From Keats to Merseybeat: a retreat into my favourite verse is a soul saver | Hannah Jane Parkinson

December 5, 2019, 11:00 pm

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Poems are Swiss army knives of words – they have multiple uses

I can’t remember when I fell in love with poetry, though I remember the teachers who encouraged it. I remember bringing in a lever-arch file of my own “efforts”, aged 14, mostly aping Wilfred Owen– a war poet who had the distinct advantage of having served in a war, which I had not. I had been kettled while on an Iraq protest, though, which I maintain counts for something.

Living in Oxford in my late teens and early 20s, I became involved in the performance poetry scene, supporting the likes of Patience Agbabi and Lemn Sissay, and winning awards at a university I did not attend. Poetry is supposed to be read aloud, and yet I enjoy it most on the page. That way you can take it anywhere, along with your heart and your brain. In this world of cacophonous news, long reads on populism, and explainers on influencers (who I still don’t really understand or care about), a retreat into my favourite verse is a soul saver.

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Thomas Keneally: ‘Does anyone write a good book at 83? Well, I think I have’’

December 6, 2019, 2:00 am

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The Australian novelist on crying over a Dickens biography, laughing at Kathy Lette and the classic he is ashamed not to have read

The book I am currently reading
The Barbara Kingsolver novel Unsheltered. Not quite up there with The Poisonwood Bibleand Flight Behaviour, but still a magnificent novel.

The book that changed my life
Nobel prize-winning Australian novelist Patrick White’s Voss. It is a sweeping and eccentric book, a modernist classic (Thomas Mann eat your heart out), and it showed me that Australians were just as entitled to write novels as anyone.

I couldn't finish Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. OK, guv, I’m ready to wear the vulgarian handcuffs and do my time

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The best recent poetry collections – review

December 7, 2019, 2:58 am

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The Caiplie Caves by Karen Solie; The Mother House, by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin; A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson; and Still Life by Ciaran Carson

As someone who passes a Pictish symbol stone with an Ogham inscription to the obscure St Ethernan every time I go to Tesco, I might constitute the natural audience for a book-length sequence on that seventh-century Irish saint’s adventures in north-eastern Scotland. Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter, Karen Solie’s TS Eliot prize-shortlisted The Caiplie Caves (Picador, £10.99) is one of the more unusual poetry collections of recent years. It is many things at once: a vision of insular Celtic Christianity in its early medieval heyday; a juxtaposition of this with a more elliptic modern narrative; and a meditation on literary form, and how the modernist long poem might look through a contemporary lens. Was Ethernan attracted by self-abnegation or a very unholy chance to show off (“I can’t be sure now there was ever humility in it / burning the self as though it were a city”)? The same might be asked of Solie herself. Whatever the answer, this is a wilfully strange and unforgettable performance.

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Poem of the month: Bicep to Bicep by Mary J Oliver

December 7, 2019, 3:59 am

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Each month the Guardian’s Review section selects a poem to highlight

It was his job
to give me away

Yet I wasn’t his to give

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Frost Fair by Carol Ann Duffy review – icy perfection from a curator of cold

December 8, 2019, 1:00 am

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Duffy’s beguiling short ballad, gracefully illustrated by David de las Heras, pithily explores London’s ‘Great Winter’ of 1683

Frost Fair is a tiny book, about 4in x 4in, and might be alighted upon as a stocking filler, though, unlike most stocking fillers, it will surely survive Christmas Day.

It is tempting to take Carol Ann Duffy for granted, in rather the same way that Joyce Carol Oates is sometimes undervalued because of her productivity. But reading this small, icy, perfectly formed book – a ballad, a winter’s tale – one is reminded of Duffy’s consistent excellence. And here she is supported by David de las Heras’s understatedly graceful illustrations. A solitary figure in rusty red walks through a sepia world of snow, flanked by feathery poplars. The ballad begins as an ordinary yarn: “So cold it was –” and then after you turn the page, becomes a singular story:

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'Sometimes the world goes feral' – 11 odes to Europe

December 8, 2019, 10:00 pm

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As Britain braces itself for the Brexit endgame, leading poets – from Carol Ann Duffy to Andrew McMillan – take the pulse of our fragmenting world

From the collection Kin, Cinnamon Press, 2018

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Poem of the week: The Flea by John Donne

December 9, 2019, 2:00 am

≫ Next: I Wanna Be Yours review – a love story with heady chemistry

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A ludicrous image of physical intimacy provides a suitor with a feeble wooing ruse – and us with sharp romantic comedy

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I Wanna Be Yours review – a love story with heady chemistry

December 9, 2019, 6:44 am

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Bush theatre, London
Ragevan Vasan and Emily Stott star as a couple pulled apart by their backgrounds in this play by slam poet Zia Ahmed

The question of how to build intimacy across the divides of our supposedly multicultural society is both urgently topical and achingly familiar, as demonstrated by Zia Ahmed’s neat three-hander at the Bush’s studio theatre. Ahmed, a London-based poetry slam champion, avoids look-at-me poetics in a wise little story about a Yorkshire actress (Ella) and a Muslim poet (Haseeb) who fall in love after she is hired to brush up his performance skills.

