Posted on by Derek Turner

The importance of ephemera

The Lost Folk

Lally MacBeth, London: Faber & Faber, 2025, hardback, 340pps., £20
DEREK TURNER finds a well-meant quest for authenticity obscured by Angst

Britain’s folk culture is world-famous, and perennially popular – the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, Padstow’s ‘Obby ‘Oss, Lewes’s Bonfire Night, and Lincolnshire’s Haxey Hood Game, to name just some of the rituals that even in a digital age help anchor the English to their earth. In recent decades, a young generation of “new countryphiles” have become involved in folk culture, joining in with traditional festivities and activities like Morris dancing and well-dressing, yet also exploring new ways of expressing identity and strengthening community.

Lally MacBeth is a representative figure among these countryphiles, as founder of the Folk Archive to foster interest in new forms of folk culture, and co-founder of the Stone Club, which celebrates Britain’s Megalithic monuments. In this, her first book, she builds on her Folk Archive work to call for greater recognition of folk objects that too often go unnoticed, and to help formulate a folk culture fit for the future. She is herself a Morris dancer, and an apparently indefatigable collector of curiosities – trawling charity shops and car boot sales in search of whatever is autochthonous, personal and locally distinctive, from church hassocks to horse brasses, pieces of old costume to tourist ware tea-towels, and shop fittings to pub signs.

Her own interest was sparked when she came across a photograph of her great-great aunt, taking part in a 1934 Ludlow pageant of Milton’s Comus – such pageants a form of folk culture now extinguished, and not even generally considered as being aspects of folk culture. She has concluded that folk culture, as conventionally defined, is too categorically confining – the filtered choices of a particular class at a particular period, now become stale and tired.

Folk culture builds community by formulating folk memory and repeating rituals that can link classes and generations to each other, and all classes and generations to particular places. MacBeth is right to aver that folk culture can be fostered by institutions as well as by individuals; churches can be repositories of folk beliefs and folkish items, and county councils can be custodians of local character. The author pays overdue tribute to many different kinds of people – dance teachers, event organisers, gravestone carvers, preservers of vernacular buildings, signwriters, topiarists, and yet others – whose largely unsung activities have helped perpetuate local distinctiveness.

Folk items can be reassuringly solid – like the eleventh century reindeer antlers used at Abbot’s Bromley, shell grottoes, ships’ figureheads, or model villages like Buckinghamshire’s Bekonscot. But they can also be disconcertingly ephemeral – badges, costumes, posters, or even sandcastles that only stand for a day. They can even be ideas – like the piquant folk-memory that a statue of Pan was once carried in church processions in the Gloucestershire town of Painswick.

The only locally distinctive items she wants to exclude from her ethnographic catalogue are “problematic and offensive historical language.” She accuses the folksong collector Cecil Sharp of recording “incredibly racist dance practices,” and creating “a folk world that suited him: sanitised, classist, racist and very, very male.” She loathes the blackface traditionally used by some Morris sides, for reasons that until the 1970s were considered more or less innocent (albeit infra dig). She expends anguished paragraphs on one solitary Morris side which has so far resisted pressure to whiten up its act. One can understand why such things make the author uneasy; yet is this not ‘sanitisation’ of the kind of which she accuses Sharp? Sharp, it should be noted, was a Liberal and a progressive, who for several years collaborated productively with the socialist collector-dancer Mary Neal (although they later fell out).

Morris dancer at Rochester Sweeps’ Fair. Image: Derek Turner

The author’s well-intentioned wish to embrace folk objects of all kinds from all kinds of marginalised or newly-arrived communities carries the obvious risk of ultimately overwhelming globally unique native objects. Folk culture allows communities to define and defend themselves – as the author says, to “feel a sense of home, and a sense of belonging.” But if everyone is to ‘feel at home,’ can anyone actually be at home? Authentic folkish manifestations are spontaneous responses to specific situations in space and time, as ‘instinctive’ and enjoyable as treading the measures of a Morris; should they also be objects of anthropological Angst?

The author is on easier ground when she asks us to honour undeservedly overlooked figures like Florence Elsie Matley Moore, who devoted much of the 1930s to painting, photographing and restoring Worcestershire antiquities and popularising country dances. Somerset’s Ruth Tongue emerges engagingly as eccentric fabulist-folklorist, who alienated more serious-minded students of folklore by toying with traditions, and claiming to speak with fairies. So too do Pamela Colman Smith, folktale-teller, occultist and Tarot card illustrator – and poor, paralysed Nellie Sloggett, who forged a successful writing career from her bedroom in Padstow, regaling readers with lively tales of ‘piskies’ and other Cornubian conceits.

Raconteurs help perpetuate folk-memory as much as scholars like the 1930s writers Dorothy Hartley and Florence White, who recorded country cooking and other crafts, or the oral historian George Ewart Evans, whose classics Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay (1956) and Pattern Under the Plough (1966) recorded authentic voices of rural Suffolk that were soon to be stilled. Fond fantasies as much as facts help underpin rescue and restoration efforts like those carried out by the too little known “Ferguson Gang” – five admirable women who between 1927 and 1957 helped raise huge amounts of money to save areas of the West Country threatened with development.

Whatever reservations we may have about some of the author’s political stances, she deserves commendation for calling such people to mind. She also deserves credit for raising important questions about the nature and future of ‘folk’ in an age of mass movement and social media shallowness. Yet in the end folk culture may not be amenable to even the most earnest analyses, and will evolve in its own way. As the author herself observes, folk culture is “…inexplicable, something that just is.”

Posted on by Stuart Millson

Musical winter warmers

Silver buckthorn under snow. Image: Derek Turner

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, orchestral works, SOMM CD 0713

E.J. Moeran, Symphony and Violin Concerto, SOMM ARIADNE 5045

Arlene Sierra, Birds and Insects, BRIDGE 9599

Vaughan Williams, Mantegna, ALBCD067

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was a man of half-English and African descent, a composer in a monocultural Britain who was championed by those quintessential musical knights, Sirs Edward Elgar and Malcolm Sargent, and who was thought to represent a vital new generation in our cultural life. Yet Samuel died in poverty – and still in the prime of life. Who knows where his musical star might have guided us?

But on a new recording from the ever-adventurous SOMM label, we are able to savour an orchestral march – championed by Sir Henry Wood – that could easily slot in alongside Elgar’s famous contribution to the military oeuvre. In Coleridge-Taylor’s Ethiopia Saluting the Colours, we find – not a piece about mystical African Emperors, their cult and country’s ability to defeat European outsiders – but a touching story-in-music about a slave in the Carolinas – named Ethiopia – giving thanks to the Stars and Stripes, as flown by the Union Army in the latter stages of the American Civil War. Of course, there are many Southerners who have not forgotten the scorched earth policy of General Sherman as he ‘liberated’ the country known as Dixie, but historical controversies aside, listeners have the chance to savour Coleridge-Taylor’s semi-Elgarian style – not to mention the rich tone of the Ulster Orchestra, under the baton of Charles Peebles.

Other works on the disc also capture the Victorian-Edwardian period feel of the music, with Rebecca Murphy, soprano, the soloist in Zara’s Earrings, Op. 7 – A Moorish Ballad, with text by John Gibson Lockhart (Walter Scott’s son-in-law, and biographer). Ioana Petcu-Colan relishes the solo part the quarter-of-an-hour in length Ballade for Violin and Orchestra in D minor. A Brahmsian lyricism, but somehow sweeter than the original tones of the great Johannes, is never far from the surface. Lovers of the music of the English Musical Renascence will enjoy this collection enormously.

E.J. Moeran, who died during a storm on the coast of Eire in 1950, was a symphonist and tone-poem writer, able to establish an immediate atmosphere of landscape and folklore in his music. Of Irish descent, Moeran was born in England, and absorbed all the loneliness of the East Anglian coastal marshes and sands, earning the praise of fellow composer, Lowestoft-born Benjamin Britten. Yet despite Moeran’s Englishness of fen and meadow, and a beery period of mugs of ale and madrigals in the North-West Kent village of Eynsford with characterful composer, Peter Warlock, it was to an almost imaginary Ireland that E.J. – or ‘Jolly Jack’ – was drawn. His Violin Concerto, completed in 1938 and inspired by Kenmare Bay, seems to assemble every part of his character, and it is the one major work of Moeran which concert-programmers turn to on the rare occasions that the composer is even thought of these days. On a new CD from SOMM Recordings, founder and director, Siva Oke (with painstaking audio restoration from Lani Spahr) brings a 1946 live broadcast from St. Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, into the sound-world of 2025 – with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and soloist, Albert Sammons, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.

