Faber's 'The Waste Land, a Biography', by Matthew Hollis

My (lengthy) review of this strange book is published at:

https://brazen-head.org/2023/03/29/a-wasted-life-of-the-waste-land/

The Lost Book of Barkynge by Ruth Wiggins

 

The Lost Book of Barkynge Ruth Wiggins Shearsman Press 2023

 

‘’In his Historia ecclesiastica, Bede refers to a ‘libellus’ (or little book) complied at Barking abbey in the 8^th century which is now lost. When I first encountered the ruins of the abbey on the banks of the river Roding, I was overwhelmed by a sense of those lost voices.”

From the foreword.

 

If the book had my attention from the moment I heard about it, these sentences hooked me. It’s a familiar experience. Stand in the ruins, or in the old part of town, and wonder about the people who lived there,  not as characters conscripted into a fantasy for the screen, or dusty footnotes in an unread book, but as people like yourself living in a different place with different problems and victories.

 

It’s a thought that must flutter through the mind of anyone with any imagination who visits an historical monument, but mostly it keeps fluttering past and dies in the search for the tea shop or the exit. It’s all gone. 

The majority of people who lived and died in the past left nothing of their lives for those of us who’d like to know what it was like to live in the 12^th or 5^th Century. 

 

Fortunately, Ruth Wiggins didn’t let the thought go. To bring these voices out of the past, as her book attests, is not an easy task and requires a compulsion that must look strange to anyone who has never suffered from it. 

 

There are short cuts, you could always give a speaker an odd name and start writing, but the results would be unconvincing to anyone who knew anything about the period your speaker was supposed to inhabit. 

 

There has to be research. A lot of it. And then as a writer a willingness to get self out of the way and let the voices speak. The technical competence to vary form is probably essential too. An Anglo Saxon Abbess and a Tudor one may have shared certain problems, but their voices would have been markedly different.  

 

In the book the characters emerge briefly, never quite in focus, blurring a little into one another as time moves from foundation to dissolution, similar but also different, as they would have been. 

 

Wiggins supports them with prose passages that serve as fractured context, and more detailed notes at the back of the book. But her nuns and washerwomen queens, the sister of a martyr and assorted locals are convincingly created in what is an impressive attempt to write  the voices swirling round the ruin.  

 

Review of Vale Royal by Aiden Andrew Dunn

 

My review of this excellent book is up at The High Window. 

https://thehighwindowpress.com/category/reviews/

If I were into snappy sub editor sound bites I'd go for 'Does for London's Kings Cross what Geoffrey of Monmouth did for Britain'. 

Ravenser Odd by Michael Daniels.

 

This is Michael Daniels’ first collection, the traditional slim pamphlet, with the added benefit that the publisher, Poets House Pamphlets, Oxford, has produced a fine object, printed on good paper, with understated art work to enhance the text.

 

A note informs the reader that Ravenser Odd first appeared as a sand or gravel bank at the mouth of the Humber in the early 13^th century. A settlement was established there. It enjoyed a bad reputation, until it was finally erased in a great storm in the 14^th. 

 

It’s the stuff of folk tales, made better by the fact it’s true, and while the enemies of the settlement might have seen its destruction as devine retribution, today as the note states, it’s easier to see it as a symbol of nature’s indifference to human concerns.  

 

The poems are all written in Terza Rima. Anyone who voluntarily writes in this form has to be admired for making their own life difficult, but the success of Daniels’ attempt is evident in the way the rhymes don’t intrude. The poems move smoothly, and there’s no sense that a rhyme has been forced or the lines padded to fit the form. The verse is spare, in keeping with the feel of medieval chronicle or folk tale.  

 

The sequence begins:

 

What is it to be held in mind

by someone else, to dwell as ghost

or presence there? The drowned recline

 

in chambered mud, yet still we host

them in our heads, subdued and dim.

It isn’t us who need them most.

 

Economically, Daniels moves from here to sketch in the development and final destruction of the place. Two passing ravens provide a bird’s eye view of the new land. Then there’s a feudal Lord; ‘…life was his to make the worse,/he was their breath, their bread, their meat’, the restless power of the sea, the gradual erosion of the land, until the dead are ‘liberated’ from their graves and washed ashore. The two ravens see the final calamity:

 

The people’s final prayer rose up,

petitioning their lonely god.

The ravens read their trembled lips

 

to scavenge scraps of uttered word,

then spat them back as raucous noise,

disemvolweling all they heard. 

 

 

This is a small impressive collection. The poet’s own website contains files of him reading his work, with evocative visual images to accompany the readings.

https://www.michaeldaniels.co.uk

 

 

 

A Man of Heart is now available

 

A Man of Heart, my version of Laȝamon's ?13th? Century version of the story of Vortigern and Britain in the fifth century, is now available from WWW.Liamguilar.com and direct from the Publisher at Shearsman

Either link will open a new window. 

Poetry as History. William .G. Carpenter's English Civil War.

Pleased to help publish an Extract from William. G. Carpenter's poem about the English Civil War. It's a splendid return of the Metrical Chronicle: poetry as vehicle for factually accurate history you could file in the non fiction, history section of the library.

You can read it at the Brazen Head by clicking on the link below. Poem will open in a new window.

https://brazen-head.org/2023/01/03/dispatches-from-1643/

A Man of Heart. The story of Vortigern and the end of Roman Britain.

 

Precisely between their God and the Devil, heaven and hell, white and black, the man of heart walks through. (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God).

My version of Laȝamon's version of the story of Vortigern and the end of Roman Britain. 

Currently chasing errant commas in this final proof copy. I am sure they move around when no one's watching. This is the second part of A Presentment of Englishry  and will be published by Shearsman in the UK in January 2023.