In Praise of Vladek Sheybal

Vladek Sheybal is one of the greatest screen villains from that golden age of 60s and 70s thrillers set in Europe during a grey morning frost, or evening of cobble stone streets and Citroens. I think here of The Odessa File and most famously The Day of the Jackal. I don't know why films of this era make me feel so curiously happy (I tingle like when I smell snow) - perhaps it is a simple childhood reflex, as I was born in '66.

More to the point, Sheybal was Kronsteen in From Russia With Love - and a truly sociopathic heroin-dealer/clock fetishist/ chain-killer in Puppet On A Chain (1970).

Puppet On A Chain - which is on DVD - is one of the grittiest and most entertaining of those 70s films with the porn-style soundtrack - and seems dubbed by actors with slightly Dutch accents. It is very entertaining, if you, like me, are a fan of all things retro. It has the flavour of an Avengers episode, but is more dark and violent than the Bonds that had preceded (and influenced) it.

The scene where the female protagonist is strung up like the title says is truly chilling, and Sheybal's drug-jaded explanation of why he has killed the women in the film is one of the most disturbing psycho-scenes in cinema from the period (and worthy of Polanski, also from Poland and with a similarly fraught childhood). The motorboat chase sequence through the canals of Amsterdam is superb, and unjustly forgotten.

Sheybal - dressed in a white suit and flamboyant hat - engages in a truly uncanny cat-and-mouse game involving a shotgun at the end - a haunting sequence within a sequence that is so still after the water and the racing motors. You can see how the directors of the recent homages to this era, The Bourne films with Matt Damon, have learned from this sort of imagery - how the films have to catch that early-morning European frost in the air, and the neo-modern chrome of the airports, and the whine of French police sirens: it is a recipe for a mood like no other if done properly.

I am not sure why the Alistair MacLean thrillers have not been properly assembled and sold to us as a collector's set (Fear Is The Key, and Bear Island, along with the Anthony Hopkins actioner - also a 70s classic - When Eight Bells Toll - would all be great items to rediscover for an age that enjoys schlock and camp).

Why is Sheybal so little praised now?

Robin Cook and the Tragic Departure

Robin Cook has died tragically, at the age of 59, while hill-walking with his wife in Scotland - apparently of a heart-attack.

I learned of Mr. Cook's death yesterday while in a hackney cab in London. The driver, who had just heard the awful news on the radio, turned to me and said: "he was the best of the lot".

The best of the lot. A tribute indeed. Throughout London yesterday and today, I have seen and heard the little, everyday average decent people of Britain murmuring their shock, and sadness, at the loss of the one decent man associated with Labour.

Robin Cook was a hero of mine, for his principled resignation on the eve of the illegal British war against the people of Iraq, in 2003. In some ways, he inspired my actions as part of the poets against the war movement. He was a catalyst for putting ethical considerations back at the heart of government and foreign policy, and he lost his job for it. But he was the hero of many. His death - at a time when he was widely expected to return to a top position when Brown replaces Blair - is a treble loss: for his family, his party, and the world. He departed parliament with the eloquent dignity of a great man, an historic figure; he departs the world, sadly, with far less grace, but no less drama. He leaves us with a memory of the best in each of us - a Socratic figure, a candidate for one of the great people of the age.

May there may be others like him in our future.

60 Years Ago Today

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb by Allied forces on Hiroshima, at the end of WWII.

I was in Hiroshima three weeks ago, and went to see the Peace Park and the dome, pictured above. I was not prepared for the banality of time: Hiroshima has flourished, trees, people and buildings (life) have returned, and the city, in summer, is lush, hot, and beautiful. The hypocentre of the bomb-blast - targeting the T-shaped bridge - was a smallish island set in the middle of a river, at the heart of the city, and on the island, 50,000 people lived.

They died within seconds. As readers will know, many more died within minutes, hours, and more terribly, days.

The tens of thousands of fatal and violently disfiguring injuries, from heat, blast-force, fire, radiation, and flying glass and steel, should remind those in London and New York of their tragedies - and compel people of good will everywhere to oppose the development of weapons of mass destruction.

I have a few very brief statements I wish to make:

1. The use of the atomic bomb on a civilian target on August 6, 1945, without warning, was a wicked act and a war crime. I am ashamed to read of the Tokyo trials, where Japanese class-A war criminals were hung, while the men who conceived and carried out the attack on Hiroshima thrived, often celebrated.

