( A piece of travel writing this time - behind cut )

Chasing Dean is here on amazon.uk.

A novel review this time:

Ghosts and Lightning, by Trevor Byrne, Canongate 2009


Denny Cullen, 21st-century Dubliner at university in Wales, thinks he's left home, but home isn't finished with him yet. Called back for his mother's funeral, he soon seems to be back in the groove, with relatives and friends who are going nowhere fast and doing nothing much (though, this being Dublin, they do it with considerable wit and inventiveness).

His sister Paula senses a ghost in the house she and Denny are allowing to go to rack and ruin; it might be her alcohol-fuelled imagination but then again it might be composed of memories of their dead mother, their absent father, the brothers from whom they are estranged and much other baggage. Before Denny can move on, he needs to decide which bits of his past he wants to leave behind, and which he needs to take with him. Though this is very much a novel of a young man in 21st-century Dublin, he is also a man with a sense of a long historical and mythological past (and his surname is no accident).

One reason this novel lives so vividly for the reader is the liveliness and realism of its voices. Denny's friends and family constantly come alive off the page: the insanely brave Paula, Uncle Victor the long-term book-borrower, gentle Pajo the emaciated recovering drug-addict with Buddhist tendencies ("he's mad into this kind o thing; life after death, ghosts, yetis, any and all religions. Basically anything there's fuck all proof for, Pajo'll believe it.")

Both fulcrum and observer, Denny himself is a joy of a voice. He is sardonically honest about himself:

Probably why I can't get a job, some witch's hex. Well, that or the fact I never filled out them forms at the FAS office

but also endlessly imaginative, as when he describes his friend Maggit having second thoughts about something he's stolen:

And wha about the kid who owned it? Is he not gonna miss it?
Maggit thinks about this. He looks into the bag again, like he might o robbed the answer as well by accident.

or when, travelling west, he finds himself overwhelmed by a sense of history:

… Dungloe, Annagary, Glencolumbkille. Never even heard o those places before, never mind been to them, and yet I dunno why, it all seems dead familiar. Mad that, isn't it? This feelin I get that nothing is new, not really.

There are a lot of very funny scenes in this novel – the car being constantly turned upside down, the funeral dominated by a priestly speech impediment. The variation of pace is remarkable too, from frenetic to leisurely and back, but above all the register of language, which accommodates colloquial and lyrical effortlessly. It's a terrifically assured and likeable debut.

"Where do you get your ideas from" – the perennial question writers get asked at readings or workshops. I used to try to give an answer to the question asked (though it generally came down to "from the world around me"). But I think now that I should have been saying "it isn't about ideas at all; it's about what you do with them". And if I were still giving workshops, I might use the two Ozymandiases to illustrate.
( cut for length )

…. and you thought we were good at it!

On the back page of the Times Literary Supplement there's a column by "JC" of notes on topical literary issues. It isn't available online, alas. On April 17th, he asked the astonishing question "Why is the role of Othello withheld from white actors?" Well, it astonished me anyhow, and I didn't write back because I confidently expected that by the next issue, (it's a fortnightly) someone else surely would. But they didn't, and haven't since, except for one letter-writer who helpfully mentioned the last time he had in fact seen the role played by a white actor.

For the record, Othello was first performed in 1604. The first black actor, that we know of, to play the role was Ira Aldridge, in the 1820s – only took just over 200 years, then. Aldridge, an American, was plagued by prejudice in his homeland, emigrated to the UK, but found London almost as hostile – though to their credit, theatres and critics in the north of England and in Ireland were not – and had great successes touring in Europe, especially Russia.

Ira's daughter Amanda gave elocution lessons to the young Paul Robeson before he followed in her father's footsteps by playing Othello to critical acclaim in the 1930s. But for decades afterwards, the norm was still for the Moor to be played by a white actor in make-up, culminating in the risible navy-blue get-up of Laurence Olivier in the 1965 film. In 1967 I saw the play at Nottingham Playhouse with John Neville as Iago; the American actor Robert Ryan was playing Othello, and he was white too.

