John Cunliffe obituary

September 28, 2018, 8:24 am

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Creator of the Postman Pat stories, who depicted a community-spirited but disappearing world

John Cunliffe, who has died aged 85, said he was inspired to create Postman Pat by his work for Wooler mobile library in Northumberland. “Like Pat, I travelled around a rural area and met a great many farmers and other rural dwellers who were kind and generous in the way that the people of Greendale are,” he recalled. “It was all there, in my memory.”

Kindness and generosity, together with selflessness and community spirit, were virtues worth celebrating in the autumn of 1981 as the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, entered her second year in office. In the first episode, Postman Pat’s Finding Day, its hero was tasked with delivering birthday parcels to the twins Katie and Tom Pottage. So Pat set off in his red Royal Mail van (licence plate: PAT1) with his black and white cat, Jess, in the passenger seat. This was decades before the Royal Mail sell-off and long before British streets became clogged with rival FedEx, UPS and Amazon vans.

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Blake Morrison on Skipton: ‘I joined the village choir, as a way of seeing my mates at weekends’

September 29, 2018, 3:59 am

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The poet and author on two inspiring English teachers and the arrival of a youth club that opened up his world

When asked where I grew up, I say Skipton, as there’s a chance people will have heard of it, but really it was a village several miles away, Thornton-in-Craven, to which we moved when I was six, a village so small that the primary school had only 18 pupils. We lived at the top of the hill, in what had previously been a rectory. Out front, in the distance, lay purple moor; to the left a valley that led to Skipton, gateway to the Yorkshire Dales; to the right small industrial Lancashire towns – Earby, Colne, Nelson and Burnley (the last boasted a top-flight football team, as it does again today).

The village wasn’t isolated – a road ran through it, one so busy that my parents banned me from having a bicycle – and in those days there was a shop. Once a year, when not rained off, there’d be a fete. But there wasn’t much happening for children, least of all on Sunday, which is why, at nine, I joined the village choir, as a way of seeing my mates at weekends. My atheist dad and lapsed-Catholic mum weren’t keen (I may have been the first child in Christendom to beg permission to go to church), though they did attend one carol service to hear me sing the opening verse of “Once in Royal David’s City”, a solo part I suspected I’d been given not because of my fine treble voice but because of my status as the son of GPs.

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How poetry can light up our darker moments

September 29, 2018, 10:00 pm

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In this fast-moving technological world, lines of poetry can be food for the soul and help people with mental illness

How can learning poetry by heart help us to be more grounded, happy, calm people? “Let me count the ways,” says Rachel Kelly, who has suffered from anxiety. Whenever she’s feeling wobbly, she finds reciting lines of poetry is grounding, validating and connects her to others who have felt as she is feeling in this moment. And it’s something we can all do: poetry we’ve learned to recite means we have another voice inside us that’s always there, a kind of on-board first responder in times of psychological need.

There’s also a certainty and stability about being able to conjure those words: they’re a crutch, we can lean on them, they can even do the thinking for us. Kelly describes how two lines from Invictus by WE Henley can make all the difference to what happens to her next: “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.” When all she can hear in her head are negative voices, she can drown them out by repeating, over and over, positive lines from poetry: they’re substitutions, life-giving mantras rather than life-sapping ones.

He held my hands across the century and said to me I’d be OK

One of the most lasting cures has been here all along

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The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes – review

September 29, 2018, 11:00 pm

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This singular hybrid of photography and poetry captures 50s Harlem on the brink of change

The story goes that Langston Hughes met Roy DeCarava by accident on a street corner in uptown Manhattan in 1954 and was so taken by his photographs of everyday life in Harlem that he took them straight to his publishers. Simon & Schuster agreed to go ahead only if Hughes, who by then had published several novels, plays and poems, provided an accompanying text. The result, which first appeared the following year, was a hybrid book that is now recognised as a pioneering exercise in merging image and text as well as a revealing glimpse into the everyday lives of Harlem’s black community.

Now reissued by David Zwirner Books, which recently took creative charge of the DeCarava estate, The Sweet Flypaper of Lifecontinues to cast a singular spell. Revealingly, DeCarava saw himself not as a documentarian, but as a modernist who valued his quest for “creative expression” over any desire to make “a sociological statement”. His approach was quietly subversive in its upending of traditional – and usually reductive – portrayals of black Americans in the mainstream media, where, as he noted, they were often presented “either in a superficial or a caricatured way or as a problem”.