Longer than the concerto by some 15 minutes, the CD also features the Symphony in G minor, a piece that is filled with lyricism and impetuous outbursts of energy – again, mirroring the composer’s stormy and unpredictable character. Those familiar with Bax’s Celtic twilight symphonic output will relish the Moeran, enjoying along the way the muscular playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra of 1949 (again, under Boult) and a finale every bit as exciting as that found in Sibelius Fifth and Walton’s First symphonies.

Sarus Crane, Cornish Bantam, Thermometer Cricket, Lovely Fairywren – these are the magical titles of short pieces which comprise Books 1, 2 and 3 of Arlene Sierra’s collection devoted to Birds and Insects. A walk through a modern Natural History Museum, or a contemporary-music, natural-history sound-installation, Arlene’s music casts a strange spell – as if you were about to disappear into a fantasy of Nature. Arlene is an American composer, but London-based and has enjoyed many collaborations with leading orchestras in Britain, Japan and America. Although very much her own, distinctive, modern yet approachable style, the music seems to stand alongside similar evocations of birds by, for example, Messiaen or Ravel; and a feeling created for the listener, very much like the Japanese composer, Takemitsu, in A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden. As complex and miraculous as the delicate bodies of the creatures it represents – the music wafts from the trees, canopies and cover of the forests and woods where its inspirations live their lives. In the hands of pianists Steven Beck and Sarah Cahill, I can think of no better album of contemporary music this wintertime.

Finally, great hymn tunes abound in a CD from Albion Records – Mantegna – so named because of the 15th-century artist, painter of The Agony in the Garden. The atmosphere of Passiontide and Gethsemane is very much to the fore, in Vaughan Williams’s setting of Sidney Lanier – an American author and poet who served in the Confederate Army in the Civil War: “Into the woods my master went,/Clean forspent, forspent;/Into the woods my master came,/Forspent with love and shame… ‘Twas on the tree they slew him, last,/When out of the woods he came.’

All People That on Earth Do Dwell (the ‘Old Hundredth’) – RVW’s famous arrangement, used at the Coronation of Elizabeth II – and the tune King’s Lynn make for inspiring listening, with the words of G.K. Chesterton: “O God of earth and altar,/Bow down and hear our cry,/Our earthly rules falter,/Our people drift and die…’ Although the son of a Gloucestershire clergyman, Vaughan Williams – though inspired by Christian culture and belief – remained an English agnostic for all his days, yet even in his deep, harmonic hymnody, misty mornings near coastal East of England churches, the Norfolk Rhapsodies and the horizons of Wenlock Edge are never far away. William Vann, the Dulwich Choral Society and the London Mozart Players (the ensemble due to open the 2026 English Music Festival) give a full-bodied and well-recorded performance.

Posted on by Samuel Martin

Art for art’s – and civilization’s – sake

Argonaut (for RC), by Alexander Adams, 2025

How to Start a Dissident Art Movement

Alexander Adams, Imperium Press, pb., 233 pps., £16.23

SAMUEL MARTIN welcomes a valuable ‘handbook’

Alexander Adams starts his book with a warning – “If anyone is in need of a practical manual of how to organise a counter-cultural vanguard, this is not the book you want.”

One may argue that Adams could’ve chosen a more accurate title. That would however be uncharitable. While not a “practical manual,” Adams nonetheless tries to show what works (or doesn’t) as derived from his own personal experience. The work isn’t a manifesto produced at the inaugural meeting of revolutionaries, declaring their intention to begin the world over again, but the progress report of a soldier who has been in the trenches for a while.

Specifically, the book is a compendium of essays, speeches, and letters by Adams in his crusade against ‘State Art.’ The term State Art is never explicitly defined, although it’s immediately clear what Adams is talking about – aesthetically heterogeneous but ideologically homogenous work arbitrarily foisted upon the public it simultaneously despises and depends on for subsidy.

Adams is however not a populist in either a political or aesthetical sense. His writing shows a clear minoritarian, elitist bent – lauding the handful of innovators, dynamos, and deviants who drag society kicking and screaming into the future. Adams regards himself (and the movement) as being revolutionary, and, like all good revolutionaries, seeks to capitalise on popular discontent, especially where it aligns with the movement’s objectives.

While this might invite accusations of opportunism, it’s clear that if Adams truly is motivated by self-interest, he’s chosen a terrible line of work as an outlet, something he outlines frankly to like-minded artists: “Any dissident arts centre will attract the ire of the governing elite… from media hit pieces and petitions to zoning-regulation alterations and de-platforming from banking systems should be expected.” It is for this reason Adams proposes a Moltke-esque ‘plans never survive contact with the enemy’ approach to dissident organisation.

In conjunction with his disdain for State Art, more cynical and reductive critics may dismiss Adams as speaking out of both sides of his mouth – nominally seeking to remove politics from art while vying to supplant one caste of ideologues with another, utilising art for a different set of political ends. But while Adams states that he’s not part of the ‘Left,’ his work forms a running argument that the enemy is not progressivism per se, but the incremental bureaucratic capture of imagination – the slow domestication of art into a credentialed, subsidised, token-dispensing machine. Progressivism is not so much an eternal enemy, but something that presently, circumstantially, stands in the way of art itself.

In that sense, his criticism of State Art is less a partisan swipe than a structural diagnosis; once art depends on public subsidy and ideological gatekeeping, risk evaporates, and merit is denounced. This is why he can simultaneously praise Old Masters, defend bad folk art, and encourage radical innovation—he sees them all as living vital expressions.

The charge that he is merely swapping one ideological caste for another misunderstands this point. Although he doesn’t seek to equivocate the marginalisation of Right-leaning artists with the liberals of yesteryear, Adams does not offer a checklist of acceptable themes or styles; his ultimate red line is that art be judged on its intrinsic qualities, not on the demographics or politics of its maker. “To be deemed a dissident,” he says, “all it takes (potentially) is being committed to art being judged on its intrinsic qualities and refusing to assess art according to the demographic characteristics of its maker or performer.” Adams’ funniest description of the prevailing art establishment view – and one that is oddly prescient in the light of highly charged current politics – goes as follows  “An arts administrator in the UK would be as likely to programme a stage play – provocative but with artistic merit – that was sympathetic towards white nationalism, as he would place a live explosive in proximity to an audience…”

Self-portrait in full sunlight, by Alexander Adams, 2025

Adams’ determination to avoid sounding like a flippant curmudgeon place his work far ahead of other writers on this subject; he can credibly claim to having a vested interest in art, not merely acknowledging it when it gets caught in the crosshairs of political punditry. In this respect, Adams’ book is timely and useful. It can serve as a powerful counter to the pseudo-profound but popular notion that because art is made in society, and society is a compound of political decisions (past and ongoing), that all art is political.

This really matters. If all art is political, then the distinction between art and propaganda is entirely arbitrary – a figment of power to perpetuate the status quo. This not only makes it legitimate to reject technically sophisticated art for political reasons, but gives licence to work that, if hung in any place other than an established gallery, would be regarded as lowest-of-the-low slop. Just as telling truth in a world of lies becomes a political act, making art in a world of propaganda too becomes a political act – if not political in the eyes of the maker, then in the eyes of those who regard the artist as some kind of ideological enemy.

Adams’ core principle – art first, politics second – means that even when he speaks of “working for your people” or “building parallel institutions,” he is not calling for counter-propaganda but for the creation of conditions in which genuine creativity can flourish on its own terms. The most politically proficient thing one can do create good art – not as political art, but as art itself.

Adams’ twelve ‘rules’ for artists stand out as the work’s backbone: (1) Take yourself seriously (2) find friends (3) look at and talk about art seriously (4) work for your people (5) balance group interest and self-interest (6) make, destroy, monitor (7) keep records (8) write letters (9) art is a social business (10) find homes for your art (11) take risks and 12) take responsibility, suffer well.

