Ah what can I say about my new book? It has the smell of summer leaves or ripe corn and the touch of silk, the finest spun silk slipping though your fingers. To touch it is to be reminded of all those childhood mornings when you woke up happy, just because the sky was blue and the wide, wide world was calling. Visually it is a thing of beauty, and also truth, successfully combining the look of parchment, priceless manuscripts treasured and pored over by philosophers and scholars of long ago, with the jeweled artifice of exotic dynasties...
Did I mention that it's out tomorrow?
Also that you can read about it in the Independent 26th June 2014!
Wednesday, 25 June 2014
Friday, 6 June 2014
world domination stats up 0.000000000001% this week!
This is because I have put my bio on goodreads and the amazon site author central. As my favourite mentee Iris has said, I have turned into a marketing machine!
Wednesday, 4 June 2014
Tuesday, 3 June 2014
Ok - so copies of my new book have arrived, look amazing and smell even better! Now I have to decide what to do with them. Of course, getting rid of free copies is never a problem. There is Amazing Anna, for instance, who read the whole book for me in its earlier and much longer form, believed in it & comforted me when I was ready to lie down in the middle of the East Lancs Road at rush hour, and read it all over again in its present form - she definitely deserves a copy. As does Ian-next-door-but-one, who resolved my many computing crises, my son who also read it for me, the aforementioned librarian who will promote it on her Time to Read website, a colleague who is going to interview me in the Manchester Children's Book Festival etc etc. See what I mean?
Obviously I will have to order more copies. While ploughing on through points 1 - 10 of my world domination plan.
Current world domination rating 568411702 934970.
Somewhere behind Obama and Putin.
While waiting for me to clamber into the no.1 spot, you might like to check out www.myindependentbookshop/livimichael
This is a project developed by Penguin/Random House in which authors are invited to create their own virtual bookshop, put their favourite books in it and review them. I thought this was a great idea - see what you think.
Obviously I will have to order more copies. While ploughing on through points 1 - 10 of my world domination plan.
Current world domination rating 568411702 934970.
Somewhere behind Obama and Putin.
While waiting for me to clamber into the no.1 spot, you might like to check out www.myindependentbookshop/livimichael
This is a project developed by Penguin/Random House in which authors are invited to create their own virtual bookshop, put their favourite books in it and review them. I thought this was a great idea - see what you think.
Saturday, 31 May 2014
Hello everyone. Starting to blog again - mainly about my new book. Because it's been a long time since I published in the adult field and everything has changed. Specifically how books are publicised and distributed. Looks like the author has to do more work. So. As some people will know, I have written many books. This is not unusual in itself. What is more unusual is that I actually seem to be less famous now than before I started writing. This is partly my own fault for opting out of everything in order to write Succession. When I wrote the first version of my novel and couldn't place it I developed a 58-point plan for the regeneration of my career. Subtitled: What to Do When You are Down and Out of the Publishing World in London. Admittedly only points 11 and 12 actually worked i.e. writing it again and sending it to someone else - but I learned a lot in the process! Now I have a new 58 point plan which I will publish as I work my way through it, with the intention of seeing just what, if anything is actually effective.
Watch this space...
Watch this space...
Thursday, 29 May 2014
Saturday, 11 May 2013
Demeter by Carol Ann Duffy
Another poem to add to my own personal anthology is Demeter by Carol Ann Duffy. I love the dramatic shift in this poem, which in so few words, and fourteen lines conveys the movement from grief to joy. When I read it in the way I have taken to reading poetry, (line by line, then sentence by sentence etc.) I found that I had to persist to get the exact order of words in my mind. Ten of the lines are interrupted by the punctuation and an unexpected ordering of words, which caused in my ear slight irregularities of rhythm. The overall effect is to slow it down so that you do get the full impact of the emotional shift. And there is a beautiful contrast between the hard words at the beginning and the gentle, softer words at the end:
I swear/the air softened and warmed as she moved/the blue sky smiling, none too soon/ with the small mouth of the new moon.
Lovely.
The mysterious line for me is 'but i saw her at last, walking/my daughter, my girl, across the fields,//in my bare feet'
what I immediately thought of was the genetic resemblance between mother and daughter, but then also considered that this story is very old, probably rooted in the time of goddess worship & the goddess traditionally had three aspects, virgin, queen and crone. So possibly in this poem the mother and daughter are both aspects of the same goddess.
It seems to me that poetry is close to myth in that they both strip the narrative to its essence, so that what they convey is a truth that can be universally applied; in this case the shift from winter to spring, loss to restoration in spare, tangible language.
I recently bought a new book of poems - Drysalter by Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape).
It is a seriously good collection, formally exquisite - 150 poems each 15 lines long, containing such a rich diversity of themes that I can't do justice to all of them - I'm going to pick out one or two that particularly interest me.
After years of writing I'm coming to the conclusion that the real power lies in the thing unsaid, and that poetry is closest to the thing unsaid. In one of the poems for example, Immortal, Invisible,Wise the first line draws attention to the inadequacy of the words in the title:
'In such mighty stature he stands'
and later lines contain the suggestion of what he is not:
'He has become no more or less than sky./ Pylon skip-ropes swing between his feet/airliner wing-tips brush his lips,/
the sun's print in his eye becomes/ a day-lit pole-star...
