The Psychogeographer – Page 12

Posted on December 30, 2022December 30, 2022 by Alexander Adams · 1 Comment

High treasures of the Low Countries

KMSKA: The Finest Museum

Patrick De Rynck (ed.), KMSKA, 2022, hardback, 256pp, fully illus., €45

KMSKA: The Finest Hundred

Patrick De Rynck (ed.),KMSKA,2022, hardback, 288pp, fully illus., €45

Bruegel and Beyond: Netherlandish Drawings in the Royal Library of Belgium, 1500-1800

Daan van Heesch, Sarah Van Ooteghem, Joris Van Grieken (eds.), Hannibal/KBR, 2022, hardback, 392pp, fully illus., €64.50

ALEXANDER ADAMS loses himself in the Low Countries

When the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, KMSKA) reopened on 24 September 2022, it had been closed for 11 years for a massive renovation that involved every part of the building and grounds. Two of three recent books cover the KMSKA as a museum, and highlights from the museum’s collections; the third covers Flemish and Walloon drawings from the Royal National Library of Belgium, in Brussels.

KMSKA: The Finest Museum is an overview of the renovation, including extensive photographs and plans relating the work done, including photographs of the renovated museum complete with art works. The museum was established in 1810; it expanded over the centuries and moved location from the academy to a purpose-built museum in 1890. It now houses 5,882 works, with prints by and after Rubens amounting to 714 prints.

Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Photo: Ad Meskens. Wikimedia Commons

Claus en Kaan Architecten initially expected the work on the museum would take place in stages that would allow the museum to stay open. That changed once a thorough inspection was undertaken. The building was in a much worse condition than had been expected, with large amounts of asbestos to be disposed of, and the climate-control system needing to be replaced completely. In order to provide new gallery space under the old building, a nuclear fallout shelter was dismantled. Care was taken to use as much natural light as possible, even on the new lower-floor galleries. The architects recognised the brilliant perfection of the original design, which had fine sightlines and so much natural light that electric lights were not added until 1976. The later addition of divisions for offices, depot and conservation studio complicated the layout and reduced space for art, so were removed.

The façade was repaired, using stone more frost-resistant than originally used. All the time, the new architects consulted the archives. A major alteration to the museum in the renovation was the use of internal courtyard patios for new galleries. These are starkly contemporary, with the old galleries restored to their 1890 state. Pompeiian-red and olive-green walls with gilded stucco detailing in ceilings and cornices. The minimalist settings for Modernist art are very sterile.

Of more concern is the thematic hanging of art. This new trend places pieces of art of ostensibly similar topics and themes beside one another so that they can permit cross-era comparison. This (initially) seems well meaning and stimulating; actually, it displays indirect hostility. The idea of curatorship as the placing of items of similar periods, places and makers in proximity is one where comparison of closely related items build a cohesive depiction of the attitudes, practices and mediums of the time. It is the bedrock of connoisseurship. That is why modern curators hate it. They seek to disrupt expertise by suggesting such a quality is merely the air of fusty museum denizens and narrowly focused specialists. It is allied to the trend of political programming, globalisation and cross-disciplinary studies – those justifications for disrupting networks of established knowledge and values.

KMSKA Curators here note that the museum cannot display an encyclopaedic story of European art because of the limited range of the collection. This seems insufficient grounds for breaking up a canonical presentation in terms of period, style and geography. In one photograph, a Rubens Holy Family is juxtaposed with a recent painting by Luc Tuymans. The large, richly coloured, emotionally inflected masterpiece next to the tiny painting of a face, drained of emotion, depth and colour, rather points out the futility of the experiment – unless it was done to demonstrate the weakness of today’s art.

I concede I could be wrong about the KMSKA hang but all previous such displays I have encountered have had an air of a curator intrusive buttonholing the visitor to comment ‘Have you noticed?’, in comparisons that are either obtuse or superficial. KMSKA curators seem to have been let off the leash in limited circumstances. Let us hope thematic foolishness – which does a disservice to a specialist and anyone seeking to understand an art work from context – is reversed promptly.

Jean Fouquet: Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim, 1450s

To find out what is in the KMSKA permanent collection, one can consult The Finest Hundred, which offers a selection of highlights, starting in the late Gothic period, with Simone Martini, through the Renaissance and the Golden Age of Low Countries art. Masterpieces of this period include an unfinished Jan Van Eyck panel (that somehow evaded a common tendency to finish or tidy up incomplete paintings), Jean Fouquet’s famed Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim (c. 1452-8) (that chilly classic, part maternity, part erotica), a Cranach nude and a handsome early Titian. Other South Netherlandish paintings are by Van Eyck (again), Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling and Quinten Massys. The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1554) by Frans Floris shows Archangel St Michael slaying nightmarish monsters. Naturally, the home city of Rubens houses a fine collection – mainly of large religious works. There are Dutch still-lifes and Flemish religious paintings. Portraits record important figures in Antwerp’s history, including the period under Hapsburg rule.

James Ensor at his easel. Self-portrait, 1890

There is a historical revival painting by Henri de Braekeleer (1840-1888) of a man seated in a seventeenth-century interior, with a fabulously ornate wall hanging behind him, as richly foliated as a forest. The KMSKA’s great collection of 39 paintings and over 600 drawings by the brilliant individualist James Ensor (1860-1949) is represented by six examples, including two of his ground-breaking and influential mask paintings. The museum’s policy of buying good examples of contemporary art from local exhibitions has paid off in the form of a strong collection from the inter-war period of Flemish Expressionism, Fauvism and Post-Cubism. There is a scattering of more foreign art by Ingres, Modigliani, Fontana and others.

The Finest Hundred contains a chapter explaining the renovation project, including some of the same photographs illustrated in the previous book. The book contains full works and some details, with a page of commentary and details for each painting or sculpture. For the average reader wanting to know about KMSKA’s art, The Finest Hundred is the best book; for architects, designers and those in the museum field, The Finest Museum is the best choice.

Bruegel and Beyond: Netherlandish Drawings in the Royal Library of Belgium, 1500-1800 presents 98 drawings by Dutch and Flemish artists born before 1800, now in the collection of the Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels (KBR). (The term ‘Netherlandish’ in art history usually means from the Low Countries, before 1500; after that point, a distinction is usually drawn between Dutch, Flemish, Luxembourgish and Walloon, except when they are referred to as ‘Low Countries’.) Although the catalogue has 98 entries (each with a full-page illustration, facing commentary and data, sometimes with details and comparative figures), it contains many illustrations of related graphics and paintings. Bruegel and Beyond is more of a thorough academic catalogue than The Finest Hundred, with an emphasis on scholarship and detailed description and discussion.

The period opens in 1520, when Bosch was working. One drawing is after (or perhaps even by) Bosch. It is a collection of figure studies of fantastic cripples, beggars and rogues. There are two very detailed ink drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526-1569); one is of a Boschian landscape relating to the sin of lust, another depicts an allegory of the virtue of justice. Some of the early drawings are unattributed; a dearth of comparative material and documentation means that authorship, locations and dates are all provisional. Rubens, Jordaens, Adriaen van Ostade, Hans Bols and other major artists are also represented.

The selection provides a great span of techniques: metalpoint (metal stylus on prepared paper), ink, pencil, line and wash, chalk and watercolour. There are not just pieces of artistic interest; the topographical watercolours of Adrien de Montigny border on the artistically naïve, but are good examples of a type of art we do not see much discussed by art historians; such depictions are more the province of historians. There are drawings for anatomy treatises, decoration for book title pages, book illustrations and mural designs. Overall, the high standard of the scholarship, attention to detail, large reproductions and clear production design make Bruegel and Beyond a very suitable book for any extensive library on Old Master drawings and history of art in the Low Countries.

