Antidote to Solitude?

 from Fair bodies of unseen prose,

Why do so few words directly contain the antidote to solitude?

One day, to be determined. Ecumenical.

In sound, in fragments. This raft, of 

inexplicable. In Orlando, withered. 

Holding shape in the hand. What kind of 

trees. The sentence, always. Whereabout. 

A preliminary phrase. Lodged. If but to 

bear witness. Translated, upon. Unwinds: 

a river of symphony. This torn ground 

will contain. It will not. This fiction of 

history. I wrote the first word.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End,(ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty(University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics(periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey(touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

author

Abdicted to Love

By Adrian Phillips

Imprint: Pen & Sword History

Pages: 240

ISBN: 9781399065412

The First Royal Media War examines the behind the scenes intrigue of a dynastic old guard of politicos trying to placate a love sick left-leaning new King of a crumbling British Empire. 

Dense in research and accomplished in portraying William Randolph Hearst, an overbearing Lord Beaverbrook, an evasive Prime Minister in Stanley Baldwin and a ‘swine’ of an Archbishop of Canterbury in Cosmo Gordon Lang, author Phillips is skilled at bringing to life the daily scuttlebutt and political posturing of press barons and politicians who circle each other like the dials of Big Ben while time ticks down on an unprecedented constitutional crisis and the King’s ultimate abdication.  

The popular but obdurate King is less a stoic people's champion more a tragic figure here. The idea of subordinating a future wife to a diminished rank compels the narrative forwards and the various attempts to parachute an unpopular American divorcee into the title of HRH bring to mind the current state of the British monarchy and weirdly echoes Prince Harry’s and Megan’s current travails and fragile media relationship. 

The relative innocence of 1930's media society is clearly overshadowed by the doomed fate of its lovers. The morganatic right of ancient aristocratic houses to accept lower born paramours into their circles is shuddered at in every level of 1930’s society and situation: in Welsh miners meetings, Canadian colonial outposts, through the halls and corridors of Westminster and the Cannes Riviera. The constitutional crisis facing twice divorced Wallis Simpson and the well-meaning but naive King reads as if it is happening now and the story is prescient in that is showcases a generational divide. The popular King is a success in the flesh at photo calls where he doesn’t lecture but is he is simply outmanoeuvred by self-serving industrialists, business magnates and stodgy empire loyalists who understand how to use the media to advantage. Knowing this dynastic terrain well and drawing on earlier writing Adrian Phillips has written an erudite, scholarly work which serves as an updated companion piece to earlier books on the subject. 

Quietly Confident

Quietly confident?
Waiting in the wings?

An introverted woman's guide to life positioning
Carol Stewart

Filament 

978-1913192693

Tackling and overcoming issues of quietness and shyness is the main premise of Quietly Visible and in its own way, the book pulls no punches in its focus of intent. The idea of being the quiet one at the party left in the shadows by the extroverts who can make small talk and shamelessly push themselves forwards may recall the 1980's movie Working Girl where the Melanie Griffith character has her quiet but clever ideas stolen by the louder and more assured character played by Sigourney Weaver. Talking about what exists beneath the surface in everyday life but may not be acted on is the enduring cautionary tone in this book and yet also serves as its gift of hope as well. After reading you might change your perception from 'watch out for the quiet ones' to 'watch and admire the quiet ones'. 

Using character studies of persons who have impacted change in their own life, the book draws on the author’s own life experience as a single, introverted mum in the corporate world, raising an extrovert son. Counselling and differentiated assessment tools offer positive paths to those seeking to foster change through self-help initiatives, through courses offered by the author. The journey up the corporate ladder in this book is more about coming to terms with the self first and pinpointing individual strengths and doing the research instead of speaking for the sake of it, or being false to one’s true nature. It seems prescient to talk about this cause in an era of Pandemics, Black Lives Matter, and the Me Too Movement, as the cause of glass ceiling busting ideologies and lateral thinking are currently in vogue. Perhaps the successes of extroverts who broker deals in corporate power moves are inbedded in the psyche of those who came of age in the 1980's and 1990's and watched from the shadows the grandiose gestures of others, like the Donald Trump grandstanding and deal brokering in bombastic style.

