*****

Dimitra Kotoula:The Slow Horizon That Breathes • Mireille Gansel: Soul House • Claire Dyer:The Adjustments • Alan Humm: A brief and Biased History of Love •  Caroline Carver: Canon ball with feathers  • Neil Fulwood:  The Point of the Stick   

*****

Dimitra Kotoula, The Slow Horizon That Breathes, trans. Maria Nazos, intro. A.E.Stallings, 9781954218161, Mireille Gansel, Soul House, trans. Joan Seliger Sidney, intro. Fanny Howe, 9781954218178, both published by World Books, £18.99. Reviewed by Ian Pople

 

Both these books come with high-ranking backers, introduced by A.E. Stallings and Fanny Howe, and with back cover puffs from the likes of Ilya Kaminsky and Pierre Joris. Both of these books are debut collections in English for both writers. And so, the reader comes to them with high expectations.  I say this not to offer some instant bathetic deflation, but to evince a slight worry perhaps that almost anything following such a context is likely to feel smaller, even shallower, somehow.

Fanny Howe’s introduction to Mireille Gansel’s Soul House briefly sketches the language background of someone who was clearly an inheritor of the polyglot legacy of the displacements of the second world war. Gansel grew up in the Savoie, the daughter of a Hungarian Jew, whose parents spoke German. In the 1970s, Gansel moved to Vietnam where she learned that language. And later in life, she translated not only from Vietnamese, but also the writing of Brecht, Rilke, Holderlin. Howe’s introduction also goes on to associate Gansel with a particular type of continental philosopher, Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, but also Walter Benjamin and Samuel Beckett. That kind of context further raises the bar for a writer who, as Howe, later acknowledges, ‘delight[s] in objects,’ with ‘a commitment to the childhood of the children.’

What we find on the page are a range of prose poems. And Gansel’s take on this form, at least in Seliger Sidney’s translation, is a set of impacted memoirs. The texts sometimes begin with an epigraph from a range of writers from Mahmoud Darwish, to Colette and Aimé Césaire. The poems begin with an epigraph from Bachelard, that reads, ‘against all odds, the house invites us to say: I will be a citizen of the world despite the world.’ In the production for this book, the texts have titles and initial lines that begin in lower case. An implication of all this is that Gansel seeks to reach through languages, her own and others, towards a deeper, encompassing empathy. Here, it is a slight pity that the warmer ‘habitant’ of Bachelard’s epigraph is translated, perhaps necessarily, with the rather colder, ‘citizen.’

My comment that the texts are ‘a set of impacted memoirs,’ was not meant to indicate any slightness on their part. However, we are not, perhaps, going to find in Soul House, the kinds of prose poems that Baudelaire both wrote and whose writing led to. The three and a half page ‘to make a word habitable,’ is an exercise in reflecting its title.  This piece begins with the epigraph from Césaire, ‘a thousand times more native…/the earth where all is free and fraternal/my earth’ The text begins,

‘this winter morning. The village of Schruns of the municipality of Montafon. Surrounding mountains and narrow streets all buried in high snow. And up to the small square where one finds the museum. Heimatmuseum: how to translate this word? and then Heimat? The native country and the house, home, the home. A word where there is intimacy: perhaps because in the Middle Ages the strong accent was put on the vowel that preceded the “t,” and was pronounced “o,” thus creating a misunderstanding with Mut. A word that speaks to a state of mind.’

My French isn’t wonderful, but it is good enough, to suggest that Seliger Sidney follows Gansel’s original closely. Thus the effect is to produce the kind of poetic essay currently associated with the American, Ben Lerne. Even with the comments about the surroundings being buried in snow, the purpose of the text seems to be a reflection of its title. As the text goes on to point how, there is a need to understand those words again. ‘Heimat’ is ‘a “sensitive” word, Gansel comments, putting ‘sensitive’ in her own scare quotes; a sensitive word ‘of the sort that exists in any language.’ For Gansel, such words emerge from ‘the German language forged in the spiritual, moral, political hearth of the translation Luther made of the Bible.’ Thus it must be understood by ‘taking into account the word Heimat and this museum subjugated by Nazism. Perhaps also by on-the-spot visits. Taking the pulse. In the field.’