Alexander Adams

ALEXANDER ADAMS is an artist, art critic, novelist and poet. His most recent book is Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism (Societas/Imprint Academic, 2022)

Posted on December 24, 2022December 24, 2022 by Ken Bell

Another American empire

The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World

Edward Shawcross, Faber & Faber, January 2022, 336 pages, £20

KEN BELL reflects on a Mexico that might have been

Mexico has only ever had one ruler who cared about the Indians and he was shot by order of an Indian. Mexican humour always has a deadpan kick. How that ruler, an Austrian, ended up in Mexico only to die there is the subject of Edward Shawcross’ book, and a very good account it is of the whole ludicrously tragic event.

This disaster came in three acts, with the first being set in Mexico and created by the local politicians. The country became independent of Spain in 1821 and within 20 years had gone through 11 presidents, only one of whom had completed his term in office. Mexico had also managed to have an emperor who didn’t last long, either, before being shot [EDITOR’S NOTE: Agustín of Mexico, reigned 1822-3]. In the 1840s a lost war with the United States had stripped the country of its northern territories, and a decade later a civil war had added to the nation’s woes.

The author overstates his case by putting most of the blame on the United States, and ignoring the role of Mexicans as the authors of their own misfortunes. For instance, Mexico could probably have fended off America’s ambitions in the 1840s by recognising the independence of Texas, which they had lost in 1836. Britain quite liked having a free trade republic that bought British goods and sold cotton to Lancashire, and with a bit of prodding from Mexico would probably have guaranteed the independence of the Republic of Texas, thus giving Mexico a buffer state. Mexico was not prepared to do that as politicians outdid each other in their bombastic determination to promise that Texas would be restored to la patria. It is perhaps not surprising Texan politicians preferred the embrace of the United States, but with a bit more Mexican astuteness it might have been averted.

At root, Mexico’s problems came about because of the internal divisions in the country, divisions intensified by the fact that political factions organised themselves within the secrecy of Masonic lodges. Thus politics became a kind of conspiracy, fought out by factions behind closed doors. Politicians outdid themselves in promising to rain hellfire down on the United States and those who would betray the nation by compromising with Washington, before trotting off to the American embassy to try and negotiate some backroom deal. Shawcross shows that out of this chaos, two political factions emerged. The first was the conservative-monarchists who had managed to lose the War of Reform in the 1850s and were gagging for revenge. The others were the liberal-republicans who wanted a federal republic in Mexico based upon the example of the United States.

For the second act, Shawcross looks at events in Europe, a factor often overlooked, especially by Mexican historians who often seem to treat the French intervention as just another act of colonialism when actually it was far more. Catholic Europe by the 1850s had become afraid of the rising power of the Protestant United States. Napoleon III was an autocrat, but of a very modern kind, who believed in constitutions and science. He was a great fan of the newly developed science of statistics and his statisticians told him that the two million people in the USA in 1763 had become ‘32 million in 1863 and calculated that in 1963 it would be 512 million.’

It was fear of the growing USA that led the French to conjure up the notion of Latin America, with themselves as the head of a Pan-Latin movement to connect Catholic Europe to Catholic America and fend off the rising USA. Thus, Mexican conservatives who wanted an empire in Mexico found a very sympathetic listener in Napoleon III and the French intelligentsia and military. Having settled on the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, it only needed a small French army to land at Veracruz, move inland to Mexico City and hang around until the new Emperor arrived to take charge in the interest of France. What could possibly go wrong?

The final act showed just how badly things could. The Mexican republicans managed to defeat the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. Actually, the French were only a part of the army as much of it was made up of Mexican conservatives, a fact which Mexican historians tend to overlook. Another factor in the defeat was that the bulk of the French officers and men were suffering from the affliction known as the ‘MexicanRevenge’. It is very difficult to load and fire a musket when squatting down because your bowels have turned to jelly.

Eventually, the French did manage to install Maximilian in Mexico City, which was when the Mexican conservatives discovered that they had been lumbered with a liberal who was not willing to turn the full, reactionary forces of Catholicism against Protestant heresy. Maximilian often wore traditional Mexican dress, learned some of the native languages and was quite happy to promote American-Indians to high office, with General Tomas Mejia commanding his light cavalry. Mejia was actually a brilliant cavalryman who saved Maximilian’s fortunes on several occasions before dying next to him in front of the same firing squad in 1867, but for those ultra-conservatives who wanted a reactionary empire he was an example that Maximilian was rather too modern for their tastes.

Having alienated the conservatives, Maximilian was unable to reach an understanding with his liberal enemies, headed by Benito Juarez, who was also an American-Indian, because they did not need to compromise. Divisions grew in the conservatives’ ranks and having an Austrian on the throne meant the liberals could crank up Mexican xenophobia to its fullest extent. Juarez orated about freeing the country from all foreigners while at the same time negotiating with the United States for arms and supplies. As soon as the American Civil War ended, Washington was only too happy to keep its side of the bargain, leaving unspoken the fact that Mexicans were dying to get the French out of their country only for American business to move in.

The French abandoned Maximilian for the same reasons that the American would abandon South Vietnam: it was costing them far too many men and far too much money to continue the contest. Maximilian hung on for longer than anyone expected, until eventually one of his most trusted generals crossed the lines and betrayed him for $30,000, which admittedly was rather a lot of money in those days.

Edouard Manet: Execution of Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico

During his time on the throne, a tomb began to be constructed for Maximilian, but after his death, the body was returned to Austria and the tomb was then completed and used for the body of Benito Juarez in 1872. About 25 yards away from Juarez’s tomb, is the grave of General Tomas Mejia, who died with his Emperor in 1867. After all the slaughter that had taken place, it is perhaps fitting that those two mortal enemies became neighbours in death: they were both Mexicans when all is said and done. It fell to Porferio Diaz, a liberal general, to seize Mexico by the throat following the death of Juarez and install the ‘liberal dictatorship’ that Maximilian should have created. His 35-year rule lasted until 1910, when everything fell apart again.

Shawcross has given us a solid account of this turbulent part of Mexico’s past, that surely merits a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the history of the Americas.

Ken Bell

KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Stuart Millson · 2 Comments

Overlooked Orpheans

STUART MILLSON enjoys some neglected gems of British music

Why does the spiritual toll of the Great War seem to have been harsher for Britain than for any of the other European combatants, asks organist, scholar, music-writer Robert James Stove, in commentary for a booklet which accompanies a new CD on the Australian Ars Organi label. His answer is clear and convincing: ‘… the innate stability of British political institutions meant a lack of opportunities for citizens to work off their war-neuroses by revolutionary activism, as agitators did on the Continent.’ Only in a marginal way did iconoclasm and an avant-garde spirit affect Britain, post-Passchendaele: for every Vorticist there was a Vaughan Williams offering benediction, although few realised that the composer’s Pastoral Symphony of 1922 was inspired by his own experiences of service on the Western Front. (Listen more closely to the ghostly, wordless voice in the unsettling final movement…)

The new recording, a superb audio curation of British music made in the magnificent acoustic of Our Lady of Victories Basilica, Camberwell, Victoria, Australia, assembles less-well-known names from the canon of Albion’s musical renascence. Alongside John Ireland and Vaughan Williams, for example, are Thomas F. Dunhill (excerpts from his Three Chiddingfold Pieces), Sir Walter Galpin Alcock (Westminster Abbey organist at three coronations during the high-tide of Empire) and Alan Gray (successor to Stanford in the organ loft at Trinity College, Cambridge).

All works and composers chosen by the Ars Organi Recordings for this collection have in common a profound attachment to English tonality (although Norman Fulton, at CD track 11, is a Scot). It is as if the music of our islands is a mirror-image of the (physical and psychological) architecture of the very institutions that have long-governed us. The slow-breathing, hushed voices of churchgoers, a ray of wintry light, piercing through a cathedral window like a gimlet; a sense of eyes being drawn toward the pinnacle of a Norman arch – these are some of the feelings and imaginings inspired by many of the works, some of which are ethereally-enhanced by the participation of singers Elizabeth Barrow (soprano), Brigette De Poi and Emily Tam (mezzo-sopranos), Leighton Triplow (tenor) and bass, James Emerson.