This book is for the quiet ones who work their way up through the ranks, listening and waiting for their chance to shine. It is also about empowerment and feeling that there is a valued place for all members; after all it takes different strokes for different folks to make the world go round. WE know that. You only get one chance to pitch a producer in Hollywood, they say, so this book is about ensuring that you sharpen your skills and look into the reasons behind why projects are green lighted. The devil is in the detail and they do say watch out for the quiet one in the room. This book is about lifting the self-esteem off the floor in a world of loud rock music and letting the acoustics of the unplugged instruments be heard.

A great deal of the book speaks of Carol Stewart's experience as a single woman of the BAME community who has survived and thrived in traditional male dominated workplace. As a leader in the BAME community it is also inspiring as Stewart uses real like examples of being a single mother who took on a leadership position in a company and also because a successful life coach and mentor to others.

The self-reflection exercises speak to the layman who is looking to identify the strengths and weaknesses in past working relationships and the onus is on that person whom is looking to overcome their fears but also doesn't want to change their personality either. This book really spoke to me and seems a practical guide to moving forwards without all the showy emotions that garner quick attention but are ultimately unfulfilling and meaningless. It is metaphysical in spirit and a meditative in tone.

The title appealed to me because the author spoke of the quiet ones in the room and I have long thought that the quiet ones are the ones to watch out for.

I will certainly be intrigued to know what Carol Stewart will write about next as this guide goes on to become a bible for the shy and quietly visible leaders in the new millennium.

Bit of Bovver

‘The graves (in Abney Park Cemetery) heave up from the ground like the teeth of a badly dentisted but black-hairedand winsome girl.’  Gothic scenes and a fearsome wit infect Tim Wells’  Skinwolf in London tale:Moon Stomp.

Bit of bovver

The debut novel begins innocently as protagonist Joe Boshover, prefers suspenders and red gingham to any 'bovver' and lives with his parents in Stoke Newington. Things rapidly build to a head when Lena Lovich infects Joe with a lover’s bite at a heaving punk show though and the young printer is soon howling through the cobblestoned streets from Hackney to Smithfield’s Market. Moon Stomp is not late night Hammer Horror thriller filler or schlocky 60’s/70’s era kitsch either. "Wotcher," is word on the street in the ‘never quite sure who is behind you’ world of young bovver boys on the town. The mindset is Thatcher-era early 1980’s; punks, rastas, skinheads pack in clusters around Farringdon clubs. Essex bands like Puncture and punks The Ruts keep the heaving sex and thrill seeking Joe and mates Dennis and Irish Philip, 'Flipper' sated in their nightly escapes from union jobs in the print trade. Story aside which drives ahead with the pace of a mosh pit, narrator Joe Boshover imparts the story with a likeable but take no prisoners working class narrative which by the second chapter has Joe inhabit the form of a menacing, snarling, hirsute, prowling beast of the Hackney Marshes. Teen Wolf this is not and any memory of cheeky Michael J. Fox be damned. Joe has ‘tude  in spades.  He sizes up competition,  is opinionated about the company ‘e keeps like a poet early doors at a gig. This works well and the humour sparkles. ‘He was keen on fanzines, which Joe liked about him, but also Adam and the Ants, which Joe didn’t.’  A narrator ready to trade zingers but also not looking for trouble either is a winning start and we soon side with Joe as his alter ego chomps through Abney Cemetery with howl at the moon, abandon. Although a slim volume, ironically not much bigger than a book of poetry, Moon Stomp is a page turner with some eyebrow and hair-raising scenes. The London poet's spare style works in the new leap into fiction. 

Beatific and a bit bent in Soho

With the recent passing of Glen Carmichael, here is a new review of the cult novel: STILL SEARCHING FOR THE BIG CITY BEATS co-written with his friend, Kevin Evans. Available now from Burning Eye Books. 

Carmichael, Evans and co.

The spectre of Jack Kerouac casts a knowing eye over Glenn Carmichael and Kevin Evans’ cult novel ‘STILL SEARCHING FOR THE BIG CITY BEATS’ which is now reissued from Burning Eye. Dean Moriarty is reincarnated in 1980’s London as dangerous driving ‘Gene Campbell’, a scene stealing, hard living poet with an eye for the ladies - and men. Echoing the role of Kerouac’s beatific, Sal Paradise and riding shotgun along Constitution Hill in their dented Vauxhall Victor is Gene's sidekick, Spike, straight man and word perfectionist searching for meaning in the repressed, Thatcher-era miasma they inhabit. It is straight man Spike's literate, self-deprecation and parody which invests our interest as the two friends careen around the Buckingham Palace roundabout trying to make their gig. The excitement builds through the tension and eyes of Spike as he wonders if he is really  'ready to.... swallow dive into the maelstrom' with this flamboyant self-seeking apostle, Gene, bent on taking them into the top tier of performance poetry. 