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Poem of the week: The Quiet Snow by Raymond Knister

October 1, 2018, 2:46 am

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A Canadian poem that blends modernism with the pastoral reveals a natural calm at work in the city as well as the country

The Quiet Snow

The quiet snow
Will splotch
Each in the row of cedars
With a fine
And patient hand;
Numb the harshness,
Tangle of that swamp.
It does not say, The sun
Does these things another way.

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Running Upon the Wires by Kate Tempest review – raw revelations

October 2, 2018, 12:00 am

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Kate Tempest’s self-exposing collection of poems, ballads and lyrics pulse with recklessness and vulnerability

This is the most personal collection Kate Tempest has ever written. It is her offstage, in-the-wings, behind-the-scenes book. Intimacy is its strength: the life could not be more private, the scrutiny of love, sex and sorrow will speak to anyone who has suffered a broken heart. Yet, at the same time, the overexposed quality of some of the poems is also its weakness. I sometimes felt voyeuristic as I read – as though witnessing more than I ought (while reminding myself that the decisions about what to include are Tempest’s own).

I wondered about the recklessness of this writing – a recklessness that seems to have grown out of vulnerability. To what extent can pain compromise poetic judgment? And why does the transition from private to public feel so uncomfortable here? It is as if some of these poems needed to spend more time on their own – in a diary, perhaps. More than one, such as Aftershowparty, in its last line, gives up, with a slippage in tone that reads like an eff off to poetry, a descent into plain – pained – speech:

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Send us your questions for John Cooper Clarke...

October 2, 2018, 10:30 pm

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Got something to ask the original punk poet? Here’s your chance, ahead of the second leg of his UK tour

Characterised by his rakish style and punk staccato rhythms, poet John Cooper Clarke rose to prominence in the 1970s, releasing half a dozen albums from 1978 to 1982 and touring the world. Laden with expletives and gags, his poems cover topics ranging from poverty to politics to package holidays. His poem Evidently Chickentown has featured on multiple soundtracks, including The Sopranos.

An unlikely mainstream icon, the 69-year-old Salford poet was added to the national curriculum syllabus several years ago. He has also worked with the Arctic Monkeys, who put one of his poems to music.

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Andrew Motion uses headstone tributes to write new war poem

October 3, 2018, 4:01 pm

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Former poet laureate drew inspiration from personal inscriptions to write Armistice

Some chose from the scriptures. Others, from literature and poetry. For families of the first world war’s fallen, finding the words for the inscriptions to adorn the headstones of their loved ones was the final tribute.

As the guns fell silent on 11 November 1918, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) faced the global challenge of ensuring proper burial for 1 million Commonwealth men and women killed. Next-of-kin were invited to add a personal inscription, each limited to just 66 stone-engraved characters.

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From John Keats to Nick Cave: poems for every stage in life

October 3, 2018, 10:30 pm

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This National Poetry Day, whether you’re in need of some verse for a wedding or to mark a death at 104, Chris Riddell selects his favourite poems for key life moments

The great power of poetry is its ability to distil thought, observation and emotion into a form that moves us profoundly. We turn to poetry to help us express our feelings at key stages of our lives – birth, marriage and death. But poetry has the ability to seep into other life experiences – falling in love, raising children and confronting our mortality in both peace time and war.

“Love Letter” by Nick Cave is lyrical poetry about passion, remorse and hope that lives on the page just as powerfully as in song – “A handful of hopeful words, / I love her and I always will.”

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Patrick O'Brian's unknown poems discovered in a drawer

October 4, 2018, 8:01 am

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Cache of more than 100 pieces, of which even his family was unaware, will be published next year as The Uncertain Land and Other Poems

• Read two of the poems below

After sitting in a desk drawer for almost 20 years, a large cache of poetry by the British author Patrick O’Brian has been discovered, with the majority unknown even to his own family.

More than 100 poems, which will be collected and published as The Uncertain Land and Other Poems next March, were discovered this year when trustees for the O’Brian estate handed over a manila folder containing the poems. They had been written between the early 1940s to the late 1970s.