John Ireland’s The Holy Boy and a George Herbert setting (The Call) from Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs are probably the best-known pieces in the entire collection. Peter Warlock’s old English carol, Adam lay Ybounden, also finds an occasional place in concerts and Radio 3 schedules. But who knows the music of the composer, whose work concludes the CD: Geoffrey Turton Shaw? A near-contemporary of Vaughan Williams, he served as a school inspector and was himself schooled by that master of church music, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Setting Milton, Ring out, ye crystal spheres/Once bless our human ears… Turton Shaw embodies all the virtues of his genre and world, confirming the past, present and future solidity of English music.

The music of a Welshman, Daniel Jones (1912-1993) makes up another important collection of lesser-known music from our shores, in a well-presented four-disc set from Lyrita Recorded Edition. Many will remember the remarkable ground-breaking Lyrita vinyls of old: symphonies by Bax and Rubbra, John Ireland songs, The Magic Island by William Alwyn, and a record that particularly caught my eye when I first came across it in the record department of Foyles, some 40 years ago – Ireland’s Forgotten Rite, Legend, Mai–Dun and Satyricon – with its strange, haunting cover-artwork; a picture which hinted at the form of a landscape, with dotted colours and distances just out of reach. In fact, if I were to try to find a simple, neat description of Daniel Jones’s music, it would come close to those suggestions inspired by the Ireland graphics – although this enigmatic composer (a code-breaker during World War Two) never really embraced, at least self-consciously, folklore and the symbolism of place. He tended to think of himself as a composer who happened to come from Wales, rather than an artist who had a civic responsibility to proclaim a culture – although he did write a major choral-orchestral piece, The Country Beyond the Stars, which – post-Festival of Britain – seemed to have an ambience of dreamy peninsular coasts, beacons and Black Mountains.

Perhaps the nearest he came to a home-spirit, an imprint of Welshness, was in his Dance Fantasy, performed at the 1982 Proms by the (then) BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra under Bryden Thomson – although the work still seemed somewhat set apart from Welsh dances and Celtic legends by fellow-countrymen Hoddinott, Mathias and Arwel Hughes. And it was at this concert that I briefly met the musician… As I walked around the hall at the end of the evening, making my way back to the tube station and suburbia, I spied the bespectacled composer (this one-time friend of Dylan Thomas) at the Royal Albert Hall Artists’ Entrance. Venturing over, I asked for an autograph, which was cheerfully forthcoming and written in a neat, methodical hand, with a fountain pen. An avuncular, slightly diminutive figure, Daniel Jones seemed very pleased by the performance of his own music at the Proms. (It has to be said, the Proms Planning Department has been less than generous to the composers of Wales.)

Lyrita’s new CD collection puts the music of Jones and Cambria very much on the map. Pianist Martin Jones has spent many hours in the National Library of Wales, painstakingly uncovering an almost Bach-like progression, cycle, abundance of piano works, from a neatly-crafted Capriccio of 1934, to the much more ambitious (“big stride”, was the composer’s own description) Theme, Variations and Fugue in C-sharp minor, dated 1945 – the year of Britten’s Peter Grimes and the advent of the Attlee era. Tonal, but sometimes wandering away from those clear lines; meditative, but never obscurely introverted, Daniel Jones created, it seems, pure music, for its own sake. Rigorous, never arduous, and always making the listener wonder what the next piece will bring.

A great deal of the composer’s character is also suggested by some of the photographic portraits featured in Lyrita’s CD booklet, not least the final black-and-white plate: Dan Jones, with benevolent eyes and a grin, partly concealed by the pint of bitter he is bringing to his lips. A good Welsh brew, no doubt.

CD details

Undertones of War, British Organ and Vocal Music After 1918. Robert James Stove, organ. Ars Organi, AOR004

Daniel Jones, Rediscovered Piano Works, Martin Jones, piano. Lyrita, SRCD.2396

Stuart Millson

STUART MILLSON is a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, and a Contributing Editor to The Brazen Head

Posted on September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 by Stuart Millson

“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile”

STUART MILLSON can hear Restoration London from 21st century Kent

Music@Malling, planned and organised by classical musician and educator, Thomas Kemp, is one of those provincially-based, smaller festivals which succeeds in bringing performers of national and international standing to local and semi-rural settings. So, instead of having to travel to Kings Place, Wigmore Hall, or St. James, Piccadilly for the pleasure of hearing the finest chamber music, discerning audiences in a mid-Kent community need only stroll to their local church, or the modern performance space of the Norman-built Malling Abbey to savour baroque bands such as Fretwork, who gave Music@Malling’s lunchtime concert on Wednesday 28th September.
With thoughts of the succession of the modern monarchy still fresh in our minds, Fretwork transported us to the candlelit rooms of Restoration England – to the great, collective release of breath and creativity that followed the crumbling of Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the return of the ‘Merry Monarch’. It was the great Henry Purcell of William and Mary fame, and the sometimes overlooked Matthew Locke (who possibly taught that renowned composer) who together gave voice to this other, long-before-Elgar English musical renascence. Fretwork’s Malling Abbey tribute to them could not have been more all-encompassing, because although only a group numbering five players and performing just sequences of fantasias, the choice of works somehow captured, perfectly, the authentic soul and sound of the composers and their age. If one representative musical fragment of an epoch could survive, the cadences of those intimate Fantasias would suffice.
Purcell’s immense creativity, packed into his remarkably short life (1659-1695), was legendary; like an English Mozart, a stream of work flowed, with Fretwork giving us an example of this impossible productivity, in the form of Fantasias 8 (in D minor) and No. 9 (in A minor) written on consecutive days. The trait of English melancholia, which would surface again some three centuries later in Vaughan Williams, Britten and Alexander Goehr (the latter earning a place in Fretwork’s programme) is clearly audible in Purcell’s music, but perhaps less so in Matthew Locke’s Consort of Four Parts No. 3, who allowed more of the spirit of the boisterous bourrée into his music, but still tempering his lighter touch, with the reflection of the sentimental saraband.

Alexander Goehr. Photo: Etan Tal. Wikimedia Commons

In his introduction to the concert, Festival organiser, Thomas Kemp, spoke of Purcell’s music as “harmonically complex for the period in which it was written”. Yet contemporary composer, Alexander Goehr, writing in an age of deliberately difficult atonality, decided to reach back to the general harmonies of Purcell’s time in his own Fantasias, written for Fretwork in 2000. Goehr’s music may be seen as Purcell through a modern prism (like Britten’s absorption of Dowland) and yet the Fantasia No. 2 for Five Viols begins with an abrupt phrase – a jolt, or disturbance in the autumnal English landscape, confirming Goehr as no purveyor of pastiche, but a composer in the continuum stretching back to Purcell and Locke’s time.
Ancient and modern were reconciled not just in the music. Fretwork’s music-stands held, not paper scores, but digital devices on whose screens were displayed the staves and notes of the 17th century. It was a fitting touch at this most memorable recital.

Stuart Millson

STUART MILLSON is a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, and a Contributing Editor to The Brazen Head

Posted on September 27, 2022September 27, 2022 by Liam Guilar

Highwire poetry

Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light

Reagan M. Sova, First to Knock, 2022, 265 pages, US$17

LIAM GUILAR takes a ringside seat for a dazzling extravaganza

‘Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is an incantatory work of narrative poetry. Infused with hobo melancholy, Jewish lore, bloodshed and hilarity…’.

It’s rare for a blurb to be so accurate. For the price of the book, Reagan M. Sova will perform as ring master, troubadour, high wire artist and magician to entertain and dazzle the awestruck crowd.

