Seamus Heaney Centre

The shortlist has been announced for the inaugural Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for the best first collection published in UK and Ireland during 2009:

(In alphabetical order)

Anne Berkeley, The Men from Praga (Salt)
Siân Hughes, The Missing (Salt)
Lorraine Mariner, Furniture (Picador)
Tom Mathews, The Owl and the Pussycat (Dedalus)
Andrew Philip, The Ambulance Box (Salt)

I am honoured and delighted to be on the list.

Siân Hughes reads from The Missing




Lorraine Mariner reads from Furniture


Tom Mathews reads from The Owl and the Pussycat:


Andrew Philip reads from The Ambulance Box (and explains the title)


I interviewed Andy last year, and his book was one of my choices for the year on Peony Moon.

Hmm, seems I'm the only one without a Youtube presence (except for this one as part of Joy of Six). Maybe I should do something about that.

Oriole

Down in the woods he sings: oriole, oriole. It's haunting, alluring, maddening. I've seen pictures of the bird but never the actual thing. I wonder if he is Edward Thomas's Unknown Bird. Thomas was a keen naturalist, and if the poem was prompted by a real bird (and why not? All the proof is-- I told men/ What I had heard) it's inconceivable it could have been any regular visitor to the UK, at least in his part of it, at his time. I write this from deepest France, where the oriole is regular but not exactly common. The oriole has been a rare East Anglian visitor for best part of a hundred years. It's not a bird of Thomas country.

A lot depends on how you hear "La-la-la". Whenever I have heard anyone read this poem they place equal weight on all three syllables. But give it a bit of song, la-la-la, and it starts to become possible.

The Unknown Bird

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off--
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is--I told men
What I had heard.

I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

Just One (more) Book

Does contemporary poetry make a difference to you? Do you relish fiction that makes you think? Do you value truly independent publishers? Then you can help. Despite heroic efforts last year, my publisher, Salt, has been having a hard time in the recession and desperately needs to sell more books to stay afloat until the new grant kicks in. Word is that they have less than one week's cash left in the kitty. Chris Hamilton-Emery writes:

I hoped I'd never have to write this note. The recession has continued to have a very negative impact on sales at Salt and we're finally having to go public to ask you to help support us.

Our sales are now 60% down on last year and have wiped out our grant and our cash reserves as we continue to market and publish what we can from what we believe is a great list. We've plans in place to help secure the business from November 2010 — though the books we'll be publishing won't deliver any real revenue until 2011. We're sorry to ask, embarrassed to ask, but we need your help to survive until then and if you were considering purchasing a Salt book, we'd dearly love you to do it right now. We've less than one week's cash left.

If you can help us, please do two things:

1. Buy one book from us — we don't mind from where, it can be from your local bookstore (they need your support, too), it can be from Amazon or the BookDepository. It can even be directly from us. But please buy that book now.

2. Please tell everyone you know to do the same. Buy just one book and pass it on.

If money is tight for you, too, you can simply write a review of any Salt book you love on Amazon. Or recommend a book to a friend.

You can visit our Web site right now, simply go to
http://www.saltpublishing.com/
and buy JustOneBook.

Remember too, that every book you buy directly from us gets a raffle ticket in our Big Summer Raffle — and you could win one copy each of the next 20 books we publish from 1 September.

Thanks for continuing to support us.

Chris

I bought two more Salt books just now: Wena Poon's novel Alex y Robert and Tom Chivers's Crashaw Prize-winning debut How to Build a City. Oh, and my book's still available if you're interested - just click on the image on the sidebar.

Ledbury

Just back from Ledbury Poetry Festival. I was there for the second weekend, reading on Saturday with Mick Wood, managing to grab a few other events en route. The first was Meirion Jordan, reading with Ruth Bidgood - quite a contrast of voices. He's good, this is a very accomplished first collection. Sarah Crown called it "a startling, lubricious debut". He reads well, too.

That night, I heard Aoife Mannix at last, accompanied by Janie Armour with great wit and intelligence. Very accomplished, thoughtful and all with such a light, sassy touch. Deserved a much bigger audience.

As for my reading with Mick Wood on the Saturday morning, it was a blast. A lovely, responsive audience. And Mick was wonderful, a real star. A seasoned thesp, he had the audience in his hand. His poems have a keen dramatic intelligence, and the audience respond to that. His delivery values the reading as a dramatic encounter, not just voiced words on a page. Couldn't be much further from the grey armchair school of poetry reading - one I've never subscribed to anyway. When poets profess to eschew a dramatic reading and "let the words speak for themselves" they are too often copping out. A performance that prefers one interpretation over another doesn't preclude those other interpretations for all time; it's questionable whether it erases the possibility of other readings even during the performance itself. The performer's first duty is to the audience, and the Ledbury audience hugely appreciated that.

An honour to be reading with him.

I took the rest of the afternoon off, going with friends up the Malverns, to sit in sunshine and the western wind surveying Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Wales, while eating strawberries and consuming lashings of ginger beer, while far below we could hear strains of tuning up for the Jools Holland concert. (Thanks, Gary!)

Rather than Jools Holland, I chose to hear Martin Figura debut Whistle, the show he is taking to Edinburgh. Based on the collection published earlier this year by Arrowhead, the poems, delivered with Mart's inimitable confidence, nous and warmth, layered and textured with slide show and recordings, earned a standing ovation. You don't get that so often at poetry readings. The story the poems tell is heartbreaking, but Mart tackles it with courage and humour. It was an intimate, generous experience. As a fellow Sixer, I've known Mart for quite a while, and enormously value his emotional intelligence vis à vis audience.

As I said, the performer's first duty is to the audience. He's a fabulous reader. I wish him every success in Edinburgh, and if Ledbury is anything to go by they will be crowding it out before he's through.

As for Ledbury, I was torn between going to lots of events and preserving my sanity. There is just too much to do.

The last event I managed to get to was Roz Goddard and Penny Shuttle (standing in for Dan Chiasson, who was indiposed). Roz's Soprano sonnets were witty and astute, and I know I missed a lot from being a TV-phobe. She's a good reader, with a lovely rapport with the audience. As for Penny Shuttle, I have heard her read loads of times, but don't tire, even of poems like "Filth", which I've heard so often I probably know by heart.