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Matthew Paul: The Last Corinthians • John McAuliffe: National Theatre • Vona Groarke: Infinity Pool • Estill Pollock: Heathen Anthems and Estill Pollock: Alias
*****
The Last Corinthians by Matthew Paul. £11.00. Crooked Spire Press. ISBN: 9781068422911. Reviewed by Rowena Somerville
The Last Corinthians by Matthew Paul is a collection of poems (widely published individually) written over a period of some years and generally exploring, celebrating, or occasionally deploring, characters and events from fairly recent history, whether personal or national. The back cover refers to history, by implication, creating ‘ghosts which insist on interrupting thought’, and that is entirely apposite. The ‘Corinthian spirit’ is commonly regarded as meaning a sense of fair play, a love of the game, a disregard for financial profit – albeit on the part of well-off white men who could afford not to earn from their talents – but historically the ancient Corinthians seem to have been regarded as a licentious and loose-living lot, so the collection title can do a lot of work of diverse kinds, and it is interesting to seek to apply both interpretations to some of the poems.
The Last Corinthians is divided into three sections – ‘Heydays’ which mostly consists of poems on personalities and events from the arts, sports and entertainment worlds of the early/mid twentieth century; ‘Black Forest Gateau’ which focuses more on the writer’s own growing up and/or personal memories; and ‘Passing Places’ which broadly looks at how personalities and events from the past manifest themselves in the present and future. The artist Edward Burra is a recurring presence, offering a perhaps harsher and more satirical version of society than the writer does – I am grateful to have been reminded of his work.
In ‘The Walrus Club’ Paul describes Irish sea-water swimmers ‘Before the Somme’:
The Walruses, bulging varsity suits
On the bladderwracked tideline, pressed fingernails
Into gooseflesh, stroked their marram whiskers
And struck out north in perishing headwinds;
Paul has a neat way with a plant-based allusion, viz the ‘marram whiskers’ above, and in ‘Blue Baby: Blitz over Britain’ he says, ‘On VE day, hilarity thrives like fireweed.’
This first section of the book includes Picasso, visiting Sheffield to speak at the World Peace Congress in 1950 (‘Picasso in England’); Prince Monolulu, the fake-African racing tipster (‘Meeting the Prince’); Brian Clough, the football manager (‘Brian Clough Visits the Rijksmuseum’); and the TV impressionist Mike Yarwood (‘The Ballad of Mike Yarwood’),
and the reader may wish to apply ‘the Corinthian test’ to any of those. ‘The Ballad of Mike Yarwood’ describes him living in a ‘Weybridge gated community’ and ends with him describing the former stars he impersonated:
a random mix of shameful blokes
and misremembered painful jokes.
I mean that most sincerely, folks.
The poems in the ‘Black Forest Gateau’ section are all first-person, beginning with childhood memories and ending with the birth of his second son. In ‘The Mile to School’ he remembers pretending to be a train on that journey. He describes the ‘Alan Whicker lollipop man’ stopping his car at a zebra crossing:
held out a bumper bag of Opal Fruits
for an eyes-closed lucky dip. I longed for
strawberry or orange; learnt instead to savour
the decadent tartness of lemon or lime.
Among the childhood and teenage years’ brand names and references there is a mention of the book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, so if the Opal Fruits don’t take you back, then the literature surely will, or certainly did for me. All these poems are admirably crafted, and are neat, evocative encapsulations of incidents which reveal where the writer was at in life sort of thing, but for me, I’m afraid, I found them cumulatively rather emotionless, or rather, that all the accompanying tumult of desire and emotion (surely?), was rather too effectively hidden. Anyway, albeit with no intervening poems on teenage or adult love and relationships, the section closes with ‘Caesarean’ and Paul’s second son is born:
Unfastened from your mother’s embrace
To put, at last the face to my voice,
You crinkled as I lifted you up:
Me cock-a-hoop; you the FA Cup.
In the final section (‘Passing Places’) Paul suggests the way that time moves on, occasionally tripping over the past, as it must. In ‘Scarlett’s Plans’ he affectionately describes, by implication, a father and daughter:
In Freshers’ Week at Bristol, Scarlett says
he mustn’t ring every single day; dyes
her hair black to signal reinvention.
Poor old Don knows better than to mention
That he’s ticking off the days till Christmas.
