tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47506019768434291462024-03-18T06:52:38.129+10:00Lady Godiva and MeBy Liam GuilarLiam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.comBlogger562125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-87441302839197224412024-03-03T20:10:00.000+10:002024-03-03T20:10:03.435+10:00Review of Seven of the wildwood, Mary Youmans. Wiseblood books.<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">This review first appeared in<i> The Brazen Head, December 2023</i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i><br /></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i><br /></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>Seren of the Wildwood</i> Marly Youmans. Wiseblood books. Illustrated. 72 pages. HB 16 USD<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>The Wildwood holds the remnants of the past,<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>Strange ceremonies that the fays still love<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>To watch-the rituals of demon tribes<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>Who once played havoc with the universe,<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>And everything that says the world is not<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>Exactly what it seems is hidden here,<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>But also there are paths to blessedness<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">So begins <i>Seren of the Wildwood, </i>Marly Youmans’ narrative poem that drifts the reader through a tale that seems both familiar and strange. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Traditional fairy and folk tales have been a resource for many modern writers and film makers. The old story is usually rewritten to correct a perceived ideological bias, or to rationalise the magic, or to make it acceptable to modern audiences, whose ideas of story have been shrunk by mass market films. With notable exceptions, rewriting fails to produce anything that comes close to the originals in their ability to unsettle and entertain. Writers can study archetypes, read the psychoanalytical literature, immerse themselves in Joseph Campbell et al, naturalise Propp’s Morphology, and still produce a story that fails to hold an audience<a href="applewebdata://76CFCD10-0004-4F32-A4D5-3A31FC885F03#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[i]</span></span></span></a>.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The stories Walt Disneyfied are closer to inappropriate dreams that don’t care about your daylight ideology or your preferred version of the world. They exist in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, recalling a time when the wolves were real and the forest was a dangerous place. <a href="applewebdata://76CFCD10-0004-4F32-A4D5-3A31FC885F03#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[ii]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Marly Youmans’ story moves bodily into that space, where nothing is quite what it seems, and never quite what it should be, where hope and disappointment are as commonplace as leaves and what we might label cruelty is just the way the world is. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Her poem is not a retelling of a previous story. Rather a new story, inhabiting old spaces to make them new again. Seren grows up on the edges of the Wildwood, her childhood overshadowed by the death of her brothers, which the story ascribes to her father’s ill-chosen words. Constrained at home by her mother’s care, she is lured into the trees by the promise of friendship and adventure. She meets characters who harm and help her, moving through a dream like landscape, made real by Youmans’ descriptions, until she finds her way home. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The poem is written in sixty-two stanzas, each consisting of twenty-one lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter ending with a ‘Bob and Wheel’. The Bob is an abrupt two syllable line, the Wheel four short lines rhyming internally . They break the visual and aural monotony even the best blank verse can produce over a long narrative; they can summarise the stanza, comment on it, or provide an opportunity for epigrammatic statement: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">[…]<i>Next, a King<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>Not young but middle-aged his curling beard<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><i>Gone steel,<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;"><i>His mind turned lunatic,<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;"><i>His body no ideal<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;"><i>Of grace and charm to prick<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;"><i>Desire: man as ordeal.<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i> </i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The Bob and Wheel, most famously used is <i>Gawain and the Green Knight, </i>inevitably evoke medieval precedent, as does the walled garden Seren finds but can’t enter. Although the Wildwood is not the harsh landscape Gawain rides into before returning home, the Knight of Romance rode into the forest to seek adventures because the forest was the place where the normal social rules and expectations did not apply. There is often a didactic element to such stories, but fortunately Youmans avoids the temptation to turn hers into a sermon.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Her poem is full of good lines:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>Like some grandfather’s pocket watch wound tight<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>But then forgotten, Seren moved slower <o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>And slower. <o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The descriptions of the landscape anchor the fantastic story. In the following quotation Seren is heading towards a river she must cross and discovers a waterfall:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>And so she travelled toward the roar of rain<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>With thunder , apprehensive as she neared<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>The lip where torrents catapulted free<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>From stone and merged into a muscular<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>And sovereign streaming force-the energy<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>That shocks the trembling pebbles into flight<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>And grinds the massive boulders into bowls.<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Occasionally it is not easy to decide if a line is padded or what might be padding is deliberate stye: ‘It seemed satanic, manic, half insane’, but this is so rare that the fact it’s noticeable is a tribute to all the other lines where it isn’t. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The poem is rich in images and incidents and packed with a diverse cast of characters but what does it mean? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">This is the wrong question. In school we are taught ‘how to read a poem’. For ‘read’, understand ‘analyse’ and the purpose of the analysis is to explain ‘what the poem means’ or, in its most depressing formulation ‘what was the poet was trying to say’. These questions and the approaches they require have little to do with the experience of reading poetry outside the academy. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Stories, poems, and narrative poems especially, can be a way of thinking in and through language, in a non-linear, perhaps non-rational, associative way. The story works for the reader when it activates memory, prior reading, knowledge and experience. The question therefore should be, what does the story do for you while you’re reading it, and afterwards, when a phrase, an incident, or an image remains in your memory.<a href="applewebdata://76CFCD10-0004-4F32-A4D5-3A31FC885F03#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[iii]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Youmans’ poem encourages such a line of thinking; there are numerous allusions to other stories, tying Seren into a network of intertextuality, (at one point she is helped in the story by remembering the stories she has been told), there are images, which evoke a host of medieval precedents, but Youmans avoids the simplification of neat equivalence or the temptation of a tidy conclusion. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">In terms of traditional narrative arcs, if you believe in the importance of such things, the story ends abruptly and very little is explained. There are questions left unanswered and threads that were run out but not neatly tied together at the end. The reader is being treated with respect and left alone with the story. It is a book that invites and rewards multiple rereading. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Reading is made easier because the book itself is a beautiful object. Wiseblood books are to be commended on producing such a fine hardback at such a low price. Printed on good quality paper, one stanza to a page, <i>Seren of the Wildwood</i> is illustrated by Clive Hick-Jenkins. His black and white images complement the tone and mood of the story.<o:p></o:p></p><div><br clear="all" /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><a href="applewebdata://76CFCD10-0004-4F32-A4D5-3A31FC885F03#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">[i]</span></span></span></a> There are obvious exceptions to this generalisation and to be precise everyone who has told these stories has altered them; the Grimms were notorious revisers.<o:p></o:p></p></div><div id="edn2"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><a href="applewebdata://76CFCD10-0004-4F32-A4D5-3A31FC885F03#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">[ii]</span></span></span></a> There are still places where the animals are dangerous and the landscape hostile. <o:p></o:p></p></div><div id="edn3"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><a href="applewebdata://76CFCD10-0004-4F32-A4D5-3A31FC885F03#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">[iii]</span></span></span></a> The undeniable consequence of this line of thinking is that the book that haunts one reader is the same book another reader can’t be bothered to finish regardless of the reviewer’s praise or condemnation. This seems especially true of narrative poetry. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p></div></div>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-11316931319651113132024-01-18T19:40:00.007+10:002024-01-18T19:40:34.831+10:00King's Champion. A Ballad of sorts.<h1 style="break-after: avoid; color: #2e74b5; font-family: "Calibri Light", sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm 0cm;"><a name="_Toc61079708"><br /></a></h1><div style="text-align: left;">This Is the companion piece to 'Taking Possession'. (See previous Post) First published in The Rotary Dial. I had been reading Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry', one of those rare books that were influential in their own time and still readable today. I wanted to try a ballad style story, knowing that half the effect of such a form is lost if there is no tune and no singer. I am also intrigued by the phenomena of trial by combat or ordeal. There is a story of William Marshall, the most famous knight in his day, being accused of treason by King John. The Marshall demanded he be given the right of trial by combat. Since no one was willing to face him, the charges were dropped. The same phenomena is evident in Malory's book, where Lancelot demands the right to prove the queen's innocence in single combat, despite the fact that everyone knows she's an adulteress. </div><div style="text-align: left;">End of Prologue. </div><h2 style="text-align: left;">King’s Champion.</h2><h1 style="break-after: avoid; color: #2e74b5; font-family: "Calibri Light", sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></h1><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">1<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The journey made, his duty done,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">the invitation to remain was not refused<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">while winter raged and sulked <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">about the castle walls. Humming <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">a minor key in passages and towers <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">the wind fumbled the tapestries.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Beside the brazier keeping watch <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">on a land gone hard and white,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">everything seemed dead <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">or waiting to be born. Summer,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">stories they remembered<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">for this stranger from the south <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">who joins the winter games <br />and watches m’lord’s daughter. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Nothing to soften the darkness, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">until spring, then mounted, armed, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">into bright sunshine and bitter wind <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">taking the princess to her wedding. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">2<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The journey done, the prize delivered.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The king’s doubts laid to rest <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">in private conversations: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">the land’s well-run, the castle’s sound.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">So the wedding goes ahead<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">But first, obligatory festivities. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">He is the King’s Champion <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and he kills not for pleasure: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">it’s just what he does. On the first day<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">he won everything and all the women <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">would have thrown their honour <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">in the moat to be with him. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">On the second day he was undefeated. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">When the Princess smiled he fled, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">risked his life on the point of a spear <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and hurtled down the lists. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">On the third day the stranger came.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Wind tugged the bunting, swirling the dust.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">His shield was black, his armour black<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">his herald, dressed in black, rode to the stands<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">saluted the young King, and said:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">My master says: this woman is my wife.