Today’s been a good day. Not only has the spring sunshine finally broken through after an winter of arctic rigour, but I got a wonderful letter this morning.

Chris McCabe of the Poetry Library on the South Bank wrote to say that he’s editing a special issue of that very fine New York magazine, The Manhattan Review [www.themanhattanreview.com] . The issue is to be concerned with Liverpool and Manchester poets, and he and senior editor Philip Fried would like to include some of my work.

Nice cover image...

So how wonderful to be actually asked to submit work! Better still, these wonderful editors said that they already had two earlier poems of mine (which they kindly termed ‘classics’ – though I think that was just a kind way of saying they’d been around for a while) and wanted to republish those anyway.

And that was what really warmed my heart above all. One of these poems – I won’t name it, as I imagine the editors want to keep a bit of suspense for the magazine’s publication day – was written back in the 1970s. In those days I never asked myself whether a poem of mine would last in any sense: I was too excited to get it published somewhere. But just a few times over the years, someone has wanted to republish a poem of mine written decades ago – 25, 35 years back – and the delight of feeling that something has actually lasted a little bit, has gone on living after its immediate occasion, is quite intense.

I don’t have vast ambitions for my work. I grew out of dreaming about the Nobel Prize a long time ago. Nowadays I’m content just to enjoy myself in my poems, craft something I think is nicely-made, and hope to play a very small part in handing on the traditions of poetry in good shape to the future (when, my intuition tells me, poetry is going to be needed very urgently indeed as the world undergoes drastic change).

But the sense that something has lasted through a generation, that it still looks good to someone coming on it freshly, is a source of great happiness. So Thank You, editors of The Manhattan Review, and may your magazine never be short of great work to publish!

Meanwhile I’m getting ready to go down (or should that be up?) to Oxford, where I’m reading in a spoken word event as part of the Oxford Folk Festival Fringe tomorrow, Friday 5th (click the ‘Latest News’ button at the top of this page for further information). If you’re in Oxford, it would be great to see you there, so do come along and introduce yourself.

Back in Manchester on Saturday 6th for a reading with Myra Schneider, John Killick and others (again, click Latest News for the full details). Hope to see you at one or other of these if you can make it.

I visited the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas in 1997. The visit turned out very differently from what I had expected, and I wrote an account soon afterwards. Here it is again for those who missed it when it appeared in the magazine PN Review.

* 

August 1997 was an exceptionally hot month, and on one of its hottest afternoons I found myself following a faint footpath across rough sheep-pasture in the north-west corner of Anglesey, heading for Llanfairynghornwy.

I was in a state of trepidation, and not at all sure I was doing the right thing. The sweat induced by a slow progress uphill, over the acres of long dry grass, through rusted iron gates and over stiles built into dilapidated grey stone walls, did nothing to raise my confidence as the horizon shimmered and the village came into view, straggling along the side of a low hill. I plodded on in a spirit of grim determination.

For several years I had come with my family every summer to stay on a farm at Cemlyn, not far from Cemaes Bay. It was, in good weather, a quietly marvellous place. The sea was five minutes’ walk away. The roads were tiny and led only to other farms, or petered out by the shore, so cars were a rarity. A lighthouse, spectacular at sunset, blinked on the horizon in one direction; in the other, gently rolling fields stretched away to the skyline, dotted with sheep and the occasional house or ruined, enigmatic stone farm building. Seals groaned and hooted in chorus from the rocks, or lolled in the shallow offshore waters, occasionally lifting a round, doglike head to return one’s gaze, relaxed and supercilious. Children could be left to run wild over the fields or seashore whilst the adults did pretty much the same at a slower pace.

And every year, at some point during our visit, the farmer in whose house we stayed would tell me, as if for the first time, that I should visit R. S. Thomas, who, he said, lived nearby. Thomas, he would continue, was seen occasionally at the local church – a tiny ancient stone building, dedicated to an obscure Celtic saint, overlooking the sea from a nearby headland. Thomas had even taken the service there on occasion. Every year I would consider the suggestion and decide against following it. Not that I was at all reluctant to meet Thomas. On the contrary, I’d admired his poetry since I’d first encountered it at school. The notion of meeting him face-to-face was an attractive one. But it was also daunting. I had heard that Thomas was reclusive, that he didn’t like the English, and that he resented them above all as holiday-makers in his country. I would embody, I thought, everything he most disliked. In any case there was no obvious way of testing the water. No one seemed to know his address, though they could describe the house, and his telephone number was (of course) ex-directory.

