Peter - portrait/ritratto
martedì 18 gennaio 2011
lunedì 17 gennaio 2011
Lettura di Poesie / Poetry Reading
In attesa della presentazione ufficiale, ecco un anteprima di "Weathering - L'Effetto del Tempo"
martedì 11 gennaio 2011
Book Review – Grand Old Man on a Grand Tour of Italy
Derek Walcott
White Egrets
Faber & Faber 2010
Derek Walcott’s White Egrets sensibly has no cover illustration – just a bold statement of its presence. The collection contains a great many poems seemingly inspired by a long trip to Italy – which is just up my street since I’ve lived here for more than thirty years.
Walcott obviously has a long-standing relationship with Il Bel Paese: he is on the editorial board of Poesia magazine published by Crocetti Editore (if I’m not mistaken, the only one in Italy receiving the equivalent of UK Arts Council funds – other non-Italian board members include Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Tomas Tranströmer and Charles Wright. Quite an impressive line-up behind a rather pedestrian monthly).
“Sicilian Suite” (eleven poems), “In Italy” (twelve poems), “On Capri” (one poem) and poem n° 48 form a hefty chunk of the collection – and are not the only travelogues.
Walcott uses place and nature as a sounding board or something to bounce his thoughts off, so that his homeland Santa Lucia is inevitably mentioned in “Sicilian Suite” with the excuse that Lucia is also the patron saint of the Mediterranean island. Despite the title of the sequence, we get a mention of poet Pavese, who was from Piedmont, and Recanati, the small town in the Marches Region where Leopardi was born. There is also a mention of Salvatore Quasimodo, the Sicilian-born Nobel poet, and a certain Vittorio who I can’t quite work out. Walcott also very deftly uses place names to generate local colour: Ortigia (the historic island of Syracuse), Passeggio Adorno (a seaside promenade in the same city named after a Mayor and dated 1868) and Arethusa (a nymph fountain on the island of Ortigia), not to mention frequent mentions of Sicily and Sicilian. We also get “a Greek tanker” thrown in as the only hint of Magna Graecia. He communicates an instant sense of being at ease wherever he is and – something I like very much – warmly takes the reader’s arm like an old friend, never the eave’s dropper always the welcome guest. There is always a human warmth in Walcott even when he is admitting he didn’t treat his wives very well.
He has a knack of combining grammatical terms in hybrids with the natural world: “consonants of gravel” catches the noise of footsteps over loose chippings, “syllables of the trimmed orange oleander” suggests the elongated, pictogram shape of its leaves and “thick with prayers like the starlings repeating their verses” delightfully captures the congregation of birds at dusk. He also uses synaesthesia-like forms: “my memory’s nostrils” perhaps has a clumsy sound but is very effective and quickly followed by “the smell of words”. He manages to humanise nature without overdoing the pathetic fallacy: “as a bosoming wave unbuttons her white bodice”, “the clouds shone altar-white” and “an anachronistic blackbird in a frock coat” are good examples.
I also get strong hints of Byron, Yeats and Eliot. Byron emerges in some of the off-hand closures, such as “It wasn’t news”, but especially in the dashing rhymes. This quote rhymes with “Syracuse” - although he can be cheeky as well, using the Italian name Siracusa to get a rhyme with Arethusa and “I would lose her”. He can get away with rhyming “culture” with vulture” (as he does in another section where “profit” and “prophets” in the hands of a lesser poet would raise a groan). I get a suggestion of Prufrock in “the crab scrawls your letters then hides them” and Yeats’s musing on politics and young girls in “I’ll tell you what they think: you’re too old to be shaken by such a lissom young woman...”.
The other long section “In Italy” has the dedication “for Paola” (shades of Laura and Beatrice), with single poems “for Giuseppe Ciccherlero” and “for Roberta”. Another Prufockian pathetic fallacy here is “and a cloud like a tablecloth spread for lunch”, which then culminates in why Walcott seems so adept at taking things in: “because we are never where we are, but somewhere else, even in Italy”. This is another echo of Eliot to my mind. We get the terms of human speech mixed with the natural world again in “patroness of palm and pine tree whose/ alphabet was the swallows of Syracuse.” Yeats’s use of compound adjectives appears in “wheat-harvested slopes”. I don’t agree with “leaping cypresses” – this tree, while lithe, is far too stately to leap – but then “streets as close as chain-mail” wins me immediately back.