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">She is no maid. He claims his right<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">to prove this truth in combat.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The King called for his Champion: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">You lied! You found the rumour true: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">a Knight came courting for his Lord <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and won the Lady’s heart instead. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">You will defend the honour <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">of this woman I must marry. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Your skill must prove her purity<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">stainless as the robes she’ll wear <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">on coronation day. And if you fail, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">I’ll feed them to the royal pigs. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">3<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Spears shatter, horses buckle, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">scrambling clear they pound away. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">His enemy anticipates each stroke. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">But he predicts the Knight’s attempts. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">A mirror image of himself, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">who tip-toed passageways <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">who risked the terrifying consequence<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and wanted his reward. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">They paused. Leant on their swords.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Blood dripping on the troubled dust. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">All summer long I had her, gasped the Knight.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">We plighted troth. I am her spouse. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">I know you did, the Champion replied,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and that is neither here nor there.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Her father won’t acknowledge you:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">he wants a grandson on the throne.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">My master was impatient.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">he proved if she were maid <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">the first night that she came <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and that is neither here nor there.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">He needs her father’s castle<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">his lands, his loyalty, his men <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">to keep the northland settled<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">at this stage of his reign.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">What matters is not<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">the truth of your claim<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">but this ritual proof<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">we both know proves nothing.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">He had not trained to parry words.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Edge striking battered metal <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">slashes the knight’s head from his body.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The Champion paused to breathe, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and bleed, then straightened up<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and turned to the applause <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The King and Princess came in finery<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">to stand above the metal and the meat. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">A royal gesture had it dragged away: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">blood spatters on the Ermine <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">from the puddles round her dainty feet.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">He took her hand. Gentles, the liar shamed<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">tomorrow this false-slandered lady <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">shall become your Queen and mine. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-62740717749386211592024-01-07T18:06:00.004+10:002024-01-07T18:55:33.556+10:00Taking Possession. A story of the Norman Conquest.<p> This poem, the second experiment in telling a story in verse, aiming for a scrupulous meanness in the diction, was first published in The Brazen Head.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b> </b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><b>Taking Possession.<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><b> </b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Normans on the great north road<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">somewhere in England in 1071.<a href="applewebdata://8ED386DA-2649-421A-8BE2-5AF040098E71#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[i]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Hubert, lord of these grey riders,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">fought at Senlac, and since then<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">has been useful to the King<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">His reward, the manor he rides towards,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">larger than the home he left in Normandy.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Walter, his seneschal, riding beside him, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">fought at Senlac with distinction, </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">rallied the savaged in the Malfosse .<a href="applewebdata://8ED386DA-2649-421A-8BE2-5AF040098E71#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[ii]</span></span></span></a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Between them, non-armoured, long haired, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Aelfric, an Englishman. Their local guide.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Their translator. He makes them awkward<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">in ways they’d struggle to define. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">If pushed, Walter might reply; <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">he has no scars: his hands are soft.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The manor is wooden, unfortified.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Too easy to attack and futile to defend.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">All this, thinks Hubert, I will change.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">After the automatic military appraisal, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">the childlike revelation: this is mine.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">All mine. A group waits, women, children,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">men so old they can’t stand straight.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The lady of the manor steps towards him.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Hubert remembers that in the English time<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">she could have run this place without a husband.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Now she and it are forfeit to the crown, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">the crown bestowed them both on him<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and he has come to take possession.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">That thought will take a long time growing old. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">He examines her the way he will inspect the cattle,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">fields, fish weir and the little mill.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Tall, straight, young, blonde: she will do.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">‘Where are the men?’ Vague images <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">of those long legs, fine hips and breasts<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">do not make him stupid. ‘Where are the men?’<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">He has lost friends who were not so cautious,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">in this green folded landscape, where the trees<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and ditches hide those desperate for revenge. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Aelfric translates the question.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">‘Where you should be.’ He ducks his head<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">til he remembers he rides with the victors<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and she’s the one who lost and all her pride<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">will not avert the fate that rides towards her.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">‘Her brothers, father, uncle, nephews died <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">at Stamford bridge and Senlac hill.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Their tenants and dependants died with them.’<a href="applewebdata://8ED386DA-2649-421A-8BE2-5AF040098E71#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[iii]</span></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The idea that Englishmen are long-haired, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">beer swilling, effeminate, will creep <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">into the Norman mind but not in Hubert’s <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">even if he lived a long and idle life.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Those longhaired drunkards stood their ground,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">all day. Charge after charge breaking <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">on that obdurate line of shields. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Anyone who’d seen a horse and rider split<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">by one swing of an axe would think twice <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">about disparaging the man who swung it.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">But Aelfric swung no axe. That much is obvious.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">2<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">After inspecting the boundaries, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">a wary country ride with scouts,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">after the inspection of the manor house, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">after the welcome meal, Hubert decided <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">it was time to inspect his human property.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The men at arms were organised.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Guards posted, tasks allotted.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Walter thanked, allowed to leave.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Hubert talking to his Lady through Aelfric<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">was reminded of those shields.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">When he was polite, she seemed insulted.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">When he had tried to show an interest <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">she had seemed offended. He sensed <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">that what he said was not the words she heard.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">She was nobility, understood the world<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and what would happen next and so he doubted <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">his tame Englishman was being honest.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">He would have to learn her language,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">some words at least, while she learnt his. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Bed, he thought, could be his classroom.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">He stood up, took her hand. She did not move. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">‘If you don’t go with him’, said Aelfric <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">he’ll strip you for his men at arms.’<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">It was a stupid lie. This Norman was no fool<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">who’d break his prize possession out of spite.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Aelfric ignored the look she cut him with.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Once she’d been too proud to notice his existence<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">now she was this Norman’s mattress <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and whatever in his character was broken, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">or unfinished, rejoiced at her humiliation.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The curtains closed behind them. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Aelfric edged towards the drapery, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">heard the sound of fabric falling, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">imagined the pale body emerging. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">He heard Hubert’s belt and sword unbuckled <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">then set down, heard them move together.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Imagined his hands, heard Hubert grunting, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">then making garbled noises like a stricken pig.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">A female hand, the curtain parted. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">She was naked, radiantly naked, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">white flesh tinged pink about the throat.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Aelfric moved. She was majestic, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">desire erased the thought that he’d been caught<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">erased the room, erased his name <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">and everything except desire<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">for the body moving closer to him<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">small hands reaching for his belt. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Who knows a dead man’s final thoughts?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Perhaps he was thinking <i>mine at last</i>,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">perhaps he heard her say, ‘You should have died<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">with all the others’, and perhaps, before the knife <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">sliced the artery in his throat and geysered blood, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">he realised she had spoken flawless Norman-French. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">She caught him as he fell, pulling him down<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">screaming in English, <i>help, help, murder, help</i>.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Walter, sword drawn, running, saw <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">the Englishman raping the frantic lady<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">thrashing on the floor, hauled him away <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">one quick blow striking off the head.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The woman, sobbing, pointing at the curtains.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Behind them Hubert’s naked corpse, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">twisted, reaching for the knife stuck in his back.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">While the bodies were removed<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Walter held the shuddering woman. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">The King still owed him for the Malfosse. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Perhaps this manor. He would need a wife. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">Hands skilled in settling a skittish mare<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">gentled the shaking body <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">aware of its taut lines, soft curves, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">its bloody promise. She would do<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;">when he came to take possession.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><div><br clear="all" /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><a href="applewebdata://8ED386DA-2649-421A-8BE2-5AF040098E71#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;">[i]</span></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> </span>This date is entirely arbitrary. <o:p></o:p></p></div><div id="edn2"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><a href="applewebdata://8ED386DA-2649-421A-8BE2-5AF040098E71#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;">[ii]</span></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> </span>When the English army finally broke and ran at the Battle of Hastings, a small group turned and savaged the pursuing Normans at a place the Normans called The Malfosse.<o:p></o:p></p></div><div id="edn3"><p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><a href="applewebdata://8ED386DA-2649-421A-8BE2-5AF040098E71#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span lang="EN-US"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;">[iii]</span></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> </span>Fulford Gate, Stamford bridge, Senlac, the three battles fought by the English in 1066. Many of the victors at Stamford Bridge died at Senlac (Hastings). <o:p></o:p></p></div></div>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-71741237346881867002024-01-05T18:39:00.002+10:002024-02-05T07:32:37.879+10:00The Buried Giant by Kazoo Ishiguro. Puzzling over value. Literary Allusions. <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>The Buried Giant</i> Kazuo Ishiguro. Faber 2015<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">‘The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin.’ Blurb.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Discussions of literary allusions usually disappear into theories of intertextuality, rather than discussions of the effects specific examples have on the reading of a particular text. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>The Buried Giant</i> is a good example of conscious intertextuality, where elements of the story are deliberately waving in the direction of any number of famous texts. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">A Saxon warrior brandishes his trophy: ‘…what they were looking at was not a head at all, but a section of the shoulder and upper arm of some abnormally large, human like creature.’(p76). In case the reader misses the reference, a character explains: ’Our hero killed both monsters. One took its mortal wound into the forest, and will not live through the night. The other stood and fought and for its sins the warrior brought of it what you see on the ground there. The rest of the fiend crawled to the lake to numb its pain and sank there beneath the black water.’ (p.76) <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">A Saxon hero, two monsters, one with its arm ripped off sinking into the black water. Minor variations, but too close to <i>Beowulf </i>to be anything else<i>. </i>Later, the same hero will go into combat with a dragon. But if <i>Beowulf </i>is being alluded to, knowing the poem adds nothing to an understanding of <i>The Buried Giant</i>, and <i>The Buried Giant </i>doesn’t offer any kind of insight into <i>Beowulf</i>.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">While our Saxon hero points pointlessly towards a specific text, there are other examples where so many allusions are in play the result seems self defeating. There is a knight called Sir Gawain, a recently dead king called Arthur, a magic wielder called Merlin, there are wild women to be met on a blasted plain, a dragon to be killed….but what are all these allusions doing? Instead of adding significance, the ceaseless, enthusiastic pilling up of literary references empties the words of meaning. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">All the aging Sir Gawain has in common with the hero of Arthurian romance is the name. A cross between Don Quixote and one of the Knights Alice meets in <i>Through The Looking Glass</i>, who just might also have spent time in Browning's Child Roland. He is every literary Knight and no one in particular.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Arthur was a gift to medieval storytellers because he provided them with a ready built story world. And the basic outline of the story, established by Geoffrey of Monmouth, gave the world a beginning and end. But since Arthur became a character in modern films and fiction, the Arthurian story world is no longer coherent. Gesturing towards it gains the writer nothing. There are so many characters called Arthur, in so many divergent versions of ‘his’ story. The recent film ‘King Arthur: legend of the sword’ could have been called King Bob and his magic stick. Prior knowledge of King Arthur is of no help in understanding either that film or <i>The Buried Giant</i>. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The allusions do create an air of familiarity. A post ‘Arthurian’ world of villages and knights, Britons and Saxons, evil lords and inevitably crazy sado-masochistic monks. But nothing in the story alludes to anything specifically Arthurian except the names. The king could just as well be Good King Billy Joe Bob. Sir Gawain could be Barny, Billy Joe Bob’s nephew. Change the names, leave the story set in a fantasy world set in pseudo medieval times, and lose nothing. It would still be a fine story. It just wouldn’t feel quite so superficially self-consciously ‘literary’. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The Beowulf character Saxon tells his apprentice that the stone monastery was once built by Saxons as a defensible hill fort, which includes an ingenious stone tower to trap the attackers. If this is immediately post Roman Britain, then the Saxons didn’t build in stone until very much later.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The Saxons and Britons could be Twiggles and Boggles<span style="color: #ffc000;">. </span>The story world would then create and define the Twiggles and Boggles. Instead nothing in the story distinguishes them, they are labelled Saxons and Britons, but they have very little, if anything, to do with any meaning those words have outside the story in either history or literature.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The Arthurian/Beowulf background is short hand wall paper, a cheap set dressing, not to be taken too seriously, not to be examined too closely. It gives the book a ‘literary air’, in which the writer shows off his reading and a certain type of reader gets to feel literary because they recognise the texts. But the names and the words have been emptied of meaning. They point everywhere. They are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-88321343030085654192024-01-01T08:33:00.002+10:002024-02-25T07:48:09.108+10:00Lost Realms by Thomas Williams. Puzzling over value Style #2 <p> <span face="Calibri, sans-serif">Part two.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>Lost Realms</i> by Thomas Williams (William Collins, 2022) <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><b>Does style matter in non-fictive texts?<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">I think it does. I may be wrong. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">To restate the obvious, the period from the fifth through to the seventh century in Britain was very different to what preceded it and what followed. A well-known lack of evidence makes it a very dim age. But the institutions, social organisations, and assumptions of the Imperial world disappear (although not entirely), and what had replaced them by the eighth century (give or take) is only starting to emerge in this period. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The difficulty of understanding the differences is compounded by the modern words we are forced to use to describe them. This is particularly true of those words related to social organisation and military activity.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">But an historian compounds the problem when he or she starts to become enamoured of similes, metaphors and other figures of speech. The desire to explain by comparing the unfamiliar with the familiar is natural, but nothing is ever exactly like something else that isn’t itself. Often the differences are more important than the feeble similarities. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Thomas has a habit of comparing something (unknown or in the past) to something fictive. (See previous post). This seems to be a trend in publishing at present. It may reassure a certain type of reader that there is no substantial difference between Lord of the Rings and Anglo-Saxon history or Game of Thrones and the Wars of the Roses, but that’s an obvious lie. More significantly, precision is sacrificed for effect. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>Stephen of Ripon presents Cædwalla’s visit to Wilfrid as one of student to teacher, the young prince ‘vowing that if Wilfrid would be his spiritual father and loyal helper he in turn would be an obedient son’, <u>a Luke Skywalker to Wilfrid’s Master Yoda</u>. […] What Stephen glosses over, however, is the manner in which the young West Saxon fugitive came to Sussex in the first place. As Bede tells it, Cædwalla swept south into Sussex with an army, killing King Æthelwealth and ‘wasting the province with slaughtering and plunder-<u>rather more Darth Vader than young Jed</u>i’.</i> p. 319<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">[Due to a proof reading error in the original the final quotation, attributed to Bede, is completed after Jedi, not plunder as you’d expect.) <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">As noted in a previous post, you could omit the words I’ve underlined and lose nothing. Not only does their presence add nothing significant, it distorts the material. If you were to stop and make a list of similarities and differences, which realistically no one ever does, then the similarities between Cædwalla and Wilfrid and Luke and Yoda, are so slight as to be meaningless. The differences, starting with one pair existed and the other is fictional, are great. What a King and a Holy man had to offer each other in this situation is not a one sided apprenticeship in a fantasy martial art, but an increase in the kind of power each is looking for: Wilfrid was no more disinterested in this than the king. Whatever the incident reveals about that particular contingent power relationship is destroyed by the Star Wars reference. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The desire for the sound grab works its way into the texture of sentences. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i> </i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>The Northumbrian King found more than a thousand monks from Bancornaburg arrayed against him, all ready to deliver their weaponised prayers on behalf of the Britons-a sort of holy artillery deployed in the face of the pagan Northumbrian war machine. P278<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Delete everything after the dash? In English, writers should visualise their metaphors. What does the word ‘artillery’ evoke? Something big and loud and mechanised. The lead up to the Somme? The Germans shelling Verdun? Soldiers operating machinery, with lines of supply bringing up ammunition, or ammunition dumps. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Now try imagining a group of monks as ‘artillery’? The image slides towards farce and trivialises the event. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">More insidious is the effect created by describing the Northumbrian army as a ‘war machine’. What do you think of when you consider the phrase ‘War Machine’? Machines of War? Tanks, Bombers, Drones? Planes and tanks rolling inexorably off production lines; factories mass producing bombs; a society geared to war: recruiting offices, training, drill, marches. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">How much, if any of that, applies to the Northumbrians? ‘Army’ is unavoidable, a convenient shorthand for ‘group of armed men’. Most of those armed men weren’t soldiers in either the Roman or the modern sense, they were farmers, and why they were there is unknown. They were probably 'armed' with knife and spear, items of daily use. Did they have any ‘military training’? There would have been a smaller group of armed men who had better weapons, and perhaps training in their use. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">How they organised their army, how many men it contained, how it fought a battle, how it was supplied, are all unknown, but it was a long way from the military organisation of classical or modern armies or any kind of production line. There was nothing mechanical about it at all. A loose modern term like ‘war machine’ simply destroys any possibility of getting at the truth of the matter. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">This is not an isolated example. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>The so called Mercian supremacy was really an exercise in early Medieval gangsterism the Mercian king was an Offa you couldn’t refuse p. 287<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i> </i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The throwaway ‘so called’ implies the term ‘Mercian Supremacy’ is somehow suspect. Why? But in what way was the Mercian supremacy different to the Northumbrian? Groan at the ancient joke about Offa, and then ask why ‘gangsterism’ is a better term? A gangster is a criminal; which laws and whose laws were the Mercians breaking? If they were gangsters who were the police, or the upholders of law and order? How was Offa more a ‘gangster’ than Edwin? The nature of kingship in the early Anglo-Saxon period is difficult enough to discern, without the construct being hauled off in the wrong direction by a loose evocative modern label like ‘gangsterism’. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">I think style matters. In <i>Lost Realms</i> it limits the author’s ability to write accurately and clearly about his subject. His imagination is inspired by the thought of ruins and loss. But beyond the descriptions of fallen masonry and weeds there are people acting in the landscape, And they go missing due to his exuberant use of figures of speech and references to his favourite fictive texts. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"> <o:p></o:p></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-33151860878774168972023-12-29T09:57:00.008+10:002023-12-29T10:04:11.324+10:00 Lost Realms by Thomas Williams puzzling over value: style<p> </p><p><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><br /></i></p><p><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><br /></i></p><p><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Lost Realms</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">by Thomas Williams (William Collins, 2022) </span></p><p><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Warning: Opinionating in progress.</i></p><p><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><br /></i></p><p><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Lost Realms </i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> is a book with much to recommend it. The basic approach, ‘histories’ rather than ‘history’ is the only one that can deal with the ways in which Roman Britain became something else.</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">What intrigues me most is two aspects of William’s style. He can write very well; evoke the landscape of post Roman Britain; negotiate the tangle of evidence and contending theories that characterise the period in clear and unambiguous prose. But so much of the book relies on the reader not paying attention. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The following is a characteristic example of general style, and it illustrates two problems. The author is remembering climbing the steps to Tintagel as a child:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>It felt endless that stairway-like the steps that ascended to the pass of Cirith Ungol from the Morgul Vale in Tolkien’s <u>The Two Towers</u>. (p.146)<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">You could delete everything from the dash to the full stop and the information would be conveyed successfully: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">It felt endless, that stairway.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">It’s a common experience, especially for children. The author can rely on most readers to understand his point (even if his intrusion of the memory into the narrative adds nothing especially relevant to the subject at hand). What follows the dash is superfluous in terms of information and is an attempt at ‘style’ but it's a strange thing to find in a history book. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">If this were a personal memoire of reading Tolkien, then the comparison would be at home if it were reversed. ‘When I read about the steps that ascended to the pass of Cirith Ungol from the Morgul Vale in Tolkien’s <u>The Two Towers</u> I remembered the steps that lead to Tintagel.<i>’ p.146<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i> </i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">This would be the normal movement, illuminating the fictional by comparing it with a real, repeatable experience that is not unique to the individual. Williams consistently goes the opposite way, trying to illuminate the historical by comparing it to the fictional. (More about this in the next post.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">But what happens to the reader (me, for example) who has no idea what Morgul Vale or Cirith Ungol are? That question points to an underlying assumption, and an impossible one: the assumption that the reader shares the writer’s fictional knowledge and his attitudes. Williams’ range of reference is eclectic: The Wicker Man, the Shining, Star Wars, the complete works of Tolkien. But no concession is being made to the reader. At one point rather than rewrite an unimportant but obviously obscure reference, he would rather add a footnote to explain his explanation. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">…that will embody an oddly retro-futuristic aesthetic, like the neo-Byzantine fantasies of the Trigon Empire…(p178)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The overall impression is that the author is not making an effort to communicate, rather, he is putting on a performance, and the performance assumes the reader shares his references, his fascination with his own memories, and his opinions. Which effectively means the Model Reader of this book can only be a model Thomas Williams. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Sometimes this positioning is insidious: an anecdote will be introduced as ‘comic’ or ‘blackly comic’ rather than simply left to stand alone. Sometimes it’s unintentionally funny.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i> </i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>The story of Uther and Ygerna is, for modern readers, an uncomfortable read.<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Stop. Which modern readers? All modern readers? Are we expected to believe that those who watched Vikings and Game of Thrones, or read Fifty Shades of Grey are disturbed by this? Some modern readers? Students in universities who are told to feel uncomfortable? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">But our author confesses:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>I remember finding it troubling as a child and it stills leaves me feeling queasy. Not I think because the tale is in itself unusually unsettling (there are many, far more violent sentiments expressed in older Welsh and English poetry) but more for the horny relish with which Geoffrey tells it and the enormous appeal he clearly expected it to have for its intended audience…p146<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">I must admit I laughed aloud at this. The thought of Geoffrey writing 12<sup>th</sup> century erotica is almost as funny as thinking that what he wrote could have aroused your average clerical reader or titillated his ‘aristocratic’ listeners. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Leaving aside the thought that horny relish sounds like a strange kind of novelty pickle, I wonder how many people reading this have read Geoffrey, or how recently or how carefully Williams has? If you’re reading this and have a copy of Geoffrey handy, stop now and read what Geoffrey wrote about Uther in Tintagel. It’s only a few lines. Does this sound like ‘horny relish’? Then go back and read Vortigern’s meeting with Rowena it’s not long either. Then remember what Geoffrey did in his day job. 'Deceived' is not a positive term.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">But most people won’t stop and read Geoffrey. They won’t wonder which readers are disturbed, or whether horny relish is an accurate description. It sounds good. It sticks in the memory. The book, like many recent ones, relies on the reader never stopping to consider what the words on the page mean. The glib references aren’t meant to be examined, or even given any thought. The author is entertaining himself and scattering his references with no real interest in ‘meaning’. If the reader isn't meant to think too deeply about this; did the author? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">This might sound like I’m being over critical about trivial detail, but it leads to a discussion of how the material is presented and understood, for which see next post. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-33038364930744101462023-12-21T09:20:00.005+10:002023-12-21T19:43:57.036+10:00Review of A Man of Heart by Liam Guilar<div class="separator"><p style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></p></div><p><br /></p><p><i>A Man of Heart </i>is reviewed in the December print edition of <i>Quadrant. </i>The text of the review is on line, you can read it by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page, which will open a new window. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC7QlsoMUnyV4e0kXA4bqPhg9Swv7uNXYtPxVTWL8FqXczGhBxfDAx7hLdD657mSbUH7ijkZolNJz7dFg47_XNjO3MquXI_FbxoGDDmOyqv8hDnhOK7jYYQuyy8quXlzgHDKy_0uv06iRixfLuHORvTU-pAD5Bix02H4Km6QsZu3OfNMCX8Y5yYO-6Ink7/s460/Coventry_1750268c.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="288" data-original-width="460" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC7QlsoMUnyV4e0kXA4bqPhg9Swv7uNXYtPxVTWL8FqXczGhBxfDAx7hLdD657mSbUH7ijkZolNJz7dFg47_XNjO3MquXI_FbxoGDDmOyqv8hDnhOK7jYYQuyy8quXlzgHDKy_0uv06iRixfLuHORvTU-pAD5Bix02H4Km6QsZu3OfNMCX8Y5yYO-6Ink7/s320/Coventry_1750268c.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Heart of the Island Nation</p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: Lora, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px;"> ..'.a celebration of long-neglected narrative traditions – an epic for an era which ironizes everything, a tribute to this once and future island and its stoically enduring people.'</span></p><p>...<span style="caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: Lora, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px;">Guilar tells of Vortigern, king (</span><em style="caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: Lora, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px;">fl</em><span style="caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: Lora, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px;">. </span><em style="caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: Lora, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px;">ca</em><span style="caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: Lora, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px;">. 425-450) of the newly independent Britons who, according to traditional historiography, used the Saxon leaders Hengist and Horsa to protect his kingdom against Picts and Scots, and granted them land. Vortigern has been mythologised, but here feels eminently real, thanks to the poet’s sweeping historical sense, and convincingly gritty detail of how those long-lost landscapes must have looked, how those nation-building lives might really have felt.</span></p><p>...<span style="caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: Lora, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px;">We open in shadows suited to descending ‘Dark Ages’, as kingdoms fade into view, and a strategic marriage is being considered sadly in a crepuscular columned room:</span></p><p style="caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: Lora, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 1.2em 0px;">“There was never enough light. / Even in summer, shade / and shadows contour brightness. / At night, torches and lamps / shiver the edge of sight.”</p><p style="caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: Lora, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 1.2em 0px;">A Romano-British matron is thinking of her daughter courted by unrefined “men of power” – regrettably necessary allies in a province turned upside down, where the uncivilized hold the sword-hand, and sophisticates overnight have only squatters’ rights. </p><p style="caret-color: rgb(68, 68, 68); color: #444444; font-family: Lora, Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 1.2em 0px;">You can read the rest of the review by clicking on the link. It will take you to the author's page. </p><p><a href="https://www.derek-turner.com/2023/12/20/heart-of-the-island-nation/?fbclid=IwAR1uOK3JMi8FByUxYmxFQZHnnZkpXJl6eiwSG-xsBJhpffYXlx2CzVWQRA8" target="_blank">Review of a Man of Heart</a><br /></p><p><img alt="Liam Guilar - A Man of Heart" data-dm-image-path="https://irp.cdn-website.com/12e499a6/dms3rep/multi/liam-guilar-man-of-heart.jpg" height="320" id="1937705038" src="https://lirp.cdn-website.com/12e499a6/dms3rep/multi/opt/liam-guilar-man-of-heart-1920w.jpg" width="213" /></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-34217815482312080192023-12-06T19:18:00.001+10:002023-12-06T19:18:17.668+10:00Michael Alexander. <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtkv0ZY3xi_5MGDyiBkRmRnRVOShOq5DXxAJMwKxDxoVpHAxwEtPKOOLwKKB-4kOG7blFnME-MmWmvgEWgzkllSjXigSKhCZt2h3iOqZTAwHv7mcaORNya46H7vDvIPoYqdxjyQkfKz9c_hdbntkCBzRspMlQ_4vNr1H6VnyhoPZKCAlVMesaMqVuDhKCU/s4624/2023-12-06%2007.47.00.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4624" data-original-width="3468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtkv0ZY3xi_5MGDyiBkRmRnRVOShOq5DXxAJMwKxDxoVpHAxwEtPKOOLwKKB-4kOG7blFnME-MmWmvgEWgzkllSjXigSKhCZt2h3iOqZTAwHv7mcaORNya46H7vDvIPoYqdxjyQkfKz9c_hdbntkCBzRspMlQ_4vNr1H6VnyhoPZKCAlVMesaMqVuDhKCU/s320/2023-12-06%2007.47.00.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Sad News. I heard today that Michael Alexander died last month. </p><p>A translator of Old English, writer of one of the most judicious books on Ezra Pound, historian of literature and a fine poet in his own right. His interests ranged widely. There's a good book on Medievalism, a fine history of English Literature, and a book on Shakespeare that stands out amongst the flood of books on that subject as being both thoughtful and thought provoking. </p><p>I bought this copy of Beowulf in 1976. I liked the cover. I knew nothing about Old English. </p><p>But I was hooked. There was something strange and intriguing and I wanted to know what the original sounded like. It was one of the main reasons I studied medieval literature. </p><p>Many years later, banging my head against Pound's <i>Cantos</i> I found his book <i>The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound</i>. He'd met the man, dedicated his Old English Translations to him 'without irony'. But his discussion of Pound's Seafarer is the most level headed I've read. </p><p>Even more years later, when Pn Review published my version of 'Wulf and Eadwacer' in the same edition Michael was remembering his meeting with Pound, I thanked the editor and told him that I owed my interest in Medieval Literature to Michael's translations. The email was passed on, a correspondence followed. </p><p>I was the awkward school boy staring at that Penguin book in W.H.Smith's in Coventry trying not to write fan letters. He was generous with his time. Stories about meeting Pound, and David Jones. Links in the chain. </p><p>When he read <i>A Presentment of Englishry</i> he was complimentary, but he also wrote; 'It wasn't all plague rape and pillage'. He was right. There's a poem in <i>A Man of Heart </i>called 'These are the good old days #1' which begins 'There must have been sunshine./ Good days when a man unbent from his work/ and smiled to see the healthy children play'. Originally 'For Michael Alexander' I removed the dedication, thinking the piece wasn't good enough. I wish I hadn't. </p><p>It's strange the debts I owe to strangers. Sometimes I'm given the chance to thank them.</p><p><br /></p><p>Safe travelling.</p><p><br /></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-64390660476315194162023-10-10T20:28:00.001+10:002023-10-10T20:28:14.850+10:00Review of Taliesin Origins by Dr. Gwilym Morris-Baird<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKI88wuKubAz0c4btXIS8yZl-xkhQ4HxOK97FuAIBufHjcE3agXDF-5IoaoXMyX2sYi9RhgYtb5535QxRsxdIgM6viwJEqirM7WEI_vNOW_0gIzuJ4Y3RkKTvmZgvjq0kNALjpUSeIhlXrqLgrCB81F39wc0YBen1bHStV7uofmxnKO2m7lxd6ip8zvXap/s4624/2023-10-07%2010.47.20.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Taliesin Origins by Dr. Gwilym Morris-Baird" border="0" data-original-height="4624" data-original-width="3468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKI88wuKubAz0c4btXIS8yZl-xkhQ4HxOK97FuAIBufHjcE3agXDF-5IoaoXMyX2sYi9RhgYtb5535QxRsxdIgM6viwJEqirM7WEI_vNOW_0gIzuJ4Y3RkKTvmZgvjq0kNALjpUSeIhlXrqLgrCB81F39wc0YBen1bHStV7uofmxnKO2m7lxd6ip8zvXap/w240-h320/2023-10-07%2010.47.20.