Tag: Poetry

The Ring of the Nibelung – Richard Wagner

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Back in March 2021 I reviewed a book about the trials and tribulations of staging the magnificent four opera series of the Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner, see here. Soon after that I purchased this magnificent cloth bound volume from The Folio Society, which is the full libretto in parallel text with Wagner’s original German alongside the superb translation by Stewart Spencer. This was first published by Thames and Hudson back in 1993 as ‘Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung; A Companion’, but the Folio version, published in 2020, is much larger at 289 × 205 × 41 mm, and has added illustrations by John Vernon Lord. As can be imagined as the four operas in the 1991 Barenboim recording I have play for a grand total of 15 hours and 5 minutes the libretto runs for well over three hundred pages with an extra seventy pages of authoritative essays on the development of the opera cycle at the beginning along with extensive notes at the end making a total of over four hundred pages of text with seventeen unnumbered leaves of plates. All in all a comprehensive guide to this greatest of Wagner’s operatic works. It should be pointed out that whilst the words sung are all in both languages the stage directions are only in English, this didn’t bother me but if you were looking for a ‘full’ parallel text then bear in mind that these parts are missing.

Wagner is unusual in writing his own libretto, it is much more common to either set an existing work or work with a librettist. For the most part he combined Norse with Old German mythologies in developing his story, these are closely related anyway with much the same characters only with different names, Odin becomes Wotan and Thor becomes Donner for example, but there are also echoes of the ancient Greek especially Homer’s Iliad. Occasionally he merges two characters from different origins into one such as Freia (this is how Wagner spells her name, more usually Freya or Freyja) a Norse goddess of fertility and in this version also the one who looks after the golden apples that confer everlasting life to the gods; she is also referred to as Holde, a similar but different character from German folk tales. Wagner also adds to the mythology with his own concepts such as carving important contracts in runes on Wotan’s staff, the staff exists in the mythologies but not the binding contracts. This melding of the various myths and new ideas make the reading of the libretto so fascinating, especially if you have a reasonable knowledge of the original mythologies, and whilst I have picked up some of this whilst listening to the operas it was only when reading the text at my own pace rather than moving rapidly on as you do in a performance that I more deeply appreciated the complex weaving of stories that Wagner achieved. Certainly the librettos can be read as a long poem without any deeper knowledge of the operas but I found myself adding the music in my mind as I read the words especially in parts I knew well.

The book is really lovely to read, as can be seen above in this section of the third opera ‘Siegfried’ shown with an engraving of the sword Northung being repaired by Siegfried. The sword had belonged to his father Siegmund but was shattered by Wotan during Siegmund’s fight with Hunding in the previous opera ‘Die Walkure’ (The Valkyrie) as Wotan’s wife, Fricka, had demanded that he die as punishment for his incestuous relationship with his sister Sieglinde which had left her pregnant with Siegfried. The illustrations deliberately do not include any of the characters but are rather of important objects within the opera cycle, which I think is an interesting choice as John Vernon Lord explains in his note on the illustrations:

I thought that the words and music together would be best for conveying the ‘appearance’ of the various characters. At the outset, I felt that the inclusion of people would detract from the symbolic nature of what I wanted to express.

It is later in this opera, in fact in the final scene, that we get one of the few ‘humorous’ lines although this was not intended as such by Wagner but I always smile when we reach the ‘This is not a man’ line when Siegfried discovers and wakes the Valkyrie Brunnhilde from where she has been left in a magical trance by Wotan.

It should be realised that Siegfried has never seen a woman before, being brought up by Mime in a secluded location away from all others, but even so ‘Das ist kein Mann!’ is not Wagner’s finest hour.

I have really enjoyed having a deeper dive into the text of the operas and will have a much greater understanding the next time I listen to or watch them, being able to look back over previous sections to refresh my memory has proved to be well worth the cost of purchasing the book especially as it is such a fine edition.