Gansel, however, has chosen this particular Heimatmuseum, because it is a centre for cultural activities from a range of refugees from, amongst other places, Somalia, Eritrea, Senegal, Mongolia, and Kenya, in ways which reflect the history of the area which has welcomed, ‘muleteers, seasonal children from Swabia, cabbage cutters, harvesters, migratory waves of Alsatians, of Walsers, of Lombards.’ Here, as the poem ends, asylum seekers have learned to ‘become neighbours.’

Many of the shorter pieces towards the end of the book are descriptions of place and landscape. ‘Stokholm Island mid June’ begins, ‘cliffs of pink sandstone blackened by seaweed sharpened by the winds in blades erect along the precipices white burst among the honey fragrance of maritime silenes and among the rocks and broken stones scarlet pimpernels…’ In a sense, of course, this stream of quiet, uninflected description is to your taste or it isn’t; although, Gansel interpolates this later with, ‘ and suddenly in this stone solitude bouquets of tiny forget-me-knots and on the back of a clod of earth wild thoughts of night blue with a border of light.’ And, perhaps, it’s old-fashioned but what might the effect have been had Gansel separated this lines into some form of lineation?

Dimitra Kotoula’s The Slow Horizon that Breaths also has an introduction from another distinguished writer, this time the American poet, A.E. Stallings, currently resident in Athens.  Stallings situates Kotoula as part of a generation who came to maturity both in life and poetic terms in the period between the fall of the Junta in 1974 and the economic crisis of 2008. This was a period that straddled both Greece’s joining the Eurozone in 2001 and its hosting of the Olympics in 2004. For Stallings, Kotoula is ‘a poet of high modern seriousness and lyric grace, who yokes intellectual and philosophical concerns to physical sensuality. Stallings also see Kotoula’s translating of Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck and Sharon Olds as reflecting Kotoula’s ‘lacunose cerebral abstraction, direct lyric authority, and engagement with the body and its desires.’ And Stalling’s encomium doesn’t end there. For Stallings, too, Kotoula’s poetry is in dialogue with the two Greek poets whose achievement overshadows so much contemporary verse, Seferis and Cavafy with whom Kotoula ‘shares a tragic historic sensibility.’

I’ve quoted Stalling’s introduction at length because other than the two great Greek poets just mentioned, contemporary Greek poetry does not seem to have much purchase even elsewhere in Europe. Yet, perhaps, in part because of the contexts Stallings outlines, the best of contemporary Greek poetry offers a sensibility of reckoning between history, politics and landscape that utterly unique. And, although like Mireille Gansel, the reader is often conscious that the poems are impacted reports from Kotoula herself, it is, perhaps, the forces discussed above that make her a very different writer to Gansel. Here is the beginning of the poem, ‘Manifesto’;

There are incidents / between you and me / still to be revealed / -incidents that only the elegy / which erodes this poem can know- / which define us / announcing our faintest breath / as a political reality / moving these roses / between you and me / a little closer to History / while the petal’s yellow fluff / lightly dusts the words of this poem.’

The first thing to note is the sheer intensity of the writing. In the same moment as reaching out to both elegy and ‘History’ (her capital), there is an equal and opposite motion back towards the roses, their yellow petals and the dust on the petals. At the same time, we are in the presence of a relationship, which might be dead itself or have the death of the Other in the poem as a component. This relationship too, has a political reality which, clearly stretches out towards that capitalized History. And if that were all not enough, it is the roses who seem to be moving and the words themselves are part of a metanarrative containing ‘this poem.’

We might think, of course, that the weave and weft of these dynamics is a bit overegging the pudding; particularly in the light of Stalling’s introduction, and even given the nature of the title of the poem, ‘Manifesto.’ That all these dynamics actually do seem to pull together rather than pull apart is not only down to Kotoula’s skill but, in our case, the skill of Kotoula’s translator, Maria Nazos. In part, though, it is the sheer energy of Kotoula’s conception that drives and is so admirable. And this is a drive that Kotoula, too, can view with some distance, ‘:just the wind’s flute blowing hot air: / (no longer do you have the luxury / to passionately engage the nation)’

These two collections offer strong, substantial introductions to two very interesting and important poets.  The production values of both these texts are also much to be applauded; clear, readable font that also has a feeling of sensible artistry, with the originals on the verso and well organised translations on the recto.  These are very fine books.

