Jay Ramsay obituary

January 13, 2019, 9:12 am

≫ Next: Poem of the week: Why the swan by Andrew Lambeth

≪ Previous: 'I trembled with shock': my brush with the rapist at the heart of the Nobel scandal

Jay Ramsay, who has died of cancer aged 60, was a psychotherapist and poet. The author of nearly 40 books, including nonfiction on alchemy and relationship psychology, and translations of classics of eastern philosophy, he was an influential presence on the alternative poetry scene. With the rich timbre of his voice and his impassioned opinions he was also an ambassador for transformative spiritual, political and psychological awareness.

His own poetry collections included Kingdom of the Edge (1980-98) and Out of Time (1998-2008). He also co-edited, with Sylvia Paskin and Jeremy Silver, Angels of Fire: An Anthology of Radical Poetry (1986) and was the editor of Soul of the Earth: The Awen Anthology of Eco-spiritual Poetry (2011), as well as editing and writing reviews for the mind/body/spirit journals Kindred Spirit (1997-2004) and Caduceus (2002 onwards).

↧

Poem of the week: Why the swan by Andrew Lambeth

January 14, 2019, 4:28 am

≫ Next: 'A star is born': TS Eliot prize goes to Hannah Sullivan's debut

≪ Previous: Jay Ramsay obituary

The writer discovers in this familiar but enigmatic creature an elusive emblem

Why the swan

Because the swan floats
up close.

↧

'A star is born': TS Eliot prize goes to Hannah Sullivan's debut

January 14, 2019, 11:30 am

≫ Next: Marcus Cumberlege obituary

≪ Previous: Poem of the week: Why the swan by Andrew Lambeth

Poet’s ‘absolutely exhilarating’ first collection Three Poems takes £25,000 prize

Poet Hannah Sullivan has won the prestigious and lucrative TS Eliot prize for her first collection Three Poems – just the third debut to land the award in its 25-year history, and a sign that the poetry world is hunting for a new generation of voices.

Sullivan, a 39-year-old Londoner who won the £25,000 prize on Monday night, is the third first time poet to take the prize, with all three winning in the last five years: Vietnamese-American Ocean Vuong in 2017 and Chinese-British Sarah Howe in 2015. Before then, the prize had tended to be awarded to more established poets a few collections into their careers, among them Derek Walcott, Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.

↧

Marcus Cumberlege obituary

January 14, 2019, 9:34 am

≫ Next: Otter magic: Spell Songs cry out to save our vanishing countryside

≪ Previous: 'A star is born': TS Eliot prize goes to Hannah Sullivan's debut

My lifelong friend Marcus Cumberlege, who has died aged 80, was a prolific poet. He lived in Bruges, Belgium, for 46 years. Earlier he had had several poetry collections published in the UK. Another 20 collections were to follow in Bruges by the time his Selected Poems (1963-2009) was launched at the city hall in 2010.

Born in Antibes, France, Marcus was the son of Nancy (nee Wooley), a Canadian, and Mike Cumberlege, later a decorated Royal Navy officer who worked for Special Operations in the Aegean. Mike was captured and eventually shot by the SS in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Germany, two months short of the allied victory in Europe. Marcus, aged nine, collected his father’s medals from King George in 1947. Mike’s ghost was to remain with Marcus all his life.

↧

Otter magic: Spell Songs cry out to save our vanishing countryside

January 15, 2019, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Top 10 books about Trinidad and Tobago | Claire Adam

≪ Previous: Marcus Cumberlege obituary

It has comforted the downtrodden, inspired Britain’s schoolchildren and even been sprayed as graffiti. Now, the book has shifted shape again – into music

It felt like the folk music equivalent of Avengers Assemble. Last September, I found myself sitting at a wooden dining table in the Lake District with multiple superheroes of British folk. Karine Polwart, Kris Drever, Julie Fowlis, Beth Porter, Rachel Newton, Kerry Andrew, Jim Molyneux– could they really all exist in the same room together? Or would their convergence in a confined space cause a small black hole to open somewhere near the Keswick Tesco?