Cult novel reissued

The novel is fuelled by the friends' failures; a prior musical incarnation as 'The White Brothers' died with a spat on Denmark Street and the tension builds with one man’s desire to transfix the clubs over pubs of 80's seedy Soho London. The 'commissars of the quatrain' take the stage with a vengeance in The Red Lion to breath new life into a dying and abandoned art form. Seizing on the energy vacuum the young friends control the mic and soon 'words richocheted around the walls'. Suggestions that Gene is going to be the 'lifeguard' to a dying scene play on the mind of the more introspective Spike and his fixation on this messianic figure, is the power of the novel's first few chapters. (After speaking with Kevin Evans by phone I was informed that the opening of the novel won a literary prize, and it was the conviction of the two friends Evans and Carmichael to finish the novel as a consequence of this). As 'poetry' is The Big City Beats mutual calling, Spike’s concerns about the very strange nature of poetry assault the opening like beats on a drum in a jazz club: poetry as life tonic is a succession of metaphors expressed as frenzied mind skipping through a Rolodex. Poetry Is everything and nothing, a tired ‘gentlemen’s club’, a ‘wild beast’ a ‘queer fish’. After all, with Spike seeking a release from a stifling Civil Service day job, poetry is all consuming. But in the same space of days it is also ‘an atrophied corpse’ and the rewards are not money nor fame perhaps. Spike admits, ‘Poetry, who needs it?’  The answer and driving force comes from the relentless but unreliable form of charismatic ‘Gene’, who wills Spike to memorise their lines and beat back their audience into full submission to their ‘heavenly light’.  The style of writing moves from metaphor to simile and 'that queer fish' poetry never suffers from a lack of time in the spotlight. In the world of the Big City Beats, ‘poetry’ needs a kick up the arse as it is as ‘flaccid as a eunuch’s dick, as dull as dishwater’. Like an odd couple band eschewing definition you wonder how this will all tap out. ‘Your best is not good enough,’ Gene yells at the audience.

If you consider that 'STILL SEARCHING FOR THE BIG CITY BEATS' is a co-authored novel it may be appropriate that this ‘fictive book’,  based on real life, asks you to go deeper to try and figure out which poet wrote which part (Evans or Carmichael)? My gut feeling is that the opening, based on the observations of a sidekick, is written by Evans and the descriptions of the lack of organisation at a poetry reading show the point of view of a young passionate man whose anger resonates with his search for meaning. Have the action scenes been penned by Carmichael? How would the novel fare without its clever plotting? The poem ‘Distance’ at the end is a clear example of Carmichael's work and there are readings of it online.  It is hard to really know who wrote what but the book is able to easily blend an obviously mutually understood world and the characters crackle, fizz and pop. There’s is humour in the book, when show boating Gene waltzes into an East End caf and sits quietly ‘glum’ while both girlfriends, ‘Maria’ and ‘plain Claire’ hold court over the spoken word poetry scene.

"What is wrong?" asks Spike to his friend  who just stares ahead and mutters hollowly that ‘Carver, Raymond Carver has died.’ 

BIG CITY BEATS

This revelation floors Spike as he never knew his friend was a fan of Raymond Carver and the spare response and style may be a homage to the American master of 'less is more'. Spike never knows what Gene is going to do next and despite them seeming to be best friends it shows how little they know about each other outside of the desire to be the next big thing in spoken word poetry. There is a 'Withnail and I' quality about the book, though at times, the admitted ‘angry at the world tone’ is played on frequently.  What the book s great at is showing how little we do know about the people we spend time with. The action scenes are comic, perhaps penned by Carmichael (who has recently passed away) but again I don’t know. The scenes of drug taking  have maximum impact and show the debauched side of drug addiction, poverty, sex for sale, etc. The celebration of Spike’s birthday on February 14th is filled with pathos and terrible sadness as the boys veer  from name checked East End watering holes, like The Blind Beggar, to Murphy’s which is their secret name for the White Hart, all culminating in a quite debauched downward spiral as things literally go south after a disastrous reading at the posh Chelsea Arts and Crafts Fair. 