Ian Pople‘s Spillway:  New and Selected Poems is published by Carcanet.

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*****

The Adjustments by Claire Dyer. £11.99. Two Rivers Press 2024. ISBN: 978-1-915048-16-5. Reviewed by Alex Josephy

Lines from a poem early in The Adjustments immediately caused my perennially knotted shoulders to relax a little:

Birdsong, and we unwrap the morning
like candy: pink sky, silver foil contrails.

We drink coffee, eat toast with warm butter,
thick cut marmalade…’

The simple pleasures outlined in ‘Perfect’ hide small, clever twists – a sweet-wrapper sky, a lawn ‘washed’ by dusk shadows. Without ever losing sight of the pains, difficulties and losses that come with contemporary life, Claire Dyer’s poems are a very welcome tonic, I think, especially in these times of wider conflict and uncertainty. Balancing between light and shade, vulnerability and agency, her explorations travel far from the ordinary, but are always grounded in acute observation and compassionate understanding. I wanted to stay as long as possible between the pages.

The Adjustments is Dyer’s fourth poetry collection; she is also a novelist and a generously proactive member of the poetry community in Reading and beyond. I came upon her poetry through the Reading Poets Café, an online lifeline during the pandemic. In this book, Dyer the novelist is subtly present. She unfolds a narrative in which nothing is directly sequential and the idea of ‘adjustments’ gradually gains relevance and depth, some of its potential meaning only revealed in the last of eighty-two poems. It is almost impossible not to read the poems as autobiographical, though they travel frequently and poignantly into realms of fantasy and speculation.

The many complexities of a family, a long term partnership, fantasies and infidelities, deaths, grief and above all, an enduring sense of wonder, are woven into a sequence that never loses momentum. Recurring images unobtrusively bind and connect the poems across a sparkling variety of formal invention; among other forms, this includes sonnets and near-sonnets, a villanelle, prose poems and variations on specular or mirror poems. The form reverts quite often to short lined stanzas arranged in couplets, which gives the effect of returning to walking pace, occasionally pausing for breath.

Dyer is courageous and exceptionally fluent when describing states of mind, perhaps particularly but certainly not solely grief. For instance in a poem about her father, ‘In the days of this dying’, overwhelming emotion does not blunt but in fact seems to sharpen her observation of the world in all its surprising detail and beauty:

in the burr wood’s holding on, holding in
the feather grains, making horse chestnut
into porcelain; there’s your hand, your heart,
the holding on, the holding in…

An intriguing invention (I think this could be a new form?) involves short, numbered sequences – but in reverse order. So for instance,‘The Woman Who Becomes a Field III’ on page 6 is revisited by ‘The Woman Who Becomes a Field II’ on page 41, and then ‘I’ on page 70. This field is not the tranquil place one might perhaps expect; the woman so closely identified with the natural world that she ‘sees herself in the eyes / of minnows and water voles’ finds herself ‘breathing in / the frightening oxygen’ alongside ‘the astonishing dreams’ that come to her. In between the three scattered poems, there is a sense that history can fold unpredictably, the poems in the collection reaching back and forth in time too, touching on the death of a mother, then a father, the arrival of a stepmother, and interspersed by relationships that never settle into being ordinary; a life full of endings and beginnings that can never be taken for granted:

You and I…have our son, our daughter-once-a-son; we sometimes laugh, others cry, plant our eucalyptus and our Judas tree, the adjustments of this life-real-life continue and begin.

As in metaphysical poetry, time and its constraints are open to question. Musing on a memory of her mother, the poet wonders:

…How can this be
then, so long, so long in the before?

when, in another poem:

I am still your daughter
though I am older than you now.

I was particularly moved by ‘Flare’, a tender description of a ninety-one-year-old ‘matchstick woman’ being helped into the sea to swim back into her past, ‘to get back here to this first time’:

in the water is a girl
striking out for the deck

where he is always waiting.
She smiles, her bones are soft,

are softening, her sun-kissed
skin smoothing to a shine.