I’m not sure what changed my mind. Partly, I suspect, the encouragement of my wife, generally braver about these things than I am myself. Also, perhaps, some intuitive sense that the years were passing, that the opportunity might not recur – followed (as in so many of life’s less comfortable situations) by the reflection that, at worst, the person concerned could only tell me to go to hell.

And so I found myself at last in Llanfairynghornwy, turning right at the village church and taking the road over the brow of the hill. The house was easily recognisable: a large former farmhouse with a traditional Anglesey courtyard, the various buildings converted into separate dwellings. There was a view towards the sea, about a mile away, and a large garden, evidently well-watered since it showed no sign of desiccation. An open hatchback was parked in the courtyard and a white-haired woman was unloading bags of shopping.

As I approached she turned towards me. It struck me that she was beautiful, and I was startled by the intensity of her pillar-box-red lipstick, a perfect match for the cardigan she wore despite the heat. There was now no turning back so I introduced myself and asked if R. S. Thomas lived here. I also presented my one small visiting card, in the form of a suggestion that Mr Thomas might remember an enthusiastic review of his Later Poems which I had once written for the T.L.S. It was, of course, the right house. The lady disappeared inside, and I could hear her calling ‘Ronald!’, followed by sounds of muted conversation.

Then Ronald loomed at the door, instantly recognisable: craggy face, white hair, towering height. He wore a blue shirt and grey trousers (as with many elderly men, the trousers somehow seemed to extend a long way up) and a tie exactly the shade of deep red favoured by traditional Labour Party supporters. If he was inwardly cursing my intrusion, he gave no sign of it. His welcome was subdued but unambiguous, and he asked me to come in. I had expected a Welsh accent, but he spoke with an almost exaggeratedly perfect English enunciation recalling BBC radio broadcasts from the 1940s and ’50s. The old phrase ‘cut glass’ floated into my head. I followed him along a passage (his walk a little shaky, a little shuffling, but his bearing very erect) into a cool, attractive sitting-room with stone walls, hefty exposed wooden beams, large windows and antique furniture, including some sofas covered with a sumptuous, satiny Chinese print fabric – Sanderson or the like. There were a great many books, and half of one wall was taken up entirely with the brown spines of something (periodical or vast reference work?) called British Birds.

Thomas seemed interested in the fact that I knew Professor Brian Cox, editor of the Critical Quarterly and my former boss, evidently an old friend, so we made conversation about him and other mutual acquaintances. Any tension rapidly dispersed. The lady in red was introduced to me as Betty: I assumed her to be Thomas’s wife, only learning long afterwards that they lived together as unmarried friends. She soon disappeared, returning with a tea tray loaded with, amongst other things, a rectangular lemon-iced sponge cake, cut into precise squares. (It was a very good cake, and when I said so Thomas looked gratified. ‘I made it myself,’ he confided, ‘in an off moment.’)

I suppose he asked me what I was doing in the area; at any rate I mentioned that I’d taken my son to fish from the old breakwater at Holyhead the previous day. Thomas immediately produced extensive information about which parts of which breakwater were the best for fishing. ‘My father worked on one of the Holyhead ferries,’ he said, ’so I had a marvellous childhood. I could ride on the ferry-boats whenever I wanted.’ Holyhead, he said, was now very run down and had terrible drug problems, ‘but then it’s the same everywhere, isn’t it?’ Lately, after living for a long time in the Lleyn Peninsula, he had, as a keen ornithologist, moved to Anglesey for the birds. ‘But the birds are not nearly as interesting here as in the Lleyn. Though we do go down to Cemlyn occasionally, if there’s an unusual bird there…’