Karine, trying to find the beginnings of a shape for the performance we were planning, pulled out a notebook and asked people to say what they could play or do. Remarkable answers were modestly given; most people there had three instruments minimum, plus voice; all were also songwriters and composers. Rachel and Julie were bilingual in Gaelic and English; Karine and Kris sang in Scots. It came round to me. “Um … grade-one recorder? Backing kazoo? Also, I once sat on my brother’s oboe and broke it in half.”

The response is about more than a book –it’s about what Michael McCarthy chillingly calls ‘the great thinning’

↧

Top 10 books about Trinidad and Tobago | Claire Adam

January 16, 2019, 12:00 am

≫ Next: TS Eliot poetry prize winner Hannah Sullivan and Kevin Powers – books podcast

≪ Previous: Otter magic: Spell Songs cry out to save our vanishing countryside

Taking in history, essays and poetry as well as fiction, novelist Claire Adam recommends favourite reading about her island nation

I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago and left, aged 18, to study at Brown University in the US. “Trinidad and To-bah-go!” people said when they learned where I was from. (I promptly corrected them: To-bay-go.) They knew of the country, although sometimes not its location, and I explained that we were a twin-island nation in the Caribbean, seven miles off the coast of Venezuela.

After graduating, when I went backpacking around Europe, I found that few people had heard of Trinidad at all: I took to pulling out a little fold-out map and pointing to the little dot by way of explanation. “The Caribbean!” people exclaimed. They knew about the beaches, the endless sunshine. But later their faces would cloud over – what on earth had possessed me to leave such a wonderful place?1 I did my best to explain, but I don’t think I succeeded. I’m not sure I even knew myself, back then, except that it had always been the goal. And it was that goal – to escape, to get somewhere better – that sparked the idea for my novel, Golden Child. During my five years of writing it, I was trying, among other things, to understand that relentless drive to get away from the country where I had grown up.

↧

TS Eliot poetry prize winner Hannah Sullivan and Kevin Powers – books podcast

January 16, 2019, 10:00 am

≫ Next: Mary Oliver, Pulitzer prize-winning poet, dies aged 83

≪ Previous: Top 10 books about Trinidad and Tobago | Claire Adam

On this week’s show, Claire speaks to Hannah Sullivan, fresh from her win at the TS Eliot prize with Three Poems. Then Sian and Claire sit down to discuss why some books get a second life in paperback.

Then Richard meets American soldier-turned-novelist Kevin Powers to discuss his second book, A Shout in the Ruins, which ties together two narratives: about a Virginian slave in the 1860s and a black nonagenarian travelling the segregated south in 1956.

↧

Mary Oliver, Pulitzer prize-winning poet, dies aged 83

January 17, 2019, 9:44 am

≫ Next: Sabrina Mahfouz: ‘Oppressive systems can destroy young people’s lives’

≪ Previous: TS Eliot poetry prize winner Hannah Sullivan and Kevin Powers – books podcast

The poet, known for her nature and wildlife-themed work, died at her home from lymphoma

Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet whose rapturous odes to nature and animal life brought her critical acclaim and popular affection, has died. She was 83. Bill Reichblum, Oliver’s literary executor, said she died on Thursday at her home in Hobe Sound, Florida. The cause of death was lymphoma.

Author of more than 15 poetry and essay collections, Oliver wrote brief, direct pieces that sang of her worship of the outdoors and disdain for greed, despoilment and other human crimes. One of her favorite adjectives was “perfect”, and rarely did she apply it to people. Her muses were owls and butterflies, frogs and geese, the changes of the seasons, the sun and the stars.

↧

Sabrina Mahfouz: ‘Oppressive systems can destroy young people’s lives’

January 19, 2019, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Jasmin Paris’s amazing feat gives new meaning to endurance | Rebecca Nicholson

≪ Previous: Mary Oliver, Pulitzer prize-winning poet, dies aged 83

With an adaptation of Noughts and Crosses set to tour the UK and her anthology of Muslim writing picked for Emma Watson’s book club, the prolific British writer is as busy as ever. Here she talks about race, class and motherhood

Sabrina Mahfouz remembers the first time she felt “mixed race” in the eyes of the world. She was 14 and applying for Saturday jobs in London when an apparent problem with her identity was pointed out to her. Until then, she had felt happily British, and happily Egyptian, with Guyanese heritage thrown in.