If one really has to spell it out: there are not that many black roles, let alone heroic starring roles, in classical theatre, and those few that exist have for generations been shamelessly annexed by European actors along with all the rest. JC, bless him, sounded genuinely aggrieved that this one great role was being "withheld" from white actors. His musings on the subject had, I think, been sparked by a recent production of Death and the King's Horseman, by Wole Soyinka, in which black actors "white up" to play stereotypical British colonials. Indeed there was an article in the Daily Telegraph by Tim Walker complaining of double standards and quoting an unnamed white actor who seems not to have heard of the concept of irony:

"Colour-blind casting seems to work only one way," complains a white actor who has made several appearances at the National. "Not only can we not play black characters, now we're not even allowed to play whites."

Aww, diddums. Never mind the concept of irony, he clearly can't understand the concept of historical context either. Or of payback. JC, Tim, Unnamed Thesp, do just take a moment to consider Ira Aldridge, reading what was meant to be a friendly critique, "In Othello (Aldridge) delivers the most difficult passages with a degree of correctness that surprises the beholder" – this of an artist whose linguistic gifts allowed him to perform roles in Russian – and maybe think about contenting yourselves with the 90% of the pie you still have?

On Jo Preston's poetry blog, A Dark, Feathered Art recently, I had a difference of opinion with a poster who said she couldn't be doing with criticism that focused on the technical stuff about poetry, rather than its inspirational, emotional side. And now I think maybe I can demonstrate why I do want criticism to do just that – because, paradoxically, I am currently quite emotionally overwhelmed by a particular poem. It's one heavy with nostalgia and loss, freighted with unreachable back-story, that leaves you - well, me - with that weight-pressing-on-lungs feeling of utter sadness and emptiness, plus a strong desire to read it again immediately and get the fix repeated, that one only gets from a really good angst-fest. Like the end of HDM, though for my money the angst there isn't fully earned, or the end of Renault's The Persian Boy, where it is. Or many an angsty fic I can think of.

Many poems do it too; one that's been giving me the angst fix for years is a French poem by Francis Jammes called "Clara d'Ellébeuse", which I might write about later. And I don't need commentary to tell me what the poet is doing; I know. What I want to come at is how he does it. As a writer, obviously I want to know his techniques so that I can pinch them but I would think non-writing readers too would be interested in exactly how someone is managing to mess with the inside of their head.

So, behind the cut, my thoughts on a poem in the latest issue of the journal Agenda, "Penllain" by Paul Henry.
( cut for lengthy wittering )

I don't speak Catalan, which I regret, because during the short time I spent in Barcelona I noticed that it seemed to resemble Welsh in some ways, like the days of the week. But I've always been irrationally chuffed to know that there's a Catalan translation of a poem of mine online.

It's at the web site of the translator Sadurní Vergés and is a translation of a poem called "The Extra" - the original is underneath the translation.

It's always fascinating to see a poem in translation, even if you can only guess at the words from their resemblance to others; you still see different rhythms, emphases, rather like giving yourself a new hair colour.

Yet another website move--- Googlepages was changing to something else, I'd have needed a new url and I didn't fancy the new system. Thanks to a pointer from federhirn I went and checked out webs.com, which seems to work pretty much like Googlepages did. So I shall now be at http://sheenagh.webs.com/. Have spent most of day moving stuff over - if this lot shut up shop any time soon, I won't be responsible for my actions.

So... if you recall this post, about the various possible cover pics for my Later Selected (which looks like coming out in July), folks voted here, on facebook and on a mailing list I'm on. And the clear front-runners from all sources together were ( Map )

and ( Franklin )

In fact, Map was slightly ahead, but it looks as if the publishers will go with Franklin, if they can. I'm not too surprised by that, because I've heard before that there is a belief that human figures on a cover sell it better.

