A Winter's Day at Westonbirt & other poems, by CJ (Jonty) Driver (reviewed by Gillian Southgate)

 

The  focus of the title poem in this collection are the trees at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire, which is viewed as a microcosm of England in 2020.  The poem contrasts the nineteenth century arboretum with the country as it now stands, poised to undertake new direction and growth, but still subject to political buffeting. Different facets of national identity are reflected in the diversity of the trees; ‘some stubborn, strong and awkward,’, some ‘apt to spiral out of shape.’ Each tree is catalogued, each is compatible in the context of a small English park. Like the country, some trees are vulnerable, but there’s a note of optimism about the future; the oak tree referred to in stanza one is fenced in, ‘as if it knew by now how not to fall’.

The poet encounters on a path a group of children who ‘make no attempt to fraternise’, but the trees go on growing together, indifferent to human insularity. In political terms, ‘we’ve circled round the paths and find ourselves precisely where we were before.’ But these lines are also a metaphor for our never having learned the lessons of mutual dependency, something the trees have long both known and benefited from.

The second stanza begins: ‘So, think about this place in England now’. An England, the poem affirms, ‘hemmed in with silly rules…. but passionately free.’ The final line acknowledges that no-one knows where we are going next. This is true of our personal, as well as our political future. The only certainty, the collection will reveal, is the fact of death, which topples nations, people, even trees in the course of the years.

There are nine more poems in the group. The garden theme continues in ‘Old Oak’ where the last line signals that the tree of life is in time cut down for us all. By contrast, ‘In a French Garden’ life itself is seen as flagrantly alive in the troupe of hoopoes with ‘panaches furled, then flared’. ‘Last Lesson’ is a tender, regretful poem in which the poem’s retired schoolteacher comes to understand the human urge to shape and force into conformity the teeming natural life around us. In old age, her judgements have softened, disappearing ‘like end of season daffodils’ and she laments not having left well alone, and allowed her plants and pupils to flourish.

The rhymed poem ‘Song of the Sparrows’ is elegiac, the writer accepting the threat of death in a plague year, even in the face of sparrows busily occupied in preparing for their next generation. Similarly, the poem ‘In the Lodi Garden’, fixes the readers’ eye on  vibrant images of a public place in New Delhi, but there is a dying fall in the last quatrain, sibilant sounds and the symmetry of organisation expressing the sacred nature of life ‘gathered in a garden.’

The final poem is a haiku.  The poet views, in full summer, a tumbled wisteria wearing the white of snowfall, a reminder of winter, and of the passing of time.

The coherence in the collection is in the themes of nature, enduringly alive, and the mind of man, who knows his days are numbered. From the general we move gradually to the particular, the white wisteria bearing within its blossoms the seeds of death. The poetry is enhanced by Jonty Driver’s delicate paintings employing a tree motif which ages with the seasons. It’s a fine collection, encompassing abundant life, transience, inevitability, and acceptance.

 

(This poetry pamphlet is, as with Jonty's other recent publications, reviewed below, available through Artwrite in Rye (Website artwrite.co,uk)

 

Mid life: Views and Poetics: talk by Nii Ayikwei Parkes, 20 November 2020

 The Lit. Soc. assembled in their now customary cyberspace huddle to hear from Nii Ayikwei Parkes whom pre-match billing had presented as a true Renaissance Man – novelist, poet, publisher, embodying the distinct cultures of Britain and Ghana and trailing clouds of glory from a fistful of glittering, international literary prizes.  Our 46 year old guest had chosen to address the topic of midlife, offering his views and analysing its effect on his work through some of the elements of Aristotle’s Poetics. 

Significantly divorcing it from its loyal attendant crisis, Parkes offered a thoughtful view from his own experience of midlife.  He saw it as the start of his life after the watershed of his children growing up and reinforced the notion of transition by commenting that although the ingredients of his life – work, reading, writing – remained the same, somehow the finished dish tasted different.  He quoted the example of Brazilian and Cuban cooking where identical ingredients yielded markedly different end products. 