“People I went to see for jobs would show shock at the disparity between my face and the name on my CV. They’d say: “I expected you to be a lot more foreign.” It’s that moment, as a teenager, when you first realise the difference between all that you are and how the world sees you.”

I wanted to be a spy – or anything else that was exciting and took me to different places

I wanted to focus on these two characters and how oppressive systems can destroy and determine people's lives from a young age

↧

Jasmin Paris’s amazing feat gives new meaning to endurance | Rebecca Nicholson

January 19, 2019, 8:20 am

≫ Next: The Dark review – dangerous escape from Idi Amin's Uganda

≪ Previous: Sabrina Mahfouz: ‘Oppressive systems can destroy young people’s lives’

The achievements of the winner of the gruelling Montane Spine Race are truly awe-inspiring

Last week, Jasmin Paris won the Montane Spine Race, for which the word “gruelling” seems horribly inadequate. Like Diana Nyad swimming from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64 or Serena Williams winning her 23rd grand slam, there are some feats of human endurance that scramble the mind and running 268 miles along the Pennine Way is one of them.

But these triumphs go beyond personal victories. They should lift our collective spirit, because sometimes people are incredible and how wonderful it is to be reminded of that.

↧

The Dark review – dangerous escape from Idi Amin's Uganda

January 20, 2019, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Poetry sales soar as political millennials search for clarity

≪ Previous: Jasmin Paris’s amazing feat gives new meaning to endurance | Rebecca Nicholson

The Egg, Bath
Nick Makoha’s fragmented and vertiginous account of his treacherous journey to Britain is a story of our times

On the left of the stage, a screen projects the Miltonic line: “No light, but rather darkness visible.” On the right, a mother and son board a minibus to begin a treacherous journey out of their Ugandan homeland in 1979, as the nation is torn apart by political turmoil in the dying days of Idi Amin’s regime.

The boy is the play’s writer, the poet Nick Makoha, and this imaginative enactment of his escape out of Africa is a personal narrative about the loss of home, as well as a fractured story of a country as it descends into violent chaos.

Touring the UK until 16 February

↧

Poetry sales soar as political millennials search for clarity

January 20, 2019, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Poem of the week: The Calabash by Christopher Reid

≪ Previous: The Dark review – dangerous escape from Idi Amin's Uganda

Record £12m sales last year were driven by younger readers, with experts saying hunger for nuance amid conflict and disaster were fuelling the boom

A passion for politics, particularly among teenagers and young millennials, is fuelling a dramatic growth in the popularity of poetry, with sales of poetry books hitting an all-time high in 2018.

Statistics from UK book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan show that sales grew by just over 12% last year, for the second year in a row. In total, 1.3m volumes of poetry were sold in 2018, adding up to £12.3m in sales, a rise of £1.3m on 2017. Two-thirds of buyers were younger than 34 and 41% were aged 13 to 22, with teenage girls and young women identified as the biggest consumers last year.

↧

Poem of the week: The Calabash by Christopher Reid

January 21, 2019, 2:00 am

≫ Next: Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson review – songs of shock and survival

≪ Previous: Poetry sales soar as political millennials search for clarity

A drolly refashioned creation myth finds both God and Man short on inspiration, and the newly created Woman unconvinced

The Calabash

Having fashioned the first man out of sticks and mud,
God looked at him and thought, ‘Not bad.’ But Man
was of a different opinion.
Equipped from the outset with the twin gifts
of speech and dissatisfaction, Man said,
‘God, be honest, are you really happy
with this bodge, this shoddy bricolage,
this job at best half done?’ ‘What do you mean?’
God asked. ‘I need a mate,’ Man told him,
‘and I need one fast.’ God was flustered;
he’d run out of ideas already; so he replied,
‘If you’re so certain what you want,
tell me how to make it.’ Glancing about,
Man’s eye fell on a plump gourd hanging from a tree:
a calabash. ‘That will do,’ he said.
God nodded and set to work, adding
legs, arms and a head to the lovely roundness,
with other details that would make Woman a match
for the stick-and-mud figure who stood by, watching.
When he had finished, God rubbed his hands, delighted.
But Man was less sure, remembering the pure shape
that had first caught his fancy: both virginal and gravid,
suspended improbably from that scruffy tree.
‘Take it or leave it,’ God said. Man remained
undecided, and Woman, too, had her proliferating doubts.