There is a refreshing moral seriousness and sincerity to these rules that is rare in either art or politics – perhaps especially in dissident circles, where grifting and Internet histrionics are too often present. Dissecting these rules individually is beyond the scope of this review – which is unfortunate, because they constitute good advice not only for dissident artists, but for anyone with any kind of creative, intellectual, moral or political imperative.

As a writer, the rule to “Destroy a lot” stands out in particular to me. I have known this intuitively for a while, yet never thought to express in such indulgently brutal yet intimate terms:

It does you good to destroy your work and relinquish the substandard. Reuse your material when you can. Without the ability to be ruthless, you will accumulate too much and will be unable to see your achievements clearly. You will incur costs that will burden you with preserving the poor and thereby prevent you from making the better. Take pride in the best you have done and do not become too sentimental regarding the weak, secondary or superseded. Preserve samples of preparatory materials, experiments and unfinished pieces, but preserve sparingly.

These rules are the closest Adams gets to a coherent system of comportment. It’s at this point one begins to realise that Adams’ movement – for all the words he spends justifying its necessity, not to mention shopping list of logistics and strategic pointers – lacks a name.

Drawing on the Impressionists, Adams notes they had no explicit creed or aesthetical guideline beyond opposition to what was ‘the system’ at their time of formation. Here, Adams’ use of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the essence of art could have been tied more explicitly into his views on strategy. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger viewed Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” as emblematic of everything rational, detached, and sterilising we associate with the Enlightenment – contaminating all ensuing intellectual development, including the arts, with a litany of -isms (subjectivism, individualism, scepticism), by presupposing the existence of an “I.”

Adams is determined to avoid punishing self-definition, in order to allow for flexibility. Should dissident artists tell us immediately exactly what they believe and intend to create, they will labour under the pressure to do so, jeopardising their solidarity, and as a result, extinguish themselves.

In the end, we discover that the title isn’t a misnomer but a subtle hint. Adams’ movement isn’t something you announce with a press release. It is something that shows itself gradually in the work, piece by piece, until the proponents of State Art realise it exists. By then, it’ll be too late to stop.

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

A tale of three cities

A house on the Appian Way

STUART MILLSON enjoys music linked by metropolises


The 2025 season of the BBC Proms was in its final furlong on Sunday 7th September, with an 11am performance of three highly descriptive works from the early part of the 20th-century – Respighi’s ‘Technicolor’ 1924 description of the Eternal City, The Pines of Rome (sun-drenched, but with a perfumed nocturne at its heart), Milhaud’s jazzy and wine-overflowing Le Boeuf sur le Toit, and the immediate pre-Great War London Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
All connected by the theme of great cities, each work was given a velvety performance by the ever-euphonious, silky-toned Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (but with additional antiphonal brass to set those Roman Legions marching in the Respighi). And relishing the writing of each musical postcard was the RPO’s conductor, St. Petersburg-born-and-educated, Vasily Petrenko, an expressive, energetic conductor of the younger generation.
Ottorino Respighi was the greatest film-score composer — who never wrote for the movies! He should have really been there for those great directors of the past, with their Xanadu grandeur and appetites for the mass-drama of the ancient world, but instead his epic scores accompany the picture-house of the mind: the rush and swirl of a heady city, full of the dust of the past, as children’s games in the park open his Roman pines holiday.

The Stravinsky-like opening, with its dainty little fanfares and marches, builds to a brazen crescendo — and suddenly the audience is plunged into a sepulchral atmosphere of ruins, remains, skulls, catacombs; and like an incantation from Roman worship, with seers and soothsayers never far away, the movement slowly lurches forward like a procession of colour plates from a history-book, come to life. The warmer, sensuous sounds of the night then waft into the score in The Pines of the Janiculum Hill, switching the panorama to one of soothing, delicate ultra-romanticism — the sweetness of the warm darkness crowned by a recording of a nightingale’s song played over the loving woodwind and strings. Respighi was right: not even a composer or first-class orchestra could imitate the such a bird.
Finally, a theme of some disquiet begins to rise and rumble on the horizon of the Via Appia — the occasional glint of sun on a shield, the faint sense of Legions’ standards coming into view. With batteries of brass and percussion standing by, the RPO made the slow, yet unmistakably glorious march to the capital of one of the world’s great empires, before the full weight of dazzling orchestral sound — reinforced by the hundreds-strong pipes of the Royal Albert Hall organ — brought Pini di Roma to its blazing finale.

Josephine Baker, by Paul Colin. 1930

Mid-20th-century Gallic wit, insouciance, even surrealism is the heady cocktail for Darius Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur Le Toit — the jazz-age scena (with orchestral, rather human voices) which sparkles on the dance-floor of a nightclub named, bizarrely, ‘The Ox on the Roof’. This is carnival time, 1919, in a fictitious bar, a ballet of weird characters tapping their feet in time to jazzy tunes and dancing the night away — although a night-spot did open in Paris, using this very name, and they made the bon viveur Milhaud a member. Even though our Proms performance was nearing noon, the Royal Philharmonic made us all feel as though we were in a late-night, Bogart-type bar, with the Gitanes-smoke smouldering in the dark corners and the hedonists relishing every syncopated note on the dance-floor.

Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1917


When the English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams takes an audience to a place — whether a lark ascending over the downland, or the oceans of A Sea Symphony — you can bet that there is more to it than just a portrait coloured in by an orchestra. The lark soars to an unknown region, or you steer, not for the deep waters of the mid-Atlantic, but navigate around your own deepest thoughts in the dark night of the soul. In the composer’s A London Symphony, written just before the Great War, we find ourselves seeing through the clearing of the morning mist, just like Wordsworth’s vision of the city from Westminster Bridge — or in the elegiac nocturne, the autumn leaves in Bloomsbury Square. But it is, too, a city of dreadful night — music which in its final movement Betjeman chose to accompany his 1977 television poetry anthology, but using the music for scenes of the stark grandeur of wintry hills, rather than the town: a sense of the life-cycle of the year — of us all — meeting the maker of our being.
Maestro Petrenko felt every pulse of this most English journey, bringing forth playing of nervy beauty in what is a complex, enigmatic, deep-water score. The finale, inspired by a passage from H.G. Wells’s novel, Tono-Bungay, depicts a vessel sailing by night along London’s river, to the Thames estuary and open sea… “London passes, England passes… all the old certainties glide astern…” — and here, the RPO’s woodwind and sepia strings conjured a Time Machine feel of dates, time, reality, all dissolving and meaningless as the city fades into a memory.
A Proms concert that won’t be easily forgotten, in this, my 44th year at these concerts.

Posted on by Derek Turner

Anglo-apocalypse

John Martin, ‘Apocalypse’

Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group

Rebecca Gransden, London: Tangerine Press, 2025, 93pps., £15
DEREK TURNER reads a story of a domain’s downfall

This powerful novella is set in southern England, following some vaguely described disaster, which is causing everything to collapse, and everyone to flee in panic. “There’s something spreading up from the far south east,” one man ‘explains’ to protagonist Flo – “Humongous red blob expanding and inflating across the land.” Notwithstanding this creeping carmine menace, the determined Flo is on a quest to find her twin brother, ‘bro.’

The novella falls within a certain Anglo-apocalyptic tradition, where folk horror meets sci-fi and terrible things can happen in cosily familiar landscapes – Richard Jefferies’ After London, John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass stories, the 1970s TV series Survivors, and 28 Days Later. But Gransden’s language is highly original – assured, forceful and inventive, made up largely of monosyllables, which gives a staccato, almost Old English quality. Flo is faintly reminiscent of Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘Buckmaster’ in The Wake – a strong-minded individual in a defeated land, whose existential plight is likewise expressed in an idioglossia that takes some getting used to. Some readers will find themselves yearning for longer words and sentences, but then Gransden’s country is a place of grim and elemental purpose, where the struggle for survival leaves no time for complex concepts.

From the outset, there are echoes of ancient epics and exhausted landscapes – “And the old red sun on the land. A slow wind stalks the brush. When the tide out at sea waits to run in green.” There is also brooding evil, as Flo sits on a clifftop and thinks “of a boy and the push that sent him down to the rock.” Was that boy who “falls to hell” bro? And was it Flo who pushed him?

