'The Island is full of noises': i.m. Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott
(23/1/30-17/3/17)

I was scrolling around on facebook the other day when I found a post by our own great Pacific writer and poet Albert Wendt mentioning the recent deaths of two artists who had helped to shape his "heart and mind and imagination": Chuck Berry and Derek Walcott. Certainly I like Chuck Berry - who doesn't? But Derek Walcott: that really did hit home.

For quite a few years now I've been finishing the poetry section of my introductory Creative Writing course at Massey with a poem by Derek Walcott. I first encountered his work in the 1980s, when I was studying in the UK, and I still have the audio recording I made then of a dramatised reading of his long poem-sequence "The Schooner Flight" on BBC radio.

I still think that poem is his masterpiece. I enjoyed Omeros and many of his other long poems, but the voice of Shabine the sailor as he criss-crosses the Caribbean, moving in and out of islands and history with equal ease, seems to me to combine all his poetic virtues into one small compass.

Here's the part of the poem I read out to the stage one students:

from Fight with the Crew

... Had an exercise book,
this same one here, that I was using to write
my poetry, so one day this man snatch it
from my hand, and start throwing it left and right
to the rest of the crew, bawling out, ‘Catch it,’
and start mincing me like I was some hen
because of the poems. Some case is for fist,
some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife –
this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first,
but he kept reading, ‘O my children, my wife,’
and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh;
it move like a flying fish, the silver knife
that catch him right in the plump of his calf,
and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white
than he thought he was. I suppose among men
you need that sort of thing. It ain’t right
but that’s how it is. There wasn’t much pain,
just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,
but none of them go fuck with my poetry again.

That last line always gets a gasp: poetry is seen as such a weak, flowery thing by so many people who aren't very familiar with it - but it's serious business to those who live by it, and Derek Walcott was definitely one of them.

Derek Walcott

Here's my own list of the books I have by him. It's not complete by any means, but I think I have most of his work, with the exception, maybe, of some of his - many - plays:

Derek Alton Walcott
(23 January 1930 - 17 March 2017)

1. In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960. 1962. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.


2. Another Life. Cape Poetry Paperbacks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973.


3. Another Life: Fully Annotated. 1973. Ed. Edward Baugh and Colbert Nepaulsingh. 2004. London & Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2009.


4. The Star-Apple Kingdom. Cape Poetry Paperbacks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.


5. Poems 1965-1980: The Castaway and Other Poems; The Gulf and Other Poems; Sea-Grapes; The Star-Apple Kingdom. 1965, 1969, 1976, 1980. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992.


6. The Fortunate Traveller. London: Faber, 1982.


7. Collected Poems 1948-1984. London: Faber, 1986.


8. Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; A Branch of the Blue Nile. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.


9. The Arkansas Testament. 1987. London: Faber, 1988.


10. Omeros. 1990. London: Faber, 1991.


11. The Odyssey: A Stage Version. London: Faber, 1993.


12. The Bounty. London: Faber, 1997.


13. What the Twilight Says: Essays. 1998. London: Faber, 1998.


14. Tiepolo’s Hound. 2000. London: Faber, 2001.


15. The Haitian Trilogy: Henri Christophe; Drums and Colours; The Haitian Earth. 1948 & 1984. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.


16. The Prodigal: A Poem. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.


17. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Baugh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.


18. White Egrets: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.


19. Maxwell, Glyn, ed. The Poetry of Derek Walcott: 1948-2013. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott


•

I don't really know what else to say about him. He won the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1992, and lots of other awards and distinctions too. Read his work for yourself. But (if you'd like to take my advice) you should start with those early books, In a Green Night and The Star-Apple Kingdom: above all, start with "The Schooner Flight."

In a sense, Walcott had already written his own epitaph in that poem. They're probably his most famous and most quoted lines:

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation …

"Either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." There's a rather more full-dress version of this idea in his book of essays What the Twilight Says, which I find - if anything - even more moving. The essay itself is entitled "The Muse of History," and it inevitably calls to mind Walter Benjamin's famous lines on "The Angel of History":

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Here's Derek Walcott's version:

I accept this archipelago of the Americas. I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the ancestor who bought me, I have no father, I want no such father, although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper "history," for if I attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and explains and expiates, and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love, since your features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no power to pardon. You were when you acted your roles, your given, historical roles of slave seller and slave buyer, men acting as men, and also you, father in the filth-ridden gut of the slave ship, to you they were also men, acting as men, with the cruelty of men, your fellowman and tribes­man not moved or hovering with hesitation about your common race any longer (than my other bastard ancestor hovered with his whip, but to you, inwardly forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race, give a strange thanks. I give the strange and bitter and yet en­nobling thanks for the monumental groaning and solder­ing of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift.

Derek Walcott

Real Illusions: i.m. Russell Haley (d. 4/7/16)

Russell Haley (1934-2016)

I've just received some rather bad news. Ian Wedde has sent out an open letter to friends of Russell & Jean Haley:

Russell died on Monday 4 July of a brain tumour, at home in Whangarei. He wanted to be cremated without any ceremony, as simply as possible, and this was done on Tuesday. There will be a celebration at his and Jean’s place in Whangarei, on Saturday 9 July.

