Forward thinking?

The Forward Prize - the so-called Bardic Booker - has been showering poets with cash since 1991 - and in the process, bringing poetry to much wider public attention. It is often called the UK's "most valuable poetry award" though the prizes are tied in value with the T.S. Eliot prize, awarded January each year.

The 2006 winner of the "Best Collection Award" should have been District And Circle, by Seamus Heaney, a collection as impressive as the earlier books that made him world famous. There had been fuss in the English media over the fact that Seamus Heaney had even been short-listed because he is a Nobel laureate. Sadly, the jury seems to have looked into the whites of the Nobel prize, and blinked.

That is a shame, and casts some doubt on the judging panel, whose reading of poetry must be wider than it is deep, to have decided against what may be UK and/or Irish mainstream poetry's finest collection of the 21st century - and one which deals powerfully with 9/11, terrorism, and also the personal, in ways that prove Heaney's grasp of how tradition, the lyric voice, and craft, ring out like struck anvils, like bells, both homely and beautiful. Instead, the prize went to Robin Robertson, the poetry editor at Cape, for his Swithering.

William Sieghart, founder of the prize 15 years ago, said "Robertson is capable of an unabashed seriousness that is rare in contemporary poetry". The very idea of "seriousness" is suspect.

It is one of those weasel-words that more and more frequently pop up on the backs of books, and in prize citations, but that mean less than nothing. Mr. Robertson uses myth, forms, rhyme and metre, in his work - is, in otherwords, a traditonal British formalist. Nothing wrong with that. But to suggest that such seriousness is rare is simply misguided - and misguiding for the media, who often soak up prize announcement press releases with little or no sense of how to parse the spin from the chaff.

I can name forty British or Irish poets who are equally as serious as Mr. Robertson - indeed, could Mr. Sieghart name one leading mainstream poet published by Faber & Faber (say) who is not serious in just the same way as Roberston? I thought not. It hardly makes critical sense to call Andrew Motion, Lavinia Greenlaw, David Harsent, Nick Laird, Maurice Riordan, Don Paterson - the list goes on - frivolous. They're as serious as it gets, in terms of their commitment to the art and craft of formal verse in the British mainstream tradition.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/forward2006/0,,1819575,00.html

http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/poetryprizewinners.htm

Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom and this year's theme is "Identity".

There will be various events througout the day and evening:

http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/npd/ukevents.php

note: photo is of poet and performer Nicole Blackman

Cable Street 70 Years Later

Eyewear salutes the brave women and men of Cable Street ("premature anti-fascists" one and all) who banded together to defeat the rise of hatred in England.

Had such courage been shown against Hitler in his homeland, history would be different, to say the least.

May our brothers and sisters have the courage to stand against such infamy in future, when we are called on. May we be blessed with the Cable Street spirit!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street

iota

iota is edited by Bob Mee and Janet Murch of Ragged Raven Press.

I'm glad to have a poem in its latest issue (No. 75) along with poets like Nigel McLoughlin, Gill McEvoy and Cath Nichols. It's only £3.

To support small press poetry in Britain, why not start by ordering an issue?

Address is 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire CV37 0LR, UK.

Life Lines: 7 Poets for Oxfam reading September 26

Life Lines: 7 Poets for Oxfam

Autumn Poetry Reading
Tuesday 26th September, 7-10 pm
Hosted by Todd Swift & James Byrne

Since 1980 Elaine Feinstein has lived as a full-time writer. In the same year, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has written fourteen novels, five biographies and radio plays, television dramas. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. She has been a Writer in Residence for the British Council in Singapore. Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna of All The Russias, was published in July 2005.

James Fenton was Oxford Professor of Poetry for the period 1994-1999. He has won several major awards, including The Whitbread Award for Poetry. He has worked as political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent, and is presently a columnist for The Guardian. He is the author several books such as Leonardo’s Nephew – Essays on Art and Artists and An Introduction to English Poetry. He has published several collections of poetry, such as The Memory of War and Out of Danger. In 2006, Penguin published his Selected Poems.

