PS

 Here's something I wrote about J.L. Carr for the excellent Engelsberg Ideas. Follow the link...

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-man-who-gave-books-away/

Park Life

 Yesterday I came dangerously close to falling in love with London again – but then I reminded myself that it was not London, that 'human awful wonder of God', that had stirred my heart, but one hallowed spot: Holland Park, the city's most beautiful park, and one for me replete with fond memories. I had been having lunch with my old friend Bryan (Appleyard), and we spent the afternoon strolling in Holland Park and visiting Leighton House, with its gorgeous oriental interiors, vast studio and impressive art collection, a monument to high Victorian taste at its most Olympian level. But the park was the thing. This was the park to which I eagerly escaped on so many lunchtimes of my working life, breathing its air, seeing its sights, delighting in the butterflies and birds, the trees and flowers, enjoying the woodland walks, the Japanese garden, the remains of the big house – and the pigs and longhorn cattle that were occasionally employed to do some useful rootling and grazing. Holland Park was for years balm to my soul, a microcosm of so many of the things I love – and all within a short walk of my workplace. London has nothing else like it – which is why I am not, after all, falling back in love with the place.  
[More on my Holland Park lunchtimes here...]

Cotswolds and Celandines

 Yesterday I was walking in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. It was a well planned five-miler, taking in three good churches (Turkdean, Hampnett and the magnificent wool church of Northleach – all open), a decent lunch, and glorious rolling countryside with wide views – pastureland and paddocks, drystone walls, picturesque villages, cloud shadows passing over the landscape. We didn't get the unbroken sunshine promised in the weather forecast, but the sun came and went, never staying long enough to really warm things up. Disappointingly, there was not a single butterfly to be seen – it wasn't quite warm enough – but bumblebees were flying, and at one of the churches darker, smaller bees were swarming high up on the South wall. Birds were singing – a cheery twitter of small birds, rooks conversing loudly as they built their nests, skylarks rising singing from the fields, buzzards and kites mewing... As for the wild flowers, these were in their early spring glory, with snowdrops, crocuses, primroses and daffodils all in full flower, along with speedwell, lungwort and a few early windflowers. Also in full flower was that golden harbinger of spring, the Lesser Celandine – a flower that Wordsworth loved so much he devoted three (pretty bad) poems to it, and wanted to have one carved on his gravestone. That stone, however, in Grasmere churchyard, remains unadorned, the celandine featuring instead on his memorial plaque, originally intended for Westminster Abbey but now in Grasmere church. Alas, the sculptor – Thomas Woolner, no less – embellished the plaque not with the ground-hugging Lesser Celandine that Wordsworth loved but with the upright, poppy-related Greater Celandine. Oh dear. 

Talking of Short Poems...

I spent the weekend over the border in Derbyshire, visiting my cousin, and on Saturday we found ourselves dodging the rain in Belper. Where better to shelter awhile than in a large charity bookshop? There I spotted an anthology edited by Wendy Cope – The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems. Having found much to enjoy in another of her anthologies, Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems*, I naturally bought this one. When I went to pay for it, the helpful volunteer at the cash desk told me he had another little anthology out the back which I might be interested in... It was Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems, edited by Simon Armitage – so of course I took that too. 
 The poems in Short and Sweet range in length from 13 lines (any more and they'd be trespassing on a companion volume, Don Paterson's excellent 101 Sonnets) to no lines at all, the latter represented by Don Paterson's On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him. None of Dick Davis's epigrams appears in Short and Sweet, but I found this brilliant three-liner by Yeats, which was new to me – 

Three Movements

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;
What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?

A first look also yielded this, by Geoffrey Hill – one of the most shattering four-line poems I have ever read...

I Had Hope When Violence Was Ceas't

Dawnlight freezes against the east-wire.
The guards cough 'raus! 'raus! We flinch and grin,
Our flesh oozing towards its last outrage.
That which is taken from me is not mine.

[The title is from Paradise Lost, Book 11: 'I had hope When violence was ceas't, and Warr on Earth, All would have then gon well, peace would have crown'd With length of happy dayes the race of man; But I was farr deceav'd; for now I see Peace to corrupt no less than Warr to waste...']