Set in the first decades of the twentieth century, the story is told by Mort Sloman, who leaves home at thirteen. He falls in with a circus, and in love with a Gypsy trapeze artist, discovers friendship across the barriers of race and difference, witnesses institutionalised racism, violent death and corruption, joins the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World, IWW) and unionizes his circus, travels through Europe during the First World War to Egypt, returns to America to help the union cause and finally performs the Festival of Light for his dead relatives.

A lot happens.

At the beginning, the narrator sets out on a quest, mounted on a mule rather than a white charger:

i/consecrated unto myself the sacred mission
the ceremony of light to honor Frank and Aunt J
i had the song in hand but i
could not do it without the right guitar
nor the Locksmith keys
not even the rabbis have them

While this quest gives the story a beginning and end, the ‘sacred mission’ fades into the background, replaced first by Sloman’s devoted pursuit of the gypsy acrobat, then by his experiences with the travelling circus, and his involvement in the IWW. Although set in a world anchored in the familiar by historical names – Ringling Brothers, Big Bill Hayward, Eugene V. Debs – and recognisable conditions and historical events, the story moves in a liminal space that shifts Sloman’s journey into the realm of legend.

The circus, which Sloman calls ‘The Kingdom’, is a ready-made symbol of America, with its outcast others, unusual characters labelled as freaks, and self-confident, exploitative hucksters and frauds. His is an American Dream where the poor boy escapes the bullies, finds love and wealth, and good guys find friendship and love, and win despite the odds stacked against them.

The poem exploits its own intertextuality in a cheerfully unembarrassed way. There are echoes of Whitman and the Ginsberg of Howl. But the influences are taken and adapted. A rambling man bound for glory with guitar on his back, writing songs and supporting the union, evokes Woody Guthrie, but the verbal inventiveness of Sloman’s songs is a world away from Woody’s. Like Sloman’s parade, which begins with himself and his friend and grows throughout the story, Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is robust and generous enough to accommodate whatever resonance the individual reader brings.

The dominant stylistic presence, however, is Frank Stanford and The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Of all Sova’s many magic tricks, the most impressive is the way he has managed to take Stanford’s instantly recognisable style, make it his own and adapt it to his own purposes.

By shortening Stanford’s line, leaving it unpunctuated and rarely end stopped, Sova has given the poem a rhythm which carries the reader through Sloman’s adventures. Stanford’s distinctive incantatory eruptions are present, but kept under control so they never take over the story the way they do in The Battlefield. They are a major factor in producing the slightly hallucinatory effect that keeps shifting the story from its factual, historical setting into the dream realm.

When Alf, the circus master, asks the thirteen years-old Sloman what he could have seen ‘with so few years under your cap’, he replies:

i have seen the elderly monk gored by the falling icicle
i have seen the family of elk sleeping next to me in the moonlight
i have seen bob’s jar of brandy
i have seen the vial of goof dust I used to trick the trickster
i have seen the blood trickling
from my grandfather’s ear when he died roller-skating
i have seen good luck without grace invite darkness
i have seen the Gypsy’s vision of my death by the mountain

This early list is typical of the many that follow. They can include everything from the factual to the surreal, as Alf’s reply does. Sometimes it is not obvious how the items coalesce into coherence. Their exuberance often seems an enjoyable end in itself.

As well as contributing to the tone of the story, they serve another function. A long narrative poem needs variety in pace. A relentlessly onward rush becomes as boring as a story that goes nowhere. Part of Sova’s balancing act is to know when to allow the voice to narrate action without interruption, and know when to pause the narration and use the incantatory to add variety.

In the circus, the emperor’s armless great granddaughter plays the violin with her toes. As an image it’s simultaneously pitiful and ridiculous. Like the circus performers, the story risks absurdity. In the wrong hands, much of it would be silly. But the final magic trick, and perhaps the most subtle, is to make Sloman’s voice and story believable on its own terms and hold a reader’s attention for 250 pages. Stylistically assured, inventive, entertaining, Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is that rare thing, a well-written narrative poem with a distinctive style creating an unforgettable story world.

Liam Guilar

LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain. His most recent publication is a translation of the Mabinogion folk-tale How Culhwch Won Olwen (Shearsman, 2026)

Posted on September 27, 2022September 29, 2022 by Liam Guilar

A Queen in the Wilderness

LIAM GUILAR‘s epic of post-Roman Britain enters its eighth chapter

The Story So Far (Chapters 2-7 inclusive have all previously been published on this site, starting here). The complete poem will be published as A Man of Heart in 2023, by Shearsman.

Mid Fifth Century Britain. After the legions have withdrawn, the island is facing civil war, a growing number of external enemies and a steady tide of pagan migrants looking for land.

Vortigern has been appointed to protect what’s left of Roman Britain. Following standard imperial practice, he has employed Saxon mercenaries led by Hengist. Together they have defeated the immediate threat of an army of Picts and a Northern rebellion and stabilised the province. Vortigern has married Hengist’s daughter.

Part two begins with Vortigern leading the Field Army towards a meeting of the Northern Lords, hoping to convince them that a unified province is in their best interests. The precarious balance of power he has established is about to be destroyed.

1

Damp woollen clothes,

the itch and stink of them,

never dried, except when smoked

acrid by the heat of a fire.

Rain falls, drifts, batters,

the wind skins the rocks

or drags mist from the hollows

while the clouds smother the hill tops.

Ragged local guides thread

the mounted column

through unmapped valleys.

Occasionally the mountain wall

greyer than the clouds

curves the northern horizon.

Riders keeping below the ridge,

following the main party.

Like guilt, thought Vortigern,

not enough to stop his progress;

a persistent qualification

intent on being noticed.

Confrontation seemed inevitable.

He rode towards it.

The lead rider, Hengist’s latimer,

dismounted, knelt and greeted him.

The second removed the gilded helmet

shook out her hair and said:

‘Wæs hæilVortigern Cyning.’[ii]

The drab hillsides patched with torn cloud,

the finest of drizzle-intensified colours,

the brown horse, the green, rain darkened cape.

Her hair, like dull gold, shaking loose.

Hengist’s delighted chuckle.

A sound so rare,

he turned to see who was behind him.

Dull gold of her hair.

Finger tipping an impossible softness.

He claws for his mind but undressing

a marvel

green eyes

watch

like a diver

assessing the risk

before

committing herself to gravity.

Fingertipping, soft

a marvel but

it’s cold here and the escort is waiting.

Green eyes

wide open, watching?

‘Lauerd king wæs hæil;

For þine kime ich æm uæin.’

It’s cold here and the escort is waiting.

‘This is no place for a Queen.

I left you safe, with your uncle.

We ride towards a confrontation.

Go home.’

‘My home is with my husband.

I have come to see the lands you gave me.

You are riding I think to a council,

a gathering of the northern tribes.’

‘Go home, lady.

This is no fit place for a Queen.’

He turns back to the valley floor.

The riders follow,

keeping just below the ridge line.

Like guilt, he thinks.

The column camped beside dark water.

He approved the choice of ground,

checked there were skirmishers along the heights,

made sure the baggage train was safely in,

waited for the rear guard to arrive.

See him talking with his officers,

noticing their discipline

making time to hear their stories,

in the bustle of the camp,

where behaviour is defined

as clearly as the perimeter

he rides out to inspect,

ignoring the presence

dragging at his attention.

Tents pitched, guards posted,

before the light began to fade

he wandered through the lines,

through the susurration

of tired conversations

stopping to talk to weary riders

commending them on the care

they gave each other, their arms and horses.

His world, where he was most at home,

contaminated by their shadow,

stopped on higher ground,

erecting simple shelters.

She sits beside the latimer

watching the busy camp below.

‘I stopped counting things I’d never seen before.’

‘There were too many?’

‘Yes. The way

water spills from the cliff top and wavers as it falls.

