I’m just back from a visit to Ennerdale – one of the most beautiful and least changed valleys in Lakeland. BBC TV’s Countryfile had called to ask if I’d be filmed talking about Tom Rawling, the wonderful Ennerdale poet, beside How Hall,the farmhouse where he spent so much of his childhood. (The programme goes out on 19 Feb. 2012).

Rawling (1916-96) was a magnificent poet – perhaps Cumbria’s best 20th century poet in my view – and, though largely forgotten at the end of his life, he’s been undergoing a renaissance of appreciation since his poems were reissued by the Lamplugh and District Heritage Society in 2009. The name may sound parochial, but believe me Rawling is a fine and perhaps major poet, bringing to life in vividly textured words the farming life of an earlier generation, the landscape and the fishing. All of it, as you read, is gritty and real enough to get your hands on, and profoundly beautiful at the same time.

(Do email stanandmarina@aol.com and get hold of a copy of his poems – it’s only £7.50 and I’m sure will become a collector’s item in the future.)

 I enjoyed meeting a very friendly BBC team, including producer Dean Jones and presenter Ellie Harrison, and despite the cameras, radio mics and freezing temperature we talked pretty spontaneously in the sunshine and open air, with a rich authentic odour of cow muck in the background (the farmer was manuring his fields at the time).

 

After filming I had a wonderful walk in the freezing air and bright sunshine around Ennerdale Water.

And the previous day, I’d taken time out to walk up in the snow to Bowscale Tarn, that amazingly dark, melancholy and beautiful place. I’ll put some pictures in here.

 

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.

 

One of the best and most unexpected things that happened to me last year came right at the end of 2010. To my amazement, Carol Rumens chose my poem ‘My Grandmother’s Opal’ as Poem of the Week on her Guardian Books blog. (In case you’re interested, here’s the link): 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/dec/27/poem-of-the-week-grevel-lindop

It was like a surprise late Christmas present, especially as Carol’s introductory essay gave a very sensitive and imaginative reading of the poem, of a kind I’d never imagined anyone would offer.  It was quite difficult to believe it had really happened. And not the least surprising thing was that I’d almost forgotten about the poem myself. As it chanced, my wife Amanda was glacing at an old diary and noticed that I’d finished the poem in 1978 – more than half my lifetime ago.

Naturally that prompted all sorts of reflections – not least, on the question of whether I could write that poem now, if I hadn’t already. Obviously, in one sense not. I’m a different person, with different proccupations. But also, the ego naturally starts wondering ‘Can I write as well as that these days? Have I lost even whatever minimal skill with words I had then?’ There’s an irrational sense of needing to compete with a younger self.

But we can’t do that. All anyone can do is to write as well as they can (however they might define ‘well’) at a given time. A poem is made in the mould or matrix of not just a mind but a language, a culture, and a personal moment. There can’t actually be a competition, with oneself or others. Any poem that gets as far as being genuine is a species all by itself.

I also found myself wondering about form. On the few occasions when a poem of mine has been brought back from the past like this, for a critical discussion or an anthology, it has very often been a poem (like ‘My Grandmother’s Opal’) in fairly strict metre and rhyme.

In that particular poem I’d chosen a strict form (or rather, felt the need of it – you don’t really choose these things) – rhyming or half-rhyming quatrains – because I wanted the shape of the poem to be a bit like a faceted stone or piece of jewellery – quite highly polished. But Carol Rumens’s choice did make me wonder again whether poems in strict forms are more likely to survive through time, to be remembered, or just look reasonably good, after the lapse of some decades.

This could be because rhyme and metre are devices that help memory (that’s surely one reason they developed in the first place); so lines from such poems perhaps have a tendency to stick in the mind more than passages from free verse poems. I wonder also if, as the language moves on, speech rhythms change, and a free verse passage that seemed very effective at one time comes to seem less so; whilst a metrical passage gives more emphatic clues to the reader about how to stress and time the words?

I find myself that the free verse passages that stay in my memory are mostly ones that have the force of a proverb or aphorism – W.C. Williams’s ‘No ideas but in things’ or Whitman’s ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself…’ or R.S. Thomas’s man ‘nailing his questions/one by one to an untenanted cross’ – though even that last line is in fact metrical, so maybe it proves the opposite.

I write plenty of poems in free verse, but soetimes I wonder if I’m making them ephemeral for that reason. Yet, again, you can’t often choose the form of a poem (maybe you can sometimes? but if you do, that’s a different poem…). And some things maybe can’t be written about in metre. I wonder.

Anyway, thank you, Carol Rumens, for a choice that encouraged me and made me feel that all those hours of toiling away over my notebook in the evenings, in my dusty bedsit, back in the faded 1970s, had been worthwhile after all.

This week’s Poem of the Week, a witty comic salute to the New Year by Winthrop Mackworth Praed (a big mouthful of a name you don’t hear often enough these days!) is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jan/04/poem-of-the-week-winthrop-mackforth-praed

And Carol Rumen’s own website is at http://www.carolrumens.co.uk/