In ‘Dead of Winter’ he describes a country walk with his wife, where the ‘passing places’ really are metaphysically thin and porous:
We sense we’re being tailed – breath on neck –
by the wood-spirit, boosting the likelihood
of chancing upon our own long-dead. A buzzard
mews and Stukas. We climb back toward the gate.
From up there, Sheffield’s lights kaleidoscope
for miles.
‘The Last Corinthians’, the title poem of the book, is placed penultimately, and it speaks of men who had seemed to embody the Corinthian spirit in the sporting sense, eg by playing both high level cricket and football in a way that would not be professionally possible today (regrettably), and it commemorates an outrageously talented schoolfriend, who died in a car crash before he could achieve public greatness. The final poem ‘A Short History of Greenhouses’ memorialises both the writer’s father and his partner for their gardening endeavours, and, while the emotional tone is firmly quiet, I am choosing to interpret this ‘recognition’, and the placement of the poem, as a token of profound affection.
The Last Corinthians is an enjoyable and skilled collection, one whose apparent lack of linguistic or emotional fireworks may simply serve to demonstrate the skills of the writer, and which should invite considered and deeper engagement from the reader. I liked the way it was divided into sections which each had a slightly differing poetic and conceptual focus, and I found the whole book refreshing.
Rowena Sommerville is a writer and singer, and lives on top of a cliff looking out to sea in beautiful North Yorkshire. She has worked in the arts for all her life, sometimes successfully. She originally wrote and illustrated books for children, is widely published in poetry magazines, and her first adult collection, Melusine, was published by Mudfog Poetry Press in 2021. She won a Hedgehog Press Stickleback leaflet competition in 2023 and was the Visual Artist in Residence for The High Window in 2022.
*****
National Theatre by John McAuliffe. €18.50. The Gallery Press. ISBN: 9781911338871
Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke .€11.95. The Gallery Press. ISBN: 978191737108 7
Reviewed by Ian Pople
It’s been written before that John McAuliffe’s subject matter is the old Platonic distinction between being and becoming. Often the poems turn upon a moment, out of which a new perspective arises. Thus, being in one situation or context becomes another that emerges out of the shift in perspective. In the opening poem of McAuliffe’s new collection, National Theatre, ‘Fathom,’ he records jumping into the sea with his glasses on. As he emerges ‘half-blind’, his holiday appears before as a series of lacks, ‘its piles of books and new destinations, /and not seeing what was in front of me,’ the ‘fuss’ of sights ‘having to be pointed out and described,’ until one of his children ‘rising out of the water, [shouts] ‘Found them’. McAuliffe’s need for ‘new destinations,’ and the crippling sense of their not being available is found in ‘Fathom,’ not only in its title but in its position as the very first poem in the book. For McAuliffe, the poet, the observed and experienced is not only the fixed point but also the moment of turning.
It is perfectly possible to pick out phrases in later poems that appear to back up my thesis. In the title poem, McAuliffe recounts a rehearsal of a stage adaptation of the film Force Majeure in which the father runs away from his family. McAuliffe comments, ‘I’m thinking of how what people say stirs up storms of hot air / a good life must navigate and sail through to actual rough water.’ Here, it is not only the yoking of ‘storms,’ ‘a good life,’ ‘navigate,’ ‘sail through,’ ‘rough water,’ that shows how we might move from something unalloyed and inner to something much more actual. It is also, perhaps, the fact that McAuliffe’s antennae seize upon that moment in the life of another. In ‘Flight,’ he comments, ‘doing the right thing // which, we all realize, will be after you finish.’ There is a telling ambiguity here about how you attempt to do the right thing in the present, but that its effects will be after that ‘thing’ has finished.
In the poem, ‘One Place,’ the speaker meets someone from his past, ‘years at the school gate.’ Because it’s a Tuesday afternoon, the speaker asks the person what they are doing to have such a time free. The other then talks about having given up a previous job; how he ‘misses nothing about his old institution, // its tense recoveries, its suddenly changed relations; / there, to ask a question was to get only a reputation for asking questions.’ Those phrases ‘tense recoveries, its suddenly changed relations’ seem key here. Whatever that institution was, it clearly both confined and distorted, maintaining, perhaps, a sense of emotional threat and uncertainty. It is that emotional flux that McAuliffe picks out.
I’d like to start my discussion of Vona Groarke’s Infinity Pool by quoting all of her poem, ‘Proposition.’