Clouds and birds below us, in the valley.

My uncle hates mountains,

says they remind him of a heaving sea.

What is the best word to describe

how stray clouds drift across the hillside?’

‘Drift is good.’

‘They remind me of assassins.’

‘In daylight?’

‘Not all assassins wait for darkness.’

Small figures

scrambling towards them,

become Vortigern

and his guard

slithering in the scree.

Keredic removed himself.

A man can turn a hill into a mountain;

an evening stroll into an epic climb.

From the valley floor

he could see a band of rock,

her tethered horse cropping the grass,

the shadow of a cave.

Then the damp fog became the world.

Smooth stones skittering behind him,

stalled in a dreamlike lack of progress.

She was sitting inside the cave.

She did not rise or greet him.

‘Lady. This is not wise or safe.’

‘Not safe? Here?

In the green world, in the wind and rain.

There are no dangers here that can’t be faced.

But stranded in a hut, hedged

by brutal threats and body parts?

No reason to greet the day

or welcome the night?

This is not safety but burial,

alive, behind locked doors

until the stallion calls to rut.

I am not ‘Hengist’s daughter’

live bait to trap a wary fox.

I am myself. And I chose you.’

When he had finished,

she waited for him to leave

but he lay beside her,

on one side of the causeway

looking to the mythic landfall

on the other side.

He had heard the stories

of the cottage in the woods.

A stand of body parts

and heads that shrieked

if anyone approached.

What had she recognised in him?

He had done nothing to earn

this devotion.

2.

The rain intensifies.

A man is speaking quietly,

someone laughs.

Keredic is singing.

His song sounds older than the rocks.

She is no longer Hengist’s daughter.

Or the wife of Vortigern the King.

She is like rock, tree or river,

as certain as the mountains

and as patient, waiting

for his act of recognition.

Half way across, and no more stones.

He can go back, he’s always done before.

Rise, fumble for his clothes.

Or he can brave the distance to the other side.

If it’s a choice?

A man stands in the cathedral ruins

looking at the sky.

The bombed reality softened by a memory

of upright walls, unbroken roof.

Even if ghosts and stray dogs

scuffle in the garbage

he can remember people in the pews,

the drift of sacred music,

the certainties of ritual.

Easier to live here,

where the shattered past

still feels like home than leap into a world

that’s blank and waiting to be born?

No maps, no rules, no precedent.

When a Queen rides, armed, in the wilderness

this is an unimagined world.

‘Lady, may I stay with you tonight?

And tomorrow, would you ride with me?’

They say: her smile is like the sunrise;

the slow spread of light and promise

after the horrors of the night,

but she never smiled at ‘them’ like this.

And later, she says, ‘But tomorrow night

we find a bed with fewer stones?’

3

Teetering over the river

the complex was scattered,

across the flat hill top

like bad teeth in a jawbone;

great hall like a strange squat wooden tent

with a scattering of huts

surrounded by a ditch and palisade.

A growth on the land,

like hanging smoke,

beside a barrow

where the ancestors slept.

A chaos of temporary shelters

festering down the slope;

banners and stacked spears,

horses, mules, carts.

Men clustered around small fires,

watching as they pass.

After days in the dripping quiet of the hills,

they were ambushed by noise and movement

crashing the private space she had begun to craft.

The bellowing of slaughtered cattle.

Carpenters hammering and sawing

as huts went up to hold guests;

the smiths at work. Everyone

with a job to do and a place to be

swirling them into public routines.

She watched the Lords accumulate to greet him.

Then he was gone, as though the sea had surged

and dragged him off the beach into the rip

that sped him out towards the sky line

leaving her bereft and stranded.

Wives and daughters came to greet her,

took the bridle, set off in procession,

leading her towards an isolated hut.

Slaves brought silver bowls

with steaming water,

sweet smelling oils;

the women bobbed and fussed,

admired how beautiful she was,

then left and closed the door.

Next day, in the great hall,

Vortigern accepted homage,

dispensed gifts, discussed plans,

handed down judgements.

Alone in a hut that smelt

of smoke and fresh cut timber,

she was prowling from wall to wall.

Dressed in the finest silk

provided by their hosts,

hair dressed, jewels shining,

a predatory goddess

no slaughter could appease.

The silver dishes

scattered to the corners,

fine white towels thrown across the room,

the servants fled in terror.

She was waiting for the horns

that would summon her to the feast

when Keredic entered

to escort her to the hall.

Wall hangings flicking the firelight.

A tripod burning something fragrant.

No loom, no Mother Gothel.

I will hone my knife and hunt him down.

‘If I am Queen: this is my country?

Should I not be there when they discuss its future?’

Impossible to explain,

not one man in ten thousand

would have taken her to the gathering

and of that number, not one in a million

would have listened to a word she said.

‘Twenty four paces from hut to hall?

The door shut and guards all round.

Twenty four paces from where I should be.

I might as well be stranded on an island

staring at the cliffs and cut off by the tide,

locked here until he wants to fuck

his princess titznkuntnhair.’

4

If you were listening,

you could hear Dame Fortune

spin her wheel

and smile.

‘Chieftain,’ said his host,

‘God smiles on you.

Lords of the North,

retinues like honed blades

ready for war,

secure in their indifference

came here to talk.

Bishops and book-learned men

recording their agreements.

3 weeks, and not one death.

You have sold them an idea:

the priest safe with his flock,

the famer will go to his field,

the merchant to the market.

Ships bringing goods to our ports

and our roads busy with trade.

Chieftain, you are truly blest.

3 weeks we’ve feasted.

The bards of the north

have come to compete

for praise and honeyed mead.

Magnificent stories,

music to gladden the heart

and the last three nights

your wife as my companion at the table.

On God’s wide earth she has no match

for wit and wisdom. She knows

5

Rowena sitting straight backed

staring at her fire.

We see her from behind.

Then her face in profile

as the sound she’s waiting for

breaks.

Vortigern straightens,

entering the room.

Stalled. Baffled. Wondering.

She rises. ‘Oh foolish man,’

she says, seeing his surprise,

‘when will you ever learn?’

The sound of a door being closed.

Perhaps he managed,

‘I watched you leave’

or, ‘I’m so sorry.’

An awkward blur of mouths,

hands, her hands, his hands, hard to tell.

Nose to nose,

he asks the golden lady,

‘What would you do?’

She had waited for this door to open.

But now the gate’s swung wide,

invited in, she pauses on the threshold;

‘I can taste winter; smell it on the wind.

Ice darkens the edges of puddles,

the thick mud hardens into rut and fold

and the wind tests the walls.

Outdoors everyone has begun to hurry.

The space from dwelling to hall becomes an ordeal.

Soon only the numbed sentry,

counting the cursed hours of his watch,

will stay squinting into the hazed light,

knowing no army moves in winter.’

‘Gloucester knows the northern winter.

He was trapped here on The Wall,

searching for his legion.

We’ve all heard his snowbound stories;

roads they had to swim across,

mud so deep men drowned in it.’

‘They were impatient,

their timing is inept.

Why are you smiling?’

‘Because incompetence is unpredictable.

They went too late or far too early.

The gods look down,

indifferent to our careful planning

and give their blessings to stupidity.’

‘I would go deep into the hills,

find a place we can defend

with half the men we have.

Then wait for Hengist to return.

And if I couldn’t find that place,

I’d build it, quickly.’

‘They‘ll expect us to go north.

We will go south and west and then

prey upon those who have betrayed us.’

‘We’ll plague the sleeping lords,

drunk by their cosy fires.

Burn their homes, steal their cattle,

kill their friends and families

and then come spring,

with Hengist’s help,

brush the remnants off the map.’

Vortigern called his officers together,

explained the friends and places lost,

named those who stood beside them.

‘You have been loyal. Now,

we travel to high country,

hard travelling, constant vigil.