Time circles and collapses in on itself, and the narrative disjoints. We see Flo some years earlier (or maybe more recently), running away from school and sleeping rough, finding a skeletal dying man, with insects already settling on him – “hair in his mouth, his knees poke out of holes in his pants, and he smells.” There are echoes and connections everywhere. Late in her wanderings she finds herself in Amesbury, Wiltshire – famous for a lavish Early Bronze Age burial, but now a setting for the twenty-first century’s fall.

Eerie strangeness is abroad, sometimes beautiful, much more often menacing – plants glow pink and gnash “at the air neath burnt day stars.” Birds are silent, but trees sing instead, “shrill and bleak.” There seem to be surreally expressed ecological concerns brooding behind the writing, as red ant armies march up out of drains, blue wasps sting dead black rats, and mutilated laboratory monkeys scream to see her. Toads are underfoot and climbing walls, and even opening their toothless maws to prophesy – a Biblical plague, appropriate for an England where everyone is in exodus – except a few left-behind loners awaiting their inevitable destruction, or clinging doggedly to delusions of salvation.

Lantern-carrying hooded religious visionaries seen by Flo in the depths of a black forest “murm as they eat the glow-worm” – an image that could have come from the hellscapes of the elder Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch. Spindle-shanked gargoyle-demons have clambered down from church walls to stalk the shires for human prey, and terrified humans pushed to traumatic limits show themselves capable of equal evil.

Central and causative to England’s overthrow is a terrible sonic force – a sound first faintly heard and intriguing, like the seemingly sourceless Hum that some people today claim to hear in the atmosphere. In Gransden’s vigorous imagination, this possibly non-existent ambient noise becomes a cacophony and hurricane – a maddening and shrieking maelstrom of “cliff noise” which spits bees and beats people to the ground. Seemingly sentient, it finally comes for Flo, eating up the way she has come as she makes a last dash for the coast in desperate hope of escape. John of Gaunt’s fort and demi-paradise has become a howling and infected Alcatraz. This striking dystopia is uneasy reading, yet “a breath of old land and ghost voice spills from an age.”

Posted on by Liam Guilar

The watchful Muse

With a Stranger’s Eyes

Jeremy Hooker, Swindon: Shearsman, 2025, 86pps., £10.95

LIAM GUILAR salutes a wryly observant yet engaged poet

With a Stranger’s Eyes is Jeremy Hooker’s third book of poems since the publication of Selected Poems 1965-2018 (Shearsman 2020) and arguably the best of this later group.[i] The poetry is divided into three sections, with a fourth, short prose ‘Reflections on Two Welsh Words.’ The first two sections record people, places and incidents from his past and present in non-English speaking countries, moving from memories of Holland to Wales, to a final section which looks outwards. The poet moves from being a stranger by nature of nationality and language, to a stranger in the world by reason of being human. The title reflects Hooker’s sense of not belonging. “I am a stranger in the area in which I live, and a stranger to the tragic history of the area. Being a stranger has affected my idea of myself as a poet (p.83).”[ii] This awareness saves the poems from sentimentality and egotism.

If we include 2016’s Ancestral Lines, then these four poetry books are what used to be called ‘a significant and important body of work,’ in their own right, because of the way they explore a maze of writing problems and offer one way out.

Hooker has quoted David Jones’ “one writes with the things at one’s disposal” which seems incontrovertible. However, biography is one of those things, and if biography is what makes writers who they are, then how do they write autobiographically without falling into the trap of producing something that is either private or, perhaps, worse, a lyric poem that begins and ends with the egotistical /I/? Hooker describes the problem: “I distrust the autobiographical impulse with its temptation to egotism and assumptions of finality. […] nostalgia came with a horror of being stuck in an idealised version of the past.” (‘A Note on Autobiographical Poetry,’ Preludes p. 79).”

The danger becomes more pressing for a man in his eighties, who has reached a time in his life when looking back seems inevitable. Ancestral Lines was Hooker’s direct confrontation with the problems of writing autobiographically. In ‘Lyric of Being’ the essay that ends that book, he wrote: “My concept of the poet was that of one who struggled to keep open a channel between self and the world and the living and the dead, as opposed to writing a verse beginning and ending with the self (Ancestral lines p.76).”

Born in 1941, in the south of England, Hooker has acknowledged his earliest literary influence was Richard Jefferies. If Jefferies taught him to pay attention to the world around him, he also gave Hooker his lifelong interest in the idea of ‘Ground’ – a word which has developed in his writing from referring to the significant place for the writer, to the complex relationships that link the individual to community, literature, history and geography. By acknowledging that grounded relationship, the poet can move away from both egotism and sentimentality.

His literary influences include some of the great modernists, particularly T. S. Eliot and David Jones, and his work negotiates the complicated legacy those writers left for those who admired them. Poetry is a serious activity. The poet exists as practitioner of an art that is both contemporary and ancient, both specific to the language spoken and yet open to poetry in all languages. Above all, those writers bequeathed a distrust of the whining Ego and what might loosely be called ‘confessionalism.’ There is an irony here, which should be acknowledged. For so many writers these are not problems. What Hooker is trying to avoid is the only thing they know how to do.

Another irony is that for a man who admires David Jones and George Oppen, he writes like neither of them. Bunting’s praise of Scarlatti describes Hooker’s poems. Initially it might seem strange to link Scarlatti’s sixty-four notes to a bar ripple and rush with Hooker’s uncluttered verse.

It is time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

condensed so much music into so few bars

with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence

never a boast or a see-here, and stars and lakes

echo him and the copse drums out his measure

snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight 

and the sun rises on an acknowledged land.

(Basil Bunting, Briggflatts)

                                                           

But in the verse, there is no pyrotechnical ‘see here,’ no pretence to ‘poetic thoughts’ no one ever had except when trying to write a ‘poetic poem’ – no congested cadence of jumbled syntax, no boastful ‘look at the vocabulary I pillaged from the thesaurus’ or ‘be impressed by my references to things you’ve never heard of.’

In ‘Reflections on Two Welsh Words’, Hooker writes: “In tune with the thinking of modernists such as T. S. Eliot, David Jones, and George Oppen, I conceive of the poem as a made object, a thing that stands apart from the poet, an act in a transpersonal ‘conversation’ (p. 84).”

His poems have a conversational tone that only someone who is tone deaf would call artless. However, art as conversation means more than just tone. He has acknowledged his debt to Martin Buber’s I and Thou.[iii] According to Buber, the destructive tendency is to turn every ‘you’ into an ‘it,’ into something that can be instrumentalised, or used, or packaged – in poetic terms, to see oneself, like a Wordsworth, as the centre of the universe. The challenge, simplifying Buber, is to see and celebrate the other in all its specific otherness AND not lose the /I/ that is interacting with it. [iv]

Hooker achieves a balance between the person writing and the subject of the writing. ‘Rowan Tree’ offers the most straightforward example. From Wales, or the Welsh poetic tradition, he took the idea of poetry as a vehicle for praise. ‘Rowan Tree’ is a song of praise but made new by the poet’s refusal to pretend the tree cares about him.

It pleases me

that you are no thing

of words, but indifferent

to all I say or think.

Yet having contemplated the tree in all its seasonal and historical variations, the poem ends.

Rowan tree

that enchants my days

be to me, if only

in imagination,

an old man’s staff.

Let me stand with you

against Atlantic gales.

Allow me to warm myself

with your leaves’ red glow

against the coming cold.

To write about the tree is to acknowledge what the tree means to the writer. The difficulty is to see the subject not as an extension of self, but as something in relation to self. As he writes about people who were important to him, he preserves their essential strangeness while celebrating what they meant to him. In ‘Gwenallt,’ for example:

But I will not insult the man

with elegy, or lessen his ferocity

with emollient words.

                        Let me see him

as the Jeremiah he was,

                                    prophet

of the death we have dealt a nation,

and the doom we are bringing on our own.                                        

Living and working in Wales exacerbated the problem. Acutely conscious of his strangerhood, in a country whose language he didn’t master, Hooker was an unwilling representative of the race some of the Welsh writers he admired and championed saw justifiably as The Enemy. The pressure of this alterity may not be comfortable for the individual, but it is bracing for the poet. It acts against any tendency to ‘egotism and assumptions of finality.’ It makes nostalgia uncomfortable and reminds the poet of the difference between reality and any ‘idealised version of the past.’