If I decide to live today as a scarecrow
on the tilled field of my life
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx(as if!)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxsuch that wind chatters me,
rain derides, and traffic on the byroad
tilts my way
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxstill I am nothing but words on sticks
liable, both, at so much as
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxcrow-squawk
to up and awayxxxout of this.
It is somewhat typical of Groarke to, as she puts it elsewhere in the book, break the fourth wall. She is a poet who lives in both dialogue and tension with the things and people she finds around her. And her writing emerges out of that relationship of dialogue and tension. What the poem posits is that even the seemingly fixed ‘person’ of the scarecrow is quite mutable. Its clothing has been provided for it. For Groarke, words are a kind of clothing but always likely to blow away. Of course, as the existence of the poem implicitly suggests, however much the poet might protest at the evanescence of not only the words but the life that generates them, there are always traces: the poem, the reaching out of the ‘real’ world, i.e., the wind, the rain, the traffic to the consciousness of the poet, and then the reaching out of the writer to the reader, with this poem. And this is a poem that is not afraid to limn those tensions and traces.
Elsewhere, Groarke shows her gifts as a narrative poet. ‘Still Life in Marble’ plays upon the ambiguity of its title; the poem is not only about creating grave stones but also how those grave stones maintain life, that there is, indeed, still life in marble. Set in a cemetery in Genoa, Italy, poem enters the life of the stone mason and also the life of a mother who lifts a child to kiss the marble lips of one of those carved there, a grandfather. The poem is written in both the present and future tenses in ways that offer conjecture; the stonemason ‘thinks of his wife walking back this evening.’ Of the peach that his wife will peel for him later that evening, ‘The peach, he thinks, will be ripe and sweet,’ and ‘he will ask his daughter to sing, / praise the song, no matter what.’ There is a slight sense that these lives are appropriated into Groarke’s ambit. But her point is, surely, as she puts it in the poem, ‘But he is not the afterwards. His is now.’ It is not the ‘being’ that lives afterwards, but his ‘ownership’ of the present.
The stonemason suffers a stye from rubbing his eye with the masonry dust, and puts that slight ‘pimple’ in the corner of the woman who is ‘so dedicated to her dutiful grief / she will forever lift her daughter to a kiss / that can neither be taken or given / his hand coming between.’ It is not that the poet and the stonemason memorializes. It is a that both poet and stonemason, this stonemason in particular, reach through into the lives to give them a continuing reality. As Groarke puts it towards the end of the poem, ‘From what I see there is no stye, / nor can my finger feel it out, / this same finger typing words / you could run your own hand over /and feel nothing / or not much // unless it’s a sore eye / you lift your hand to / unless it is the dust in your mouth.’ Thus, the poem is both a creation and a reality, it is both the scarecrow and the tilled field, the dust in your eye. It is not that Groarke is breaking the fourth wall, or ‘indulging’ in the modernist practice of undermining the utterance in the moment of its delivery.
For both McAuliffe and Groarke, the poem is a way of negotiating with realities even as the poem negotiates with its artifice. There is a way in which their project is to give the idea of an order that arises in front of the reader, the things realized in the poetry are in the moment of appearing, and organize themselves for us as we read them.
Ian Pople‘s Spillway: New and Selected Poems is published by Carcanet.
*****
Estill Pollock Heathen Anthems ISBN: 978-1-956782-85-1 and Alias ISBN: 978-1-966677-07-9 Broadstonebooks. Reviewed by Gary Day
Open any page of Heathen Anthems or Alias and marvel at what you find. The poems are a glittering combination of delicacy and extraordinary tensile strength. Take ‘Paper Crane’, a poem about how ‘the Japanese coax paper from / the bark of trees’. The whole process is beautifully evoked in all its complexity before being exquisitely tied up in the bow of the last two lines.
While each poem is complete in itself, it also pushes filaments out to others connecting them in strange and surprising ways. The word ‘paper’ is mentioned in a number of contexts: simply, as in ‘A Life that made the papers’ (‘Skeletons’) or dramatically where the ‘poems, a novel and treatment notes’ of James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter Lucia, ‘were all destroyed’ (‘The High Ground’). Paper preserves, but only if it can survive the malice of humans and the accidents of history.
