “Where are you from?” requires resistance. I work “from” a place that would be pigeonholed if named but whose multiplicity liberated my imagination. Caribbean writers have a tradition of crafting words, rather than defining themselves by genre or occupation; there is no hard contradiction between poet, journalist, Carnival maker, festival programmer, Ministry worker, housewife, judge — only the tensions of everyday survival. Betrayal and connexion sing from the unfair trade and travel routes of the archipelago and its Americas; so even the lyric’s context and time zone are expansive. Trinidad’s languages, from the First Peoples, Africans, Indians, Chinese, Syrian/Lebanese, Europeans, make various music continually in my mind, bearing blissfully dissonant ways of understanding and making images of the world.

In a more recent statement for The Stinging Fly magazine, “Notes on the power of the unwritten” (Summer 2022), Capildeo reflects on the other side of this experience — what emerges from imagination’s store of early memories in the moment of writing:

What, then, matters? Neither the mechanism of memory itself, nor the timing of the memories’ imprint, nor even their content. It is that I do not write about these memories. They exist in between the lines of poems, or in the background. From this derives my sense of the space in between and around words as being astir with voices, things, moods, atmospheres, rhythm, music, and sound. Working on the poetics of Old Norse and the implications of translating Old Norse into English for my doctorate, half a lifetime ago, I felt comfortable with the inadequacy of the translations of skaldic verse. This was because it was shiningly obvious to me that any text, translated or not, is soaked in the unwritten; that receiving any text involves listening to failure, in the weightlifting sense of “training to failure”, that is, to the point where something becomes impossible, unbearable. Where no words are, is extreme attention.

The most regular home for Capildeo’s critical prose has been the magazine , to which they have been contributing regular “reports” since 2013. “Letter Not From Trinidad” (January-February 2015) recalls the ritual space of “my childhood Deepavali” — the garage of the family home, filled with hundreds of small earthenware, vegetable-oil lamps — and illuminates how a writer’s relationship to poetic form may be conditioned by other formal experiences:

The air at Deepavali hissed and rang with burnt offerings, bells, and Sanskrit (painstakingly explicated; never fully understood by me). Sanskrit had to be chanted with absolute attention to the pronunciation of each syllable, the shape and rhythm of the line, and a breath so profound the whole body resonated. We were made instruments. To this experience I can trace my instinctive revolt against such terms as “line break”, “white space” or “margins of silence”. Without meaning to, I developed a poetics of reverberation and minor noise. I find a line does not break so much as hum; the background to the letters (screen or paper) is not flat, but streaming; I want extra words and syllables here and there (as it were, the Caribbean English in which the Sanskrit is embedded) which I can fuss over and also ignore, like the necessary and distracting objects which demarcate “here” from “theirs”.

The phrase “poetics of reverberation” names a quality that I admire across Capildeo’s work, from lyric verse to critical essay. Here is a passage from a PN Review report last year which exemplifies their ability to make poetry and memory speak to each other:

The guitar is a curvy shape that warms up and yields its voice as it is hugged to a human body that can pluck, strike, stroke, tingle and strum. Federico García Lorca plays on this early in his poetic tragedy of small-town repression, La Casa de Bernarda Alba, where enclosed women gossip about a loose woman who lets herself be carried away on horseback by a man who holds her as if he were playing the guitar. With this image, Lorca both conveys the bitter and snippy tone of sexual yearning mixed with judgmentalism and fear, and sets a kind of imaginary background music thrumming, one made of night and a woman returning herself to the woods. As a pre-internet era child in a country with few music shops, to learn musical technique I listened to pirated recordings of the classical guitarist Andrés Segovia. He taught shamelessness. His interpretations were romantic in their tempo rubato approach, where “robbed” time hurries or sways around the prescribed measure. They were erotic in their audible breath and the squeak of finger-contact with the neck and strings. Nothing too clean here.

All of which brings me to a short lyric from Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear (Carcanet, 2018), which is, I think, about the aesthetic and ethical value of “reverberation and minor noise”. It is these qualities that musicians seek in the acoustics of catgut strings; here, the syllabic modulation between “to… to… to” and “tone”, “tune” and “note” creates a poetic echo of the tuning process of plucking and tensing a string:

Catgut

You like them silken.
I’m listening for the looseness:
there’s one string in them
cannot be tensed
to the tone they listen for
to the tune you’d disappear
to the note this song needs.