The Welsh poetic tradition also began in commemoration. The poem offers both poet and reader the possibility of learning how to see and different ways of understanding. Hooker’s poems deal with places made memorable by the people he associates with them, or where tragedy happened. The poet commemorates by finding the image to bring events to the reader’s attention and understanding in ways that journalism cannot. In ‘Passing through Aberfan,’ fourteen lines of understatement manage to capture the horror of an event that once reverberated through British culture. ‘On the Road to Senghenydd’ confronts the problem of writing about another, perhaps less well-known disaster.[v]

Do not imagine you can imagine it.

Do not suppose you know

what grief is, or terror, or courage

of men entering an inferno

to rescue their kind. Today

you may think the scene medieval,

like a picture of hell.

But you will know nothing

unless you catch a distant echo

from the very ground, where

a father calls for his son,

and a son cries for his father.

Following Buber’s lead, the poems explore the rich variety of life. There is anger, and sadness, and humour. ‘Haunted House’ begins as any rural ghost story:

Children called it

the haunted house.

It may have been because

an angry man lived here.

But the swerve at the end is both unexpected and highly effective.

Whatever it was, I do not know

why children passed this house

with a tremor of fear.

What I do know are days and nights

when I would have given my life

to feel the touch of a ghostly hand.

It’s easy to confuse ‘serious’ with humourless, but in Hooker’s case that would be a mistake. To be human the poems have to smile occasionally. This is from ‘On the Painting called Peace:’

But the artist’s soul was in it.

It wasn’t his fault

that he was a Victorian.

This is from ‘In Memory of Norman Schwenk:’

An American in Cardiff

you were always a man from Nebraska –

though a follower of Glamorgan cricket,

which in recent years

has been a hopeless pursuit.

I turn a page and read ‘Dialysis: reading Ibn ‘Arabi:’

Love is my creed.

Wherever love’s caravan

turns along the way,

that is my belief.

Briefly, an image

of holiday traffic on the M4

passes through my mind.

One of the ways out of the problem of the ego, is the figure of the man at the window.[vi] Looking outwards has been a common theme in Hooker’s recent books. Poems frame a space for thinking through and in language, inviting the reader to look and think again. As he writes in ‘David Jones at Capel-y-ffin,’

                        And yes, it is true
the universal is revealed
through the particular thing.

‘On Gelligaer Common’ begins: “A wild horse with its hoof trapped/in the rusted springs of a mattress.” If the poem is ‘about’ the weight of history, the way it traps and tangles the present, then the ‘about’ is carried in the images rather than in prose-like argument. Nor does poem or poet have to offer a conclusion or preach. ‘On Gelligaer Common’ ends; “The wounded horse strains to free itself/ but the rusted springs hold.”

Seagulls have been the subject of several memorable Hooker poems, and we come across them again in ‘Man at a Window: six observations:’

Gull, gull,

lover of sea

and rubbish dump

devotee of plough

take me with you,

the observer asks,

                        let me share

a world that is alive,

where sea roughens

with flying spume

under the west wind.

If you live on the coast no poem can make you see seagulls ‘for the first time’. But a poem can colour the way you see them, so the irritating, chip-scavenging noise-makers will never be the same again.

‘Man at a Window: six observations’ ends the book. The sixth poem offers an image that might stand for Hooker and his most recent work. The Man at the Window is alone, separated from what he’s observing, but not trying to conscript what he sees to his own purposes, while celebrating what he sees and what it evokes for him. It begins:

One bright star

solitary, it seems

in the whole night sky.

Not knowing the star’s name it reminds him of

[…] the young poet
who never died, but lives
steadfast,
for the holiness that is love.

You might miss the allusions to Keats; you might think the ‘young poet’ is the poet’s younger self. It could well be, but it’s hard to miss the affirmation of one possible role of poetry. The passage quoted earlier about T.S. Eliot, David Jones and George Oppen continues. “I differ in emphasising its nature as an emotional process. I have finally come to recognize that I am primarily a lyric poem and a love poet.”

Love is a dangerously imprecise word. I’d suggest that for Hooker, ‘love’ is not just the confusion that drives adolescents to attempt poetry but a mature working through of Buber’s ideas about the possibilities of human relationships, and how the self relates to the world’s variety of people, writings, history and places. ‘Love poetry’ describes an open-ended conversation, grounded in what Keats called “the holiness of the Heart’s affections.”[vii]

[i] Word and Stone (2019) and Preludes (2024). In the last five years Hooker has also published a book of essays, and three books of mixed poetry and prose in a genre he has made his own: The Art of Seeing (2020), The Release (2022), Addiction, a Love story (2024) and Presence and Place (2025). All  of them have been published by Shearsman. To do it justice, With a Stranger’s Eyes, should be considered in the context of this group of later work, reaching back to include 2016’s Ancestral Lines. But that requires more words than an essay offers. 

[ii] Unless otherwise stated quotations and page numbers refer to With a Stranger’s Eyes.

[iii] The Austrian-Israeli philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) published Ich und Du in 1923, published in English in 1937 as I and Thou – a meditation on human relationships, and a critique of objectification and over-abstraction.

[iv] ‘Simplifying’ here is an extravagant understatement.

[v] In 1913 an explosion at the pit head killed 439 men and boys. It was the worst mining disaster in British history.

[vi] I’ve written about the man at the window in the context of The Release. https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2022/02/jeremy-hookers-release-part-three-poems.html  I’ve reused the Bunting quote from that essay.

[vii] John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated 22 November 1817.

Posted on by Derek Turner

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Image: Creative Ignition, Wikimedia Commons

The Naked Spur

Alexander Adams, London: Exeter House, 2025, 304pps., pb., £14.93 (Amazon)
DEREK TURNER reads about a young artist’s attempts to get established

In 2007, a burned-out young British artist arrived in Berlin from London. He rented a frigid apartment in the worst district of the city, and subsisted on coffee and chocolate while he hammered out the draft of a novel ‘inspired’ by his recent bad experiences in London, perversely using an old-fashioned typewriter instead of a user-friendly laptop. In a May 2025 article published on his Substack, he explained his mindset at that time: “I wanted to do it the difficult way because that was what made it real. Suffering – even self-inflicted unnecessary suffering – made any achievement more worthwhile because it had been hard won.” Alexander Adams’ grimly determined mindset has changed little since that time, although he has subsequently found not just some artistic success, but also greater acceptance and understanding of himself, and the art world in which he operates as a rare ‘conservative’ presence.

Adams made desultory attempts to publish his manuscript at that time, but following rejections put it away for almost two decades. Having come across some of the artwork of that period again while working on a new project, he feels it is now a good time to publish, to set his present work in context and reveal more of his backstory to his subsequently acquired audience. It will also, he feels, be purgative – “a personal accounting” that can balance his books.

Novelists, as we know (or think we know) write largely about themselves, but The Naked Spur really is based very closely on actual experiences. The protagonist is a thoughtful artist called “A,” he is highly skilled but commercially unsuccessful, and he lives where Adams used to live, and bristles with his former emotions – a frustrated, lonely and resentful figure surrounded by equally atomised but usually far less intelligent individuals.

In desperate need of money, and in search of any kind of recognition, A has a cunning plan – to sell customised nude pictures to wealthy sensate individuals who wish to parade not just their wealth as patrons of the arts, but their allegedly ‘liberated’ selves. It is a cynical and even seedy concept, designed to prey on the gullibility and vanity of self-styled ‘sophisticates,’ and the reader is not sorry when it fails, despite the strenuous efforts of A and several revolving-door associates and collaborators.

One does, however, develop some sympathy for A himself – an impressive person reduced to such resorts, who has besides come to believe in the worth of the art he is producing for such shabby purposes. Yet in the end the failure of the scheme was good for him, as well as for society – because it forced him to do something infinitely more useful with his talents than flogging pornography-adjacent images to the wealthy and credulous. And he has done many more useful things in the years since – produced artworks which are held in world-famous collections, staged powerful exhibitions, edited anthologies, and written insightfully about the state of the arts in many articles and reviews, and important books like 2002’s Artivism.