Mark Ford has published two collections of poetry, Landlocked and Soft Sift, and a study of the French writer Raymond Roussel. He has edited The New York Poets anthologies for Carcanet. His most recent book is A Driftwood Altar, a collection of his essays. He is a professor in the English Department at University College London.

Chris Kinsey’s poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies including Reactions 3 & 4. Her first collection Kung Fu Lullabies, published by Ragged Raven Press, came out in 2004. She lives in Mid-Wales. She has read at Ledbury and Hay festivals. Chris is on the board of Ty Newydd, the National Writers’ Centre for Wales.

Daljit Nagra comes from a Sikh Punjabi background although he was born and raised in West London and Sheffield. His pamphlet Oh My Rub! was a Smith/Doorstop winner and was the first ever PBS Pamphlet Choice. His poem "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" won the 2004 Forward Prize for Best Individual poem. His debut collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! will be published by Faber & Faber on February 1st 2007.

Fiona Sampson has published fourteen books – poetry collections, philosophy of language and books on writing process – of which the most recent are The Distance Between Us (Seren, 2005) and Writing: Self and Reflexivity (Macmillan, 2005). Common Prayer (Carcanet) is forthcoming in June 2007. She is short-listed for the 2006 Forward Prize. She contributes to The Guardian and the Irish Times and is editor of Poetry Review.

Jean Sprackland's second collection, Hard Water (Cape, 2003), was shortlisted for both the T S Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. CarolAnn Duffy praised the poems for their "exhilarating quality of freshness and truth. captured with relish in a textured and physical language". Jean's third book of poems is to be published by Cape in Autumn 2007.

Don’t forget that Life Lines, Oxfam’s best of British Poetry CD is still available.

Wine and refreshments will be available and all in return for a suggested donation of £8.

Please contact Martin Penny to confirm your places: Telephone: 020 7487 3570
email: oxfammarylebone at hotmail.com

Poetry buys clean water for 14,000 people

Who says poetry doesn't have efficacy in the real world?

Some extraordinary sales figures in today from Oxfam's Su Lycett - Life Lines: Poets for Oxfam, launched just a few months ago, in June 2006, has already sold around 5,000 copies, and made £10,000 in profit (around $20,000 USD) for Oxfam. That translates into clean running water for 14,000 people, or equipment for five schools, or livestock for eight farms.

With National Poetry Month coming this October, and then the Christmas sales season, there is every expectation the CD (which I edited on a volunteer basis) will sell even more. The nearly-70 major and emerging poets involved also donated their time and poems, and publishers donated their rights. The list of contributors reads like a virtual who's who of UK poetry, across a broad spectrum, from mainstream, to performance, to avant-garde. This will surely make it one of the most successful poetry CDs (let alone anthologies) of its kind, ever.

The CD is now available in about 200 places and online at www.oxfam.org.uk/poetry.

Eye On Jack Beeching

John Tranter, the editor of Jacket, recently drew my attention to the curiously-undervalued work of the poet Jack Beeching (pictured, above, with his wife of the time, Catherine, off Ibiza, in the 1960s).

Beeching's poetry is impressive, lovely and often unique, and it is hard to understand how or why it has been allowed to become so marginalised, unless one stops to consider how actually convoluted and concentrated poetry publishing - and more to the point, reviewery - often still is in England.

I'll be seeking out his Modern Penguin Poets 16 selection from 1970.

Here are some links to good articles on Beeching in Jacket, and some of his poems:

http://jacketmagazine.com/26/beech-l-w.html

http://jacketmagazine.com/29/beech-wood-luck.html

http://jacketmagazine.com/26/beech-5p.html

Babylon Burning: 9/11 Five Years On

Nearly 90 poets from around the world have contributed new, unpublished poems to Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years on, an anthology of poems on the Twin Towers atrocity and its consequences. But they aim for more than pious hand-wringing: the anthology will be free, but there will be a request to donate to the Red Cross.

Babylon Burning will rely on readers to spread the word – the site is completely unfunded. A print-on-demand paperback of the anthology will also be available from lulu.com, with all profits going to the Red Cross.

