Monday 12 October 2009

And I thought I'd been a bit hard on Don Paterson...

Issue 3 of Horizon Review is jam-packed with all sorts of goodies, and a fairly brief trawl through it at lunchtime was nothing like long enough to do it justice.

I put the poems themselves on hold for now, and the podcast on West Midlands poetry, and turned instead to the interviews. There's a really good piece on Hugo Williams, always a favourite of mine. I love what he says about line-breaks, especially that last line about the broken thermometer. Carrie Etter and Claire Crowther's piece is good too, as you might expect if you read the interviews with them both on these pages earlier this year.

And then there's Vidyan Ravinthiran's interview with Craig Raine. Among other things, he has some pretty harsh words to say about Don Paterson, words I'd struggle to agree with, despite my previously mentioned lukewarm response to most of Paterson's work. I think there's quite a bit of 'previous' between the two, though, and it's probably safe to assume that that's where all this coming from.

There's one thing Raine definitely gets wrong, though. No one decides to support Leicester City arbitrarily. Why on earth would you, on a whim, decide to subject yourself to a lifetime of gallant, underachieving mediocrity, punctuated by an all-too-brief golden era and not-so-occasional periods of grinding misery?

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