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REVIEWS - MISCELLANEOUS _________________________________ THE
VORTEX The Vortex is a play about narcissism. In its early days, everyone identified Coward with Nick Lancaster. Coward was looking for a vehicle for his acting and wrote himself a hefty part, but not a self-portrait. Nor did he feel the fashionable society of which he was a part was as reptilian as his characters. But he needed a target. It worked and the play made him critically and financially. It’s far from a masterpiece but Florence and Nick Lancaster are well-drawn and sufficiently repulsive to be fascinating. Florence is a supreme narcissist. She has never grown up and fears growing old. What an irony then, that the part of Nick should be played by a star from the narcissistic world of pop music. Presumably Will Young was offered the role in the hope of attracting a young audience. At the performance I saw, most of the audience were over forty-five. Behind me were three young women who whooped when Young took his bows. Whatever excited them, it wasn’t his acting. He is out of his depth, especially playing against the superb Diana Hardcastle, a consummate professional with a sexy, slow-turning grindstone voice and the ability to convey a complex emotional nexus in a simple gesture. She could hold her own on any stage with anyone. Poor old Young looks like he’s stepped straight out of the school play. He speaks the lines. Most of them are mostly audible. But he speaks them as Will Young. He has no idea who Nick Lancaster might be. Here is a neurotic drug-addicted son of a narcissistic mother at a loss to understand himself. Young turns him into the local paper-boy: chirpy one minute, sulky the next but utterly unconvincing. I thought of the unknown Brando on the first night of Truckline Café. He came on stage and the audience broke into spontaneous applause which held up the performance for two minutes. Young comes on stage and the play stops because he can’t act. He isn’t in the play, he’s just on the stage. With such a poor performance in the role of such a central character, the play sags. All the same, the rest of the cast do their work so well, because they are actors, not just famous people pretending to act, that the thing holds together and rolls along and the climactic confrontation between Nick and Florence has a few skin-prickling moments. They come, of course, from the acting of Diana Hardcastle. There is enough tension and drive for us to enter into the world of the characters and to feel their anguish at their emptiness. They don’t know why they do what they do nor why they feel how they feel. In this, Coward raises his drama to the level of the universal. Happy or unhappy, living lives full of meaning or sapped by despair, we never understand why. David Fielder as Quentin, Rhiannon Oliver as Clara, Laura Rees as Bunty convey beautifully the sense of lives lived out because they must be in circumstances which close down on alternatives. Alexandra Mathie is also convincing as the relatively sensible Helen, trying to knock some of the infantile delusions out of Florence’s dizzy head. Sam Heughan is solid in the role of Florence’s toy-boy, Tom, who inevitably falls in love with the Bunty he has known since childhood and who is obviously ill-matched with the unstable and posturing Nick and Drew Carter-Cain in the minor roles of Preston and Bruce Fainlight shows what real acting his: he brings both characters perfectly to life as soon as they appear. Why didn’t they cast him as Nick ? He’s an actor! Coward’s play was written out of the conditions of England after the Great War: a divided and disoriented society where the hard-pressed majority had to get on with it and the rich, unable to find a real role, indulged themselves like babies. Today we live in a divided and disorientated society in thrall to empty celebrity. Just the kind of thing Coward might have seized on as a target. And here, at the heart of this production is empty celebrity on display. Would anyone expect a pop singer to be able to play for Chelsea just because they’re famous? Singing is singing and acting is acting. Could Brando sing? I don’t know, but Sinatra couldn’t act. Not like Brando. Not like a real actor. A world-class theatre like the Royal Exchange should hire actors. Like Diana Hardcastle. It’s worth seeing this production for the thrill of her acting. She’s the star. Alan Dent
THE CREATIVE LIFEby MICHAEL CURTIS*W.B.