2. No historical argument, or geo-political strategy can substitute its claims for an ethical imperative that should be at the heart of all human agency: it is always wrong to kill thousands of innocent civilians in a cruel, painful and indiscriminate manner. Once we dicker with the word always in the phrase above, we enter the world of real politique that leads to ash-heap-graves where 50,000 people can crouch in one wheelbarrow.

3. The ongoing development of nuclear weapons and nuclear strategic thinking by Western governments is a crime against humanity.

4. The manufacture, sale, and distribution of arms supported by governments such as the UK, France, Canada, America, etc., is an evil which perpetuates immense suffering and much conflict in the world; the fact that the market can be imperviously-driven by the profits that arms sales unquestionably make only hints at the immense flaw at the core of the Western world in our time.

In honour of the many victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we must work to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Or lose our own humanity.

Russian Submariners

The Russian Kursk submarine (pictured to the left) met its tragic fate roughly five years ago - the anniversary will be next week. Tragically, another Russian submersible is today - in waters of a depth of 190 meters - facing a similarly trying rescue operation; the world can only hope for the best for them at this time.

Five years ago, I was very much exercised by the intersection between poetry and the immediacy of world events as conveyed by the news (and was living in Budapest).

At that time, I wrote a poem with disturbing echoes of today, not least the death of German tourists (then in an Air France crash, this time in Russian bus accidents).

You'll find the poem "Hull Losses" below; originally published in 2002 in my second collection, Cafe Alibi. The technical-actuarial term hull losses refers to plane crashes, but also the hulls of submarines; and by extension, I was thinking of Larkin, who lived in Hull, near a bleak seascape, and faced many different losses in his work.

As such, the poem is, I believe, the only one in English to concern itself with: a) aviation and submersible disasters; b) Internet pornography; c) Philip Larkin; d) murder; e) the intersection of these themes in terms of scopophilia and fragility of structures (including poems).


Hull Losses

First, the Concorde's tire burst, then
the Kursk went down in the Barents Sea,
all hands knocking out Morse
with spoons on bent hulls, the high-tech

surroundings inexplicably silent.
Rescue pods fail. Scan-addicts,
meanwhile, search for HQ babes,
dragging up thumbs from blue depths.

Cold Russian submariners morose
on an Arctic floor; exploded German
tourists in the burst supersonic;
a child penetrated, later dumped in a bag;

the convict injected; the neurological patient
whose eyelid, alone, is what still moves
(fluttering like the flap of a cut thumb).
Each a real presence: but not for all time.

What is our true quality, sly impermanence?
The flaw in us may be like a single hair
scanned in by accident - a stray line
fracturing the collector's perfect jpeg.

poem by Todd Swift

50 Years Waiting For Godot

Fifty years ago today, August 3, in London, Waiting For Godot had its English-language premiere, directed by Peter Hall. It is as we all now know, one of the great post-war plays, and the sequence of events triggered by the August 3 production (at first being harshly reviewed then lionized) led to the less-than-well-known Beckett becoming the Irish Kafka of the 20th century - the bleak-yet-witty writer most likely to be associated in chrome-gleaming suburban Cold War households with a sort of Existenz-darkened Zeitgeist. He also won the Nobel Prize.

Today, the works seems more permanently a part of the canon than ever - and it is somehow astounding to realize it is only 50 years since Godot entered the public imagination. In a world where new episodes of Dr. Who are described as "edgy, dark" etc., the vision of this masterwork remains brilliantly opaque and ascetically lavish. I retain an unfair suspicion, however, that some writers ascend to the dizzy heights partially on the basis of what could be called The Gaunt Factor.

Beckett - long before the sort of pr photography that made Joy Division, Depeche Mode and U2 seem intensely profound and doomed in long-gentleman shadows - was blessed with iconic photographic images of himself equal to his stature - somehow, images were found to portray his language. No English writer, other than Auden, has ever used his own wrinkled visage to such effect. If we love Dostoevsky, it is despite his unpalatable portraits - if we love Beckett, it is at least partially because of his face.

Ten Hallam Poets

Ten Hallam Poets is an anthology whose no-nonsense title says it all. There are in fact ten poets here, and they are each, in their own way, products (that gross word) of the writing programmes (MA and PhD) at Sheffield Hallam University. The introduction is by Sean O'Brien, one of the best-known poet-critics currently writing in the UK.

As is usual with such anthologies (and I am no stranger here myself) a series of market-savvy blurbs adorns the back cover, culminating in the statement by Don Paterson (a major UK poet) that this collection "represents one of the most astonishing constellations of poetic talent to have emerged in the last ten years" - which begs the question, where are all the other "astonishing constellations" if this is only one of them?

