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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt
2. The Pleasure of Ferocity. A review of Malika Moustadraf’s short stories. By Michelene Wandor
3. Pastmodern Art. By David Rosenberg
4. What Is Truth? By Alan Macfarlane
5. The Beatles: Yeah x 3. Fab books and films reviewed by Alan Wall
6. Two sequences of poems by David Plante, introduced by Anthony Howell
7. The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias
8. Young Wystan by Alan Morrison
9. Nothing Romantic Here. Desmond Egan reviews Donald Gardner
10. Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections and Blind Summits
Previously: More below. Scroll down.
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2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
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Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
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Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
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Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
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Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
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Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
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The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
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Sequence, consequence and the random.
A Fortnightly Review
Counting Backwards: Poems from 1975-2017
by Helen Dunmore
Bloodaxe Books /412pp / £14.99 $15.13
By MICHELENE WANDOR.
Language moves ‘forward’, from beginning of word/sentence to the end. The novel moves ditto – even where the ending might appear ‘first’, as a kind of loss leader, the novel (very generally) proceeds with a cause-and-effect dynamic, even when it returns to its ending/beginning. So you pick up a novel, and generally read from the beginning (first numbered page) to the end. While much thought and work goes into structuring a collection of short stories, there is no necessary narrative imperative to begin on p.1 and follow through. One can start anywhere and then go anywhere. The same is true of poetry collections. Ways of reading poetry and stories are flexible in a way that reading the novel is not.
So what of this? Does placing 2017 first mean that one should/must/wants to read it first? Or does one ‘cheat’ the publisher, respect chronology, and start at the ‘end/beginning’ with 1975?
I didn’t want to engage with and/or answer these questions, and so decided on a different way of reading. Random. Open the book at a poem and read. The only stipulation I placed was to ensure that I entered each of the ten collections, though I might not discuss each poem.
The first poem turned out to be ‘Bristol Docks’. Spare, short stanzas, spanning the present – ships, gulls, the past, historical figures, slavery, and the overarching economy from financiers to traders. There is tight, musical rhythm, an Audenesque cadence here and there, and the hovering influence of the syllabic/haiku: a tiny taste:
I find, though, that I have cheated my idea of the random. In aiming to open at random, but in turn in a different collection, my eye inevitably catches other poems, and I see the strong influence of the presence of history (there in the above poem as well). So a short poem: ‘Prince Felipe Prospero (1657-1661)’, is seen in and through a painting, though we have no idea why the dates only cover four years. Three materials, one in each stanza: silver, amber, thistledown, are fixed in the painting, and we are fixed ‘watching him’. While ‘Bristol’ gave us historical interpretation, this poem gives us the ‘picture’ in words, leaving interpretation to ‘us’.
Finally (and, of course, it is not finally at all) there is ‘Whooper swans’. Three and a bit wing-shaped stanzas, bound by the tiny intros:
And dove (!)-tailed within the stanzas is a non-specific ‘he’, linking swans and planes and vast earth-bound landscapes.
♦
Michelene Wandor is a poet, playwright and short story writer. She has also written a critique of Creative Writing — The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (Palgrave).
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Publication: Sunday, 18 August 2019, at 15:23.
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