Yeats: A Life. I. The Apprentice Mage, II. The Arch-Poet. I read books as a writer and as a reader. Of course, these categories are rarely exclusive and I can’t always predict which will be which. Sunshine holiday fiction can present unlooked for, unexpected prompts. Much-anticipated poetry can run off the page without a syllable sticking to the back of the mind – as far as can be told at the time. Playing the percentages though, musical and literary biography come with an abundance of possibilities. There’s simple curiosity to be satisfied, the follower’s aspirations to indulge, the fan’s admiration to test as well as the surprises, the connections, the contexts, the anecdotes. And, occasionally, before we outgrow it, the guilty habit of shadowing to indulge. Bob Dylan’s recent autobiographical Chronicles, for example, appears to ‘tell all’ and yet retains sufficient mystery for our long-standing relationship to survive, indeed to continue strengthened. There are living examples of the life of the artist and the risks it entails beyond the teenage imitation of dress, manner, attitude or even belief through to inhabiting what we might term the artistic psyche. See how Brian Wilson resurrected Smile (recordings abandoned in 1967) and the lost zones of himself after thirty-seven years of perceived failure and deep-grained fear, even if the commercial opportunities it aroused risked another kind of darkness. Dangerous but rewarding territory. When I was nine the teacher asked us to write our own version of a patriotic, stirring poem by Tennyson, The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet. (Very English!) This poem swept me up and inspired an action-packed response that was chosen as the best in the class, printed and exhibited on the wall. Naturally this success turned my boyhood head, showed me that poetry could be vigorous and moving and, also, that I could write it. That was the first lesson. The best biographies for me are celebratory and constructive. What does one artist find in the critical atomising of another’s art, in the cold detaching of the artist’s retina from the observed creation? The work is out there, yes, for each and any of us to make of it what we will. But it has its origins. Whenever I run a workshop or take questions after a reading someone (possibly with a picture of the sick reclining romantic bathed by a pale shaft of sunlight in mind) will ask, “Where does your inspiration come from?” Well, whatever else, it doesn’t come from disinterested dissection but from active engagement, meeting the muse half-way. In my teens, growing up in a vibrant Liverpool, the galleries were bursting with ideas and colour and confrontation, the clubs and bars were confident with music and performance. And poetry. Young poets stood up and read their work to crowded, informal but usually appreciative rooms and I watched and admired and let it fill me with possibilities. Now the performed poem is normal; then it was a revelation. For a young person in the city at that time it wasn’t enough to be a student or have a job. You were expected to participate, to be active, to play sport or make something – be it music, pictures or words. I tried them all – with mixed results. Then a new, enthusiastic teacher came to my school to be Head of English and opened up the great books of canonical and contemporary literature for me, reconnecting me with that early excitement of language and, as it turned out, determining the rest of my life. So the poems started. And not just the primary works but stimulating, provoking, informing criticisms and commentaries too. These introductions and accompaniments, as it were, offering ways in or throwing a light on an aspect that had eluded me. Not just to generate more criticism and comment but also to contribute to the making of new, original work. This could come, for example, from an ‘old-fashioned’ biography where the life and the work are integrated not only to provide greater understanding but also to offer, excitingly, new creative possibilities. This for me is what Roy Foster has achieved with his masterly two volume biography of W.B. Yeats. * I encountered the first volume, The Apprentice Mage, at the Hay Festival where Foster was promoting the newly-published book, reading extracts and answering questions. I have attended many such events but few if any came close to the creative impact of this one. Here was a biographer who could write fine prose, an historian by discipline, opening channels to an artist I’d admired since school days and thought I knew. Like many writers, though besotted with the poetry, I’m wary of Yeats. Like his antecedent Blake, he’s dangerous to imitate and seems impossible to emulate. Enjoy him too much, give him too much room, and he’ll colonise your style, warp your world view. So I’d beaten a cautious path round Yeats although his place on my Desert Island had been secure for decades. Roy Foster gave me a fresh route in and, remarkably, let me unwind the string to find a way back out again. How? By his own creative interaction with his subject inviting the reader to do the same with an assurance that welcomes empathy but is not taken over by it. Some examples. In this passage - in a single paragraph – Forster’s consideration of a poem enables him to summarize intensely the qualities of the later Yeats and describe the mix of technique and experience that accounted for them:
Or again, in the late ‘twenties when Yeats was wintering in France and Italy, Foster integrates the life and the work and exhibits a powerful model of artistic dedication and single-mindedness:
How does a biographer know this? How can he tell us what was in his subject’s mind? Risky stuff. Without all the necessary assiduous, detailed, factual research such interpretations and inferences, such creative reconstructions, would lack foundation. But the informed and imaginative reader will bring his or her own touchstone to assess such speculations, the cornerstones of our understanding. For me Roy Foster’s consistently ring true and accord with what I understand of the creative sensibility. And nourish it. And this, crucially, is not the same as an obsessive interest in celebrity and fantasising other lives. Changing masks and forms, Yeats crafted and reshaped his work to create integrated collections, each with a different identity, writing of his personal life but never directly. He demonstrated that writing is an artefact, but a passionate one. My own poems are a line through life, charting a continuous though far from straight course from childhood to now. Their crafted realities have lived with me longer than anyone who exists this side of memory and provide an oblique autobiography, perhaps more of a dramatised biography written by a series of partial observers. Detail is persuasion. The ‘I’ isn’t always the me you’ll meet, but he has a heart. File me in Fiction! Where do poems come from? Yes, from the heart and from the imagination and from the intelligence, from incident and insight. But why do they come? How do they find their way? A creative culture, an expectant, optimistic society (great and small), and an affirming (in the end) education all played their part in encouraging me to realise and articulate some of my possibilities. And part of that environment is the observed and reported creative life as exemplified by this superlative biography.