Danny Boyle, would you option this?

There is lots of great funny writing about working class observations of ‘Taffs’. The figure of Rhys a kind of stoned bully from hell who persecutes Spike for maximum comic effect is particularly effective as we want Spike to stand up for himself, which he never does.  Rhys, described as ‘the blond pale shit-bag, a neurosis and crisis written scumbag’ is over the top so we delight in the mad caper of his sadistic advances. The sadness of the book permeates through but the book has a page turning quality, and would make a decent film as the set pieces, all based  a round London landmarks like Pall Mall, Soho, The Red Lion Pub, Soho peep shows, The Blind Beggar, evoke a certain era of East End versus West End rent boys, scenesters, poets and lowlife's of 1980’s London. 

I see this book as a film. The scene driving around Buckingham Palace is a page right out of classic cinema  and the characters are rip snortingly real, as if the writer had put it down here to get the characters right when the book is filmed. This book has a very dark soul but is honest in its account of real life events which may have occurred at The Hard Edge Club from 1989 till 1995 and it features award winning writing (the first chapter won the East Side Writers award in 1998) and the comedy is there. If there were a sequel I would call it something like Spiked: Withnail’s uncle pops his clogs in Soho. 

After speaking with Kevin Evans by phone recently and in light of the recent death of his old friend Glenn Carmichael, I asked Kevin whom he would like to direct the film of this book. One particular person was in my mind but I asked Kevin anyway.  "Danny Boyle or someone like that, would do a great job." Are you a director looking for a book set in 1980's London. This one has it all, and deserves its beat, cult status. 

Shakespeare's Ripper: Templar Knights, East End Frights

'You are the first,' a shadowy brother whispers to a terrified actress before grasping his large hands around her neck and throttling her before dissecting the young girls body to mimic the crimes of Jack the Ripper. 

So begins Naomi Asher Wallace's novel blending the unsolved mystery of the East End's most diabolic denizen Jack the Ripper with a modern Shakespearean tale of shadowy Masonic lore. While the novel is admittedly inspired by Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and borrows hypothesis from the Johnny Depp film, From Hell, and offers its own Shakespearean revelations, the delight of this mystery lies in the understated charm of the novel's academic protagonist, brainy but unlucky in love Dr Arden James and her American Theatre student protegé Charlie Leder

Opening up Shakespearean London like an insider tour guide, the novel's stagey protagonists sleuth in London's lower caverns of the Thames and Globe theatre.  The passionate students continue their cat and mouse love interest in an annex of the London School of Economics where, Dr James confesses a little possessívely that Leder is her sole pupil; as bars and bridges are scoured, London is revealed the way a well meaning but mysterious Good Samaritan may take an American student under their wing.

Clearly mortified and distancing herself from loud and brash American student, Mary Jo, Dr James takes her magnifying glass and wide eyed student and sets to track down her unpublished academic essay which as gone missing from the archives of Shakespeare's Globe. The gift in Asher's writing is that you feel Dr Arden's sense of outrage and want the essay back for her.

The side characters of Mary Jo and the undercover clutzy cop Peter feel like real life walk ons from musicals of a bygone era, with undercover lover Peter speaking in a Dick Van Dyke/Sam Wellerian mockney (Blast!) and Mary Jo speaking in a voice which would make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. The comedy works.

At one point you may be forgiven for hoping Mary Jo is the next victim of the accursed 'brothers'. However the understated and humble tone of Dr Arden and her naive but insightful sidekick charts the story's course and we are coaxed into James and Leder's love story and hidden back alleyways around the Thames as they hunt for that missing thesis.

Although at times heavy in plot which suggests the power of the Templar Knights as Masonic puppet masters from the crusades and Elizabethan era through to now, Shakespeare's Ripper is full of intrigue about potential divisions within the secret society which adds to a palpable narrative: is an extremist religious zealot stalking the back streets casting sinister designs and perverting the cause of sacred Masonic secrets?

Careful not to offend (excusing any possibility of Masonic involvement in the Jack the Ripper murder), the dense plot is given vibrancy and wit by the solidarity of the two relentless students while Mary Jo offers stand alone comic relief and steals many a scene, a la Bronson Pinchot in Beverly Hills Cop.