From the mountains in the west,

we will fall upon the rebel lords,

we will reprimand their insolence.

They will learn the price of disobedience.’

The northern lords knelt before him.

‘Send for us when you are ready:

we will ride beside you.

Take our sons as hostages and guides.’

Local guides thread the column

through unmapped valleys.

The mountain wall

greyer than the clouds

leans forward to embrace them.

[i] Old English Cwēn meant both ‘woman’ and ‘queen’.

[ii] Cyning, Old English for King, is pronounced ku-ning.

[iii] From The Vulgate. Genesis 2:18: ‘The Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him’

Liam Guilar

Posted on September 25, 2022October 4, 2022 by Paul Garner

Lincolnshire – a land apart

Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire

Derek Turner, Hurst & Co., 2022, hb., 446pps, 32 col. Illus. & map, £20

PAUL GARNER enjoys a survey of an oddly little-known county

Edge of England is a rich tapestry woven of many threads—history, nature, industry, geography, religion and folklore—all intertwining to create a picture full of interest. It tells the story, or rather multiplexity of stories, of the author’s adopted county of Lincolnshire, an unjustly overlooked and unfashionable part of England, one that is often, as the author reminds us in his opening chapter, the butt of snide jokes and liberal disdain. Turner’s book challenges this snobbery and prejudice, revealing “a county like no other … an England time half-forgot, where you can still find an unabashed past inside an unpretentious present—and freedom and space on a little offshore island”.

Turner delights the reader with captivating tales of eccentric characters, atmospheric places and intriguing events, his wide reading and breadth of knowledge apparent on every page. A thousand and one rabbit trails are laid by the author, any one of which could profitably be followed by an inquisitive reader. We learn about the lives and times of many sons and daughters of the shire, some well-known, others less so. Among the colourful characters that we meet are parliamentarians, scientists, explorers, military men, poets and writers, and religious figures.

The more familiar include John Wesley, the evangelical clergyman whose spirited preaching was the fountainhead of the emerging Methodist movement, Sir Isaac Newton, the scientific prodigy who developed differential calculus while sheltering from the plague at Woolsthorpe in 1665, and Dutch engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, whose land reclamation work met with fierce opposition from locals, who feared dispossession. But we are also introduced to less familiar personalities, such as the cantankerous nineteenth-century contrarian, Sir Charles Sibthorp, who, as MP for the city of Lincoln, vehemently opposed steam railways, water closets and barrel organs, the polymathic Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook aboard HMS Endeavour, and amassed important collections of botanical specimens, and the demon-afflicted Saint Guthlac, who, at the end of the seventh century, established a hermitage at Crowland, destined, after his death, to become a monastic centre and place of Christian pilgrimage.

Turner writes with affection of the ordinary people of Lincolnshire. They are kind, practical, helpful and courteous, even to outsiders, and when they get to know you “accord you the ultimate sign of acceptance—telling you about the idiocy of London”. He describes, with wistful melancholia, Lincolnshire’s lost villages, decaying industries and disappearing ways of life, but does not rub salt into the wounds in the fashion of some unkind commentators. Grimsby may be down-at-heel today, with “a depressed town centre, and too much bad housing”, but Turner writes movingly of the skill and bravery of its sailors and fishermen, and the fortitude of their families, ensuring that the reader knows of the town’s epic origins, regal connections, and dogged “tough pride.”

Many absorbing stories are related, ranging from the whimsical and quirky to the ghoulish and macabre. There is the curious tale of the “Stamford Schism”, an ill-fated attempt by a cadre of unhappy students and tutors from Oxford to establish a rival institution at Stamford in 1333. It was a short-lived venture, the brass door knocker the students took with them when they left Oxford now proudly displayed above high table at Brasenose, in the manner of a spoil of war. The Haxey Hood is another oddity, a game played every January in the town of Haxey, during which enthusiastic locals chase a group of costumed “Boggins” around the town in pursuit of a leather bolster, ostensibly re-enacting an incident with a riding hood said to have taken place almost 700 years ago.

Grisly crimes, pogroms and witch trials are also part of the county’s story. For instance, Turner tells of the tragic death of poor Mary Kirkham in 1806, and the execution of her murderer and erstwhile suitor, Tom Otter, whose skull was said to have provided a home for nesting blue tits when he was gibbeted at Saxilby. However, one of the darkest episodes in the county’s history took place in 1255, when an antisemitic rumour began to circulate in Lincoln that a young boy named Hugh had been murdered by a local Jewish man. This led not only to the arrest, torture and execution of the suspect, but the imprisonment of ninety-one others, eighteen of whom were also executed. The boy’s burial place became a shrine, and “Little Saint Hugh” acquired legendary status, becoming the subject of ballads and folk songs.

Those who, like me, appreciate tales of the strange and uncanny will enjoy reading about the ghostly goings-on at Epworth Rectory, home, in the eighteenth century, not only to the Wesleys, but also, it was said, to a noisy and disincarnate spirit called “Old Jeffrey”. We learn of the spectral “Green Lady” who haunts a tree-lined avenue near Thorpe Hall in Louth, and the “Black Lady” of Bradley Woods, still weeping for her lost children. The county also has tales of water sprites, wild men and mysterious big cats, and, although not mentioned by Turner, Black Shuck, the demonic hellhound that patrols the county’s byways, its red eyes flaming like coals through the fen mists.¹ Anyone eager to explore the supernatural aspects of Lincolnshire further may want to consult a series of hair-raising articles by Rob Gandy in recent editions of Fortean Times.²

Turner says of the Lincolnshire-born antiquarian, William Stukeley, that he could see “the magic of words”. If so, Stukeley would have appreciated the spellbinding mellifluosity of Turner’s own writing. Almost every page yields memorable examples. Consider, for instance, Turner’s charming distillation of one village’s peculiarities and idiosyncrasies as “a little ampoule of English eccentricity” – his spinetingling description of old gateways as “unquiet, touched by the memories of everyone who has ever gone through them, especially if they never came back” – and his description of a carved stone man, high on the forlorn ruins of Barlings Abbey, abandoned at the time of the Dissolution, “stuck in eternal outrage, his mouth forever open as if howling at all this sacrilege and sky”. Turner sees poetry in the everyday, as when he recalls a dead carrion crow, “lying in a patch of sun beneath trees, intact and gleamingly black, studded with iridescent greenbottles, like a mislaid piece of Visigoth jewellery”, or when he waxes lyrical about the vistas that open up from the Humber bridge, “especially to the west on a warm evening when it has been raining, with the sun going down in splendour, and backlit air and water so full of each other that it is like being inside a pearl”.

The reader is also treated to some wonderfully dry asides, perhaps my favourite being an anecdote about a cringeworthy sermon given by the new Bishop of Lincoln at his enthronement, its low culture references jarring awkwardly with the high pomp of the ceremony that had preceded it. Turner concludes, somewhat archly, “The Order of Service read ‘After the sermon, silence is kept for a few moments,’ and it was, but not necessarily for the right reasons”.

Edge of England is a book to savour and is accompanied by thirty-two colour plates and a rather beautiful, Tolkienesque map in which the Wolds take on something of the aspect of the “misty mountains”.