Dyer’s work is what you might call culturally conversational; an engaged version of intertextuality. The poems thrive in the company of other poets and artists of various kinds. For example, in ‘Reimagining Wild Geese II’ and ‘I’, she boldly interrupts and darkens Mary Oliver’s well-known poem, in a plea for deeper understanding, a more nuanced compassion. Other ekphrastic poems pursue threads that weave back into the overall arc of the collection, making the book a satisfyingly consistent read.

Dream logic is an important element in Dyer’s imagery, as of course it is with almost all poetry. Elizabeth Bishop, in a letter to Anne Stevenson, described this as ‘a peripheral vision of whatever it is that one can never really see fullface but that seems enormously important.’ And I recall Jo Shapcott once saying something to the effect of the poetic process being a bit like lowering a bucket in to the well of the unconscious, curious to see what would come up, and confident that it would certainly not be what one had expected. Dyer is adept at drawing on that well, and I think that is what gives her poems such energy and fire, as in the three poem sequence ‘Diving’:

…you kicked,
dived deeper, deeper. Fish swam alongside

marble-eyed, with their swift fin-flick
and tails strong as steel. It took us years

to reach the seabed…’

Another delight not to be ignored is Dyer’s wickedly imaginative sense of humour, for instance in ’The day I went swimming with Theresa May’, a swimming pool fantasy in which she pokes fun at herself and at a succession of Tory PMs, including Churchill:

us floating like starfish,
him smoking a cigar in khaki bathers
like grandpa used to wear.

I want to end with a plea that when you read this collection, do not miss ’The Frog Collectors’, now, alongside Norman McCaig’s ‘Frogs’, my joint all-time favourite frog poem. Who else has made frogs so much more lovely than princes?:

And, when I said goodnight, I touched a kiss
to each fragile, marbled head.  We woke, of course,

to catastrophe, all frog promises broken…’

I will leave the rest to be discovered.

I am immensely glad to have The Adjustments on my bookshelf. It’s a book to turn to in any mood: for solace, recognition, food for thought, and a sense that life may at any turn skip sideways, take one by surprise.

Alex Josephy lives and writes in London and Italy. She has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has worked as a teacher and university lecturer and as an NHS education adviser. Her most recent collection is Again Behold the Stars, a Cinnamon Press pamphlet award winner 2023. Other work includes Naked Since Faversham, Pindrop Press, 2020. Find out more on her website: www.alexjosephy.net

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*****

A brief and Biased History of Love by Alan Humm. £9.  Culture Matters.  ISBN  978-1-912710-55-3. Reviewed by Patricia McCarthy

This interesting debut collection from novelist Alan Humm merits reading and re-reading with its fresh, startlingly original images and equally original angles on ordinary lives, losses and loves.

The collection is introduced by what amounts to a three-page essay by Fran Lock. This is so articulate, so probing and detailed that it has to be wondered if it should have remained on its own as a wonderfully incisive review. The problem here is that the reader reads this almost overwhelming, detailed build-up to the poems to follow that, when the poems are encountered, with such expectations, they can only seem thinner and more slight than they should. Most readers don’t like having their opinions on a text dictated to, especially as poetry is elastic in meaning and therefore each poem is different to every reader. This is my only caveat.

Humm is billed as a poet who explores and represents working-class masculinities. I think this is to focus too narrowly, and too trendily, on his work. Yes his memories in these poems are those of a typical English male. The emotion seems somewhat restrained, withheld, which, in an ironic sense, perhaps gives the poems their power. It is a recognisable world of pubs, bars, squats, clubs with ‘girls sitting in a row’, village halls, estates, a mill, graveyard, river, a textile factory,  a supermarket which , in one poem, is visible in the playful rhyming couplet: ‘late at night/ like Santa’s grotto in the light’, ‘suburban nothingness’ circumscribed even from the very first poem by walls.