CRUCIFIXION IN THE PLAZA DE ARMAS by Martin Espada Puerto Rico ( rich port ) got its name from the Spaniards after Christopher Columbus discovered the island on his second voyage. The native Tainos offered Columbus and his men the gold nuggets from their rivers and from that moment on, were slaves. On 21st March 1937 nineteen people were killed and many injured in the Ponce massacre, a violent suppression of a peaceful demonstration in favour of the independence for which the people of the island have struggled through the centuries. The sad history of the colonization of the home of his forbears is Espada’s subject in this, his fifteenth book and the most recent since The Republic Of Poetry was shortlisted for the Pulitzer. His style is straightforward, clear and uncluttered yet full of memorable inventions and unusual images: Again he smacked his welted neck feasting on rebel songs Hands without irons become
dragonflies, This last is from a long poem, the collection’s finale, in memory of Clemente Soto Velez, the poet imprisoned with Albizu Campos in 1936 and virtually unknown outside his native land. To the pleasure of his easy rhythms ( they echo the island’s music, the sensual sway of Tito Puente’s Oye Como Va), evocative images, fascinating story-telling and expert poet’s nuance, Espada adds a lesson in history which will introduce many readers to little-known names, dates and events. In three sections, the first personal and familial, the second geographical and atmospheric and the last historical and political, the book ties the fate of the island to the poet’s ancestry and identity, the great slow sweep of history forming the landscape in which the personal has to find its locale; in so doing he prevents the intrusion of the harsh, haranguing voice of tendentiousness, humanising his material as naturally as if he were writing of matters without public import. He may be a new name to many British readers but he’s well worth getting to know and here displays the disciplined talents which have won him many awards and fellowships. He was born in New York but Puerto Rico is in his blood, and anyway, as he points out in his introduction, there are more Puerto Ricans in New York then any city in the world. The book is a subtle plea, all the more powerful for the beauty and restraint of its writing, for independence for the oldest colony in the world, a superb poetic testimony to the unfortunate endurance of the colonizing mentality and the inevitable resistance it engenders, it will itself endure through the loveliness and truth of the writing. * Contemporary Poetry from the other USA. Smokestack Books Literacy ought to bring a flourishing of voices but our culture is afflicted by systematic infantilisation and trivialisation as power seeks to keep its opponents silent. This, then, is a book to celebrate: fifty-three poets, many of them well published and some familiar names but for the most part, writers of undeserved obscurity all with something serious to say and the talent and discipline to say it memorably. This is not great, ground-breaking poetry, there is no Walt Whitman here, but there is what an educated culture should celebrate: a high level of literary accomplishment combined with a measured and clear-sighted vision of the major problems facing the contemporary world. There is some truly excellent work, Jim Daniels’s Time, Temperature, for example, a long poem dedicated to James Baldwin which rings the sorry changes on the racism that has blighted American life: My grandfather has his theories Daniels purls subtle humour and gentle mockery into the atrocious catalogue of ignorance and prejudice and over eleven pages leads us on a shocking yet delightful and heartening journey through the labyrinth of dead-end attitudes and, thankfully, breakthrough insights. One of the better known poets is Adrienne Rich but she’s joined by twenty other women who rival her in skill, insight and subtlety, having learned Emily Dickinson’s lesson: tell all the truth but tell it slant/ success in circuit lie. Invidious to select only a few names but in particular Anne Babson’s Vocabulary Test is a clever and penetrating reflection on the dangerous assumptions of the education system, Nellie Wong’s Praise Song For A Dead Girl in its calm and compassionate detachment brings into focus the everyday evil of violence, Patricia Smith’s brilliantly disturbing Skinhead explores the generation of neo-fascist mentality in the alienated young and Linda McCarriston’s To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons is a controlled j’accuse against the justice system’s failure to engage with the needs and rights of women. Of course, in a book of over a hundred and fifty pages and featuring such an array of writers, there is variation in quality and interest, but there are no slack or slovenly poems, and the overall tenor - concerned without being strident, committed, but to truth and justice rather than to cause or ideology, and above all radiant in its belief in the power of literature to illuminate, to enrich and to bring to every life a love of disciplined language’s pleasure and revelation – makes it one of those collections which sing to be revisited and which never lose their freshness. Jon