Contributors to Babylon Burning are:

Ros Barber, Jim Bennett, Rachel Bentham, Charles Bernstein, bill bissett, Yvonne Blomer, Stephanie Bolster, Jenna Butler, Jason Camlot, J R Carpenter, Jared Carter, Patrick Chapman, Sampurna Chattarji, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Chivers, Alfred Corn, Tim Cumming, Margot Douaihy, Ken Edwards, Adam Elgar, Elaine Feinstein, Peter Finch, Philip Fried, Leah Fritz, Richard Garcia, Sandra M Gilbert, Nathan Hamilton, Richard Harrison, Kevin Higgins, Will Holloway, Bob Holman, Paul Hoover, Ray Hsu, Halvard Johnson, Chris Jones, Jill Jones, Kavita Joshi, Jonathan Kaplansky, Wednesday Kennedy, Sonnet L’Abbé, Kasandra Larsen, Tony Lewis-Jones, Dave Lordan, Alexis Lykiard, Jeffrey Mackie, Mike Marqusee, Chris McCabe, Nigel McLoughlin, Pauline Michel, Peter Middleton, Adrian Mitchell, John Mole, David Morley, George Murray, Alistair Noon, D Nurkse, John Oughton, Ruth Padel, Richard Peabody, Tom Phillips, David Prater, Lisa Pasold, Victoria Ramsay, Harold Rhenisch, Noel Rooney, Joe Ross, Myra Schneider, Robert Sheppard, Zaid Shlah, Henry Shukman, Penelope Shuttle, John Siddique, Goran Simic, Hal Sirowitz, Heather Grace Stewart, Andrew Steinmetz, John Stiles, William E Stobb, jordan stone, Sean Street, Todd Swift, Joel Tan, Nathaniel Tarn, Mark Terrill, Helên Thomas, Vincent Tinguely, Rodrigo Toscano, John Tranter and John Welch.

All gave their work for free.

Babylon Burning is available now from nthposition.

http://www.nthposition.com/babylonburning911.php

Poem by Emily Berry

Emily Berry (pictured above) is twenty-five and lives in London, where she works for a small publishing company.

Her work has been published by Brittle Star and Nthposition, and she has poems forthcoming in Ambit.

Eyewear is very glad to feature this promising emerging poet this first day of September.


Communication

That day we didn’t speak and ate sandwiches swiftly.
I have always struggled with the roaring woman within
who might emerge and say her piece, impossible to understand.
I tried to convey this to you:

I have pinned her down with a series of pegs
so she lies flat like a wire against a wall.
This way all her anger is channelled into a phone that rings;
I pick it up: “Hello?”

You said you were peopled with other personalities; I knew them all as one,
like coloured sections of an umbrella that meet at the spike.
Under the shade of your muted colours, I stand in the rain,
talking to myself on the phone.


poem by Emily Berry

Poem by Togara Muzanenhamo

Togara Muzanenhamo (pictured here) was born to Zimbabwean parents in Lusaka, Zambia in 1975. He was brought up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to study in The Hague and Paris.

He became a journalist in Harare and worked for a film script production company. His work has appeared in magazines in Europe, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and was included in Carcanet's anthology New Poetries in 2002.

The poem below is taken from his debut collection, recently out from Carcanet, The Spirit Brides. Eyewear is very glad to welcome him to these pages this Friday.


The Laughing Wood

A rock and a river,
And on the rock a blade of sunlight intensifying the colour of moss.
The sound of water
Flowing down into the valley where they found the bags.

I have never seen a fairy,
But she professed to seeing fields of them, at play, in flight.
And to talk of them in the sparkle
Of sunlight amid the dreamy sound of water; that was a great pleasure.

The moss was warm and soft,
She lay with her head in her palm and knee up,
Exposing her inner thigh
As the river flowed down into the valley where they found the buried bags.

poem by Togara Muzanenhamo

UK Gets Bigger and Pluto Gets Smaller, Plus Tea

The BBC news has been fascinating today. First Pluto is demoted from planet to just a bit of dirt way out yonder (in Kafka's Prague, no less, by scientists who think Xena is a good name) - and you thought your ego was fragile, how about goofy Pluto's now? Then the UK gets bigger than 60 million people for the first time ever.