* an anthology which includes Dick Davis's great love poem 'Uxor Vivamus'.

An Epigram on Epigrams

 Dick Davis, one of our finest living poets (and translators), has always published sparingly. If and when his complete poems are published – and they really should be – they will not make a fat volume. Davis favours short forms, including epigrams. Here is one of my favourites – 

On Epigrams

This neat, egregious house-style
Parades its insights pat, on time: 
It smiles a very knowing smile...
Here comes another fucking rhyme.

(Its doubles entendres are subtle, supple – 
'To fuck' here means, of course, 'to couple'.)

I've written about Davis before – a search for 'Dick Davis' brings up these posts... 

Here, for good measure, is another short poem by Davis (not an epigram) –

With John Constable

Slow-rotting planks and moody skies;
I look with your impassive eyes

Whose tact is love for what is there –
The worked soil and the moving air,

The reticence of grief: I hear
Through silence your dead voice draw near –

Those words you gave to Ruisdael's art,
'It haunts my mind, clings to my heart.'

Doggy D'Artagnan

 One of the pleasures of grandparenthood is enjoying all over again some of the things that most entertained us in our own childhood and, later, when our own children were young. Books, of course, but also vintage animations – the great Chuck Jones classics, Popeye, Oliver Postgate's Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine, John Ryan's Captain Pugwash, and more from the golden age when cartoons were lovingly made, creatively scripted and free of computer-generated razzle dazzle. And now there's another animation that the Lichfield grandsons (and their grandparents) are loving – Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, an improbable Spanish-Japanese production from the early 1980s. I'd forgotten how good this was (though I hadn't forgotten the signature tune, 'One for All and All for One' – no one can). As the name suggests, it's a retelling of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, with some of the darker elements expunged, the names of Porthos and Athos swapped around (why?), the plot much simplified, and, er, the principal characters mostly played by dogs. Dogtanian, the canine D'Artagnan, looks rather like Snoopy in 17th-century French costume, and has a nose that responds visibly to strong emotion, but he is every bit as impetuous, honourable, romantic and handy with a sword as his human original. The story is as exciting and swashbuckling as Dumas (and told much more concisely), and the ethos is very much that of the original. So far we've watched six episodes, and happily there are twenty more to come. This is going to be fun. 

Porter Day

 Peter Porter was born on this day in 1929, in Brisbane. His career, and his life, got off to a faltering start, but by 1955 he was living in London and associating with the informal group of poets known as, er, 'The Group'. It was this poem, published in the TLS in January 1960, that brought Porter to wider attention – and no wonder...

Metamorphosis

This new Daks suit, greeny-brown,
Oyster-coloured buttons, single vent, tapered
Trousers, no waistcoat, hairy tweed – my own:
A suit to show responsibility, to show
Return to life – easily got for two pounds down
Paid off in six months – the first stage in the change.
I am only the image I can force upon the town.

The town will have me: I stalk in glass,
A thin reflection in the windows, best
In jewellers’ velvet backgrounds – I don’t pass,
I stop, elect to look at wedding rings –
My figure filled with clothes, my putty mask,
A face fragrant with arrogance, stuffed
With recognition – I am myself at last.

I wait in the pub with my Worthington.
Then you come in – how many days did love have,
How can they be catalogued again?
We talk of how we miss each other – I tell
Some truth – you, cruel stories built of men:
‘It wasn’t good at first but he’s improving.’
More talk about his car, his drinks, his friends.

I look at the wild mirror at the bar –
A beautiful girl smiles beside me – she’s real
And her regret is real. If only I had a car,
If only – my stately self cringes, renders down;
As in a werewolf film I’m horrible, far
Below the collar – my fingers crack, my tyrant suit
Chokes me as it hugs me in its fire.

[DAKS is a long-established British luxury fashion house. The Australian slang term 'daks', meaning trousers (see Barry Mackenzie passim) is probably not related, as it's likely a conflation of 'dad's slacks'.
Worthington is one of the biggest British brewers, but now produces bland 'nitrokeg' beers and has dropped its best brew, the bottled White Shield.]

As readers of this blog will know, I've long been doing my bit to keep Peter Porter's name alive – see, for example, this from ten years ago.  He was one of the best.