In the present book, the London of some twenty years ago is excellently evoked in innumerable gritty details. I lived in Deptford around the same time as the artist, and his landmarks were also mine – the handsome baroque church of St Paul’s, the Bird’s Nest pub, the High Street, the Docklands Light Railway, and immediately across the river Canary Wharf still rising around its central silver tower. The sadness and shabbiness he shows in such photorealist detail – the drunks and their vomits, the glue-sniffers, the unhygienic takeaways, the graffiti and litter, the futile casual encounters and conversations in grubby rented rooms, the sleazy ‘top shelf’ magazines in newsagents – all that too rings authentic, the underbelly of the brittle metropolitan world A so badly wants to break into. It is closely observed, and faithfully depicted.

But sometimes the detail takes up space that might have been better devoted to character development. Some of the characters in The Naked Spur seem insubstantial, at times almost staffage, representations of sets of attitudes rather than real people. Even A hovers on the edge of focus, an observer rather than instigator, a reactor rather than a principal. He is obsessed with his single big idea, and concentrates so hard on trying to bring it to fruition that everything else is forgotten. The project becomes an end in itself, the artistic vision increasingly reduced to individual brush strokes, and the logistics of packing crates and pots of varnish. For a book about ‘nakedness’ and ‘spurs’ – a book, furthermore, which the author has described as “very personal” – A’s character and motivations seem rather opaque.

Insofar as we can see into A’s soul, it can seem sere. Sitting in that freezing flat in Berlin, he was writing in “self-aware replication” of his project’s failure. He goes on, “I would become an isolated broke author engaged in a private unprofitable gesture writing an uncommissioned novel about an isolated broke artist engaged in a private unprofitable gesture painting unsaleable pictures. The novel would be as sterile as the paintings – uncontaminated by commerce, uncompromised by any consideration of propriety.” As an explanation of what he was doing and thinking at that time, it is bracingly honest, but it sounds like a rather unappetising fictive formula.

The prose style is generally austere, a welcome change from the pretentious word-salads of the arts ‘establishment.’ This amorphous entity is the hinted-at villain of the piece, a jellyfish without a central brain but capable of responding quickly to environmental stimuli (money, or trending politics), and of course armed with poisonous nodules. Whatever the merits of A’s art (and Adams really is a superb craftsman) he was destined to be included out of lionisation or major grants by early Noughties arbiters – and he did not exactly help himself with his choice of subject matter. Adams’ more recent art must similarly sometimes have found itself treated with suspicion, because of his now publicly known political views; it is a testament to his abilities that he has achieved as much as he has against such odds. His art is luckily likely to last longer than that of many of his establishment-embraced contemporaries.

One slightly wonders who the novel is addressed to, apart from himself. Some of Adams’ generally conservative admirers and followers might even look askance at these productions of the artist’s youth – although conservatives are frequently more forgiving than the liberal-minded, and more morally complex. All would doubtless welcome a more recent autobiographical outline, in which the tough but callow young A can be balanced with the thoughtful and experienced Alexander, the ‘naked spur’ clad more warmly. For now, at least we have a striking study of a clever and interesting man at a low ebb in his life, losing all illusions to his and our advantage.

Posted on by Michael Yost

A structured lightness

The Old Current

Brad Leithauser
Alfred A. Knopf, 2025, 84 pps., £9.99
MICHAEL YOST admires a poet’s orderly sensibility

Brad Leithauser’s new book is aptly titled. The simultaneity of old and new is at the forefront of this collection, and with good reason: most of the poems deal with the themes of memory, childhood, nostalgia, and loss. As the current of a river carries the past forward into the present, so this book makes the old new, and presents us with Leithauser’s unique and relatively unchanging style. Looking back on his older works, there’s a continuity in his style over the last 30 years. This bespeaks a poet whose style is a part of them, something achieved and conserved.

The book overall is very well-structured; that is, it is very clearly and thematically structured. Leithauser’s experience as a novelist shows here: the work is organized into chiastic parts, which taken together have a rising and a falling action.

The first part is “Darker,” where themes of birth and youth provide the top-note for a full-bodied occupation with the past. However, this section also introduces the themes of old age, of finality, which run throughout this book. The second section contains poems which spring from Leithauser’s time at the Kyoto Comparative Law Center in Japan. Thematically, we move from childhood to young adulthood, from infancy to activity. The best poems in these sections are mostly epigrams: ‘The Philosopher’s Walk’ and ‘The End of the Adventurer’ from Darker, and ‘How it Looks From Here,’ ‘The Third Suitor,’ and ‘A Beach of Big White Stones.’ It is no secret that that epigram, like hanging, has a way of sharpening the attention, and of forcing a poet towards a kind of formal and intellectual concentration he might not have elsewhere. This quality of attention and concentration is more absent from the poem that gives the book its title.

In general, however, Leithauser’s metrical style is a little unbuttoned: in both this as well as his love of sentiment and memory he is reminiscent of Auden. In places, this sentimentalism becomes bathetic and trivial (as in the poem ‘Furry’) and the rumpled meter and half rhymes look slovenly, as in the opening poem ‘Lullaby for a Newborn,’ or, regrettably, the poem that gives the book its title; although the story both poems tell, and the scenes they depict, are not uninteresting. That said, Leithauser succeeds often enough.

This is not to say that Leithauser is a metrical novice. He seems especially to love iambic tetrameter – its sing-song sway, its potential for both irony and lightness. His rhyming is inventive, as ‘The Third Suitor’ demonstrates, and he can tell a story. Throughout, he is also at great pains to explore and affirm the ordinary and the day-to-day. Leithauser’s work aside, this mode of poetry, a kind of bourgeois lyricism – suburban, intentionally small poetry – is often read by and produced by conservatives and formalists, probably in reaction to the hangover from the stream of pseudo-romantic, beatnik, hippie, Freudian, psychological, deconstructed, antiracist or Tik-Tok-infused industrial byproduct that many poets have been slinging for the past few decades. This petite romanticism has its place. Its benefit is that, at its best, it is clearly written, normal, and aims to be reflective of the values associated with what Yvor Winters called “the plain style.” That said, one begins to tire of writing and reading it if it is unredeemed by sharp observation, psychological realism, and an appreciation of the real scope that even a normal, small life affords.

Leithauser addresses an issue adjacent to this one in an interview with Ryan Wilson (Literary Matters 9.1). I highly recommend the interview, which will do a better job of introducing Leithauser’s work to new readers than this review. His is an impressive resumé. The quotations below are from that interview, and serve to put this new book of poems in their proper context:

RW: ” . . . These days, I daresay a great many young writers go in fear of nostalgia because it seems irrevocably connected to sentimentality, but your novels, while sometimes steeped in nostalgia’s honeyed glow, don’t come across as sentimental at all. Would you discuss how you think about the relationship between nostalgia and sentimentality?

BL: Sentimentality interests me a good deal. I sometimes feel especially drawn to writers who are often at their best when being sentimental—however unlikely that may sound… In a better universe than ours, the distinction [between writing interesting and likeable characters] wouldn’t exist. To be likable would be to be interesting. It’s one of many ways in which the world of fiction fails to correspond to the world we live in. Kindness, goodness – these things are so welcome in real life, where surliness and suspicion so often rule. But kindness, goodness – these things are often dull on the page. So even without thinking much about it, perhaps, the novelist learns to be wary about depicting virtues of this sort. In addition, among critics there’s that pervasive axiom (again, perhaps insufficiently thought about) which says that kind characters are inevitably sentimental. Hence, the elderly retired nanny in Waugh’s Brideshead, who takes such a loving interest in her former charges, is seen as sentimental. Yet I find her utterly believable. I often wonder about some critics: have they truly never encountered disinterested compassion, clemency, solicitude? I suspect they have, but have also trained their critical judgment to view its depiction as inherently untrue-to-life. I see that we’re back to the subject of sentimentality, a subject of endless interest to me. With many critics (as with many novelists and poets), there’s a self-congratulation about being unsentimental – about being sufficiently hard-boiled and cynical – that strikes me as itself sentimental. I find this is true about two modern poets I absolutely revere – John Berryman and Philip Larkin. There’s a persona to Berryman – the one who keeps saying, effectively, “Here I am looking death in the face, Pal” – that emerges a little too glibly. These things are hard to discuss without oneself sounding self-congratulatory or unsympathetic. But I remember as an undergraduate in Elizabeth Bishop’s class the day she brought in Larkin’s High Windows, and read some of the poems and we discussed them. Now that book strikes me as an absolute masterpiece. I think she thought so too – but she was trying to illuminate some aspect of the book that displeased her or unnerved her. And if I understood her aright, she was saying there was something a little too easy – sentimental – to the book’s darkness. The harder task was to see light within the darkness. Gentle Miss Bishop, it turned out, was taking up in her poems the more difficult task. There’s a good argument to be made, anyway, that her winsome and delicate Geography III, which came out a few years after High Windows, is the less sentimental, the much tougher, of the two books.”[i]

I quote the paragraph because I agree with it in large measure, even as a reader who has revisited Larkin more often than Bishop. I also want to make sure that my comments about Leithauser’s occasional lapses into the sentimental or trivial, as I have put it, are seen in their relation to the author’s values and sense of the world. One can have too little, as well as too much, lightness.

