Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

The beginning seemeth a great pleasure, but the way out is very narrow to come honourably out thereof.’ – Edmund Dudley on foreign wars

This fifth volume has been a frustratingly long time coming; having devoured the previous four, I often wished the noble lord would get on with it and spend less time giving Reith Lectures and fulminating about lockdowns. But it arrived at last and completes a monumental achievement in historical writing. Though those of us who had collected the previous four in paperback and have made space on our shelves for the fifth were pardonably irritated to find that it was only available in hardback and Kindle (I bought the latter as I decided I couldn’t wait for the paperback).

As usual, one can’t fault the thoroughness of the research, the objectivity of the analysis or the readability of the clear, unfussy writing style – “But if the King’s illness had been a misfortune, his recovery was a disaster”. I would say that in this volume there are fewer of the odd little anecdotes and character sketches that enlivened the others, but that may well be the nature of the material. These were the end times of a preposterously long war which had left lands ravaged and populations exhausted. Most, even in the English government, wanted nothing more than to put a stop to it. The trouble was that they had painted themselves into a corner with their misplaced reverence for the baseless sovereignty claims of Edward III and the conquests of Henry V (who, had he lived, was looking likely to have realised they were unsustainable in the long run and to have come to an accommodation).  They were, as Sumption puts it, “prisoners of their own claims, condemned by the logic of the past to carry on a war that they knew they could no longer win”. Even after it had been irrevocably lost, they went on playing ostrich: “Henry VI and Edward IV continued to make appointments to ghost offices in a Gascon administration which no longer existed, and grants of land and revenues which they no longer possessed”.

Meanwhile ordinary people in France continued to suffer the horrors that followed a “ville prise” and the depredations of unpaid soldiers on both sides who replaced their missing wages via pillage while their masters turned a blind eye:

“A soldier called Colard de Verly from the Dauphinist garrison of Guise was captured in the city’s territory while trying to carry off some local people for ransom. Colard was imprisoned in the felons’ jail pending his appearance in the city’s criminal court. The Dauphin’s representative demanded (and secured) his release, asserting that this was ‘not a crime but a simple act of war’. ‘In conducting his wars’, this officer explained, ‘the King does not have the means to pay his troops, who therefore have no choice but to burn down buildings and kill or kidnap people.” Their own people, be it noted.

English people, though protected from such effects of war in their own lands, were burdened with crippling taxes to support an increasingly useless venture; indeed one reason the English could never conclusively defeat their opponents was that the English parliament, which had to vote the taxes, had had enough of pouring money down an insatiable drain.

This volume, of course, includes the story of Joan of Arc (who, you may be interested to learn, wasn’t a shepherdess and never used her father’s name of Darc – apparently Lorraine women went by the mother’s name) and many another grim episode. Nevertheless, there are moments of light relief – the peace conference at which even the two mediators were not on speaking terms; the meeting to which the prince-bishop of Liege turned up “wearing plate armour and a straw hat”; phrases like “John the Fearless’s cynical promise of honest government and tax cuts”, at which we cannot but feel that very little has changed. But the lasting impression is of how much suffering was caused to ordinary people and to how little purpose. What lay behind the deed of amicable separation executed by Robin and Jeanne Porcher of Châteaudun in 1422, which declared that they could no longer afford to live together as husband and wife, we cannot know for sure, but in all probability it involved the ruin of trade and harvests and/or the ravages of looting, all direct results of a pointless and unjust war.

Perhaps the last word should rest with Bernard Georges of Bordeaux, a Gascon arrested by the French for supporting English rule in Gascony (many Gascons did, mainly because the English government was further away than the increasingly centralising French one and less able to interfere with their regional interests). “He told his interrogators that he had joined the rebellion because he ‘did not want to be French’, but it was clear that he had no emotional attachment to the English either. When asked why he had not migrated to England like some of his fellow citizens, he replied that he did not want to live in England and would not like the beer.” Clearly a man who preferred localism and minding one’s own business to nationalism of any kind.

When Nikolai told them how the family had had to hide in the cellar for a month, the man in command replied “Why were you hiding? We came to liberate you!”
 And at that, Nikolai had snapped a little.
 “I said, Did I invite you here?”