The challenge of the piece is to expose social cliche without succumbing to it, and by the time Haseeb is mistaken for a drug dealer for the third time, I was beginning to fear the worst. But gradually it becomes clear that repetition is precisely the problem. Whether he is clubbing or childminding, white strangers will always misjudge Haseeb on the basis of his skin colour; he in turn will forever feel alienated by the rooms full of white faces with which his choices – both of partner and of vocation – confront him.

At Bush theatre, London, until 18 January.

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'Ridiculously hard': how Neil Gaiman wrote a poem for refugees from 1,000 tweets

December 10, 2019, 7:06 am

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The author and UNHCR ambassador appealed for warm scenes for his poem What You Need to Be Warm – and received ideas from everyone from Ben Stiller to Monica Lewinsky

Read the poem below

Coming up with his latest work was “ridiculously difficult”, Neil Gaiman admits. Last month, the Good Omens and American Gods author, who is also an ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), asked his Twitter followers to tell him what reminded them of warmth. After receiving almost 1,000 responses – with Ben Stiller and Monica Lewinsky among those to contribute – Gaiman found himself with a 25,000-word document, from which he has composed his newest written work: a freeform poem to launch UNHCR’s Winter Emergency Appeal for refugees across the Middle East.

What You Need to Be Warm touches on everything from “a baked potato of a winter’s night to wrap your hands around or burn your mouth” to “the tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house”.

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This old Etonian is no harmless buffoon | Letters

December 11, 2019, 10:16 am

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The nickname ‘Boris’ is misleadingly cuddly, says Lisa Hallgarten’s poem, while Hilton McRae can’t understand the public’s fondness for electing Eton alumni

Don’t call him Boris.
It’s the name for a cuddly toy, a cute little Russian boy, a dashing guy from a book by Tolstoy. Don’t call him Bojo.
He’s not fast like Flo Jo or sexy like J-Lo. Don’t mix up mojo with a sleazy libido.

Don’t even call him a Bozo.

He’s not dopey or stupid or amusingly ropey.
He’s lazy, duplicitous, slippery, wet soapy.

He’s no fool, no joker, no harmless buffoon, he’s a cynical, devious, racist goon.

Please don’t compare this dangerous fake
To a benign and affectionate
namesake.

He’s not original, a one-off.
He’s not a maverick.
If you have to...
call him Johnson
...another word for dick.
Lisa Hallgarten
London

• In Simon Woods’ play Hansard, recently on at the National, the biggest laugh – and some of the audience standing and cheering – occurred on the line “I tell you it’s the great mystery of our time, the insatiable desire of the people of this country to be fucked by an old Etonian.”
Hilton McRae
London

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The advantage of life in the slow train | Brief letters

December 12, 2019, 10:25 am

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You say the Advanced Passenger Train had been canned “partly because of the motion sickness it allegedly induced” (End of era for Virgin: Why track record is mixed for Branson’s red trains, 7 December). Pendolino trains do induce motion sickness, as I can testify. It’s one of the reasons (not to mention the price) I choose to travel via the slightly slower Chiltern line, which is more efficient as I’m not prevented by nausea from working on the train.
Margaret Jacobi
Birmingham

• I went to vote then came home to read my Guardian. The superlative collection on the letters page (12 December) left me weeping – and praying that all the thought-waves encapsulated there could somehow echo way beyond the confines of the Guardian chamber and save the country: hopeless, I know, but this naive girl has to dream.
Alexandra Shepherd
Aberdeen

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Clive James remembered by John Simpson

December 15, 2019, 5:00 am

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7 October 1939 – 24 November 2019
The BBC world affairs editor on the gifted critic, poet and wit who elevated British life with his televisual panache

• Gordon Banks remembered by Peter Shilton
• Read the Observer’s obituaries of 2019 in full

He came into my life in the same way, I imagine, as he came into everyone else’s: with a joke and a certain amount of bounce, but also with a degree of authority that meant you took him seriously, even while you were laughing. “Jesus, what do you do here – put on Wagner?” It was Clive’s, and my, last year at Cambridge University, and I was living in a medieval room with a central wooden pillar which held the ceiling up. It really was like something out of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. I was the editor of the pretentious student magazine Granta, and he’d got a sheaf of papers in his hand which he thrust at me: not aggressively, but certainly not with the timidity that most of us would feel if we offered our poems for publication. In fact, if anyone was timid it was me. Clive was five years older and physically imposing, even though he wasn’t tall.

