The Return of the Charity Shop LP

I walked into town this morning intending to buy some milk and go and sit in the library and do some writing. I’d armed myself with notebook, pen, and a list of writing prompts. All set. Only problem was the ‘quiet’ area of the library that has tables and chairs was occupied by a loud and patronising lady who was being slightly horrible to a lad of about eleven as she tutored him in something or other. I left. Went upstairs to the café, because after all, how hard can it be to find a quiet table at ten in the morning and sit with a cup of tea and write something? They had sandwiches, which wasn’t fair, so I had to have one (roast beef and spinach). Once I’d eaten that, and looked around at the other café folk – mostly gents of a certain age reading the complimentary copies of the Daily Mail – I realised it just wasn’t going to happen. I would buy my milk and go back home to write. I hate writing by hand anyway. Be much easier at home on the computer.

Still had to buy the milk, so I wandered down Newgate Street towards Heron, picked up a couple of pints, and thought I might as well pop into some charity shops on the way back. I usually do themed shopping – one week I might look for books, another for oddments of china. This week I noticed they had started doing LPs again. It’s been a good few years. These shops always used to have piles of them, mostly Jim Reeves and Barry Manilow, but then CDs came in and pretty much took over; we were told the sound was better and they’d last forever (ha!). Charity shops, certainly round here, stopped collecting and selling them, and most of us stopped listening to them.

Fast forward a few years and us diehard LP fans have been joined by a load of people from a much younger generation who for one reason or another love their turntables and want to be able to buy records to play on them. I invested in a turntable a few years ago when they just started becoming available again, mostly because I have an extensive collection of LPs and 78s and wanted to have the option of listening to them, but oddly I never did, so the turntable has been gathering dust.

One of the first charity shops I went in this morning had a mountain of LPs and they were only a pound each and so I thought, okay, have a look, there won’t be anything, but why not. It was curiously nostalgic to bump into Gentleman Jim Reeves again. I must admit, I’ve never heard anything by him. He might be quite good – but then again, the fact that he is always, without fail, in charity shops suggests that maybe he isn’t if so many people have been so keen to get rid of his records. I have no problem with Barry Manilow, and am surprised that he turns up so often. Apart from that, all the usual suspects were there, everyone from Liberace to Herb Alpert, who actually isn’t too bad, but still not really my cup of tea. This shop had a lot more, however. It had rude rugby songs. It had Johann Strauss waltzes. It had something I couldn’t read because it was in Hebrew. It had Frank Ifield. Definitely an eclectic mix, so I had a good look through and came away with a number of records: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘London’ Symphony in a classic recording by Vernon Handley; the Schumann and Grieg piano concertos played by Radu Lupu; and a couple of records of masses by William Byrd and Josquin, sung by the Tallis Scholars. I looked at them all carefully and all appeared unmarked. The Josquin was still in a sealed package so had never been played.

Back home, I tried to play the Vaughan Williams. Nothing happened. Looked round the back, realised the turntable wasn’t plugged in. Felt slightly silly. Plugged it in, tried again, and it worked – the sound was crystal clear. Utterly beautiful. While it was playing I wrote a half decent poem with almost no effort at all. Then I put the Grieg on, then the Schumann. I’m listening to that one now. The Byrd comes next. I’ll quite likely write a short story while that’s playing, and will soon reach the thousand words a day I’ve been aiming at as a minimum since the start of December.  

We all write differently. Some writers can go into cafés and coffee shops and libraries and find endless inspiration by observing the characters who come and go; some people do the same thing on trains. I write to music. Not always – sometimes I write to a rugby match on the telly. But music, I think, works best. I’m not sure why it isn’t a distraction. When I was doing A level music at school and had to write a piece of music for homework, I would often annoy my mother by doing it with the radio on. It did genuinely help my concentration, bizarre as it may seem. Of course it’s different if you’re writing words rather than music, but I’m still not quite sure why it works. It’s not that it provides a sort of white noise that can be tuned out, because I’m well aware of what I’m hearing while I write. A neurologist might be able to tell me what’s going on, but I certainly don’t know.

All I know is I’ve bought some records, and that’s something I haven’t done in years, and I’m getting a terrific buzz from listening to them. They might well give my writing a spur, give it more depth – make it better simply because I’ll be in a better ‘zone’ (horrible word) at the moment.