Such praise does a disservice, perhaps, since the language with which we are able to recommend good poetry is becoming increasingly inflated to the point where soon a "new dazzling voice", "that rare good thing: the real thing" or "fizzy genius" won't even be able to buy you a loaf of bread.

Helen Dunmore says the anthology "deserves the widest possible readership" which in fact is a sort of poetic truism. Most poetry - indeed any poetry these days, especially in England - deserves a readership, and I am the first to wish to imagine a possible future world where that was the widest; given the Dan Brown Hypocentre we live in, it is more likely this attractive, small book will reach an actual readership of several hundred, or thousand. This may not be wide, but it could be deep readership, which might be almost as good.

This leads to the question of creative writing "programmes". I have recently been on the MA at UEA, one of the better in the world in terms of reputation, so am not about to throw stones here. This book is worth the price simply for O'Brien's Introduction, which should, once and for all, put to rest the silly notion, widely assumed (though rarely considered) in British literary circles, that such creative writing degrees are for the birds. Roughly speaking, O'Brien reminds us that while perhaps talent, let alone genius, cannot be taught (though Plato would have said it could surely be teased out of even the lowliest boy) it can certainly be harnessed, trained and guided by an attention to craft. The Hallam programme is one of the better ones in the UK (some would say the best of course).

The ten poets selected here are good, well-read, and what's more, they do deserve to be read. Their names are: Don Barnard, Anne Stewart, Tim Turnbull, Tracey O'Rourke, James Sheard, Gabeba Baderoon, Andrea Dow, Tony Williams, Shelley Roche and Frances Leviston. They have been selected by the editors: Steven Earnshaw, E.A. Markham and O'Brien from a presumably much wider pool, so we must assume this is Hallam's cream of the crop. I confess to thinking that about 70% of the poetry presented here is as good as - but only as good as - what could be located at any excellent department of creative writing, anywhere in the USA, Canada, or UK, at the current time - that is, rather than this book being an astonishing constellation, what is astonishing is how adequate and serious and prepared almost all graduate students writing poetry in such contexts now are - certainly, such a book could easily be prepared by UEA (and should be!) with equal results.

That being said, two or three poets out of the ten stand out with such distinction as to be in fact stars in the Paterson sense. I will briefly observe two of these.

The first is Tim Turnbull, born in 1960. His writing is witty, risk-taking, and able to play with form at ease, while never abandoning his own street-wise voice. His "Chainsaw" poem, which takes the piss out of Simon Armitage's recent poem on the same theme, is a sort of contemporary version of the kind of thing that little Pope did so well - taking down other poets with only the literate weapons of words to hand.

Turnbull is very good when he's at his best, but, like many current younger (and not so young) British poets, has mistaken attitude, humour, bravery, and insouciance for top-notch achievement - as if poets like Todd Colby in the USA had never existed.

What I am saying about Turnbull is, he is very good, and will become a force to be reckoned with - especially if he avoids assuming every pop culture reference or vernacular pose he adopts is original or an expressway to Frank O'Hara Central.

The very best poet in this anthology is Frances Leviston who was born in 1982. She is without a doubt - and on the basis of the eight poems included here - in pole position to be considered the major poet of her emergent generation. Her command and vision, at such a young age, makes her a sort of Armitage or Duffy in waiting.

It is good to read her debut will soon be with Picador (Paterson's press) - and no doubt the word "astonishing" mainly relates to her being in the constellation, for she is that fine. It was likely an editorial mistake to lead with her work, since the book can never quite recover from the the reader's desire to simply keep flipping back to pages 1-10. "Losses" is as good a poem as has been written in the 21st century by someone working within the British mainstream tradition.

For the fact that Turnbull and Leviston are here, this anthology has perennial value. James Sheard and Anne Stewart, and a clutch of poems by the other contributors, are also note-worthy.

Okay - so maybe not astonishing, but, remarkable. Time to welcome ten new poets in to the unfirm firmament where writing wheels, burns and often blazes out unseen.

Poem by David Hill

Dressed for success

No, no. Germanic pop, not Anglo rock.
Not Rolling Stones, not Velvet Underground,
But Amsterdam's and Stockholm's ample stock
Of Dancing Queens; the Berlin Wall of sound;

Camp groups like Ace of Base – remember them?
Army of Lovers – how could one forget?
Or Two Unlimited, or Boney M,
Or Falco, Modern Talking, or Roxette;

And, to pronounce those broken English names,
With turquoise eyes, a spangly lipsticked kiss:
Tall Eastern girls. Mad glamour. Freedom games.
Forget the greasy earnest rockers' claims:
It's this that killed off Communism. This.

by David Hill