Delighted, today, to receive in the post my copy of 99 Words – the anthology Liz Gray has compiled by asking ninety-nine people ‘If you had breath for only 99 words, what would they be?

Liz was left, after an accident, unable to speak or write for more than a few minutes at a time. She started to realise how precious words are, and how we waste them. Eventually she had the idea of asking people what they would say if they had just under a hundred words left.

The result is a delightful little book full of wisdom, delight in the world, philosophy and playfulness. Contributors range from public figures like Desmond Tutu and Tony Benn to writers like Ursula LeGuin, Russell Hoban, Maggie Gee and Ben Okri (not that any of these are ‘like’ one another – but that’s part of the book’s charm). There are peace activists and Buddhist meditation teachers, musicians, actors, a ‘welfare funerals officer’, whatever that is, an astrologer, a fairground historian, a calligrapher and so on and on. Not on and on forever, though: only 99 of them! (Or actually 101 because a couple turned up unexpectedly that were too good to omit.)

And among them all is me, for some reason I don’t quite understand. I got this email out of the blue about a year ago, putting the basic premise to me and asking me to contribute. I agreed – it seemed interesting – and then forgot all about it. Then, as happens, came another email, telling me the deadline was nearly here. Help! I felt I would like to contribute a poem – that’s what I hope I do best – about something important. I looked through my unpublished recent-ish work, looking for short poems. Aha! There was a poem written – with tears in my eyes, I admit – when my daughter was pregnant.

Someone had just told me that at that number of days, the baby would be the size of an apple-pip, and the poem had just poured out. I put the poem, minus title, onto a page and clicked the ‘word count’ button, without much hope. Unbelievable: it was exactly 99 words! And it was about the most important subject I could have chosen: love, new birth, someone who will go on in the world (hopefully) long after I’m gone.

Amazingly, Ursula LeGuin says she had the same experience: she checked a poem she wanted to use, and lo and behold, it was 99 words long! Amazed by the coincidence, she says ‘I feel like an Augur or something.’ There must be a touch of magic about the whole business. Anyway, 99p from each copy sold goes to the charity PeaceDirect, to support local peacemakers in war zones. So click that button, or go to that bookshop, and buy, buy, buy!

Merry Christmas! and a Happy New Year to you.

Carcanet’s New Poetries series is rightly respected as a showcase of exciting talents of varying kinds. The latest volume was launched yesterday and I want to call attention to a fine new poet whose work has excited me a lot.

I’ve been reading Helen Tookey’s work with growing admiration. Her quiet, precise poems have a genuine eeriness – a spooky quality that I’ve met with nowhere else in recent poetry. I think it comes from the fact that she has interests in both archaeology and psychology, but knows intuitively that they aren’t separate – that when we dig up the past it’s our own roots we are looking at; and when we explore the dark corners of our personal psyche, we’re also daring to open up the hidden aspects of our culture and society.

 ‘At Burscough,Lancashire’ is a case in point.  Here it is (with permission):

At Burscough, Lancashire

 Lancashire’s Martin Mere was the largest lake in England when it was first drained, to reclaim the land for farming, in 1697.

 Out on the ghost lake, what’s lost

is everywhere: murmuring in names

on the map, tasted in salt winds

that scour the topsoil, westerlies

that wrenched out oaks and pines, buried now

in choked black ranks, heads towards the east.

Cloudshadows ripple the grasses as the seines

rippled over the mere by night, fishervoices calling

across dark water. Underfoot, the flatlands’

black coffers lie rich with the drowned.

The poem is about a lake that’s no longer there. Helen Tookey uses its absence to evoke the landscape (a strange, nondescript no-man’s-land) in vivid, sensuous detail but also with semantic depth, so that the placenames on the map recalling the lost mere merge into the sound of the wind, and the trees which still turn up now as fossilised bog oak and the like become disturbingly evocative of mass human graves. Ruminating on the loss of the mere, she writes, by implication, an elegy for the communities that lived and worked there and have now, like the lake, gone with hardly a trace. She also hints at the other cultural obliterations which have stained past centuries. The ‘choked black ranks’ recall ethnic cleansing, forced migration, mass starvation. And the simple fact that, over the centuries, many people, fishers and other, must have drowned in the lake and been forgotten. Even money is there, faintly, with the substitution of ‘coffers’ for the expected ‘coffins’.