Walcott evidently enjoyed his trip around Italy – as well as the already mentioned places, he also lets us know he knows Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence – and obviously enjoyed meeting and being with young people. But this is not a guide book (even though other sections take in Spain and Barcelona, London, the British Empire, the West Indies): the tour around the world is an excuse for a tour around the mind and soul. This is substantial, challenging poetry, even when it is gruff and grim or doesn’t quite reach the mark. This is my fourth reading – I’m sure there’ll be many more and I’m sure I’ll be buying other of Walcott’s books soon. Head and shoulders above the other titles for the 2010 T S Eliot prize.
White Egrets
Faber & Faber 2010
Derek Walcott’s White Egrets sensibly has no cover illustration – just a bold statement of its presence. The collection contains a great many poems seemingly inspired by a long trip to Italy – which is just up my street since I’ve lived here for more than thirty years.
Walcott obviously has a long-standing relationship with Il Bel Paese: he is on the editorial board of Poesia magazine published by Crocetti Editore (if I’m not mistaken, the only one in Italy receiving the equivalent of UK Arts Council funds – other non-Italian board members include Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Tomas Tranströmer and Charles Wright. Quite an impressive line-up behind a rather pedestrian monthly).
“Sicilian Suite” (eleven poems), “In Italy” (twelve poems), “On Capri” (one poem) and poem n° 48 form a hefty chunk of the collection – and are not the only travelogues.
Walcott uses place and nature as a sounding board or something to bounce his thoughts off, so that his homeland Santa Lucia is inevitably mentioned in “Sicilian Suite” with the excuse that Lucia is also the patron saint of the Mediterranean island. Despite the title of the sequence, we get a mention of poet Pavese, who was from Piedmont, and Recanati, the small town in the Marches Region where Leopardi was born. There is also a mention of Salvatore Quasimodo, the Sicilian-born Nobel poet, and a certain Vittorio who I can’t quite work out. Walcott also very deftly uses place names to generate local colour: Ortigia (the historic island of Syracuse), Passeggio Adorno (a seaside promenade in the same city named after a Mayor and dated 1868) and Arethusa (a nymph fountain on the island of Ortigia), not to mention frequent mentions of Sicily and Sicilian. We also get “a Greek tanker” thrown in as the only hint of Magna Graecia. He communicates an instant sense of being at ease wherever he is and – something I like very much – warmly takes the reader’s arm like an old friend, never the eave’s dropper always the welcome guest. There is always a human warmth in Walcott even when he is admitting he didn’t treat his wives very well.
He has a knack of combining grammatical terms in hybrids with the natural world: “consonants of gravel” catches the noise of footsteps over loose chippings, “syllables of the trimmed orange oleander” suggests the elongated, pictogram shape of its leaves and “thick with prayers like the starlings repeating their verses” delightfully captures the congregation of birds at dusk. He also uses synaesthesia-like forms: “my memory’s nostrils” perhaps has a clumsy sound but is very effective and quickly followed by “the smell of words”. He manages to humanise nature without overdoing the pathetic fallacy: “as a bosoming wave unbuttons her white bodice”, “the clouds shone altar-white” and “an anachronistic blackbird in a frock coat” are good examples.
I also get strong hints of Byron, Yeats and Eliot. Byron emerges in some of the off-hand closures, such as “It wasn’t news”, but especially in the dashing rhymes. This quote rhymes with “Syracuse” - although he can be cheeky as well, using the Italian name Siracusa to get a rhyme with Arethusa and “I would lose her”. He can get away with rhyming “culture” with vulture” (as he does in another section where “profit” and “prophets” in the hands of a lesser poet would raise a groan). I get a suggestion of Prufrock in “the crab scrawls your letters then hides them” and Yeats’s musing on politics and young girls in “I’ll tell you what they think: you’re too old to be shaken by such a lissom young woman...”.