NOTES

You can read a longer online essay by Capildeo which develops these themes in relation to the idea of “travel writing” here:

https://granta.com/microtravel-capildeo/

And here is Capildeo in full flow as a prose poet, with the brilliant title sequence of their 2015 book, Measures of Expatriation:

https://www.gangan.at/40/vahni-capildeo/

The anniversary of the Covid lockdown in the UK last week took me back to this post about the poem that I thought of when it was announced: Edwin Muir’s “The Horses”.

And thinking about the historic shift from horses to tractors took me back to Adrian Bell, one of my favourite writers about rural life. I first read Bell’s newspaper columns, “A Countryman’s Notebook”, in my local paper, the Eastern Daily Press, when they were being reprinted about fifteen years ago. The original series ran from 1950—1980, and seems to me one of the great literary achievements of the newspaper column as a form — perhaps not to be compared with Baudelaire’s feuilletons, which became the “little poems in prose” of Paris Spleen (1869), but an enduring contribution to the art of the sentence nevertheless, written with a poet’s feeling for words.

One thing I enjoy about “A Countryman’s Notebook” is how many light-hearted allusions to English poetry Bell manages to work into a column ostensibly about life in the Suffolk countryside, to be read over East Anglian breakfast tables each Saturday morning. As he told his life story, at the age of sixteen he read Tennyson’s lines about “The moan of doves in immemorial elms / And murmuring of innumerable bees” and decided to dedicate himself “to the plough and poetry”. His allusions are often to such Golden Treasury-style touchstones, but his range is wide. In April 1965, for example, he begins a column by quoting Henry Reed’s World War Two poem about being trained to use a rifle (“this is the piling swivel, / Which in your case you have not got”):

But how many BBCs are there? […] I reminded rather of that poem called “The Naming of Parts”. There is BBC 1; there is BBC 2 “which we have not got”.

The joke was that the BBC 2, launched in 1964, could only be watched on more up-to-date TV sets, which were presumably in short supply in Suffolk in 1965.

The tone of Bell’s newspaper columns is gentle and homely, but he had a quick wit, and said of his writing that he wanted “to put into words the way unrelated things came together and formed a relation” — a well-considered definition of the poetic impulse (compare T.S. Eliot in “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) on how, “a poet’s mind […] is constantly amalgamating disparate experience”). In the same year as he published Corduroy (1930), his first autobiographical book about farming, Bell also set the first Times crossword, which he said was “the ideal job for a chap with a vacant mind sitting on a tractor harrowing clods”. He continued to set Times puzzles throughout his life; classic clues include “This cylinder is jammed” (5, 4). The answer appears in this Surrealist painting from 1939 by the poet Humphrey Jennings:

For all the poetry in his head, however, Bell only published one book of verse, Poems (1935), which epitomises the “slim volume” in its generous spreading of 14 poems over 23 pages. Like other English poets of his generation, Bell was influenced by two Victorians who became honorary moderns: Thomas Hardy, who lived until 1928, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose experimental prosody was only appreciated after the posthumous publication of his poems in 1918. Bell’s poem “Harvest” echoes the heroic magnification of the farm worker in “Harry Ploughman”. Compare the bodily solidity of Hopkins’ “Hard as hurdle arms” and “Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank” with Bell’s “shire-horse hoof / Trunk broadening trouser to strong boot”, which blends the tapering shapes of man and animal:

But it is easy to get carried away by Hopkins’ sprung rhythms and percussive rhymes, as Bell does in the next sentence, when he describes scything by hand:

Mind no more daunted than young shoots that swerve
Round irremoveables, makes life’s curve serve
To sever at the base and lay all trim

With “curve serve / To sever” the crossword setter takes over, playing with words more than the poem needs. There are no wholly successful pieces in the book, but there are flashes of phrase and image that show Bell’s talent for resonant word-painting: “the hound insouciant / Shadowed fantastic on sunrisen frost”; “that sliced stack bright and blind”; “hay swathed over the graves”.

Reading Bell’s promising but stilted poems has left me with an even greater appreciation of how he wrote about the same subjects so warmly, thoughtfully and naturally for the local newspaper reader, perfecting an erudite but friendly voice whose verbal ingenuity is gently tamped down below the surface of each sentence. Here are some paragraphs that I admired this month in A Countryman’s Spring Notebook, one of a set of four recent seasonal collections of Bell’s columns. The cadenced phrases of the prose are unemphatically pointed by alliteration and assonance, and surprising and precise images shine out from the fluent wash of countryside evocation (“tabby pattern”, “fluorescent dot”, “five o’clock sun”):

March is a month beautiful for shadows. The sun, glittering now through the keen air, casts shadows of bare boughs on thatched roofs in a tabby pattern. It lays them across harrowed fields, dark upon their lightening brown: where there is young corn, the gleam and stir of the green blades gives the shadows life.