Ariel – André Maurois

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30th July 1935 was a very important date in the history of publishing, as that is when the first ten Penguin books made their appearance. Ninety years later these books in their first editions are somewhat fragile and definitely difficult to find, especially the crime titles. I do have all ten and seven of them still have their elusive dust wrappers as can be seen below, the wrappers have the 6d (six pence) price on the front cover. For August I’m going to be reading the first four, one a week, and the plan is to read five of the remaining six during the rest of the year, one has already been a subject of a blog so this will be linked to when its turn comes, I will probably re-read this one as well just to say I’ve read the set in a run. As the books are so delicate, and valuable, this is not something I have done before but it only seems appropriate as a means to celebrate Penguin’s 90th birthday. The books are colour coded with blue indicating biography, orange fiction and green crime, other colours would be introduced as time goes on. This was a concept started by Albatross Press in Germany, see my blog on those books for more details and the similarities between them and Penguin.

Before talking about ‘Ariel’ the book there is one other thing that needs to be mentioned regarding these first ten books and that is an error on the back of the very first versions of all of them. Book two, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, is missing its first word in the list of titles on the rear. This was noticed quite quickly but not in time to prevent the first batch of titles going out with this incorrect list. Subsequent batches of books from the first editions of all ten books were corrected and the full title appears, however another error happened with ‘Ariel’and this is clear on the front cover at the top of this log entry. The authors first name is André not Andre and this led to a third cover being produced for the remainder of the first edition run of this title, not a great start to a new publishing enterprise. The first edition is therefore available in three variants:

  • Farewell to Arms on the rear and Andre on the front
  • A Farewell to Arms on the rear and Andre on the front
  • A Farewell to Arms on the rear and André on the front

All three versions are shown below, the first book being the rear of the one used at the top of the page with the missing accent, the second book is also missing the accent on the front cover.

Another thing to add, as it is clearer at the base of the rear covers above, is that Penguin Books when it began was simply a paperback imprint of the publisher John Lane The Bodley Head which explains why all the books say THE BODLEY HEAD on their front covers. This would be the case for over a year with Penguin Books finally becoming a separate entity and references to The Bodley Head no longer appearing from the batch of books numbered 81 to 90 published in March 1937.

When reading ‘Ariel’ it becomes clear that its subtitle ‘A Shelley Romance’ is particularly appropriate, as whilst it reads as a biography of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley it is at least partially a novel with a lot of clearly invented dialogue with no documentary evidence behind it, rather than what we would regard as a properly researched scholarly work today. That said the general thrust of the book and the sequence of events is accurate and it is impossible to examine the extent of Maurois’ actual research due to the lack of notes, citations or even an index in the book. Maurois is clearly more interested in getting a feel for his subject and portraying him in a way that gives an impression of what it would have been like to know him rather than providing a definitive biography, but it is very readable and still in print, both in this translation by Ella D’Arcy and other more modern versions.

We follow Shelley from his time being badly bullied at Eton, going on to Oxford where he lasted just a few months before being expelled from the university along with his friend and fellow student Thomas Jefferson Hogg over the authorship of a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ which he had mailed to the bishops in the area and the heads of all the Colleges. Whilst at Oxford he had met Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen year old school friend of his sisters whom shortly after his nineteenth birthday he eloped to Edinburgh with. This led to their considerable financial difficulties as both sets of parents were outraged and stopped their allowances. Shelley had two children with Harriet, the second born after he had run away to France with the sixteen year old daughter of William Godwin and her sister whilst believing Harriet had begun an affair. Mary of course became famous as the author of Frankenstein which was published and went on to write several other novels after Shelley’s death but Maurois completely ignores this side of her portraying her as a dedicated wife, they married just days after after Harriet’s suicide, but also covering domestic arguments mainly between her and whichever other people (usually other women) were living with them at the time. The lack of acknowledgement of Mary’s literary talents is possibly the greatest failure of this biography. During the coverage of Shelley’s extended time in Italy, until his death there at just twenty nine, the quality of the biography improves markedly with letters included and far more evidence provided for what Maurois states happened.