Nii displayed his abilities as a performance poet with readings from Aminatta Forna’s Happiness  and the St. Lucian, Sir Derek Walcott’s The Bounty, using the latter as a platform to introduce the analytical elements of Poetics.  To illustrate the concept of shapeshifting in this Caribbean setting, he used the transformative role of the tide in the metamorphosis of a reef to a series of small islands.  Shapeshifting of  familial roles altered the nature of  his own  literary output, notably fatherhood and then  losing his own father.  He corroborated this with readings from The Making of You  and Caress from his poetry collection The Geez, both readings linked by a gardening theme.  Fatherhood also shifted his interpretation of actions having him now always  seeking the purpose or motive behind them.   

Employing the workshop approach, our guest solicited questions from the audience which demonstrated their intent to trap that elusive wraith, creativity.  Nii confessed that his ideas germinated from random seeds borne on the wind, overheard snatches of conversation, trawling bursts of song from the depths of memory, similes conjured from subconscious associations, exploiting the altered language and geography that were the legacy of a dual national heritage.  These struck the creative spark that fired the imagination to write the plot or mythos and summon the characters (ethos).        

Pressed on the difference between writing Prose and Poetry, Nii likened the former to building a house and the latter to decorating it.  As the simile implies, prose needs more stamina and self-belief requiring a leap of faith to start the process and the conviction that you would see it through    The plot forms round the kernel of your preliminary ideas and about half way through you achieve critical mass and sufficient momentum and self confidence to carry you through to the end.  Intermittent reading aloud (lexis) helped sustain the creative impulse and Parkes likened the acquisition of that critical, creative momentum to driving as a teenager during a severe petrol shortage where opportunities to freewheel on long descents were seized with an exultant alacrity.  A different Muse fostered Poetry in a more seductive process whose origins lay in feelings rather than ideas.  Music or melos could be influential donating an evocative phrase from the lyrics of a song or altering interpretation; a butcher – of what, livestock or men?  The ability to draw from  the wellsprings of both English and West African cultures was an asset.  There was no conflict and the range of different tongues widened his linguistic vocabulary. 

The Lit. Soc. had enjoyed a stimulating and thought provoking evening delivered in a novel format and as one audience member observed lockdown’s deprivations  had made space for Nii’s material – thereby obviating the need for preliminary catharsis, Aristotelian or otherwise.  Whew!       

By William Doherty  

 

COOKING FOR ONE by Gillian Southgate

First thing: turn your computer off. You’ve worked since six a.m.

You’re absolutely starving, and you’re on your own, pro tem.

So dig a fat white onion out, and dice it very fine,

Add two crushed cloves of garlic and a glass of good red wine,

Then put in oregano, thyme, and sugar (just a tad)

A tin of chopped tomatoes, and the best mince to be had.

If you like, throw in some pepper, broken mushrooms, what you will,

Some fennel, even, but leave out the stronger herbs, like dill.

Cook all of this down slowly on an even, gentle heat,

And you’ll end up with a pasta sauce that’s pretty hard to beat.

At this point, pour yourself another glass of something red,

Boil up spaghetti in a pan, or penne shapes instead,

Add just a little oil so that the pasta moves about,

Then drain, supply a shallow bowl, and spoon the supper out.

Italian food is just the thing to cook if you’re on furlough,

A dish for one, and perfect with another glass of Merlot.

 

(This poem was the winning entry in a recent Literary Competition in The Oldie)

 

 

 

The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping Samantha Harvey (Zoom Meeting 23 October 2020)

The Lit. Soc. delighted once again in welcoming Samantha Harvey, albeit on this occasion as a Zoom mediated apparition, who elucidated the process which yielded her latest book  The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. She mapped the battlefield of her years-long struggle with insomnia, explaining how this generated a tortured creative process resulting in her  latest  book, which veered dramatically away from the course set by her earlier works.  

