Otwituaries

There's an awful lot of rubbish on Facebook and Twitter, but Andy Jackson's Otwituaries manage to be funny, touching, and genuinely poetic (not that that should come as any surprise). I only discovered yesterday that they're also on this blog.

Helen Ivory at Peony Moon

I make no apology for sending you in the direction of Michelle McGrane's fine blog Peony Moon, for the second time in a couple of weeks.

The latest post is this remarkably honest and enlightening interview with Helen Ivory on the writing of her new Bloodaxe collection, Waiting For Bluebeard. The specifics are fascinating, but there's also a lot there that applies to the whole creative process more generally.

Antiphon 7

The latest issue of Antiphon is here - there's a truly impressive range of writers featured, including Helen Mort, Bernard O'Donoghue, River Wolton, Alastair Noon, Suzannah Evans, Jonathan Davidson, Pam Thompson, Geraldine Monk and Ian Duhig. Eclectic and exciting, and certainly the best issue yet.

Birds and People

I'll give you fair warning - I'm likely to blog about this book a lot over the next year or so. It arrived in the office on Friday and I can honestly say no review copy's ever been so eagerly awaited. Eight years of research and writing have gone into it, and at first glance it's truly extraordinary.

Mark Cocker's Birds Britannica has long been a favourite of mine, and here he does for the birds of the world what he previously did for the species of these islands. Which is to say, considers them in the round, and especially in terms of their interaction with humans. Folklore, myth, literature, science, anthropology and birdwatching mingle in these pages, and he continues to manage the difficult balancing act between getting over a wealth of hard information, and maintaining great readability.

This time, there's the added bonus of David Tipling's superb photography - it makes it a book that you can't stop flicking through every time you've got a spare moment.

Anyway, I'll be returning to the subject soon, but keep an eye out - it's released this summer.

Why isn't poetry popular?

Interesting blog post here, at the Sidekick Books blog, on the popularity or otherwise of poetry. In the light of Salt's announcement this week that they'll soon be ceasing to publish individual collections of poetry, concentrating instead on their Best British Poetry anthology series, it's an issue that's bound to get a lot of discussion in the coming weeks. Not sure about the whole 'reading poetry while sitting on the toilet' debate, though...

Some recent reading

Browsing through my blogs list this week, I enjoyed reading this post on Andrew Shields' always excellent blog. It helps that You Are The Everything is just about my favourite REM song, too.

Meanwhile, over at the Magma blog, there's Andrew Philip's thoughtful review of John F Deane's Snow Falling On Chestnut Hill. I've seen plenty of online debate recently about what a poetry review should do - this one makes me want to read more of the poetry in question, and to find out more about the poet. That's what I'm looking for, really.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

Cuckoos clocked

Down at a local nature reserve last weekend (well, it's an old sewage works, to be exact), I heard the strange, bubbling call of a female Cuckoo, something I haven't heard locally in a long time. In no time at all, two males were in attendance, replying with their familiar song. One remained fairly elusive, although I caught glimpses, but the other took up position on a tree near me, so despite the failing light I was able to get a few pics.

When I went back on Monday night, one of the males was still around, singing constantly, and there was an occasional distant second male, but neither sight nor sound of the female. It's a site with lots of Reed Warblers, though, one of the Cuckoo's preferred host birds, so she might well just have been sitting tight, looking for a suitable nest to parasitise.

Alvin Pang at Peony Moon

Michelle McGrane's blog Peony Moon offers a constant stream of the best new poetry out there, so it's well worth checking daily. Today, it features Singapore poet Alvin Pang, whose Arc collection When The Barbarians Arrive is out now. You can read four poems from the book here.

I like the look of that a lot - I'll be ordering it later. I've been reading a lot of older, 'back catalogue' poetry recently, so it's time to get back to the here and now.

After-work birding

I've not been doing much twitching at all the last couple of years, even within the county, as I've been concentrating on working my local patch, but now that the longer evenings and better weather are here, it's hard to resist the temptation to stop off and do some birding on the way home.

I called in at Cossington Meadows last night to have a look for the Ring Ouzels that have been reported there in recent days. The female showed up just after I got there - it remained frustratingly half-obscured in a little hollow for much of the time, but John Hague managed a decent digiscoped shot, and it occasionally came right out into full view.