Andersen, whose marvellously witty If I Live is included, has done a first-rate job in the editing and introduction and provided us with a view of the extraordinary fecundity of the small gardens of American poetry. It would be remiss too not to mention the inexhaustible energy and imagination of Andy Croft of Smokestack who is turning his little press into one of the most courageous and cutting edge in Britain. * by Edward Mackinnon The ambiguity of the title, together with the fact that Arcadia is both a real place and a locale of the mind, is typical of Mackinnon’s desire to simultaneously delight, amuse and provoke. The cover shows Poussin’s Et In Arcadia Ego modified a la Banksy, a serious point made in a comic way, a hint of Debordian detournement. Mackinnon is a learned man who seasons his work with his erudition, but like a good chef, blends his flavours carefully so nothing dominates or intrudes. His style is very much in the modern mode but is distinct, and there is more to that than simply voice: at his best, his work evokes a unique sensibility. The supreme poem here is The Bus To Arcadia twelve pages long, expansive, allusive, full of the Proustian sense of reality taking shape in the memory alone, big enough to invite us in and allow us to explore. The short, self-contained poem has become the norm, and most of the poems here are of that kind, but in this long piece Mackinnon discovers an alternative way of addressing the reader; no longer beginning from a single idea or image, he’s exploring his consciousness, casting out lines to reel in old experiences, making connections between the disparate, ceasing to be a point from which language travels in a straight line to the reader but rather a centre around which galaxies of meaning and association orbit. The long poem may have become unfashionable but here Mackinnon reveals its remarkable possibilities, and truly invigorating about this piece, to draw a term from linguistic philosophy, is the paucity of input: he manages to evoke a whole gamut of experience from very limited vocabulary and though he is writing out of his own experience, the confidence of the poem lies in its ability to trigger kindred memories and emotions in the reader. Such a poem sits ill with post-modern atomisation but that’s all to the good for Mackinnon reconnects us, re-enchants us. In focusing on one long piece, I’m far from suggesting the rest is nugatory. On the contrary, there are one or two brilliant very short pieces like this on Nazim Hikmet: Prison and exile could not unvoice
him. In this second collection Mackinnon establishes himself as a significant figure. Lets hope there are many more and that he continues what he has begun in The Bus To Arcadia. Alan Dent.
A PROPER STATE, The second song on this CD, The Ghost Of Georges Brassens, pays witty homage to the great French chansonnier, who Kenneth Rexroth thought of as the best poet of twentieth century France, and whose work has influenced everyone who is genuinely interested in how to craft a song, how, as Brassens himself put it, to create un petit labyrinthe, to please, tease , challenge, delight and embolden the listener. Leon Rosselson is our own Brassens but unlike the Frenchman he has never reached a mass audience, though some of his songs have, notably The World Turned Upside Down, that great celebration of the Diggers and of the thrilling tumult of ideas of the era of the English Civil War, heartening ideas like Rainsborough’s defence of the poorest he (and she also we should add), recorded and taken into the charts by Billy Bragg, which goes to show, I suppose, that the argument from consumer choice is feeble: when people have Rosselson’s work put before them by an artist they know, they respond. The effort to ensure the majority listen only to what Rosselson has called mashed potato music is huge and vigilant. Big money is at stake. More. The very economic arrangements which permit a relatively small number to make fortunes from a relatively large number. Rosselson has been deliberately sidelined because if too many people listened to this work, they would start to understand what a real song is, their sensibilities would shift, their ideas would change. It’s all too dangerous and must be reserved for a minority. What a lucky minority. Rosselson is on great form here and has lost none of those qualities which have made him for so long such a fascinating and uplifting presence: a wonderful ear for melody, a poet’s skill with words, a subtle and highly intelligent humour and a brilliant ability to make his theme poignant by concealment. He begins with an hilarious and spiky ditty about mobile phone culture which brings to mind the comment of Thoreau when he was told men could communicate from one end of America to the other by telegraph: Yes, but what would they say to one another ? The slick technology of communication renders ever more banal and redundant what is communicated and Rosselson explores this through a lover’s conversation where the usual misunderstandings and misinterpretations are increased by inevitable technological interpolations like, my battery’s running out . As always, Rosselson’s sharp intelligence and objective insights are softened by his humorous angle. The song in