The Josquin, however, is special. That’s being reserved for when I’m painting. It would be wasted on writing.

How to Write Poetry

I’m currently the person in charge of running Wear Valley Writers. I’m not sure how this happened, and it may be simply because I’m the only person who is prepared to send out the mass emails necessary to inform members of who’s doing what when, and all that sort of stuff. Be that as it may, I’m not only in charge of the admin, I’ve come to be seen as some sort of poetry guru. This is mostly because I write the stuff, and even get it published, so fair enough – but I do sometimes feel a bit of a fraud. When I was at school, ‘creative writing’ as such didn’t really exist, but I do have an ‘O’ level in English Language, which was about as close as you could get, and because I did English Literature ‘A’ Level, I did get a thorough grounding in Milton (hated his stuff), as well as the Metaphysical Poets (loved them) and there must have been something more contemporary, but I’m damned if I can remember who it was, so it can’t have made much of an impression. This is the sum total of my ‘training’ in writing the poetry. However, many years later for various reasons I decided to have a go at versifying. Once you start, it’s hard to stop – or it was for me – so here I am, many flukish publications later, a bona fide expert in how to bluff your way as a poet. This is going to be useful, because the Wear Valley Writers have asked me to do a workshop on how to write poetry. This means I have roughly forty minutes to tell them absolutely everything about poetry, though at least they’ve narrowed it down a bit and have asked me to concentrate on how to handle metre. I suspect if you do creative writing at university level, you may well get a whole term on metre. I have forty minutes, and a group of people who are mostly hobby writers who prefer prose anyway. 

 

So how did this situation come about, because Bridport shortlistings and Pushcart Prize nominations, I still feel a bit of a fraud? I suppose I only have myself to blame. Some months ago I was browsing around, looking for possible markets, when I came across the Rattle ekphrastic challenge. This is a monthly competition run by the Rattle, an immensely important and respected literary journal – but they also know how to have fun, so they run this little contest, which is free to enter. They provide an image, and you use it as a prompt to write a poem. Simple enough. I tried several months running and got absolutely nowhere with it, but then they put out a call for submissions to provide the actual artwork. I had an ‘Aha!’ moment, and sent in some drawings and paintings, and they actually liked one of them – so my artwork will be the one that hopefully will inspire some super poems in a couple of months’ time. Not only do I get paid for having provided the picture, I also get to be one of the judges of the contest, because there are always two $25 prizes: one awarded by the magazine editor, and one by whoever did the artwork.

I told the writing group all about this, and they said, Ooh! We must enter! And I said, Yes! Do! And they said, So how do you write a poem? And I said. Oh. Hmm... And that was why they want me to do the workshop. I think I must have banged on about scansion and metre a fair bit in the past, and I’ve certainly suggested to those who attempt to write poetry in the group that if they’re dead set on doing end line rhymes, then they really HAVE to get to grips with metre, because without it you’ll end up with doggerel unless you’re very, very clever. 

As I say, it’s all my own fault. Working out how to teach metre in just forty minutes has been challenging, but I think I’ve done it. I’ve prepared handouts so that if I talk too quickly, as is my wont, at least they’ll have something to refer back to. I have given examples. I am going to concentrate on iambic pentameter and tetrameter because for a beginner I reckon they have to be the easiest to grasp. I’ve looked up examples. I’ve done all the stuff that my teachers should have done for me years ago, and maybe did, but I’ve forgotten. I don’t have a single poetry text book that tells you all this stuff, so thank God for Wikipedia.

Tomorrow is the day I deliver my amazing talk on how to write poetry. I know for a fact that some of the writers don’t know what a syllable is, and are pretty vague on parts of speech. They don’t know their alliteration from their assonance – and why should they? A few of them are decent novelists, so they consider they don’t actually need to know how to write poetry.