Now for some good news. Tea is actually better for you than water. That may explain the thriving British population, eh?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5281360.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5282440.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5281046.stm

Betjeman

Sir John Betjeman (pictured above) is one of England's most charming and popular 20th century poets. It is his centenary this year. He was Poet Laureate, as well as a succesful media personality, and sold millions of books. One of the poetry albums made of his recordings was titled Betjemania, which quite accurately reflects the general public regard for this rumpled, Teddy Bear holding, lovable eccentric: taught by T.S. Eliot and Muse to Philip Larkin.

The great Atlantic drift between Britain and America yawns wide on the question of his reputation, thought it also seems up for grabs at home, too.

Arguably, Betjeman is little read or valued in America. Meanwhile, the BBC's flagship morning radio news slot, Today, today featured a rather long and winding debate, during its most valued minutes (the last ten before the nine o'clock news) on Betjeman's enduring legacy as a poet.

Oddly, one of the commentators expressed the view that Betjeman could not be considered a great poet (like Milton) as he was not very good in terms of "diction or form" - absurd claims from a North American perspective, where Betjeman's perfect English diction (his grasp of idiom, tone and style) and formal gifts (expert and traditional) mark him as both quintessentially English and something of a hothouse flower.

It was then put forth that, compared to The Waste Land, Betjeman had produced nothing of significant poetic value. The Waste Land is a famous and striking literary assemblage, but it is neither the greatest, or most moving, or most beautiful, poem of the century. While I agree that Betjeman is perhaps not in the first rank of poets, his gifts were many, and need not be dismissed quite so easily.

http://www.johnbetjeman.com/

Poem by Peter Robinson

Eyewear is very glad to feature Peter Robinson (pictured here) this Friday. He is arguably one of the finest, and most subtly innovative, of lyric poets now writing in the English tradition.

Robinson was born in the North of England in 1953. After seventeen years teaching English Literature at various universities in Japan, he has recently accepted a chair in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. He is married and has two daughters. His many publications include Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2003), a collection of aphorisms and prose poems, Untitled Deeds (Salt, 2004), and Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations (Oxford, 2005). Two new books of poetry, Ghost Characters (Shoestring) and There are Avenues (Brodie), appeared earlier this year. Forthcoming this autumn are two books of translations, The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (Princeton) and Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (Chicago), as well as a collection of his interviews, Talk about Poetry: Conversations on the Art (Shearsman). A collection of essays on his work, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, is scheduled for October.


Disorientation

That newly fledged hedge sparrow
that flutters in the aura
of a neon lamp among the laurels
activates this height of summer
on pools with their reflected glories
where rain, nostalgic for the sky,
evaporates as heat
relentlessly returns, and we
are suddenly that bit poorer.
Obits come from another day.
Late light glows behind the leaves;
it backs off, turns away,
and I can do no more.

Like when, just out of hospital
and trying to feel well,
you sense the place as fragile;
you see how two wood pigeons
have gone and built their nest
in branches over the garden fence,
scaring away such smaller birds
as those aligned on the top of one vast
motorway junction sign
for Canterbury, Sevenoaks, Dover and the coast
— these things themselves like a picture of health,
being more at home than you can be
in your curiously lost self-interest,
and the light too going west.


poem by Peter Robinson. First published in English (2005)

Seven Million Can't Be Wrong

Bloggers of the United Kingdom unite!

The Guardian today reports that one in nine UK citizens blogs - that is, seven million bloggers. Oddly enough, this social habit is still misunderstood and maligned by the mainstream, yet is probably more prevalent than most other consensual activities. Thankfully, the above-mentioned paper notes in their editorial today that blogging needs to be fully integrated into the public and personal spheres.

Hopefully, those poetry publishers - and poets - who continue to avoid the Internet and by extension blogs as if they were rat poison will begin to see the writing on the blog: cyberspace is now as "normal" a form of communication as the printed page, the telephone, the radio, the TV, the mobile phone text...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1824415,00.html

Summertime

The Summertime issue of Poetry Review, the UK's leading journal of poetry, founded in 1909, is now out, and it includes poems by (among others, as the saying goes) John Burnside, W.S. Merwin, Andrew Motion, Don Paterson, George Szirtes, Sarah Wardle, C.K. Williams, Tamar Yoseloff, and, indeed, myself.