I can't be at that celebration, unfortunately, but I would like to put a few things on record here even so. I've known Russell Haley for a long time. He was (briefly) a fellow-tutor with me in the Auckland University English Department in the early 90s. I also met up with him quite often while Jan Kemp and I were working on the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive in the early 2000s (in which he is, of course, included).

He taught life writing for us for one semester at Albany, and I'll always remember the masterly guest lecture he delivered on the relationship between voice and personality: using a recording of Kathleen Ferrier as a starting point, then moving on to his own biography of Pat Hanly, he took the students and me carefully through every stage of a complex argument about identity.

He was always cheerful, always interesting to talk to, always full of new ideas and original aperçus. We didn't meet often, but it never seemed to matter: there was always something to add to what we'd been discussing on the previous occasion.

Of course it's mainly as a writer that Russell will survive: will continue to be with us for the long haul, I'd venture to predict.

Here's a list of his major publications. Most of them I have, though there are one or two pesky gaps still waiting to be filled:

1. The Walled Garden (1972) [poetry]


2. On the Fault Line (1977) [poetry]


3. The Sauna Bath Mysteries (1978) [stories]


4. Real Illusions: A selection of family lies and biographical fictions in which the ancestral dead also play their part (1984) [autobiography]


5. The Settlement (1986) [novel]


6. Hanly: A New Zealand Artist (1989) [biography]


7. The Transfer Station (1989) [stories]


8. The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (1989) [edited, with Susan Davis]


9. Beside Myself (1990) [novel]


10. All Done with Mirrors (1999) [novel]


11. A Spider-Web Season & The Transfer Station (2000) [stories]


12. Tomorrow Tastes Better (2001) [novel]

Russell Haley: All Done with Mirrors (1999)

Russell's work figures prominently in Matt Harris's Doctoral thesis on "Metafiction in New Zealand from the 1960s to the present day" (Massey, 2012), which was co-supervised by Mary Paul and myself. There is also a fascinating interview with him included as one of the appendices.

I guess he had a good innings. Somehow that doesn't seem to matter much when one hears news like this, though: Russell was just one of those people whom it's impossible to imagine gone for good: I'm sure I'll keep on expecting to run into him somewhere for quite some time to come - always with that cheeky smile and that fund of good stories and quiet, unobtrusive intelligence.

I was rereading the first few stories in The Sauna Bath Mysteries just last week. I know that sounds improbable, but it's true. It just suddenly stood out from the shelves and demanded to be read. That will probably keep on happening, too, I'm sure.

Love and good wishes go with you, Russell: and my best to all those gathered in Whangarei today, also.

Russell Haley: Hanly (1989)

Something to Say: i.m. John O'Connor

John O'Connor (d. 12 May, 2015)

all down the Jewish lane children are falling. it’s a game called autumn, a pastiche of drifting leaves and gathering. yet one stays out, has not joined her companions in what they suppose is a fine tumble, quick in the wind, now still.

just one moved towards the vents. a photograph shows them piled in a corner, naked and shaved, almost as if stacked up. yet one figure is in front of the group — as if she had something important to say.

This is the prose-poem "Something to Say," By John O'Connor, included in David Howard's anthology Complete with Instructions. It's always been a favourite of mine - among the very many poems of his I liked.

David Howard, ed.: Complete with Instructions (2001)

It was David Howard who introduced the two of us, in fact. I was going down to Christchurch to teach a weekend writing course, and David suggested that I take the opportunity to interview a bunch of the local poets down there for a possible feature in his new magazine Firebrand (which eventually, after many vicissitudes, turned into the anthology pictured above).

I was happy enough to do it, and had a fascinating time driving round the city and talking to the likes of Julia Allen, John Allison, Kenneth Fea, David Gregory, Rob Jackaman, Graham Lindsay, Mike Minehan, and - John O'Connor (you can find complete texts of the various interviews, which I ended up calling "Imaginary Toads in Real Gardens," on my Opinions blog here.

John O'Connor had recently helped to set up Sudden Valley Press, and was active in the Canterbury Poets Collective, and seemed in many ways a natural organiser. It was quite a surprise to me to find out just how delicate and subtle his poetry could be. He wrote in many voices, some of which appealed to me more than others, but in every one of his many books there was always the chance of turning the page and finding something quite extraordinary - something like that haunting prose-poem I've reprinted above.

Here's a list of his books, as accurate as I can make it from my own notes and reviews of his work over the years. There could well be some missing. These are the main ones, though:

John O’Connor: haiku

1. Laying Autumn’s Dust: Poems and Verse 1974-1983. Concept Publishing, 1983.


2. Citizen of No Mean City: Poems and Verse 1983-1985. Concept Publishing, 1985.


3. [with Bernard Gadd]. Too Right Mate. Hallard Press, 1996.


4. As It Is: Poems 1981-1996. Christchurch: Sudden Valley Press, 1997.


5. A Particular Context. Christchurch: Sudden Valley Press, 1999.


6. [with Eric Mould]. Working Voices. Auckland: Hallard Press, 2003.