The Bullfinches that John mentions were good to see, too, there were a few Lapwings around, and an interesting Wheatear a little further along the track. It looked large, to me, with long wings and a shortish tail, all suggestive of Greenland Wheatear, but I'm not sure if it was highly-coloured enough to be one. The timing's right, too, with most Wheatears of the nominate race having already gone through, but I'll have to put it down as a probable.

Over on Rectory Marsh, this Little Egret was the highlight - strange to think that 25 years ago it would have been causing major twitching activity.

Postcards from Berlin 3

Sitting around in the Tiergarten, there were huge numbers of small birds, some residents, others presumably moving through on migration. Nuthatches were plentiful, singing from bare branches, squabbling with Great Tits over nest holes, and in this instance, foraging on the ground to within a few feet of my bench.

Postcards from Berlin 2

I love corvids, so it was good to see so many Hooded Crows - even in Scotland I've not seen that many in the past, having generally done most of my birding south and east of the Great Glen, which is the dividing line between Hooded and Carrion Crow (you also get hybrids there).

Two poems at And Other Poems...

I've got two poems up at Josephine Corcoran's wonderful And Other Poems blog today - she features a huge array of poets, including the likes of Alison Brackenbury, Bill Herbert, Carrie Etter, David Morley, Ian Duhig and Penelope Shuttle, with new content appearing on a very regular basis.

Both poems - The Mind's Skyline and The Dark Ages - will appear in my forthcoming Nine Arches collection, The Elephant Tests, of which more news in the next few weeks.

Postcards from Berlin

I spent a few days in Berlin last week, and was arrived there just about the same time as spring did. The sun shone, the avenues and squares were crowded, and all in all it was a good time to sit at a pavement cafe with a beer, or to toddle from museum to museum.

Of course, I can't go anywhere without doing at least some birdwatching, and I'd heard all sorts of good things about Berlin, not the least being how easy it was to see Goshawks. Relatively easy, I mean - in this country, their locations are often closely guarded secrets, but in the German capital, there's thought to be up to 90 pairs, often nesting very close to buildings.

So, on the morning of my first full day, I started by looking in the Tiergarten. I'd had a quick look there the evening before, and the first thing that struck me was how wild it was for a city centre park. Instead, it feels like a chunk of forest dropped into the middle of the city, so the thought that it might harbour Goshawks, Buzzards and Wild Boar suddenly didn't seem so strange.

So, at 8.30am, I'd just crossed the road from the Brandenberg Gate, and was maybe 50 yards into the Tiergarten (in the photo above, just to the right of the trees on the right). A rusty-brown bird was rifling through the leaf litter a few yards to the right of the path, and even without binoculars it was obvious that it was a Nightingale.

This in itself is unusual - I don't think I've ever seen a Nightingale before without my attention first being drawn to it by its song. As I stood and watched, it fluttered to a low branch on a bush, and started singing, although in a more subdued, quieter fashion than you'd normally expect. 

When I eventually walked on a little way, I heard two more singing the same way, presumably in answer, and by the end of the morning I'd heard half a dozen or so throughout the park. I did catch up with a couple of Goshawks, too, but to be honest, the Nightingales would have been enough by themselves.

So much so that the next day, I couldn't resist having another look. This time, three near the Brandenberg Gate were in full voice, their songs audible from the far side of the road even over the traffic noise. It reminded me of this John Clare poem - I suspect the subdued singing was down to the birds having just arrived after their long migration.

I'll be posting more about the non-birding aspects of the trip soon, as well as a few more bird pics, but for now I'll just mention the one very slight disappointment about the Berlin Nightingales, discovering that their name in German is Nachtigall, nothing like as interesting as the Spanish name for the species, Ruisenor, literally, 'the noisy man'.

Poets as dragonflies

The weekly post at HappenStance's Unsuitable Blog is always worth reading, but here's a particularly good Odonata-themed one. Personally speaking, I'm just emerging after a few months of writing inactivity - probably still at the drying my wings in the sun stage.