I think they’re wrong. I came to novels from poetry, and I think it’s made my prose much stronger as a result. Writing prose requires rhythm as much as writing poetry, though in a less formal manner – but surely it must be the case that if you know the poetic techniques, it will inform your prose? It has to make it better, whether you go for the deceptively simple rhythms of Hemingway, or the much more complex meter of someone like DH Lawrence. It should help us all, whatever we write. We do a lot of flash fiction in the group because there isn’t much time to do anything else, but a flash can be virtually a prose poem, and in fact if it’s going to be at all literary, then that is the direction it needs to go; it needs that concentrated rhythmic and sonic beauty that you expect as a matter of course in poetry; it needs that feel for the music.

I’m amazed I managed to get this far through this post without mentioning music, but of course that’s what underpins it all. Music!

I will now go back and dot some random pictures through this post, because blog posts always look better with pics, and perhaps anyone reading this would like to use one of my images to attempt an ekphrastic poem. I will absolutely NOT be posting the picture that the Rattle are going to use though – no head starts allowed. Have fun! And do pop along and look at the Rattle ekphrastic challenge. There are few enough free-to-enter poetry competitions these days that have that sort of prestige, so it’s well worth doing.

Writing a poem when you have not an idea in your head

Since December last year I’ve been writing an average of 1000 words a day, the point being if you’re not writing you’re not a writer, and 1000 feels like a sensible and achievable total. The words comprise a mix of short stories, flashes, poems, and blog posts. I haven’t written a poem for about a week, so I’d like to do one, but I don’t have a single idea in my head at this moment, so I thought it might be an interesting exercise to write down the process, and see if a poem comes out of it at the end.

Facebook has already proved helpful. I have a possible title. Someone has noted that today is the anniversary of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, and they’ve helpfully included a quote: “the world to me was a secret which I desired to divine”. I like that, and I think I’ll use it.

Sometimes there will be a word or phrase that strikes me from one of the many prompts lists that appear on various workshops and forums on the internet, but today nothing is working, so I’m going to go to my alternate source – images. Street photography is invaluable for story and poetry ideas, and one of the best street photographers around is ‘SUDOR’ on deviantART, so that’s where I’m going. My notifications are usually packed with a good selection of his photos, and today is no exception. Having had a quick browse, I see there are several that include a little girl. I could use her as the character who sees the world as a secret which she desires to divine. I’ll go through the photos one by one and jot down descriptions of what I can see, and perhaps something will grow out of my observations. I’m a great believer in ‘things’, ie concrete objects. I don’t want to note if the girl is smiling – I want to describe what she is looking at that is making her smile.

First photo. I don’t know if she’s smiling or not as it happens, as it’s a back view. She’s on the Paris Métro, and she’s small, maybe about five years old, dressed in a tartan raincoat, white ankle socks, smart little shoes. She’s right at the front of the train, and has climbed the ladder that’s attached to the end of the compartment so that she can lean across and see through the window that gives her a view of the driver’s cabin. She’s holding on tight. She can’t get through the door into this other world. Her side has a carpet, shiny poles, posters – the driver’s side has a huge window, daylight, windscreen wipers – it’s raining, so we’re not in a tunnel. Most children would be pulled straight back down by whoever’s in charge of her, but she looks relaxed and comfortable. I think she’s been up there a while, holding on securely while the train rocks and buffets.

Second. In the Quartier de la Défense, a wide paved path that curls like a snake, she’s running along it, and she could run in a straight line but she’s choosing to follow the curves, so although she’s running, she’s not in a hurry, she has time to enjoy the architect’s design.

Third. She’s not in this photo at all, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll imagine her standing at the photographer’s side and looking in. The scene is a hairdresser’s shop. The hairdresser has short cropped dark hair and big earrings, she’s wearing a dark jumper, a suede mini-skirt and suede platfrom boots, she’s perched on a stool on casters. The lady having her hair done has turned to look at the camera – at the girl – with a ‘what do you think you’re doing here?’ kind of a look. She has an unpleasant long, horsey face. I’ve taken an instant dislike to her; she is supercilious – but I mustn’t think in such terms. I’m not interpreting at this point, I’m trying simply to observe, note down as if I were going to draw the scene. Okay then. She has one hand up to her face, and has her long thumb pressed against the side of her mouth, the fingers of the hand are curled over. Eyebrows are raised. There’s a chair in the way so I can’t see her body, but I can see her feet, in patent leather slingback shoes, lowish heels. The hairdresser has a small smile on her face as if she’s thinking about something good that’s going to happen when she leaves work tonight. I don’t think anything good is going to happen to the lady in the chair.  