7. Home River. Auckland: Hallard Press, 2003.


8. Bright the Harvest Moon. Wellington: HeadworX, 2004.


9. Parts of the Moon: Selected Haiku & Senryu 1988-2007. Teneriffe: Post Pressed, 2007.


10. Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-Class Verse, 1996-2009. Teneriffe, Queensland: Post Pressed, 2009.


11. Aspects of Reality. Wellington: HeadworX, 2013.


12. Whistling in the Dark. Wellington: HeadworX, 2014.

John O’Connor: Whistling in the Dark (2014)

There's a brief bio / bibliography up at the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive, but it dates from 2004, over a decade ago, so is pretty out-of-date. He'd done a great deal since then:

John O’Connor is a past winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society’s International Prize, founding editor of the poetry journal plainwraps and has edited various issues of Takahe, Spin, and the NZPS annual anthology. With David Gregory he founded Poets Group and also Sudden Valley Press of which he is managing editor. John’s haiku have been internationally anthologised on a number of occasions, translated into 6 languages and were recently chosen as “best of issue” in Frogpond International, a special issue of the leading US haiku periodical, Frogpond, featuring haiku from 26 countries. His criticism and non-haiku poetry have been widely published in New Zealand and overseas, and his work has been anthologised by Lauris Edmond and Bill Sewell in Essential New Zealand Poems. His last book, A Particular Context, was chosen by members of the Poetry Society as one of the 5 best books of New Zealand poetry of the 1990s.

John O’Connor: A Particular Context (1999)

I guess one of my own fondest memories of John is the roadtrip we did together out to Banks Peninsula in 2003. The ostensible reason for the jaunt was to look for the grave of D'Arcy Cresswell - in which attempt we were singularly unsuccessful (though we did find the grave of a Douglas Cresswell), but actually it was really just to explore a bit. We ended up at Port Levy, as I recall, and John did a good deal of quoting from Denis Glover's Towards Banks Peninsula along the way - not to mention his own poem "At Port Levy."

I wrote a poem about our trip, in fact: probably too allusive to make much sense without the context of that day out in the hills, but I give it here as a little tribute to that good man and good poet John O'Connor - "A red libation to your good memory, friend":

Towards Banks Peninsula
i.m. John O'Connor (d. 12/5/15)

1 - The Summons

Feed, propagate, be fed on; please someone; die.
– Kendrick Smithyman

Mahogany desk
crybaby
goodness sake

a gobfull
that’s disgusting
sorry

didn’t mean to
sampling
set for

landing
sun breaks through
the clouds

2 - Searching for the Original

DRINK
D R I V E
– road-sign

Dog gobbles up flies
from the floor of the church

Not D’Arcy
Douglas Cresswell

dug in
with his wife

Look up at the hills
stone plugs

the fairies lived there
girl could tell you more

John O’Connor & Eric Mould: Working Voices (2003)

I'm glad I was able to include two beautiful translations by John in the last issue of Poetry NZ, together with a notice of his latest book. I didn't then fully understand the significance of its title, Whistling in the Dark.

John O'Connor is a man who will be sorely missed, and I'm sorry that there won't be any more of his wonderful books to leaf through, with curious surprises lurking behind the most unobtrusive pages.

John O'Connor: As It Is (1997)

A Triptych for Lee Dowrick

i.m. Lee Dowrick
(8th February, 1931 - 29th November 2013)


Launch of Golden Weather Anthology in Takapuna Library (19 September, 2004)

[Back Row (l-to-r): Shonagh Koea / Alistair Paterson / Stu Bagby / Lee Dowrick / Jan Kemp / Tony Green / C. K. Stead / Bust of Frank Sargeson / Wensley Willcox / Graeme Lay / Kevin Ireland
Front Row (l-to-r): Christine Cole Catley / Jack Ross / Jean Bartlett / Alice Hooton / Jacqueline Crompton Ottaway / Riemke Ensing]

It's Lee Dowrick's funeral today. For roughly a decade a group of us used to meet every month at her house in Devonport to read out poems and trade gossip about the "literary life." I have to say that I owe her quite a debt. That note she left in the Baxter and Mansfield Second-hand Bookshop, inviting aspiring poets to join her little group of "bookshop poets," made a big difference to me.

I met such poets as Leicester Kyle, Stu Bagby, and Raewyn Alexander through Lee's good graces. The other core members of the group, Alice Hooton, Jackie Ottaway, Wensley Willcox, became good friends and valued collaborators over the years. That invitation of Lee's, and her unfailing hospitality, helped to get me out of my solipsistic cave and out meeting other writers instead. My very first book launch, in 1998, was together with one of Lee's: That Was Then.

Today I'm going to her funeral, in Devonport, down by the sea, the little suburb she loved. Funny the way things turn out. The first time we met, it turned out that she'd once been a patient of my father's (as an East Coast Bays GP, there seem to have been few people here who didn't visit his surgery at one time or another). The last time we met, in the shopping centre, a couple of years ago now, she didn't know who I was, and couldn't think how to respond to my cheerful "Hi, Lee!"