Sadly Shelley never enjoyed the fruits of his poetic labours, as at his death he was still barely read and his life too coloured by his socialist and atheist reputation to make him acceptable reading for anyone likely to see his works in print, which is ironic bearing in mind his status as one of the great Romantic Poets nowadays. By all means read this book by Maurois as a general overview of the life of Shelley, but if you are really interested in the poet I have to recommend ‘Shelley: The Pursuit’ by Richard Holmes, first published in 1974 but still the definitive work.

Hairan – Daoid Sarhandi-Williams, Ali Sobati and others (Ed)

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This book was inspired by the killing of Mahsa Amini by the Morality Police in Iran apparently for not having her hair properly covered by her hijab. This murder in 2022 added further outrage to a movement that was already existing in the country known as Woman Life Freedom which opposes the oppression of women not only in Iran but neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan. I have featured works both from and about Iran several times in the past and when I spotted this book in a shop last month I was inevitably drawn to it, I especially like the title combining the provocative word hair, which for women must at all times be hidden in public, with the name of the country.

The book is much more than simply a collection of poems, most of which were especially written for this collection, as there is also a very informative introduction which covers the history of female poets in Iran going back to the days of the Persian empire. This introduction also includes brief remarks about several of the poems in the collection, setting them in context. There are also thirteen black and white photographs of Iranian women from the back showing their hair, with clearly no identifying information in order to protect them from the regime and several political posters supporting the Woman Life Freedom movement. One thing the editors were surprised by was the refusal by any of the poets included to use a pseudonym or be credited anonymously especially bearing in mind the topics covered.

The poems are powerful in their imagery and in sorrow and outrage at the treatment of women and sometimes men who support them. If a poem needs more explanation for those of us that don’t live in Iran and therefore haven’t been exposed to names, places or events referred to there are useful notes after the poem. Several poems refer to Ferdosi’s epic Shahnameh, which I briefly covered in 2018 as the story is a classic in Persian culture and familiar to most Iranians. Whilst reading I was noting any poems that I thought I could pick out in this review as I particularly enjoyed them and ended up with twelve of the seventy six which is clearly too many to list but emphasises how strong this collection is. However I particularly want to mention “This Place” written by Atefeh Chararmahalian during her 71 days incarcerated in the infamous Evin prison in Tehran along with “You’d Said” by Fanous Bahadorvand and “freedominance” by Leila Sadeghi which are both explicit tributes to Mahsa Amini as is the poem I have chosen to represent all the others:

The three young women included in the dedication are Mahsa Amini (aged 22 when killed in police custody), Nika Shakarami (aged just 16 when abducted by the security forces and killed sometime during the next ten days, who know what happened to her during that time) and Hananeh Kia (aged 23 when shot by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard near a protest whilst walking back from the dentist, she was due to get married just two weeks later). Nika’s body was never returned to her family and she was instead secretly buried by the security forces forty kilometres away presumably to avoid her funeral becoming a flash point for more protests.

The book is published by Scotland Street Press, who I must admit I hadn’t heard of before purchasing this collection, but looking at their online catalogue they seem to have quite a few titles that are very interesting, so I don’t think this will be the last book of theirs to make it to my library. I’ll finish with a couple of the images of Iranian women’s hair from the book including one very bravely out in the street without a hijab.

The Poems of Robert Burns

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There is one name that comes to mind immediately when you think of New Years Eve and that is Robert Burns due to the international fame of Auld Lang Syne (Old Long Since) a song about a couple of friends enjoying a drink and reminiscing about things they have done in the past. But there is a lot more to Burns than a song that most people know the first verse and chorus to, even if they don’t know any more or what it means and this edition of The Penguin Poets from 1946 is a great introduction. The collection consists of forty three poems and fifty six songs and helpfully for those of us that struggle with the Scots language and dialect there is a single page glossary of common words and translations of lots of others alongside the lines where they occur.