The walls of the persona’s body become the walls of his life viewed with the long-angled lens of memory in different lights. Within these parameters, the reader is confronted with the poet’s experiences of a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father, a feisty mother who ‘can make a fist/with her whole body’, and is capable of having it off with another man, forgiveable perhaps when her husband ‘with lamplight dribbling down his chin’ who ‘looked like someone’s dog’ tried to rape her. There is adolescent fumbling with the opposite sex … as the poet or persona balances between ‘fear’ and ‘love’. ‘Love’ of course is what has to be learned in order for it to be defined – definitely distinct from plain male ‘desire ’as in the poem ‘Julie (again)’. His adolescent self idolises Julie: ‘She was so blonde/ that I could hardly bear to look at her’, but he quickly realises ‘she was just a girl’… ‘bewildered by the ferocity of my desire’. He can’t quite define the word ‘desire’ except to say it was ‘like a dull endless explosion’. Yet he comes close to defining ‘love’ earlier as ‘that dark shape in your heart/ that comes to claim you as its own’. He also can’t quite define ‘the thing that music names’ and he wishes fervently for ‘decent tunes/ and a bright millwheel for a heart’.

Similes and metaphors abound which make the reader sit up with their accuracy. This collection is haunted by the ‘disgrace’ of an alcoholic father who links to the theme of violence. He is matter-of-factly described as he ‘wielded the leather/ and the bucket like a matador’ but in the evening he ‘was doubled/ in the funhouse mirrors of the pub’. At times he ‘will upend the wine bottle, like ketchup’. His father’s voice is always a threat: ‘It ebbs continually,/ its timbre mussed by distance into a dull/downpour in the room below’. Even the silences are ‘contaminated’: ‘They all contain my father’s murmur/like a river does a crocodile’.

No wonder, then, that the friends addressed individually and fondly in a clutch of poems offer some relief. Yet what serves mainly as a counterpoint to the monstrous father is popular music which acts as a constant recitative throughout, whether it be made by an amateur band of youngsters ‘whose notes’… ‘had the breadth, the dull/intransigence of mud’. Even his own voice, he realises in retrospect, was ‘its own worst enemy;//each song weighed down/ by an acoustic like dull water’.  On the other hand, the voice of John Lennon, when the poet was a boy, made him rise from ‘Dumb skies’… ‘amplified, like a balloon’. Yet it is imperfect and perfect music that gives the poet a more wanted home than the one he has. He envies the house of his upmarket friend David who plays the cello: ‘Everywhere – books./  The house was built on them/in the same way that a mind/constructs itself upon/its memories’ – as Humm’s mind does in these poems.

Learning is a theme too: in the above poem he says ‘I learned that time/conspires to keep you/in the places that you love’ – just as in ‘Teaching at Addington’ he humbly acknowledges: ‘Which of us,/me or the kids,/ was teaching who’ pointing to the fact that teaching is the best way of learning, even to ‘become yourself/ when you transcend yourself’. Humm’s wisdom is apparent too in the haunting ‘Villanelle’ which elaborates on ‘Within the part of us that never grows/ the future is the past in different clothes’.

His friend Sam on the drums has ‘hands that begin to sing’ as his poems do when read, and re-read to give them their full understated rhythm and impact. In the poem ‘How to love music’, Humm states: ‘If rhythm was a liquid/ then a voice would be its grain’. And maybe in this collection he achieves just this: his voice the grain in the unswerving subtle rhythm of his verse.

Patricia McCarthy edited Agenda poetry journal for more than two decades. She won the National Poetry Competition in 2012 and has been a runner up twice. Her poems are published widely and she has several collections to her name, the latest full collection, published a year ago, being Hand in Hand (London Magazine Editions/Agenda Editions) based on Tristan and Yseult, and the pamphlet A Ghosting in Ukraine (dare-Gale Press, 2023).