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Wales can boast one of the finest literary traditions in the world and in the poetic tradition of Wales, Taliesin is a vital figure. There are, intriguingly, two ‘Taliesins’. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The first is an historical character. A Briton who (?Probably?) was a court bard in ‘The Old North’, during the sixth century AD. He composed praise poems for ‘kings’ like Urien Rheged and was well-rewarded for his songs. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">There is a second Taliesin, who is a character in a legendary tale. He benefits from a concoction in a magic cauldron and having been pursued by its irate owner, through several animal transformations, is finally eaten as a grain and born again to become the greatest of poets.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">In the long Welsh tradition, it seems that ‘being Taliesin’ became a persona that later bards could adopt. The poems were memorised, recited and passed on. The poems associated with this practice tend to be 'visionary' and for a modern reader often baffling. Poems like 'Armes </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Prydein' or 'Cad Goddeu' remain obscure even after they have been 'explained'. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Scholars have tried to separate the ‘Historic’ from the ‘Legendary poems’ in an attempt to see what the historical poet may have composed. Not everyone agrees on the selection but they do agree the Historic ones are few. They do however contain gems like 'Marwnat Owein'; the great lament for Owein Rheged which is not only a great lament, but a master class in metrical finesse. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">There’s not much that can be said about the Historical Figure, though the book gives a good introduction both to him and his context. Morus-Baird’s focus is the story or stories that survive about the legendary Taliesin. In an eloquently written exploration of the myth, he reads the symbolism of the stories to establish links to other stories, and to older and wider themes in a broadly ‘Celtic’ history. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">He knows that interpretation, especially interpretation of myth, legend and folklore is an art, not a science, but he is too well-informed and too sane to drift off into the twinkly-eyed excesses of others. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Reading discussions of medieval literature and folk lore, it often feels like being a passenger on a tour bus in a foreign country. Too often the tour bus arrives at a junction and the obvious progression is to go right. You can see the Hill of Tara which is where you thought you were going. The bus goes left. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">This happens far too often, and the reader becomes mired in the kind of arguments that C.S.Lewis mocked as: ‘Apollo was a Sun God. He rode in a chariot. Cuchulainn rides in a chariot. Therefore Cuchulainn was a sun god.” At which point you get off the bus, hike back to the intersection and wait for someone going in the right direction.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">This never happened for me with Morus-Baird’s book. The tour guide is eloquent, entertaining, and obviously very well-informed. When the argument arrives at the intersection, he may go left, but you will be glad he did, because he will take you to places you hadn’t considered and while objections will occur to any reader, he always stays within the grounds of possibility and is very explicit about when he is speculating or stretching a point. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The writing navigates a territory whose boundaries are mapped by the meticulous linguistic arguments of cautious scholar and the wishful thinking of the ill-informed. As such it’s very valuable not least because it's readable. He cares about his subject. Part of his argument is that the Taliesin tradition is built into the Welsh Language, and therefore its diffusion and perpetuation are essential parts of a thriving Welsh culture. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">This might sound like niche marketing, but the ‘Taliesin tradition’ has a lot to offer anyone; especially those interested in folklore, or interested in one of Medieval Europe’s great poets. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Hopefully before the next Robert Graves blunders around in that tradition, he or she will have read this book. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">(My only criticism of this book is its lack of an index.) </p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-74932016481985227852023-09-27T16:26:00.002+10:002023-09-27T19:01:10.214+10:00Review of David McCooey's 'The Book of Falling' <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidAn51l80WVPCC9z4u2r0vTY2H2KXoVqy0Fid_SdsNU0nczOB02sfbTJU4iokQPXLSAZeiA804TQuGGGvbvFIDExM43B5SJmn-9A2hF-M03Kk7GOABvQsRuHxrbLEAPfm1zeBJHYRiDFqkj3XSccb3dzH5N0b3d2nc1_4cg1NqaUiuYTeqYGH-z1r03Hel/s840/UP_The-Book-of-Falling_front-cover-600x840.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="840" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidAn51l80WVPCC9z4u2r0vTY2H2KXoVqy0Fid_SdsNU0nczOB02sfbTJU4iokQPXLSAZeiA804TQuGGGvbvFIDExM43B5SJmn-9A2hF-M03Kk7GOABvQsRuHxrbLEAPfm1zeBJHYRiDFqkj3XSccb3dzH5N0b3d2nc1_4cg1NqaUiuYTeqYGH-z1r03Hel/s320/UP_The-Book-of-Falling_front-cover-600x840.jpeg" width="229" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>Three reasons why you should read David McCooey’s poetry.</p><p>(This review originally appeared in The Brazen Head, September 2023)</p><p>David McCooey, The Book of Falling. Perth, Western Australia, Upswell Publishing, 2023. 109 pages. $24.99 (AUS)</p><p><i>The Book of Falling</i> is David McCooey’s fifth collection of poems, and if nothing else, gives the lie to the invidious myth that people who work on academic writing programs can’t write.</p><p>1)<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>He’s very good at what he does. His poetry evokes Bunting’s praise of Scarlatti:</p><p><br /></p><p><i>It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti</i></p><p><i>condensed so much music into so few bars</i></p><p><i>with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence</i></p><p><i>never a boast or a see-here, </i></p><p><br /></p><p>Every well-chosen word in its place, and each word doing the necessary work. In the first four lines of the collection, a sense of vague but threatening menace is swiftly evoked:</p><p><br /></p><p><i>The unseen night creatures -scaled and feathered </i></p><p><i>for their occult ceremonies-rasp and call outside</i></p><p><i>in the dark beyond the half dark that</i></p><p><i>surrounds this marbled, half lit house</i></p><p>(<b>Questions of Travel</b>) </p><p> </p><p>This deft verbal economy is a feature of the wide variety of poems that appear in <i>The Book of Falling </i>and plays against often surprising content. The first three poems are conventional poetic monologues as though the poet were setting out his stall and proving his ability. At the same time the subjects are anything but conventional. Elizabeth Bishop packs to travel; Sylvia Plath looks at her life on her 80th Birthday; Marilyn Munroe divines the future and amongst other things, ‘…see[s] who will be forgotten first/ Queen Elizabeth, Molly Bloom, or me.’ </p><p>These are followed by word play, short sequences about family, a group of satires and elegies, poems about urban life, as well as ‘Three Photo Poems.’ The latter a new genre to me: three sequences which juxtapose very short texts (one of the sequences is made up of ‘found poems’) and photographs. </p><p>The juxtaposition of pictures, either of the mundane, as in the sequence about bathrooms, or the family photographs which on closer inspection look anything but mundane, with short pieces of text, lead to the second reason you should read the book.</p><p>2)<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><b>Variety.</b> </p><p>On a first reading you can never tell what’s going to be on the next page. This is a defining characteristic of the other two books of McCooey’s poetry I have read and unusual in single author collections where formal and thematic similarities tend to be on almost every page. The variety here is held together by a unified view of the world, a laconic wit, which takes pleasure in the commonplace while recognising how strange it is. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Rain Poem.</b></p><p><i>And as if someone uttered the trigger word</i></p><p><i>rain begins without ceremony.</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>But it’s not ‘driving rain’;</i></p><p><i>it’s just sitting outside</i></p><p><i>engine idling over the neighbourhood.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>The poem could stop there, but it turns into something more than a pun and a neatly turned image.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>It doesn’t give a damn</i></p><p><i>And then, like a poem ending</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>you look out the window </i></p><p><i>and the rain has stopped.</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>The birds have returned and the wind </i></p><p><i>has begun its invisible cover-up job. </i></p><p><br /></p><p>Many of the poems present the everyday and familiar but altering the point of view just enough to destabilise the way you’re used to looking at the world. Freud’s Uncanny perhaps, without the baggage attached to that word.</p><p>When was the last time you thought about how strange bathrooms are? ‘Bathroom Abstraction #3’ begins: ‘Windowless bathrooms are the cave of modernity’.</p><p>What you encounter as reader is an intelligence moving through time, and recording the variety of experience, taking interest and pleasure in the world . And above all wanting to share it with the reader. There are numerous single author collections where the reader is left feeling his or her presence is not required. Or perhaps only required as an anonymous cheerleader who proved their devotion by buying the book.</p><p> </p><p>If a poem can be a space for thinking through and in language, McCooey’s poems invite readers to look without telling them what to think. A short example:</p><p><b>Australia</b></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Dropping my son at school.</i></p><p><i>It is ‘Art Day’;</i></p><p><i>students are to dress up </i></p><p><i>as their favourite artist. </i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>I see a kid dressed in white.</i></p><p><i>He has sunscreen on his nose,</i></p><p><i>And carries a cricket bat.</i></p><p>Both bemused and amusing, but open to different ways of being read. The traditional art community criticism of Australian attitudes towards ‘the arts’ in a sports mad country; a criticism of the arts community’s failure to penetrate the education system even on a school day ostensibly devoted to ‘Art’; or a wry celebration of the artistry of Australian cricketers, who can flog a rock like ball a long distance with enough balletic grace to suggest cricket is indeed an art form. The poem holds all these possibilities (and others) open for the reader.</p><p>And finally. This may be a heretical comment: poetry is a highly sophisticated form of entertainment. It provides unique pleasures. Reading book reviews, it can seem that enjoying poetry is a subversive activity. The reviewer usually makes great claims for its importance, significance, ground-breaking genre-bending, appropriate ideological stance on the burning issues of the day but rarely admits to having enjoyed reading the book under review. </p><p><br /></p><p>3)<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>McCooey’s books are skilfully written, varied, thought provoking, and above all enjoyable. You should read them. </p><p><br /></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-28026464096222908582023-09-21T20:40:00.000+10:002023-09-21T20:40:06.491+10:00Culhwch and Olwen.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge1PdcnRJhqW_rtu_69d0Al5J7dWVJn9k9vEN4vSV4MgrZw6O8I_ifGx_j8ARznL9fvH3VuCiCMuGEM3xfccRqvrwoVdC6K6Le6EMMu4SpVx9sxfi8pazwoONoAcmxyI2DjJaCalfNR0sDMr0cqXlV014yuC271Dv3YkZFWPSbneVccsh3YNpWxCzMdXih/s4624/2023-07-31%2007.43.46.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4624" data-original-width="3468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge1PdcnRJhqW_rtu_69d0Al5J7dWVJn9k9vEN4vSV4MgrZw6O8I_ifGx_j8ARznL9fvH3VuCiCMuGEM3xfccRqvrwoVdC6K6Le6EMMu4SpVx9sxfi8pazwoONoAcmxyI2DjJaCalfNR0sDMr0cqXlV014yuC271Dv3YkZFWPSbneVccsh3YNpWxCzMdXih/s320/2023-07-31%2007.43.46.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>I have loved this story since I first read the Jones and Jones translation many decades ago. Now I'm working my way slowly through this magnificent edition, which has the text in Middle Welsh but the introduction, notes and glossary in English. (The same two scholars produced an all Welsh edition but I despite the ongoing effort I still can't read Modern Welsh.)</p><p>The story begins as a folk tale which wouldn't be out of place in the Grimm's world, and then the hero gets on his horse to ride to Arthur's court. You can almost sense the anonymous genius who put this together realising here was an opportunity to show off, and the prose shift gears. (Marked for me by the sudden increase in the number of words I have to look up).</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBqO4UQDwBpQ6xaXwvSUBfku9LTDI5_2O_A1zBQx8bYymFDuXcO1e-96jE1eQcXATTH8w-XG_eWP8vBpTsuEBkz5WSaZ2lT8esvAN1gFUnKQAKGK5-d_bykVjGtRdTaQfXSczozdXJ3dMnkRtsQEgf87_wg4Ids_8lnCIZ3ilzwulAy_OSa2mfcQrPyWd9/s4624/2023-09-21%2008.29.41.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4624" data-original-width="3468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBqO4UQDwBpQ6xaXwvSUBfku9LTDI5_2O_A1zBQx8bYymFDuXcO1e-96jE1eQcXATTH8w-XG_eWP8vBpTsuEBkz5WSaZ2lT8esvAN1gFUnKQAKGK5-d_bykVjGtRdTaQfXSczozdXJ3dMnkRtsQEgf87_wg4Ids_8lnCIZ3ilzwulAy_OSa2mfcQrPyWd9/s320/2023-09-21%2008.29.41.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">I particularly like this description of Culhwch's dogs, gambolling around him:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And before him, two white breasted brindled greyhounds<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">each with a gold collar from shoulder to ear<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And the one that was on the right would be on the left<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And the one on the left would be on the right<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Like two sea swallows frolicking about him.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">After this, the porter scene which is another favourite. </span></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-31448584211114577782023-09-01T19:56:00.008+10:002023-09-13T20:24:44.171+10:00Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Memory, narrative and identity. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Are your memories like the panel of a cartoon, that’s been torn from the rest of the strip? A scene from a film where the credits have gone missing? Vague images glimpsed from the wrong angle, a collection of shade and colour and movement? What happens to them when you try to put them into words and tell them to someone who wasn’t involved? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Beyond the obvious idea that writing memory is always a work of reconstruction, there is the lurking problem that although the event can be described in words, the writer is on the outside looking in. Whatever emotion that incident evoked at the time, or no matter how important it seems in retrospect, it slips away or is distorted in the attempt to write it. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Freud claimed that some of his patients could not ‘narrate themselves into coherence’. And what is a memoire, if not a retrospective rearrangement of events to produce a coherent character who shares a name with the narrator? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">But the key term is ‘narrate’. We all have memories. But putting them into words, even for the most eloquent, is never straight forward.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The English poet and critic, Jeremy Hooker suffered a stroke in July 1999, and kept a journal of his experience, first in hospital then when recuperating, until his return to work in January 2001.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">As the book progresses the entries integrate record, observation and memory and gently develop into a memoire of his early years. The awareness of the problems of writing memory make this book far more interesting than a well-written memoire would be on its own. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The book begins with short entries which record the world of the hospital, his return home, and his adjustments to a body that was no longer to be taken for granted. The entries record encounters with friends, old and new which provoke reflection, and Hooker, refusing to sentimentalise, is candid about himself and his life. However the book turns on his unexpected desire to write about his past. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">‘Since lying in hospital I have thought that I would like to write something-call it a memoire or autobiographical sketch-about my childhood…. I doubt I could do it formally since it would confront me with problems of public persona & literary occasion-problems in my own mind about my ‘rights’ as an author. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;">What I might do , though, is give way to the impulse when it occurs and use this journal space , in which I feel most free as a writer, to sketch a memory or an impression. (P.93. November 10.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;">For a writer who had refused the ‘confessional’ and ‘autobiographical’ in his own poetry the desire was not straight forward. How to avoid what he had called ‘the sludge of nostalgia?’ More significantly, if a memory is a first person narrative, the writing of it becomes tangled in problems of subjectivity. In a previous essay, Hooker had reflected on ‘the lyric I’ and written ‘quite simply, I might look at a tree or any living thing and know its reality would always be beyond my words’. The past may be factual. But in narrating it, it becomes a thing, to be described, ‘to be always beyond words.’ <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;">In the same essay he wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;">…’One problem with Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as originating in emotion recollected in tranquillity is it’s tacit assumption of a stable ego in the act of recollection’. Against this he juxtaposes D.H. Lawrence’s ‘ If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!-then, I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me.’<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Comparing such disparate figures as Keats, and David Jones, he wrote: ‘Each involves self or soul as more process than fixed identity, as something one works with and realises in the making’. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;">A memoir is not just a straight forward account of past events. It is the construction of one possible version of a life, a fixing of identity in retrospect. In Hooker’s case, an activity qualified by a critical awareness:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;">‘It seems to me that a lot of ‘inner experience’, offered as the subject of poetry, isn’t interesting. For a start it tends to be conventional, with more sameness (but less common depth) than its advocates are prepared to allow. The individual is a bourgeois concept , a commercial asset in a society given to buying and selling ‘lifestyle’ products. The person by contrast turns away from convention and instead of idolizing the psychological, as though it were a precious private property, is sensitive to the unique and relational aspects of human being.’ (p. 81. October 24)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">He is therefore, wary. If our past is something we narrate into coherence, then what is a genuine memory? How much of our idea of our past is constructed around stories other people have told us, or photographs we have seen. How do we know our memory isn’t a story we have told ourself so often we now accept it as something that ‘really did happen’. In retrospect do we freight incidents and people with a significance they didn’t have at the time? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">One of his memories is off sitting in a car, waiting for his father, and sketching what he could see outside the window. The image becomes a symbol of what he’s <i><u>not </u></i>trying to achieve.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Often the memoire seems to the writer, looking out at a world that is ‘over there’, as if the world was a painting without people. Or that what mattered was his or her reflection in the glass. ‘But what I want to see is the life out there, not my face reflected in the glass, or an empty landscape, but the quickness and the plenitude in this common place.’ <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">As with Hooker’s other Journals, his reading and reflection are contained in the diary. During the period covered in <i>Diary of a Stroke</i>, he was also working on <i>Imagining Wales </i>and these two books complement each other. <i>Imagining Wales</i> is the publicly endorsed critical approach, <i>Diary of A Stroke</i> contains a personal response to these writers that is no less interesting. For readers of his critical work, the journal references provide a perspective on these authors: these writers give him a way of orientating himself, or navigating his way through the experience. It is a model of literate critical reading in the best sense, of taking what can be learnt from books and folding them into his life. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Hooker’s long engagement with the work of John Cowper Powys, David Jones and Richard Jeffreys, provide threads through the journal. Two of those writers provide unusual models for anyone writing about his or her past. In his <i>Autobiography</i> Powys carefully manufactured a version of himself. It’s an astonishing performance but he left his biographers the task of untangling the fact from fiction. Jefferies’s <i>Story of my Heart </i>is an autobiography mostly lacking in the kind of dated events one might expect. Hooker’s approach is less programmatic, more conventional but no less interesting<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">If you take into account class, geography and time, most childhoods, barring traumatic events, are similar. Like it or not, we are cliches. What makes <i>Diary of a Stroke</i> more than just an eloquent record of memory and recovery is Hooker’s reluctance to simply record his past. There’s an honest tension between the desire to write about memory; the critical sense that self-revelation is usually not that interesting to a third party, and an awareness of the technical difficulties of writing about the past that elevates the book above the merely self-referential and provides a stranger with much to think about. <o:p></o:p></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-57108895471663219092023-07-10T13:34:00.001+10:002023-07-10T13:34:52.571+10:00Transformation, magic, the conception of Arthur, a digression.<p> </p><p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">At some point, things that people accepted as real pass into their stories, and survive only as ‘something that can happen in a</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">story’. The idea that human beings could transform, or be transformed, into other humans or other animals, seems to have been almost universal. But gradually the idea passes into the world of the storyteller.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">This doesn’t happen at a specific time in a culture’s history. And it happens at different times for different groups and different individuals within the same culture. If you are one of those who believe in the ‘contextualising of texts’ to identify ‘values and attitudes and beliefs’ this should make you reconsider what you’re doing. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The stories in The Mabinogion were written down in the 14<sup>th</sup> century. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">in 2023 Amazon is selling books of magic spells, and if the reviews are anything to go by, people not only buy them but expect them to work. ('Where am I supposed to get wolves teeth?' asks one reviewer.) <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">A very tentative google search reveals that on Fiverr I can hire a powerful practitioner of black magic (his sales pitch) to cast a transformation spell for less than ten dollars. For fifty dollars, another expert will transform anyone into a physical beauty. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Astrology is still popular, not just in the free versions that turn up in most papers, or online, but in versions that require payment for a horoscope. Tarot readers flourish.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">So before tracking ‘contemporary’ attitudes to magic and transformation, and puzzling over what it means to ‘believe a story’, it’s worth pointing out that while the stories in the Mabinogion were written down in the 14<sup>th</sup> century, a belief in magic is not something that disappeared from our society at some vague point in the past. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"> <o:p></o:p></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-14839652424323736002023-06-29T20:25:00.000+10:002023-06-29T20:25:04.043+10:00What's great about Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur<p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCFIZaLEdD4FiwU2CG1Z-SHRVzVLvv5nxYDcclRfbobUKf9EGdgHhNOjo3B5F-jm77x8TbMyGtfbamaYPx5X5ErSxhf4_39EdxjpzlqLcFeDsx5COlUlEOxsaEuc0EBbms490ZYvBmNponLKk34D2Pso7eb0EtbDEqr3PgQS8a8I9Xm-5Gqr2swsLg0_zA/s4624/2023-06-29%2010.10.21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4624" data-original-width="3468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCFIZaLEdD4FiwU2CG1Z-SHRVzVLvv5nxYDcclRfbobUKf9EGdgHhNOjo3B5F-jm77x8TbMyGtfbamaYPx5X5ErSxhf4_39EdxjpzlqLcFeDsx5COlUlEOxsaEuc0EBbms490ZYvBmNponLKk34D2Pso7eb0EtbDEqr3PgQS8a8I9Xm-5Gqr2swsLg0_zA/s320/2023-06-29%2010.10.21.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>My attempt to explain why I admire Malory's book, and why I've been rereading it since the late 1970s, is published on The Brazen Head Website. Clicking on the link below should take you there.</p><p><a href="https://brazen-head.org/2023/06/27/thomas-malorys-civilisation-shaping-chivalry/" target="_blank">https://brazen-head.org/2023/06/27/thomas-malorys-civilisation-shaping-chivalry/</a> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-41348548053882093792023-06-27T15:16:00.002+10:002023-06-27T15:16:33.374+10:00The Conception of King Arthur. Transformation, magic, belief. 2/3<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;"><span style="color: red; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">What <span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">is</span> the audience being asked to <span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">believe when Uther becomes Gorlois?</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="color: red;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The first Branch of the Mabinogion illustrates two types of change: disguise (Pwyll pretends to be a beggar) and transformation (Pwyll is Arawn for a year while still remaining Pwyll) (see previous post).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The Fourth Branch offers several examples that refine the concept of ‘transformation’. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The first of these is illusion. This is the explicit use of magic to confuse two things for effect. Gwydion offers Pryderi 12 horses and twelve hounds, with saddles and bridles and collars and leashes and golden shields. The story teller inserts the comment ‘y rei hynny a rithassei ef o’r madalch’ which Sioned Davis translates as ‘He had conjured those up out of toadstools’. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Fleeing Pryderi’s court, Gwydion tells his companions they must hurry because the magic will only last ‘until tomorrow’. Later, he creates the illusion of an invasion fleet to scare his sister. In neither case does the illusion last.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The second type is transformation as Pwyll experiences it in the First Branch. Gwydion and his brother are turned into three animals over three years. In this case they are specifically told they will have the nature of the beast they have become, but the implication is that they remain conscious they are men and they only return to human form when Math wants them to.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The most famous transformation in the story is Math and Gwydion’s taking flowers and turning them into a woman. This is not an illusion. The Flower Lady is fully human, and as she is human she has speech, and free will, and the power to choose. When Gwydion punishes her, she isn’t changed back into petals, but transformed into an owl.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">So a suitably threefold division. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Disguise (without magic)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Genuine transformation, permanent. (With Magic)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Illusion ( A Magic trick.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">What this allows us to do is now is to look at what people seemed to have believed about transformation at the time these stories were circulating. It's not at all straightforward. And it should eventually bring us back to <span style="font-family: Calibri;">Laȝamon</span> and Uther. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-2339115001593335672023-06-14T13:50:00.003+10:002023-06-14T13:50:19.264+10:00The Conception of King Arthur. Transformation, magic and belief.1/3<p> <span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The story of Arthur’s conception may have been Geoffrey of Monmouth’s invention. (See previous posts about how was King Arthur's father.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Uther, love sick for Ygraene, and at war with her husband, Gorlois, is transformed by Merlin into Gorlois and as Gorlois, Uther is able to enter Tintagel castle and spend the night with Ygaerne. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The story opens Malory’s 15<sup>th</sup> Century version. There are classical, biblical, mythological and folk tale examples that might have inspired Geoffrey, but most academic commentators seem to note the parallels, discuss possible sources, or how it fixes Arthur into ‘The Hero Paradigm’ and then move one. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">But the longevity of the conception story obscures how bizarre it is. It’s worth stopping and considering just how bizarre.