I don't have much more to say about Lee, other than to say what a careful crafter of words she was, and that the few books of mostly nostalgiac poems she did publish don't really do justice to her gift as a writer. To demonstrate that, I thought I'd include a few of her poems here, ones which I published myself during my stint as co-editor of Spin. What better memorial for a poet than a few of the many, many poems she wrote and published over the years?:

happily never after

we’ll be married
in your protestant church
no room at the altar in mine
my family won’t come
our children will be
out of wedlock

don’t drink
from the beer bottle
please my darling
not while
you’re
at the wheel

- Spin 36 (2000): 23.

sugarloaf

he shuffles along
feet heavy to lift
weighed down
with Oxford labels

vacating the brain
they slide down
the stalwart column
of his spine
to sit squarely
in laced up shoes

the wonderment
of this sweet life

- Spin 42 (2002): 22.

not waiting for mummy

I attack
the grimy comers of my room

while I wait
I scour them down
dig out
the stubborn stuff

black
built up layers
a sharp knife
shaves the skin

again
I scrape the corners
I haven’t
reached the pink yet

thick-skinned
I wait

soon
I will pick up
the silent beast
and dial a holiday
in Egypt

- Spin 33 (1999): 26.

Goodbye, Lee. We're all going to miss you a lot.

•

R. I. P.: Dr John Mackenzie Ross

(10th December, 1928 - 10th September, 2013)


Feeding the Seagulls
(24th February, 2009)

My father died this morning, after a brief illness, at Aria Gardens rest home, Albany.

This isn't the time to try to explain what he meant to me, or to try to write any kind of eulogy. I just felt I should put his death on record here, for those of you who knew him. I'll post funeral details here also when we've had more of a chance to absorb the news and tell as many as possible of the family, as well as his many friends.

He loved the sea, and sailing, and this was one of his favourite poems, so I thought I'd just put it up here in memory of him:

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

- John Masefield, Salt Water Ballads (1902)

•


NZ Herald (11/9/13): A34.

ROSS, John Mackenzie (Dr).

Peacefully on 10 September 2013 at Aria Gardens.

Much loved husband of June;
father of Jim, Kenneth, Anne (deceased) and Jack;
father-in-law of Janet and Bronwyn;
grandfather of Catherine, Murdo and Trudy;
and brother and brother-in-law of Jim and Ruby.

Greatly missed.

A service will be held at the North Harbour Chapel of Dil's Funeral Services, 185 Schnapper Rock Road, Albany, on Saturday 14 September at 10 am, followed by private cremation.

In lieu of flowers, donations to NZ Red Cross, PO box 97144, SAMC, Manukau 2240 would be appreciated.

•


My grandfather, Angus Alexander Ross (1920s?)


Jim and John Ross (Deep Creek, 1930s)


John with his mother (1940s)


John as a young bagpiper (late 1940s)


The Ross family (early 1960s):
l-r: [unknown], Ken, June, Anne, Jim, John


The Ross family (1970s):
l-r: John, Anne, June, Jim, Jack and Grandma


Ken, Anne, Jim, Jack (1970s)


In Ross tartan (1980s)


sailing the boat (1980s)


In Ross tartan (2000s)


John & June Ross (2000s)


John & June Ross (2000s)


At Bronwyn & Jack's wedding (November 2007)


Setting off to feed the birds (late 2000s)


John & June with their granddaughter Catherine (Christmas 2011)


John with Jim & Catherine (Christmas 2011)


Out and about (2000s)

•

Famous Seamus: Lament for a Maker

i.m. Seamus Heaney


Bobbie Hanvey: Seamus Heaney

born County Derry, Northern Ireland
13 April 1939
died Dublin, Eire
30 August 2013

I went to a talk by the distinguished Irish writer Dermot Healy recently, while I was at a conference in Singapore. As well as plays, screenplays, and fiction - most famously his haunting and terrifying novel A Goat's Song (1994) - Healy has also published a number of books of poetry. He's a pretty unpretentious sort (in fact, when I last saw him, at the conference dinner, he was trying to imitate Tibetan throat music to an increasingly unenthusiastic throng). One of his quips was that he was getting used to people coming up to him and saying how much his poems meant to them, then producing a copy of Death of a Naturalist for his signature ...

Dermot Healy / Seamus Heaney - the names are not really that similar, but he claimed that he got mistaken for the more famous Seamus on a regular basis, and had in fact taken to signing some of his books simply in order to avoid further explanations.

Famous Seamus - that was his nickname in Ireland, another Irish friend told me. Virtually from the beginning of his career, in the mid-sixties, it was apparent that his was a talent on a different scale from most of his contemporaries. As Gavin Ewart put it, wryly: "I think I'm Auden, he thinks he's Yeats." That was the competition - not the other poets he knew, or (increasingly) that he'd taught at Queen's University in Belfast.

I wrote a fairly long piece about Heaney and his sense of poetic genealogy for a guest lecture I gave to Jo Emeney's somewhat bemused English students at Kristin School in 2010. Not just Yeats, but Homer, Shakespeare - above all, Dante, who inspired his wonderful dream vision Station Island of 1984, and whom he translated piecemeal in various collections throughout his career.

He bore his burden of fame (the Nobel Prize, the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford) with grace, I think. It can't have been easy at times, when each of his pronouncements was taken so seriously, weighed up with such scrupulous attention - particularly as the Troubles dragged on, and he had somehow become the voice of Catholic Northern Ireland itself.