Jen Stout, born on Fair Isle, had fallen in love with the Russian language in high school, and a school trip to St Petersburg convinced her that she wanted to return. Various things then got in the way – family commitments, lack of finance, Covid – as they do, with the result that, apart from a stay in Ukraine in 2018, it was 2021 before she managed to get to Moscow on a nine-month fellowship. And three months into that, war broke out…

You or I might have gone home at this point, but Stout is a freelance journalist by trade; she went as far as Vienna, to collect some flak jackets a friend wanted taken to Ukraine, then headed for the crossing point of Isaccea in Romania to report on the refugee exodus. Then, after a short conflict-zone training course, it was back to Ukraine, spending time in Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Donbas among other places.

This is a journalistic account but also a personal one; she had friends in Ukraine already and made others while there. It is very much a story of individuals and the war’s effect on them. The laconic response of the man in Kostiantynivka to the shelling of his apartment block: “The place was full of broken glass, broken furniture. His enormous grey cat had been hiding in the cupboard when it happened, so there was no harm done really, he said.”  The children at Chuhuiv: “some kids had chosen a hairpin corner for their playtime checkpoint. They brandished plastic guns and scowls […] eerily perfecting the contemptuous glare of bored soldiers.”  Some named individuals, like Victoria Amelina of PEN Ukraine and Vlada Chernykh, medic and drone pilot, have been killed since she met them.

She is a sharp observer and alert to reactions that do not necessarily fit the clichés editors expect and want; “One thing stands out in almost every interview I did with the new refugees coming across at Isaccea: their fury. While the paper wanted heart-rending stories of escape and despair, my interviewees wanted to tell me what a bastard Putin was, what a piece of shit.”

Her observation of the way people at war quickly become inured to danger will strike a chord with anyone who has read accounts of the Second World War air raids and how soon the warnings began to be ignored: “a loudspeaker voice boomed out over the intersection, ordering citizens to turn off the lights and mains gas and take shelter. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention.”

Other aspects of the war that come over very strongly: the way a conflict between neighbours inevitably divides families and friends, with some no longer speaking to relatives on the other side of the border; the way it polarises opinion, so that people refuse to speak each other’s closely related language and begin to refer to each other as “nazis” and “Rashysts” – a compound of “russkiy” and “fascist”. The mayor of Kharkiv, once suspected of Putinist leanings, takes to speaking only Ukrainian. When Stout suggests this is political trimming on his part, her Kharkiv friend disagrees; yes, expediency is part of it but there is more: “There was, she went on, this strong sense of personal outrage: how dare these Russians try to destroy Kharkiv’s flower gardens, its beautiful avenues? The mayor, she added, was no exception.” As Hitler found, bombing and invading people is apt to concentrate their minds against you and everything you stand for. One of the most thought-provoking stories in the book is how the Kharkiv LGBT activist Ivanna makes common cause with Tarasenko, commander of the “Freikorps” militia, which had no time for LGBT and had specialised in disrupting their marches. She does so because she feels their common enemy (and the Russian government is of course no more tolerant of LGBT than Tarasenko) is more important. When he dies in battle, she mourns him and writes a valedictory, much to the annoyance of his comrades, who find it insulting for her to speak of him.

This is a powerful book, moving but always striving for some journalistic objectivity. She recounts some instances of journalists behaving badly: harassing refugees for copy, filming without permission, getting in the way of medics. But her own contribution to observing and recording events shows clearly how necessary a job a good journalist does.

This is the third in a trilogy of books on osteoarchaeology and related disciplines and how they are changing our view of history. This time the focus is very much on disease; what the bones of the dead can tell us about the pathogens that killed them and, through that, about the conditions they lived in. These studies can also have a surprising contemporary relevance.