The other long section “In Italy” has the dedication “for Paola” (shades of Laura and Beatrice), with single poems “for Giuseppe Ciccherlero” and “for Roberta”. Another Prufockian pathetic fallacy here is “and a cloud like a tablecloth spread for lunch”, which then culminates in why Walcott seems so adept at taking things in: “because we are never where we are, but somewhere else, even in Italy”. This is another echo of Eliot to my mind. We get the terms of human speech mixed with the natural world again in “patroness of palm and pine tree whose/ alphabet was the swallows of Syracuse.” Yeats’s use of compound adjectives appears in “wheat-harvested slopes”. I don’t agree with “leaping cypresses” – this tree, while lithe, is far too stately to leap – but then “streets as close as chain-mail” wins me immediately back.
Walcott evidently enjoyed his trip around Italy – as well as the already mentioned places, he also lets us know he knows Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence – and obviously enjoyed meeting and being with young people. But this is not a guide book (even though other sections take in Spain and Barcelona, London, the British Empire, the West Indies): the tour around the world is an excuse for a tour around the mind and soul. This is substantial, challenging poetry, even when it is gruff and grim or doesn’t quite reach the mark. This is my fourth reading – I’m sure there’ll be many more and I’m sure I’ll be buying other of Walcott’s books soon. Head and shoulders above the other titles for the 2010 T S Eliot prize.
lunedì 3 gennaio 2011
Book review - Not everyone thinks Simon Armitage is the Bee's Knees
Simon Armitage – Seeing Stars – Faber & Faber 2010
The jacket illustration says it all: a hotchpotch horse seemingly missing a hind leg with a dog’s muzzle, purportedly inspired by a poem inside titled “Poodles”. What is actually inside is a hotchpotch of non-poetry that leaves a distinct sensation that something else, and more important, is missing.
I hope Simon Armitage has his Yorkshire tongue firmly in his Yorkshire cheek. If not, we are being seriously taken for a ride. After reading four or five poems into the collection, the pieces become tediously contrived and predictable, at best, and at worst simply trite and silly. The format is endlessly repeated – a setting the scene followed by a denouement that quickly loses any surprise element.
The fashion for the long and ludicrous title is very much in evidence, so is flippancy, funny ha-ha jokes and a tiresome lack of real substance: no passion or compassion, no anger, no desire. The verbal fireworks fizzle out very soon to become mundane, obvious, matter of fact, dull and irritating. Word games that play the same dull note over and over.
You could right justify the margins and get 1 or 2 page short stories. The feeling is that they made it into print as “pretend poems” because they hardly stand up to analysis as stories. Once again, we get the popular prose-poem wool pulled over our eyes, where the whole is much less than its parts (i.e. neither prose nor poetry).
Despite talking about so many different lives, the overall impact is lifeless, constructed and soulless, like butterflies pinned in display cases rather than vibrant with flight.
What is missing apart from the leg on the cover? What is missing, as hinted at above, is passion and compassion – these portraits are cold and clinical, contrived and concocted. A mere exercise in creativity where empty, worldly inventiveness takes the place of insight or feeling in a spontaneous overflow of nonsense.
There are also a few “lifts” – from The Truman Show and Steptoe & Son, for instance. The style eventually establishes the subtlety of a hammer hitting the same nail again and again in a kind of gumbo “let’s write another creatively daft poem” approach.
There is a kind of selfishness in these poems, which makes a second reading very unrewarding. The reader is kept at arm’s length, patronised and merely required to acknowledge the skill and daring of the poet. Yet it all becomes terribly mechanical – and as you can see, I didn’t find one, not even one, line or phrase to quote.
We are living the F-Generation of poets: flimsy, flippant, fatuous and facetious.
The jacket illustration says it all: a hotchpotch horse seemingly missing a hind leg with a dog’s muzzle, purportedly inspired by a poem inside titled “Poodles”. What is actually inside is a hotchpotch of non-poetry that leaves a distinct sensation that something else, and more important, is missing.