She opened with the first of several  readings from Shapeless Unease and detailed her encounter with unsolicited, nocturnal wakefulness and revealed how intimidating the prospect of “the yawning expanse of a night awake” was.   Linking Sleep and Death, a recurring pairing through the talk, she confessed how in the restless throes of insomnia she was haunted by an image of herself as the reluctant centrepiece of groups assembled in medieval death-bed scenes. The evening started to assume the form of a case presentation by some late Victorian medical luminary theatrically unveiling a patient’s inner torments to an audience of medical students, junior doctors and speculative, intelligent laymen. On this occasion the normal denoument in which the professor, exuding Olympian detachment and an assured serenity, pulls the rabbit of  diagnosis from his top hat and moves on to the morale boosting topic of treatment failed to materialise and Samantha remained mentally embattled.

In the absence of a treatable cause and a therapeutic silver bullet, Samantha’s intractable guerrilla war with insomnia dragged on, draining but devoid of any dramatic focus or likely resolution. It might have started with domestic anxieties but precise recollection was proving difficult. GP consultations resulted in a strained relationship and a refractory malaise. Discussions with a Christian friend and scrutinising her situation through the prism of religion only increased nervous tension and feelings of vulnerability. Driven in desperation to the wild side, she found cold water swimming – particularly that initial immersion of head and face – produced a transient, pleasing distraction but no cure. Writing in her customary, conventional style proved an unattainable objective; she could not maintain the narrative arc for a novel but found some solace  in an intimate, self - searching  approach. Her output was fragmented; some of the shards identified with an indigenous Amazonian tribe, others managed to embed a complete and  coherent short story in the body of her text while the rest were elements from her autobiography. She became absorbed by the nature and structure of this new work and the possible well springs of her new Muse – a distillation of  multiple conversations with herself, a veiled truth- telling exercise?  Was all this mental thrashing about sucking her down into psychological quicksand – denied dreams now; had writing become a way to process her subconscious?  Uninvited images from these wakeful vigils were incorporated into her text.  Startling conclusions ricocheted round her cranial vault; the mind was a prison, love was the escape of the self from the self and could proliferate.  She found she wrote easily, writing  “helped”;  this last book completed in 4 months as against her previous average of 2-3 years   

The memoir of this  anguished internal reflection was coaxed from her by her publisher with a view to printing it as a magazine article but the plan was  changed to marketing it as a book. But what had she written?  Self-indulgence?  Self-help?  Female auto – fiction? Psycho-masochistic trauma porn?  Where were the boundaries these days between fiction and non-fiction?  Whatever others say, Harvey is convinced the book is genuine and is prepared to stand by it. 

The audience almost palpably ached for a happy ending – the serial long dark nights of the soul would end and Joy would "cometh in the morning".  Reality was more prosaic; Samantha remained a martyr to insomnia but could  manage it and her expectations better. She quotes from Macbeth and reveals she knows what she is missing   

……….the innocent sleep

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast.        

Resignation has proven a sturdy carapace – others’ judgement of her work intrigues rather than enrages, she accepts she cannot control the book’s journey post-publication,  politics is viewed with detached equanimity even if alloyed with disappointment. 

A lively Q&A session indicated that the Winchelsea audience was fully engaged with this highly original foray into experimental writing. 

William Doherty

 

Printing, Literacy & Bookselling in Early Renaissance Venice; Zoomed talk by Patricia Erskine-Hill, 25 September 2020

 

While for Shelley it may have been a case of

"Underneath Day’s azure eyes

 Ocean’s nursling, Venice, lies"       

Patricia Erskine-Hill, delivering the latest instalment  of Winchelsea’s Zoom Chronicles, had a different Venice in mind; a fully-weaned maritime power reaping the commercial harvest of a location straddling the main East-West and North-South trade routes and the metropole of an Empire incorporating Corfu, Cyprus, Crete and the Dalmatian coast. By the mid-15^th century, Venice was the industrial powerhouse of its day with the Arsenale naval yard producing 300 ships a year by virtue of an advanced assembly line using a novel modular construction method.