It can be ordered from www.poetrysociety.org.uk - a single issue is £7.95.

On Novellas

The novella is the ideal form of the novel, just as the short lyric poem is the best sort of poetry - for a reason that is self-evident: brevity. Or rather, brevity by way of compression. And not just pounds-per-square-inch. The balance between the demands of the author, and the needs of the reader, seem to find equipoise in the novella - which can be read in one sitting, in one moment and place, just as much as a poem can, or a piece of music may be listened to.

While longer works of writing have their different values and charms, one of them, surely, is the function of being able to be "picked up" later. There is no later in a novella - there is the enveloping sense of a dying movement, a now turning into a then, as one flows with the work itself. The novella is the glance at the painting that turns into the look that's held by wanting to see more, but also knows the gallery will be closed in an hour. Its dance with the finite is responsible and sweet at once - the novella is the last glass of wine before the bottle is done, the kiss at the doorstep, the short walk home. It finds its place among all the pleasures of life that are neither here, nor there - but gently in-between.

My three favourite novellas were two, until yesterday. And now a third has joined them. It is not lonely company, but a third is welcome. I love very few books, and the ones I love transport me. I make no apologies for this. I am much moved by a sense, in the author, that a time is both passing and held, in the written word; I prefer the elegiac. My previous favourite novellas are Daisy Miller and Death In Venice. If one wishes to suggest that Miss Lonelyhearts is a novella, then so be it. So, four, then. For a full handful, my fifth would be Heart Of Darkness. In all novellas of greatness, the themes are death and love, and how they meet and undress each other.

I read A Month In The Country (1980) by J.L. Carr yesterday, on a train, from Scotland, and a remote farmhouse on a firth, where I spent a golden week-end with brilliant, beatiful poets in their youth - hurtling back to London. The weather darkened as the distance forshortened.

I am not sure how this book escaped me until now - that is one of the pleasures of reading - one never need read a book until it finds one. The time being in joint, I read it in one (motionful) sitting, and was moved. I won't summarize here - the "short novel" is less than 90 pages in my Penguin Classics edition. I simply hope you read this book some day. It opens irresistibly, for me - a young shell-shocked veteran-artisan stepping off a train in 1920s England in terrible rain on to a platform where he is to be greeted with kindness, friendship, love and discovery, even as his grotesque facial tic sets him apart as a man who has seen irremediable horrors. I am so touched by this meeting of opposites, of violence and gentleness. Then, it unfolds that the novel is a looking-back, to a lost time, and that always gets me.

It has something of A Separate Peace in it - also informed by a classical knowledge that life is passing. This book, too, is based on the carpe diem perspective. It is also a fine meditation on art, and work, friendship, desire, and faith. Carr loved Conrad, Hardy and the poems of Housman, and he manages to bring their various ways of writing, and seeing, into his own story. Like The Good Soldier, but more simply, each line is pitch-perfect, and leads to an ending of great sadness. The last line is one of the most quietly beautiful in the modern English language.

That being said, I am not entirely convinced by the figure of Mrs. Keach. As such, this is a great work, and it is Carr's masterpiece, but it is a slightly flawed one. Only slightly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Carr

Modern Poetry and the Tradition

I am back from Wales, where I read poems with the poet Chris Kinsey, at the Oriel Davies Gallery (www.orieldavies.org) in Newtown, and then spent another day book-buying at Haye-on-Wye; and then later, in the drawing room of a Victorian fishing lodge(Pwll-y-Faedda) on the banks of the salmon-rich river, read Yvor Winters.

The gallery reading went well - perhaps 45 or so in attendance. The exhibition was of modern British art, 1900-1950, and a Wyndham Lewis of Ezra Pound was to my left (ironically) as I read. Kinsey's work was vivid, rich in imagery, and well-delivered; she was able to connect each of her poems to a painting in the gallery, as she lives nearby.

