Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

April's prescription is a poet who is well known and much loved in the USA, but less so in the UK. Sarah lent me a collection of Mary Oliver's work from the UK poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books

I came across the title poem in 2009 when I joined a group doing The Artist's Way that Sarah co-ordinated. It came up because of this quote which has become a bit of a touchstone for me:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.

The soft animal of Mary Oliver's body loves to lie quietly in wild places and watch wild things. Because she watches and waits patiently she sees marvels, like a fox playing in a cranberry patch, which she polishes up so that less patient and watchful people can appreciate them too.

Wild Geese includes prose as well as poetry -- I love reading about how other writers work, so it was a joy to find occasional pieces like 'The Swan', which gives a behind-the-scenes look at the poem of the same title (the true nature of the bird made me laugh out loud).

I found I couldn't wait to get back to this book. It moved around the house with me at first, but soon settled in the attic where I could read in peace. I think perhaps I need to follow Oliver's example and spend some time sitting still and watching. This is another book that I am feeling sad about returning -- I'll have to buy some Mary Oliver collections of my own.

Wild Geese (Bloodaxe World Poets) is available from Amazon.

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

I have a history with this book: I received it some years back as a review copy, started it and failed to get into it -- my thoughts were "This is a prose story chopped up into short lines to fill a novel-sized book. And I don't like werewolves." However, it's not the sort of book I forget -- my memory tends to file away odd combinations of form and genre -- and the fear I felt when I got it as my poetry prescription for March was tempered with a lot of curiosity. I was afraid because I was prejudiced against this book; and because of its length and what with one thing and another I only got my poetry prescription in the last days of the month.

So -- the genre is horror > werewolves; and it has elements of hardboiled detective (I would say that Peabody is too vulnerable to be truly hardboiled, but there is something noirish about his determination to see his case through, despite its baffling, disconcerting nature and its unprepossessing victims). And the form is free verse.

The endeavour as a whole calls to my mind another bonkers combination of form and genre from my past: Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, which I studied at university. Lucretius, for reasons best known to himself (and much discussed on our course), presented to the Roman audience the principles of Epicurean philosophy in 7,400 lines of hexameter.

From my own experiences as a writer I know that form can be a matter of expediency rather than choice. I do wonder what chance and circumstance led Toby Barlow to tell his story in verse form. It must put people off picking up the book -- but I can see it helped generate a lot of the buzz, and I'm sure that people who thought they didn't like poetry, or verse novels, have been sucked in by the fast-paced, visceral reading experience. Talking of visceral, I wondered if another reason for Barlow's choice was that verse allows him to take a more direct route into the sensory parts of the reader's brain. Dogs aren't known for their skill at verbal expression -- but they are known for their deeply sensory, physical experience of the world. Of course a skilled prose writer evokes all sorts of feelings in his audience; but readers of verse are more attuned to the sounds and the rhythms of the words they are consuming. And perhaps they are more open to the magical connections sparked off by metaphor and simile.

This is a brutal, bloody book about brutal people doing bloody things to each other. There were scenes that really troubled me, which is why I don't normally consume hardboiled crime or horror unless I think it's going to be worth the flashbacks. This book was, thanks to skilled writing oddly likeable characters (hats off Cutter and Blue, the bridge-playing gangster dog men).

Sharp Teeth is available from Amazon and probably your local indy will get one for you.

Don't Wear it on Your Head, Don't Stick it Down Your Pants by John Siddique

This is the second book I read in February, and it was supplied by Sarah with an instruction that I should share it. It is subtitled "Poems for young people". I did try some on Alec because he loves wordplay and rhymes -- particularly rhymes with a song -- but he wasn't terribly interested in John Siddique's verses. I think perhaps the rhyme structure was not rhythmical enough for his taste, the imagery is not concrete enough and he doesn't yet have enough of a handle on the abstract. (Do I sound like an terribly over-ambitious mama? The book is recommended for three and up. Alec might be only two, but I try very hard to avoid underestimating or patronising him and just occasionally these experiments do work out).

I was thinking back to the poetry I read as a child -- mostly anthologies. Off the top of my head I can't think of many books by a single poet -- A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson and the only contemporary collection I had was Gargling with Jelly by the Liverpuddlian poet Brian Patten. This last impressed the young me with its range: from the title you'd think it was a collection of shouty daft poems, but several of the verses are very dark, some are very sad and even the laugh-out-loud poems have a sinister undercurrent.

I went into Don't Wear... assuming that it would be daft. It's not -- not all, anyway -- (even the title poem is (I think, anyway) a warning about managing your public and private identities). There are, of course, poems featuring bums and trumps -- Siddique knows his audience. But there are poems dealing with identity (this theme comes up again and again), with bullying, with complex relationships, with immigration.