Holyhead is a strangely Irish town, its buildings and general atmosphere strongly coloured by the daily traffic with Dublin. I asked Thomas if he he’d had much contact with Irish writers in his youth. His eyes lit up and he explained that at the beginning of his career he’d been ‘taken up’ by Seamus O’Sullivan, editor of the Dublin Magazine, and had spent a good deal of time in Dublin. ‘O’Sullivan was an oldish man then, but still something of a dandy. Good clothes, close-cropped silver hair, attractive to women. And every so often he would produce a poem and show it round, saying “What do you think of this? I wrote it the other day…” But everyone knew that it had been in a drawer for twenty years. It was very sad. He couldn’t accept that he was no longer writing poems. Sheer vanity.’ O’Sullivan had advised Thomas to try the New English Weekly, ‘and that,’ he said, ‘is where my first poem appeared.’

Was Thomas himself, I wondered, still writing poems? ‘Still writing,’ he said, ‘but whether anyone else would call them poems is another matter. Anyone,’ he added, ‘can be pardoned for writing rubbish, but there’s no excuse for publishing it!’ Such aphorisms came from time to time throughout the afternoon; another was ‘Never believe what a man says in his poems. Art is art because it’s not nature, that’s my belief.’

I was curious to know what Thomas, as a uniquely gifted master of the short free-verse line, would think of William Carlos Williams. It turned out that he liked ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ but was dismissive of the shorter poems, and had no time for ‘frippery like “Red Wheelbarrow”‘. He couldn’t really imagine, he said, how people could write poetry at a typewriter, ‘let alone a computer’. Williams, he thought, must have been ‘a very odd man.’

In current British and Irish poetry he saw no value whatsoever; or at any rate, ‘nothing of any significance.’ ‘Heaney?’ I ventured. ‘A better prose writer than a poet,’ was the reply. The only poet of any substance, he thought, was Geoffrey Hill. He asked me if I’d seen Hill’s latest book, Canaan. I said I’d read a few of the poems in Agenda and hadn’t much liked them, so I’d avoided looking at the book itself for fear of disappointment. ‘I’m afraid you were right,’ said Thomas. ‘But he has been very ill lately, he’s had heart trouble and so on, and I suppose it’s affected his poems. But his publishers should have noticed the lapse in quality even if he didn’t.’

Thomas had recently met Czeslaw Milosz at the house of Dennis O’Driscoll, a mutual friend, and they’d got on well. Thomas thought Milosz ‘a very nice man’. (‘A very physically powerful man too,’ Betty added.)

Since I was then working with Kathleen Raine on Temenos Academy Review I asked Thomas if he knew her. Not really, he said. He’d met her at Vernon Watkins’s memorial service. He didn’t greatly like her poems, though there were ‘a few good ones’. He had included four of them in his Penguin Book of Religious Verse. He had heard her speak on some occasions, and been mildly amused at her self-esteem; he claimed to have heard her refer to herself as ‘the world’s leading Blake scholar’.

Betty had a good deal to say on the associated subject of Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water, for whom Kathleen Raine had cherished an unrequited passion (chronicled in The Lion’s Mouth, the third volume of her Autobiographies). Betty had, it seemed, lived with her first husband next door to Maxwell, and had had to look after ‘the blessed otters’ when he was away. They had been a huge handful. ‘And,’ she said, ‘don’t believe half of what Gavin said about them in his books.’ I asked whether she had been bitten (otters are ferocious biters, and the broadcaster Terry Nutkins, a former Maxwell protégé, lacks a finger to prove it). ‘No,’ said Betty, ‘but then my husband was a hunting man and he wasn’t going to stand any nonsense from a couple of otters.’ That seemed to settle it.

Betty also knew the explorer Wilfred Thesiger (‘A very nice, genuine man,’ put in Ronald). Gavin Maxwell had, said Betty, conceived a notion that he would like to go to the Arabian ‘Empty Quarter’ with Thesiger, so they had met in London to talk about it. Ten minutes had been long enough to convince Thesiger that under no circumstances would he go to the Empty Quarter or any other place on earth with Maxwell. ‘Thesiger,’ Thomas summed up, ‘had nothing of the playboy in him. Whereas Maxwell…’

Somehow we got on to the subject of  poetry readings. Thomas was wary of Performance Poets. He wouldn’t, he said, want to read on the same platform as one of them (an unlikely scenario, it seemed to me, though I didn’t say so), ‘those people who use drums and jazz and things, I think I should come off very much the worse, very discomfited.’ Ted Hughes he thought a good reader, of ‘plainness and intensity’. He found himself irritated, he said, by ‘poets who end the last line with “thank you very much” as if it were the last words of the poem. W. B. Yeats used to do that. Are they anxious to get away?’ (‘Or maybe just polite,’ Betty put in.)