Appropriately, when we move to “Lighter,” the middle section of the work, we see that light verse takes wit to write. Leithauser has this in abundance, and playfulness besides. The best here are ‘Six Quatrains,’ ‘In the English Department Lounge,’ and ‘The Muses.’ ‘Icarus and His Kid Brother’ is inventive, but hard to read aloud properly. ‘Kisses After Novocaine’ is trivial, the subject matter unequal to the pseudo-reflection that attends it; it could have been funny had the innate absurdity of the situation been carried to greater lengths. I quote my two favorites of the ‘Six Quatrains’ in full:

II. ANONYMOUS’S LAMENT

Though love, (it’s been said) is a perilous game,

       At times I might wish to be bolder—

Just once to be either the moth or the flame

        And not the candle holder.

IV. WHAT TO BELIEVE: A BIBLICAL EXEGESIS

The garden of Eden?

       Maybe a fable.

Yet you can be certain

        Cain slew Able.

The next section, “At Home” begins the book’s thematic diminuendo. This section of the book seems to me more uneven than its fellows. Its themes are domestic, familial memory and sentiment. ‘Permeable Worlds’ is really a collation of three separate poems that are thematically joined, but it holds together well. It is observational, yet does a good job of making the ordinary strange, highlighting the otherwise unobserved. ‘Some Stranger’s Passport’ is more interesting in its second half than its beginning, and one feels like the windup was not quite worth the pitch, although the plot (involving two doppelgangers whose paths cross) sounds like a short story Leithauser never wrote; if it had to have been a poem, it would have been better to have been a long blank verse poem. ‘Furry’ is odd, disjointed, and bad. ‘A Single Flight’ gives us Leithauser’s five-page version of Wordsworth’s ‘Preludes’ and Betjeman’s ‘Summoned By Bells.’

When we reach the last section (also named “Darker,”like the book’s first part,) we are greeted by eight short poems, mostly about animals, machines, and a man with severe dementia. Since human beings entertain all manner of hopes about their innate worth, ultimate destiny, and what constitutes their happiness, and are also capable of asking the questions about life that animals are not, a poet can make effective use of “the pathetic fallacy” to strip such things away, and leave us with raw suffering, raw joy. ‘The Parrot,’ ‘Happy Hour,’ and ‘Motel’ all do this effectively. ‘Blaze’ is a poem with a solid punchline. ‘The Parrot’ reminds one of Baudelaire’s poems about cats, pipes, and other bits of domestic furniture. It also does a good job of permitting the poet a moment of pessimism while identifying such pessimism with a sort of artificial crankiness – the product of maladjustment to unnatural and demeaning conditions. (Is it a caricature of Philip Larkin?) The book ends, appropriately enough, with the poem ‘Total’, which is so effective that I quote it in full, below:
For now, this once, a blackened noon.

              Cold silence drops on everything.

. . . It’s clear the world is ending soon.

              And why in their dead reckoning—

Their voices echoed off the moon—

              The crickets have begun to sing.

This poem (another exemplary instance of the integrity and clarity possible in epigrams) does an excellent job at pulling together the thematic threads of the book: life and death, music and terror, psychological immediacy and ironic distance, with a dash of humor and humanity. We are dropped into the middle of panic at the omnipresence of death, and then we are required to see things in perspective. Life and happiness (and the crickets) have the last word.

The epigrams and the “light” poems are the most successful, and I do not think this is to damn Leithauser with faint praise. These kinds of poems are often the hardest poems to write, since they require concentration, wit, ruthless editing, and poetic mastery, whereas very little is easier to write than the breezy Wordsworthian memoir-poems that are also a part of this volume. Almost no single poem in this book is a ‘Great Poem,’ but there are many strong poems collected here. (‘Total’ may be the best.) As is so often the case with well-wrought lyric poetry, we end by wishing to know the person who wrote the poems better, because of the intelligence, the humor, and the sympathy for suffering that the poems reveal. On the strength of these poems, I purchased one of the author’s novels and am looking forward to deepening my acquaintance.

[i] My thanks to Ryan Wilson and Literary Matters for their kind permission to use this quotation. See Issue 9:1 – Literary Matters

Posted on by Stuart Millson

Call of duty

Duty of Care 

Directed by Asa Bailey, co-written by Asa Bailey and Jack Marsden, starring Bruce Jones and Jack Marsden

In the world of film and cinema today, it is something of a relief to find, not just a story without improbable car chases through Los Angeles, AI-generated explosions or extreme-weather calamities, but which centres itself upon the quiet north Wales town of Llandudno and the lives of two men: army veteran, Major Harris, and his carer, Gary.

It is the kind of film at which our country excels – slow-burn, minimalist drama, set against the background of ordinariness – the result being the sense of an even more acute build-up of tension than one would find in any blockbuster. It is a simple enough idea: the retired soldier, looking back on a life of action, but unable to adjust completely to the banality of everyday life, coming into contact and conflict with the equally tedious world of care and social services. Gary (played by BAFTA winner, Jack Marsden*) – volunteer carer, dressed in casual clothes – knocks at the Major’s door, and at once there are the unmistakeable signs of an impending personality and culture clash. Gary seems domesticated enough and willing to help, but Harris is accustomed to his own household rituals and his emotional short-fuse (the result of his war-experiences) leads to a grand bust-up.

Jack Marsden

Taking the role of Major Harris is the well-known Coronation Street star, Bruce Jones, who brings something of the all-in-a-day weariness of a ‘soap’ character to the story. And yet, because of the pauses, the silences, the sense of brooding, anxiety, misery in the Major, the viewer is given far more than a low-budget film with an efficient, half-hour TV script. Jones’s performance is worthy of the highest accolades – and this is because he is completely believable in his role, so much so, that you – the viewer – may find yourself wanting to reach out and help him.

And it is Gary, the casual care-worker – a man who resides in a mobile home – who doesn’t even know his next step in life, who wants to give Harris the assistance he clearly needs. Rejected, though, and ordered out by the old soldier, Gary seems to pass from the story. A new carer arrives, a cheerful-enough girl (played by Sophie Anderson), this time, wearing a uniform; more what you would expect a care-assistant to look like, but it is soon clear that she, too, is just drifting in our modern Britain. Gary, meanwhile, breathless and in disarray, and unable to find any other work, tries to cling to his identity: ‘I’m Gary, I’m Gary,’ he says – as if trying to prevent himself from tipping into complete despair. Yet at this point, we discover something of his own identity: he, like Harris, has a past, but one which he hardly talks about and acknowledges to himself only in moments of extreme emotion.

Bruce Jones and Jack Marsden

The film, recalls Jack Marsden, was first premiered in Liverpool, in the presence of HM Lord Lieutenant of Liverpool – to a standing ovation, with many ex-servicemen in the audience clearly profoundly moved by the screenplay. Jack also notes the role played by Anthony H. Wilson of Factory Records, the founder of a Manchester-based charity concerned with suicide among men; and it was Anthony’s wide knowledge of this problem which helped Jack to shape his on-screen character.

