The winner of this year's national poetry competition (UK 2023).

You can read the poem here.

 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/29/poem-of-beauty-wit-and-grace-about-fathers-and-sons-wins-national-poetry-competition

 

The headline reads: Poem of ‘beauty, wit and grace’ about fathers and sons wins National Poetry Competition” and continues:  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 ‘

 

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? 

 

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. 

 

Apparently this poem exhibits: ‘beauty wit and grace’. 

 

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’? 

And when you read the poem you’re going to wonder how any of those words apply to it, especially ‘wit’.

 

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. 

 

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. 

 

I see little happening in this poem with any of these three.

 

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. 

 

‘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”.

 

Think of the great opening lines you know. Your choice, not mine. You’re reading 17,000 poems, and you read:

 

It has gas pumps with red horses and wings,
but is not merely a gas station, your father is not my father,
standing over me with a clipboard, checking off things done and left undone.

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^nd and 3^rd line? What is gained by setting the lines out like this and not:

 

It has gas pumps with red horses and wings,
but is not merely a gas station, 
your father is not my father,
standing over me with a clipboard, 
checking off things done and left undone

Unless it’s to keep under the 40 line limit?

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. 

 

Now read this:

 

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.

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. Word choice? Do you need ‘personally’? Isn’t that implied in ‘mean to me’? Is there a meaningful difference between ‘I wish he were alive again’ and ‘I wish he were alive’? 

 

Would these lines lose anything written like this:

 

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.

 

Is this even good prose? 

 

Arrange the lines like this, 

 

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.

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 staccato statements of the obvious would not be out of place on a post card. 

 

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. 

 

15,000 entrants must be wondering in what way this poem is better than theirs.

 

(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.)  

The Punishments. Publication in The High Window

My version of an incident in the Middle Welsh story Math uab Mathonwy, 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.

https://thehighwindowpress.com/2023/04/04/liam-guilar-the-punishments/?fbclid=IwAR1AvEgjbh-DsP4TbpmlfPeI5JzKTNVoPsVmX1rrQqTGbcSd8AcfaIzA9sU

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. 

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.

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. . 

In the story, the punishments wouldn't work if the brothers forgot who they were in their various transformations.  It's nasty. But appropriate. 

I understand the significance of the Deer 9living in fear) and the Wolf (nothing that harms the pack), but the pigs elude me.  

My thanks to David Cooke for publishing this. 

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

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

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

The Lost Book of Barkynge by Ruth Wiggins

 

The Lost Book of Barkynge Ruth Wiggins Shearsman Press 2023

 

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

From the foreword.

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Review of Vale Royal by Aiden Andrew Dunn

 

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

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

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

Ravenser Odd by Michael Daniels.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The sequence begins:

 

What is it to be held in mind

by someone else, to dwell as ghost

or presence there? The drowned recline

 

in chambered mud, yet still we host

them in our heads, subdued and dim.

It isn’t us who need them most.

 

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

 

The people’s final prayer rose up,

petitioning their lonely god.

The ravens read their trembled lips

 

to scavenge scraps of uttered word,

then spat them back as raucous noise,

disemvolweling all they heard. 

 

 

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

https://www.michaeldaniels.co.uk

 

 

 

A Man of Heart is now available

 

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

Either link will open a new window.