In a poem which seems to me to be about the transcendent rather than the immanent, or intimate, God found in To Listen what is unsaid is the need for attention.:
he holds so still,/ has held for so long this, his repose,/that no one sees him any more.....
and although the world/is never silent, there are split-second/gaps when you can hear his long-drawn/ breath begin to shape a word.
This is the need for attention in the Simone Veil sense of the word: 'the direction towards God of all the attention that the soul is capable of...it cannot be replaced by the heart's warmth.' And in fact the god in this poem is not apparently warm and loving. But if the act of attention 'consists in suspending thought, in leaving it empty and available, subject to penetration by the object...like a man on a mountain, who looking in front of him sees without looking at them many forests and plains below him,' then the God of this poem is not so much divorced from the world as engaged in a universal attention; which effort is beyond or rejected by man (in the poem Refuseniks), who, like the psalmist in another poem sings 'for fear I'll hear the still/ small voice and not like what it says.....
Listen. The unsung is unuttering,/sucking back into itself/the inverse of words...'
(Portrait of the Psalmist as Ultra-Singer).
Throughout this collection there are images of dislocated, alienated man, who, despite being locked into the quotidian, might suddenly experience a shift in perspective, as in Rare Sighting, or, as in Discoverers, suddenly respond to a call that goes beyond maps and astrolabes, so that he can sing his way home.
Frequently the immanence of god seems to be suggested by the symbolism of song. In Elegy for John Milton
paradise has become 'an old zoo/abandoned by its keepers, broken cages/ravaged by years of unchecked flora/buddleia, cotoneaster, ragwort,/bindweed, russian vine, dead nettle, ivy?on the edge of evolving into song.'
By contrast the birds in Abyss of Birds are already sung; both immanence and transcendence are captured in a single, astonishing sentence.
Hopefully I have suggested that in this collection the frame of reference is large; anagogic. I should also mention that there are moments of intimacy and tenderness too, as in Des Canyons Aux Etoiles, when the two come together.
I swear/the air softened and warmed as she moved/the blue sky smiling, none too soon/ with the small mouth of the new moon.
Lovely.
The mysterious line for me is 'but i saw her at last, walking/my daughter, my girl, across the fields,//in my bare feet'
what I immediately thought of was the genetic resemblance between mother and daughter, but then also considered that this story is very old, probably rooted in the time of goddess worship & the goddess traditionally had three aspects, virgin, queen and crone. So possibly in this poem the mother and daughter are both aspects of the same goddess.
It seems to me that poetry is close to myth in that they both strip the narrative to its essence, so that what they convey is a truth that can be universally applied; in this case the shift from winter to spring, loss to restoration in spare, tangible language.
I recently bought a new book of poems - Drysalter by Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape).
It is a seriously good collection, formally exquisite - 150 poems each 15 lines long, containing such a rich diversity of themes that I can't do justice to all of them - I'm going to pick out one or two that particularly interest me.
After years of writing I'm coming to the conclusion that the real power lies in the thing unsaid, and that poetry is closest to the thing unsaid. In one of the poems for example, Immortal, Invisible,Wise the first line draws attention to the inadequacy of the words in the title:
'In such mighty stature he stands'
and later lines contain the suggestion of what he is not:
'He has become no more or less than sky./ Pylon skip-ropes swing between his feet/airliner wing-tips brush his lips,/
the sun's print in his eye becomes/ a day-lit pole-star...
In a poem which seems to me to be about the transcendent rather than the immanent, or intimate, God found in To Listen what is unsaid is the need for attention.:
he holds so still,/ has held for so long this, his repose,/that no one sees him any more.....
and although the world/is never silent, there are split-second/gaps when you can hear his long-drawn/ breath begin to shape a word.
This is the need for attention in the Simone Veil sense of the word: 'the direction towards God of all the attention that the soul is capable of...it cannot be replaced by the heart's warmth.' And in fact the god in this poem is not apparently warm and loving. But if the act of attention 'consists in suspending thought, in leaving it empty and available, subject to penetration by the object...like a man on a mountain, who looking in front of him sees without looking at them many forests and plains below him,' then the God of this poem is not so much divorced from the world as engaged in a universal attention; which effort is beyond or rejected by man (in the poem Refuseniks), who, like the psalmist in another poem sings 'for fear I'll hear the still/ small voice and not like what it says.....
Listen. The unsung is unuttering,/sucking back into itself/the inverse of words...'
(Portrait of the Psalmist as Ultra-Singer).
Throughout this collection there are images of dislocated, alienated man, who, despite being locked into the quotidian, might suddenly experience a shift in perspective, as in Rare Sighting, or, as in Discoverers, suddenly respond to a call that goes beyond maps and astrolabes, so that he can sing his way home.
Frequently the immanence of god seems to be suggested by the symbolism of song. In Elegy for John Milton
paradise has become 'an old zoo/abandoned by its keepers, broken cages/ravaged by years of unchecked flora/buddleia, cotoneaster, ragwort,/bindweed, russian vine, dead nettle, ivy?on the edge of evolving into song.'
By contrast the birds in Abyss of Birds are already sung; both immanence and transcendence are captured in a single, astonishing sentence.
Hopefully I have suggested that in this collection the frame of reference is large; anagogic. I should also mention that there are moments of intimacy and tenderness too, as in Des Canyons Aux Etoiles, when the two come together.
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