1 March 1958

Now the day which began with a gale and a gallop of old leaves, is dying in a sunset such as Samuel Palmer in his notebook called “raving-mad splendour of orange twilight glow” — yet not more splendid than one spot of fungus I saw on a rotten gatepost this afternoon. That fluorescent dot, that total sky; and a smell of cut grass (yes, I mowed it), and now no wind at all.

12 March 1977

Next a bonfire. Bonfires are in the air on this first day that has really felt like spring. Then, the job done, I can sit watching the river making wriggling snakes of reflected boughs. The mildness makes small birds sing and rooks so pugnacious that they tumble to the ground in a black tangle, disputing over an old nest. The beech buds are pointed, barbing their delicate boughs. An amber cloud lit with five o’clock sun stands behind them. The upper sky is filled with small puffs of sunlight on clouds, though on the horizon behind the willows is that thickening greyness which is the aftermath of a warm day in March. The river pulses with slow bars of light and shadow, perhaps by some contrary urges of light wind and slow tide.

24 March 1956

The final sentence here catches the encounter of water and wind using the rhetorical figure of chiasmas, in which words are repeated in reverse order: “slow bars of light… light wind and slow tide”. And there is a crossword setter’s touch to the way that one kind of “light” becomes another: subtly, as twilight falls, the sun gives way to the cold.

NOTES

Bell’s Countryman Notebooks are published by Slightly Foxed. This extract begins with a story about meeting T.S. Eliot — “as townee a poet as ever lived” — and telling him “why April is the cruellest month to us country people”: https://foxedquarterly.com/adrian-bell-hungry-gap-countrymans-spring-notebook/

The quotations about Adrian Bell’s life as a crossword setter come from Alan Connor, Two Girls, One on Each Knee: The Puzzling, Playful World of the Crossword (2013).

Here are the answers to the Times Crossword No. 1:

Lots of people liked my post last month featuring a week’s worth of short poems from recent reading:

So I thought I’d give it another spin. My model was the late-night radio show where the DJ has the freedom to play a mix of things without much more comment than the name of the track and the artist. This time, I’ve widened my range from recently-published books to include poems from magazines too, and sprinkled in a few links.

I found it hard to pick a favourite from Ian Duhig’s excellent new collection, An Arbitrary Light Bulb (Picador). So I decided to go with one that continues last week’s post about my discovery, as a teenager, that other poets sometimes made fun of Ted Hughes. This poem is much more than a joke about “Hawk Roosting” though:

And Duhig’s attempt at a bird poem pairs nicely with this fish one, from three fine new elegiac pieces by Gail McConnell in the latest :

The poet is often a bird in the shapeshifting poems of Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Pain Wings (And Other Stories), translated by Don Mee Choi. Not here, though:

After launching their new poetry list with Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s Strange Beach last month, Fitzcarraldo Editions have now brought Diane Seuss’ Modern Poetry — published in the US last year — into a beautifully printed UK edition:

I was happy to see new poems by Anthony Vahni Capildeo in the latest London Review of Books. The last line here has kept surprising me, like a daylight ghost, all week:

I always enjoy the use of Scots for translation, perhaps because it cannot stray so readily from a feeling for place and voice as local-to-nowhere Standard English. Colin Bramwell’s Fower Pessoas (Carcanet), a selection from the multiple voices of the great Portugese modernist, is a treat. This is by Pessoa’s Horatian heteronym “Ricardo Reis”:

Finally, I feel lucky to have a copy of Like Now (Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks), the latest pamphlet by American poet J.T. Kelly, who kindly sent it in defiance of the complexities and expense of transatlantic pamphlet shipping. It contains many short, witty and touching poems that I might have shared — here’s one:

That’s the seven for this week, but here’s a genuine DJ bonus track that I owe to whoever played it on BBC 6Music on Thursday morning — new music by the T.S. Eliot-Prize-winning poet Anthony Joseph: https://idol-io.ffm.to/blackhistory-2

This week, the publisher Simon & Schuster announced that its authors will no longer be expected to obtain blurbs from fellow authors for a new book. Sean Manning, writing in Publishers’ Weekly, traced the decision back to his realisation that

many of the biggest-selling, prize-winning and most artistically revered titles in the flagship’s history did not use blurbs for their first printings: Psycho, Catch-22, All the President’s Men…

Manning now believes that there is an “excessive amount of time spent on blurb outreach” — which, if nothing else, is a memorably new combination of words.