Many relatively new research techniques have revolutionised our ideas about the past – palaeopathology, the study of diseases and injuries of the past, archaeogenomics, the extraction and analysis of entire ancient genomes, not only human genomes but those of diseases themselves. And things are moving quickly; not long ago it was almost impossible to sex the bones of juveniles, because sexual differences like pelvis size were not yet evident. Now we know that the amelogenin gene appears on both the X and Y chromosomes, in slightly different forms on each, which means this gene can be extracted from teeth to help sex juvenile bodies. The term “osteobiology” has been coined for what we can learn about people’s lives and deaths from their bones, and while there will always be frustrating lacunae, there is more information to be found there than one might think.  Isotope analysis can show diet (and by extension social status), and where the person lived in childhood. The localised wear and tear on the bones of the sailors who sank with the Mary Rose has much to say about the work they did while alive. In a mass grave in Oxford, where at least 35 people had plainly died by violence, the absence of “the type of wounds you might expect when someone is defending themselves – often on forearms” suggests this was not a battle but a massacre, possibly of people who were running away at the time. And though all the bodies where sex could be determined were male, there was also an absence of old, healed wounds on the bones, meaning they were unlikely to have been professional fighters.

The chapter on the Oxford mass grave postulates a connexion with Ethelred’s infamous decree of 1002, more or less inciting mob violence (the St Brice’s Day massacre) against those of his subjects who happened to be Danish, or descended from Danes, or who looked as if they might be. Like most suggested answers to archaeological puzzles, this one is not certain, though it does sound plausible, but it is the techniques used, rather than any positive solution, that provide the interest, particularly when they turn out to have a personal, human application. One of the Oxford bodies, that of a young man with ten horrific skull injuries, turned out to be “closely related to another man, buried in the cemetery of Galgedil on the Danish island of Funen. That man – who was probably around the age of fifty when he died – also seems to have suffered a violent death, with a stab wound to his pelvis”. They were second-degree relatives; the older man would have been the grandfather, uncle or half-brother of the younger.

The chapters on researching the genomes of disease were the most fascinating. The plague pathogen, Yersinia pestis, turns out to have been with us at least since the Late Neolithic. The leprosy pathogen, Mycobacterium leprae, would seem at first sight to be intent on putting itself out of a job; it is a parasite which can only live in a host (it cannot be cultured in a lab), but which all species quickly reject except two: the nine-banded armadillo and homo sapiens. And even most of the latter are resistant to it; only one in twenty is susceptible. Its saving grace, however, is the remarkably long time it takes to incubate, show symptoms and kill its host, giving it plenty of time to pass on to a new one.

In the chapters on Paget’s disease and syphilis, we meet both a pathogen and an individual person – in the latter case, even possibly a named one – which naturally increases the interest. The Paget’s chapter is also interesting for what it shows about the relevance of palaeopathology to modern medicine; research has shown that the disease was far more severe in mediaeval times than it is today and has isolated a particular protein that might give clues as to why.

There’s much to like about this book, also a few downsides. One is her determined quirkiness. Her humour does sometimes work, as in the description of modern pilgrims to the tomb of Becket, who sound every bit as gullible as their mediaeval forebears: “a man who wanted to re-frame negative experiences he had at sites that would be visited, a woman who was there as part of her shamanic training, a raver who had been up clubbing the previous night and had stumbled upon the group, a banker who wanted to reconnect with nature, and an American cyclist and university administrator with a penchant for history”. But she can sound irritatingly arch, and though it is less of a problem than in the first of the trilogy, there are still instances: “Eighteen of the relatively complete skeletons showed evidence of ossification of the ligamentum flavum (OLF). I know – sounds painful, doesn’t it?”. That makes this reader wince rather than laugh. There is also the occasional carelessness; she mentions “a minstrel at the court of King Henry” without specifying which of the eight she has in mind, and it isn’t evident from the context. And she is sometimes inclined to overdo the background information, never more so than in the chapter on Becket, which has very little to do with the book’s theme and certainly didn’t need his well-known life story rehearsing. Most of that chapter strikes me as padding.

However she does make a good case for the role of non-verbal history in conjunction with (and sometimes as opposed to) the written variety. “The testimonies etched, cut and burned into bone have one important advantage in that they are not skewed by politics, not managed as propaganda, not favouring one version of events over another. They are simply oxygen and strontium, carbon and nitrogen, the shape of a male pelvis, the mark of a blade cutting into bone. They do not obfuscate, deceive or embellish. They are just there.” They are of course still subject to human interpretation, but to be fair, she is scrupulous about mentioning alternative versions.

