D A PRINCE
The long awaited visit of Davina Prince did not disappoint. There was in fact something special about the evening and it was encouraging that such a good audience turned up to enjoy it.
Quietly spoken and very well organised, the writer focused mostly on a careful and sensitive reading from her first full length collection of poetry, 'Nearly the Happy Hour' (Happenstance, 2008, £8). Its subject matter is often the stuff of ordinary domestic living – growing herbs, the place of the self help manual, the characters we recall from childhood, but also branch out into larger themes such as the tension of growing up and relating to others reflected in the very skilfully written 'Not Even in Colour'. In this poem the writer discovers that her apparently more sophisticated cinema goer partner with an acquired knowledge of film was not as genuine as seemed and even finally 'Whispered me into someone else'. The fine first poem in the collection, and the first one read, 'Writing Just About Parsley' struck a key note. All the qualities on show during the reading seemed to lie within it - seeing the significance in the apparently ordinary, the unerring accuracy of the description, 'the gawky parsley with its trail of stems', the lovely lightness of the observation, 'faintness under green translucence' and the integrity of the setting where everything is scrupulously defined from the 'yellowed Pyrex' to the 'floorboards scrawled with neglect'.
The evening was rounded off with two fine poems ‘Cormorants’ and ‘The Going Away Dress’, the first of these making very effective use of the metaphor of a raucous football crowd to convey convincingly the sense of clamouring birds and the second describing a faded dress and its memories with utmost delicacy as if it was 'floating on butterflies, its closed wing praying'.
The second half of the evening was given over to members reading poems, often their own, on the theme of hoarding which our secretary had suggested would make a fertile topic. This certainly proved to be the case. A very successful evening.
Back to TopKIT WRIGHT
Kit began the evening by describing a children’s project with which he was involved over Christmas; Westminster City Council encouraged 600 children to write a poem each about the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square which Norway gives to the U.K. every year. Kit’s task was to summarise these 600 poems into a single poem by ‘committee writing’ and then to train some of the children to recite it to an audience of over 300 guests. The final poem was printed on a Christmas card and included some of the children’s own lines which had original turns of phrase which were then synthesised by Kit with the assured rhythm we associate with his writing. This type of community project is worth remembering when poets feel isolated and is an approach T.P.S. might find rewarding in the future.
After his original introduction, Kit read some of his own more recent poems which reflect his love of cricket as well as poems about birds and buildings. Many of Kit’s poems are short and funny, like this one which he didn’t read:
Cricket widow
Out of the love you bear me,
By all its sweet beginnings
Darling heart, please spare me
The details of your innings.
Kit makes subtle use of rhyme in many of his poems which often follow a set form; for example his ‘Elegy of a Sidesman’ describes with great warmth the man who took the collection in church; ‘Walk of a Friend’ is a very accurate and funny observation of our walking habits which are often passed down through families, and ‘Lastly the ghastly…’ challenged Roy Orbison’s claim that ‘Only the lonely know the way you feel tonight’ in an hilarious parody which includes ‘Surely the poorly…’, ‘Simply the pimply…’ and ‘Quaintly the saintly…’ in Kit’s ‘The Orbison Consolations.’!
Some of these poems are published in ‘Hoping It Might Be So’, a collection of Kit’s poems from 1974 to 2000 which includes his four other collections. It is published by Leviathan Press in paperback, over 200 pages long and costs £10. The ISBN number is 1-903563-01-1.
For those who prefer to hear Kit read his poems, some are available on www.poetryarchive.org where there are many contemporary poets listed in alphabetical order including George Szirtes who is reading for us on May 11th.
Kit then answered some questions explaining how he started writing as a child and that his father and grandfather also wrote light verse. When asked how his writing had changed over the years, Kit replied that his poems have become more celebratory and witty rather than gloomy.
We had some spirited readings from the floor to conclude the evening including Veronica Gudgin, who read her own poem about cricket, Ann Biddle, Dick Hancock, Dick from Poetry I.D. in Letchworth who read an interesting poem about iron, George Knight who recited a witty ditty from memory about a dog whom we all hope to avoid, a clever clerihew from John Godfrey and William Greig who read Kit’s own parody of ‘How the Wild West Was Won’ titled ‘How the Wild South East Was Lost’!
With over 30 of us in the audience Kit gave us an uplifting and fitting evening to christen our new home at Stockwood Golf Centre.
Back to TopJOHN MOLE
Master of Form, Gentle Rhythm, Tone and Rhyme
Basil Bunting said "Take a chisel to write / words are too light". Well, John's words have a surface lightness but he has used his chisel skilfully, and perhaps unconsciously, to achieve an enchanting elegance in both his serious and his more humorous poems.
His reading started with sequence of 19 short poems entitled The Memory of Gardens. Each poem was beautifully balanced, and led naturally into the next, and each contained memorably nuanced language. It would be impossible in a short review to highlight all of the fine writing, so I must confine myself to a few examples from the sequence. In the first poem, Love. he writes:
We have built a shelter Amongst ashes, marked with a cross.
