Book Review: A Light Song of Light by Kei Miller

'A light song of light believes nothing
is so substantial as light, and
that light is unstoppable,
and that light is all.'

It started with the death of his mother, which Kei Miller felt as both a personal sadness and a test to his beliefs about the utilitarianism of poetry. Could it - the act of writing, the act of reading - help him sing his way out of sadness? And if not, what was the point? A Light Song of Light is a bold response to that challenge, a demonstration of the healing, enabling power of words, and a delightful treat for every reader, whether you read poetry regularly or not.

Miller has a feel for the interrelationship between light and dark, their mutual dependency: the darkness that confers significance on the light, the light that creates shadows through it’s very existence. A Light Song of Light is yin and yang, day time and night time, Jamaica and the UK. It explores a range of subjects through the prism of the personal, including Jamaican history, colonialism, immigration, family, and experiences of homosexuality. At its heart lies the Singerman, a member of Jamaica's road construction gangs in the 1930s, whose job it was to sing while others broke stones. He weaves in and out of the action, an emblematic response to Miller's central questions: how can song be useful? Will we sing for those who cannot sing themselves? And who will sing for us when we need it most?

'When we have lost song,' Miller writes with conviction, 'we have lost everything.' Throughout the collection, form is fluid yet always free, redolent with Miller's broad and expressive Jamaican accent. A Light Song of Light is poetry as song, poetry as aural experience, poetry that wears its heart on its sleeve and asks the same from the reader. If these are wonderful on paper, they are even more so when read aloud. They have the feeling of intimate confession, of smiling while crying, of everything that is important in life but that we relegate to the sidelines most of the time.

There is political significance to everyday lives. In 'Unsung' Miller sings a thank you to his father, a song for the 'man whose life has not been the stuff of ballads / but has lived each day in incredible and untrumpeted ways.' It is one of the standouts of the collection, a simple thank you from a son to a father and one of a handful of poems that brought a tear to my eye.

Miller's personal circles are not limited to his family. As everyday lives are significant, so too are they personal, whether the individual in question is known or not. 'Questions for Martin Carter' considers the life of Guyanese poet Martin Carter who was under such surveillance that some of his work survives only  from pictures government spies took of the fence on which he wrote many of his poems. And it cannot be forgotten that the Singerman’s song, for all its utilitarianism, came 'at the price of history...which, even now, you cannot fully consider.' 

In the prose poem, 'A Smaller Song', Miller responds to a news article about a young man killed for cohabiting with his older brother. Its one of many poems that explore the experience of homosexuality, documenting discrimination and hate in a deeply superstitious society, but also, at other times, tenderness and love. 'A Short History of Beds We Have Slept in Together' carries with it an almost fairy tale vision of love built despite the odds:
'If we are amazed at anything let it be this:
not that we have fallen from love,
but that we were always resurrected
into it, like children who climb sweetly
back to bed.'

I first read A Light Song of Light in the cloisters of Toledo Cathedral, just outside Madrid. It was a timeless blue sky sort of day, pockets of light drifting between the branches of four orange trees, the patter of tourists around me. There I sat in the shade with my back against a cold stone wall and read. It was one of those rare and wonderful occasions when the atmosphere and content of a book perfectly matches the surroundings in which it is being read. I will long remember that wonderful afternoon. But the book is worth more than that single experience. I have reread it a number of times since, sitting in the first sun of a long overdue spring, and with rain pouring down outside. Each time it moved me as it did that first time. Almost every line of the title sequence, 'Twelve Notes for a Light Song of Light', produces something inside me. It is almost a manifesto for what poetry can be, and I come away wishing there were a place to sign up at the end.

Similarly, in ‘A Creed’, Miller unites all those for whom the dark has become all too familiar, a lightness of shared experience takes over.

‘when you are done with the news
because it no longer beaks your heart,
and you now know sand
where there once was river in your inner parts;
when you are ready
to say - I have done terrible things,
and there is a room somewhere that holds
this evidence, a thumbprint
made in blood;

then this creed is for you.
We belong to a single country,
and this is our sad anthem.’