I hope Simon Armitage has his Yorkshire tongue firmly in his Yorkshire cheek. If not, we are being seriously taken for a ride. After reading four or five poems into the collection, the pieces become tediously contrived and predictable, at best, and at worst simply trite and silly. The format is endlessly repeated – a setting the scene followed by a denouement that quickly loses any surprise element.
The fashion for the long and ludicrous title is very much in evidence, so is flippancy, funny ha-ha jokes and a tiresome lack of real substance: no passion or compassion, no anger, no desire. The verbal fireworks fizzle out very soon to become mundane, obvious, matter of fact, dull and irritating. Word games that play the same dull note over and over.
You could right justify the margins and get 1 or 2 page short stories. The feeling is that they made it into print as “pretend poems” because they hardly stand up to analysis as stories. Once again, we get the popular prose-poem wool pulled over our eyes, where the whole is much less than its parts (i.e. neither prose nor poetry).
Despite talking about so many different lives, the overall impact is lifeless, constructed and soulless, like butterflies pinned in display cases rather than vibrant with flight.
What is missing apart from the leg on the cover? What is missing, as hinted at above, is passion and compassion – these portraits are cold and clinical, contrived and concocted. A mere exercise in creativity where empty, worldly inventiveness takes the place of insight or feeling in a spontaneous overflow of nonsense.
There are also a few “lifts” – from The Truman Show and Steptoe & Son, for instance. The style eventually establishes the subtlety of a hammer hitting the same nail again and again in a kind of gumbo “let’s write another creatively daft poem” approach.
There is a kind of selfishness in these poems, which makes a second reading very unrewarding. The reader is kept at arm’s length, patronised and merely required to acknowledge the skill and daring of the poet. Yet it all becomes terribly mechanical – and as you can see, I didn’t find one, not even one, line or phrase to quote.
We are living the F-Generation of poets: flimsy, flippant, fatuous and facetious.
giovedì 30 dicembre 2010
Book Review - Not Everyone Thinks Annie Freud is a Bobby Soxer
THE MIRABELLES
Annie Freud – Picador Poetry
One would expect the title poem of a collection to have some wallop behind it. But Annie Freud’s starts with a dull clunk - “A young poet visits an older poet” - and then tramples through six thudding, unrhymed couplets to a dreary banality: “… every day for the rest of her life”.
Blurb can rarely be trusted and the back cover claims for The Mirabelles certainly qualify as misleading advertising. “The most gripping account of a billiards game you’ll ever read” turns out in “The Peculiar Clucking that Indicates Regret” to be an exhibition match totally devoid of any tension or excitement that plods along with a bit of jargon here and there to the grand finale of the last line: “That ended the most brilliant display of the game”. A pity the same cannot be said for the previous three pages of prose-poetry at its poorest. Poor prose and poorer poetry.
This obviously has something to do with Freud’s purported “boldly unfashionable lack of irony”. This is euphemistic for “blunt”. Nobody refuses something off the back of a lorry so I suppose the almost cruel delight in finding and then plucking a “pheasant dead on the road … her body is warm” can pass as brutal honesty. There is a suggestion of gluttony since this delicacy joins “chipolatas, chops and cheese” (my goodness, the lady knows about alliteration). Yet a few pages later we come to “Christmas Poem”, where a shot partridge is shoved through a letterbox – and my doubts that Freud is short on compassion are confirmed. Inasmuch, all Freud’s apparent matter-of-factness (“especially in these times”, “scrape the barrel”) ends up as a mere pose.
It happens that I live in Verona and know Monte Baldo (page 21) extremely well – but I can’t for the life of me grasp the connection between the content of this poem and the title. Nothing in it brings Monte Baldo to mind at all. This is another characteristic of the book - a taste for non sequiturs (not to mention fashionably long and flippant titles) that ultimately becomes extremely irritating.
It is also extremely middle class, smug and complacent. “The Actual Pronunciations” – one of the poems inspired by family letters that the blurb insists “are profoundly moving and startling” – is a catalogue of consumerism and selfishness, stuffed full of wine and food but, sadly, absolutely no song. It is limp and very, very boring.