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*****

Canon ball with feathers by Caroline Carver. £8. Oversteps Books. ISBN: 9781906856946. Reviewed by Lucy Newlyn

A spirit of adventure and curiosity animates the poems in this collection, which range widely both in setting and subject-matter. The poet travels as far afield as New Zealand, Bermuda, South Dakota, and Jamaica; she takes us to the Bahamas, the St Elias Mountains in Canada, the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania. She finds inspiration in Norway,  Bucharest, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Scotland and North East London as much as in Cornwall, now her home. Visuality is frequently foregrounded, but it is of a particular kind. Carver doesn’t write about the vast landscapes she visits or inhabits; she is more interested in close-ups which allow her into the inner life of what she observes. She identifies with creatures great and small (whether they are real, or the stuff of legend), both honouring their otherness and finding what she and they have in common.  The natural world is a place of mystery and magic, observed with a childlike sense of wonder: an ash tree’s roots reach deep into a ‘kingdom/of ferns and wet darkness’; a little mermaid ‘sits sleepless on her rock’;  horses have legs ‘so long they can run/to the moon and back in a morning’; swans are ‘the kind…you’d want to strike up a friendship with’; a limpet asks ‘did you know I have the strongest tongue of all the creatures?’ This is an almost Blakeian world in which animism is warmly embraced as a source of imaginative connection.

Family members are the subject of about one third of the book. Those concerning the poet’s father are affectionate and tender, moving between vivid memories trying to bring him back, and apocryphal anecdotes – as when she tells how, as a pipe-smoker, he even had a pipe in his mouth as he dived underwater.  About her mother, Carver is more ambivalent. In ‘I was a child who loved parrots’ she imagines herself as a foetus curled inside a womb, ‘the size of a small bat/comforted by darkness’; but returns on several occasions to unresolved conflict with her mother as an authority figure.  ‘My life as a daughter in 44 lines’ recalls how, on one occasion, her mother beat her with a hairbrush but failed to tell her what she’d done wrong. She confesses openly to jealous feelings about her sister, whom she once observed selfishly taking the last julekake, watched by her mother with an indulgence never shown towards the speaker herself. The emotional honesty of these poems is bold and arresting. The poet declares outspokenly that she hates her sister ‘for doing everything better/ for knowing how to please people/ that’s the interesting one they’d nod to each other’ (‘Norway Soster poem: leaving home’). Unresolved emotions with respect to her family leave her vulnerable and troubled about her identity. In ‘Fife’ she recalls the day her mother died, when she had to touch something so she could understand her history.

There is an enigmatic quality to the collection; a respect for unplumbed mysteries and secrets withheld. But questions proliferate, as in ‘Kirkenes’ where the traveller, returning to her cabin on board a ship, notes a pair of enormous work-boots showing under a laundry room door, and leaves us with the unsolved mystery of who it is, hiding in one of the cubicles:

prisoner? murderer? Spy? Imagine runs riot
as we close our porthole against 24 hour sun

The poet’s questioning spirit is repeatedly foregrounded. A park full of trees reminds her, tantalisingly, of paintings by an artist whose name she can’t recall as she runs among them, asking each one ‘what are you trying to say to me?’  Addressing Alice (a friend who may be dying), she allows a question to linger in the reader’s mind, communicating uncertainty and the fear of permanent separation:

If one day you’re not there anymore
If you never come back
How will I know who to ask
Where I can find you?

Carver is acutely alert to the questionable shapes of memory, their fleeting and provisional nature: ‘I like to think I can remember’, she admits, in ‘I was a child who loved parrots’;  ‘Sometimes I dispute this story   ask myself/how important is truth?’  she confesses, in ‘the sunken trimaran’.  Memories and sayings of others are woven into her own, giving narration a layered dialogic texture: ‘my mother loved to tell…’ (I was a child who loved parrots’); ‘Its legs went on moving, you said’ (Norway soster poems, leaving home’).  What the people around her don’t say is as important as what they do. In ‘Luke’, one of her most moving poems, she recalls the tragic death of an eight-year-old friend, who fell from the rusty ladder of a water tower. Did she herself witness the event? At the end of the narrative, she distances herself from the memory – almost disowns it – by saying it ‘happened far from home/and none of the grown-ups/ ever talked about it’.