I first came across Burns at school where he was introduced as one of the pioneers of the romantic movement in poetry although we didn’t do much more than the really famous ones including, ‘To a Mouse’, ‘To a Haggis’, ‘A Red, Red Rose’ and the comedic rage expressed in ‘To a Louse’ where Burns gets so annoyed when he sees a louse on a lady’s bonnet in church, all of which are of course in this collection. I really fell in love with the musicality of Burns’ verse however when I was lucky enough to be at The Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Edinburgh for Burns Night and to hear the poems recited with the correct accent made for a wonderful evening which of course included ‘To a Haggis’ and the appropriate, for the venue, ‘Scotch Drink’, the first verse of which (after the initial quote from Solomon’s Proverbs) goes as follows…

Let other Poets raise a fracas
‘Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ drucken Bacchus,
An’ crabbit names an’ stories wrack us,
An’ grate our lug:
I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak us,
In glass or jug.

Scotch bear is barley and Burns is of course talking about whisky, the full twenty one verses of the poem can be read here, let no-one say that Burns wasn’t keen to celebrate his national drink. When I first started to read this book for this blog I did have some problems with the unfamiliar Scots dialect but as I progressed through the works I gradually found it easier to understand and found I needed to refer back to the glossary less and less. Interestingly when I have heard Burns recited I have often had far fewer issues with understanding, I guess this is similar to the way I find reading Middle English easier if I read it aloud and it then seems to make more sense than just reading silently.

So let’s finish where we started with Auld Lang Syne. This is the original version from 1788, in 1795 he changed the first line of the chorus to ‘For auld lang syne, my dear’

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?

(Chorus)
For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

We twa hae run about the braes
And pu’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot
Sin auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn,
Frae mornin’ sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right guid willy waught,
For auld lang syne.

Happy new year

The Art of Floating – Melanie Marttila

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Melanie Marttila lives in Sudbury in Ontario, Canada north of Lake Huron and several of the poems in this collection are clearly inspired by her environment especially in the final section ‘Fire and Ice’. As someone who lived in Wisconsin, northern USA, for a while I appreciate the descriptions of the cold winters in this section especially the poem ‘Ice Storm’ the extreme effects of which has to be seen to be believed and her description of “temperature drops and for two days, the world is quicksilver bright in the sun”. My first exposure to rural Wisconsin was during an ice storm and I’ve never forgotten the experience, the beauty and yet the awe inspiring danger of trees whose individual branches are encased in brilliant ice making them far heavier than the tree would normally support. I loved being taken back to that winter of 1985/6 but this section also has poems that reflect the equally dramatic changes autumn brings such as the one below.

I now live back in England and from my window a wooded hillside does its best to emulate the sudden turns of seasons from Canada and Northern USA, especially round the Great Lakes or even Sweden where I also lived for a while. This collection brings back memories.

Yet to dwell on the poems recalling my familiar past is to leave out a lot of the other side of Marttila, this her first collection of poetry, published April 2024, is dedicated to her father who died in 2011 and the sense of loss comes through in many of the works. There are also unexpected poems where we suddenly delve into cosmology, apparently her partners subject, but we also explore aspects of her mental health, Marttila is autistic but is not willing to be brought down by her diagnosis, so along with the deeper poems there are highlights of beauty. Reading the conclusion of the blurb on the back cover “The Art of Floating is dedicated to the poet’s father who taught her how to surrender to and survive the rough waters of mental illness.” you might expect a depressing read but the collection is far from it. But I am always drawn back to her lovely depictions of the Canadian countryside especially in its most extreme, but even then I’m regularly surprised by the imagery she chooses such as the opening lines of ‘Compensation’

small blue spruce and
tender birch
are the foundation
upon which this
green world is built.
scantily clad tamarack,
waif like larch
towering jack-pine
branches twisted by
wind, reaching for
sun, like the arms of Lakshmi
or Saraswati

Lakshmi and Saraswati are Hindu goddesses, Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge whilst Lakshmi represents wealth, beauty and fertility. It seems odd to invoke their names in a world that is so clearly Canadian as the Tamarack is a species of larch native to the wilds of that country, Both of the goddesses however have four arms often depicted holding items in multiple directions so their appearance represents the spreading branches.

The Art of Floating is published by Latitude 46 Publishing, a company founded in 2015 that specialises in authors connected to northern Ontario, which you might think is overly restrictive but a glimpse of their catalogue shows the rich variety of works represented and there are so many more books I would love to explore.