honour of Brassens touches on the thickened stupidity of our culture, as if the majority want nothing better than pop songs whose melodies are weary, harmonies barely present and lyrics trite and dull, as if this anti-song is demanded by the people. Brassens was a great example of high-standard popular culture which combined erudition with bawdiness, anarchism with self-deprecation, a love of life with a wry take on death and a consistent spiking of pomposity, arrogance and the corruption of power with an easy-going, good natured celebration of friendship and love. In reviving the spirit of Brassens, and the song is wonderfully constructed, robust, energetic and memorable like his, Rosselson is pointing up the terrible sadness and waste of a culture which is too cowardly to offer people real artistic sustenance. Rosselson revives the old song Barney’s Epic Homer and adds a new one Barney’s Got A Job Now, a lovely broadside against the unimaginative and depressing conformity and regularity of the workplace. There’s a clever little song about death in which, like all the best artistic work on the subject of our mortality, he manages to be funny, a love song that’s real love song unlike mawkish and false tripe promoted on the radio day in day out and, of course, great songs of protest. Rosselson is a master of the protest song, always composes and writes from a position of high principle, bracing and uncompromising in the best sense, and imbues these pieces with exactly the right tone of indignation, resistance and generosity so any sense of ranting or simplification is eliminated. Many years ago he made, from the plans by the property developers to revamp Piccadilly Circus into a profiteers paradise, the wonderful anthem Plan whose chorus began, that’s not the way it’s got to be , the defiant leit-motif of all his songs of protest. Here, The Third Intafada, Faslane 365 and The Power Of Song are vibrant, rich, compelling and inspiring. As the final song says:
Though we’ve nothing but our voices, yet our
voices make us strong Long live Leon Rosselson and down with Radio 1. Alan Dent
COLLECTED
POEMS: ALUN LEWIS. Alan Dent
Allison McVety’s work has the feel of necessity. In all her poems you sense she has worked hard to get to the heart of things. She has a writer’s impatience with cliché and the penetrating attention of the artist who stares hard at the ordinary to find what makes it work. The ordinary is everywhere. Here’s some of the lexis: pavement, hopscotch, fags, flags, kerbs, scullery, sequins, slop bucket, newsprint, smog, pub, canal, docklands, street lamps, prams, tarmac, rum, shilling, stove, tat, corporation, wireless, gabardine. This short list speaks of three things: the commonplace, the north and the past. McVety is brilliant at quickly evoking an era or milieu:
She has an acute sense of how identity is built from small details and of the way the past tugs on the present like the reins on a toddler. She conveys the feeling she’s amazed by existence and finds the remarkable in the banal, and the sensibility that shines through this collection is as subtle as Emily Dickinson, as wry as Jane Austen as without illusions as Aphra Behn. McVety’s style isn’t remote from that of most modern poetry. She isn’t an innovator in that sense. Yet she is startlingly original. Her originality lies in her eclecticism, her ability to make connections between the material and the abstract, the familiar and the remote, and her astonishing care in leading the reader to the delightful little insights the poems deliver. Holub’s toothache is entirely absent from this collection which is remarkable when so much of it is rooted in McVety’s own experience. How does she do it ? How does she take the stock-in-trade of contemporary British verse and quietly make it deliver McVetyism ? My guess is the answer is too complex to be fathomed but one crucial element , I would suggest, is that she has that rare combination of a down-to-earth background, high gifts and fine education. D.H.Lawrence had the same and it permitted him to write about experience denied to middle-class writers. Yet it isn’t merely a question of subject matter, it’s also a mind made in circumstances which allow the elaboration of a perspective and sensibility as surprising as a camel on Deansgate. Most of all though, McVety is beautifully precise with language. I think this is what gives her the edge over many poets. All poets strive for his precision of course, but there’s a Flaubertian quality to McVety’s choice of le mot juste which sets her apart:
Not many poets can make a line about cold ham and new potatoes interesting without needing to stretch into archness. Mcvety can because of her belief in her artist’s task and her exemplary discipline in its pursuit. There is not a moment’s self-indulgence here, no playing to the gallery, no showing-off, no deliberate attempts to please , just a real writer at work determined to get to the core of things. She succeeds wonderfully. There are forty-five poems here. If McVety didn’t write another word she would have won her place as one of the very best poets of her time. Let’s hope, however, there’s much more. She is a thoroughly excellent writer.
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