One interesting thing: she several times points up contemporary parallels, as in “We learn of an episode of terrible brutality, when hate speech unleashed a tide of violence against an ethnic minority in multicultural England; of life-changing disease as incurable epidemics swept through medieval Europe”. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it has been a feature of nearly every history book I have read in the past few months, by widely differing authors, and I wonder if publishers in this genre are demanding an awareness of “contemporary relevance” from their authors. (The exception among said authors was Jonathan Sumption, who in his final volume on the Hundred Years War seldom acknowledged the existence of any century after the fifteenth.)

The city has not known real darkness since the beginning of the century; the gaslamps in every street give a purplish glow to the night sky that seems part of the texture of the air. Now this purple has turned to black and it is as if the man has been plunged into the depths of space.

Hastings Wimbury, would-be actor, is working as a “gas-boy” responsible for the lighting effects in a London theatre – which are more elaborate, and a lot more dangerous, than one might have thought.  In fact, in 1883, we are just on the cusp of when gas began to give place to electricity, as Hastings notices on a nocturnal stroll:

“It was as if London itself had been turned into a theatre, with the Embankment its auditorium and the Thames the stage, with its scenery of moored boats and barges, and the steps arranged along it as entrances to that impossible space. He sat on a bench and looked at the reflected lights, a show like those he had helped to put on at the Villiers. These were not gaslamps but electric lights, Yablochkov candles as they were called, that used the same mysterious power as Mr D’Oyly Carte’s electric fairies at the Savoy. He looked at the nearest of them; above the base with its coiled black dolphins rose a tall iron post with a globe on top giving off an intense white light. The whole structure crackled and hissed and seemed to shake slightly; he was sure that if he were to go up and touch it, he would feel those vibrations flowing through his own body. One night soon, Hastings thought, there will be enough of these celestial candles to eliminate the shadows altogether. Then there will be only day, the yellow day of the sun alternating with the pure white day of electricity.”

Light and dark, both literally and in the mind, are at the heart of this novel; Hastings has, in the best tradition of Victorian Gothic mysteries, fallen in with a well-spoken titled foreigner who, as any alert reader can guess, is Not What He Seems. Who and what he actually is, however, is less easy to guess. There are many conscious literary echoes, from Sherlock Holmes’s emphasis on observation: “Dr Farthing always warned her never to judge a man by his appearance (which struck her as odd since he was always lecturing her on how much could be deduced from it)” to the Reverend Pilkins with his fleeting resemblances to certain Austen clergymen in embarrassing situations. Arthur Machen, too, feels as if he might at any moment turn up in the dark London streets that he liked to depict. But it is RLS and his fascination with “doubleness” who is the most persistent ghost.

Appropriately for this theme of doubleness, the novel has two heroines, Flora, the country lady to whom Hastings is unofficially engaged and Cassie, the town girl in the new profession of stenographer, who falls for him. Though rivals from different backgrounds, they form common cause to solve the mystery when he disappears, and since each in her own way is enterprising, sharp-witted and with a keen sense of humour, their quest is an entertaining one for the reader. Indeed there is a deal of humour in the novel, evidence of how much the author himself is enjoying the genre (“’Unhand me,’ Flora said, finding an opportunity to use the expression at last”). Mr Gilbert at the Savoy would probably call it rollicking. It is pacy, and switches expertly between its various point-of-view characters. It also gives us the joy of being ahead of our protagonist: we know, long before he does, that he is being fooled; what we don’t know is by whom, and when we find out, there is one of those “how didn’t I see that sooner?” moments. I read it in one afternoon, slowing down only when I needed a magnifying glass to read the letters between Hastings and Flora which have been printed in a cursive font. I can see why the author did this; it does add to the period feel, but I could have done with a font that was easier to read.  I doubt, though, that this would bother younger eyes.

The characters – Hastings, doggedly continuing to convince himself of the increasingly impossible, Flora dealing with her intoxicated suitor, Cassie making her way in a man’s world – are not just convincing but engaging, and the atmosphere of nocturnal Victorian London really comes alive. It shouldn’t be regarded as a parody of Victorian Gothic, for that implies a slightly superior, even mocking, attitude to the genre, and this shows nothing but delight in it.  I found it a hugely enjoyable read.