The poems in this collection are honest in a very subtle way, and this subtlety marks them out as distinct from poetry which exploits the ‘Confessional’ genre to disclose sensational subject-matter, and/or exhibit raw emotion. They are written in free, unpunctuated verse which moves fluidly, with a laudable sureness of touch.  Line-breaks and mid-line spaces indicate where the voice should pause in reading aloud to allow for the unsaid, for gaps in knowledge, for enigmatic hesitation in the finding of words. The poems are not musical, but sometimes their cadences reveal a musical sensibility, as in the beautiful phrasing (reminding me somewhat of Walcott) in  ‘the magic of oceans/the inevitability of water’ (‘bye bye baby’). The title of the collection, Cannonball with feathers, exactly captures the quality and texture of the poems. Now and again the image of a feather floats gently down the page, a gentle reminder.

Lucy Newlyn was a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, and is an Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, where she taught for thirty-five years and published widely on English Romantic literature. She became a poet in 2000, since when she has published six poetry collections. The most recent of these are *The Craft of Poetry: A Primer in Verse* (Yale University Press, 2021) and *Quicksilver* (Lapwing Publications, Belfast, 2022). She now lives and writes in Cornwall.

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*****

The Point of the Stick by Neil Fulwood. £8.   Shoestring Press. ISBN  9781915 553430. Reviewed b y Alan Price

On being told that Neil Fulwood’s The Point of the Stick was about conductors I realised that he’d got there before me. I’ve played with the idea of writing poems about the power of maestri yielding their batons. No matter, Fulwood has produced a memorable and very entertaining chapbook of thirty nine poems. My attempt can wait another day. Twenty five of Fulwood’s conductors would also be mine: whilst for me the other fourteen remain occasionally great, often good, a bit mediocre or just undiscovered – the newcomer Klaus Makela.

Before I launch into a “what no Rafael Kubelik or Kurt Sanderling?” protestation let me say a project like this is (a) very personal and (b) in danger of going on and on. And in his introduction Fullwood lists conductors he hasn’t written about because of his not knowing enough about them and wanting to avoid repetition in tone and content.

The poems remain untitled but a list of conductors’ names is at the back of the book.

I read a lot of the poems blind and managed to identify twelve names without glancing at the back page. I’m tempted to make thirty nine snapshot remarks about the lot. For even when he writes of conductors who musically don’t do it for me (Kurt Masur, Daniel Barenboim and Georg Solti) all warrant a mention as they’re poetically so well realised by Fullwood.

I’ll start with poem one and see how it goes. This is about Artur Nikisch (the father of conducting) and the first to see “score as holy writ, understood / on the deepest, most intimate level.” I’d agree with that.

Toscanini is number two with him conducting the American premiere of Shostakovich’s 7^th symphony (The wartime Leningrad) “building like a storm, / of history being made.”

Poem 3 is my first favourite of the book. It’s Pierre Monteux conducting the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. I love Fulwood describing his conducting as not to be blamed for the riot in the concert hall “has less to do with his podium presence / than Nijinsky and his stomping Lolitas.” Great lines!

Thomas Beecham clocks in fourth. Aptly described as having “…a jet-setting lifestyle / before the jet-set even existed.” Spot on in describing Beecham’s cavalier manner.

Leopold Stokowski is next “in performance / eccentricities pile up / the score sometimes/ little more than a suggestion.” Maybe that’s a little unfair. Stokowski didn’t tamper with everything. But Stokowski’s Wagner recordings display Leopold’s own personal musical synthesis.

Otto Klemperer follows to be depicted as the black dog of misfortune. Yet he’s ready for his “paw on throat moment” and I love him becoming, in old age, “a supernova of creativity” My evidence of this fact is those 60’s BBC televised concerts that have long gripped me.

It’s Wilhelm Furtwangler’s turn. A man so obsessed with preserving high culture that he remained conducting in Germany during the Nazi era.

“that the only ideology
was High German culture
its protection from within.”

On Hans Knappertsbusch I’ll only say that Fulwood is correct to stress that live performance was the key for him.

Fritz Reiner conducting had a face that looked like a stern eagle. Members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra thought him a bastard. But he got brilliant results.

“he is the face of wrath to errant players
a rod-of-iron tyrant
answerable only to the score.”

With Adrian Boult we come to the first of Fulwood’s great conductors that I saw live at a performance of Elgar’s 1^st symphony. Boult hardly moved on the podium. And the poem accurately describes his minimalist conducting “…baton size of a billiard cue / deployed with a slight supple turn of the wrist.”  I can see him now.