↧

Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson review – songs of shock and survival

January 21, 2019, 1:00 am

≫ Next: 'Pretty aint it … Mrs Yonge said so': the changing face of teaching poetry

≪ Previous: Poem of the week: The Calabash by Christopher Reid

Benson’s extraordinarily moving collection is a bold confrontation of violence against women

Vertigo & Ghost is one of the darkest, bravest and most unsettling collections I have read in a while. Its first half turns to Greek mythology to explore violent crimes against women and casts Zeus as he-man, ace swimmer and serial rapist. Yet the opening poem, on the dawning of female sexuality, gives no clue of what is to follow. It describes girls gathering on a tennis court:

and sex wasn’t here yet, but it was coming,
and we were running towards it,
its gorgeous euphoric mist;

↧

'Pretty aint it … Mrs Yonge said so': the changing face of teaching poetry

January 22, 2019, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Young people look for meaning. But poetry doesn’t always offer clarity | Bridget Minamore

≪ Previous: Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson review – songs of shock and survival

An exhibition in Cambridge shows how poems have been taught to GCSE students down the decades – with pupils’ own textbook annotations included

“This bum is the property of the Education department. Parents are asked to cooperate in seeing that the bum is kept clean and in good repair.”

You can almost hear the gleeful sniggers with which an unknown pupil at Grange Academy in Ayr neatly and repeatedly replaced the word “book” with “bum” in a poetry textbook in the 1970s. The defaced book, Here Today, is one of dozens of anthologies used by GCSE students over the decades that have been collected by former teacher Julie Blake, some of which are now on display at Cambridge University library.

↧

Young people look for meaning. But poetry doesn’t always offer clarity | Bridget Minamore

January 22, 2019, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Dear Elizabeth review – poets bare their souls in a lyrical show

≪ Previous: 'Pretty aint it … Mrs Yonge said so': the changing face of teaching poetry

New figures show a dramatic growth in the popularity of poetry among millennials. A poet writes this original poem in response

• Poetry sales soar as political millennials search for clarity

Clarity is

a murky word despite itself, sitting
on the topsoil of reasons I’m supposed
to embrace this odd alchemy / this way
of sharing thought / this beautifully bizarre
approach to scattered words in some time strange
shapes. I’m certain some feel different to me,
certain many pick up poems and hope
to see through them, but I have always searched
for the opaque / always been dazzled by
the haze of vagueness poetry seems to
inspire. I’m scared like we all are – or all
aren’t, which is perhaps even scarier –
but a poem can be a kingdom in
which blindfolded foresight makes perfect sense
and the political and personal
align like nowhere else. Perhaps it would
be easy to label my attachment
a modern phenomenon / attribute
the groundswell of love towards volumes of
verse to the uniqueness of my peers / claim
the rise in buying and reading pages
bound and bulbous with poems is a new
response to recent chaos, but surely
we poets know better. We know the world
screams as loudly as it always has done,
the young are the same as the young always
are, poetry is a language we have
spoken since we could speak, and most of us
don’t ask poetry for clarity, but
for an escape / for the chance to run far,
far away from the unmistakable.

↧

Dear Elizabeth review – poets bare their souls in a lyrical show

January 23, 2019, 3:24 am

≫ Next: 'I was very angry' – the last interview with Jonas Mekas, godfather of avant garde film

≪ Previous: Young people look for meaning. But poetry doesn’t always offer clarity | Bridget Minamore

Gate theatre, London
Jade Anouka and Jonjo O’Neill give first-rate performances reading the letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Sarah Ruhl’s dramatisation of the letters exchanged between two great poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, was first seen at Yale Rep in 2012 and is not without precedent.