Thomas said he had travelled to read at a festival at Cley in Norfolk, agreeing to go partly because it is a famous bird-watching site. One section of the audience turned out to be made up of local fishermen and the like, and ‘afterwards one of them came up to me confidentially and said, “Now you’re a real poet, you are.” I was very pleased at that.’

Betty said that even now and despite his lack of gimmicks, teenagers in Thomas’s audiences seemed enthralled by him. ‘You do have to rehearse to go on the reading circuit,’ said Thomas. ‘Ronald’s training for the ministry has probably helped there,’ added Betty.

In due course the conversation turned to the question of what work I was doing. I said I was editing De Quincey’s complete writings, and also Graves’s The White Goddess. Rather to my surprise both Thomases turned out to be enthusiastic about De Quincey. ‘Especially,’ said Ronald, ‘”The Flight of the Kalmuck Tartars”‘. Betty asked how my eyes were standing up to the work, adding that ‘one thing about poetry is that you don’t have to bother so much with footnotes’. I pointed out that some poets – Southey for example – had used a great many. Was there a correlation: the more footnotes, the worse poet? Thomas cited David Jones as a counter-example, ‘though some of his could have been better omitted. It’s annoying to find a reference to Llangollen and then a note saying “pronounced Thlangothlen” or something like that. You’d be better off without that kind of thing; but then David Jones was always very meticulous.’

As for Robert Graves, Thomas thought him ‘a good poet and a good influence’. John Crowe Ransome, also a good poet, ‘came entirely from his [Graves's] work.’ Graves had written too much, Thomas thought, but considering the period when he had lived, yes, he had done well. (I was unable to get elucidation of this tantalising remark about the ‘period’.) Asked what he thought of The White Goddess, Thomas said he’d never read it. ‘More Kathleen Raine’s department than mine,’ he added, whereupon Betty hazarded the suggestion that perhaps Kathleen Raine had been one of Graves’s ‘mistresses’. Ronald rejected this idea firmly. ‘I don’t think so. No, Kathleen Raine was a bluestocking; and Graves, like Yeats, preferred them…’ The sentence was left unfinished, but its drift was clear enough.

Betty mentioned that she was trying to fill gaps in their collection of Thomas’s own books. They lacked, especially, copies of his first three volumes (The Stones of the Field, An Acre of Land and The Minister), and also ‘a little book for children’ (which I cannot identify). Booksellers, she said, offered his early books at around £150 ‘and they won’t reduce them, even for the author, even without the jacket.’ ‘Well,’ said Thomas, ‘they’re not in the bookselling trade for love.’

It was getting towards evening so I left soon afterwards, with invitations from the Thomases to visit again. I never did, though we exchanged one or two letters and Thomas sent a good poem for Temenos Academy Review (where, through no fault of mine, it failed to appear). Within a few months the Thomases left Anglesey for another part of Wales, and some two years after that R. S. Thomas died.

To me, that afternoon at Llanfairynghornwy is still a bright and happy spot in memory, and I remain deeply grateful to the poet and his remarkable companion. Nothing of great significance, perhaps, was said or done. Still, an encounter between a famously ‘cantankerous’ Welsh Nationalist poet and a holidaying Englishman arriving unannounced on his doorstep might have been expected to turn out rather differently. Since his death, R. S. Thomas’s reputation as a poet has shown no sign of sagging, nor do I believe that it will. His integrity and independence have never been doubted. But it seems worthwhile putting on record that his virtues also included generosity, hospitality, wit, and the baking of excellent cakes.

Salsa with Heart: La Casa de la Salsa

It was a lovely evening. Gorgeous table settings, beautiful balloons everywhere, an imaginative cocktail menu at good prices, Mike Parr’s usual suave and seamless DJing, and of course friends, lots and lots of friends, and wonderful dancing.