"If they can", however, is the operative phrase, because that image is owned by the National Maritime Museum and so far they haven't replied to emails asking if it can be used. If it doesn't work out, I guess they'll go with Map, because I think that's public domain.

My favourite three were definitely Map, Franklin and Landscape 1 - that was probably my ultimate fave but in the end you gotta go with what'll shift copies.

It was a fun exercise, anyway! Thanks to all who joined in.

- to echo oursin's line. I'm glad Kathryn Hughes has written this article in response to Elaine Showalter, because when I first saw Showalter's theory on the absence of great 19th-cetury american women novelists, I was convinced things weren't as simple as that. Basically Showalter asked why no American Brontes or Eliots and concluded that it had to do with British women having more servants and less housework to do:

"While English women novelists, even those as poor as the Brontës, had servants, American women were expected to clean, cook and sew; even in the south, white women in slave-holding families were trained in domestic arts."

As Hughes points out, it's really misleading to suppose British middle-class women like the Brontes were sitting on their hands all day just because they kept the odd maid (as did their US equivalents, anyway). In fact "the mistress of the middle-class household was most likely to be cooking and cleaning alongside her servants. In the days before vacuum cleaners, washing machines and fridges, the daily battle against soot, bedbugs, candle grease and mouldy food was one that lasted pretty much all day and required every hand on deck.".

This, though, does leave the original question: where were the American Brontes? And there probably isn't one simple answer, but two possibilities do occur. First, there hadn't been much time to build up a tradition of women's writing in America (and what there was seems to have been poetry). The Brontes, Eliot, even Austen, did have both fellow women writers and precursors, maybe not many but enough to provide a bit of vital I-can-do-this encouragement.

The other thought is that since the likes of Austen, Eliot and the Brontes couldn't hope to get paid a lot for their work, however much they might have liked to, they could at least write more or less what they wanted. Austen in particular got peanuts. There were 19th-century American women novelists; Stowe and Alcott come to mind, but they were writing neither for themselves nor for posterity. Stowe was writing for a cause, so aiming for maximum sales and publicity. And Alcott. like her heroine Jo, was writing for money, so had to do the same. I don't know what the relative markets were like at that time (other than that the US wouldn't recognise foreign copyright). Was it the case that a writer, even a woman writer, stood a better chance of actually making a living by writing in America? If that were so, it might at least partly explain writers aiming at a market that may simply have been less available in the UK. I guess the likes of Mrs Radcliff made more in the UK than the Austens and Brontes, but AFAIK, even she wasn't actually financially dependent on writing. Anthony Trollope's mum did make a living with her pen, but she was a travel writer, I think?

Interesting.

- which should enlarge if clicked on. First. the village. Shetland, like Wales, tends to have ribbon villages along roads, but Hoswick is one of its few nucleated ones. I don't think this actually shows our place, which would be just off to the left.




Second the poster.... Hoswick is part of a wider community called Sandwick and it was the fishermen of Sandwick, back in the early 20th century, who put up this poster proclaiming their refusal to sell herring bait to the fishermen of Dunrossness, down the road, because Dunrossness had elected a Tory councillor, "which is calculated to be against the benefit of the Working Classes".

Well, himself has been up in Shetland talking to lawyers (my favourite line from Cat Ballou: "You've poisoned his well; you've made him talk to lawyers") and the grey house in the middle of the picture above is where we be goin' to live, eventually. Though by the time we live there it will be painted white. It's called Bayview (I know, I know, naff but at least it's accurate) and it's in a village called Hoswick. We'll be dividing our time between there and Cardiff for a while; we aren't selling the house in Cardiff yet, partly because it is hardly the right time to sell a house (and the way interest rates are, you might as well have the money in bricks and mortar as anywhere else) and mostly because our 19-year-old cat can't be expected to move at his time of life. So it doesn't entirely feel like My Place yet, but no doubt once I manage to get up there and play with it (and its walled, sea-facing garden) it will.