Nine Arches Poetry Rodeo

I'm reading at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival on Saturday, as part of the Nine Arches Poetry Rodeo. It takes place from 2pm at Copa (admission is £5/£4), and involves two Gloucestershire-based Nine Arches poets, Daniel Sluman and Angela France, taking turns in an exchange of poems with myself and fellow Leicestershire poet Maria Taylor.

You can also hear Maria a little earlier at this, and I highly recommend that you do - her own book Melanchrini is superb, and her husband Jonathan will be reading from his new collection Musicolepsy.

There's lots, lots more too - the full programme for Saturday (and the rest of the festival) is here.

The Holy Place, by John Dotson and Caroline Gill

Poet To Poet 5, The Seventh Quarry & Cross-Cultural Communications, 2012, £3.50 / $10

This is the fifth in a series of chapbooks published by Swansea-based The Seventh Quarry in partnership with their transatlantic counterparts – the idea is that each one pairs up a US writer with a British poet.

The first thing to say is that, although there’s a pleasing consistency of theme across the two halves, John Dotson and Caroline Gill approach their concerns in quite different ways, both in terms of their (surface) subject matter and style. At first glance, you might even be tempted to say that the pair fulfil certain cultural expectations in that respect – Dotson’s poems are more open-field, and use white space and varying line-lengths to good effect, while Gill’s are more traditional in form.

That works well to provide variety in what’s a large (52 pages) and thus thoroughly good value pamphlet, and it ensures that the afore-mentioned themes aren’t signposted or foregrounded too obviously – you’re left to discover what Dotson calls “unsuspected symmetries” for yourself, and the book’s all the more enjoyable for that.

Dotson’s strength is the ability to place the everyday, the scientific and the philosophical in close proximity, without being impenetrable or sounding pretentious, and he does this to best effect in poems such as the opener, Aurora Consurgens, and the splendid Trapezium, which attempts to “explain / my vocation as / trapeze artist” and ends with “the little boy body / of an old man / still at this / peculiar performing arts / business / more and less”.

Gill’s work is more obviously grounded in the flesh and blood of the natural world, although perhaps grounded is the wrong word to use, given how many birds and insects flit and soar their way through her work.

 The best poems here are when she combines this close observation of nature with a keen sensitivity to the history and landscape of Wales (and sometimes further afield). Preseli Blue, for example, eulogises “the stone that sings of hiraeth” in 16 well-honed lines, while Rhossili: Writing The Worm, is the highlight, metrically-surefooted and musical, and managing the always difficult balancing act of writing about writing. And she has a knack for suddenly shrinking the universal down to the utterly specific – Master Of Arts ends when “the only universe / was this great green / bush cricket”, leaving you with the feeling that the divine, rather than the devil, is in the details.

If there’s a weakness, it’s when one or other of the poets reaches too obviously for a moment of significance, but such slips are few and far between. More often they offer contrasting routes to the same destination, and it’s a journey that’s well worth making.

New reviews at Sphinx

A new batch of reviews have been posted at Sphinx, with more to follow over the coming days. Here's my look at Brad Johnson's The Dichotomy Paradox, which I can heartily recommend, and as always with Sphinx, there are alternative reviews from Helen Evans and Matthew Stewart too.

Winter waders

In the absence of spring migrants locally, I'm birding vicariously on the internet this week. My Bird Watching colleague Mike Weedon was out on the Nene Washes on Tuesday night, and posted some interesting photos.

In the first, he snapped a Spotted Redshank in flight - the distinctive but very subtly drooped tip to the bill is visible.

In this pic, you can have fun trying to pick out the lone Lapwing among a flock of Icelandic Black-tailed Godwits - it is there, honestly.

Ira Lightman: Two chapbooks

Phone In The Roll (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2011)
Mustard Tart As Lemon (Red Squirrel, 2011)

The first of these chapbooks takes at its starting point “experiments with voice to text apps on a smartphone”. It’s a neat idea, and one that I’m surprised I haven’t come across before, but I suppose the real test of such an intriguing writing process is the end result.