Haye-on-Wye, as may have been said (if not consider it coined here), is to book shops what Venice is to canals. The best has to be Chris and Melanie Prince's The Poetry Bookshop which is on Brook Street; nicely, I found Cleanth Brooks there - namely, a first edition of Modern Poetry and the Tradition, published in 1939 (!) in Chapel Hill.

Cleanth must be one of the most beautiful names in the English language.

I am currently apalled yet revived by reading Winters. His precise attention to certain strictures whets the mind's dull knife in this age of celebrity and the inflated blurb. His meter is moral and exact. And his claims often patently absurd.

It seems a different age in which someone could (try to) dispel Yeats with an essay - and one that is also refreshingly alternative and eccentric.

Review: The Feeling, Twelve Stops and Home

The band above are The Feeling. They have an eponymous website with bells and whistles, which you're free to find as you please. I feel you might not need to.

Their new album, out in the UK June 5th, Twelve Stops And Home, is not, in fact, a typographical error referring to some unfortunate addict's struggle to kick the sugar rush of pop music, but it could be.

When someone mentions Supertramp, Bread, 10cc, The Alan Parsons Project and The Beach Boys - well, someone else reaches for their gun. For every mad lover of "Jet" or "Eye In The Sky" there is an equal and opposite personage welling with great hate for such pap - especially people who support the idea that 77 punk was the second coming. Well, The Feeling predicate their very existence on the idea that it was time for an anti-thetical return of the repressed - call them the Soft Negative.

Nothing on their fluffy, sickly-sweet, jaunty, piano-tickling Breakfast-in-America-style album is as good as their pop masters' very best, which is the problem - not the so-bad-it-is-jolly-good stylistic decision to mine the sugar walls of this 70s goldmine of supersweet melodies.

For the record, there are three or four exquisitely good songs here, though they don't seem to all be the planned singles, but here goes: "Kettle's On", "Sewn", "Same Old Stuff" and "Helicopter". "Sewn" stands above these others, and demands an almost OCD-like replaying, so entrancingly upbeat is it.

As attracted as repelled by the honey-trappings, Eyewear gives this 3 specs out of five.

Terras Astraea reliquit

I attended a production of Titus Andronicus Saturday evening, at "Shakespeare's Globe Theatre" - that is to say, the hyper-real simulacrum of the original, dreamed into being by visionary American Sam Wanamaker and built in the late 90s. This had me fooled.

The reconstruction, which is artistically and architecturally faithful, is (perhaps in a Disneyland way) exactly how one expects it to be. It was the first balmy night of the London summer, and the bank of the Thames was thronged with drunks and lovers. Sometimes these were the same people.

Have I ever had a better time at a Shakespeare play? Maybe once, when I was fourteen, in Ontario, or so, when Brian Bedford played a brilliant Richard II. But I doubt it. The bawdy, ultra-violent production, directed by Lucy Bailey, takes full advantage of the groundlings as a crowd to swell a scene. Also, the use of carts, as used in medieval mystery plays, pulling the players through the audience, in the round, to declaim and sport there, was thrilling and doubled the visceral sense of the play's havoc unleashed.

Much has been made of the story - which is deeply resonant of the present moment in Iraq (and elsewhere) - a cycle of barbaric militarism-turned-sadism that becomes a spiral of very cruel bloodshed. In brief, Titus is a great General and a good Roman (a Colin Powell type) who obeys the law to the letter, and beyond, into blinding nobility. This means that, upon his return to Rome, having vanquished the Goths, he sacrifices one of his prisoners (Queen of the Goths Tamora's son) as is the rule of law, to Roman gods, despite her pleas for leniency - this sets off a chain of madness.

Next, within minutes Titus declines the crowds' demand that he become Emperor, and supports the lawful transition to the callow, debauched Saturninus, the late Emperor's eldest son. Saturninus, newly-laurelled, now declares his intention to take Titus' daughter Lavinia to be his wife, even though she is betrothed to his brother, Bassianus. This near-Oedipal rapine signals worse to come. Titus' sons defend Bassianus' claim to their sister (which is based on true love) and seek to kidnap her away from the bad Emperor. Titus defends the claims of the young Emperor, and kills one of his sons in trying to rescue back his daughter.

