Poetry
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One of the most important links I have is with Carcanet Press, whose Managing Director (and the editor of PNReview) is Michael Schmidt. Carcanet published three of my volumes of poems (Time Signatures, 1993; Not Only I, 1996; The Country of Perhaps, 2003) and I've contributed essays and reviews to PNReview for many years (since 1983).
For more information on Carcanet Press, and on PNReview, please click on www.carcanet.co.uk/
Together with Stella Butler, Michael and I function as Directors of the Modern Literary Archives Project (MLAP) in the John Rylands University Library, Manchester. The image shows some members of the Steering Group for this project meeting in Carcanet's offices in Manchester in December 2005. (We look utterly miserable, of course.) From left to right: Chris, Michael, Stella Halkyard, Fran Baker, Bill Hutchings, Robyn Marsack, John Hodgson, and Stella Butler. Fergus Wilde, a Steering Group appointee from Chetham's Library, took the shot, and the former Librarian, Bill Simpson - also a key player in the Steering Group - was away somewhere, reading.
The MLAP is a significant repository of literary archives, including the archives of Norman Nicholson, dom sylvester houedard, Grevel Lindop, and many others (including the papers of one Chris McCully). The archives of PNReview and Critical Quarterly are part of the collections. A recent and very important acquisition are the papers of the poet Elaine Feinstein. In truth there are very few 20th and 21st century poets whose work isn't represented in the MLAP, and the remit of the project also extends to important collections of material relating to film (the Robert Donat archive) and modern and contemporary art.
The MLAP is partly searchable (given the extent of the material, cataloguing the papers, and turning them into electronically searchable links, will take a lifetime). You can find out more about all the literary archives of the John Rylands Library by clicking on http://rylibweb.man.ac.uk/data2/spcoll/ and/or on http://archives.li.man.ac.uk
A Letter to Torquatus
Frankly I don’t know how you can stand it •
For months the same broken doors in the kitchen;
The relics of weeks-old meals on the bedspread;
Vitreous stains that haven’t received due attention.
But perhaps after all a life should be measured
By the capacity for bearing what its critics call squalor,
And equally, perhaps it’s merely over-fussy
Or prurient to find dirt somehow deficient,
Whereas clearly it’s a symptom of long-drawn-out resentment
That begins in the classroom, ramifies through families,
Dispatches its lovers late at night to the wine-shops
And will drop its fag-ash even into the open palm
That has begun to beckon towards the final judgement.
You might take it, Torquatus, as a species of sympathy •
Though you’ll see only nit-picking antiquity
And tell me robustly to mind my own business.
Quite right. A man so lonely
That for company he murmurs at saplings
Or drones over-loudly about the dubious merits
Of olive oil or sea-bathing
Has no right to engage with the intricate choices
Of others. Still…. How many decades, between us?
Truth is I’ve admired your insouciance
In the face of time and non-being,
And the years have allowed me, down to dust and atoms,
To compose the lineaments of order, called friendship.
I will look for your smile even as my monologue
Makes the women fall asleep in their soup-plates.
You will look for my approval among a chaos of nurses.
We shall slip into the dark out of step, but hand in hand.
(PNReview, 2007)
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'The Country of Perhaps' (2003) is my most recent full-length collection of work. It includes a number of short lyric poems, including award-winning pieces ('Fishermen on Santa Monica Pier'), along with the full text of 'Mass', a piece that took me seven years to complete...or perhaps, to abandon.
This collection of poems has sold modestly, but it's still selling, and that is something.
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'Not Only I' appeared in 1996. I worry sometimes about this collection of poems. Technically-speaking it contains pieces that are among my most sophisticated, but thematically it seems to me now that the collection reads as a somewhat remorseless selection of pieces about love and loss. I suspect that, encouraged by the reception of 'Time Signatures' three years earlier, I was trying too hard, and rushing work into print which would have been better kept and re-worked - or simply junked. Nevertheless, there are single pieces here of which I'm still fond, and I'm quite astonished by my apparent virtuosity - many of whose techniques I seem, ten years on, to have quite forgotten. If I'm being kind, I murmur the phrase '...bravura performance...' If I'm being myself, and therefore grumpy, I murmur the phrase '...just showing off....'
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'Time Signatures' is that rarest of things, a full-length collection of poems that has paid its way, and is still, ten and more years after publication, in print. It's not coincidental that this was my first collection (first collections are usually generously received, particularly where the writer has a visible presence as an essayist and reviewer), but still.... It means more to me that I still get occasional letters about poems in this collection, since the pieces seem to be recognisable to those who love the Northern English land- and river-scapes whose presence can be heard and felt in almost every poem here. Best of all was a comment from one of my correspondents of two years ago (2003): 'Swifts [migratory birds] do behave just like that.....'
I wince now (but only here and there) at some of the lines I was then allowing to pass my internal censor. I mean.... 'They thaw slowly, the three trout' has to be up there as a contender for Worst Opening Line of Any Poem, Ever. But I was young, ambitious, and hadn't quite found my range, or anything approaching fastidiousness. It's a tribute to the multiple generosity of my readers that I have apparently been forgiven.
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In the early 1990's I was able to invite many visiting writers to what was then 'The Poetry Centre' in what was then the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Manchester. I was pushy enough to give each of these distinguished visitors a brief, and I dare say these fine men and women had to work far too hard for their money, since each was asked to give a talk as well as a reading. The result of these splendid talks was the collection of pieces that Carcanet published under the title 'The Poet's Voice....'
One of my proudest moments - not that I have ever had many of those - came when I read several years ago in the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook that the poet and critic John Whitworth had recommended this text (over all its competitors) to aspiring writers. I paraphrase, but John's recommendation ran something like 'If you really want to know something about writing, then have a look at...' I took that comment to be an immensely generous - and what's more, professional - tribute to the sharp, warm, flawed, insightful writing contained within these covers.
I was lucky to be associated with this project.
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