Anyone who had a good laugh at Warrior Lovers needs to go to this post in which lauredhel links to a youtube vid of Symons expounding on slash and the strange creatures (known in the local dialect as "women") who write it.

Mind you, his sheer wrongness (and ignorance of same) isn't so funny.

... though unlike the BBC we are not promising mendaciously to abide by the people's choice. But my publishers are seriously interested to know what the potential readers think of the various candidates for the cover image of my next book, which is a Later Selected Poems. So...

here is a gallery of 7 images. In the gallery view they are sometimes the wrong shape, but click on one, it will appear as it should and then you can go to "next picture" - see top right - through the 7. Not all have text added yet.

And then you can vote! How's this for interactive literature?



Which gets your vote?
Landscape 1
Polar bear 1
Polar bear 2
Franklin
Map
Landscape 2
Kite



EDIT: I have, btw, been told to keep quiet about my own views. Also I have tried to make this a proper poll with ticky boxes but though it looked fine in the preview it lost them. So it'll have to be comments...

- that would be Edwin Morgan, above, who is 89 today. It is considerably more than 6 years since some doc told him he had only 6 years to live, but that's Indomitable Genius for you. A lot of great writers are not very nice people; he is. Here's a link to A Home in Space, on his web site

- and to Strawberries, same place.

Strangely enough, he shares his birthday with Samuel Morse, which I'm sure he appreciates; he has always been interested in unconventional language. Here's The Loch Ness Monster's Song, a sad little narrative which makes perfect sense when you hear him read it. (I must check if it's on youttube; will edit if I find it)

- for the Wales Book of the Year prize. With another 9 (one of them the poetry collection Mandeville by Matthew Francis, who's not only a good friend of mine but has written a fine book, blast him). Three will get shortlisted at the Hay festival in May, then one will go on to win in June (provided they don't get an idiot politician to read out the winner and find he reads the wrong name, as happened last year...)

And there's also a People's Choice category; folk can go here and vote for their friends and relatives favourite books. Should be interesting to see if the two votes agree!

Here's a free sample:

The Opportune Moment

If you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it" - Capt Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

When you go ashore in that town,
take neither a camera nor a notebook.
However many photographs you upload
of that street, the smell of almond paste
will be missing; the harbour will not sound
of wind slapping on chains. You will read
notes like "Sami church", later, and know
you saw nothing, never put it where
you could find it again, were never
really there. When you go ashore
in the small port with the rusty trawlers,
there will be fur hawkers who all look
like Genghis Khan on a market stall,
crumbling pavements, roses frozen in bud,
an altar with wool hangings, vessels
like canal ware, a Madonna
with a Russian doll face. When you go
ashore, take nothing but the knowledge
that where you are, you never will be again

Booksellers, like anyone else, tend to hype their goods. But The Bookseller currently reports

"Wm Heinemann has acquired a début novel from Welsh policeman Mike Thomas. Publishing director Jason Arthur acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for Pocketnotebook from Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown. The title is about a police firearms officer experiencing a mental breakdown, which he records meticulously in his pocket notebook. The publisher is calling the book an "angry black comedy" and an exposé of the macho culture within the police. Arthur described Thomas as a "wonderfully talented and original new voice". The title will be published in February 2010."

I can promise they're telling no more than the truth, 'cos I've read it. Mike wrote it on the University of Glamorgan's Masters in Writing course, while working full-time on the beat, and I've been following it avidly from the start. If anyone had given me a back-jacket blurb that said "this is set in a really macho culture, full of casual sex, drugs, violence and bad language and is also as pacy as a rollercoaster" I would have concluded it was Not My Type Of Book. I don't usually go for lots of action, and I wouldn't have thought I could easily sympathise with a violent, macho, extremely un-PC PC.