Open Break with Vicky

But it was a good enough evening to make me want to say, Watch out for La Casa de la Salsa and their future events. Check them out on Facebook and keep up with what they’re doing.

Braz, Tina, Silvia: Awesome Threesome

What else? Well… Several people said they’d had a terrible time finding the Hotel. Maybe better directions could be available next time? Lighting: perhaps a bit bright on the dancefloor. Any chance of dimmer, warmer, coloured lights or even a disco ball? Music: maybe a bit bland (and no merengue, no reggaeton? well, perhaps you can’t expect reggaeton at a Valentine Ball…) – but some faster, heavier music, some salsa dura, might have been welcome. Though I admit this is from the viewpoint of a Cuba fanatic: all those hours of sweaty dancing on cracked concrete in near-darkness, moving between the tropical heat outside and the freezing air-conditioning inside, have probably warped my brain more than a little.

Thanks, Girls: And here's looking at you too! (Next time I'll bring my camera...)

Gustav Mahler - currently celebrated in Manchester

 But they proved equal to the task, and if the Third didn’t send us out quite as dazed and elated as its predecessor, it was mainly because this symphony, though just as complex, is more contemplative, a slower-paced work with quieter dynamics relying more or mood and melody than on stark contrasts and shattering climaxes.

Vassily Sinaisky took the first movement, with its resounding opening fanfare on the horns representing the great god Pan arriving to reanimate nature after the winter, at a steady but not rapid pace – very much the approach Stenz used last time for the opening of the Second. The brass section was superb throughout, playing with resonance and precision. Just as well because in every movement the brass has vital thematic parts to play, most often to remind us, in some way, of that opening motif of descending horn notes. The first movement as a whole gave an experience of restrained power, deep strings sporadically throbbing and surging, with the brass and the more fragile, fragmentary woodwind floating over the top.

Here’s an extract from the movement (LSO, splendidly conducted by Valery Gergiev, looking more than ever like Boris Karloff):

Mahler’s idea for the symphony was to make it ‘a work of such magnitude that it actually mirrors the whole world…In my symphony the whole of nature finds a voice.’ The movements aim to layer one tier of being on top of another. The orchestra gave second movement (originally titled ‘What the flowers tell me’) a light, almost staccato touch and brought out the exuberant, dance-like qualities of the third (‘What the animals of the forest tell me’, according to Mahler’s early notes). The distant horns (how Mahler loves those!) sounded here like a faint reminder of the world of men, rather thanan eruption of the animalistic Pan.

Reaching ‘Night’ and the world of men, the 4th movement, mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill got her entrance exactly right: the voice seemed to emerge and radiate without an identifiable starting-point, simply welling up out of the orchestral sound, as if uttered by the universe as well as by humanity. This lovely setting of the mysertious Nietzsche poem was a delight.

Mahler’s gentle audacity is astounging and wonderful:  having begun the symphony with Pan, then led on to Nietzsche (who loathed Christianity), he then dances into the fifth movement with a children’s folksong – it sounds almost like a skipping game – about Jesus, St Peter, and God’s forgiveness. And every so often what sounds like a reminiscence of a Bach choral sweeping in to underline the religious elements. The CBSO Youth Chorus made a fine job of the children’s chorus, vigorous and precise, entering with the ‘Bimm bamm…’ of the church bells. Personally I would have liked a bit more volume from them, and I suspect Sinaisky held them back a bit too much; but it wasn’t a major blemish.

The transition to the sixth movement made me see something I’d missed before, listening to the symphony endlessly on disc, which is that having brought Christianity and Gid into the structure, Mahler goes a step further and higher. Where the 2nd symphny ends in song, it’s as if he now sees that words aren’t enough and nothing but pure music will say what he has to say. We’ve gone beyond God too, beyond anything that can be formulated or imagined.

The final movement was wonderful, with that  sense of endlessly-shifting and changing and evolving harmonies as Mahler finds his way very slowly through a vast musical mist, drawing notes out and mutating the harmonies so that you constantly find a chord emerging that’s different from the one you expected, and then that melds into yet another and so on. Sinaiski did a good job with the dynamics here, very slowly building and building the movement until all the layers came together in those vast closing chords that show you the whole imaginable cosmos towering up octave above octave, layer above layer, energised and tranquil but completely alive, like a vast wall of glass or water that doesn’t topple but just settles and poises there, with the brass finally folding harmoniously into the picture and the timpani slowly repeating deep notes that echo the bell-chimes of the children’s song. The combination of energy and peace at the end of the symphony was very impressive. Here’s a clip (Dudamel, La Scala Philharmonic):

I didn’t cry this time (though the girl next to me was in tears throughout the final movement). There’s less melodrama, more serenity in this than in the Second Symphony, but the vision is vaster. Maybe Sinaiski didn’t always make the dynamics as exciting as he might have done. I overheard one departing audience member talking about the difficulty of staying awake, in a way that made me wonder if the work is just too big and complicated to grasp until you’ve heard it over and over again and got all those details into your system. The applause was loud and long but it didn’t really match the reaction to No 2.

Certainly I notice these days how closely-integrated the Third is. The pattern – melodic and rhythmic – of that opening fanfare, for example, comes into just about everything in the work. Sometimes I think Mahler 3 has an entire symphony for its first movement, and a whole other one for its last, with a suite of other things in between. Then again I find myself thinking the entire work is a single movement. The first time you hear it, it’s a sprawl. By the tenth time, you just notice the mind-boggling precision with which it’s all integrated. Very strange. But how wonderful to hear these masterpieces one after another, so well-played. Not sure yet if I’ll make the Fourth on Thursday. Lorraine’s Rueda class at Cuba Cafe is calling, and Amanda is able to dance again now her broken arm has healed. A dilemma. But I’ll post something as soon as I get to another Mahler extravaganza. Meanwhile there’s always salsa and a million other things.
And don’t forget: starting 5 April, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast the entire series on consecutive Monday nights at 7 pm. Listen to any you missed and see if you agree with me! And do post your comments.

Republic of Salsa: Manchester's Best Cuban Salsa Nights

I don’t want to leave without giving you more fun than that, so here’s something a bit different. Last night at Pauline’s rueda class (Tuesdays, Spreadeagle, Chorlton, Manchester) I heard some good music on Jordan’s iphone. He told me it was Orquesta de la Luz. Ever heard Japanese salsa? No? Then take a look at this clip, recorded in New York. I guarantee it’ll blow your socks off!

That’s all for today. But watch out shortly for posts about the wonderful, rediscovered Ennerdale poet Tom Rawling, and about Anacaona – the song, the woman, and the stories behind the song we all love to dance to!

Here are all the bits and pieces I’ve meant to write about salsa lately! First, an update: the next Salsa Republic at Manchester’s Chorlton Irish Club will be on Saturday 20 February (NOT 6 Feb) – this is because Lorraine got stuck several extra days in Cuba (poor girl!!) owing to snow at Gatwick causing flight cancellations.

Late last year, just before my phone and internet were cut off and the UK disappeared under a blanket of snow, I recorded a piece about salsa for the BBC World Service, in conversation with Miami Cuban Emilio San Pedro. The studio people mixed in a few good tracks and we had some fun. And a few important points about the spirit of salsa were raised.

It seemed a pity for this to disappear for ever – it’s long gone off the BBC i-player – so here it is as an audio file. I hope you’ll enjoy it, if you didn’t hear it first time around. And please feel free to comment!

Conversation with Emilio San Pedro

Meanwhile, Yanet has -sadly – been voted off BBC’s ‘So You Think You Can Dance’. She had a bad night last Saturday: she looked exhausted and stressed-out from the moment she started and something was clearly wrong. It was bad luck, too, that the dance she had to do was the Lindy Hop – a dance that’s both very difficult and extremely ungainly. No chance to show off her ballet skills or body isolation there: Lindy Hop makes people bounce around like manic toddlers, without grace or dignity. But there was more to it than that.

My guess is that there were other, personal problems in the background. Yanet, unlike other competitors, was thousands of miles from her family. Moreover, there are special problems about being Cuban – layers of difficulty most of us can’t even imagine, economic, social, political. Being an exiled Cuban doesn’t remove the difficulties, it just changes them a bit. But Yanet will remain a star and her teaching will be in more demand than ever. Let’s forget ‘So You…’ and take a look at her as she is, so often, at her best:

Finally, don’t miss the excellent LATIN MUSIC USA series on BBC 4 TV. It’s at 10 pm Fridays and this week – 5 Feb – they are doing the history of SALSA. The trailers showed the Fania All Stars with Hector Lavoe and Celia Cruz so this is going to be legendary stuff. To make it even better, the programme is immediately followed on the same channel with broadcast of a great live salsa band LA EXCELENSIA playing at the Barbican, and after that is a documentary about Celia Cruz herself. At last someone has come up with a TV channel that’s worth watching! As a preview, here’s a nice, funky, atmospheric clip of La Excelencia:

All this TV won’t turn you into a couch potato, because if last week’s similar viewing on the same channel is anything to go by (history of Latin music up to Santana, followed by salsa Paladium orchestra, followed by documentary on Carmen Miranda) you will be dancing around the room all evening. Enjoy!

Mahler’s Second was bound to be a make-or-break point in the unfolding ‘Mahler in Manchester’ project. The Halle and BBC Philharmonic are playing all ten of the symphonies this year to mark the Mahler centenary, and this was the first of the really big ones.

Gustav Mahler

On Thursday, though, there were no such doubts. This was a real, transcendent experience, with everything you could look for: clarity, dynamics, amazing textures, lyrical passion. And, incidentally, a capacity audience. The Bridgewater Hall was full and the atmosphere was charged.

The Second has maybe the most electrifying of all Mahler’s openings: an intense vibrating note on all the upper strings that just rivets your attention until the grumbling, growling basses and cellos start to enter and the whole thing begins to gather momentum like some colossal machine or mountain avalanche. Fascinating and terrifying.

And the melodies! Mahler has an unbelievable fertility in generating one gorgeous tune after another. The melodies just seem to flow out of him: eeerie little folksongs, huge chunky rhythmic patterns reminiscent of Brahms or Beethoven, catchy dance tunes, marches, rhapsodic romantic syrup, postmodern hair-raising discord-patterns, you name it. 

And then he collages and interweaves and overlaps all of this to produce amazing drama – changes of mood, gradual revelations, mystical ecstasy, frightening shocks. It’s all there, and the result is a sound-drama (or movie if you like) that has the range of an epic yet keeps you engaged as if he were writing the soundtrack to your most intimate thoughts.

Speaking of which, I discovered Mahler when I was still at school, on my father’s LP records, and then by luck shared rooms at University with a music student, the conductor Peter Lawson, who was a Mahler fanatic. So I got soaked in the music for a whole year and it went somewhere very deep inside.  And while other kinds of music have set the pace of my life at different times – the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, JJ Cale, Mingus, Parker, Coltrane, Bach, Stravinsky, and for the past few years Salsa in particular, underneath it all Mahler has never gone away. I find myself singing snatches of his music at the oddest moments. It’s like part of my DNA.

Thursday’s performance absolutely lived up to all of this. Markus Stenz took the first movement at a relaxed tempo but he kept it moving with a steady relentless pulse and there wasn’t a slack or dull moment.  The momentum was maintained throughout the symphony and there was a clarity and precision at every point that gave the sense of an orchestra absolutely involved and attentive. The dynamics were interesting too. Stenz, who seemed to be enjoying himself immensely throughout,  brought the harps right up, something I enjoyed because it emphasised one of Mahler’s strangest and most delightful textures.

Susan Gritton (soprano) and Katarina Karneus (mezzo) melted into the heart-stoppingly beautiful lyrics of the last movement with crystalline beauty as well as solid volume. The whole thing was so perfect and felt so natural that the symphony as a whole felt  more like a geological or spiritual phenomenon – two things that aren’t so far apart for Mahler – than a human composition.

The colossal surges of sound and energy in the finale  rolled over us with a huge unanswerable impact.  This was Mahler the visionary, experiencing an apocalyptic resolution – maybe a highly unorthdox Day of Judgment, or maybe all beings finally revealing their Buddha-nature. As he wrote, ‘there are no sinners, no just. None is great, none small. There is no punishment and no reward. An overwhelming love illuminates our being.’ I’ll put in a clip of another superb performance – Rattle/CBSO – at the end of this post, so you can get a glimpse of what it’s all about.

