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I was watching a Rick Stein program tonight and he mentioned the poet Jack Clemo – I am not really a reader of poetry, but after hearing a few lines I was drawn to find out more about this poet.
Jack Clemo was born in Goonamarris. Jack was educated locally in the village school and concentrated on his poetry, while he lived in poverty with his widowed mother. He lost his hearing and sight by 1955, the scenes of the Clay Country became his symbols for mystical and religious experiences.
Each day a few more flowers are killed,
A few more mossy hollows filled
With gravel. Like a clutching hand
The refuse moves against the dower,
The flaunting pride and power
Of springtide beauty menacing the sod;
And it is joy to me
To lengthen thus a finger of God
That wars with Poetry. […]
I love to see the sand I tip
Muzzle the grass and burst the daisy heads.
I watch the hard waves lapping out to still
The soil’s rhythm for ever, and I thrill
With solitary song upon my lip,
Exulting as the refuse spreads:
“Praise god, the earth is maimed,
And there will be no daisies in that field
Next spring; it will not yield
A single bloom or grass blade: I shall see
In symbol potently
Christ’s Kingdom there restored:
One patch of Poetry reclaimed
By Dogma: one more triumph for our Lord.”
The Flooded Clay-Pit
These white crags
Cup waves that rub more greedily
Now half-way up the chasm; you see
Doomed foliage hang like rags;
The whole clay-belly sags.
What scenes far
Beneath those waters: chimney-pots
That used to smoke; brown rusty clots
Of wheels still oozing tar;
Lodge doors that rot ajar.
Those iron rails
Emerge like claws cut short on the dump,
Though once they bore the waggon’s thump:
Now only toads and snails
Creep round their loosened nails.
Those thin tips
Of massive pit-bed pillars – how
They strain to scab the pool’s face now,
Pressing like famished lips
Which dread the cold eclipse.
Links:
FLETCHER CHRISTIAN CONFESSES
The Grave Tattoo
ISBN 978-0-00-782552-3
Val McDermid
The conceit in this thriller is that William Wordsworth encountered a fugitive Fletcher Christian (hero / villain of the the mutiny against Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty. Bligh, while captain of the ship was, confusingly, a Lieutenant by actual rank). Fletcher, a Cumbrian, wants to get his side of the events recorded. The account given here of his adventures on Pitcairn Island, and in places as far-flung as Valparaiso, the Carolinas, and the Isle of Man from where he trades as a smuggler to the gentry of Cumbria; (something of an anachronism), ‘Cumbria’ was invented in 1972. Prior to that it had been the ancient counties of Cumberland and (landlocked) Westmoreland, a large bit of Lancashire (the Furness peninsula) and a small bit of Yorkshire).
This epic poem and letters about it are alleged to have been given on the death (of the now entirely non-revolutionary Wordsworth) to the care of his maidservant Dorcas Mason (also known as ‘Mayson’ – claimed here, to be because of ignorance on the part of clerks, even clergy, but English spelling didn’t settle-down until work on the Oxford English Dictionary began. And the notional introduction of universal education in Great Britain in the early 1870s. It only became genuinely universal at the turn of the 19th / 20th century. Jane Gresham, a native of the English Lakelands and a Wordsworth scholar, lives in a south London sink estate, has to serve in a [booze-]bar in the evenings to make ends meet. She is a part-time Lecturer, simultaneously attempting to do heavy-duty research on Our William, while keeping an eye on the single-parented wild-child Tenille. She doesn’t like school, but does like reading in general and poetry in particular.
Jane Gresham travels to her home territory in search of the, possibly non-existent, Wordsworth documents. As this is a (quite thrilling) thriller a villain is also on the case. And on her trail. In fact the tranquil Lake District is crowded with villains. Some of them are false friends. One of the falsest being a Gay man with whom Jane went to the local primary school. Her jealous, sulky, elder brother is headmaster of said school. He turns out not be be a jealous as Jane thinks (it’s that sort of book). That is not a sneer, this is an absorbing tale, but possibly too complex (or, more than conceivably, one is too thick to keep up… (you are allowed to disagree with this judgement)).
My one (slightly treasonable) problem with the narrative was that it must have struck somebody in the course of two centuries that making a transcript of the Great Man’s work would have been a good idea. The reasoning will have to be withheld as the sting in the tail of the tale will be wasted. After all, a ‘Pencil Museum’ is mentioned in the course of this narrative, quills were definitely available, the metal nib and the typewriter were invented relatively shortly after Wordsworth turned his toes up.
This is an interesting and pleasurable read (lots of elderly corpses, though) and should while away some hours of the (currently grisly) weather, or that beach-wait, before the cute Latinos / Latinas happen along.
Seán McGouran
Ivor C. is very clever writer, in fact he sometimes verges on the clever-clever – which may be one of the reasons why I have always like his stuff. If you’re a smart Alec you may as well be Smart Alecky with style.