When I started reading I felt a bit squirmy -- I was a suspicious child, never quite sure about adults who tried to get down to our level. I suppose I was used to being spoken down to, I think. Some of the poems seemed a bit... simple, a bit odd. 'Apples' in particular sounds as if it had been written by a child -- but as I read on I understood that this is actually the point. Siddique is imitating and raiding children's thought processes and speech rhythms, the way they create poetry by almost by accident. I know how magical this can be: every day Alec reminds me to look again at the knee-high world, and his make-do phrases have worked their way into our household vocabulary (particular favourites are "bubby noses" for nipples and "mucmic" for music.). But as an adult who no longer has a child's unselfconsciousness, to use a childlike voice as your professional voice takes a special kind of fearlessness and as I read I came to value this more and more.

You can order Don't Wear... directly from Salt or you can get it on Amazon by clicking the picture above.

The Departure by Chris Emery

I ended up reading two poetry books for February (actually, I read some others as well: it appears that reading poetry is addictive). This was the one I said I was going to read and then my poetry mama Sarah Salway supplied me with a second contrasting book. 

I found it hard going -- "difficult to access" is the official term, I'm told. I talked over my fears with Sarah she said not to worry because sometimes you feel your way into a poem before you understand your way in.

At university I from time to time found myself in a roomful of people all competing to find something clever and intelligent-sounding to say about a poem that I really didn't understand. The Greek lyric poet Pindar is tremendously highly thought of by respectable ancient sources, but his verse is difficult to penetrate. I wept frustrated late night tears over the fragments we studied -- and you can imagine the mixture of relief and exasperation that swept through the seminar the next day when our tutor said (only half joking) that he suspected Pindar was on drugs and that we weren't to try to hard to understand.

This project isn't about being (or sounding) clever. It's not even about trying hard to understand. It's about the experience of reading poetry. I feel very vulnerable admitting here that I struggled to unlock this book (I feel just like the traveller in Walter de la Mare's poem The Listeners). But that was my experience of it.

I've read poetry (and short stories and all kinds of writing for that matter) before that just lies there like a dead fish and this was not my experience with The Departure. Images and tiny fragments of narrative flipped and flashed before my mind's eye -- and just occasionally I felt as if I might almost be swimming with the shoal.

The poems made me feel and put images in my head, but I never understood why I felt that way, or how these quicksilver pictures fitted into the narratives. There is something about the quality of the images ('Snails' silently drowned in "forest tears" and awkward 'Sunday Fathers' "wasting time by the swings") and of the atmospheres conjured up (for me the book as a whole has a feeling of carparks and gritty sodium lights, isn't that odd!) that tells me I should trust Chris Emery and that there are more treasures to be found. In a month or six I could revisit and find that I'm more experienced or wiser or older. Or perhaps layer upon layer of readings will help me to scribble in the details I need to make the poems complete (I once did a drawing class where the teacher told us to keep adding information to our pictures until they were complete: that phrase, to  my mind, was worth the course fee).

You can buy a copy on Amazon (click the picture) but it's more efficient and pleasing to buy it direct from the publisher, Salt.

Feminine Gospels by Carol Ann Duffy

One of my resolutions for 2013 was to read a poetry book a month and this is an account of January's reading. Sarah Salway has generously offered to prescribe a book whenever I need one, and for the first month she bravely lent me one from her own collection: Carol Ann Duffy's book Feminine Gospels.
Flicking back through our emails on the matter I see I asked her for '...something spare and clean but with a dark understorey (or understory), please?'

I made a Pinterest board to help  me get a handle on the visual side of things. I found it especially helpful in my reading of 'Beautiful' which recounts a series of reincarnations as iconic women.

Some of the poems deal with transformations in the Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' sense. Transformation and change is, I've always thought, a vital part of the womanly experience. Men seem to stay the same (they age, of course, and grow fat or thin or sicken and heal just like women) but women are at the mercy of hormonal tides as the month progresses, and our lives seem to have delineated stages like maiden-mother-crones where men have no obvious equivalent. In this collection 'The Woman who Shopped' turns into a shop; and the protagonist in 'The Diet' finds her regime more effective than expected. 'The Map-Woman' loses the thing that makes her extraordinary (and I think perhaps beautiful).

My two favourite poems in the collection were 'The Laughter of Stafford Girls' High'; and 'A Dreaming Week'.

'The Laughter...' is a short story poem showing the effect of infectious laughter on a stuffy grammar school. It is a marvellous tonic for individuals but a disaster for the institution. The poem reminded me rather of St Trinian's -- although I think these girls and teachers were less empowered to start with than Ronald Searle's girls.

'A Dreaming Week' is a week's worth of excuses (I imagined it was turning down dates or perhaps sex) all starting 'Not tonight, I'm dreaming...' It is a wonderful recommendation to make dreaming an active activity, as opposed to a passive while-you-are sleeping passtime. It's the sort of poem that makes me want to tell Sarah I've lost her book.

Next month's collection will be Chris Emery's 'The Departure'.