Fourth. This one’s odd. It’s a Paris street. There’s a man, sixtyish, business suit. He has a small attaché case, an old fashioned leather one – and he’s balanced it on his head. He is standing perfectly motionless with a case on his head! No, I don’t know either.

Fifth. A dark alleyway. All old cities have these. It has high walls either side, stone built, repointed so many times you can hardly see the stones any more except where the pointing has fallen away. Dark mossy steps, well worn. Granite setts, or similar. Very damp. Four or five steps, every four or five yards. It alleyway bends slightly so that you can never see very far ahead. Nobody else there. Splashes of graffiti, but old, scrubbed away, so they just look like coloured mosses. Brown leaves in the corners where the wind has dropped them.

Sixth. This is the first photo where we see her properly – and incidentally, it’s not the same child, but for the purposes of my narrative it can be. There is more tartan after all – she’s wearing a tartan skirt that’s too small for her and a vest top. Her hair’s cut in a bob, her legs are long and very skinny. She’s leaning against a wall, concrete render, the side of a house. There’s a ventilation grill low down. The window is above her head, painted wooden frame, net curtains, iron bars across the front. One casement is open, and there’s a tabby cat that’s come out onto the ledge, it’s reaching down one paw towards the girl’s head, and I think she knows it’s there. She’s keeping very still, it reaches further and just pats the top of her head.

Seventh. The Parc de Sceaux, a wide, wide, grassy avenue covered in autumn leaves, trees either side. She’s riding her bicycle pell-mell, nobody else is anywhere near.

Eight. Her parents’ car. They are moving furniture. There’s a roof rack, a mattress on top of the roof rack, and then an unidentifiable piece of wooden furniture – it’s covered with a tarpaulin which is tied to the roof rack but also secured to other parts of the car, like the wing mirrors and the boot, by long ropes. The bonnet is up and father’s looking into it, mother’s got her hand on one hip and the end of one of the ropes in her other hand. The car door is open. It’s looking seriously unsafe.

Nine. She’s in a library, standing in a quiet corner surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of books, some of the lower shelves have had books pulled out and their higgledy-piggledy on the floor. She has her hands behind her back and is scowling at anyone who comes past. The shelves are very close together.

Ten. Back outside, the Rue Mouffetard, an ancient lady carrying a capacious wicker basket and a black cane, bent double, walking past scaffolding that’s protected by a fence of what looks like bamboo. Behind the fence, peeling posters. I’ve seen this one before – I recognise the ‘Emerson, Lake and P...’ poster. I wrote a poem about it ages ago. Must be the same photo. Doesn’t matter. The impression of the scene is that this grimy street has been like this for ages.

Eleven – I’m in two minds whether to use this picture or not, as it’s London and all the others have been Paris. It shows a woman with a huge dog. Massive. It’s standing its ground and she can’t move it. There are skid marks on the paving, and it’s almost as if the dog has caused these. I can’t get over how big this dog is. Maybe it’ll have to be in the poem anyway. I saw two Bernese mountain dogs outside the supermarket yesterday and they were just as big – everyone was looking and commenting. I think you never outgrow the joy of seeing an absolutely huge dog.

Twelve. Here she is with her two friends. She’s in her tartan skirt again, and all three of them are wearing clothes that look like hand-me-downs. It’s the Boulevard de Ménilmontant. Scruffy kids, one’s barefooted, but they look very very happy.

That’s enough pictures. I’ve now closed the window on the computer where I was bringing them up, and I’m going to read through what I’ve written so far and see if anything is gelling. I’m still thinking the idea of tying these images together with the little girl is a possible, but I’m wondering if her age needs to be less specific, if they need to be snapshots of different times with her looking back on her childhood. Maybe she’s the woman in London with the huge dog, remembering her Parisian childhood. Perhaps she was very poor – but now she isn’t, hence the dog.