A Light Song of Light invites the reader to share all of these emotions, to empathise with experiences of loss, living between cultures, discrimination. In it, Kei Miller celebrates our incredible and abundant lives, facing the darkness head on yet constructing around it a light and inspiring song of light. A Light Song of Light sings a defiant, fragile song, a 'brave and terrible song', a song of love, and compassion, and acceptance, and gratitude, and anger because the world isn't always as we might hope. It is everything poetry can and should be, a clear argument for poetry that communicates with the directness and universality of a song, and carries a similar emotional resonance. I love it. And if you need some persuading to give poetry a go, take Miller's last words as a guide:

'...turn these pages slowly
push the sun down, down, down the horizon - and a story will
come to steal your breath.’

A Light Song of Light was published by Carcanet Press in 2010. ISBN: 9781847771032, 69pp

www.summerreads.org.uk

To hear Kei read his poetry, including 'Unsung' and 'Twelve Notes on a Light Song of Light' click here.

On Discovering William Stafford

This morning I woke to a bright blue sky. I rose, dressed, and walked to work with the intention of watching the London 2012 Olympics. Instead, I stumbled upon an NPR interview with the American poet William Stafford from the exceptional All Things Considered series.

On such incidents are lives enhanced.

William Stafford was born in Kansas in 1914, and grew into a pacifist - one, he said, of the "quiet of the land" - and a plainspoken poet. As a pacifist, he spent the years 1942-46 working in outdoor camps and projects for conscientious objectors in Arkansas, California and Illinois.His poetry, from what I've read, is reflective, gentle, and unassuming yet with a startling, simple poignancy. It focuses on the natural world, its rhythms and flows and on quietly turning the tables on common perceptions of life around us. Ultimately, a strong pacifism run throughout.

I've since spent an hour reading his work and am blown away. I've found a new friend who I hope will remain a friend for life.

Here are some of those that have particularly struck a chord. I hope you enjoy them.



'For the Unknown Enemy'
By William Stafford

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.



'At the Bomb Testing Site'
By William E. Stafford

At noon in the desert a panting lizard  
waited for history, its elbows tense,  
watching the curve of a particular road  
as if something might happen.

It was looking at something farther off  
than people could see, an important scene  
acted in stone for little selves
at the flute end of consequences.

There was just a continent without much on it  
under a sky that never cared less.  
Ready for a change, the elbows waited.  
The hands gripped hard on the desert.




'At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border'
By William E. Stafford

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

You can read more poems by William Stafford at the William Stafford Reader: www.williamstaffordreader.com/poems/topic

Book Review: Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott

Too many of the best cells in my body
are itching, feeling jagged, turning raw
in this spring chill. It’s two thousand and four
and I don’t know a soul who doesn’t feel small
among the numbers. Razor small.
‘Of Mutability’

In her essay ‘On Being Ill,’ Virginia Wolf describes the effect that being ill has on one’s perceptions. She talks about the ‘horizontal view of the world’ that comes from spending so much time on your back, the different ways of seeing that it inspires, and the way it opens up the sky.

In 2003, Jo Shapcott was diagnosed with breast cancer. Seven years later, the cancer beaten, she published Of Mutability. Although not specifically about her battle with illness – cancer is never mentioned for instance – that experience of ill health and the different ways of seeing it enabled, provides the topography upon which the collection is built. As the title suggests, these are poems about transformation, mutation, mutability, in the body and the world around it. Shapcott presents this mutation as sometimes liberating, sometimes destructive, full of possibilities and yet ultimately a symbol of just one terrifying inevitability. There are shifting territories and permeable boundaries, where pavements ripple beneath feet and fingerprints dent hillsides.

Of Mutability loosely follows a narrative arc from diagnosis through all sorts of mutations towards a resolution and all-clear. There are also nods to the artwork of Helen Chadwick, which two of the poems respond directly to, and Percy Shelley’s ‘Mutability’ with its clarion call: ‘Nought may endure but Mutability.’

That is certainly the feeling here. Mutability is the single consistency around which uncertainty orbits and transience passes. The first mutation, that of cells that leads to a diagnosis and the title poem is wild and unbounded. The year is 2004 and the world is tearing itself to shreds through war and climate change, leaving the narrator feeling ‘razor small’, everyone in skins they feel uncomfortable within. In ‘Era’ the reader is placed into a dangerous world where magpies squabble, fountains splash ‘chemical bubbles’ and traffic swarms ‘round Vauxhall Cross, like crazy fish, with teeth’. Later in St Bride’s we have an even clearer vision of war, where internal transformation and external conflict mirror each other, leaving ‘the smell of print and ashes in my nose.’ In ‘Night Flight to Muncaster’ the reader is transformed into an owl, flying free over the landscape and taking a trip to the seaside. But it ends on a sour note, as the owl’s senses enable it to hear things other can’t: ‘You can hear clouds creak, droplets hiss’.

