NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS » On Poetry

‘The poem that every young man should learn to recite by heart if he wants to pull classy girls’

Nigel Beale — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:32:41 +0000

The incomparable Clive on Louis Macneice: As is only proper, we go on forever hearing about W.H. Auden. But we never hear enough about his friend Louis MacNeice, although there were things MacNeice could do that even the prodigiously facile Auden could not. One of them was Autumn Journal, my favourite long [...]

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Forward Prize for Poetry: List of Winners

Nigel Beale — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:21:03 +0000

Best Collection 2009: Don Paterson, Rain (Faber) 2008: Mick Imlah, The Lost Leader (Faber) 2007: Sean O’Brien, The Drowned Book (Picador) 2006: Robin Robertson, Swithering (Picador) 2005: David Harsent, Legion (Faber & Faber) 2004: Kathleen Jamie, The Tree House (Picador) 2003: Ciarán Carson, Breaking News (The Gallery Press) 2002: Peter Porter, Max is Missing (Picador) 2001: Sean O’Brien, Downriver (Picador) 2000: Michael Donaghy, Conjure (Picador) 1999: [...]

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Marking Bloomsday: A Canadian Poet…

Nigel Beale — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:38:16 +0000

…riffs off Joyce’s Ulysses in a collection of poems entitled Bloom (read review here). Listen here as Michael Lista reads "Louis Slotin as Pigeon Feeder" one of the strongest poems in the collection, highlighted by these charged lines: When your replacement, Alvin Graves, adhered himself to her in the centre of the dance floor and [...]

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Head Shaking and the best Canadian Poem

Nigel Beale — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:19:12 +0000

1. First there are the words and the music they make; then there’s your interpretation of the meaning of these words – and the emotional and intellectual impact they have on you – triggered largely by life experience, and, to a lesser extent, other work you may have read. 2. Then there’s what the poet says [...]

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Apparently all poets do this…

Nigel Beale — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 11:19:15 +0000

The Guardian 1927: During a summer walk in Appletreewick, Yorkshire W.H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis came upon a dry-stone wall. "A hundred yards from the wall, as if on a common impulse, we both began to walk faster: in fifty or sixty yards, we broke into a trot, and we were sprinting all out over the [...]

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Time to reconsider John Masefield

Nigel Beale — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 03:04:13 +0000

"Cargo Ships on the Sands of the Elbe" by Johann Martin Gensler During our visit together in Philadelphia Frank Wilson brought this great poem (written in 1903) to my attention: "Cargoes" by the English Poet-laureate John Masefield (1878-1967) : Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And [...]

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Hopkins, Wells, Music and Communication

Nigel Beale — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:38:51 +0000

Over at the Guardian Carol Rumens gives us a splendid reading of ‘The Windhover’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Concise and cerebral, it contains illuminating factual, biographical background, set against simple structural analysis… The Windhover To Christ Our Lord I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him [...]

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Poetry Month, Climate Change and George Murray’s ‘Hunter’

Nigel Beale — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:15:45 +0000

I notice that this year’s Poetry Month theme is climate change. Not sure that the best is typically written on-demand or by prescription; George Murray’s Hunter probably wasn’t. I think it one of the best poems written on this topic… Here’s an excerpt: The forest lies quiet immediately before the axe, the desert gives up accelerating the wind. Across [...]

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Watch out for this Explosion, Coming Soon…

Nigel Beale — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:41:55 +0000

From Anansi: "On May 21, 1946, the day of a lunar eclipse, a Canadian physicist named Louis Slotin was training his replacement on the Manhattan Project, preparing the bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Slotin decided to forego the standard safety procedures, and there was an accident: the plutonium went critical, a phenomenon [...]

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Who’s running the Antigonish Review anyway?

Nigel Beale — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:35:32 +0000

"I know what I like" criticism from rob mclennan in the Antigonish Review on Carmine Starnino's "Cornage": "What I find most interesting (no explanation of why) about CREDO, and conversely, most disappointing (no explanation of why, other than "I would have expected better'), is the fourth section, the long poem "Cornage," a salvage-type operation (say again?) [...]

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Brent on Betjeman, Betjeman on Brent

Nigel Beale — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:31:18 +0000

David Brent’s reading of Slough (via Carmine Starnino) Slough’s reading of David Brent Slough (Written in 1937) Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now, There isn’t grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death! Come, bombs and blow to smithereens Those air -conditioned, bright canteens, Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned [...]

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rob mclennan requests attention…

Nigel Beale — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:04:41 +0000

rob mclennan, in this querulous little post, worries that my profile of him in Guerilla magazine focuses on the writer instead of the writing. Hello? rob: the piece is a P-R-O-F-I-L-E, not a review…and how it manages to constitute ‘sour grapes,’ or ‘diva behavior’, as you suggest, I really don’t know. What I do know, [...]

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Rexroth on Homer and the Great Chinese Poets

Nigel Beale — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:18:46 +0000

As you read the Iliad and Odyssey, says Kenneth Rexroth, the sublimity of the conception rises slowly through the sublimity of the language. "An old man, blind now, who has known all the courts and ships and men and women of the Eastern Mediterranean, tells you, with all the conviction of total personal involvement in [...]

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Crow Alights by Ted Hughes

Nigel Beale — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:32:51 +0000

Crow Alights by Ted Hughes Crow saw the herded mountains, steaming in the morning. and he saw the sea Dark-spined, with the whole earth in its coils. He saw the stars, fuming away into the black, mushrooms of the nothing forest, clouding their spores, the virus of God. And he shivered with the horror of Creation. In the hallucination of the horror He [...]

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The Unforgettable John Smith

Nigel Beale — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:42:15 +0000

More interesting stuff surfacing as I pack up and browse (mostly the latter) through my books. Settled upon a collection of poems by a relatively obscure poet with this unforgettable name: John Smith. Evidently he got into the Literary agency business after writing poems and plays – mostly in the 1950s – and editing the [...]

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