It is also an ugly book, typographically speaking. Curiously, the poem with the longest lines has the shortest title - “Ute” - but had to be set in a smaller font to get it on the page. Possibly better than being spread-eagled over two pages with indents to indicate non-breaking lines and consequently lots of jagged white space but the horrible visual clash is very amateurish, nevertheless. “Ute” has yet another lip-licking catalogue of “food, jars of honey, eggs and flowers” alongside “concentration camps” and “the upstart Hitler” but reminds me of the first flying machines: try as hard as it will, it never quite gets off the ground and succeeds only in falling flat on its face. The description of Ute is chock full of information that could become a fine portrait but it is, instead, prosaic and – sorry to repeat myself – dreary. It is plain, obvious, humdrum – an attempt at irony that, in failing, is worse than merely being blunt.
“Thunder in the Middle of the Lake” is also set in a smaller font and its two three-line stanzas have very twee gaps in the “middle” of the first line and the first two lines respectively - presumably an effort at visual poetry, that rears its stale head again in the poem opposite.
There’s also a certain pretentiousness; I have no commiseration for the person in bed after eating a “rather nasty omelette, / eggs being the only provender in the house” as the closing lines to a discussion of Desdemona and “the cry of all women / all over the world” (all-all and other such repetition is another cause of the generally leaden rhythms of the collection). Something also comes across as very patronising – a determination to funnel as much as possible into certain poems for the sake of impact and cleverness, showing off and demanding applause for such bravado. There is a hollow, empty ring to it. A castle of playing cards that the mere whiff of critically turning the pages blows flat. It is the malaise of creative writing courses, degrees and departments where the bicycle pumps of reciprocal back-patting generate a lot of air yet very little real substance.
Carrots, melting beef, tarte Tatin – there’s an obsession with food here and “The Case of the Egyptologist’s Honey-Pot” manages to combine this and many of the other faults in this collection: mind-boggling non sequiturs, long lines set in a smaller font, prose masquerading as poetry while being neither one nor the other, unjustified length and sheer boredom.
There’s all the flippancy that seems to be so much in vogue these days. While I quite like “inexplicable human gorgeousness”, it is one of the few phrases to rise above the general, corny dullness. Whoever wrote “exhilarating cornucopia” for the blurb surely read another book.
Which brings me to other blurb, this time from the Poetry Book Society Winter 2010 Bulletin. In the listing for the TS Eliot Prize 2009 (page 20, which is surely a typo, corrected as 2010 in the first paragraph), we learn that Annie is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and daughter of painter Lucian Freud –we probably suspected that since it’s not such a common surname. Yet they simply couldn’t resist throwing in the info that her maternal grandfather was Sir Jacob Epstein. You can’t help having suspicions, can you?
Annie Freud – Picador Poetry
One would expect the title poem of a collection to have some wallop behind it. But Annie Freud’s starts with a dull clunk - “A young poet visits an older poet” - and then tramples through six thudding, unrhymed couplets to a dreary banality: “… every day for the rest of her life”.
Blurb can rarely be trusted and the back cover claims for The Mirabelles certainly qualify as misleading advertising. “The most gripping account of a billiards game you’ll ever read” turns out in “The Peculiar Clucking that Indicates Regret” to be an exhibition match totally devoid of any tension or excitement that plods along with a bit of jargon here and there to the grand finale of the last line: “That ended the most brilliant display of the game”. A pity the same cannot be said for the previous three pages of prose-poetry at its poorest. Poor prose and poorer poetry.
This obviously has something to do with Freud’s purported “boldly unfashionable lack of irony”. This is euphemistic for “blunt”. Nobody refuses something off the back of a lorry so I suppose the almost cruel delight in finding and then plucking a “pheasant dead on the road … her body is warm” can pass as brutal honesty. There is a suggestion of gluttony since this delicacy joins “chipolatas, chops and cheese” (my goodness, the lady knows about alliteration). Yet a few pages later we come to “Christmas Poem”, where a shot partridge is shoved through a letterbox – and my doubts that Freud is short on compassion are confirmed. Inasmuch, all Freud’s apparent matter-of-factness (“especially in these times”, “scrape the barrel”) ends up as a mere pose.