Blurb outreach has certainly increased in British poetry in recent years. I’m always happy to say something positive about a new book if I can, especially if it’s from a small press and/or a debut author. But I inevitably then wrangle too long with the job, as though it were a “real” piece of writing, rather than a nice cheerful signpost. That’s a mistake: to adapt what Gertrude Stein said about remarks, blurbs are not literature. But I can think of some poetry blurbs that are at least interesting footnotes to the life and work of those who wrote them, and the poets they were written for.

In this post from last year I noted how T.S. Eliot noted — 99 years ago — that “blurb” was a piece of American slang “pretty certain to be adopted in this country”:

Eliot’s definition of blurb, though, was a “publisher’s notice on the wrapper or jacket of a book” (Gelett Burgess, the American humourist who coined the word, defined it as “a noise like a publisher”). So the current meaning of “advance praise from a well-known name” seems to be a later development. The OED only traces usage as far as 1955, when the blurb is still talked about as something written by the publisher. The invaluable online edition of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, however, comes to the rescue: in a letter from 1957, Jack Kerouac says: “I wrote a jacket-blurb for Gregory Corso’s new book”. The book was Gasoline, published by City Lights, with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac appears on the back cover, calling Ginsberg and Corso “the best two poets in America”. Were the Beat Generation also the first Blurb Generation?

Wikipedia suggests that the earliest instance of the inter-authorial blurb was when Walt Whitman took a phrase from a fan letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson (“I greet you at the beginning of a great career”) and had it embossed in gold on the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856). Technically, of course, this wasn’t “blurb outreach”. But it seems reasonable to suspect that hyperbolic high-fiving between writers began in the US, and only later took hold in the UK. For decades, London publisher Faber and Faber followed the in-house example set by its first poetry editor, T.S. Eliot, whose downbeat blurb writing often put the “dust” into dustjacket. Compare, for example, his first sentence for Lynnette Roberts’ Poems (1944) —

Miss Roberts’s name has become familiar, in the last three years, to readers of poetry magazines and anthologies: this is the first selection of her poems to appear.

— with the opening of the Faber blurb for Paul Muldoon’s debut, New Weather (1973), years after Eliot had left the building:

A selection of Paul Muldoon’s poems was published in Poetry Introduction 2 in 1972, and was singled out for special praise by a number of reviewers.

The warmth of tone has increased over three decades, but only by a degree or two (none of the reviewers’ praise is actually quoted).

By the end of the century, however, even Faber were beginning to big up their big names: the back of Miroslav Holub’s Vanishing Lung Syndrome (1990) quotes the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (“one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere”) and speculates, hopefully, that Holub “is a potential winner of the Nobel prize”. But privately at least someone at Faber seems still to have felt that over-excited blurbs were a bit déclassé. In 1985, a selection of Wendy Cope’s poetic parodies from her debut collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was circulated as a limited edition promotional pamphlet. The back cover blurb was a parody too:

In his later years, John Ashbery was, among other things, the casual king of the American poetry blurb. Someone should — and one day, I assume, will — collect all his paragraphs of wry generosity together. One of my favourites is the rambling anecdote he tells on the back of Clark Coolidge’s Selected Poems 1962—1985:

Many years ago I was taking a train from New York City to go upstate and grabbed the first book that presented itself as I was leaving the apartment, which happened to be Clark’s recently published Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric. I sat across the aisle from an Italian family who had apparently just arrived in New York and were also headed upstate. One of the men asked if he could borrow the book I was reading, so I let him look at Clark’s integrated opus. After glancing at it for a while, he turned to his companion and said, “Mai io non capisco veramente niente!” I wanted to tell him not to feel bad, because most of the Americans in the railway car would have had the same trouble. And yet, I thought, if one merely lies open to it, Coolidge’s arresting words will sink in and provide a seldom experienced refreshment.