Erich Kleiber is an anti-fascist and “the freelancer as man of integrity”.

Karl Bohm could be as economical as Adrian Boult. And the wonderful results did have an “Austrian certitude.” Some great conductors you admire but others you love.

And John Barbirolli was a great personal favourite of mine. He took the Halle orchestra and stuck with it. A great achievement but maybe in this poem I’d have also liked a description of Barbirolli’s manner of conducting.

Eugen Jochum was for me a god of conductors and especially conducting Bruckner.

Yes Neil, Jochum certainly knew how to create those transcendent edifice moments in Bruckner’s symphonies.

Herbert von Karajan had a rock star lifestyle. And we are reminded of that fact. When it comes to Willi Boskovsky then his chocolate box Vienna style had love and depth. I agree that Georg Solti (I’m not a fan) made it in the Rat Pack Chicago. Carlo Maria Giulini is someone I like in fits and starts. Fulwood has him bringing down his baton “like an act of resistance.”

Having just seen the film Maestro then the Bernstein poem reminded me of the film’s Mahler 2 performance.

“He conducts as if possessed
or transported. Mahler
surges through him,
an ecstasy of revelation.”

I never thought I’d get to read a poem about Neville Marriner. And yes he often wore a white silk scarf. Lovely poem. Klaus Tennstedt is another conductor I saw live conducting Bruckner’s 4^th symphony and it was unforgettable. His conducting had a neurotic edge that Fulwood exactly exposes in the poem’s last lines.

“nerves like high-tensile wire
turned to the agonies
of the great composers.”

Then we have old-school Karl Richter praised for his glorious hard work. I’ll pass on Kurt Masur but his causes and conducting are gleefully rendered. Maybe Colin Davis required a fuller description than what’s provided. Fulwood really understands Bernard Haitink (One of the Greats for me) on speaking of his alchemy in realising so much humanity in his performances. Good to see “Mr Hollywood” Andre Previn included. Nice to have Istvan Kertesz who is “playing fit to beat the devil.” Yes!

The poem for Nicholas Harnoncourt is rather slight. Lorin Maazel – clever about his lack of interest in fame. I wish Fulwood’s poem on Carlos Kleiber had concerned itself with the always glowing enthusiasm of Kleiber’s face on camera, rather then demanding payment in the form of a custom-built Audi. Gennady Rozhdestvensky is described as using his baton “jinking like a duellist’s blade.” Great stuff. And Claudio Abbado is undoubtedly the “Man of few words.”

For me Zubin Mehta, as a conductor, is too much swaggering mediocrity. Fulwood speaks of the “flamboyant showman, core repertoire as Hollywood Bowl swagger:”

I can take or leave Ricardo Muti. But the poem for Muti (with audience joining the choir singing ‘Va pensiero’ fom Verdi’s Nabucco) had me cheering. Jordi Savall reads well but Daniel Barenboim is better “to set music stands in place of weapons.” Whilst Trevor Pinnock (another guy I’ve seen conducting live) gets an appropriate treatment

“big-hearted exuberance / for the music and all it contains.”

I once met a member of the LSO who told me that Valery Gergiev always turned up looking unwashed and scruffy for rehearsals. But this poem is about weightier matters, his friendship with Putin which caused trouble for Gergiev.

“And now the falling dominos
of cancellation, meddling fingers
choking the music.”

Finally Klaus Makela. A new kid on the maestro block. And Fulwood thinks he has “An unsurpassed charisma.” We shall see.

The Point of the Stick is a delightful read: a book to have whether you are well acquainted with these maestros or not. I shall dip into this collection next time I play my CDs for a comparison of interpretations game. And I do have a baton and mirror at home to imitate facial gesticulations (Save me from Simon Rattle’s though) and hand movements (Stokowski conducted like a sorcerer). Thanks Neil. Write me a further maestro book, before I do mine!

Alan Price was born in Liverpool and now lives in London. An ex-librarian who writes film and book reviews for the websites Magonia, and London Grip. Three poetry collections Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady,The Trio Confessions and The Cinephile Poems have been published by The High Window Press. He’s presently working on a chapbook called The Women.

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