The next stage will be to copy all of this into a fresh document, delete all the words that won’t be included in the poem, and see what’s left; it should be a reasonable set of snapshots. Then I’ll go away and do something else for a while, letting the images gel in my mind. At some point a story will emerge, but I don’t yet know what it is. Some items will go. I’m not sure about the colour – I think this needs to be in black and white, so to speak, it needs to be looking back; childhood through the adult’s eyes. Possibly she is very old now, and these memories are fragmented. Perhaps she’s the old lady with the wicker basket rather than the child seeing her – or perhaps she’s both. Now that’s an angle I like. May well use that one.

I now have to stop writing and start thinking. I think a poem will emerge. It may only end up eight or nine lines long, but that’s fine. Distilling the essence of what I’ve seen and finding a narrative thread is all that’s required, and if that turns out to be very short, it’s no problem. The process is the thing, and the process can be a joy; the teasing out of images, finding exactly the right words to express something, getting into the mind of the protagonist. I write lots of poems, but I’m essentially a story-teller. They have to have character, voice, theme – all the elements of a story. They are no more ‘pretty pictures’ than my artwork. They get under the skin, and the deeper the better. As Mary Shelley said: “the world to me was a secret which I desired to divine”.

Being a Writer

An email out of the blue – a student at Greenwich University asks if I’d be happy for her to interview me regarding ‘My Hidden Mother’, the book I’ve written about Mum surviving the Holocaust. I’m happy to oblige, though I point out I’m a long way from Greenwich. She however is amenable to coming up to Darlington, so we arrange a date. She knows about the book from her grandparents. She gives me their name, but it means little to me, so I ring up Mum who tells me they’re a couple she regularly meets at the bus stop.

This is so random. I was expecting them to be people she’s known for decades.

So next weekend I’m going to be interviewed, and I’m going to have to sound as if I know what I’m talking about as regards writing. I’m going to have to sound like a proper writer. This student is studying creative writing – all I have is an O level in English Language. I wrote stories at school only if they were set by the teacher; never just for the sake of it. I then wrote nothing for decades, didn’t even consider writing until I was in my forties, and then it was purely by chance, and wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t fallen in with some poets in an internet chatroom. I’ve never written a diary and I didn’t spend my teens writing angst-filled poetry. I still don’t write a journal of any kind, which is why my blog entries are so few and far between. When I’m out, I don’t have a notebook with me to jot down ideas. I don’t have paper and pen by my bedside in case I happen to wake up in the middle of the night needing to write down something incredible because I know I’ll forget it by the morning. I was never one of those people who thought they had a novel in them and who were just waiting for the right moment.

The old msn chatrooms were much like facebook today – a right old load of tosh, but with the occasional brilliant conversation. I started jotting down ideas from these conversations, invented characters, threw difficulties at them to see what they would do, and they took off, they flew – and ended up as a novel. Having never written anything longer than three or four sheets of A4 at school, I soon had a manuscript of 96,000 words. In my naivety, I sent it to a few agents. When that got me nowhere, I published with a vanity press – cost me nothing, but I was bombarded with ‘special offers’ to buy my own book at an exorbitant cost, so I sold very few. That book is now thankfully out of print. First novels, eh? Absolute tripe if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I certainly didn’t.

The writing bug had taken hold, however, and within a few years I had learnt the craft properly and had a number of traditionally published books to my name – a poetry collection and three novels.

Did this make me a ‘proper’ writer?

No. When you’re starting out, publication feels like the ultimate goal. Then you realise all you have to do is write something and send it somewhere and someone will eventually publish it. On my website, I used to list all these publications, but I’ve now heavily culled the listings as I’ve realised too many of them are embarrassments. The poetry collection and novels are fine, as they’re out with Circaidy Gregory Press, a very decent indie-press, so I keep them on the list, along with Bridport listings, Pushcart Prize nominations, Butcher’s Dog, Frogmore Papers, etc – but I keep very quiet about some of the others from the distant past before I knew better.

Being published in the right places, however, still didn’t make me a writer, it simply mades me a person who happened to write and who sometimes managed a decent hit.

I mentioned my O level in English Language earlier on. That was slightly disingenuous of me, as it makes me sound as if I haven’t studied writing at all. I have, but I’ve used the internet. I soon realised the chatrooms where people said ‘thank you for sharring’ (sic) were to be avoided at all costs. I drifted instead towards the private, much tougher forums, one of which set me on the right track. I learnt a lot there, but it didn’t make me a writer.