What’s particularly charming about this, I think, is that Ashbery — who as a poet could be as strange and arresting as Coolidge — decides not to compete, and instead to be homely and plain, as though the readers of his blurb were the Italians on the train, not realising that they are about to encounter lines like

car ice in bring bong bone flat tints

Another magnificently baffling poet, J.H. Prynne, has also been known to break cover into normal human prose for the purposes of blurbing. Ten years ago, I edited the Complete Poems of R.F. Langley, who died in 2011. Prynne kindly agreed to provide some words for the back cover — and in the end sent so many that it changed the format of the book. In order to accommodate Prynne’s two paragraphs of fond tribute to his late friend, the publisher, Carcanet, decided to add “French flaps” to the paperback design — that is, an extra leaf of card which folds back in like a dustjacket. It gives the book a lovely touch of luxury, with Prynne’s words tucked like a private letter inside the front cover, inviting us into Langley’s world:

Syllables and small insects, like birds on the wing, shadows on the wall, alerted his understanding. To read well, here, is to open the mind and peruse thoughtfully, alert to inner sounds and imagined recall of scenes and the exacting delicate behaviour of words.

And since the point of a blurb is to lead you to read on, here is one of my favourite pages from Langley’s Complete Poems: the opening stanza of “Blues for Titania”, a cartoon-like fantasia about the adventures of a beetle and a wasp.

The beetle runs into the future. He takes
to his heels in an action so frantic its
flicker seems to possess the slowness of deep
water. He has been green. He will be so yet.
His memory ripples emeralds. The wasp
takes it easy. She unpicks her fabric of
yellow and black, which slips from her fingers to
land in the past, loop-holed, lacy, tossed off on
the wing. The beetle is needled right through on
one string. He peels a strip as he packs a shelf.
He is thrilling the grass, and whatever it
means, it is radiantly green like himself. Thus
he will invest again and again in that
same flashy suit. The wasp has forgotten her
costume, but proves herself wise to the ways of
the sun, which are pat on her back. She drops a
curtsy, blows a kiss, and somersaults over
the beetle’s attack. Lost moments swill round in
the shallows, until they can stick there and stack.

You can read the whole poem here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n14/r.f.-langley/blues-for-titania.

To end on a self-blurb of a sort, I’m pleased to say that, to mark the tenth anniversary of Langley’s Complete Poems in 2025, I’m going to be writing about individual poems for , where many first appeared. It will be an unmissable literary event.

A simple Pinks this week: seven poems from books on my recent poetry shelf. As a critic with a never-ending To Read pile, I envy the John-Peel-style DJ who can make a show from listening to new music and playing stand-out tracks (my current favourite is Gideon Coe on BBC 6Music, 9-11, Thursday nights: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0026kln). So I decided to find a week’s worth of short poems from my recent reading that I felt would speak for themselves. This was harder than it sounds: my critic’s instinct was to look for talking points, but I tried to suppress this and listen instead… Here’s my playlist. If you want to read more, I’ve linked to the publisher page for each. Tune in next week for sonnets by The Fall.

Isabel Galleymore, Baby Schema (Carcanet)

Timothy Thornton, Shapeshifting (Run Amok Press)

Mimi Khalvati, Collected Poems (Carcanet)

Graeme Richardson, Last of the Coalmine Choirboys (New Walk Editions)

Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, translated by Alissa Valles (Penguin)

Billy Mills, a book of sounds (Shearsman)

Stevie Smith, Not Waving But Drowning and Other Poems (Faber) [somehow I never noticed this Smith poem before until I read it in this new selection…]

That’s the seven, all from books published in 2024. And now here’s a bonus track, from Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s forthcoming debut, Strange Beach, which is out on 30th January. It marks the launch of the Fitzcarraldo Editions poetry list, which is an exciting development in UK poetry publishing — a new record label, pop pickers!

Much of the best advice about writing poetry has been expressed in terms of the body. This might seem paradoxical at first: poetry is the least embodied art, words plucked from the air, to be read in the head or aloud. But the simplicity of its medium means that poetry is also intensely embodied, because it only needs a body to happen. “I made it out of a mouthful of air”, said W.B. Yeats — and I remain confident that AI will never write a really memorable poem, because it doesn’t have a mouth:

Making poems with a mouthful of air isn’t just about sound, either — it’s about the whole feeling of communicating something across space from one body to another. Ben Lerner defines “poetry” with a story about “rolling [a] word around, as it were, on my tongue”:

I remember walking around as a child repeating a word I’d overheard, applying it wildly, and watching how, miraculously, I was rarely exactly wrong. If you are five and you point to a sycamore or an idle backhoe or a neighbor stooped over his garden or to images of these things on a television set and utter “vanish” or utter “varnish” you will never be only incorrect; if your parent or guardian is curious, she can find a meaning that makes you almost eerily prescient […] And when I felt I finally mastered a word, when I could slide it into a sentence with a satisfying click, that wasn’t poetry anymore— that was something else, something functional within a world, not the liquefaction of its limits.