The sources about the flow of information in eighteenth-century Paris are extraordinarily rich. We can reconstruct conversations in cafés, pick up news in underground gazettes, listen to the running commentary of street songs, and visualize power as it was displayed in processions and festivals. We often say that we live in an age of information, as if this were something new. Yet every period of history is an age of information.

This is an attempt to figure out, not so much the causes of the French Revolution as the mood that gave birth to it. After all, hunger, unemployment, disaffection with the government, were nothing new; they had existed for a long time without actually erupting in violence and the overthrow of a regime. This time they did, and Darnton persuasively argues that various factors had combined to build up a “revolutionary temper” in the people. Beside street songs, he uses diaries, pamphlets, gazettes, fashions in hairstyles, demonstrations, court records, even café conversations, which were reported, often in dialogue form, by police spies who had no idea what a help they were being to later historians. Without these obliging fellows, we should not know what café wits were saying after the battle of Lawfield: “Police spies noted that the foreign gazettes were widely read in Paris and that some Parisians—those with enough money and leisure to frequent cafés—had doubts about the government’s claim of victory. “That is to say that according to them [café commentators], we won the battlefield and they won the battle.”

Darnton takes various incidents and cases in the lead-up to the revolution and shows how they were reported, how they appeared to Parisians, and how each contributed to, and sometimes changed, the prevailing mood on the street. (The book does not totally ignore the rest of France, but Paris is its main focus, reasonably enough, since it was there that things really kicked off.)  Satirical songs set to well-known tunes, for instance, were widely thought to have brought about the downfall of the Maurepas ministry, while Voltaire’s passionate pamphlet campaign undoubtedly brought about the posthumous rehabilitation of poor Jean Calas. Such events demonstrated to ordinary people that even under an autocratic regime they had more potential power than they might have supposed. Meanwhile unprecedented advances in science – like the craze for ballooning – seemed to show that they were living in an age where there were possibilities for change and progress.  After one incident where Parisians had for a short time taken over the streets, the Marquis d’Argenson wrote: “The common people now are under no constraint and can dare to do anything with impunity …. When the common people fear nothing, they are everything.”

There was also a wave of idealistic sentimentality, for which one may blame La Nouvelle Héloïse, which generated a demand booksellers could not satisfy, they had to fall back on renting out copies by the hour. The fan letters Rousseau received show readers wallowing in “tears,” “sweet tears,” “tears that are sweet,” “delicious tears,” “tears of tenderness.” Not only that; many had persuaded themselves that the characters and events depicted were real, because they wanted them to be (“I sense that I am better ever since I read your novel, which, I hope, is not a novel”), much as fans of TV series sometimes do now. This confusion of fact and fiction fed into the permanent rumour mill that could do such damage. Calas was killed on the basis of completely false rumours, and though her extravagance is a matter of record, the evidence for Marie-Antoinette’s alleged debaucheries is equally flimsy. And the sentimental belief in the perfectability of man showed up even in politics; “On July 7, 1792, Antoine-Adrien Lamourette, a deputy from Rhône-et-Loire, told the Assembly’s members that their troubles all arose from a single source: factionalism. They needed to respond to the principle of fraternity. Whereupon the deputies, who had been at each other’s throats a moment earlier, rose to their feet and started hugging and kissing one another as if their political divisions could be swept away in a wave of brotherly love”. They couldn’t, of course, as would soon become clear. Lamourette was guillotined in 1794.

As the proliferation of pamphlets, songs, posters and other forms of information shows, the public were desperate for news, and government attempts to censor it were not only ineffective but generally counter-productive. Means of evading censorship were incredibly inventive – Darnton remarks of wall posters that “if attached to walls with enough pressure and powerful glue, they could leave a readable impression after being removed by the police”. Even more brilliant was the method used by the Abbé de Prades to get the defence of his controversial thesis past the Sorbonne; “The examiners did not read it carefully or perhaps not at all, because it was printed in the standard format of one page, but […] it went on for 8,000 words and therefore had to be printed in very small type. They passed it without hesitation, but then word spread that it contained heretical propositions”.  When the establishment tried to use similar methods, it tended to shoot itself in the foot: “The scandal might have dissipated if Archbishop Beaumont had not thrown oil on the flames by issuing an episcopal decree (mandement) on January 31, which was distributed in all parishes and hawked through the streets. In it, he fulminated against de Prades’s arguments in so much detail as to make them known and comprehensible to Parisians who had no familiarity with such abstract propositions”.