 But it’s all held together by a consciousness which sees in a context of myth. The ‘fisher voices calling/across dark water’ are voices from the other side of the river – Styx or Lethe – that separates the dead from the living. These are the souls of the dead that might call to us in sleep. Could it even be that they are fishing for us? The choice choice of ‘flatlands’ is deft also – and again a neat substitution, because we would expect ‘wetlands’ (indeed, the remnants of Martin Mere are now a bird sanctuary run by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust). Not just a neat label for the nondescript alluvial west-Lancashire landscape, it suggests a flat earth that might tilt up one day and show worrying things underneath. For the mathematically aware it also recalls Edwin Abbott’s 1884 Flatland, a brilliant Lewis-Carroll style fantasy which enables even the simplest person to understand the amazing nature of spatial dimensions.

 Helen’s poem shows us just how many dimensions an absent lake and a depopulated landscape can have. And she tells us about it in such deceptively gentle and musical tones, hovering on the edge of blank verse, but always staying flexible, floating  between four stresses and five – ‘rippling’ and ‘murmuring’ as the poem says. It’s like listening to a lullaby that soothes and seduces with its beauty; but just might give you nightmares.

I’m looking forward to this evening as I’m introducing Victor Rodriguez Nuñez, a Cuban poet whom I met at the Stanza Festival last year in St Andrews, to give a reading at Manchester’s Instituto Cervantes.

Victor is a fine poet who work is full of colourful imagery and with a talent for linking earthy detail with a visionary scope. I was charmed and impressed by the vitality of his work and by his excellent reading of it when I heard him at St Andrews, and he turned out to be a friendly and really delightful person. So I proposed him as a guest for the Manchester Literature Festival, and now here he is.

Victor teaches at Kenyon College, Ohio in the USA but insists he is not a political exile from Cuba, just a wandering intellectual to whom geographical boundaries don’t mean a great deal.
To my amazement, he and his co-translator Katherine Hedeen have done me the compliment of translating a group of my own poems into Spanish, something I never expected and which came as a complete surprise. It will be great to see him again after so long, and the reading should be memorable.

 

Had a great night out on Saturday – good old rock and roll with one of Britain’s legendary guitarists. 

We went to see Wilko Johnson at the Manchester Academy. Wilko has a unique guitar style that blends what used to be called  ’lead’ and ‘rhythm’ – basically, he plays both at once in a percussive, economical way that owes something to Chuck Berry (and before her to Sister Rosetta Tharpe – see my post on her from way back) but is really all his own.

Wilko’s name may not mean much to you if you’re under 40 but he is still remembered as the star attraction of a sensational rhythm and blues band called Dr Feelgood back in the 1970s – just before the punk era dawned. Wilko was famous for the way he would go whizzing around the stage while he played – he never seemed to keep still and he would slide and tear around as if he was on skates, with a weird hypnotic glare on his face.

More recently the band - and Wilko above all – have been the subject of a fascinating film by Julien Temple called Oil City Confidential about the band, its history and the highly individual Wilko, who is a natural star – quoting Shakespeare and Milton fluently (he read English at Newcastle under my old friend Robert Woof, later curator of Dove Cottage – another crazy genius), demonstrating his highly personal guitar technique, and climbing onto the roof of his house in Canvey Island, Essex, where he has a high-grade astronomical telescope. In fact, he’s such an expert that there’s a Facebook group campaigning for him to take over on The Sky at Night when Patrick Moore finally has to retire!

Amanda and I had a quick chat with Wilko in the dressing room and he told us that he’s now got a solar telescope, which has darkened lenses so you can look directly at the sun, so he’s able to watch the solar flares erupting.