Perhaps both these are less of a worry in our digital world, but as books start to look and feel like relics from another age so the existence of paper, the medium of so much of our humanity, becomes ever more precious. Pollock is sensitive to the forces that have always been brought to bear on the literary. Compared to the ‘Twitter feed’, ‘the blog’ and ‘Reality TV’ poetry is ‘dull’ (‘Log In’) ’ but perhaps it was ever thus: ‘the test / not blank verse at The Globe, but rough crowds / at the interval, betting / cup and ball games in the pit’.
The literary is a constituent of a number of poems-by definition-yet there is a scepticism about its value. ‘Bloodlines’ packs in Homer, Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Baudelaire. The literary manifests itself as fragments. These cannot be shored against any ruin for they are instances of that ruin. Faust, Hamlet and Peer Gynt are crammed into one small section of ‘Bloodlines’ as part of a meditation on heroes based on lines in the sand, sand in the hour glass and glass ‘polished until a face shines back.’ Difficult? You bet. And that’s the point.
These poems are intended to stop and make us think. We cannot scroll past them as we do posts on Facebook, Instagram or Threads. We have to engage, we have to focus. Even then the poems can prove resistant: ‘you may not know all the words / but to recognise the Mystery suggests / you shuffle towards repentance with / something more than shopping vouchers’. The diction suggests that Christianity is not quite dead but it is certainly not promoting the faith. Rather it gestures to the need for something more, something that acknowledges the depth and range of human experience beyond what is catered for by consumer society. It’s not a new cry but the articulation is original.
Just look at the poem’s title again. ‘Bloodlines’. Two words joined together. The first plays on so many different levels, ancestors, descendants, kinship, the blood of the lamb and the very stuff of life itself. The other word, ‘lines’, is also significant. Where would words be without them? Words join together in lines but they are also separated by them. And yet the lines of these poems radiate out to each other, creating connections in a world of contiguity; connections readers are encouraged make for themselves.
The title of the collection, Heathen Anthems beautifully captures this dynamic. The etymology of anthem comes from the Latin antiphona, a call and response style of music associated with religious services. That’s what these poems are doing, calling and responding to each other. But what about ‘Heathen’, surely a discredited word today with its negative connotations of non-Christian? Whether or not is used ironically or simply as shorthand to designate a spiritually bereft society it certainly evokes a kind of pre-history or deep time which is one of the themes of Alias.
‘Frames of Reference’ is a good example of a work that shuffles between history and pre-history. It is a quite stunning achievement, an endless source of provocations: ‘In the clock’s carved / face, time, sumptuous / owl flights through sumps / of walnut burl’. The eleven page long poem enacts the flow of time by not having a single full stop, even at the end. This attention to the performative aspect of punctuation is an example of Pollock’s care for the craft of poetry. For example the section in Heathen Anthems, called ‘The Discipline of Clouds’, has the rhyme scheme ababcc.
‘Mr Coleridge and Other Portraits’ in Alias interrogates the boundaries of prose and poetry. Is writing prose about poets somehow poetry? The narrator is not named but from the clues Pollock gives us it seems that it is Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller who published Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey. The portraits are gossipy, mundane and salted by a publisher’s awareness that poetry should be as much about money as beauty. Perhaps this whole section is a response to D. J. Enright’s quip that there’s no poetry in money and no money in poetry.
Alias, as its title suggests, is concerned with identities a theme that is also explored in the last section of Heathen Anthems, ‘The Natural Order’. These identities are contemporary, historical and evolutionary. The range is astonishing. Many of them are refracted through literary figures who themselves have no substance. ‘Double Double’ is as an oblique a take on this theme as you can get, with cryptic allusions to the nature of time, Japanese puppet theatre, Macbeth, and suburban adultery. It is a perfect example of how these poems resist precis. They affirm the mineral rich heaviness of language in the face of the set menu of phrases which increasingly dominate our culture. Pollock’s intricate imagery is never less than original his observations never less than profound. These poems do not tolerate the idle reader. They make demands on attention, intellect and patience but the pleasures make up for any pains.
Gary Day is a retired English teacher and the author of several books including Class, Literary Criticism : A New History and The Story of Drama. His poems have appeared in Acumen and Beyond Words. His poem ‘Anne Bronte’s Grave was shortlisted and highly commended in the Artemesia 2024 Poetry Competition. ‘About Daffodils’ was shortlisted for Vole Poetry Competition 2024 and published in Vole’s Autumn Anthology, Autumn Makes Me Sing, 2024.
*****
The High Window 