The first thing to say, then, is that in reading it, the process never felt intrusive. You might expect the texts to be frustratingly haphazard, but in fact this is as thematically coherent a pamphlet as you’re likely to come across. The theme, as often as not, is the difficulty of communication, in public, in private, and in relationships, and what’s lost or distorted between thought and expression. In short, the process here suits the subject matter entirely, and instantly ceases to be an end in itself.

It’s hard to quote from, because the effect is gradual and cumulative, with the experience of reading it at times being like listening in on a conversation several seats down a noisy train carriage. Here’s the start of The Dream, for example:

I will never have what? I want it. I want

children with the woman I go live with! Fuck, for sure.
Have the new love and have to wait. You love. Search.

Children I have already take from me number of hours everyday

a number of times in three weeks. There is no room
for both children to have a time they, anyway, have had.

As the reader, you have to do a certain amount of work to fill in gaps, but there are phrases that stay with you, and importantly you keep making connections between seemingly disparate snatches of text the deeper you get into the book.

Of course, the original input into the process is Lightman’s, but the point, I suspect, is that you’re always left wondering just how large a gap there is between intention and end product. Intriguing and invigorating, and well worth revisiting.

Mustard Tart As Lemon comes across, initially at least, as a more straightforward proposition, with narratives and especially threads of arguments easier to grasp. That’s not to say they aren’t sometimes ‘difficult’, though, in the best sense of the word, precisely because Lightman is unafraid to talk about and around ideas and emotions, both directly and more obliquely. Take this passage:

I’m learning from you

not to trust too soon,
to have the courage
to feel hurt.
When I’m interrupted
or neglected, me
I’ll ride along
with the other
story, forget
mine exists.
You resist
kidnap of attention,
turn to who you
become. Some
conversations they have
are bullshit, but
I wouldn’t
dare to let them know
I think so, as you show
you do, the
volume
up on your earpiece,
simply looking down.

The cumulative effect of Lightman’s poetry is just as apparent here as in the other pamphlet – it’s not a criticism to say that many of the poems bleed into each other.

Lightman utilises the page to its fullest extent – indents and line-breaks are superbly used to pace the poems and achieve that effect of recording thought-processes as they happen, while long lines and, towards the end, concrete-type poems also make an appearance.

Most effective of all, perhaps, are the dual-column passages – the ambiguity created by being able to read down and/or across works well for a poet whose subject is often, as suggested above, the difficulties of communication, especially on a personal level.

Perhaps that subject isn't a particularly unusual one to come across, especially away from the mainstream of British poetry, but what makes Lightman consistently enjoyable and rewarding to read is that he's never deterred by the possibility of failure - for all the intrusion of technology and language into our relationships, he never loses sight of the human.

More from Stanley

I'm going to take a break from talking about the wildlife of the Falklands to return to Stanley (note, the 'Port' only applies to the actual harbour). As I mentioned in a previous post, it has the air of a small town on the west coast of Scotland, although the presence of huge cruise ships in the harbour, or just outside, can dispel that illusion.

We stayed at the Waterfront Hotel, a smart, modern establishment that wouldn't be out of place in most cities, although it is pretty small. It boasted a warm welcome, though, and a nice coffee shop that's clearly popular with locals, residents and cruise ship visitors alike.

We also ate at the Malvina House Hotel*, along at the other end of the main waterfront road. This is the top hotel in town, and the restaurant was really excellent. It seems to be the main meeting place for the town, or certainly for its business community.

Of course, we also wanted to see what the town's pubs were like, so on the last night we went along to The Globe, very close to our hotel. Inside it's not too different from what you'd expect in any smalltown British pub, although the odd assault rifle and rocket launcher on the wall is a giveaway as to location. Inside, the beer was all British brands (just as the West Store, the town's main shop, stocks M&S, Tesco and Sainsbury food items), and the atmosphere thoroughly relaxed. And don't think that the War dominates wall space - as in most of the houses, hotels and other establishments we went in during our stay, the islands' maritime history and wildlife riches also loomed large.

A single squaddie was defeating all-comers on the pool table - the locals told us that the following night, a Saturday, was the big one for servicemen coming from the Mount Pleasant base, 30-odd miles away. You can't imagine there's much trouble, though - both the military and local police wouldn't have too much of a job tracking down trouble-makers.