This wee book is in three parts (not unlike Caesar’s Gaul) the middle section is Foreign Parts, the poems being often quasi-experimental. Lisboa for example, being written over two pages to give an impression of the great earthquake which ruined Lisbon of the classical era.
On the train to Leipzig, written when East Germany (the Deomcratic Republic) still existed, is written in very good standard verse; it scans and it rhymes. This section involveds visits to other parts of the erstwhile Soviet boc, including Romania, but Treby does not fall into the trap of jibing at “the sytem”. I was very struck by An Embalmed Revolutionary, about George Dimitrov, who defied the Nazi in their own People’s Courts:
“When young
and full of fire
did he expect this state,
the marble tomb, and all his trips
re,pved?”
Lost bright waters is about travelling to and through Australia and New Zealand. The poems are a sort of crescendo and diminuendo up to and away from transmitted in the blood, at least that’s how it appears to one reader.
Mr. ICT has a certain amount of Carollian fun at the expense of the kakapo, the ground parrot in lost bright waters. In fact there is a Carrollian air about ICT’ use of language – it is precise but off-centre, not deliberately eccentric but the product of a way of looking at the world which is inborn.
It a ‘serious pleasure‘ to find lesbian sex and sexuality celebrated by those to whom they belong. But there are problems on several levels with this book.
The Sheba Collection are only too aware of some of these and assure us in their well-considered introduction, that they discussed them at great length. For example, one of the things they invite us to ponder is the thinness of the differential line ‘between erotica and pornography’. How do we cope with the fact that there are some men ‘out there’ who will inevitably use the book as a turn-on, written as the stories and poems often are, with frank and uncompromising abandon. Sheba obviously feel that there is a further general – and important – debate, around lesbians taking ownership of how we are represented. And I believe that they feel that they have taken a step within that debate, challenging us to rise towards finding ‘the fine balance between political correctness and personal experience’.
And there, of course lies another possible problem, colouring how individuals are likely to react to this volume. It is, I would guess, improbable that every lesbian will identify with all the fantasies and romps through its pages. It is also conceivable that there might be those who fail to identify with any of it and that not merely because personal experience precludes identification but also because personal politics, which, of necessity, have a collective focus and significance, will raise too many questions.
That larger debate aside, though never forgotten, there is one further problem to be addressed in reviewing the book: are the stories and poems a good read? Disappointment will not be yours if all you want to do is absorb and react to many and varied visions of lesbian sex in full flow. On that level, the stories are indeed a good read. Some are headily passionate, others questing and sometimes finding. Yet others are sheer fun, one, in particular Parting Gift by MIndy Meleyal with punchline which almost takes the breath away.
But is it wrong to want more than that level of expectation grants? Does writing erotica have to mean, as it sometimes does here, that quality – of language, of story construction, of character creation – has to go by the board? The essence of many of the stories is most definitely ‘grunt and thrust’, and that occasionally quite aggressively so. (I am thinking on particular of the poem by Storme Webber, Like a Train). There were occasions when I felt that what mattered was not the characters, but how quickly they could be got into bed or under the shower, so as not to lost space for exhaustively describing them at it. As if the only vital thing is the fantasy. Perhaps it is in erotica and I am looking at this book from a completely wrong premise.
But then, you see, not all of the book is like that. Cherry Smith’s Crazy about Mary Kelly is a case in point. Not that it is devoid of what I have called ‘grunt and thrust’. But the presence of sexual desire and its fulfilment serves Cherry’s characters, helping to make them and their angers, fears and needs recognisable. How they are together physically mirror their individual emotions and reactions to each other – and for a brief while we have the tensions of whether they will be able to grow past these to respond to each other as they need to The story has a wholeness which some of the other lack.
And there are others which, while giving themselves over quite fully to fantasy, also carry something of universal about them. In Ambivalance by Tina Bays, we see before us something which most, if not all of us have expereinced – that electric insecurity of wanting and needing, which one is wary of voicing in case the other is not feeling the same way.
All in all, though I suppose I did feel rather overshelmed by the experience of reading this book. I think I felt rather like the speaker in the last piece in the book – a poem of Cheryl Clarke (whose work as represented in Serious Pleasure is worth the folling up and I intend to). I’m almost convinced that Sheba Collective, aware of the possibility of many shell-shocked readers, deliberately put this poem last, in a moment of wry humour, to slow things down, and bring other perspectives to bear.
Here it
is:
Sexual Preference by Cheryl Clarke
I’m a queer lesbian
Please don’t go down on me down yet
I do not prefer cunnilingus
(There’s room for me in the movement.)
Your tongue does not have to prove its prowness
there
to me
now
or
even on the first night
Your mouth all over my body
then there