A few years later, I discovered Alex Keegan’s online ‘Bootcamp’, and if you can’t learn how to be a writer there you’re really not trying. I’ve been a ‘bootcamper’ for three years now, and have learnt one hell of a lot – but none of the skills I’ve picked up there make me a writer in themselves.

What makes me a writer is the fact that I’m currently writing every day – averaging around 1000 words – and I’ve been doing this for months now, not even stopping for Christmas Day. When you’re primarily a poet, that’s pretty much impossible, so much of my output at the moment is short stories. They pour out, and they’re initially gibberish, so when they go through the bootcamp mill they’re eviscerated by myself as much as anyone. I fix them if they’re fixable, submit them if they have a chance in one of the better markets or competitions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t – but the important thing is that I’m writing them, so the idea of a student from London coming up to interview me about my writing no longer seems such a weird idea. This is not a hobby. It’s what I do.

Review of Mandy Pannett's 'All the Invisibles'

SPM Publications  

ISBN: 978-0956810120

‘Best After Frost’ was chosen by the Inter Board Poetry Community as their poem of the year 2011, and quite right too. Medlars – who remembers medlars? More to the point, who will be able to forget this ‘smutty fruit’ after reading a garnet-red and delicious slurpy-slimy poem that sets the tone for an extraordinarily vivid collection. I would have been happy with a whole book of Pannett’s nature poetry, could have sat back in a comfy chair and read through one brilliant imagist poem after another, but it was not to be. By the second poem, I was having to start googling references. This was not a chore – this was a Good Thing. I will explain.  

Pannett breaks us in gently with the word. ‘psychopomp’. Great word, but I didn’t know what it meant so looked it up. The definition made perfect sense. Pannett could have used an easier word in her poem title, but why should she? Why dumb down? The chosen word is always precisely the right word, never the one that is better known but might not do the job so well. In ‘Psychopomp: a Guide’, Pannett explores the fine line that is the meeting place between the contemporary and the mythological. This theme runs through the entire collection. Ancient and modern – are we really so different from our ancestors? ‘Two For One’ is an age old tale of vengeance told in a contemporary setting, so any doubts that we’re somehow different is quickly dispelled. The ancients will have their say later in the collection, and they go far, far further back than I expected – but more on that later.

Pannett expects her readers to have a reasonable familiarity with concepts from the ancient times through the dark ages to the Renaissance and beyond. Unfortunately not all of us have her level of erudition, but we no longer need volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica weighing down our teak veneer wall units – we have Wikipedia – and even if we didn’t, the poems stand by themselves without the necessity to know all the references. Knowledge adds an angle, a colour – but it’s not essential. We can read about the traveller from the ship of fools as he explores dry land, and sense the irony because Pannett has made it clear and has no interest in veiling her message. You’d be hard pressed not to understand the poem even if you didn’t know the historical uses of the image. I became so used to looking stuff up that when I came to poems where I was sure I was missing references, I actually emailed the author for clues. As often as not, it turned out that the poem in question was exactly what it said it was and I didn’t need a Masters in Classics or anything else. Sometimes a hare in a field is just a hare in a field. One forgets.

One of the most intriguing offbeat facts I learned from this collection was that Catherine of Aragon brought sweet potatoes to England as part of her dowry. Pannett was not making this one up. I checked. And Henry VIII really did set a competition for growers in England, none of whom managed to cultivate the plant successfully. Out of this random historical fact, Pannett has built a powerful and unusual poem. In ‘Trust the Sun’, Odysseus makes his first appearance. He’ll be back – unless I’m misreading one of the poems, which is always possible. They are so rich in ideas, it’s easy to go off at a tangent and see tales that aren’t really there, but that’s an undeniable strength as it brings out the story-teller in the reader.

You think you know certain images, but you don’t, not really; not until you’ve viewed them through Pannett’s eyes. What if a horse in the Bayeux tapestry could speak? What indeed. The poor beast would suffer ‘bowels of blancmange’ before experiencing the terrible transitions of its brief history, assaulted by ‘arrows like blowflies’. And what is really going on in Millais’ painting of Isabella (she who loved a severed head) that arrived via Boccaccio and Keats and ended up dissected by Mandy Pannett’s pen? Everything is in precise Pre-Raphaelite sharp focus in the painting, and also in the poem, but here it’s at an oblique angle. There’s probably a doctoral thesis to be written exploring the difference in precision between words and pictures with specific reference to Isabella.  