When You are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales – W B Yeats

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This collection of Yeats’ early works is split roughly 50/50 between his poems and other works including the play ‘The Land of Hearts Desire’ and selections from ‘Irish Folk Tales’, ‘The Celtic Twilight’, John Sherman and Dhota’ and ‘Stories of Red Hanrahan’. There are eighty eight poems split into four categories by subject including the work that gives this collection its title, ‘When You are Old’.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Yeats would come to look back on his early works with distaste as he regarded his more mature works as far superior and in the original preface of this collection he made clear that he thought the works that were cut were not worth retaining.

The first poem mentioned above ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’, more commonly titled ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ is the longest poem included in the collection and takes up 35 of the 158 pages dedicated to poetry. I love the rhythm of this poem and despite its length it is actually quite an easy read and takes the form of a conversation between the legendary hero Usheen/Oisin and Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, although it is somewhat one sided with Saint Patrick barely managing to get a word in. It tells the story of Oisin’s journey into the land of Faerie and his wanderings with the fairy princess Niamh there for the last three hundred years. A small extract from the first section of the poem will give some idea of the work.

But now the moon like a white rose shone
In the pale west, and the sun’s rim sank,
And clouds arrayed their rank on rank
About his fading crimson ball:
The floor of Emen’s hosting hall
Was not more level than the sea,
As full of loving phantasy,
And with low murmurs we rode on,
Where many a trumpet-twisted shell
That in immortal silence sleeps
Dreaming of her own melting hues,
Her golds, her ambers, and her blues,
Pierced with soft light the shallowing deeps.
But now a wandering land breeze came
And a far sound of feathery quires;
It seemed to blow from the dying flame,
They seemed to sing in the smouldering fires.

One thing I didn’t realise until I read this collection and recognised the words, is that one of my favourite tracks by Irish band The Chieftains uses one of Yeats’ poems for the lyrics, beautifully read by Brenda Fricker, ‘Never give all the heart‘.

Leaving the poetry behind and delving into the second half of the book took me to totally unfamiliar territory as I had only read Yeats’ poetic works before. The one play included here has us yet again dealing with a character from the land of Faerie, this time the fairy is tempting a newly married woman to join her and leave the mortal realm. Following that is a very short and disappointing because of that, extract from the 1891 ‘Irish Fairy Tales’ which seems to just consist of an introduction and the enjoyable ‘Appendix: Classification of Irish Fairies’ this starts off with the largely friendly Sociable Fairies and then goes deeper into the mainly disagreeable Solitary Fairies. The brevity of this section makes me want to hunt out the complete book and read the actual folk tales told within it.

The next extract from a book, this time ‘The Celtic Twilight’ is at over forty pages quite a bit more representative than the handful of pages given to ‘Irish Fairy Tales’, it consists of a series of essays dealing with fairies, ghosts and other such supernatural characters and their encounters with humans. These essays are quite short, often just a single page but explore the myths of the Irish people with tales either told to Yeats or experienced by him. The selection from ‘John Sherman and Dhoya’ is again very short being just concerned with the story of Dhoya a giant mortal living alone who attracts the attention of a fairy lady who decides to become his companion until she is taken away by a male of her own folk leaving him alone again and inconsolable. Like ‘Irish Fairy Tales’ I’d like to read more of these stories as the taster is too brief. The final selection is actually complete and includes the six short stories concerning Red Hanrahan that were published together in 1897. These tell tales of Hanrahan’s, often ill-fated, encounters with women and supernatural beings.

If you want to get a representative overview of early works by William Butler Yeats then this collection would be a great place to start and like myself you will probably end up wanting more, especially of the prose works. This is the fourth book from the Penguin Drop Caps series I have written about along with a general overview of the series. There are twenty six in total, one author per letter of the alphabet and previously I have covered Ellery Queen, John Steinbeck and Xinran.

Haiku & Lips too Chilled – Matsuo Bashō

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A Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world.