This is an unhappy world being transformed against its will. Much later, in ‘Viral Landscape’, and ‘I Go Inside A Tree’, the mutated internal and external landscapes come together, permeable, liminal. And yet, around this, there is a calmer, sensual, more mystical view of mutability taking place. In ‘The Oval Pool’ a woman turns to water, and watches the pain of those around her. Yet she remains defiant: ‘there will be no evaporation.’ In ‘Abishag’ a couple seeks to mutate together so that they are sponged down as one, the borders between them vanishing as she licks the sweat from his skull and feels ‘his mind through my tongue’.

There is humour, too, a black humour in some, but genuine humour elsewhere. In ‘Hairless’, Shapcott questions whether physical transformation changes who and what you are, the poem starting with the line ‘Can the bald lie?’ and ending with a roar against the dying of the light. In ‘The Deaths’ she imagines walking with death like ‘two drunkards’ before she implodes ‘like a ripe mango’. One of the most enjoyable poems is ‘Somewhat Unravelled’, an imagined conversation between Shapcott and her auntie whose experience of the world has similarly been transformed by dementia. Their intimate words fill spaces, their promises of straight talk and ‘a meal so wholesome and blimmin’/pungent with garlic you will dance on it and/eat it through your feet’ a guard against further mutation.

There are series of poems that mythologise mutability, others that map the gradients of permeability and a series that reflects upon trees, those bastions of strength that yet ‘respond to everything, everything else’ just as everyone does.

Towards the end, the register again changes, uncertainty, hope, gratitude creeping in until, in ‘Procedure’, all the worries literally go up in the steam of a cup of tea, the narrator putting all the ‘blood tests, and cellular madness’ behind her and saying ‘thank you thank you thank you for the then, and now’.

Yet, ever playful, Shapcott ends on a different note, a postscript to the mutations. In ‘Piss Flower’, one of two direct responses to individual pieces of Helen Chadwick’s art, we finally see a limit to mutability. Now all clear, Shapcott is no longer so mutable, she become a man and produces ‘a golden parabola’, but she can do tricks of her own, in her own body and without any transformation. Perhaps other things may endure beside Shelley’s mutability.

The theme of mutability is so ubiquitous that it can even be applied to the structure of the poems themselves. Almost all start as one thing before transforming before your eyes, their implications shifting with one surprising line or dissonant ending.

In June 2012, Jo Shapcott spoke in Norwich and referred to life as ‘vertiginous, multi-layered joy’. That seems to me a perfect description of Of Mutability. But these layers are not separate, they leach into each other, they mutate, they contain within them near limitless possibilities. Of Mutability is a collection that looks mortality bullet-straight in the iris, but does so without fixating upon it. It is self-knowing and vulnerable. These poems are highly intelligent and yet entirely unpretentious, each word carefully weighted yet retaining an accessible clarity. The collection is playful, frequently humorous, and quietly powerful. It rewards multiple readings and careful consideration but has a visceral power that captures you immediately and doesn’t let go until the last word.

Ultimately Of Mutability is a book about the euphoria of survival. The notion of Per ardua ad astra – ‘through adversity to the stars’ – runs throughout this collection, an open mouthed appreciation of the spectacle of life, even when mired in earthly troubles.



Of Mutability is one of five books featured in the Writers' Centre Norwich Summer Reads programme. For more information and resources that include an extract, video content, and links to other reviews, see www.summerreads.org.uk

Book Review: Rain by Don Paterson

This book response is written in the form of a short story. For a discussion of why I am trailing this approach to writing about books see the Reviewed a Short Stories page, here.

It started in The Gambia. Or came to a head, there, anyway. One or the other.

Walking along a dusty road overlooking the ocean and discussing poetry. From shanty town to boutique hotel like the evocations of privilege they were.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

A disappointed scoff from her companion. “I’m sick of hearing people say that,” the poet replied tersely. “People are scared of poetry and I don’t understand why.”

She could give no adequate response. So she closed her mouth and changed the subject. She didn’t read poetry. She read novels. How could she explain why one form of marks on a page made sense and another didn’t? How could she explain that she was scared of poetry; that it seemed to require a higher plane of comprehension than she possessed? They changed the subject and walked on. Tension wilting under the sun that scorched white their combating views.