His was a fate rather like Dante's - and Yeats's - then: a partisan political as well as a poetic role to play in the tragi-comedy of late twentieth-century history.

Now all that's over and we can go back to the poetry. A few years ago I bought the recordings he'd made of his entire body of work to date: a 15-CD set which I've listened to a couple of times since then. It's a very different experience from reading the books (I have all of them, as well: the 12 collections, at any rate). His shaping and patterning is so clear on the page. When spoken aloud, the poems become more genial and anecdotal, more like the fragments of a complex life story they were always, I imagine, meant to be.

It seems rather fitting that it was Jo Emeney who sent me a link to an obituary by Colm Tóibín, and thus informed me indirectly of his death yesterday. I don't know quite what to think, actually. He was one of the major shapers of poetry in our time. It seems rather unfair that we should have to part with him so soon. I suppose the true breadth of his work will come into focus now, though - that journey he started on almost fifty years ago.

I'll quote a part of his translation of Canto 1 of Dante's Inferno. It seems to say so much more than I can find to say at this moment:

How I got into it I cannot clearly say
for I was moving like a sleepwalker
the moment I stepped out of the right way,

But when I came to the bottom of a hill
standing off at the far end of that valley
where a great terror had disheartened me

I looked up, and saw how its shoulders glowed
already in the rays of the planet
which leads and keeps men straight on every road.

Then I sensed a quiet influence settling
into those depths in me that had been rocked
and pitifully troubled all night long

And as a survivor gasping on the sand
turns his head back to study in a daze
the dangerous combers, so my mind

Turned back, although it was reeling forward,
back to inspect a pass that had proved fatal
heretofore to everyone who entered.

- from Dante's Inferno: Translations by 20 Contemporary Poets, edited by Daniel Halpern (New York: Ecco Press, 1993)

What more can one say? It comes to us all in the end, that "pass that had proved fatal/ heretofore to everyone who entered" - in Seamus Heaney it took away one of the best and the brightest ... Perhaps one might conclude, instead, with some lines from Dunbar's "Lament for the Makaris":

I se that makaris amang the laif
Playis heir ther pageant, syne gois to graif;
Sparit is nocht ther faculte;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

[I see that makers among the rest
play here their pageant, then go to grief;
their faculty is not exempt;
The fear of death obsesses me].

Seamus Heaney: Collected Poems (2009)

Seamus Justin Heaney
(1939-2013)

Poetry collections:


1. Death of a Naturalist (1966)
   • Death of a Naturalist. 1966. London: Faber, 1969.
2. Door into the Dark (1969)
   • Door into the Dark. 1969. London: Faber, 1985.
3. Wintering Out (1972)
   • Wintering Out. 1972. London: Faber, 1993.
4. North (1975)
   • North. 1975. London: Faber, 1992.
5. Field Work (1979)
   • Field Work. London: Faber, 1979.
6. Station Island (1984)
   • Station Island. 1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.
7. The Haw Lantern (1987)
   • The Haw Lantern. London: Faber, 1987.
8. Seeing Things (1991)
   • Seeing Things. London: Faber, 1991.
9. The Spirit Level (1996)
   • The Spirit Level. London: Faber, 1998.
10. Electric Light (2001)
    • Electric Light. London: Faber, 2001.
11. District and Circle (2006)
    • District and Circle. London: Faber, 2006.
12. Human Chain (2010)
    • Human Chain. London: Faber, 2010.

Selected editions:


13. Selected Poems 1965–1975 (1980)
    • Selected Poems 1965-1975. London: Faber, 1980.
14. New Selected Poems 1966–1987 (1990)
    • New Selected Poems 1966-1987. London: Faber, 1990.
15. Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (1998)
    • Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996. London: Faber, 1998.
16. New Selected Poems 1988–2013 (2014)
    • New Selected Poems 1988-2013. London: Faber, 2014.
17. 100 Poems (2018)

Prose collections:


18. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (1980)
19. The Government of the Tongue (1988)
20. The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (1995)
    • The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. 1995. London: Faber, 1996.
21. Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (2002)
    • Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001. 2002. London: Faber, 2003.

Plays:


22. The Cure at Troy: A version of Sophocles' Philoctetes (1990)
    • The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes. London: Faber, in association with Field Day Theatre Company, Derry, 1990.
23. The Burial at Thebes: A version of Sophocles' Antigone (2004)
    • The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone. 2004. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Translations:


24. Sweeney Astray: A version from the Irish (1983)
    • Sweeney Astray. 1983. London: Faber, 1984.
25. Sweeney's Flight. Photographs by Rachel Giese (1992)
26. The Midnight Verdict: Translations from the Irish of Brian Merriman and from the Metamorphoses of Ovid (1993)
27. [with Stanisław Barańczak] Laments, a cycle of Polish Renaissance elegies by Jan Kochanowski (1995)
28. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (1999)
    • Beowulf: A Verse Translation. 2000. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Daniel Donghue. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.
29. Diary of One Who Vanished, a song cycle by Leoš Janáček of poems by Ozef Kalda (1999)
    • Diary of One Who Vanished: A Song cycle by Leos Janacek / Poems by Ozef Kalda. London: Faber, 1999.
30. The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables (2009)
31. Aeneid: Book VI (2016)