Startlingly, the unfair Emperor does not appreciate this noble sacrifice, but rather blames Titus for his son's actions - and cancels his marriage offer to Lavinia, instead marrying - on the spot - the sexually charismatic Tamora, hacking away her chains. Tamora's and Titus' shocking reversal of fortune is now complete - the slave is Empress of Rome, and the beloved General is an outcast, doomed to be destroyed by Tamora who remembers the murder of her son and vows revenge. All of this takes place in the first ten minutes, so you see how action-packed the play is.

The tragedy is that both Titus and Tamora are locked in to a belief in vengeance. However, as the play proceeds, Titus, much like Job, or Lear, is brought to suffer levels of horror and ordeals of such sadism and loss, that he must either go mad and lose faith in divinity, or have his faith strengthened. This being Shakespeare, not King James, Titus goes mad.

A short deviation is in order here. The acts of violence in this play re worthy of a "video nasty" - it makes something from a chainsaw massacre look tame - and indeed about ten people fainted the night I was there - old and young, man and woman - and Tamora's sons have something of Deliverance about them. Terribly, Lavinia has a surgically-enforced aphasia thrust upon her, as she is faced with an unbearable mimesis - becoming the "real" to classical "Philomel".

Philomel was raped, had her tongue cut away, and hands cut off. So too, with Lavinia. The scene where she and her young husband are cornered, trapped, and then realize what will happen to them is - to say the least - deeply disturbing, The way that Bailey directs this transgressive sequence of extreme sexual mutilation gives full weight to the suffering impact of all victims of torture and rape in wartime.

Back to Titus. He is played beautifully by Douglas Hodge. I think that Hodge is the best actor I have now ever seen on stage, and that includes Ralph Fiennes and Kevin Spacey. I had enjoyed his dashing turn in the BBC-TV adaptation of Middlemarch, but nothing prepared me for this. He was electric, galvanized, tormented, funny, and always-moving, just compelling to watch.

Hodge entirely enacts the post-traumatic eloquence of utter despair. Mirroring his muted Lavinia, who is forced to retain only an inner voice, Hodge, who begins as a stalwart Roman, evolves into a fully deranged, yet never less than also fully conscious, witty, humane expressiveness - he becomes the tongue his daughter has lost. He cackles, jests, debates, and ultimately concludes that justice has fled the earth. Having given his hand, and received two lopped heads - his deeply-sensitive and loving blood ransom repaid with total humiliating indifference - Titus confronts the unspeakable, and determines to throw language above the world, to the next. In this world, he will use action again.

Knowing his talking can do nothing, he shoots arrows to the lost gods, begging for mercy or justice. The arrows become rain somewhere, but otherwise fall on deaf ears. There being no justice, Titus/ Hodge goes medieval on Tamora's sons, and the end of the play descends into Death Wish bathos - but always grippingly. You can understand, if not condone, to paraphrase Cherie Blair.

Titus Andronicus is often considered a lesser, savage play. It is violent, but it is violence bodily entangled with language, blood and flesh - it is the play that most demands we note the way the tongue, and the polis, are connected. This poesis / polis connection makes the play a subtextual working through of Platonic and Aristotelian notions of poetics, and politics. Shakespeare clearly fused the two worlds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5042516.stm

[ps comment on A's note - I saw Lester as Hamlet; Spacey in many productions (he's a genius I think) and still say Hodge was superb. I found nothing wrong with his diction. As for indicating that I live in "London, England" - perhaps my worthy interlocutor is geographically-impaired - but it is common courtesy to do so, lest those who live in "London, Canada" - and other such, smaller Londons, feel neglected.]

Eye On Valentine Ackland

It is the centenary of a poet I had never heard of: Valentine Ackland (pictured above).

Thankfully, an article in Saturday's Guardian Review section (see link below) has introduced me to this extraordinarily-intriguing-sounding poet - a lesbian, communist, Catholic, environmentalist (at various stages of her complicated journey through self-exploration) - whose poetry will be re-published by Carcanet, that necessary press (for those who want to reclaim the past we should not have missed, and read the present others would rather keep from us).

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1778230,00.html