In Durham Botanical Gardens there’s a block of marble engraved with Basil Bunting’s famous lines from Briggflatts: ‘Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write’. I thought of that line on reading ‘Mottoes on Sundials’, as well as the more obvious ‘Time is. Time was. Time is past’ which supposedly originates in Greene’s Elizabethan play ‘Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’ despite sounding much older. Be that as it may, Pannett has found inspiration in the mottoes engraved on sundials. This is a lovely idea. She has taken each inscription and turned it into a poem. Aulus and Lucius built their sundial in Pompeii, so there is great resonance in the lines about voids in the ash – but Pompeii is never mentioned. I find this theme of taking scenes from antiquity and showing them from a different angle refreshing and beguiling.

In ‘Stopping a Bunghole’, I can’t help but feel we have the complete thoughts of Shakespeare (but mostly Hamlet) in one short poem. And why not. This is certainly one possible reading. Pannett never lays down strictures; never insists on a specific meaning. She gives you the best words in the best order, but after that it’s up to you, as should be the case with all literature.

I’m an art nut, so for me, personally, it’s the art poetry that does it; that makes me want to read and re-read. If you want to know how to seduce this particular reader, write about Dürer. I know the artist, now show me the man. This is precisely what Pannett does. Just as I’ve settled into the Renaissance, however, ‘A New Cartography’ comes along and I’m yanked back into the present; a present so removed from the past that this reads as sci-fi at first, but no – it’s contemporary. This is real. This is happening now. I’m back in the present and seconds later I’m addressing a ‘True Fly’ which unexpectedly takes me into DH Lawrence territory and made me think of his mosquito poem. Then, without warning, we jump back to ancient times with ‘Group of Eight’. Coincidentally, when I first read this poem I’d just been looking at Neanderthal cave paintings of seals looking weirdly like double helix DNA. There is something about cave art that ties us together across the millennia in a way words cannot. Language grows and changes. The owners of those eight hands wouldn’t speak any language we know, but we know what a bison looks like and we understand the concept of deer flying across the sky – we’ve never lost that sense of wonder, of the numinous in nature.

‘The Hurt of Man’ needs to be read with Sibelius playing in the background to get into the right mood. This one sent me scurrying off to find out who ploughed the field of vipers and to generally renew my woefully slight acquaintance with the ‘Kalevala’. I like poetry that says, ‘Look, here’s something that happened that you may have read about – go and read more’. I did, and I’m glad I did.

The poetry of the potential typo is represented in the lovely misreading poem, ‘The Starling Point’ where the dull little church of St Olave Hart Street is transformed by the idea of ‘a word / misread that ushers in rune-stones’, but just as the reader settles into this comfortable place, Pannett throws ‘Stunted’ into the mix, a searing poem of what happens when a child has to find some way to survive a cruel upbringing – one of the most powerful and unsettling images of the entire collection.

‘Later, All At Once’ is a wondrous bunch of snippets. No, snippets is too mean a word. A time-traveller’s compendium of moments? Yes, that’s closer. A veritable gallimaufry of images, all of them precise, every one crystal clear. Another clear image sings through in ‘Every Last Bell’. I’ve drawn that bridge with its ‘glittering vertebrae’. This falcon’s eye view of the City zooms in on what might not be immediately obvious, but is no doubt somebody’s prey. When reading this one I couldn’t help thinking of Macbeth and the bell that summons Duncan to heaven or hell. On the subject of sounds – I want to hear the reconstructed fossil’s chirp. Read the collection, and you will too, I promise.

Driftwood has so much more resonance than dust or clay. In ‘Woman-Tree’ I had to assume Pannett was channelling her Norse forebears, and if she hasn’t got any, that’s quite bizarre. Of course she’s got some. Must have. Without getting all Jungian about it, there’s a strong impression of collective memory at work here. Her ancestors could read this newly written poem and understand every word, every reference and every thought. Stories – we all have stories. We understand such things. William Shakespeare wrote many of them down for us, which is handy. ‘Titania’s Wood’ takes me straight to the 1935 Fritz Reinhardt version of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, one of my absolute favourite Shakespeare adaptations for the dangerous other-worldness with which he imbues the visuals. I’m convinced that while the cameras were pointing one way, this poem was happening somewhere else, very nearby.