Oxford reference

Almost certainly the master, and certainly the best known outside Japan, of the Japanese poetry style known as haiku is Bashō, a poet who lived from 1644 to 1694 and produced the most elegant works in this form. However as can be seen from the definition of haiku it is an extremely difficult poetic style to translate as in theory to do it properly the translator has not only to render the meaning of the poem but also to express it in the syllable limitations. Which between two such different languages as Japanese and English, or indeed any of the ‘western’ languages, adds an extra level of complexity to the task which frankly could destroy the meaning.

The two short volumes I have of Bashō’s poetry are both by Penguin although published twenty years apart, one to mark sixty years of Penguin Books (in 1995) and the other eighty (2015). They are both extracts from the Penguin Classics volume ‘On Love and Barley: Haiku of Bashō’ originally published in 1985 and translated by Lucian Stryk a Polish born American poet and professor of English at Northern Illinois University. This book has six haiku on each page and has sixty one pages of poetry so just over 360 poems in all. whilst ‘Haiku’ has a wonderful austerity of design with just one poem per page over sixty pages and ‘Lips too Chilled’ has two per page over fifty six pages. There is surprisingly little duplication between the two short books so I have somewhere around 150 haiku by Bashō which admittedly is still well short of half of his output but allows for an appreciation of his work. Stryk does sometimes attempt to stick to the rigid format of haiku but is quite happy to divert from this where the sense of the poem would be lost in translation, which I think is a perfectly fair way to approach the rendering between the two languages as I would much rather appreciate the meaning of the poets words than suffer the pedantic imposition of form. Let’s explore a little of the poets work in the title poem from the 2015 volume:

Lips too chilled
for prattle –
autumn wind

Not perhaps his finest work, I prefer:

Storming over
Lake Nio; whirlwinds
of cherry blossom

As with that I can picture the scene and the paucity of words adds a starkness to the image which would be lost with a longer form. So who was Matsuo Bashō? Well as I mentioned at the beginning he lived in the second half of the 15th century in Japan and as is common in the far east his first name (Matsuo) is his family name. Bashō is not even his real given name as he was born Matsuo Kinsaku, he took the name Bashō from the Japanese banana plant outside the hut built for him by his followers in the later part of 1675 as by then he was already a well known poet and this hut clearly inspired him.

New Year – the Bashō-Tosei
hermitage
a-buzz with haiku

Bashō is also well known in Japan as a traveller making many long walks, usually alone despite the dangers of bandits. But his best known walk, taking 150 days and covering roughly 2,400km (around 1,500 miles) was done in 1689 with one of his students and inspired his great travel book ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’, which when it was published posthumously further embellished the master’s fame.

Journey’s end –
still alive, this
autumn evening

I Hate and I Love – Catullus

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A collection of forty three poems by Gāius Valerius Catullus, a Roman poet born in 84 BCE and who died in 54 BCE, but in his short life he wrote a number of poems, 116 of which have survived to the present day. Penguin published a complete volume translated by Peter Whigham which I don’t possess however this selection from that larger volume is part of the Penguin Little Black Classics all of which I purchased when they came out. Catullus’s poetry is normally categorised nowadays into three main subject types, those dealing with his friends, those about a woman he loves but refers to only as Lesbia rather than her real name which was probably Clodia Metelli and the rest are largely described as invective or works attacking other people, which was quite a popular style at the time. This volume is mainly poems in the ‘friends’ or ‘Lesbia’ categories with just seven of the ‘invective’ style represented although over fifty of the surviving works are categorised as ‘invective’. An example of the invective style is poem 43 which attacks the girlfriend of Formianus.

Apologies but photographing the poems without breaking the spine of the book has led to the distortions in the images. The next poem that I want to select to illustrate the tone of Catullus is one which describes his desire to travel now that the warmer weather is here. I have deliberately selected three of the shorter works although few are what we would regard as long, but the descriptions of personal experiences and desires is what marks Catullus as one of the writers known collectively as poetae nov or ‘new poets’ as poetry moved away from the epic heroic style favoured before then. The works of Catullus were almost lost to us completely as a single manuscript was found in the Chapter Library of Verona around seven hundred years ago. This document was copied twice before it was again mislaid and one of the copies was in its turn copied twice before being lost. So the 116 poems have come down the centuries due to these three surviving precious documents.