I said I’d read them later. “No, have a look now.” The top one was called Together, Sleeping Sideways and it started:

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The nine lives of Cats: how poetry became a musical, then a film …

December 15, 2019, 11:00 pm

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Published as war broke out in 1939, TS Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats outsold The Waste Land. The 1980s saw a West End smash. Will the new film speak to us today?

When Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats appeared in the first week of October 1939, it might have been thought that its author had lost the plot. It was only 17 years since TS Eliot had published The Waste Land, his cryptic lament for the moral and psychic disintegration that both caused and followed the first world war. Now, a mere month into renewed hostilities in Europe, here was Eliot, the man with more claim to cultural authority than almost anyone living, wasting his time (not to mention everyone else’s) with light verse about cats.

If Eliot’s cat book spoke to the terror of the times, it also mapped the continuing disintegration of his personal life

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Poem of the week: The Corn-Stalk Fiddle by Paul Laurence Dunbar

December 16, 2019, 3:04 am

≫ Next: Robert Graves on magical women – archive, 18 December 1968

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From one of the great black American poets, this harvest song combines formal and vernacular language to potent effect

The Corn-Stalk Fiddle

When the corn’s all cut and the bright stalks shine
Like the burnished spears of a field of gold;
When the field-mice rich on the nubbins dine,
And the frost comes white and the wind blows cold;
Then its heigho fellows and hi-diddle-diddle,
For the time is ripe for the corn-stalk fiddle.

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Robert Graves on magical women – archive, 18 December 1968

December 17, 2019, 9:30 pm

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18 December 1968: On a walk in his adopted home of Majorca, the poet talks about women, love, life and death

“Women,” said Robert Graves, “hold the key to the return of a Golden Age. And that will be the time when man will recognise himself once more as a spiritual being and escape from all this nonsense…”

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The Penguin Book of Oulipo review – writing, a user's manual

December 17, 2019, 11:30 pm

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Lovers of word games and literary puzzles will relish this indispensable anthology celebrating Perec, Calvino and many others

The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) was founded in Paris in 1960 by the writer and publisher Raymond Queneau and the scientist and educator François Le Lionnais. Oulipo set out to formally explore the use of mathematical and other rules – known as “constraints” – in the writing of literature.

Its approach was two-pronged. First, what Oulipo called “anoulipism”, discovering constraints used by writers from other ages and cultures, wittily referred to as “plagiarism by anticipation”: they seized on reversible poems in 3rd-century China and acrostics concealed in the Psalms, as well the bifurcating narratives in Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 “The Garden of Forking Paths”. Second, “synthoulipism”, the invention and demonstration of new constraints for any writer who wished to use them.

In the 'prisoner’s constraint', letters with ascenders or descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, y) can't be used

Related: Top 10 experimental thrillers

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How to be hopeful: Alice Oswald’s poem Mist

December 18, 2019, 10:00 pm

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The poet on the startling wonders of the natural world

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'We encourage the audience to boo, jeer and heckle': competitions that reward bad poetry

December 18, 2019, 1:51 pm

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Poets have a reputation for taking themselves too seriously. The anti-slam throws that stereotype out the window

Jakob Boyd’s whole body folds around the microphone. The words come out of him like a heartbeat – slow and steady – and then they rise. He whispers about drinking out of a goon bag late at night. He shouts when talking about traffic and urban sprawl. His shouts get lost in the cheering.

The event Boyd is performing at is not quite a poetry slam. Yes, its loud – it’s held in a pub – and promotes audience participation. In a regular poetry slam, the poet often has a time limit and cannot perform with props, costumes or music. Judges are selected randomly from the audience and, at the end of the competition, the poet with the highest score wins.

It’s really rewarding in such a socially performative age to give people the chance to let go, to invite ridicule

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TS Eliot would not have minded Cats reviews, says his estate

December 19, 2019, 6:48 am

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Original author ‘liked to have his head blown’ and would have seen the funny side of film’s terrible reception, says spokesperson

TS Eliot “would have had a sense of humour” about the much derided film adaptation of Cats despite the drubbing it has received from reviewers around the world, according to his estate.

Starring big names including Taylor Swift, Idris Elba and Ian McKellen, Tom Hooper’s adaption of the long-running musical is based on Eliot’s book of children’s poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The film has been variously described by critics as “revolting and briefly alluring ” and “two seconds away from turning into a furry orgy in a dumpster”.

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Rick Vick obituary

December 19, 2019, 9:50 am

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My best friend, Rick Vick, who has died aged 71, was known as “the Poet of Stroud”. He was a writer who became a teacher in prisons and rehab centres in Gloucestershire. He contributed to the research and writing on my recent film, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, as well as editing Tracking Down Maggie and Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer.

Rick, the son of Richard Vick, a high court judge, and his wife, Judy (nee Warren), a property developer, attended Oakham public school in Rutland.

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