Notes

Ethel Rudkin, ‘The Black Dog,’ Folklore 49 no. 2, 111-131 (1938).
‘The Ruskington horror,’ Fortean Times 401, 32-38 (January 2021); ‘The Ruskington horror: part 2,’ Fortean Times 402, 38-43 (February 2021); ‘The Ruskington goblin,’ Fortean Times 405, 48-38 (May 2021); ‘Weird wheels of the Wolds,’ Fortean Times 407, 48-51 (July 2021); ‘Scary stories from Scunthorpe,’ Fortean Times 411, 48-52 (November 2021); ‘Not the face,’ Fortean Times 414, 46-47 (January 2022); ‘Lincolnshire’s bevy of the bizarre,’ Fortean Times 416, 44-48 (March 2022); ‘A warning to the Fortean,’ Fortean Times 421, 42-45 (August 2022); ‘A grand fen-ale!’ Fortean Times 423, 42-45 (October 2022)

Paul Garner

PAUL GARNER is a researcher, speaker and writer based in the Cambridgeshire Fens. His interests include the natural sciences, Christian theology, classic TV sci-fi and fantasy, British folklore, and the ghost stories of M. R. James. He is also a dancer with the Devil’s Dyke Morris Men

Posted on September 23, 2022September 24, 2022 by Derek Turner

A painter’s peregrinations

Field Notes: Walking the Territory

Maxim Peter Griffin, London: Unbound, 132pps, hb., £16.99

DEREK TURNER admires a unique landscape artist

Several years ago, when I was thinking about writing a book about Lincolnshire, I found a strikingly original Twitter account. Almost every day, the seemingly tireless Maximpetergriff posted pictures painted during or after apparently endless walks across Lincolnshire, in all weathers and states of mind, showing the things he had seen in clear and luminous tones – birds, buildings, clouds, dogs, people, planes, planets, plants, pylons, rains, roads, skies, stars and suns.

These things had not just been seen, but looked at – everyday things uplifted by a strong sense of their possibilities, made resplendent in modern hues. Nothing seemed beneath this observer’s notice, nothing predictable in this parallel Lincolnshire, his glowing images intercut with staccato captions about bats overflying, bridges crossed, dogs howling, insects hurrying, litter lying, people overheard, the smell from takeaways, strange stones picked up, waterways running slickly away under moonlight.

The images were small, apparently simple and spontaneous, but in truth were full of thought. This was a county beyond conventional depictions, a painterly psychogeography; here were Englands within England. This walker was no pedestrian, but dashed off little-known vistas with verve, influenced by the likes of Nash and Piper while also being confidently contemporary; as he records, “two older ramblers look on the work with dismay”.

Some of these evanescent images have now been confined within the boundaries of a book, crowdfunded by those who liked this take on this territory. Field Notes’ freeze-frame cover suggests the unusualness of the author’s perspectives, and the élan of his approach. A redder than real sun stands in a yellow-brown sky, silhouetting black grasses. Geese power south from Scandinavia in a sky like a destroyer’s dazzle pattern. Suggestions of cirrus shadows spot Ravilious-reminiscent fields. Cruciform crows angle home over saltmarsh. White pylons overlay lands filled with decayed life-forms. On the inside back cover, where we expect an author photograph, we find a fugitive Everyman in a raincoat, painted from behind on a beach improbably alchemised from greens and blacks – the self-effacing artist as Sebaldian character, stepping out sturdily across the echoing east.

Griffin is sometimes sentimental, but never nostalgic; the book, like many of his Twitter posts, ends on the word “Onwards”. Yet he honours equally the mammoths that stomped drowned Doggerland (whose bones are taken up by trawlers), the antiquarians and eccentrics who discovered or dreamed our ideas of England, and today’s young English, heedlessly in the moment yet standing on the same fossiliferous foundations. Seams of gaseous Kimmeridge, outcrops of chalk, flint hagstones, the slimed tree-roots exposed at the lowest tides and the movements of muntjac are in a continuum with John Aubrey, boys on BMX bikes, exhausted seaside resorts and whooshing wind-turbines, while overhead ley-lines intersect with jet-fighter flight paths.

Field Notes is an account of one closely-noticed, deeply felt year in Lincolnshire, starting for the author (predictably, unpredictably) in October, with a Humbrol-hazed moon announcing the equinox, and the coming of the cold. “Look – the peak of autumn”, he marvels – with anthropophagical arachnids eating each other on barbed wire, RAF Chinooks, leaking boots, geological specimens arriving in the post, and ancient tracks to towerless churches passed over by Pevsner. “Look” again, he urges us, at the waning of the year, the chiaroscuros of clouds, the shadows of fences, the darkness under trees, the unlikely reds of earth, the arsenics and Prussian blues of limitless firmaments.

November brings branches waving against vastness, bleached bones in dunes, beachcombed sealskins and plastic bottles, deserted caravan parks, huge ships hove to off Spurn Point, memories of the drowned. An Airfix-coloured pillbox gives rigidity to the dynamic landscape, and a gun port leads into blacker than blackness. December holds the old names of ditches, mysterious murmurations, Mesolithic mirrors, thoughts of Raymond Briggs and memories of Mablethorpe Carnival Queens, the turning of this twelvemonth accepted as part of the epic, indifferent, unalterable cosmic churn; “The ocean will have us all – good.” Deep Time, East Midlandian history and today meet and mingle, even his cooking over campfires a sensory link with aurochs-eating, the crude charcuterie once carried out in willow-meads ages ago eaten by the waves.

Month by month, step by sometimes blistered step, sketch by swift sketch, we glimpse something of this arcane county’s blend of beauty and bathos, its grand desolations so often made mean by bungalows, car boots, leylandii, phone masts, and the demolition derbies of Skegness. There is grit in this Lincolnshire, some hardness and ugliness – asbestos sheds, chicken concentration-camps with humming extractors and the sharp stink of ammonia, algae-choked dykes, desperate biro notes found on the ground, rat-gnawed rubbish, washed-up whales, a man in an oxygen mask expending too much of his short time selling 1970s cassettes. But the overarching impression is deeply positive – room to breathe and self-realisation under the biggest of big skies, despite the oncoming storm-fronts of life.

Field Notes is filmic, impressionistic, and personal. It also manages to be unpretentious. In Griffinland, knowledge of the exploits of Alexander, Welsh poetry, Kurosawa, or “our pal Pieter Bruegel the Elder” co-exist chummily with pop blasting from cars, addicts passed out in hedges, shops selling tourist tat, and lost footballs floating out to the estuary. Phrases that from others might have been merely gnomic point towards places you’d want to visit. Even those who have some acquaintance with Lincolnshire will not be familiar with all the artist’s itineraries, and are certain to see new sights from his very particular vantage-points.

After long obscurity, Lincolnshire may be rejoining the mainstream of national history, with uncertain effects. This paean to little-known landmarks carries folk-memories forwards, while facing “Onwards” with equanimity. Ultimately, it suggests that whatever happens or is done, Lincolnshire has always been, and will always be, a land of graphic dreams.

Derek Turner

DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964

brazen-head.org

Posted on September 23, 2022September 23, 2022 by Michael Yost

The Deadlift & Towards the Pebbled Shore

MICHAEL YOST is an essayist and poet living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems can be read at Crisis Magazine, Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review and Hearth and Field, as well as at his website, poetryofmichaelyost.com.

The Deadlift

The name rings hollow: pig-iron

In gravity’s deep wallow.

The unpoetic callus

On each palm’s pad too hard

To feel the microscopic knurl

Packed white with chalk, the burnished steel

Bar like some eel of river shining

Yet stippled still with the pock of rust.

The body, braced against itself feels fear

For its own softness, singing for sweet rest.

The plates all packed like brothers on the bar,

Their edges sharp from the white hot lip of the mold.

Then suddenly, the mind resolves itself to mass,

White pylons of tense bone, and round well fatted muscle,

Presses itself in feet and shin through concrete ground

And grinning, pulls through gravity like broken glass.

And there they hang, the bar and plate, all clattering in air,

Yet shaking violently as if they cannot stay, like leaves

or bells quite badly made, to ring the chimes and iron hours

Of body’s powers, pains, and passing finally away.

Towards the Pebbled Shore

My Papa took me out the day before

to sit outside the ancient red barn’s door,

All painted black, and sliding back to shut.

He told me I was helping him out, but

I couldn’t help but feel he wanted me

To witness something. I was there to see.

The barn’s inside was dim, and cellar-cool.