That one feels very modern with Catullus looking forward to a holiday in Turkey and hoping to meet up with friends there. For my third example it has to be one of the famous Lesbia poems although not the best known, which is poem 5, as that extends over a page in this edition so is difficult to include here. But poem 51 expresses his desire for Lesbia and how he feels when in her company although it is worth pointing out that poem 85 refers to her husband so Catullus was probably one of several men she had affairs with, including Rufus the subject of invective poem number 77 written after Catullus found out about their relationship.

A few others are quite ribald so I don’t feel I can put them on this blog. Although I have certainly enjoyed reading the collection it does nowadays probably need to come with a warning regarding adult themes, The title by the way is from the opening line of the very short poem 85, which is just two lines long:

I hate and I love. And if you ask me how.
I do not know. I only feel it, and I’m torn in two

Catallus 85 translated by Peter Whigham

The Compleat Angler – Izaak Walton

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First published in 1653, so 370 years old this year, my copy is the first Penguin edition from January 1940 and like the first book in the natural history theme for August which was Gilbert White’s ‘The Natural History of Selborne‘, it was intended to be part of the second series of Penguin Illustrated Classics which never happened. Only these two books made it as far as being illustrated, this one with lovely wood engravings by Gertrude Hermes, before the project was cancelled.

Born in Stafford (a town in the English Midlands) in 1593 Izaak Walton originally went into trade as an ironmonger in London and retired in 1644, aged just fifty one, moving back north to Staffordshire where he became a well known countryman and after the publication of this book in 1653 a famous angler. His retirement appears to be linked to the royalist loss in the English civil war as he was a staunch supporter of the King and London was probably uncomfortable for him during the Cromwellian period. Walton would live to be ninety, a remarkable age for the time, and he kept updating The Compleat Angler for a quarter of a century as he came up with things he felt he wanted to add. The book consists of a series of conversations between a Piscator (angler) and a Venator (hunter) along with other characters but these two are the main ones as the Piscator, clearly Walton himself, aims to teach the Venator the noble art of fishing and how to catch the various species of fish in the local rivers. At times the text can be a little tedious if, like myself, you aren’t a fisherman, for example there is a long section which describes various artificial flies used for catching trout and how these should be made, with which feathers, threads and other materials. However the book is largely enjoyable even if you aren’t an angler for its descriptions of country life and the songs and poems that a liberally spread throughout the text.

The Angler’s wish.

I in these flowery meads would be:
These crystal streams should solace me;
To whose harmonious bubbling noise
I with my Angle would rejoice:
  Sit here, and see the turtle-dove
  Court his chaste mate to acts of love:

Or, on that bank, feel the west wind
Breathe health and plenty: please my mind,
To see sweet dew-drops kiss these flowers,
And then washed off by April showers:
  Here, hear my Kenna sing a song;
  There, see a blackbird feed her young.

Or a leverock build her nest:
Here, give my weary spirits rest,
And raise my low-pitch'd thoughts above
Earth, or what poor mortals love:
  Thus, free from law-suits and the noise
  Of princes' courts, I would rejoice:

Or, with my Bryan, and a book,
Loiter long days near Shawford-brook;
There sit by him, and eat my meat,
There see the sun both rise and set:
There bid good morning to next day;
  There meditate my time away,
  And Angle on; and beg to have
  A quiet passage to a welcome grave.

It is these poems and songs along with various descriptive sections that Walton mainly added in his various iterations of the book, the technical sections of how to fish and suggestions as to how prepare the catch for the table are largely unchanged through the published versions. The book is split into five days, the first of which is quite short and is largely an introduction via a four mile walk between the Piscator, Venator and Auceps (a man with hawks) who compare the advantages and pleasures of hunting in water, on land and in the air. This is where the Venator decides to become the Piscator’s pupil therefore leading to the rest of the book however the Auceps is never referred to again after this opening chapter. From day two the lessons on fishing begin and the two men are occasionally joined by the Piscator’s brother, Peter, and his friend Coridon, along with a couple of milkmaids who turn up a couple of times and appear to be there mainly to sing some songs and a few other people who are mentioned just once.