In Wings,
....an uplift Aimed at joy and making it.
In To His Love, Sleeping
....your eyes So sweetly abscond To a country beyond their lids.
I find that beautiful, and I also loved:
... a sunspot, where all points of light Play leap-frog dazzle in a water-bowl ...
in Serenade, and the image that ended Con Amore:
... the pages turn Like a white rose opening.
There was a change of mood after John's opening sequence. In Cluedo, he demonstrated a playfulness with rhyme that made me wonder what he would do with other popular board games. He went on to demonstrate great skill as a sonneteer with a double sonnet, The Call.
For me the most evocative poem , amongst many, in John's new collection, The Other Day, was On a Photograph of Air Raid Wardens, Taken After All-night Bombings of the West End: 1940, in which Vermeer and the comfortable domesticity of a cup of tea, (Shall I be mother?) are a temporary relief from surrounding destruction and carnage, and contrast with today's voyeurism, watching the horrors of modern warfare on television screens.
John is an acute observer, who has married this talent with a subtle musicality and command of tone.
Reading his work in major magazines and listening to him, I get a sense of his awareness of the passage of time, and his acceptance of life and love in all of their aspects.
Back to TopNEIL BEARDMORE
We have often enjoyed listening to Neil reading his own very distinctive poems so it was good to be able to provide him with an extended opportunity to demonstrate the range and versatility of his full creative talents and impressive skill as a confident and engaging performer. He did not disappoint. The presentation made for a most unusual and captivating evening.
The word unique is often overused when reviewers search for the right word to convey the peculiar quality that distinguishes a writer’s work but it accurately described what was on offer here. It is not uncommon to hear poetry set to music but Neil’s approach is very different from this as he seeks to fuse image and word in a total and singular experience. As for subject matter, he is clearly drawn to elemental features such as the flow of water, the stillness of stone and the amorphous nature of materials such as sand. Words, music, photography and paintings worked very well together in pieces such as Water and Sahara. The range of work was then extended in an extra-terrestrial piece and in Helicopters which had a far rawer and more urban quality to them. It was, however, probably the original work on a farmer’s discovery of Spanish cave drawings prompting both the scepticism of ‘experts’ as to their authenticity and the wondrous reaction of a child who first witnessed them that the presentation came truly alive for the audience. It was as if the strong elements of story had been added to the basic elements and helped to dramatise them.
After the interval Neil sang two blues numbers and read some of his most recent poems, revisiting childhood in a piece which memorably recalled his experience of learning to play the piano, describing vividly a local character, and finally entertaining us with a delightful comic fantasy.
Throughout the presentation it was clear that Neil was enjoying the evening himself and this feeling was communicated to the audience who shared his pleasure in the informal and relaxed nature of an unusual and diverting evening.
Back to TopA Way Of Looking
The visit of Kathryn Simmonds on 13 October 2009
The startling title of Kathryn’s first collection, Sunday at the Skin Launderette, was perhaps all we needed to alert us that we were in the company of an emerging writer with the capacity to command our attention. No histrionics were needed to strive for additional effect as her quiet reading of the poems drew us into the ordinary world around her, seen with an acute brightness and a surprising degree of affecting humour, an attribute turned to very good effect in her radio play, Poetry for Beginners. Early up was The Boys in the Fish Shop. This set the tone for what was to follow. The behaviour of the lads is described precisely enough but then the writer gets into her stride with the quite remarkable image that starts the second half of the poem:
The fish lie around all day, washed-up movie stars stunned on their beds of crushed ice.
But this is no isolated image, however effective, and the poem’s overall impact does not disappoint in a collection that takes the stuff of everyday living the writer knows so well – an old photograph of a mother, leftovers in the fridge, clichés – and invests them with an aura which is sometimes beautiful, often humorous, but never quite what we expect. There is little that is pastoral in this world, it’s urban living from which yet another thread emerges. Listening to the poems you become increasingly aware of a sad undertow, muted but nonetheless present, the abiding preoccupation of poets down the ages – the passing of time and with it lost opportunities, of things not quite working out. Some of the poems, such as Taxi Drivers and Charity Shop show the deft touch we associate with surefooted sketches but the overall effect of reading the full collection suggests promise of deeper and more sustained work still to come. Kathryn interspersed readings of her own work with poems by established writers such as Elizabeth Bishop and Fleur Adcock, illustrating her enthusiasm for writing and a capacity for appreciating the work of others.
Before rounding off the evening with two sonnets which effectively illustrated another key aspect of her work, its craftsmanship, and especially its use of rhyme, Kathryn gave an opportunity to members to read their own current work and engaged us in a discussion of the significance of small literary magazines as well as weightier matters such as the importance and purpose of writing poetry.
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