This describes the exact opposite of what Large Language Models are trained to do: for ChatGPT, the satisfying click is all. Liquefied language would rust its circuits.

I will swear to my dying day that an iambic pentameter is not what’s showing on the hospital heart monitor:

But I do think writing has a relationship to the body and its rhythms. I believe Gertrude Stein when she says:

Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is. I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean.

Even Sir Philip Sidney’s inspirational quote, “Look in thy heart and write”, packs more of a punch when you remember it is framed by quill-chewing and head-slapping — the whole body involved in the marathon of a sonnet sequence:

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,

“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “Look in thy heart and write.”

T.S. Eliot went further, arguing that the heart “wasn’t deep enough […] one must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts”. Eliot the modernist is exaggerating for rhetorical effect here — but this does sound strangely like a list of the internal organs he fired up to write his poem “Journey of the Magi” (1927), which he claimed he did rapidly, drunk and on an empty stomach,

in three quarters of an hour after church time and before lunch one Sunday morning, with the assistance of half a bottle of Booth’s gin.

There are no physical descriptions of the South Korean poet Lee Seong-bok in Indeterminate Inflorescence (Allen Lane), a collection of 470 “notes from a poetry class” made by his students and translated by Anton Hur. But Lee’s programme for the would-be poet is all about cultivating an almost-physical attitude towards pen and page. Throwaway your theories, he seems to say, and be. “The brain is deliberate and social, but the hand is closer to desire and the unconscious. A poem is like a finger that breaks out of your head.” It’s easy to imagine the lecturer’s emphatic gestures.

Lee’s memorable sayings to his students often make the writer’s mind a body. Here are some of my favourites:

NOTES

Indeterminate Inflorescence is published in the US by Sublunary Editions:

https://sublunaryeditions.com/products/indeterminate-inflorescence-lee-seong-bok

Lee Seong-bok’s poetry isn’t currently published in the UK, but these prose poems, translated by Yea Jung Park, give a flavour of its vivid physicality:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/translation-tuesdays-by-asymptote-journal/2017/apr/25/translation-tuesday-two-poems-by-lee-seong-bok

Although T.S. Eliot was arguably the most influential literary critic of the 20th century, for decades, scholars worked without a collected edition of his critical prose, which was scattered through the high-minded journals of his day. Such a gathering would not only have spared the split bindings of the periodicals scoured hundreds of times across library photocopiers: it would also have enabled ready cross-referencing to Eliot’s opinions on Charles Baudelaire, the relationship between prose and verse, English and American stupidity, the music hall, the churches of London, and Stravinsky — to list just some of the topics covered while he was writing The Waste Land (1922), his poetic collage of a civilisation.

This is the opening paragraph of my review of T.S. Eliot’s Collected Prose for the new issues of Prospect — you can read the rest here:

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/68345/the-collected-prose-of-ts-eliot-review-faber-the-wasteland

For this week’s Pinks, I thought — oh, for no reason — that I’d look at something I didn’t have room for in the review: what Eliot said about America. The essays that he preserved in his critical books, such as The Sacred Wood (1920) and For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), tended to give the impression that he was almost entirely concerned with English and European literature. This was, I think, part of his careful ongoing cultivation of an image of himself as an English writer, despite having being born and raised in America. Wyndham Lewis — the great troll of Modernist literature — mocked this habit in Men Without Art (1934) when he imagined a disagreement between two Eliots: the conservative, Anglo-Catholic “Mr. T.S. Eliot (1933)” and “this fellow (bearing his name […] an American I believe!)” who wrote The Waste Land.

The four volumes of The Collected Prose cost £50 each. Volume One is the best: it’s packed with brilliant literary journalism, witty and precise in its judgements, not yet weighed down by fame and respectability. Running up to 1928, it also includes various suggestive comments about the country Eliot left, aged 26, in 1914. Here are a few.

[Americans] like to be told that they are a race of commercial buccaneers. It gives them something easily escaped from, moreover, when they wish to reject America.

“In Memory of Henry James” (1918)

The idea of “escape” here — in a tribute to Henry James, the American novelist who settled in England — echoes the famous claim that Eliot would make the following year in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

Poetry is […] is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality

We might say that one of the personal qualities Eliot was trying to “escape” in his poetry at this time was being American: Poems (1920) and The Waste Land (1922) are notable for how they exchange the claustrophobic Boston of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) for a haunted London. In an unpublished prose poem, “The Engine” (1915), written as Eliot crossed the Atlantic to see his family after marrying an Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, he imagines the other passengers as a cubist nightmare of “commercial bucaneers”:

Flat faces of American business men lay along the tiers of chairs in one plane, broken only by the salient of a brown cigar and the red angle of a six-penny magazine.