It happens that I live in Verona and know Monte Baldo (page 21) extremely well – but I can’t for the life of me grasp the connection between the content of this poem and the title. Nothing in it brings Monte Baldo to mind at all. This is another characteristic of the book - a taste for non sequiturs (not to mention fashionably long and flippant titles) that ultimately becomes extremely irritating.
It is also extremely middle class, smug and complacent. “The Actual Pronunciations” – one of the poems inspired by family letters that the blurb insists “are profoundly moving and startling” – is a catalogue of consumerism and selfishness, stuffed full of wine and food but, sadly, absolutely no song. It is limp and very, very boring.
It is also an ugly book, typographically speaking. Curiously, the poem with the longest lines has the shortest title - “Ute” - but had to be set in a smaller font to get it on the page. Possibly better than being spread-eagled over two pages with indents to indicate non-breaking lines and consequently lots of jagged white space but the horrible visual clash is very amateurish, nevertheless. “Ute” has yet another lip-licking catalogue of “food, jars of honey, eggs and flowers” alongside “concentration camps” and “the upstart Hitler” but reminds me of the first flying machines: try as hard as it will, it never quite gets off the ground and succeeds only in falling flat on its face. The description of Ute is chock full of information that could become a fine portrait but it is, instead, prosaic and – sorry to repeat myself – dreary. It is plain, obvious, humdrum – an attempt at irony that, in failing, is worse than merely being blunt.
“Thunder in the Middle of the Lake” is also set in a smaller font and its two three-line stanzas have very twee gaps in the “middle” of the first line and the first two lines respectively - presumably an effort at visual poetry, that rears its stale head again in the poem opposite.
There’s also a certain pretentiousness; I have no commiseration for the person in bed after eating a “rather nasty omelette, / eggs being the only provender in the house” as the closing lines to a discussion of Desdemona and “the cry of all women / all over the world” (all-all and other such repetition is another cause of the generally leaden rhythms of the collection). Something also comes across as very patronising – a determination to funnel as much as possible into certain poems for the sake of impact and cleverness, showing off and demanding applause for such bravado. There is a hollow, empty ring to it. A castle of playing cards that the mere whiff of critically turning the pages blows flat. It is the malaise of creative writing courses, degrees and departments where the bicycle pumps of reciprocal back-patting generate a lot of air yet very little real substance.
Carrots, melting beef, tarte Tatin – there’s an obsession with food here and “The Case of the Egyptologist’s Honey-Pot” manages to combine this and many of the other faults in this collection: mind-boggling non sequiturs, long lines set in a smaller font, prose masquerading as poetry while being neither one nor the other, unjustified length and sheer boredom.
There’s all the flippancy that seems to be so much in vogue these days. While I quite like “inexplicable human gorgeousness”, it is one of the few phrases to rise above the general, corny dullness. Whoever wrote “exhilarating cornucopia” for the blurb surely read another book.
Which brings me to other blurb, this time from the Poetry Book Society Winter 2010 Bulletin. In the listing for the TS Eliot Prize 2009 (page 20, which is surely a typo, corrected as 2010 in the first paragraph), we learn that Annie is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and daughter of painter Lucian Freud –we probably suspected that since it’s not such a common surname. Yet they simply couldn’t resist throwing in the info that her maternal grandfather was Sir Jacob Epstein. You can’t help having suspicions, can you?
Weathering
Presentazioni in programma per gennaio 2011
presso Librerie Gheduzzi
e come ospite di
Frangenti culturali
presso Librerie Gheduzzi
e come ospite di
Frangenti culturali
Availability of Weathering
My new book is available through my small-press publisher:
Bonaccorso Editore
Via Mazza 30/c
37129 Verona / Italy
bonaccorso.domenico@tiscali.it /
attn Dr Antonio Seracini
Bonaccorso Editore
Via Mazza 30/c
37129 Verona / Italy
bonaccorso.domenico@tiscali.it /
attn Dr Antonio Seracini
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