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Brass band and Oxbridge mourners at WH Auden’s funeral – archive, 5 Oct 1973

October 4, 2018, 9:30 pm

≫ Next: Who Is Mary Sue? by Sophie Collins review – correcting sexist narratives

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5 October 1973: The English-American poet is laid to rest in a small Austrian village

Kirchstetten, October 4
Wystan Hugh Auden was buried here today in the little Roman Catholic churchyard in the village of Kirchstetten, where he had spent the last 16 summers of his life.

Once an enfant terrible of English letters, in the 1930s the committed anti-fascist voice of the Left, and two decades later Professor of Poetry at Oxford, he was laid to rest in a corner of Lower Austria where the Vienna Woods peter out into rolling fields and orchards.

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Who Is Mary Sue? by Sophie Collins review – correcting sexist narratives

October 5, 2018, 3:00 am

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Using a range of inventive techniques, these poems pick apart damaging assumptions about female creativity

The term “Mary Sue” was coined by author Paula Smith in 1973, to satirise the unrealistic female characters in Star Trek fanfiction. The label, for the implausibly perfect female archetypes that are thought to be thinly disguised versions of the fanfiction author’s idealised self, has acquired a pejorative significance over time. It is mostly associated with self-insertion and wish-fulfilment in a genre dominated by female writers, giving the term an undercurrent of misogyny.

Sophie Collins’s debut poetry collection, Who Is Mary Sue?, inquisitively picks apart the assumption that women lack creative autonomy, and that female-authored literature only ever reflects on real, often domestic, experience. She exposes the murky politics behind readership and reception with rigorous investigation and clever, almost comical, allegory. In her poem Healers, a scaffold is imagined as a female and described as “fundamentally insecure”, found “slumped against the side of the church … Her safety mesh / was torn in places and sun-bleached all over / and threatened to dislodge”.

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Poem of the week: A corner of the road, early morning by Norman MacCaig

October 8, 2018, 2:00 am

≫ Next: The – very quick – Slowdown: will a five minute poetry podcast calm your nerves?

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With precise local detail and metaphorical daring, the poet finds inspiration in his Highland surroundings

A corner of the road, early morning by Norman MacCaig

The thorny light
Scratched out a lanky rose bush in the air.
Goats had been at it, leaving five flowers there.

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The – very quick – Slowdown: will a five minute poetry podcast calm your nerves?

October 7, 2018, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: 'Forgotten' female poet of first world war to be honoured at armistice centenary

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A new daily podcast is read by US poet laureate Tracy K Smith – but it’s just the tip of a social-media-driven resurgence in versifying

Name: The Slowdown.

Appearance: Every weekday, starting in late November.

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'Forgotten' female poet of first world war to be honoured at armistice centenary

October 9, 2018, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Poem of the week: Manhattan by Lola Ridge

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Mary Borden’s passionate sonnet was addressed to a British soldier with whom she had an affair while running a field hospital at the battle of the Somme

A love poem written from the frontline of the Somme by the “great forgotten voice of the first world war”, the American author, heiress, suffragette and nurse Mary Borden, will form the heart of an event at the Tower of London to mark the centenary of Armistice Day.

Borden’s poem, the third in a sequence entitled Sonnets to a Soldier, was written for a young British officer with whom she had an affair while running a field hospital during the first world war. It will be the basis for a choral work by the artist and composer Mira Calix, accompanying a light show that will fill the Tower of London moat from 4-11 November with thousands of individual flames, in the build-up to the 100th anniversary of peace.

Sonnet III, from Sonnets to a Soldier

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Poem of the week: Manhattan by Lola Ridge

October 15, 2018, 2:00 am

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An intensely dynamic vision of New York City in the early 20th century raises questions about its gilded allure

Manhattan

Out of the night you burn, Manhattan,
In a vesture of gold –
Span of innumerable arcs,
Flaring and multiplying –
Gold at the uttermost circles fading
Into the tenderest hint of jade,
Or fusing in tremulous twilight blues,
Robing the far-flung offices,
Scintillant-storied, forking flame,
Or soaring to luminous amethyst
Over the steeples aureoled –

Diaphanous gold,
Veiling the Woolworth, argently
Rising slender and stark
Mellifluous-shrill as a vender’s cry,
And towers squatting graven and cold
On the velvet bales of the dark,
And the Singer’s appraising
Indolent idol’s eye,
And night like a purple cloth unrolled –

Nebulous gold
Throwing an ephemeral glory about life’s vanishing points,
Wherein you burn …
You of unknown voltage
Whirling on your axis …
Scrawling vermillion signatures
Over the night’s velvet hoarding …
Insolent, towering spherical
To apices ever shifting.