Jack had also worked with Bruce Jones, prior to Duty of Care, on Ken Loach’s Cannes award-winner, Raining Stones; and it was with great pride that all those involved with the new film received the praise and endorsement of the senior filmmaker. Yet it is also the town of Llandudno that stars in Asa and Jack’s compelling work: a place, perhaps, of sleepy anonymity, where Major Harris and Gary spend so many of their hours looking out to sea, churning over the past and wondering what the future holds…

*Jack Marsden, BAFTA award-winner for his role as PC Rylance in The Cops

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Verse for today

Barcoo, Queensland, 1906. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Foal in the Wire

Robbie Coburn, Lothian, 2025, 121 pps.
LIAM GUILAR finds insubstantiality in the Outback

Set in rural Australia, The Foal in the Wire is a book length narrative of short, individually titled poems.

The story is told by Sam, an adolescent boy. One night he finds a foal caught in a barbed-wire fence. He and his neighbour’s daughter, Julia, save the injured animal. As they help it regain its health, they draw closer together. Sam’s parents’ marriage is falling apart; he’s bullied at school, and Julia’s father is an abusive drunk. Some things are resolved: some can’t be.

Australia has a tradition of narrative poetry that shows how rich and varied the ‘verse novel’ can be. The three best known, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, and Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers, demonstrate different ways a writer could approach ‘narrative verse.’ They are all book-length stories, their lines don’t go all the way to the right margin, and they are marketed as poetry. Their differences are greater than these similarities. Porter’s narrator, Jill, is the literary granddaughter of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Told as a sequence of short, free verse poems, Porter’s lines and images create a modern, laconic private eye. Fredy Neptune is a masterclass in controlled rhythm, and the story, progressing through tightly controlled eight-line stanzas, reads like a picaresque novel. Wearne’s The Lovemakers, with its huge cast of characters, written in a variety of verse forms, reads like nothing and no one else, and at 800 pages is one of the longest verse narratives.

At the same time, staying in Australia, there’s a tradition of verse novels aimed at what is now described as the Young Adult market. Pioneered by writers like Steven Herrick, whose A Place Like This still reads well after thirty years, these books range from Herrick’s teenagers trying to find their place in modern Australia to work as different in both form and content as the dystopian science fiction of Lisa Jacobsen’s The Sunlit Zone.[i]

The Foal in the Wire, aimed at the YA market, sits comfortably in such company. It would make an excellent short story. The question anyone writing narrative poetry is forced to confront, sooner or later, is why not write the story in prose? Part of the answer, as suggested above, is that there is a range of techniques for organising words and creating effects with words which are available to someone writing verse.

Coburn has chosen to make little use of those resources. If organised sound is the essential characteristic of poetry, there’s little poetry in the book. The Foal in the Wire opens:

As I run down the veranda steps
in the dark

I can still hear them screaming
at each other
inside the house.

he doesn’t love her
and she doesn’t love him
but they stay.

Read aloud, I can’t hear a significant difference if the lines were written out as prose: As I run down the veranda steps in the dark, I can still hear them screaming at each other inside the house. he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him but they stay.[ii] It is a very popular stye of verse. The internet is awash with poets who write declarative sentences chopped into short lines. Some of them have had astonishing commercial success.[iii] For anyone brought up on this kind of poetry, and that includes many of the current YA market accessing poetry outside of school, Coburn’s style is going to be immediately familiar and comfortable.

In short poems, the style has very little to commend it. It sounds like a clumsy effort to plunk ‘Three Blind Mice’ on a Stradivarius which has recently been used by a virtuoso to play Bach’s Solo Partitas for violin.

However, as Coburn’s poem in The Brazen Head for Spring 2025 suggest, style here is a choice, a balancing of possible loss and gain, and such a plain style has definite advantages when used to write narrative verse. 

No one speaks in poetry but it’s easy to imagine someone telling this story. If Sam were speaking in iambic pentameter or tightly controlled Spenserian stanzas, littering his story with clever literary allusions, he would not sound like a lost teenager in rural Australia.[iv]

The other major advantage is pace. The story moves with the inevitability of a folk tale or a parable. Like a folk tale it can deal with cruelty and loss without romanticising or sensationalising either. 

Like a folk tale there is a characteristic blend of the general and the specific. Small details give the story credibility while there is an absence of details that would identify where and when the story takes place. The Foal in the Wire is located somewhere in rural Australia, on two properties that run horses. There is little to fix when the story happens. Having moved away, Julia writes a letter and sends it through the post. Although she and Sam take the bus to school, they don’t use computers or phones to communicate.[v]

Balanced against this is a careful use of detail making the story believable. Sam sneaking out at night:

“making sure to stay on the clover

lining the sides of the path

to avoid the potholes and depressions

left in the ground by horses.

tells us he’s done this many times. Both children, having watched their fathers, know how to help the foal.

Julia has bought another bottle of formula

and I have a bundle of hay

I gathered

from inside the shed.

dad won’t notice.

whenever hay is lifted

stalks fall from the bale

and gather on the floor. 

Style allows the story to become its own metaphor. The foal is both a particular foal, and a symbol of those who are damaged and survive. None of this needs to be underlined or emphasised. 

It would be a brave writer, especially in a first book, who trusted the reader enough to let the story do all the work. And ‘story’ isn’t everything. The book has a therapeutic potential. It’s offering its readers a realistic message of hope. Coburn occasionally gives those readers a gentle nudge towards the preferred reading as the narrative unfolds but comes close to labouring the point at the end.

The story ends at ‘After’, which concludes:

I want to write down everything

about my brother and Julia and the foal

I am no longer ashamed of who I am

and where I come from.

I can hold on and be anyone.

Two poems follow and both make the same point without adding to the story. The last piece, ‘Wounded Animal’ ends:

Maybe this

scarred and haunted body

is enough–

the wounded animal

is capable of survival.

If this seems to be restating what was already obvious, it is in keeping with the narrator’s character in a book aimed at adolescent readers and dedicated ‘for those who are wounded and surviving.’

There is a contemporary tendency to read poetry through the life of the writer. To claim that the writing is ‘authentic’, ‘raw’[vi] or ‘based on experience’, can set up a defence which frames any criticism as cruel, irrelevant or a personal attack on the writer.[vii]

But as made art, published and offered to strangers, what should matter is the quality of the product. No matter how intense the experience, or the emotion it engenders, once it’s written down and offered to a stranger, it is an unpleasant fact that even trauma is a cliché of life and literature. The more literate the reader, the greater the chance they’ve read versions of this story before. As humans we sympathise with people who suffer, but readers deserve something more for their money than a stranger telling them how bad their life was.

In the wrong hands The Foal in the Wire would be a string of YA Fiction cliches: a family disintegrating after the death of a child, a narrator lost, isolated, contemplating suicide, bullied at school, first love, first sexual experience, a drunk abusive father, some form of reconciliation.

What is therefore most impressive about Coburn’s handling of his material is that at no stage does his book read like a string of clichés. ‘First Time’ is that rare piece of writing, a description of a first sexual encounter that doesn’t sound coy, crude or clinical. It manages to capture the baffling nature of the experience:

like holding a body

and cradling a ghost

at the same time.

Bunting’s injunction: ‘Emotions first – but only facts in the poem’ might be too austere for a modern audience, but Coburn’s book comes close. There is no self-pity, no attempts to exaggerate the horror of the situation and no unrealistic Hollywood ending in which everything is made good and Sam and Julia live happily ever after, running their own shelter for abused horses. 

Whether or not the story is based on lived experience, Coburn’s triumph is to make it believable.

[i] The list of book length narratives could be extended, but these examples give some idea of their variety. Verse novel is no more a genre than prose novel.

[ii] This review was written with an uncorrected proof copy so quotations may vary in the final, published version. In the version I used, sentences within poems consistently begin without a capital letter.

[iii] Why readers buy books containing poems they themselves could have written while they were still at high school is one of life’s mysteries.

[iv] This is not to suggest that there are no literary teenagers in rural Australia. One of the criticisms levelled against Fredy Neptune was that its central character was too eloquent.

[v] There are possible reasons for a lack of phones and computers but their absence adds to the effect.

[vi] Although it seems I’m in the minority, ‘raw’, when applied to writing, is not a compliment. It suggests a lazy chef slapping uncooked food on the diners’ plates and leaving them to do his or her job.

[vii] The other version of this is to dismiss the writing without reading it because ‘everyone knows’ the writer is guilty of unacceptable behaviour, beliefs or opinions. Both popular extremes tend to ignore the actual writing.