It says something about how mesmerisingly well it's done, then, that in fact I couldn't put it down, and that by the end I cared extremely about what was going to happen to Jacob, the protagonist. I think I'll try to cajole Mike and Heinemann into letting me quote something from it, but basically its appeal has to do partly with the frenetic pace and mostly with the author's total assurance in the book's world. When his policemen pull scams, swap banter, bestow nicknames, you just know this is how it really happens - there's all the difference in the world between an author visiting this world from outside and one who works in it every day. The only annoyance is having to wait until early 2010 for it.

Amazon's rationale for removing "adult" books from its sales listings doesn't altogether make sense to me. "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature" is both silly and hypocritical - it's easy enough to find these titles by using the search option; if Amazon were really so concerned for the morality of the young or easily offended, they'd be better off not selling them, though not of course financially better off....

But their apparent definition of "adult & potentially offensive"="LGBT, even in its most non-explicit form" is plain disgusting. Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast - a memoir of grief by a great poet, not explicit in anyone's language - is "adult"; Playboy centrefold collections and books on dog-fighting are child-friendly?

They must have been ploughing through in a fairly haphazard way, to judge by the current inconsistencies, but they need their mind(?) changing before it goes further. There are petitions, but I favour the Google-bomb myself.

This is my publisher's current favoured look for my next. I'm not sure. It's non-girly, which is good, and has Arctic associations, which is appropriate (it's one of the expeditions that went out in search of Franklin and I've got a long Franklin sequence in the book). But it could be a bit drab. What do you think?

I've just added a new FAQs page to my website, specifically for those unfortunates currently studying the WJEC English AS-level paper which has a module on me and Carol Ann Duffy (the only context in which we are an item).
I added it because I get so much email from students who are convinced (a) that there's one true, perfect interpretation of every poem and (b) that I, as the writer, know it. I wasn't surprised that students would think this, but I've been mildly astonished to hear the same "what is this poem about" queries from teachers.

( Text copied under cut )

If anyone can think of useful additions, I'll have 'em...

Andrew Motion in today's Guardian:

"News editors don't think a poem is a story in and of itself, so they then get on the phone to as many people as it takes to find someone who doesn't like the poem - then they have their story: poet laureate writes another no-good poem.

I'm not the first laureate to complain about this. John Betjeman (who got so fed up with it he considered resigning) and Hughes say exactly the same thing in their letters. But I am the first person to say it in public - call that a privilege of my 10-year span, if you like. My point is not simply that the response is tiresome for whoever happens to be laureate. The point is: it's bad for poetry in general - but journalists apparently have some difficulty (or, more likely, no interest) in grasping this."

This is absolutely true, though not just of poetry. It's true in a wider sense of literature - the Whitbread prize for biography was only news the year two authors who happened to be husband and wife were "rivals" for it, and I've been rung up a few times by BBC bods who were doing stories about fan fiction and hoped that, as a published author, I would tell them how terrible and intrusive it was. When I told them what harmless fun it was, they were gravely disappointed, though to their credit BBC Wales has latched on to this now and rings me up when some other author is getting stroppy about it. But the format is still "find two people to disagree on air, or find one to take a negative view", and it extends beyond the arts. "Government Initiative Succeeds" isn't news. "Exam Results Improve" isn't news unless you cast doubt on their accuracy. I happen to think this is bad for society in general - anyone would think our national newspapers were all edited by Eeyore - but I think Motion is right that it's particularly obvious in editors' treatment of poetry, perhaps because they see poets as an elitist bunch who need mocking. They do love being able to portray them as forever feuding and squabbling, though, bizarrely and inconsistently, they also see them as forming cliques to assist each other's careers in underhand ways, which you wouldn't think they'd do if they really hated each other so much.

One result is that if a literary author of any kind wants publicity for a book, he or she is well advised to find some totally non-literary angle - invent a feud or a case of censorship. Which demeans things, but is scarcely unexpected....