Chapbooks & Limited editions:


32. Eleven Poems (1965)
33. The Island People (1968)
34. Room to Rhyme (1968)
35. A Lough Neagh Sequence (1969)
36. Night Drive (1970)
37. A Boy Driving His Father to Confession (1970)
38. Explorations (1973)
39. Stations (1975)
40. Bog Poems (1975)
41. The Fire i' the Flint (1975)
42. Four Poems (1976)
43. Glanmore Sonnets (1977)
44. In Their Element (1977)
45. Robert Lowell: A Memorial Address and an Elegy (1978)
46. The Makings of a Music (1978)
47. After Summer (1978)
48. Hedge School (1979)
49. Ugolino (1979)
50. Gravities (1979)
51. A Family Album (1979)
52. Toome (1980)
53. Sweeney Praises the Trees (1981)
54. A Personal Selection (1982)
55. Poems and a Memoir (1982)
56. An Open Letter (1983)
57. Among Schoolchildren (1983)
58. Verses for a Fordham Commencement (1984)
59. Hailstones (1984)
60. From the Republic of Conscience (1985)
61. Place and Displacement (1985)
62. Towards a Collaboration (1985)
63. Clearances (1986)
64. Readings in Contemporary Poetry (1988)
65. The Sounds of Rain (1988)
66. The Dark Wood (1988)
67. An Upstairs Outlook (1989)
68. The Place of Writing (1989)
69. The Tree Clock (1990)
70. Squarings (1991)
71. Dylan the Durable (1992)
72. The Gravel Walks (1992)
73. The Golden Bough (1992)
74. Keeping Going (1993)
75. Joy or Night (1993)
76. Extending the Alphabet (1994)
77. Speranza in Reading (1994)
78. Oscar Wilde Dedication (1995)
79. Charles Montgomery Monteith (1995)
80. Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture (1995)
81. Commencement Address (1996)
82. Poet to Blacksmith (1997)
83. An After Dinner Speech (1997)
84. Audenesque (1998)
85. The Light of the Leaves (1999)
86. Ballynahinch Lake (1999)
87. Something to Write Home About (2001)
88. Towers, Trees, Terrors (2001)
89. The Whole Thing: on the Good of Poetry (2002)
90. Hope and History (2002)
91. A Keen for the Coins (2002)
92. Hallaig (2002)
93. Arion, a poem by Alexander Pushkin, translated from the Russian, with a note by Olga Carlisle (2002)
94. Eclogues in Extremis (2003)
95. Squarings (2003)
96. Anything can Happen (2004)
97. Room to Rhyme (2004)
98. The Testament of Cresseid (2004)
99. Columcille The Scribe (2004)
100. A Tribute to Michael McLaverty (2005)
101. The Door Stands Open (2005)
102. A Shiver (2005)
103. The Riverbank Field (2007)
104. Articulations (2008)
105. One on a Side (2008)
106. Spelling It Out (2009)
107. Writer & Righter (2010)
108. Stone From Delphi (2012)
109. The Last Walk (2013)
110. My Yeats (2019)

Edited:


111. [with Ted Hughes] The Rattle Bag (1982)
     • [with Ted Hughes] The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry. 1982. London: Faber, 1985.
112. [with Ted Hughes] The School Bag (1997)
     • [with Ted Hughes] The School Bag. London: Faber, 1997.

Recordings:


113. Collected Poems (2009)
     • Collected Poems: Death of a Naturalist (1966); Door into the Dark (1969); Wintering Out (1972); North (1975); Field Work (1979); Station Island (1984); The Haw Lantern (1987); Seeing Things (1991); The Spirit Level (1998); Electric Light (2001); District and Circle (2006). Read by the Author. Set of 15 CDs. Dublin: RTE / Lannan, 2009.

Secondary:


114. O'Driscoll, Dennis. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber, 2008.

Seamus Heaney (2010)

•

Dreamtigers: i.m. Sarah Broom

[Sarah Broom (2012)]

I heard some really bad news yesterday.

I got an email from her husband Michael Gleissner saying that my friend Sarah Broom had died on Thursday, finally losing her long battle with cancer.

It's not that the news was unexpected. Sarah's struggle with the disease had been protracted and courageous, but - though none of us really wanted to admit it - there was never any real prospect of a cure. Month after month, year after year, we received emails telling us of the latest experimental program she was on, the latest series of flights overseas to try one more wonder drug.

As a young mother, Sarah knew that every moment with her children and family was precious. She never faltered or flagged in that duty, tempting though it must have seemed at times just to give up and let go. She never did.

[Sarah Broom: Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)]

I first met Sarah about ten years or so ago, when she came to take up a Post-doctoral fellowship at Massey Albany. She'd just finished the PhD research which would eventually become her first book, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction (2006), and I suppose I was one of the few people there who'd even heard of some of the poets she'd been studying. We shared a love of craggy British poet Peter Reading - it was, however, she who converted me to the great and powerful Paul Muldoon.