In fact, throughout our stay, we saw precious little trace of the military presence, except when we flew in and out of Mount Pleasant. A couple of Land Rovers, perhaps, but that was it. No low-flying jets or helicopters. There are still a number of minefields, but they're all well mapped and fenced off, and experts from Zimbabwe were actually present on Stanley Common (itself scarred by peat-digging) removing some of them.

* The founder named it after his young daughter, Malvina being a Scottish name that was popular in the islands. It seems to be something of an ironic coincidence that it's almost the same as the Argentinian name for the islands, Las Malvinas.

Lern yersen t'speak Coville

I love anything to do with accents and dialects, so I've been enjoying looking through this Facebook page about my hometown.

Coalville does have a significantly different accent to, say, Leicester, only 12 miles away, because the mining industry brought influxes of people from Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and then later County Durham and Ayrshire. That's probably why a Coalville accent can sound surprisingly northern, although there are certainly West Midland influences in there too.

Although I spent my entire childhood in Coalville, and have been back there a good few years now, I don't have a typical accent, probably because neither of my parents are local - my dad's from North Lincolnshire and my mum from South Wales. But a lot of the stuff on that page sounds familiar, and if I was back in town, I'd certainly normally use some of the words myself ('snap' for packed lunch, for example).

It set me thinking about the name of the town. Every few years, some local businessman or councillor suggests changing it, saying that it projects the wrong image and is too backward-looking now that the pits have gone. I'd always oppose that anyway, being proud of our history, but anyway it never seems to take account of the fact that no-one local sounds the 'l' - it's Coville, and it always will be.

Albert Ross and friends

Until a few weeks ago, I'd never set eyes on an albatross of any kind. OK, that's fairly normal for a UK birdwatcher, because other than the occasional bird that strays into our waters from time to time (I'm pretty sure one of them became known as Albert Ross), we don't get them.

Still, it feels very strange to go, in the space of a day, from seeing none to having seen literally thousands. On our first day on Carcass Island, we could see reasonable numbers of Black-browed Albatrosses offshore, and 24 hours later, on West Point Island, we were able to see the colony they were coming from.

Black-broweds aren't anything like the biggest of the family, belonging instead to the group of albatrosses known as mollymawks, but they're still pretty big, to be honest. Near the colony, I settled down for a good long wait in an attempt to film them in flight. A constant stream of the birds dropped in on the same downdraft, turned sharply, then landed. As they passed just a few feet overhead, they made a sound exactly like when a glider goes over low.

On the ground, they're much more clumsy, and they used little downhill grass runways to waddle along to get back into the air. Once there, though, they're every bit as graceful and effortless as you'd imagine. A flap of the wings becomes a very noteworthy event. It was worth noting, too, that they didn't necessarily need those runways - they took off from the sea easily enough when they needed to.

They're pictured below along with swimming Rockhopper Penguins - there might be the odd Kelp Gull there too.

Some more Falklands residents

Tussac Birds (more properly known as Blackish Cinclodes), is found in the southern part of South America, as well as on the Falklands. It's restricted to the smaller, rat and cat-free islands, but where it is present, it's present in large numbers. It's also very, very tame (see below).

Black-throated Finches (below) were elusive, but we found a few round the coast of Carcass Island. The Falklands subspecies is becoming increasingly important in world terms, as the species as a whole has suffered on the mainland in recent years.

Every month is NaPoWriMo

Last week, Carrie Etter drew my attention to the fact that it's almost National Poetry Writing Month time again. I've signed up to it a couple of times in the past - you have to write an post a poem a day throughout April - and have found it a lot of fun and a great way of generating ideas, plus a fair few poems worth working on.

I'm going to have to give it a miss this year, because work and other commitments would make it hard to keep up with things, but Carrie did point out that there's no reason not to give it a try any time.

So, later this year, I'll be doing my own one-man NaPoWriMo (unless you'd like to join in), and attempting to write a section of a longer poem every day. Not only is it a good way (I think) to throw off the shackles and finally get something down on paper reharding an idea that I've had for a long time now, but the more I think about it the more I think a diary-like approach might suit the subject matter well. I'll keep you posted.