Meanwhile the unsavoury private life of Louis XV, commemorated in verses like “Quitte ta putain/Et donne-nous du pain”, and the chilly hauteur of his successor Louis XVI, plus the financial extravagance of the latter’s Austrian wife, were diminishing any respect for the monarchy, while a succession of ministers tried by various methods, all unsuccessful, to stabilise the price of bread. The usual reaction in the Paris streets was to hang the offending minister of the day in effigy, and while the authorities did not positively condone this, they do seem to have seen it as a relatively harmless, carnivalesque means of letting off steam. In fairness, few would have prophesied that in a few years the victims would not be effigies.

Though perhaps they should, for the volatility of the crowd – Chaucer’s “stormy people” – does come across very strongly, as does the change in the public mood between 1773, when Beaumarchais got the better of his enemy Goezman by, in Voltaire’s phrase, getting the laughter on his side, and 1787, when he came off worst against Kornmann because the public was no longer in a mood for wit.

There are many entertaining observations – during a period when Jesuits were unpopular, “shopkeepers sold toy Jesuits made out of wax, which could be made to retreat into a shell like a snail by pulling on a string” – and Diderot’s suspiciously anti-religious Tree of Knowledge in his Encyclopaedia – “he gave “Revealed Theology” a place on his tree, but he consigned it to a small branch close to ‘Black Magic’.” But the one that stays in the mind, because after reading this, one can see how events confirm it, is the verdict of one of the foreign newspapers Parisians favoured, in the absence of an uncensored press of their own: “’It was an insurrection,’ remarked the Gazette de Leyde, ‘because one had become necessary.’”

"They were the doors out of the ordinary"
(“Mari Lwyd Finds the Forgotten Horses”, from Ann Drysdale's collection Feeling Unusual)

I knew Ann, who has recently died, when I lived in South Wales; I'd heard her read several times and she came to read and talk to our Masters students. In a way this was ironic, as an academic of my acquaintance once said of her, not meaning it as a compliment, "She isn't really a seminar poet". He meant, I think, that you couldn't spend ages discussing what she was getting at in this or that poem, because, inconveniently for his purposes, she had made her intent clear to anyone of average intellect. Though by no means superficial or obvious, she saw no merit in the fashion for deliberate obscurity; she wrote poems, not crossword puzzles.

Yet there would in fact have been plenty to discuss at a seminar; not so much what she was doing as how she did it. The way she used humour to deflect sentimentality.  Her astonishing range, lightly worn, of cultural references, and how subtly she could slip them into a poem to direct the reader's reaction. The eternal curiosity that led her to seek out more information about her many enthusiasms, from sheep to tall ships, so that they were not just enthusiasms but knowledgeable enthusiasms.  Her gift for finding images that at first glance looked incongruous; at second glance memorably apt:

    The white bird tumbles clumsily out of the sun
     carrying a small crab like a novelty reticule
     held ostentatiously in its tight tweezer-beak,
     every leg pedalling, each one on its unicycle ("A Sea View", from Vanitas)

The last interaction I had with her on Facebook was a comment she left on a post I'd made about the replica East Indiaman Amsterdam at the Dutch maritime museum. I'd mentioned that the remains of the original ship, sunk off Hastings, could apparently still be seen at low tide. Being Ann, she had seen it, and attached a photograph in which, little though there was to see above the mud, one could still make out the vessel's graceful shape.  This now seems eerily apt, for Ann was very much a poet, and indeed a person, who could look at a skeleton of spars and see a full-rigged ship.  

A picture is more like the real world
when it’s made out of the real world.