She left to take up a lectureship in English at Otago University, but gave it up after a year. I must confess that it wasn't till then that I understood that, while literary-critical research was important to her - and she was indeed a very fine critic, as I said in my Poetry New Zealand review of her book (reprinted here) - what she wanted above all to be was a published poet in her own right.

[Sarah Broom: Tigers at Awhitu (Auckland: AUP, 2010)]

I remember her showing me the initial drafts of what would become Tigers at Awhitu (2010), and my slightly ambivalent reaction to it. Her poems seemed - I have to admit it - a bit old-fashioned to me, a bit well-behaved, well-rounded, British. By the time the book eventually appeared, though, it was a very different proposition. Quite a few of those earlier poems remained, but they had been supplemented by a section of poems about her disease - wilder, stranger poems, culminating in the title piece "Tigers at Awhitu":

tiger, why do you hide?

my fur is matted
and mangy, my face
is raw, there's red
under my claws

tiger, have you killed?

no, not for weeks
of stony days
and vagrant nights

tiger, why do you cry?

I cannot say

I think my heart
was left unwatched
and opened,
secretly, rashly,
like a flower in the night

sleep, tiger, sleep
sleep and let it be

tiger hearts can take a lot

of love

[p.66]

Is the tiger cancer? No, nothing as simple and reductionist as that - but it is (perhaps) a symbol of the unpredictable forces of nature: those which smile or frown on us seemingly at whim. The power of the poem lies in its suggestiveness, its unpredictability: "And when I have found enough wildness / I lie down right inside it / and sleep" [p.69].

I saw Sarah last at the Korero exhibition last year. Twenty poets had been matched with twenty artists, each of them taking inspiration from a single poem. The artist Sarah had been paired with chose "Tigers at Awhitu," and - as I recall - produced a very beautiful driftwood sculpture to evoke its magnificent setting at the head of the Manukau Harbour.

We had a nice chat about that; about, also, the great success of her book, both here and in the UK, where it had been published simultaneously by Carcanet Press (characteristically, Sarah asked me if I'd like a copy of the British edition to go with the New Zealand one - she knew that with my bibliographic obsessiveness, I'd like to have both versions on my shelves: and so I do):

[Sarah Broom: Tigers at Awhitu (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010)]

1. Broom, Sarah. Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
2. Broom, Sarah. Tigers at Awhitu. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010.
3. Broom, Sarah. Tigers at Awhitu. 2010. Oxford Poets. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2010.

I remember also, shortly before her collection appeared, when it had been accepted by both publishers, but was still in that limbo that poetry books inhabit before they come bursting out on the scene like phoenixes, I invited Sarah to take part in a poetry reading at Massey Albany.

The reading was for our stage one Creative Writing class (the other readers were Jen Crawford, Thérèse Lloyd, Lee Posna and Michael Steven). Sarah admitted to me that it was her first formal poetry reading, which should give you some idea of how long she'd been waiting for her work to be recognised. She must have got a lot more habituated to poetry readings after that - from 2010 onwards, the name Sarah Broom was on every list of up-and-coming young poets in New Zealand.

I'll never forget what she did on that first occasion, though. She started off by reading Stevie Smith's famous poem "Not Waving But Drowning", then segued into her own response to the poem, "All my life" (now available on the Tuesday Poem website). It seems somehow terribly apposite now, more even than it did at the time:

and yes he was
drowning, not waving, now we know,
and isn’t it hard to tell?

[Sarah Broom]
[photograph: Shane Wenzlick (2010)]

In Memory of
SARAH BROOM (1972-2013)

Wife of Michael

Mother of
Daniel, Christopher & Amelia

Author of
Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction (2006)
Tigers at Awhitu (2010)
& (hopefully forthcoming soon):
Gleam (2013)

Rest in peace, Sarah:

sleep, tiger, sleep
sleep and let it be

[Awhitu]

•




Sarah Broom - St Lukes, Remuera
(23rd April 2013)

Don't Think It Couldn't Be You

[Peter Reading: Vendange Tardive (2010)]

i.m Peter Reading
born Liverpool 27 July 1946
died 17 November 2011

Well, it's happened again. I was just looking up a few details for my lecture on Peter Reading on Saturday when I saw that he had died:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead ...

- Callimachus, tr. William Cory

I have to say that the news left me feeling quite upset. It was almost exactly the same sequence of events as I experienced with J. G. Ballard a couple of years ago: you start checking someone's dates online, and next thing you know, you find out they've been dead for months ...

Don’t think it couldn’t be you -
bankrupted, batty, bereft ...

as he says in his most famous poem, Perduta Gente [Lost People] (1989), exploring the cardboard canyons of the homeless in Thatcher's Britain.

"Don't think it couldn't be you" -- now that Thatcher's been Hollywood-ised, another notch in Meryl Streep's list of accents, it's hard to remember that cold face presiding over Nuremberg-style rallies at Brighton, the faithful baying with ecstasy as she preached her crusade against the poor, the starving, the mentally ill:

grievously wounded veteran of the Battle of Bottle,
jobless, bereft of home, skint,
down in the cold uriniferous subway ...

It's a curious irony that she should have ended that way herself, her mind betraying her, all that self-reliance eroded into complete dependency on the social services she so deplored.