It’s a somewhat odd book, being unsure if it is a technical manual on fishing or a book of songs and poetry with countryside tales. I suspect the first edition was much more the manual but as Walton kept adding to it, taking the book from the original thirteen to the final twenty one chapters over twenty three years it somewhat lost its way. It’s largely an interesting read for the fishing layman and I’m glad I’ve finally read it.

I Wanna Be Yours – John Cooper Clarke

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This is my three hundredth blog entry so I have decided to tackle what turned out to be a fascinating autobiography of the famous ‘punk poet’ which comes in at a pretty massive 470 pages, of which more later. Clarke is now seventy four and has lived a fairly unusual life, which he is extremely frank about in the book. This includes his many years as a heroin addict, indeed his descriptions of sometimes desperate attempts to get his next fix make up quite a lot of the last half of the book, it could have been a depressing read and it says a lot about his wordsmith skills that it isn’t. I first came across Clarke’s work when I went to university in Manchester in 1980 although sadly I never managed to see him perform. His famously stick thin physique was undoubtedly aided by the heroin but I hadn’t know until reading this book that at the age of eight he had had tuberculosis and probably shouldn’t have made it out of childhood in Salford, South Manchester. Clarke is brutally honest about his slide into addiction and the subsequent partial collapse of his career as getting the next fix became more important than anything else. He even took to avoiding his mother after she found out and he claimed to her to be getting help when in fact he was taking even more drugs and progressing to speedballs, cocaine and heroin mixed in one shot this is probably the lowest point of the narrative.

I was aware he had had a drug problem but the extent of it surprised me and I wasn’t really prepared for the story of a drug addict being the main part of the book rather than his climb to be performing and comparing at shows at the biggest clubs in Manchester. Thinking about it later I was also aware that he had largely disappeared for years after the late 1970’s, or at least I hadn’t heard of him for a long time until he reemerged to a larger public presence many years later and yet now plays sell out shows around the world. Indeed his 2024 fiftieth anniversary of performing tour, entitled ‘John Cooper Clarke: Get Him While He’s Alive!’ is already having to add extra dates due to demand for tickets.

There is also substantial coverage of his childhood and early years before starting to perform which was characterised by the poverty of growing up in Salford in the 1950’s and the extra problems due to his poor health. He worked as a bookies runner for a while whilst still at school before the police started to crack down on unlicensed bookmakers and going round taking bets and paying out winnings became too hot a job to continue. He was always looking for a way to earn some money but his apprenticeship on leaving school as a car mechanic eventually ended early due to both parties, employer and employee, recognising that he had absolutely no aptitude for anything mechanical. His desire to be a poet was strong even then but his father pointed out that nobody made any money at poetry until they were dead and it was only the arrival on the scene of the so called Mersey poets from Liverpool that proved that it was possible to make it a career. But it took a long time, and the assistance of Manchester club owner Bernard Manning, now a somewhat controversial figure, that eventually got him onto the stage and making some money at what he wanted to do.

As I wrote at the beginning of this review the book is 470 pages long, but by page 430 we have spent so much time on his childhood, youth and addictions we have still only reached 1985 and I was thinking that this was just the first half of a planned two volume autobiography. Instead Clarke basically sums up the remaining thirty seven years as: Met Evie (his wife), tried and eventually kicked heroin, rebuilt the career, started a family, gained an honorary doctorate from Salford University and nothing else much happened. Thirty seven years in forty pages, I’m pretty sure there is more to that period than that and as I had so enjoyed reading the first 430 pages, covering thirty six years since his birth in 1949, I was definitely set up for volume two.

If I have one criticism of the book it is Clarke’s excessive name dropping, usually in long, frankly tedious, lists of people or bands he has met or worked with, or maybe had worked in the past at a venue he was then working at, which I got into the habit of skipping as I got more into the book but as the last line of the book makes clear he isn’t bothered about criticism of the autobiography.

Any complaints, mail them to last Tuesday, when I might have cared.