If people have quibbles about Dan Brown taking poetic license with the facts, it hasn't affected his sales and Shakespeare's Ripper is an entertaining ride through the centuries, a winner featuring enduring wit and a sequel would not be out of place and surely find its own slot in a crowded thriller marketplace.

Love in Aging Minds (from a work in progress)

I did not mention this yet but things happened very quickly in England and my great aunt died of old age. As a family of habit my great aunt never married and was living in an old farmhouse with her cats; she entertained, with a kind of reluctant acceptance, the villagers who came round to call on her. She was my favourite aunt and when we were little she took us down to the orchard where the chickens were and fed them scraps. We would marvel at the eggs we would bring back, amazed that every Sunday one chicken was bound for the pot. The male chickens were the ones that went first  – and as young as we were we could still see that my aunt did it with a gruff sense of purpose; she wasn’t mean, just dogged and practical and on an Edwardian farm, a wartime lady she surely was.

“Never saw much use for men,” she said once when I quizzed her in her back garden and I wondered how much was directed towards me, a wistful eighteen year-old who lodged with her after high school and worked for a next door cousin's marquee business. Many times she was awoken from her slumber on the second floor of that old farm house by the anxious voice of my high school girlfriend whom I'd left back home who had no clue a school night in Nova Scotia was the witching hour in ol Blighty. 

"Silly girl!" My aunty chided but I could tell there was a slight tinge of regret as if she had loved a man as a teenager. She never spoke of this but I could feel it during hot summers when skyward glances during weeding sessions followed war planes in air shows from nearby Brize Norton airport. "Oh what a carry on." She would say gruffly. "Next I suppose it'll be the colonel driving past in his mustard tin car, following the hunt," she stated as if she didn't really want to go and watch the hounds and the men come through on horseback. I found her a bit of an enigma as if to say that she put many things down, but had no real mean bone in her body. Once I asked her what she thought of Warren Beatty whom was one of the best looking men in Hollywood in his day. “Oh I suppose he’d be all right to sit on a park bench with,” she said.

She was tallish and had swollen legs and big dark severe spectacles that she wore very imposingly but she squeaked with delight at the cats took in strays and she loved nature. I always marveled at her sense of purpose, pushing through the old Edwardian farm house with her cane and fielding once a week phone calls from her sister, Saturdays in the stairwell.  The reason I was with her had been set-up a year before by my parents. My mother wanted me to get some work experience in the UK after high school and my aunt was my mother's, aunt and godmother. Arrangements were made for me to work the for my cousin's marquee business. This all done after she came to Nova Scotia to visit us when she was seventy three – Seventy Three! She had a cake on the plane, was waited on by all the ladies 'in all their finery', the stewardesses.

When I came back to England from Toronto, in 2003, I went to her 90^th birthday party at her old farmhouse. It was a grand affair with some local dignitaries and her favourite, a jockey. My aunt asked me if I was still very vain and had I found a woman who wouldn’t make a fool of me?  She sat in a large marquee at one of the main tables table and held court for as long as she could; all of the elderly relatives  passed around photo albums and told me stories of my grandmother, Judith and my aunty as young ladies during the second world war, letting down their hair at dances, in nearby Carterton, and Eynsham, and Witney. In 2003, even though I had lived most of my life in Canada, we were still connected; no matter my lack of success in any proven field other than being a painful word obsessive, we had formed a bond after high school. As I mentioned I had lived with her for a year in her old crumbling farmhouse, working at a factory and as a barman and labourer in rural Oxfordshire before I went back to Nova Scotia and University.

When she died, now a very old lady who had recently celebrated her ninety-fifth birthday party, sitting with blinking eyes on her couch, sitting for pictures with all and sundry out to see her, she was becoming house bound. She was struggling a great deal. Her sister (my grandmother) had recently died and she missed her weekly phone calls from her sister to see how things were. Then as the relatives trickled to a halt and she became more resigned to the infrequent visits, she asked me if my wife, “the little one”, was taking up all my time; when the Polish “ladies in waiting” came round to tidy up she was abrupt with them and if they did get too close to things, (meaning trying to dust or tactfully declutter), my aunt gave them their marching orders, sharpish. She still had the sharp tongue we loved about her but her fire had died. I received calls and letters from “her carer” and her niece saying that they didn’t think I should come out and see her in the ways that she had fallen into around Christmas, forgetting things, falling silent, drinking a little; when she went into the nursing home I knew that she was ready that way but I did not listen to any warning not to go.  I went to say my goodbyes in the Windrush Hospital in Witney; she was propped up in bed, in her gown, sedated, her eyes were closed, slightly reddish, her teeth were out and she was snoring away but when we huddled round and started to talk she stopped snoring and I know that she was listening. Of course her life had been hard but also fair and eventful as well. 