But mainly we listened to Wilko and his band performing a classic set of blues numbers and Dr Feelgood songs.  Exciting, energising and great fun.  And if you want to meet one of British rock’s great characters, or learn about a key episode in British popular culture, or just see a fine documentary film which I guarantee you’ll enjoy, do get hold of Oil City Confidential .

Rose Castle is a gem of northern Cumbria – a beautiful house centring on a pele tower built in the 1340s and once the palace of the Bishops of Carlisle.  It belongs to the Church. But there is now a threat that within about one week it will be sold to the highest bidder with no arrangements for public access and little protection for its future. Yet there is a plan to take care of its financial liabilities and allow public access to this beautiful and tranquil place.

Please read the information below and sign the petition at www.friendsofrosecastle.org  NOW before it is too late.

I first discovered Rose Castle when I was researching my Literary Guide to the Lake District: Coleridge and the Wordsworths went there on their way to Scotland in 1803 and Coleridge wrote in his notebook:

“We are delighted with Rose Castle, the thickset green Fence to the garden, the two walls, the lower making a terrace / the House, the Orchard crowding round it – The Chestnuts – the masses of Ivy over the gateway, from one great root. This stands on the other side of the wall to my left as I face the gateway – Go in, the ivy over the Coach-House, belonging to the same mass – the horns of the dark old mulberry Tree among it – the Swallows & their Shadows on the Castle-House walls – the green shaven Bank, like the roof of a House between the main Building & the Castle, properly so called / the great Nets on this castle, to cover the fruit Trees – all, all perfect – Cottage Comfort & ancestral Dignity!”  – Coleridge, Notebooks, 1427.

Here is what my friend Philippa Harrison has written about the house and its peril:

LAST CHANCE TO SAVE ROSE CASTLE FOR THE NATION?
Only one building represents the unique history of the establishment of a Border between Scotland and the North West of England, Rose Castle, created for the Bishopric of Carlisle to administer the “lands which were Scottish”, before Cumbria finally became English a hundred years later than the rest of the country. Also the preeminent English castle in the medieval Scottish wars and reiver skirmishes in the North West, Rose is the only remaining monument to our turbulent border history there. Its retention, with public accessabilty and as an educational resource, is vital for the maintenance of any sort of national historical perspective.

Although today Rose, its land and gardens, have a wonderful, indeed exceptional, sense of serenity and calm, it mirrors the development of national and dynastic struggle, architectural taste and the role of the Church in England since the Norman Conquest. Now the castle mainly reflects the Gothic Revival style, its chapel well recognised as an outstanding example. But there remain the pele towers and the crenellations of the fourteenth century when Rose was burnt three times within twenty-five years only to rise again each time, phoenix-like, to become a symbol of triumph over adversity. Later besieged, taken and burnt in the Civil War, Rose was rebuilt by the Cumbrian people yet again while secular castles were abandoned and left wasted.

In this sense Rose belongs to its people, a people easily ignored by the distant centres of governance. Since Rose was decommissioned as the Bishop’s see-house , it has been made clear to the Church Commissioners that there is a local plan for removing all financial liabilities for the castle from them if they so wish, a plan which will preserve the spiritual, historic and educational value of Rose for future generations. To achieve it, everyone needs to work together. However within ten days the Church Commissioners appear to be intending to recommend that Rose goes under the hammer with no stipulations about public accessibility, educational use, use of the chapel or the great public rooms.

This situation is of paramount importance for the North of England, a travesty of natural justice and a betrayal of eight centuries of care from the bishops of Carlisle and the Cumbrian people.

Only public protest about disposal without any guarantee of the preservation of a unique resource for the public good has any chance of affecting the outcome. A petition at friendsorrosecastle.org has been hastily set up. Every press comment about the importance of Rose for the national heritage will count.

The Bishop of Carlisle has written that he very much hopes “ that a really worthwhile use for Rose can be found”. Amen.