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Shirley Toulson obituary

October 16, 2018, 10:09 am

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My mother, Shirley Toulson, who has died aged 94, was a highly regarded poet and an innovative writer about Britain’s walks, ancient tracks and traditions.

Her poetry was broadcast and published in journals (The Listener, Tribune, Ambit and Outposts), in a book, Shadows in an Orchard (1960), and in a poetry collection, A Group Anthology (1963), edited by Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith. Further books included Circumcision’s Not Such a Bad Thing After All (1970) and The Fault, Dear Brutus: A Zodiac of Sonnets (1972), both published by Roy Lewis, the commonwealth correspondent of the Times, on his Keepsake Press for which she became adviser and commissioning editor following his death in 1996.

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Anna Burns's Booker prize win and poet Kate Tempest – books podcast

October 17, 2018, 8:44 am

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Milkman delivers the 2018 Man Booker prize, while we listen in as a poet discusses the lyric art with her editor

This week saw Anna Burns crowned as winner of the 2018 Man Booker prize. We discuss how Milkman speaks to us in the era of Brexit and #MeToo, despite its setting in 1970s Northern Ireland, and how a literary award can transform an author’s life.

Then we hear from the poet Kate Tempest, who talks process with her editor and fellow poet Don Paterson. Can an old relationship ever find closure? What happens when you’re so deep in poetry you can’t see past the way a poem is constructed? And does writing poetry ever get easier?

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TS Eliot prize announces 'intensely political' shortlist

October 18, 2018, 4:06 am

≫ Next: Weatherwatch: autumn in Borrowdale, in the words of Coleridge

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Prestigious £25,000 award selects 10 collections showcasing ‘poetry’s ability to engage with language when it is being debased’

A sequence of sonnets written during the first 200 days of Donald Trump’s presidency is just one of the “intensely political” poetry collections shortlisted for the most valuable award in British poetry, the £25,000 TS Eliot prize.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, in which the award-winning US poet Terrance Hayes tackles the fast-moving news cycle of American politics, is one of 10 collections contending for the award. Alongside it, US poet laureate Tracy K Smith considers the country’s past in Wade in the Water, named after a spiritual sung on the Underground Railroad, former winner Sean O’Brien considers England’s relationship with its continental neighbours in Europa, and Nick Laird takes on topics from Grenfell Tower to the refugee crisis in Feel Free.

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Weatherwatch: autumn in Borrowdale, in the words of Coleridge

October 19, 2018, 1:30 pm

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The romantic poet found Borrowdale in the rain a marvel of light and colour

It is drizzling rain, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his notebook on a Friday morning, 21 October 1803, in the Lake District. “Heavy masses of shapeless vapour upon the mountains (O, the perpetual forms of Borrowdale!) yet it is no unbroken tale of dull sadness. Slanting pillars travel across the lake at long intervals, the vaporous mass whitens in large stains of light – on the lakeward ridge of that huge arm-chair of Lodore, fell a gleam of softest light, that brought out the rich hues of the late autumn. The woody Castle Crag between me and Lodore is a rich flower-garden of colours – the brightest yellows with the deepest crimsons, and the infinite shades of brown and green, the infinite diversity of which blends the whole, so that the brighter colours seem to be colours upon a ground, not coloured things,” he notes, in Coleridge: Complete Verse, Select Prose and Letters, edited by Stephen Potter for the Nonesuch Library 1950. He delights in the “little woolpacks of white bright vapour” that rest on the summits and declivities. “Through the wall of mist, you can see into a bower of sunny light, in Borrowdale; the birds are singing in the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April, and the decaying foliage were flowers and blossoms.”

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