The speaker of the poem then retires to his cabin to think about the ship sinking.

Eliot’s nightmare vision of the all-conquering homogeneity of American culture returns in a review of English Literature during the Last Half-Century by J.W. Cunliffe, an English professor at Colombia University. The student “text-book”, he fears, will replace all other kinds of book:

America outstrips the world in the development of the text-book; America has carried the text-book into conquests elsewhere unaspired to by that humble vehicle of instruction; in America every serious work threatens eventually to conform to the text-book decorum, and to wear the text-book uniform of bibliography and guide to Further Reading; in America instruction is a manifest of seriousness.

“The Education of Taste” (1919)

Two essays which appeared in the spring of 1922 suggests how Eliot’s feelings about English and American culture may have made their way into The Waste Land (1922), via the metaphor of organic cultivation:

You must talk about America, just as here you must talk about England: only, there are different things to say. It is necessary to pretend that England is a green and pleasant land; at present, you need not say that America is pleasant […] but you must make out that it is big, that it is new, that it contains the germs of a colossal growth.

“London Letter” (April 1922)

and

The advance of “American literature” has been accelerated by the complete collapse of literary effort in England. One may even say that the present situation here has now become a scandal impossible to conceal from foreign nations; that literature is chiefly in the hands of persons who may be interested in almost anything else; that literature presents the appearance of a garden unmulched, untrimmed, unweeded, and choked by vegetation sprung only from the chance germination of the seed of last year’s plants.

“The Three Provincialities” (1922)

Compare: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (The Waste Land). Are these lines — shouted by the speaker at someone with the cartoonishly American name “Stetson” — Eliot’s way of asking whether American poetry has managed to cultivate the corpse of Eng Lit yet?

There was at least one American poet Eliot admired for being American: Marianne Moore. His review of her early work is one of the most illuminating things he ever wrote about a living poet. Its discussion of how Moore taps into a quality of socially neutralising “pleasantry” in American English — which unites “the jargon of the laboratory and the slang of the comic strip” — suggests how keenly he heard it as a mode of speech distinct from English English; a distinction that may be harder for us to hear now:

[Moore makes] a peculiar and brilliant and rather satirical use of what is not, as material, an “aristocratic” language at all, but simply the curious jargon produced in America by universal university education — that jargon which makes it impossible for Americans to talk for half an hour without using the terms of psychoanalysis, and which has introduced “moron” as more forcible than “idiot” […] She uses words like “fractional,” “vertical,” “infinitesimal,” “astringently”; phrases like “excessive popularity,” “a liability rather than an asset,” “mask of profundity,” “vestibule of experience,” “diminished vitality,” “arrested prosperity.”

“Marianne Moore” (1923)

Eliot turns again to the verbal life of his home country in an unsigned review of a book of American slang for the Times Literary Supplement from 1926. It’s perhaps not surprising that “blurb” caught his eye, as by this time he was working as a publisher at Faber & Faber, and writing much anonymous copy for book jackets — although he characteristically resisted the American instinct to “boost” (hard-selling Louis MacNeice’s debut, he told readers: “His work is intelligible but unpopular”).

We are told that there is a peculiar American vocabulary of racy popular speech […] a few [words] are pretty certain to be adopted in this country. Bootlegger is a word that has no equivalent, and is used here whenever we have occasion to refer to that industry. It is the first in the field, and will probably survive later inventions. Blurb (publisher’s notice on the wrapper or jacket of a book) is qualified by the editor himself as [an] “admirable word, indispensable.” The word dope, after an eccentric history (including the history of its derivatives: very few persons remember that doper, or horn-doper, means “individual,” “person,” whereas dopester is “tipster”), has now settled down, here as in America, to mean “poisonous or forbidden drugs” […] Certain words, like the verb to boost, and its substantive booster, reflect aspects of contemporary American life so accurately as to obtain a documentary value.

“American Prose” (1926)

The most personally revealing of Eliot’s early comments on America comes at the end of Volume One of The Collected Prose. In a short preface to a non-fiction book published by Faber, This American World by Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Eliot reflects feelingly on his sense of having a double American identity, divided between southern and northern landscapes — something, perhaps, he was only comfortable explaining in print after he had formally confirmed his status as a British citizen in 1927:

My family were New Englanders, who had been settled — my branch of it — for two generations in the South West — which was, in my own time, rapidly becoming merely the Middle West. The family guarded jealously its connexions with New England; but it was not until years of maturity that I perceived that I myself had always been a New Englander in the South West, and a South Westerner in New England; when I was sent to school in New England I lost my southern accent without ever acquiring the accent of the native Bostonian. In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shell-fish; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts.