Its walls were lined with seed-bag, wire and tool;

The floorboards wide, unvarnished, roofbeams barked.

One long swift century had weathered, marked

It for its own. The sun outside showed all

The colors of the world there were. The ball

I played with sat still in the north field’s green

Long blades, bright rubber blue. The sheen

Of light struck firmly off each branch and stone

And gave each thing a presence all its own,

And lit the rock wall flaming low with moss,

As coals flame low and heavy in the loss

Of fire in evening. Papa loped out, took

The cockerel by his claws, and with a look

Of concentration laid him down upon

A stump, quite still. A stroke: the head was gone.

It fell down flat, heraldic, violently;

Beak parted, tongue out, crowing silently.

One eye looked up; alone, to watch the sky,

The other gazed at earth. The pool and dye

Of blood, much brighter red than you would think

Dripped down the empty ruff, in squib and plink

Into the metal bucket, drops of jewels

Upon a field. Invert, above these pools,

The bag of muscles twitched just where it was.

The dead bird’s gray pin feathers and gray fuzz

Soon littered all the lawn. The entrails out,

The feet off, Papa turned the bird about

And carved at each distinct and white-pink joint.

I stood and shuffled, looking at one point

At ground and sky, and back again as well,

Made nervous by the casual, wholesome smell

Of cockerel’s blood and feathers in the air.

I grabbed a quill, and put it in my hair.

At that age, I could barely think or talk;

But still some thing as round and firm as rock,

And yet as broad and moving as the gust

Of wind that blew that day came as it must;

Yet everything retained its form and color

And multiplied its mass; no shade was duller.

I knew myself as something with a shore,

Where water laps and freely spills. Before

I thought myself the world, some kind of all

Without circumference, gravity, or fall.

Michael Yost

MICHAEL YOST is a poet and essayist living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems have been published in places like Modern Age, First Things, The University Bookman, Dappled Things, The Brazen Head, and others. He substacks at The Weight of Form

Posted on August 3, 2022August 3, 2022 by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

Summer with the Sinfonia

Tintagel. Photo: Chris Gunn. Wikimedia Commons

STUART MILLSON enjoys a super-orchestra’s seasonal offerings

The re-formed Sinfonia of London (a recording and film-score orchestra of the 1960s) appeared at the Proms on Saturday 16th July under the baton of the ever-popular John Wilson, for a concert of music by British composers. The programme was made up of Vaughan Williams’ 1910 Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Welsh composer, Huw Watkins’s new Flute Concerto, the Partita by Walton, Bax’s 1917 Arthurian tone-poem, Tintagel, and Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ of 1899.

The Sinfonia is a handpicked, super-orchestra – a superior “scratch-band” of top freelancers, players drawn from existing orchestras and even members of string quartets and chamber groups, dedicated to reviving the idea of “demonstration sound quality”, i.e. dazzling, virtuoso performance, chiefly in a studio setting. A previous example of this type of ensemble was the old National Philharmonic Orchestra, which appeared on the RCA label and notched up some notable recordings, often under conductors such as the suave American, Charles Gerhardt. But to have real life and vigour, an orchestra must play in public, so what better arena for publicising the dynamic stage presence of your orchestra than at the Proms on a Saturday evening, right at the beginning of the season?

And what finer non-ecclesiastical setting for a cathedral-inspired piece, such as the Tallis Fantasia, than the Royal Albert Hall, in which John Wilson cleverly created antiphonal special effects by placing part of his string band in a line, high on the right at the rear of the platform? The two bodies of strings answered each other: the music moving across the centuries, from Tallis’s Elizabethan sound-world of church voices, to the well-upholstered, romantic early 20th-century string writing of Vaughan Williams.

Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1898. British Library. Wikimedia Commons

The one new work in the programme, the Huw Watkins Flute Concerto also suited the hall’s great acoustic – a beautifully air-borne thing and (for this reviewer) strangely reminiscent of a scene from the Ken Loach film, Kes, about a boy from a deprived background, spiritually rescued by a chance ownership of a hawk. In the film, there is a moving scene where the boy takes his kestrel to a field at the edge of the northern town in which he little more than exists, and flies him with all the skill of a mediaeval falconer. The bird takes to the wing, accompanied by flute music, neither tuneful nor atonal, which seems to represent freedom, air, longing, space. All of those qualities were to be found in the Huw Watkins piece, played by distinguished soloist, Adam Walker.

The great (literally) landmark work of the evening was the 1917 tone-poem by Englishman and also Celtic enthusiast, Arnold Bax, Tintagel. The composer visited the dreamy north Cornwall coast with his mistress, fellow musician Harriet Cohen, and found deep escapism and solace in the ancient surroundings of rocky coast and the ever-present gentle, heaving breast of the sleepy Atlantic. The work begins in pure, clear-blue summertime, but as Bax pointed out in an explanation of the piece, not a windless day.

John Wilson’s orchestra began their evocation with gentle, dreamy woodwind conjuring a feeling of sea-birds and distances. The growing swell of the sea against the rocky sentinels of Cornwall’s headlands was beautifully executed in the surging, strong, cohesive orchestral tide of sound created by the Sinfonia. But just as quickly as the physical setting of Cornwall has been established, Bax then begins to dissolve it all, with the supernatural drama of the ancient kings, Arthur and Mark, and the destructive, legendary love of Tristan and Isolde – the latter, a symbol of Bax’s own romantic entanglement. The composer wrote several Celtic-folklore-inspired pieces and seven impressive, well-orchestrated symphonies (the Fourth being the most radiant and most-often played, although an outing for a Bax symphony is still a rare occasion).

What Tintagel represents is a (nearly) fifteen minutes-long condensed symphony – a clear, concise distillation of some of the more long-winded ideas which all long symphonic structures have, but which in the case of this piece are assembled with utterly persuasive and spellbinding cohesion and power. Not a note is wasted in Tintagel: there is a beginning, middle and an end, and like Sibelius’s The Oceanides (a tone-poem of some ten minutes), a listener or concertgoer can instantly know the composer just from this one calling-card piece.

With instantly recognisable pieces in mind, the concert concluded with Walton’s shimmering, Italianate Partita, written in the Mediterranean sun and siesta of the late 1950s – and Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, (‘Enigma’), penned at the end of the 19^th century, but looking forward with masterful confidence to a new century and (for Elgar) new successes and untold honours. Again, the Sinfonia of London matched the mood, its players responding with great physical commitment to the scores of these British giants; men whose music, in different ways, captured the spirit of our native music.

Skara Brae on the Orkneys. Photo: Daniel Bordeleau. Wikimedia Commons

Yet what really is our native music? – as BBC Radio 3’s Tom Service (a Scot) asked in the evening’s programme notes. Slightly dismissive of the insularity of the land “sandwiched between Hadrian’s Wall and the South Coast” (his words), the writer nevertheless correctly noted the way in which our music has transcended the country’s physical boundaries. However, metropolitan observers should not be so quick to dismiss country cottages and “folky-wolky melodies”. As Vaughan Williams pointed out, all great universal art is rooted in a place, whether Bach’s Lutheran northern Germany, or the Spain of Velazquez. And as Tom Service should know, modern composer Peter Maxwell Davies, who settled in the Orkney Islands, immersed himself in a Scottish island identity, garnering, like a beachcomber, every conceivable Orcadian cadence, myth into his music, showing just how powerful “insularity” can be as a creative inspiration.

The capacity audience at the Royal Albert Hall, not a bit dissuaded by the Met. Office’s red-alert, heat-wave weather warnings, gave the performers a typical Proms ovation. And John Wilson gave them in return, one more piece – an encore from Eric Coates’s Summer Days suite, a nostalgic, innocent waltz. Judging by the overflowing applause, it is a world that still means something to so many.

Stuart Millson

STUART MILLSON is a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, and a Contributing Editor to The Brazen Head