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Looking at another literary example makes explicit what the audience is being asked to believe. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">In the <i>First Branch of the Mabinogion</i>, the story of Pwyll consists of three episodes. In the first two, Pwyll adopts a disguise. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">In the first episode, Pwyll becomes Arawn, and lives as him for a year. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">In the second, he arrives at the wedding of Gwawl and Rhiannon in disguise. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="color: red;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The second is an example of ‘being disguised’ that most people would accept as credible. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Someone acts a role, altering appearance superficially to avoid recognition. At a time when even Kings would not have been recognised outside the limited circle of their close acquaintances, Pwyll can easily hide his identify by wearing a disguise (rags) which he can throw off. He is playing at being something else. The charade is made easier because he’s playing ‘generic beggar’. This disguise hides his real appearance without in anyway altering who he is. Pwyll is not a beggar, but a Prince pretending to be one. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The first transformation, however, is much more complicated.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Pwyll doesn’t just take on Arawn’s appearance and pretend to be him. This would be impossible. There would be so much he couldn’t know. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Before they change places, Arawn reassures Pwyll that he will have the fairest woman he’s ever seen (Arawn’s wife) to sleep with every night, and neither she, nor the chamberlains, nor the officers of the court, nor anyone of his retinue, will know it’s not Arawn. In other words, the people who know Arawn intimately, will not notice the deception over the course of a year. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">So Pwyll becomes Arawn, not just in his appearance. He knows the court and its inhabitants, and its rituals. He must therefore have access to Arawn’s memories. Even when he acts ‘out of character’ Arawn’s wife does not suspect it’s not her husband, but that something is wrong with him. <span style="color: red;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">For a year.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">But he also remains Pwyll. Although Arawn has essentially given him his wife for a year, and judging by his reaction at the end of the episode he fully expected him to take that offer in all the ways it could be taken, Pwyll turns his back on her every night, and doesn’t even speak to her until the morning. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Pwyll remains Pwyll in the body of Arawn, with access to Arawn’s memories. This is the transformation that occurs when Uther becomes Gorlois so he can spend the night with Ygraene. (Euphemisms are wonderful things. ) <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">And like all good stories, it raises interesting questions. Which will take us via the Third and Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, to Saint Augustine and others, and then back to Uther. <o:p></o:p></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-35676929368278406452023-06-12T19:07:00.002+10:002023-06-12T19:07:41.777+10:00'Layamon's Last Interview': Publication in Long Poem magazine<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ4UtER8RwRYY22vQFA34Kld-89nVPY1KhE5zHanq3MUDoaXVUbGYtmpMHmx8gwG_0PjI3krHOnv7Ve-8lg6bRci6znHg1QCU_j-2hGfUfLzvtQ6gZt4WeCL89G9wyzLyInTgqI7g2PgCKTKRqweq2UCpUX4N4yhuvpeWhEQwPYbwqkiyzYE1hZQROcA/s4624/2023-06-12%2015.55.32.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4624" data-original-width="3468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ4UtER8RwRYY22vQFA34Kld-89nVPY1KhE5zHanq3MUDoaXVUbGYtmpMHmx8gwG_0PjI3krHOnv7Ve-8lg6bRci6znHg1QCU_j-2hGfUfLzvtQ6gZt4WeCL89G9wyzLyInTgqI7g2PgCKTKRqweq2UCpUX4N4yhuvpeWhEQwPYbwqkiyzYE1hZQROcA/s320/2023-06-12%2015.55.32.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">'Laȝamon's last interview', published in issue Twenty Nine of Long Poem Magazine, will be the final chapter of the last book in the series that runs from A Presentment of Englishry, to A Man of Heart. (Both published by Shearsman in the UK). </span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: none; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">After he finished his book, what did he do next? There's no evidence he wrote another line. Was he proud of his work? Was he disappointed by its limited reception? Was he bitter? To contrast two very different story telling traditions, Gwydion son of Don meets the old man who wrote the Brut, and 'interviews' him. </span></p><p>Long Poem Magazine, published in the Uk, is one of the few print outlets for someone like myself who writes very long narrative poems. So i am delighted to have work published in this edition. This is the third time this has happened, and if I ever finish this project I will owe the editors 'a debt of gratitude'. </p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">A short extract.....</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Gwydion, stooping to enter,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘You’re a hard man to find.’</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘I didn’t know anyone was looking.’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The woman blocks the doorway;<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">her shadow and the priest, <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">two darker stains on the rough wall.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">One stool, one bed, two bowls,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">two wooden spoons.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">No books. No writing materials.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">He can taste the damp.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘She looks after me. I don’t know why.’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘Because you need looking after.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Don’t wind him up, sir, please.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">He’s a bugger to settle.’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘The Lateran council forbade the priest his wife or concubine.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Gerald made the usual Latin puns so few could understand.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">But why shouldn’t a man hold someone in the dark?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">And how could I survive without her patient charity?’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘They called you latimer, not priest.’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘I translate at those sad times <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">m’lord shouts at his tenants<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">and they need to understand<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">or when he’s feeling threatened <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">by the written word. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">You’re Welsh? Kyuarwydd? <br />A professional storyteller.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Trained in the tradition. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Valued. Honoured.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">How very easy for you. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">How very lucrative.’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘You know as well as I,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">no one stands on the summit<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">who hasn’t sweated the slopes. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">I read your history. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">I liked it very much.’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘You must be the only man who has.’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘You wrote in English. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Did you expect an audience to rival Monmouth’s?’<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The woman interrupts.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">‘They feed us; bread, cheese, honey. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Sometimes meat and wine if he’s been useful.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">I’d offer you some but there’s nothing in the pot.’</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span> </p><div><br /></div>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-61218158959447311932023-05-05T14:53:00.001+10:002023-05-05T14:53:18.217+10:00Bonfire Books' Anthology of Australian Verse. Publication. <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7J6ypB6l6X50TX1cOh9ImOwZI8XX-1itSrhCZ_7WUhfVZoR3DzeplnzCK0JBPp5EjgiWm-fvJ9wZudcgi8yMl8r0y-ZE5WyKnYWhDoqo3HWubGd_6saCsnvyK61Q8UlhCbntR0Ics8EgCJY3DI0THkdpQcvzg7mYr1m3VBq3jzU1hATMTltah2kL7Pw/s2560/Anthology-of-Australian-Verse-2023-Bonfire-Books-Front-scaled.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1766" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7J6ypB6l6X50TX1cOh9ImOwZI8XX-1itSrhCZ_7WUhfVZoR3DzeplnzCK0JBPp5EjgiWm-fvJ9wZudcgi8yMl8r0y-ZE5WyKnYWhDoqo3HWubGd_6saCsnvyK61Q8UlhCbntR0Ics8EgCJY3DI0THkdpQcvzg7mYr1m3VBq3jzU1hATMTltah2kL7Pw/s320/Anthology-of-Australian-Verse-2023-Bonfire-Books-Front-scaled.jpeg" width="221" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX0lpuWD23JBWPsnQKw-3qzZLzHC1ZWgzWY2lCWtYZpjLtOWDiHk8M3nmAw6v8Xg0YZF1WxPhGLhAoh8kAV8KVnJ2wTD_xl5h4RdlvcsqnK7eLpN-fuVX3NGRZ20js9u2jiPKtGG1x4KLTZE6N7A8bUqwA70_66SyCDoi0R_rVR9IkvTAWN-MG3JI3XQ/s2560/2Anthology-of-Australian-Verse-2023-Bonfire-Books-Back-scaled.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1668" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX0lpuWD23JBWPsnQKw-3qzZLzHC1ZWgzWY2lCWtYZpjLtOWDiHk8M3nmAw6v8Xg0YZF1WxPhGLhAoh8kAV8KVnJ2wTD_xl5h4RdlvcsqnK7eLpN-fuVX3NGRZ20js9u2jiPKtGG1x4KLTZE6N7A8bUqwA70_66SyCDoi0R_rVR9IkvTAWN-MG3JI3XQ/s320/2Anthology-of-Australian-Verse-2023-Bonfire-Books-Back-scaled.jpeg" width="209" /></a></div><br /></div><br /> I have three poems in this Anthology of Australian Poetry, published by Bonfire Books. One of them is this one. <p></p><p>The book is available from <a href="https://bonfirebooks.org/product/anthology-of-australian-verse-2023/" target="_blank">https://bonfirebooks.org/product/anthology-of-australian-verse-2023/</a></p><p><a name="_Toc64377908" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 21.6pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></a></p><p><a name="_Toc64377908" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 14pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 21.6pt;"><span lang="EN-US">Testimony of One of Sir John Franklin’s Officers</span></a></p><p align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-indent: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></p><p align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-indent: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US">When I was a child I was promised the ocean:<br />a trip to the coast, so we rode down to Hastings.<br />The clouds sagged like a dirty tarpaulin. <br />The waves rattled the shingle. The sun <br />bradawled a hole though drifting grays<br />to spotlight the place where sea became sky.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-indent: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US">Nanny’s screams were baffled by the wind<br />but shifting pebbles under stubby legs <br />betrayed me to strong hands before the water’s edge. <br />Not safe, not saved, restrained. Returned <br />to Nanny where I howled. Her voice: <br /><i>You big girl’s blouse: big boys don’t cry</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-indent: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-US">I have forgotten much; first this, first that;<br />things I should remember. But I do not forget<br />the sea and the sky and the line where they met;<br />or that need to stand where the light fell<br />and peer over the edge of the world. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-40071634212487003532023-04-15T08:23:00.003+10:002023-04-15T19:51:58.619+10:00The winner of this year's national poetry competition (UK 2023).<p>You can read the poem here.</p><p> <span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #954f72; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/29/poem-of-beauty-wit-and-grace-about-fathers-and-sons-wins-national-poetry-competition" style="color: #954f72; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" target="_blank">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/29/poem-of-beauty-wit-and-grace-about-fathers-and-sons-wins-national-poetry-competition</a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The headline reads: Poem of ‘beauty, wit and grace’ about fathers and sons wins National Poetry Competition” and continues: </span><b><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Ex-New York cab driver Lee Stockdale wins £5,000 after My Dead Father’s General Store in the Middle of a Desert beat 17,000 other poems</span></b><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> ‘</span><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">Poetry competitions are a lottery. In the absence of a stated criteria it must be very difficult to distinguish between 17,000 poems. The thought of having to read 17,000 poems is frightening. How could you pay each one the attention a poem requires? How easy would it be to miss subtlety? </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">When you read the article, the events behind the poem, and the author’s comments on the poem, come before it and that will inevitably colour your judgement. But the judges were reading without these, and every poem should stand on its own, without any external information about the writer. </span><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">Apparently this poem exhibits: ‘beauty wit and grace’. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">As a description this is vague, if not practically meaningless. It’s the kind of thing people say about poems when they have nothing specific to say. How would you quantify those qualities? How would you explain how one poem has more ‘beauty’ than another? How would you make your draft more ‘graceful’? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">And when you read the poem you’re going to wonder how any of those words apply to it, especially ‘wit’.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">As an occasional editor, my very rough way of assessing any poem is to start with the basic idea that writing a poem offers the author the possibility of manipulating diction, syntax and line endings for effect. Content can be put to one side. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">This is not a precise criteria. If you read a lot of poetry you will have your own but it’s flexible enough to accommodate the many different kinds of poem that are in circulation today. It’s possible to look at any poem, in any style, and ask what does the writer achieve with these three possibilities. Their interactions will, in skilful hands, bring about the effects that can be associated with good poetry and deliver the pleasures that only a good poem can. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">I see little happening in this poem with any of these three.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">There is a possibility that the diction is being deliberately used to blur the age of the speaker. 'Bullshit’ sounds like a contemporary adult, 'mean to me' like an eight year old, 'a dear sweet man' like a stereotypical maiden aunt. But it’s not consistent and it doesn’t tie in with the rest of the piece. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">‘The judges called My Dead Father’s General Store in the Middle of a Desert a “remarkable” poem that “caught and held our attention from first reading”.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">Think of the great opening lines you know. Your choice, not mine. You’re reading 17,000 poems, and you read:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="dcr-az7egx" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212;"> </span></p><p class="dcr-az7egx" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212;">It has gas pumps with red horses and wings,<br />but is not merely a gas station, your father is not my father,<br />standing over me with a clipboard, checking off things done and left undone.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">How does it measure against your gold standard? Why is the poet telling me his father is not my father? What purpose is served by the abrupt pauses in the 2<sup>nd</sup> and 3<sup>rd</sup> line? What is gained by setting the lines out like this and not:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="dcr-az7egx" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="dcr-az7egx" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212;">It has gas pumps with red horses and wings,<br />but is not merely a gas station, <br />your father is not my father,<br />standing over me with a clipboard, <br />checking off things done and left undone<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="dcr-az7egx" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212;">Unless it’s to keep under the 40 line limit?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">Think of the great lines you remember, and the images that stick in your head even if you can’t remember them word for word. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">Now read this:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">I begin to see what a dear, sweet man he is. Is this because he is dead?<br />I wish he were alive again.<br />I don’t think he killed himself to be mean to me personally.<br /><br /></span><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">The first line sounds very clumsy to me and the abrupt break in the middle calls into question why it’s such a long line. The is/Is is awkward. You’re forced to stop after one to pronounce the next one calling into question the unity of the line. The third line jangles to be/to me/personally with the second half hanging off the first. </span><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Word choice? Do you need ‘personally’? Isn’t that implied in ‘mean <u>to me’</u>? Is there a meaningful difference between ‘I wish he were alive again’ and ‘I wish he were alive’? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">Would these lines lose anything written like this:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">I begin to see what a dear, sweet man he is. Is this because he is dead? I wish he were alive again. I don’t think he killed himself to be mean to me personally.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Is this even good prose? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Arrange the lines like this, <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">I begin to see what <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">a dear, sweet man he is. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Is this because he is dead?<br />I wish he were alive again.<br />I don’t think he killed himself <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">to be mean to me personally.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The first two are a guess but the others follow the abrupt breaks in the long line There’s nothing wrong with declarative statements in a poem, or a conversational diction, but these </span><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; padding: 0cm;">staccato statements of the obvious would not be out of place on a post card. </span><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">In the article, the poem is placed after the poet’s biography. And we realise this writer experienced an horrific trauma as a child when his father committed suicide. But while we must sympathise with the writer, it doesn’t redeem the writing. It would be grossly inappropriate to perform acts of literary criticism on a poem written for a funeral or a wedding, or written as a private way of coming to terms with a trauma. But once that poem is offered for publication, or entered into a competition, then the writer is claiming this poem is worthy of a stranger’s interest, and inviting critical scrutiny. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">15,000 entrants must be wondering in what way this poem is better than theirs.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">(For the record I did not enter this competition and I have no desire to be a judge. And last year's competition winner seems so much the better poem.) </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-580068544004824702023-04-06T21:47:00.003+10:002023-04-08T10:31:58.531+10:00The Punishments. Publication in The High Window<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtNse5jn9zxHz5aAMFtAY0_-ZQage35a7h3-2NkZPrUPYPE0a8K5r83lMSOOafywyVu0PzhePI37KOl8DN1Gf6XjJqWnh7b-niz_pJMBfIOmhhNcnADFyWFrAUyd1CRsTHS1HEE70u4Hb6mMfDvUwDu4Ng43gYKRAfSfr4dO6ah60csd-Vk6FTy95oyQ/s2560/two%20wolves.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="2560" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtNse5jn9zxHz5aAMFtAY0_-ZQage35a7h3-2NkZPrUPYPE0a8K5r83lMSOOafywyVu0PzhePI37KOl8DN1Gf6XjJqWnh7b-niz_pJMBfIOmhhNcnADFyWFrAUyd1CRsTHS1HEE70u4Hb6mMfDvUwDu4Ng43gYKRAfSfr4dO6ah60csd-Vk6FTy95oyQ/s320/two%20wolves.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>My version of an incident in the Middle Welsh story <i>Math uab Mathonwy, </i>the fourth Branch of the Mabinogion. I was plodding my way 'translating' the Middle Welsh prose when I started wondering about the punishments. Clicking on the link will open The High Window in another window.</p><p><a href="https://thehighwindowpress.com/2023/04/04/liam-guilar-the-punishments/?fbclid=IwAR1AvEgjbh-DsP4TbpmlfPeI5JzKTNVoPsVmX1rrQqTGbcSd8AcfaIzA9sU" target="_blank">https://thehighwindowpress.com/2023/04/04/liam-guilar-the-punishments/?fbclid=IwAR1AvEgjbh-DsP4TbpmlfPeI5JzKTNVoPsVmX1rrQqTGbcSd8AcfaIzA9sU</a></p><p>Every time I read this story, I'm perplexed by the character of Gwydion. If the stories originally had a mixed audience, then I can't imagine how a woman in that audience would have 'read' his actions. I can't see a male audience reading him in an entirely positive light either. He consistently puts his need to prove his competence before any thought of the possible consequences. And his indifference to the three women in the story drives the plot and leaves the cliched 'trail of misery' in his wake. He assaults Goewin, humiliates and then insults his sister, and then makes the lady out of flowers and never once considers that as a human she has free will and might want to exercise it. </p><p>There is nothing in the story to suggest that he learns anything from the Punishments. Hence Math's choice of words at the ending of my version.</p><p>The Punishments also fit into a medieval discussion of shape shifting. While many thought it was not possible, others were not willing to say that God could not do this if He wished. At the same time there was a discussion about whether or not someone who changed shape, became a werewolf for example, remained essentially human in a wolf's shape, or became a wolf and forgot being human. . </p><p>In the story, the punishments wouldn't work if the brothers forgot who they were in their various transformations. It's nasty. But appropriate. </p><p>I understand the significance of the Deer 9living in fear) and the Wolf (nothing that harms the pack), but the pigs elude me. </p><p><br /></p><p>My thanks to David Cooke for publishing this. </p><p><br /></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-79627331369985706492023-03-30T08:25:00.007+10:002023-03-30T11:02:41.421+10:00Faber's 'The Waste Land, a Biography', by Matthew Hollis<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiel-lQcwsOf20dQdaU7YJY9oONKZuoByeguGjO1_V-mjzrvch4RizS_2rb6U7vZvWx6t7fwbP5IY43pUY0c0q9nGEu8jGsWVfi5y_CHfjeGUdN_MQbvrCejgyZuQipPoyZR2BGvIrs2l8z1hB7_8_BRKBWck1QMXP61KEbhMI5cnUGCC1FAb2frf5I7A/s475/hollis.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="310" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiel-lQcwsOf20dQdaU7YJY9oONKZuoByeguGjO1_V-mjzrvch4RizS_2rb6U7vZvWx6t7fwbP5IY43pUY0c0q9nGEu8jGsWVfi5y_CHfjeGUdN_MQbvrCejgyZuQipPoyZR2BGvIrs2l8z1hB7_8_BRKBWck1QMXP61KEbhMI5cnUGCC1FAb2frf5I7A/s320/hollis.jpeg" width="209" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>My (lengthy) review of this strange book is published at:</p><p><a href="https://brazen-head.org/2023/03/29/a-wasted-life-of-the-waste-land/">https://brazen-head.org/2023/03/29/a-wasted-life-of-the-waste-land/</a></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-30769417721845397982023-03-24T12:21:00.001+10:002023-04-09T18:55:31.203+10:00The Lost Book of Barkynge by Ruth Wiggins<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZBGvAQPGNMRQE6WRih70xnQnjxwm5Rqb6LB21OEpI-meikbd6_42IaYTNATTF8kzvzAs0re9EwBktQ1JNJ8_2Co3HCLWBWGpAFMajpnABkWx3oFedqY47OUzdQdZBcnrBL8QY4q_i6iTkOe7YhZsCHosU5pqlE6icU9uVMaBVL2tHRirOgtASheDs5w/s450/ruth-wiggins-lost-book-of-barkynge-1920w.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZBGvAQPGNMRQE6WRih70xnQnjxwm5Rqb6LB21OEpI-meikbd6_42IaYTNATTF8kzvzAs0re9EwBktQ1JNJ8_2Co3HCLWBWGpAFMajpnABkWx3oFedqY47OUzdQdZBcnrBL8QY4q_i6iTkOe7YhZsCHosU5pqlE6icU9uVMaBVL2tHRirOgtASheDs5w/s320/ruth-wiggins-lost-book-of-barkynge-1920w.jpeg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>The Lost Book of Barkynge</i> Ruth Wiggins Shearsman Press 2023<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">‘’In his <i>Historia ecclesiastica, </i>Bede refers to a ‘libellus’ (or <i>little book) </i>complied at Barking abbey in the 8<sup>th</sup> 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.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">From the foreword.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">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. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">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<sup>th</sup> or 5<sup>th</sup> Century. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">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. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"> <o:p></o:p></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-63466817727464237642023-02-19T08:13:00.009+10:002023-02-19T08:13:47.190+10:00Review of Vale Royal by Aiden Andrew Dunn<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNcdCbKArGIN515g36l_ARW3hoIilDmboBpKFVYe6hD3qFfuq-2k6uT7o0V8lLrYVzuysIVTyCvsx_4TAusijtIHyBtPnA4CNYLSKVGSjy3F571ag-ep101CUqxDUAi22wTCkPSo-qxqa3HUKbLsLecABcolnvi7PtO2Y_S0QIr_eVwQL3CJiNCA48cA/s4624/2022-12-21%2013.16.08.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4624" data-original-width="3468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNcdCbKArGIN515g36l_ARW3hoIilDmboBpKFVYe6hD3qFfuq-2k6uT7o0V8lLrYVzuysIVTyCvsx_4TAusijtIHyBtPnA4CNYLSKVGSjy3F571ag-ep101CUqxDUAi22wTCkPSo-qxqa3HUKbLsLecABcolnvi7PtO2Y_S0QIr_eVwQL3CJiNCA48cA/s320/2022-12-21%2013.16.08.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>My review of this excellent book is up at The High Window. </p><p><a href="https://thehighwindowpress.com/category/reviews/">https://thehighwindowpress.com/category/reviews/</a></p><p>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'. </p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-77869947070317772972023-01-21T19:29:00.003+10:002023-01-21T19:29:12.936+10:00Ravenser Odd by Michael Daniels. <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv5K9SuWL5rUxpFHzT_NMQdVj5qXeD6WJ0mTYvoKVoNfBFJ087x1Pv7vXYde3Q6FK_p4dqJtXb_8CFa3N6NxC1nIyq1EVMFtYTOzGhP21eU-rNMr2FBkccOMtr95seupxpWvd68q36QBmOGku97C7yoVm79jk8vVhc3v3mN9_igALGI1ilpI6eiOI2cQ/s4624/2023-01-21%2019.08.36.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4624" data-original-width="3468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv5K9SuWL5rUxpFHzT_NMQdVj5qXeD6WJ0mTYvoKVoNfBFJ087x1Pv7vXYde3Q6FK_p4dqJtXb_8CFa3N6NxC1nIyq1EVMFtYTOzGhP21eU-rNMr2FBkccOMtr95seupxpWvd68q36QBmOGku97C7yoVm79jk8vVhc3v3mN9_igALGI1ilpI6eiOI2cQ/s320/2023-01-21%2019.08.36.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">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<sup>th</sup> century. A settlement was established there. It enjoyed a bad reputation, until it was finally erased in a great storm in the 14<sup>th</sup>. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The sequence begins:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">What is it to be held in mind<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">by someone else, to dwell as ghost<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">or presence there? The drowned recline<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">in chambered mud, yet still we host<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">them in our heads, subdued and dim.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">It isn’t us who need them most.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">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:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The people’s final prayer rose up,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">petitioning their lonely god.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">The ravens read their trembled lips<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">to scavenge scraps of uttered word,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">then spat them back as raucous noise,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">disemvolweling all they heard. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><a href="https://www.michaeldaniels.co.uk">https://www.michaeldaniels.co.uk</a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4750601976843429146.post-8119890349880343942023-01-11T19:18:00.001+10:002023-01-11T19:20:50.821+10:00A Man of Heart is now available<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKUbrhE3GbqC4K2GvAQLyXeLbBMgd_9BIkUJPO4xLVSZKPEG_8E4GFIZPBj-PDlqoqNt6O9TfjkRFblw_8ID9LLKKZxGavmlzgSnNhc4_0o-r38DHx4nUyJ3rmyTFWh7AtV_o4FyGmqZKYdn2MysV8OQx7JrNSDMEo90o3HCZJn30bcmWriUaw0-W0dw/s4624/2023-01-11%2013.02.56.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4624" data-original-width="3468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKUbrhE3GbqC4K2GvAQLyXeLbBMgd_9BIkUJPO4xLVSZKPEG_8E4GFIZPBj-PDlqoqNt6O9TfjkRFblw_8ID9LLKKZxGavmlzgSnNhc4_0o-r38DHx4nUyJ3rmyTFWh7AtV_o4FyGmqZKYdn2MysV8OQx7JrNSDMEo90o3HCZJn30bcmWriUaw0-W0dw/s320/2023-01-11%2013.02.56.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>A Man of Heart, my version of <span style="font-family: Calibri;">Laȝamon's ?13th? Century version of the story of Vortigern and Britain in the fifth century, is now available from <a href="http://WWW.Liamguilar.com">WWW.Liamguilar.com</a> and direct from the Publisher at <a href="https://www.shearsman.com/store/Liam-Guilar-A-Man-of-Heart-p489745737" target="_blank">Shearsman </a></span></p><p>Either link will open a new window. </p>Liam Guilarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04031376624826567522noreply@blogger.com0