“Preface” (1928)

These feelings of nostalgia for two landscapes would eventually emerge in Eliot’s poetry too: the bay and the goldenrod became

… the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

and the long dark river, the ailanthus trees became

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god […]
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard

The Dry Salvages (1941)

NOTES

For more little-known T.S. Eliot quotes, see:

and

A quick, pictorial Pinks this week. A month into the academic year, things have been — digitally, but also physically — piling up on my desk. I sat down to sort through some of the paper-based things, and began thinking about poetry books as printed objects. The almost-tangible way in which poetry organises words into formal shapes is, I think, one of its most powerful, yet hard to articulate, attractions. And the way books are put together can, of course, enhance that experience — as my subconscious reminded me when it gave me a pop-up edition of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons in a dream (see last week’s post). Unfortunately, phone cameras don’t work in dreams, so you’ll have to use your imagination for that one. Instead, here are some pictures of some real books that came to hand this week.

One of my favourite places to browse for new poetry is Good Press, a workers cooperative in Glasgow who run the best online bookshop I know (each item is photographed with sample pages). I found Vivek Narayanan’s The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror there, as published by Hanuman Editions, a project which, according to its website, continues

the legacy of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993. Our books are designed as a contemporary homage to the playful kitsch and small, object-like format of the original, evoking the Hanuman Chalisa, a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold in the bazaars of India.

The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror is “a fractalized translation and reinterpretation of a classical work in the Tamil Sangam canon, an anthology of 401 short poems composed between 100 CE and 300 CE”. After (NYRB Poets), Narayanan’s epic reworking of the Ramayana, was one of my favourite books of 2022. It’s fascinating to see him working with lyric miniatures now, translating and improvising across playing-card-sized pages on which gapped words “chank shell beads on a string”. The “close-fitting translations” are on the left-hand page, with Narayanan’s improvisations on the right. Here is a sample, with thanks to the good thumbs of Good Press:

https://goodpress.co.uk/products/the-kuruntokai-and-its-mirror-by-vivek-narayanan

Yasmine Seale’s House Style (RunAmok) begins with an author’s note:

Some years ago, I was invited by a publisher to produce a new English translation of a collection of Arabic folk tales. At some point in the editing process, I began to see the queries that arose as a long poem, a counter-text vibrating in the margins, an effort to press the dream logic of nights into the narrative logic of (American) days.

Each query is given its own blank page, eerily disembodying the brisk professional voice that seeks to make all neat. The results read like deadpan little anti-Imagist poems: “use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something”, wrote neat-freak Ezra Pound — here, the words reveal their own polite impatience with the subtleties of translation.

Buy House Style here: https://runamokpress.cargo.site/untitled-page

Stella Halkyard’s Library Lives (Carcanet), published last month, is almost as pleasing as a pop-up book in the way it brings objects to life. A gathering of columns that Halkyard wrote for the poetry magazine PN Review while working as an archivist at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, it’s full of stories about poets, sparked by an encounter with some material relic of their life and work (the Rylands, for example, holds the lining of Walt Whitman’s hat). One follows Wallace Stevens as he negotiates arrangements for the fine limited edition of his long poem Esthétique du Mal (1945 — pictured above) from the Cummington Press. Halkyard summarises the big questions:

The absorbency and sensitivity of different paper types; inks; the vellum backs of bindings; the limitations of kiss-printing; the value of printing images in rectangular boxes; the relationship between word and image on the page (a matter of especial significance in the case of poetry with its “uneven right-hand margin”)

Stevens says early on that he likes “bright colours” for bindings. But when Harry Duncan, the printer at the press, casually mentions that he’s looking for “a good stiff ink in dark green or purple” for the poems themselves, Stevens is not happy:

I don’t like the idea for green or purple ink in the text: in fact, I cannot even imagine purple. Green is possible, but why not black; with coloured initials? I cannot think of a decent book that I have in which the text is printed in coloured ink, and I am strongly against it […] Books in coloured inks are trivial and undignified, or so it seems to me.

Halkyard does not mention whether pop-up options were explored.

NOTES

You can buy Library Lives with 10% off from the publisher here. It’s a treat: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781800174375

For more on the making of poetry books, here’s a post from earlier this year about fonts: