Partisan Poem

The super new cultural/political magazine out of Canada--international in scope--Partisan has posted a poem from my new book, Hunting the Boar, coming soon from CB editions.

Saskatchewan

I am startled by how the name of "Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan" keeps popping up, most recently on the jacket bio of Karen Solie's terrific new book from Farrar Strauss and Giroux: "Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan." I suspect people just find it so incredible that a place named Moose Jaw could exist that they can't resist repeating it.

Well, just for the record my dad was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and in our summer trips north and east from Vancouver to Waskesiu Lake in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, we'd drive through a town called Medicine Hat, Alberta. I myself was born in the exotically named Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on the banks of the Saskatchewan River (home to Saskatchewan's famous ski jump)  and I know a funny story about that:

A man and a woman from south of the American border were on a road trip in Canada and they were a little lost (sparsely settled up there). They spot a farmer ploughing. "Ask him where we are," the husband, who was driving, says to his wife. She jumps out, asks, returns to the car. "He says we're in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan," she says. "I guess they don't speak English up here." 

Happily ever after

I'm suffering withdrawal from Downtown Abbey, having tapered my doses of Season 6 by watching every episode twice before proceeding to the next, but all good things etc. Having read a recommendation for the British novelist Henry Green's autobiographical book Pack My Bag (by Helen Macdonald, the author of the wonderful book Hawk) and having ventured into the deepest reaches of the library stacks to find it (Green), smelling of old book, I began to read it a few days ago, just as I was watching DA Episode 9 (and final) for the last time, and lo! it is the Abbey in print form. Surely Julian Fellowes was inspired by it. I shall read Green's novels to explore this hypothesis. I see online that others have made this discovery before me, particularly with regard to a novel of Green's called Loving.

Really Fellowes must be commended for pairing off so many happy folk with more-than-Shakespearean gusto at the end of the series. You could see them all exchanging complicit winks at the marriage of Edith and Bertie, with a few more weddings clearly upcoming in epilogue. Perhaps there's even a match somewhere for poor Mr Barrow... . Seems a little unfair he should be the odd man out in the orgy of nuptials.

New work

PartisanMagazine has just posted my poem, "A Day in the Life of a Chair" (after a print by the artist Judith Pressey). This is one of the concluding poems in my new book Hunting the Boar, to be published by CB editions later this year. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoy looking at and writing about Judith Pressey's print.

Pears, October 2015

This morning, sitting in a chair with my feet up on the bed, reading through some half-baked poems and some of the drafts--possibly--for poems, I came across a draft I jotted down On October 22.  I read it through, warily, keeping my trigger finger off the delete key. What does all this add up to? was the question that nagged at me, then when I got to the end, I thought, no, there may be something there, work on it--only the act of working on it may make it less interesting to me, less a record of a moment in October and more something laboured over, possibly spoiled. I have a small handful of poems like this, records of a few hours in October jottings. They need work,  I'm reluctant to touch them, and lose whatever bloom there is on them, for me, at least. So here it is, uncooked, typos included, as I wrote it down, quickly, not letting myself stop until I reached a point that felt like a stopping place:

Pears 

On the road that descends io La Roque,

just past the cemetery and the three or four

parking spaces and a stone table and a map

of the cycling routes around the Mont Ventoux,

a pear tree grows up from the road that’s below

so thatits branches are at eye level

if you are walking on the road above

(because the village is nestled into a steep hill)

and in autumn the pear tree is loaded with pears

and even the ground underneath (one level down)

and it seems a shame to let all these fat pears

fall to the ground, so we knock on the door

of a nearby house, and ask if they belong

to the pears and if so, may we pick some?

But the lady says, no, they are not her pears,

they belong to—she points to a house further down—

the house where we stopped yesterday

to photograph the sign on the front porch

my dog runs 400 metres in ten seconds,

if you don’t run that fast, stay outside the front gate

and ring (in French)

so we go to that house, which is also below the level

of the main road (dirt, one way) into the village,

and we ring, and the dog comes racing round the corner,

and although the dog is a collie, when I hold out my hand

in my usual friendly, not easily intimidated manner

with strange dogs, it snarls and shows its teeth

and flashes its eyes, and I quickly withdraw my hand

and wait for the owner to open her front door,

which she does very soon, a nice-looking lady,

who is quite happy for us to pick some pears

off the ground and even off the tree.

Don’t you eat them? I ask her.

A few, she says, which could mean No,

adding, “They are winter pears, you know,

they stay hard, they’re only good for cooking.

So here I am, this morning, looking for a way

to escape my laptop, and I go to the fridge

on top of which I put the pears on a platter

with some of the black grapes from the yard

that the wasps are devouring faster than we can,

and I sort out the pears, the ones from the tree

and the blemished windfalls I now notice

are rotting. So I take out the kitchen knife,

the one with the black handle and the very

tarnished blade that has been in the house

probably for a hundred years at least, and

which looks like those black-handled knives

you find in almost every still life of Chardin’s

sitting slantwise across a table, hanging over the edge,

that are there to give the flat canvas a feeling

of depth,

and I quarter the pears (without peeling them)

and I carve out the bad parts, and I slice

them into pieces and put them in the new pot

from Ikea (me having burned all the old ones)

with some water and I set them to boil for lunch,

with or without added sugar, depending on

how sweet they are when they are soft,

and now I am back at my computer writing all this down,

because of the knife, because of the pears,

because of the sun shining through the plane tree

leaves that are turning yellow outside the window.

More reading list

Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums. Highly recommended, except for a chapter or two in which he goes home to North Carolina and his brother-in-law thinks he drinks too much and works too little.

I've never read Kerouac's On the Road, but this book is terrific, fresh, immediate, charming. San Francisco and Berkeley (mostly) in the 50s, the Beat scene, portraits of Ginsberg and of Gary Snyder, hanging out in Berkeley, Marin, SF, hiking in the Sierras.

Also reading Thom Gunn's last, I think, collection of poems, Boss Cupid.

Reading List

After having lunch with some French friends at the campus museum a week ago, and talking about Houellebecq's Submission, I decided I should read it. Well written, if you like language stripped to the bare bones, with a plot that gets less and less believable as the novel progresses, provocative. I'm glad I've read it, but I don't think that it is very good.

Also thought I should read another Ian McEwan book, so borrowed the latest (I think), called The Children Act. Not great either, though he's clearly got his eye on greatness. Which has been my impression of all the previous books I've read. But it is easy to read, with a plot that is interesting enough to keep you going, especially as he tends to write short, almost novella-length (aside from the awful Atonement).

It sent me to my big map of London to locate Gray's Inn and to wish I knew London's neighbourhoods better.

New work up on The Manchester Review

Three poems from my forthcoming collection Hunting the Boar (London, CB editions) appear in the latest issue of the Manchester Review, along with lots of other interesting stuff.