BOOKS RECEIVED

Helen Lopez, Shift Perception, Exeter: Shearsman, 2009, isbn 978-1-84861-073-6 -- my sister Helen's first poetry book.

Andrew Nightingale, The Big Wheel, Kingsbridge, Devon: Oversteps, isbn 978-1-906856-05-2 -- Andrew studied for the MA in Creative Writing at Plymouth.

Christopher Cook, Notes to the Graphites (exhibition catalogue), University of Plymouth: Peninsula Arts Gallery, 2009 -- I have a small collection of Christopher Cook artworks.

Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Ted Pearson, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Steve Benson, Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman and Kit Robinson, The Grand Piano (Part 9): An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975-1980, Detroit, MI: Mode A, 2009, isbn 978-0-9790198-8-3 -- The Grand Piano design and typography by Barrett Watten, cover motif after Varvara Stepanova.

QUARANTINE AT EXETER PHOENIX

I went to see Make Believe by Quarantine at Exeter Phoenix on 1 December. It's a piece of devised theatre performance, a patchwork of stories that must be the stories of the performers themselves, each taken over by other performers and thus turned into fictions presented both as fictions and lived experience. This teasing mix was the main pleasure as the show developed and I liked the changes in pace and mood as it went on. 

    Having opened with one performer telling a personal story that couldn't have been her own, then another, then each of the other performers taking over, it moved on to music and dance, showtime, dressing up, working with a toddler onstage and not onstage, more music and dancing and a big slice of audience involvement. Some of the best theatre events I've seen (and this was one of them) have that quality of theatre cut down to essentials. I've seen it recently in work by Chris Goode and by Lone Twin.  In Make Believe the stripped-down set really works for the production, the curtains used with the panache of Morecombe and Wise, tech crew on view at the side of the stage, wonderful use of music, every aspect dovetailed into the current story. I really loved this show and will look out for their future work.

Talk at Dartington

I was at Dartington (lower image) on Tuesday 20 October for a talk on Darwin for students and staff there. The event was organised by Larry Lynch who directs the field of writing at Dartington. There was a good crowd for a writer's talk and discussion about working methods, the questions went on longer than the original talk. John Hall, Jerome Fletcher and Marianne Morris were there. I stayed over at Sharpham House (top image, thanks Jerome, for your generous hospitality) and was able to look around the wonderful palladian house and estate in the morning, we even saw the vineyard, dairy and walled garden: amazing views from above the river Dart down two bends in the river and north to Totnes.

TRIP TO SWEDEN

I was in Sweden last week for a meeting with the photographer John S Webb to discuss a new collaborative project. John's photo Finnvorduhals, Iceland, 1997 is the cover and frontispiece for my latest book Darwin (Acts of Language, 2009). We spent two days touring Skane by train, ferry, car and on foot, travelling round Oresund and visiting the Louisiana art museum as well as different kinds of landscape around the coast from Malmo where John lives. 

    We saw an international contemporary art show The World is Yours and a one person photography show Jacob Holdts Amerika both at Louisiana, a first rate art museum in Denmark. The Holdts show is a major documentary view of American society in the 1960s and early 70s, rough and ready photo quality with some contemporary more professional looking photos, the whole show focusing especially on race. 

NEW POETRY JOURNAL LAUNCH

The new Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry is launched this autumn with events at Birkbeck College, University of London, 7.30pm, 21 October, featuring Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady, and at University of Salford, 4pm, 9 December, featuring Christine Kennedy, Allen Fisher and Ian Davidson. The JBIIP is an academic journal devoted to a range of late modernist writing on poetry and poetics, and seeks the very best critical writing and reviews for publication.

GAVIN SELERIE AT FURZEACRES

It was great to see Gavin Selerie reading at Furzeacres on Dartmoor yesterday, hosted by Philip Kuhn and Rosie Musgrave. Gavin read from the second section of his book Le Fanu's Ghost, published by Five Seasons Press in 2006. The poems work over the connections between certain locations in Dublin (Phoenix Park, Chapelizod), their recreation in gothic fiction, the Sheridan / Le Fanu family, Wilde, Swift, Beckett, and especially Joyce's Work in Progress which became Finnegans Wake. These Irish literati, their houses and families, their interconnections, are a rich and luminous field for Selerie's obsessive writings and wonderfully inventive poems. The format at Furzeacres allows a writer to take the time to read from a longer work, and Gavin Selerie really benefitted from the opportunity to give us a sense of the expanded literary context of the poems, mapping in Le Fanu's The House by the Church-yard, The Cock and the Anchor, Joyce's letters and early venture as a Cinema manager, Work in Progress, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Francis Bacon's London studio reconstructed in Dublin, the rivers of Dublin and much more. Le Fanu's Ghost is a compendium of literary allusion, an expanding map of Irish culture and its workings in English but also a masterpiece of writerly poetry made of literary sources. I've heard Gavin read from it three times now, quite different performances, and this last one the best and most assured.

     Just for the record, Five Seasons Press makes the finest books you could find, beautifully designed and printed, clear type, sympathetic setting, sewn bindings, unfussy but real quality manufacture on recycled paper. Their list includes poets such as Alan Halsey, Yannis Ritsos, Gary Snyder, and Gavin Selerie, enough said.

BOOKS AND JOURNALS RECEIVED

Rupert M Loydell, Lost in the Slipstream, Maryport, Cumbria: Original Plus, 2009, isbn 978-0-9562433-2-4

Caterina Ricciardi, Ezra Pound and Roma, Rome: Edizione Fuori Commercio, 2009

Carol Watts, When Blue Light Falls, Hunstanton, Norfolk: Oystercatcher Press, 2008, isbn 978-1-905885-11-4

Tony Trehy (ed), Text 2, Bury, Lancashire: Bury Metropolitan Borough Council, 2009, isbn 0-9538915-3-4 -- This is an anthology associated with the Text Festival, Bury, 2009, includes new work by Tony Trehy, Phil Davenport, Hester Reeve, Alan Halsey, P. Inman, Allen Fisher, Caroline Bergvall, Carolyn Thompson, Judy Kendall, Tony Lopez, Scott Thurston, Stephen Miller, Jesse Glass, Joe Devlin, James Davies, Carol Watts, Carl Middleton

Andrew Hiscock et al (eds), English: The Journal of the English Association, OUP, 58, 2009, issn 0013-8215 -- two poems of mine in this journal, a corrupt text of 'A Path Marked with Breadcrumbs' and the first publication of 'On Tuesday'.