She was a no-nonsense type of person and her sister had been the beauty and my aunt had been the one who had never married and had cared for her parents instead, both of them who had lived well into their eighties, and nineties, too.   

I went to her funeral in the country and read a poem that I had written for her in the country church with all there to listen. It was emotional and I followed the funeral procession out into the grave site and watched the coffin get loaded down into the ground. She was my great friend, the befriender of her nieces' Canadian kids and then offering advice to an eighteen-year-old teenager and I did not want to deny her, her day. I loved her and I would always love her, sitting as she did with her blankets across her, crossword on her lap. She said once that she read The Insolent Boy and “couldn’t make head nor tail of it” but after a while, “the penny dropped.” I had started writing at her farm when I was seventeen, so in a way a filament of that desire to try and make a go of it was kindled in me then; even her sister, my grandmother -  a great personality and talker, wit and gossip and beauty as well had never been published as a writer.

And so after her passing I am resigned to the fact that that idyl is simply that a memory now and I continue to work at whatever jobs I can and make myself a ghoul, haunting my house till late hours creeping from the marriage bed into the study where I pound on the keys till the late hours. My wife say, “come to bed” but I do not she lays there with here hands in her hair pulling at hairs, in her pajamas, waiting for me to come in quietly. I klutz in and cave in eventually, in the darkness of the night whispering to her; “Do you love me? Do you love me? Will you love me forever and so on.”

The replies  – always the same: “Yes, Papi.” Till it all gets louder and more irritated; a grown woman, under siege.

The jobs I work I throw myself all over the city into different situations, predicaments. The other day I was working in a market research job in the East end of London, Enfield, which is up in North East London but because the trains were down I had to take a replacement bus to the main terminus in Finsbury Park, to get a connector service. The East End is still rough; living in Leytonstone I know why David Beckham runs so hard on the pitch when he plays football ­– he never wants to come back here again. Two stories come to mind; perhaps both caused by  a problem with the transport system. In the first case the replacement bus was stuck in traffic on a Saturday and cramped in the back back, sitting with yobs, pensioners, we were suddenly all told to 'get off the bus' because the quietish but sinister young man with the hood had a dog and the dog had shit right in the middle of the bus without anyone seeing it happen. Someone said “its been sick!” the dog has been sick but  it was shit, everyone could tell by the smell of it and the way it was in three separate pieces. The bus driver said everyone off and the crowds out in Walthamstow were fierce, milling around Black Horse Road and trying to figure out whether to take train bus or tube and wondering at the same time where the boy with the dog was, thinking he must be having a chuckle now ducking down a back alleyway? Later on, I was on a door-to-door market research job, knocking on doors and some old, ancient, man invited me into this place said "sit down" he’d be "happy to answer all the questions I had for him."

“What is this all about then?”

 “It's for the council,” I reassured him as I looked into his living room; all the furniture was covered with plastic, little porcelain figurines, crystal, like a strange abandoned trailer. The first clue was the long bony fingers on my collar and a puppetish smile. A bit creepy. Problem it stunk in his place like there hadn’t been anyone in there for days; the place was covered in a thin film of dust and inactivity, like it was preserved in time, on the day the President Kennedy was inaugurated or something; the elderly man was dressed in his night shirt, stooped, spidery thin, was ninety four and deaf as a post, not to mention smiling like a little George Burns, Jewish, gay as the hills. He said, after we had conducted the interview about the council, “I’m rearry attracted to you.” I said, “What?” and he put his hand on me and shuddered and mustered with all his strength “I quite fancy you…” and he was ninety four years old, cuteish, (this must have been his charm as a young man, as he said that he was a tailor) and gave me a hug, he said “AR quite fancy you.” and I said “OK Thank you God bless” as if I was honoured in a weird way to be with the chief of a nearly extinct time and place but I was in such a state I left in a hurry without my bag and all he said, “I can be very discreet ­– come any time you like.”