I had tears in my eyes at the end – something I don’t recall from previous performances. Half of the audience got to their feet during the applause, and I don’t know why the other half didn’t do the same. I never expect to hear a better performance of the symphony, and I’m grateful to have been present for that one. I don’t want to intensify the competition for tickets, which are going fast or already gone, but if you haven’t yet booked, I would suggest that you think about trying to hear some of the eight symphonies that remain. I couldn’t get to The Song of the Earth on Saturday, sadly, but I’m hoping to hear number 3 on 13 February. I probably won’t bother you with my amateurish comments on it. But if Thursday is any indication, this Mahler season is going to be unforgettable.

During the recent cold weather, whenever I managed to drive anywhere through the snow I was accompanied by a deep, rolling, slightly guttural voice, with an accent you’d have found hard to place. West Country? Irish? North-Eastern?

John Haines: quietly intense eco-poet

Actually the accent was Alaskan, and the voice was that of John Haines, former Poet Laureate of Alaska, on a CD someone sent me from the US. I found Haines’s poems riveting, with their dreamlike, slightly surreal images, their subtle rhythms, and their intense focus on the natural environment. Haines, born in 1924, arrived in Alaska as a young man at a time when the government would give you a piece of land if you were prepared to live there.  He built himself a house out of wood and lived as a fur trapper, hunting elk and bear and gaining an unrivalled knowledge of the landscape and ecosystem. He also wrote poems.

Haines uses a short-lined free verse that asks you to consider carefully each image. The poems build, stage by quiet stage, and much of their quality comes from a combination of the stark beauty of their images with the unanswerable finality of the propositions they offer:

The door is open

and the shaggy frost-fog

bounds across the floor

and wraps itself about my feet…

…I feel

its breath deep in my bones.

 

A spirit in it wants

to draw me out past

the whitening hinges

into the cold, enormous rooms

where it lives.

 

Out there a flickering pathway

leads to a snowy grave

where something in me

has always wanted to lie…

Haines also has a remarkable sense of the very ancient history of the region’s peoples, particularly the ancestors of the Inuit and the Native Americans who came into the continent from Asia some forty thousand years ago:

Among the quiet people of the frost,

I remember an Eskimo

walking one evening

on the road to Fairbanks.

 

A lamp full of shadows burned

on the table before us;

and the light came as though from far off

through the yellow skin of a tent…

 

Thousands of years passed.

People were camped on the bank

of a river, drying fish

in the sun. Women bent over

stretched hides, scraping

in a kind of furry patience…

 

We were away for a long time.

The footsteps of a man walking alone

on the frozen road from Asia

crunched in the darkness

and were gone.

Besides his very fine Collected Poems, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer, Haines has written an autobiography, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, which is essentially a meditation on his many years in this austere, dangerous and immensely beautiful landscape.

Although a few years ago he was a candidate for the US Laureateship, he seems virtually unknown in the UK. The fine CD I was given seems unobtainable. But at least his books can be bought, and should be. His is an authentic voice, of great integrity,  less self-dramatising than Gary Snyder, more thoughtful and muted.  As a hunter (whatever one’s urban discomfort with killing) he had to learn to live not only close to animals but even as one of them: something that gives at times a shamanic quality to his poems. Here he tells how he lured a moose by making the noise of a rival moose rubbing its horns on a tree:

I went to the edge of the wood

in the color of evening,

and rubbed with a piece of horn

against a tree,

believing the great, dark moose

would come, his eyes

on fire with the moon…

In that poem, ‘Horns’, the moose survives. A companion poem (‘A Moose Calling’) is darker and sadder:

Who are you,

calling me in the dusk,

 

O dark shape

with heavy horns?

 

I am neither cow

nor bull -

 

I walk upright

and carry your death

in my hands…

Quietly and without fuss, perhaps disconcertingly so, John Haines is that recently much-trumpted thing: an eco-poet. We should be reading him. He’s made my life deeper and richer. I recommend him.