Peter Edwards: Peter Reading: Poet

But who was Peter Reading? The "laureate of grot" was one disimissive phrase (dreamed up by hollow-man pundit Blake Morrison) ... People who considered themselves quite well-informed on contemporary British writing would turn out never to have heard of him. To me, he was one of the very few justifications for even daring to speak of a contemporary British poetry scene.

You loved him or you hated him. For most readers, it was clearly the latter. His strange books, with cut-out newspaper clippings, classically turned verses, scribbled notebook entries all jostling for position on the page, were calculated to excite or offend.

When Perduta gente first came out I was living in Scotland, recently targetted as the victim of one of Thatcher's bigtime social experiments: the poll-tax. The subject matter Reading had chosen did not surprise us; what was really surprising was that no-one else seemed to be writing about these things. All the news round the streets was that the last time someone had tried to bring in a poll-tax, it had led to the Peasants' Revolt ...

[Lannan Foundation]

That's not to say that he was neglected, exactly. After his London publishers dumped him in the mid-nineties, Bloodaxe Books of Newcastle reissued his entire back-catalogue in three successive volumes of collected poems. He ended up being one of the most extensively available poets around: another factor in this being the decision of the Lannan Foundation in America to record his entire back-catalogue on a series of DVDs - 24 hours or so for him to read out 26 separate poetry collections.

And here they all are:

Contemporary Writers

Poetry:


1. Water and Waste. UK: Outposts Magazine, 1970.
2. For the Municipality's Elderly. London: Secker & Warburg, 1974.
3. The Prison Cell and Barrel Mystery. London: Secker & Warburg, 1976.
4. Nothing for Anyone. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977.
5. Fiction. London: Secker & Warburg, 1979.
6. Tom O'Bedlam's Beauties. London: Secker & Warburg, 1981.
7. 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5. Ceolfrith Press, 1983.
8. Diplopic. London: Secker & Warburg, 1983.
9. C. London: Secker & Warburg, 1984.
10. Ukelele Music. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.
11. Essential Reading. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986.
12. Stet. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986.
13. Final Demands. London: Secker & Warburg, 1988.
14. Perduta Gente. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.
15. Shitheads. Squirrelprick Press, 1990.
16. Three in One. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991.
17. Evagatory. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992.
18. Last Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.
19. Collected Poems Volume 1: 1970-84. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 1995.
20. Penguin Modern Poets 3 (Mick Imlah, Glyn Maxwell, Peter Reading). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.
21. Collected Poems Volume 2: 1985-96. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 1996.
22. Chinoiserie. Bay Press, 1997.
23. Work in Regress. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 1997.
24. Apophthegmatic. Bay Press, 1999.
25. Ob. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 1999.
26. Repetitions. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University, 1999.
27. Marfan. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2000.
28. Faunal. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2002.
29. Collected Poems: 1997-2003. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2003.
30. -273.15. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2005.
31. Vendage Tardive. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2010.

Secondary Literature:


• Martin, Isabel. Reading Peter Reading. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2000.

[Isabel Martin: Reading Peter Reading (2000)]

It is, however, revealing that the one major critical work about him was written in German, before being translated and published (in somewhat abridged form) in English. There was something a little "European" about his immense, concentrated pessimism; his decision to be a professional Jeremiah. The UK newspaper obituaries tend to concentrate on the his (alleged) "sense of humour" - as if that were a kind of excuse for daring to take things so seriously for so long, in such a thoroughly un-English way.

I suppose, too, that some saw a degree of affectation in his refusal to take up the usual "poetic" ways of making a living: the Academic teaching, the light journalism and reviews. Instead, after an early stint at Art College, he worked as a weighbridge operator for almost twenty years, a job which he claimed gave him "plenty of time to think."

That is, until a newly appointed manager tried to get him to wear a uniform. He promptly resigned and (according to Isabel Martin, his principal witness to the world) managed to achieve depths of indigence rivalling those of his characters Mucky Preece and Boris the Swine in Perduta gente, until he was rescued by the Americans.

Reading's books are complex, intertwined, Dickensian in their balancing of form and content. Their message is grim, but his late shift from social to ecological lamentation certainly showed a refusal to settle into any reconciliatory "final manner" - no Shakespearean late romances for him. The very last one, Vendange tardive seems, in retrospect, prophetic of a mind at the end of its tether. There was little more to say that hadn't been said already, so many times over, but those last words of Perduta gente somehow had to keep sounding out:

Woe vnto woe vnto woe
vnto woe vnto woe vnto woe

It seems a fitting epitaph.

If you'd like to hear the man himself in action, reading from his later works in the Lannan Foundation archive, here are a few links:

• Peter Reading reading Civil (2002) [Video Recording]


• Peter Reading reading ∂ (2003) [Video Recording]


• Peter Reading reading -273.15 (2005) [Video Recording]


• Peter Reading reading Vendange Tardive (2010) [Video Recording]

For the rest, what can I say? A great soul has passed. No-one can claim he didn't warn us, though, to the very utmost of his ability. We'll regret not having listened more carefully as the last tree falls in the ash-pits of the future.

•
[Peter Reading: -273.15 (2005)]