 I looked into the room where I am certain he entertained favourite nephews and sisters who have married and moved on with having good jobs, families and the like but it was so dark and it was so stale the place, like he covered it in plastic so when people left he wouldn’t have to clean it. There are things you don’t want to see, things about your aged aunts and uncles and you don’t want them to see them in you either. Does this old gay man, feel this way as well? Was he a teachers pet as a child or a favourite nephew who had to keep mum about his own gay inclinations?

Of course I was in the street, feeling strangely naked and vulnerable like when you have forgotten something you can’t quite remember (a friend from one of those jobs would just as easily say you would lose your nose if it wasn’t attached to your face!) so I went back to get the bag he left in the place I could not get in and he would not answer, which made me think that old people are smarter than they let on. I tried the number he had provided for back checking but he when I tried to call it gave a wrong number. And my interview bag was still in there, Crafty old codger.

That Sardonic Eye

Humbert Summer

A.K. Blakemore

Eyewear Publishing 2015

Humbert Summer, winner of the 2014 Melita Hume Poetry Prize, is a memorable début from a promising young poet. Already feted by The Times as 'one to watch' and an Oxford English graduate at 23, this book perhaps shows what A.K. Blakemore was up to between train and secondary school. Some of these poems were composed whilst many were cramming for their GCSE’s though Blakemore's interplay of words, convent girl crushes, Japanese fetishes and inevitable and depressive ‘sinking on the stairs’ are relayed with quiet emotion. At their best the poems show an older voice with a bite of killing honesty; Blakemore may be a female counterpoint to that old ‘male spider in a trenchcoat’, that ultimate 1960's era hipster, Leonard Cohen whose, poem in Energy of Slaves:

"I didn't know until you walked away you had a perfect ass.

 Forgive me for not falling in love with your face or your conversation."

echoes Blakemore’s sardonic eye:

…

This is one for the

Girl who has lain a short way

Off

While his body recoils

Like a cinder

And felt part of nothing

…

You might be forgiven for thinking of the goth girl smoking the cigarette with the cutting remarks, catching you trying to look cool, too. At first, you worry that the sarcasm might be too strong, the façade too easy to hide behind. This is echoed in the very funny HATE

‘She believes the earth laughs through flowers and other asinine things…’

‘Ross and Rachel’ get the poet’s lens trained on them as well.

In ROSS AND RACHEL AS INVERTEBRATES, the annoyingly ‘in love’ couple are watched by two twenty-something singletons, perhaps on a train in from the south downs?

However we feel a sense that the skin is not as thick as it might pretend to be, that Rachel has bits of that comfort and perhaps experience about her that the others may also long for? And this hidden ongoing tension is also what makes you wonder what Blakemore will come up with next?

There are memorable moments here. 

In YOU ENVIED THE STARS THEIR HEIGHT

‘The day folded like a cabbage

while closing its wings on a windowsill.’

As a poet, more than capable of talking head lice (in Lower school?), Ganymede, Greek Temples and calling time on weak, selfish men, you might recall those college and/or school days and perhaps ‘envy’ the girl her time.

Dad's jokes are still 'Dad' jokes (in the 1850's?)

The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Dad's jokes are still 'dad' jokes.



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Down and out with Russians in Paris (and London..)

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Working in a busy hotel kitchen as a busboy/dishwasher 'plonguer'in 1930's Paris is hard work as the detailed accounts of the stress, heat and pandemonium in the Paris hotel kitchens attest; young Eric Blair describes the turbulence of the political climate in 1930's Paris with a strange youthful stoicism, especially the exiled world of down at the heels but still proud Russian Émigrés. Switching countries, the London tramp scenes don't quite have the same flair as the scenes amongst the working waiters and plongeurs in Paris and the matter of fact style will do little portray tramps as people with their own hard luck stories however this grim style is also very effective and takes you deep into the hard boiled luckless world of the petty thieves 'screevers' and 'glimmers' of London. The descriptions of tramping in and around the East End offer telling insights into the interior worlds of faceless men when one admits 'there is never anywhere to sit down for any length of time'. Before he was Orwell, Blair was a young man, trying to make it pay. The two epochs come to life in all of their dingy and grimy resolve to press on through hard times.



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