**

Back in the UK she started a new job. Working in literature; still not ‘getting’ poetry. She attended readings, programmed poets, sometimes even introduced them, too. But never read any. Poetry was West Berlin in the 1950s, walled off from the rest of literature surrounding it. It made sense, somehow, to assign these labels, despite her otherwise conciliatory nature. It was one of those hypocrisies of character she didn’t think to question.

**

This is a story of the crumbling of that wall. But there was no storming or smashing; no momentous moment to witness. No gatekeeper received an order to lift the barrier and allow the inevitable to pass peacefully. This wall crumbled without resistance, gradually, over the course of months.

The catalyst for change was money. A grant for the development of a programme to improve the teaching of poetry in schools. Teachers were recruited. They amassed and sat around a table. A poet – a cross between a soldier and missionary and yet nothing like either - entered. He said that poetry was like running. Both were things we did in childhood, and lost interest in as we grew older. That school had a stultifying way of making both seem difficult; more like work than play. Focusing on what they said, rather than the feelings they engendered.

“Poetry,” the poet declared and she paraphrased, is a personal thing. “A work either speaks to you or it doesn’t. If it does, and you enjoy it, then it is good. If it does not, then move on to something else.” She nods some more and goes home. Permission. Something inside has shifted. Her head as yet unaware what it means. She has always been inordinately influenced by what people say.

Later, she hears a quote from Samuel Johnson and assimilates it. “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it”.

Yes, she thinks. That is what the poet meant.

**

Somewhere amidst these words she understands something she had not before. It was the word ‘poetry’ she struggled with, not the form. The word ‘poetry’ that had skulked around inside her, distorting her impressions of what it was. A red blanket cast over a genre, designating it other; making trust difficult.

How preposterous, she now thinks. How judgemental. She is embarrassed and confused at her readiness to categorise.

Almost at once, it is as though that wall rolls over onto its side, vast slabs of concrete chromatically shifting from grey to yellow brick.

**

Months later she leaves work and walks the cold streets with a collection of poetry in hand. It is winter. The sun sunk hours ago. The bar she settles in has a Victorian feel. Lamps ensconced on walls, red candles dripping lava down old wine bottles. Upstairs, there’s a sense that a séance may begin at any minute. The lights are dim, almost too dark to read. She unfurls in a corner.

And she reads. The words stand up to greet her, images like shadows moving around, whispering to her.

We talk, make love, we sleep in the same bed –

But no matter what we do, you can’t be me.

We only dream this place up in one head.

‘The Day’

Gulping, she marks passage after passage. She reads as she would read prose: confidently, taking each word as it comes, unfussed by line breaks or meter. Experiencing them. Nothing more or less. They make her laugh, sometimes. Cry, sometimes. Other times she merely smiles at the Robin Hood accuracy of an observation.

If we never left this room

The wind would be a ghost to us.

‘Motive’

When other people arrive for the book club, she resents their intrusion. They discuss, academically at times. She listens. They slice open the words; revealing shades inside that expand her understanding. She listens and enjoys the explanations, technical comprehension that causes her head to bob in agreement. But nothing touches her experience of the words. When the confronted her in the corner and made her feel things. She loved the book for how it enabled her to feel, the images it conjures for her. The rest is pleasant white noise.

**

That was a second beginning, of sorts. From there she reads other collections, enjoying some more than others. That evening and that collection stands out amidst them, a union of setting and text and emotion that shapes every positive reading experience she has had. Like the time she read The Great Gatsby on a train back from London. Or The Ground Beneath Her Feet in an apartment in Barcelona. Or Even the Dogs on a bus in Kentish Town. Or, now, Rain in a low ceilinged bar in Norwich. Times, like this, when she unfurled within and divisions came to seem painfully arbitrary.

**

The poet said something else too.

“Poetry works in tandem with its environment and that environment includes the reader. Just as the sensation of running is strongly linked to the world around the runner, so the experience of a poem is linked to the world around the reader. It is so important to remember that.”

Yes. Experience, she thinks. That is what reading is all about.