In 1462, an obscure German conflict, the Baden-Palatinate War, saw Mainz sacked and Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing presses destroyed casting his crew of trained printers adrift to seek another European haven  to  foster their craft. The Papal and Neapolitan courts were the initial magnets but some individuals drifted back north to wealthy, cosmopolitan Venice and set up shop there. At this time, print was challenging an established manuscript culture. Laboriously crafted, usually by monks, on expensive vellum (calfskin) these were a niche product for the weighty purses of the European elite and although they were widely distributed even the rich would only possess a few scripts. The scribes were artists whose skill delivered beautiful texts enlivened by a constellation of illustrations. Ownership conferred a social cachet and the manuscript market lasted for several decades after the coming of print. 

The tradition of literature presented as a thing of beauty was duly absorbed by the artisans of print and the audience was treated to a series of delightful slides demonstrating the work of the Venetian publishers, each of whom developed a characteristic “house style”. The format of the text varied with subject matter e.g. theology scripts came in a red and black Gothic font and in the early  days the surrounding illustrations were done by hand. Aldo Manuzio gave us italic script which allowed a more efficient use of page space and was used for more personal material. These printer/publishers were highly educated with Manuzio’s family famously conversing in classical Greek at home. His equally cerebral rival, Marcolini, was a confidant of Titian and publisher of Dante. His work was characterised by spare, plain text set in a clean, uncluttered layout. Their output was mainly Latin and Greek classics and  religious and devotional works which even featured exotic hybrids like a Book of Hours in Arabic. Other staples were fortune telling, cartomancy, chivalric romances drenched in lust and gore and subversive works like Boccaccio’s Decameron  - awash with obscenity and anti-clerical sentiment. Such specialised creativity was a target for plagiarists and although Manuzio had copyright  or “privilege” laws passed, the writ of the Venetian Republic did not run in Lyon or Breslau. Manuzio introduced the Octavo (i.e. Folio folded x3) format and targeted Army officers as a potential market for these” pocket books”.      

Although much more productive than its predecessor, print was still the province of the craftsman. The initial capital investment was substantial -a printing press and  movable type made by highly skilled cutters for whom Greek, Arabic and Hebrew script  proved particularly challenging. The fonts were made from an alloy of lead, tin and the highly toxic antimony.  and each press needed two compositors, two pressmen and an apprentice The last graduated to journeyman which often entailed becoming a travelling salesman for the firm. .Paper was made from rags and relatively expensive and the paper mills in Treviso and Parma had to increase their output  to meet the rising demand. An average print run at this stage consisted ,of around 400 copies although Manuzio had gone to 3000 copies for popular works. The minimum viable run was 100 copies. The workforce was drawn from the cittadini originali, the Venetian citizenry, and had to be literate, numerate and have a working knowledge of Latin. 

The readership was drawn from the nobility, the clergy, the merchant class and the upper echelon of artisans. 33% of adult males and 13% of females (nuns and wives and daughters of the elite) could read with half the literate males knowing Latin.  In Venice, the Rialto bridge and the streets of  Le Mercerie were favoured pitches for book sales. Publishing was an international trade and family networks helped distribution across Europe and the Levant. Northern Europe was the main market and large bookfairs were held in Strasbourg and Nuremburg. Lasting legacies of  this period were the refinement of punctuation with the introduction of the colon and semicolon, the use of annotations and the glossary, in a  move towards the standardisation of language.   

Decline of the Venetian book trade set in around 1560 as competition increased in the secular book market. The city’s open, liberal,  commercial  ethos drew it to the attention of Protestant Reformers who saw a potential door into Italy. As all Monty Python fans would have expected ,  this occurred to the Counter-Reformation Inquisition too and they firmly closed the door. Their introduction of pre-publication censorship reduced the industry’s responsiveness and  popular appeal.

For the sensualists among the Lit. Soc. membership  Patricia Erskine -Hill’s talk would have been illuminating and inspiring, encouraging them to continue to savour the appearance and the feel of a book while naturally retaining their ability to eschew judging it by its cover. 

 William Doherty

 

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