Poetry as biography, biography as poetry

Ian Hamilton's biography In Search of J.D. Salinger is as much a reflection on the nature of the genre itself as a story of the the man's life. This might have initially been down to legal reasons (Hamilton's original effort had to be pulped), but the end result is excellent.

While reading it recently, I was again reminded of parallels between poetry and biography, above all in the treatment of subject matter. Even though they may often deny doing so (even to themselves), the practitioners of both genres take fact and transform it into fiction. They take fiction and transform it into fact. They play at blurring the two.

Small publishers and Amazon

Over at her Happenstance blog, Helena Nelson has published a post which highlights the pìtfalls of dealing with Amazon from the perspective of a small publisher. It's well worth the read (find it here), showing just how commercial giants in all realms of business squeeze their suppliers' margins.

Of course, I too buy poetry through Amazon, as their Marketplace enables me to access secondhand books that I'd struggle to find elsewhere. However, I do try to purchase new titles directly from poetry presses. Otherwise, Amazon's cut can easily turn a profit into a considerable loss.

Review: Gopagilla, by Roy Marshall

The last few years have seen the gradual emergence of a number of exciting poets in the U.K. who dare to embrace a tradition that runs through from Larkin to Farley, that of taking the everyday by the scruff of its neck and reinventing it. In his high-quality first pamphlet, titled Gopagilla (Crystal Clear Creators Publishing, 2012), Roy Marshall shows that he deserves to be added to that growing list.

What's more, his chapbook also heralds the arrival on the U.K. scene of a new pamphlet publisher, Crystal Clear Creators, who have taken the plunge with the simultaneous publication of six collections. They've certainly made an excellent start and I'll be keeping a close eye on how their project develops.

In technical terms, Marshall combines his powers of observation with a keen ear for the music that's formed from the playing-off of assonance, alliteration and stresses, all to the end of illuminating narratives and scenes, as in this example from Arrival:

"...The circuitry of crickets on the air,
his red wine and cigarette breath,
a sickle and scythe laid aside,
and rosemary scent, rising..."

As for thematic concerns, Marshall is especially strong when exploring the tricks of identity. In Rose, for instance, his son's "Latin genes" lead to unexpectedly "mousy hair on a milky brow". This subject is intertwined with the juxtaposed shifting perspectives of the past, present and future, which are implicitly compared and contrasted so as to cast fresh light on each other. In this respect, family is present, as in the first lines of Inheritance:

"I'll take it now, that look you gave me,
the one I saw yesterday..."

The effect of time on relationships, meanwhile, also appears,and is equally well handled in the final lines of Telepathy: 

"...One night, as we spoke on the corridor payphone
where even Queens had to queue, your voice let slip
that you had left me, but I already knew."

As these two poems show, Marshall is especially adept at beginnings and endings. Gopagilla is a satisfying and poetically coherent first pamphlet. It delivers a lot and promises even more. I very much look forward to reading more of Roy Marshall's poetry in the future.

New Walk magazine reviews Inventing Truth

Issue 4 of New Walk magazine has just come out, packed with lots of excellent poetry by the likes of Ian Parks, Carol Rumens and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. Why not visit their website and get hold of a copy or take out a subscription to what's fast becoming one of the best and most thought-provoking print-based literary magazines in the U.K?

I was also delighted to find that the same issue features a terrific review of Inventing Truth by Simon Robinson. Here are a couple of extracts from his piece:

"This assured first pamphlet by Matthew Stewart explores poetry’s capacity to express and potentially resolve the conflicts engendered by experience. Its simplicity is its strength; as Stewart understands, if the goal is directness and honesty, why obfuscate those ends with artificiality and mannerism...?

"...Stewart writes beautifully on the level of the line and the stanza, but the greatest pleasure of this collection lies in its overall coherence..."

I'm very pleased to have struck such a chord with Robinson, especially as he has captured exactly what I attempt to achieve in my poetry. All this euphoria leads me on to a shameless plug for Inventing Truth....

...if you now feel drawn to buying my pamphlet and reading it for yourself, you can do so at the Happenstance website here.

Lizzy Dening's Nasty Little Intro #2

A whole host of freshly baked reviews have just gone live over at Sphinx as part of Issue 20. It includes pieces on chapbooks by poets such as Hannah Lowe, Ira Lightman and Ian McMillan, while also featuring my take on Lizzy Dening's excellent mini-pamphlet, Nasty Little Intro #2, which you can read here.

Larkin on Betjeman

As part of their extensive web archive, The Guardian provide an online version of Philip Larkin's 1959 review of John Betjeman's Collected Poems. It's well worth a look and you can read it here.

I often feel that such articles reveal as much about the reviewer as his subject, and this is no exception. Larkin implicitly defends many of his own poetic values when highlighting Betjeman's virtues. I was especially drawn to his explanation of the way he feels many critics misuse the term "nostalgia" when dealing with Betjeman (and Larkin):

"the quality in his poetry loosely called nostalgia is really that never-sleeping alertness to note the patina of time on things past which is the hall-mark of the mature writer"

This is superbly put. Of course, it inevitably dodges the constant interplay in both Larkin's and Betjeman's work between their yearning for "things past" and their critical view of "things present". All in all, Larkin's review is a terrific piece of unashamedly partial and passionate writing. I invariably end up comparing his view of British poetry and society in 1959 with how he might judge where we are in 2012, but that's a different blog post altogether...

Six things

Today sees me tackling Kona Macphee's questions as part of her regular "Six Things" feature on that elusive clarity. You can see my responses here. Why not have a look at how other poets replied while you're on her site? W.N. Herbert's dual identity and Polly Clark's brief yet illuminating answers are among my personal favourites.