Rain was published by Faber and Faber in 2009. 80pp, ISBN: 9780571249572

Book Review: Seeing Stars by Simon Armitage

There is a scene in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in which Monsieur Jourdain, an uneducated but wealthy tradesman determined to improve his social standing, returns from a lesson with his philosophy master utterly entranced with a new discovery. He has, he pompously informs his wife, spent his life speaking prose! Prose! His more grounded wife counters that the only thing she has heard him speak recently is “total rubbish” but he departs more self-satisfied than ever. It is a hilarious scene in which Molière ruthlessly mocks Jordaine’s pretentious predilection for fancy notions over substance.

I start this review with this anecdote because one of the responses I hear most often in relation to Seeing Stars, is that it “isn’t really poetry, is it.” Such nonsense! As if form were more important than content! As if Jourdaine could become a gentleman simply by knowing the form in which he speaks. Whether Seeing Stars is conveyed in a form that more closely resembles poetry or prose is largely irrelevant. What matters is whether it has an effect on the individual reading it, and Seeing Stars is, for me, a collection of rather wonderful and moving vignettes that its author, or rather one of his collage of narrators, handily refers to as ‘story-poems’. These story-poems combine narrative drive and plot twists with awareness of language, pacing, and the impact of an odd transgression mid-line. In this hybrid form, Armitage excels.

There is a performance quality to the work. Armitage debuted many of these pieces at readings for a couple of years before publishing Seeing Stars and that gently lulling Yorkshire accent is apparent even when reading on the page. If there is a focus, it is on the substantial over the stylish, the meaningful over the meaningless. Armitage has a sneer for those “critics, sponsors, trustees, rich benefactors and famous names”, for whom art is canapés, champagne and glamorous receptions. Seeing Stars is their antithesis: an intimate and memorable chorus that suggests that often the most meaningful things in life are the least dramatic.

The title itself, and the works contained, conjure connotations of awe-struck wonder at the majesty of life, of punch-drunk shock at things gone wrong, of the flat disappointment that comes with encountering a celebrity who turns out to be just like everyone else, who cannot transform everyday monotony into something spectacular.

Seeing Stars is gritty, surreal, tender, and often hilarious. In ‘Last Words’ a woman who has been mortally wounded by a spider makes a last phone call and finds herself conversing with a similarly dying man stranded at sea. In ‘The Christening’ a sperm whale sites ‘finders keepers’ as justification for the British Crown continuing to own the Elgin Marbles and in ‘Seeing Stars’ an injudicious remark by a pharmacist to his customer results in a nasty altercation that leaves him reeling. One of the more poignant passages comes in ‘The English Astronaut’ when the narrator follows an astronaut to a Little Chef on the A1 and watches him stare out of the window at the busy road, never at the sky.

 “…And his face was not the
moon. And his hands were not the hands of a man
who had held between finger and thumb the blue
planet, and lifted it up to his watchmaker’s eye.”

In many ways, Seeing Stars most closely reminds me of a collection of Murakami short stories, where the fantastical and the mundane exist together, overlapping and interpreting each other and emotional states are elucidated through grandiose experiences. However, where Seeing Stars differs is in the liberal use of satire and farce. These reverential experiences are never allowed to become too heartfelt before Armitage’s wicked, pen cuts them down a peg or two. There are many laugh-out-loud lines, and some exemplary first lines:

“I hadn’t meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins
but he can be very persuasive.”
‘The Experience’

“I fear for the long-term commercial viability of the new
Christian cheese shop in our neighbourhood.”
‘Cheeses of Nazareth’

How could you not wish to read on after these? Armitage casts an absurd eye over various aspects of life that might otherwise become too heartfelt. In ‘The Delegates’, he lambastes consumerist waste, in ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ he turns the cult of celebrity on himself, recalling Googling his own name and imagining participating in the Simon Armitage Trail, a guided-tour of his life where the turnout is ‘woundingly low’. Family interactions, Thatcherism and the perception of Yorkshire in the wider world all intwine.

This is an entertainment rich, content conscious collection that works on many levels and provides a satisfying reading experience. In substance it is full of ideas and humour and wry glances into the sort of poignant, absurd, contradictory lives we live and have always lived.


If this review has whetted your appetite, you can read three of the poems here, or listen to Simon Armitage read from them here.
Seeing Stars is one of six books selected for the Norfolk-wide Summer Reads campaign, run by Writers’ Centre Norwich. For more information, see www.summerreads.org.uk

Seeing Stars was first published by Faber and Faber in 2010. The edition shown above is the paperback edition, published in January 2011. ISBN: 9780571249930, 74pp