There are so many more wonderful images in this collection. I wanted to list them all, but knew that would be impossible. Read the book instead, as that’s where you’ll find faces of foxes, whimsical looks at the heart, achingly sad poems, and others that make you remember how extraordinarily potent cheap music can be (thank you Noel Coward). Then clutch your birthstone and hope for salvation.

Or visit Room 44 at the National Gallery. I’m talking ‘Seurat, It’s a Long Sunday’ here. The Sunday picture is of course ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’. The picture on ‘the other side’ has to be ‘Bathers at Asnières’ from the description. The poem tells the reader to go north – the empty beach, I would guess, is ‘The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe’ and your boat can be tied up on the river bank (The Seine at Asnières). I tend to go even further north. I love Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s ‘Lake Keitele’, and if it’s not mentioned in so many words in the poem, it’s only because we’re concentrating on Seurat’s work. It’s still there. You can’t miss it. Go and have a look. Does the reader need to be familiar with this particular room in the gallery? I know these paintings so well, I find it impossible to do a ‘new’ reading of the poem, so I really have no idea.

After Seurat, we have Monet – his life in reverse through ‘A Suggestion of Leaves’, a beautifully conceived and executed poem, but before getting too comfortable with the French Impressionists, we’re yanked back in time again. Mesolithic morphs into Neolithic, but hindsight is unavailable to this stone age man. Is this progress? He can’t tell.

Why didn’t I know the paintings of Eric Ravilious? I do now. I read the poem, looked up the artist. Ah – a student of Paul Nash. I love Nash’s work. I’m taking so long looking at the paintings, I’ve forgotten about the poem. Go back to look at it. This is an artist I should explore further, but before I do that there are a few gentle poems and then suddenly we’re back to pre-history and crossing the land bridge that brought people from Siberia to America. ‘The Kelp Days’ is a stunning poem. Vivid and real and immediate. I’m not surprised to find it won first prize in the Wirral Festival of Firsts 2011.

Remember Odysseus? His father was Old Laertes. Did Odysseus dream of the artichokes and olive groves back on old Ithaca when he was far, far away? I certainly think Pannett dreams of the South Downs. That distinctive countryside pervades much of the collection, particularly the title poem, ‘All the Invisibles’. At this point the reader is nearly at the end of the book. Just a few more intriguing facts to learn ‘Ignatius of Antioch Looks for Stars’. He does? Okay, I’ll look him up, and also try to find the Peckham Rye reference and – good grief. In 1767, William Blake visited Peckham and had a vision of an angel in a tree. I didn’t know that. Oh yes – the poem. What was that about? I return... I’ve a feeling the music of the spheres is going to link this poem to the last: ‘Aeolian Rain’. Yes it does. Angels; this is all about angels – maybe. And everything else.

I’ve resisted talking about aspects of the poems that put one in mind of the collective unconscious or archaic remnants mostly because I don’t know enough about such concepts to say anything sensible, but if I did know about them, I’d be able to analyse this collection and explain its universality in a very technical way. As I don’t, I’m relieved to be able to suggest you read the book instead. I can guarantee that these poems are far more enlightening than any essay I might be able to write. Ideally, take the collection to an art gallery and read it there. You might suffer sensory overload, but it will be worth it.

wormwood, earth and honey

wormwood, earth and honey is my first solo poetry collection, and has just been published by Circaidy Gregory Press ISBN 9781906451042

The poems are accessible but never trivial: warm, earthy, intelligent and – just when you begin to snuggle into the intimacy of it – spiked with fire and venom.

mary

yesterday
she walked between trees
from chapel to ruin

followed a path of sorrel
where the ground dips
into a muddy trap

raced past garden walls
neat bricks, secret delights
peaches,
stolen on a whim

remembered, too late
that sorrel poisons
the unwary

wormwood, earth and honey may be purchased from amazon, or directly from the publisher here.