What is unusual about Ellen McDougall’s staging is that two different actors perform the show each night without rehearsal, in an attempt to depict “life as it is lived”. Even though I question the principle, Jade Anouka and Jonjo O’Neill did a fine job on press night, and the piece offers a rich testimony to the possibilities of romantic friendship – one that endured from 1947 to 1977.

↧

'I was very angry' – the last interview with Jonas Mekas, godfather of avant garde film

January 24, 2019, 2:45 am

≫ Next: Poetry pharmacy set to open in Shropshire

≪ Previous: Dear Elizabeth review – poets bare their souls in a lyrical show

He mentored Warhol, partied with Dalí and showed John and Yoko the perfect espresso. In this interview given shortly before his death, the film-making legend looked back on his amazing life

Jonas Mekas, titan of the underground, dies aged 96

Jonas Mekas tells me he’s 27 years old. Strictly speaking, he’s 95, but the avant garde film-maker, poet, critic and philosopher decided 68 years ago that he was sticking at 27. “After 27, people begin to become old, according to Melville,” he says. “They look back and repeat. After 27, you begin to think, ‘Is this the right way to do it?’ You think twice. Before that, you say, ‘Fuck you, I don’t care. I just do it.’”

Is he still in his “Fuck you” period? “Yes I am. When I came to New York I was 27. I was very angry about what I had lost before 27. I always blamed the ‘civilisation’ that threw me out of my home.” Mekas still has a thick European accent. He grew up in a small village in northern Lithuania called Semeniškiai – he calls it a paradise “where nothing happened then suddenly everything happened”.

He tells Susan Sontag she should stick to writing and accuses Agnès Varda of making an ‘escapist’ film

↧

Poetry pharmacy set to open in Shropshire

January 24, 2019, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Land of westlin’ winds: the best Scottish poetry for Burns Night

≪ Previous: 'I was very angry' – the last interview with Jonas Mekas, godfather of avant garde film

The Emergency Poet, Deborah Alma, plans to dispense literary first aid from a shop in Bishop’s Castle

Following in the hallowed footsteps of Milton, who wrote in 1671 that “apt words have power to swage / The tumours of a troubled mind / And are as balm to festered wounds”, the poet Deborah Alma is preparing to open the UK’s first poetry pharmacy. Here, instead of sleeping pills and multivitamins, customers will be offered prescriptions of Derek Walcott and Elizabeth Bishop.

Alma, who as the “Emergency Poet” has prescribed poems as cures from the back of a 1970s ambulance for the last six years, is now setting up a permanent outlet in a shop at Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire. An old Edwardian ironmonger’s, it still has the original fixtures and fittings, and, together with her partner, the TS Eliot prize-shortlisted poet James Sheard, Alma is preparing to turn it into a haven “to help ease a variety of maladies with the soothing therapy of Poetry”.

↧

Land of westlin’ winds: the best Scottish poetry for Burns Night

January 25, 2019, 6:44 am

≫ Next: ‘Keats is dead...’: How young women are changing the rules of poetry

≪ Previous: Poetry pharmacy set to open in Shropshire

James Naughtie’s picks include bashed pillows, sharp stars and sexy spacemen. What are your favourites?

In a week that feels ripe for celebrating the reach of poetry– and just in time for Burns Night – the Scottish Poetry Library has asked James Naughtie to choose his “best of the best” Scottish poems of the past 15 years.

Moving from, as Naughtie puts it, “Edwin Morgan in his last years talking about love” to “Kathleen Jamie catching a sense of national belonging in a few short lines”, it is a soul-quenching selection. There is humour and beauty in Claire Askew’s I Am the Moon, and You Are the Man on Me: “Tonight, I am white and full. / My surface is all curves / and craters,” she opens, later writing, deliciously: “Your compass does not work here, / but you are sexy / in your spaceman suit.” Liz Lochhead’s In the Mid-Midwinter, written after John Donne’s A Nocturnal on St Lucy’s Day, feels ever so apt for these bleak days of January: “There’s nothing very much to speak of anything to speak of / in the sky except a gey dreich greyness / rain-laden over Glasgow,” she writes. But “the light comes back / the light always comes back.” Lochhead’s description of the winter moon, “fat in the frosty sky among the sharpest stars”, is irresistible.

↧

Latest Images