Tamar Yoseloff has long been interested in poems that bounce off other art forms, witness her publishing company Hercules Editions, which specialised in the ekphrastic, often with illustrations. So it’s no surprise that she should produce a collection themed largely around paintings by Rauschenberg and music by Cage, with references also to other writers, artists and musicians – John Latham, Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns, among others. Indeed the sequence “Combines” is illustrated with the Rauschenberg paintings that inspired it.

I may as well admit at this point that I had never before seen (or in some cases heard) any work by most of these folk, not being much into modern art or classical music. I did consider disqualifying myself from reviewing the book on this account, but that would seem to imply that only readers with the requisite background knowledge of Lives and Works could enjoy the poems, and having read several previous collections by this poet, I knew she would not have written anything quite so niche. Indeed in “Bridges”, though the reference to Wordsworth resonates with anyone who recalls the relevant sonnet, without that knowledge we would still have a striking poem about London (another recurring theme of hers) during the covid lockdown:

      miss all those strangers, our city shut up
      like an oyster worrying its pearl,
      as I stick to my grid, never venturing
      far enough to find the river’s glint
      – all that mighty heart, as the poet said,
      stopped, the monitor switched off.

The pandemic perhaps also lurks behind this collection’s consciousness of mortality:

      Prints of dogs and hooves,
     our heavy-soled shoes,
     pressed in sand until the first
     stiff wind – how simply
     we lift from earth.
     (“Common”)

The pessimistic description, in “New Year”, of

      the season of fresh starts,
     all those resolutions like cut pines
     lined up for the bin men

is characteristic of the first part of this collection, shadowed by a brooding sense of things coming to an end; not just individual lives, but also perhaps a way of life, menaced by both the pandemic and the environmental crisis of which the poet is conscious; “it’s time to say goodbye to easy days” (“Summer Fields”).

Even in this first part, there are many references to, and riffs off, other writers and artists. The second part, “Combines”, is an ekphrastic response to Rauschenberg’s hybrid works “bringing together painting and collage with an assemblage of cast-off objects”, each poem being accompanied by an illustration of the relevant work. He talked, apparently, of “working in the gap between art and life”, or as Yoseloff puts it in “Trophy V (for Jasper Johns)”:

     A picture is more like the real world
     when it’s made out of the real world.

In the variant sonnet “Trophy IV (for John Cage)”, we get a sense not only of Rauschenberg gaining inspiration from the thingness of things – “A stroke of paint means nothing much/ but a boot speaks of endless journeys” –  but also of how artists, even in different fields, feed off each other:

    The composer gets a kick out of the artist
    striking a blow for rag and bone.

The third part of the collection consists of the long poem “Belief Systems”. This is itself something of a collage; it was written in response to the exhibition The Bard: William Blake at Flat Time House, and owes its genesis to Blake’s illustrations of Thomas Gray’s poems, which in turn inspired his own poem cycles; to the world-view of artist John Latham, and to events in 2020, notably Storm Brendan. Again therefore we have art feeding off art, but also off reality, particularly the cast-off and abandoned, and the shadow of ecological catastrophe from the book’s first section is present here as well – if anything, more desperate:

    nothing we’ve made will save us
    from what we’ve razed. When the foaming
    flood hits shore
    our time is up.
    *
    The storm collects our waste.
    Circuits bared, maps to nowhere.
    Analog screens, their ancient stars
    trapped in static. All of it shipped
    to Surabaya; farmers ditch failed crops,
    sift plastic for gold.

This is a brooding, urgent collection, the kind that both entertains and alarms. As I suspected, it is perfectly capable of being enjoyed without extensive background familiarity with Rauschenberg & Co, though the notes at the back are helpful and informative for those who want to mend their knowledge.

“Every tale has another chapter”

In her blog at https://www.catherine-fisher.com/culhwch-and-olwen/, Catherine Fisher explains what drew her to this particular Welsh legend and made her want to write a version of it for today’s children: “Culhwch and Olwen is not one story, but many different tales, held inside a framework. It’s a heap, a tapestry, a tangle, a hedgerow of stories”.

It begins, in fact, with a noblewoman giving birth in a pigsty because she has fled her home for reasons not plain even to her, never mind anyone else, and which would clearly make a story of their own; it ends with a young man and his wife returning to a court where it is hard to imagine him being safe, let alone happy. Along the way, there are all manner of other stories peering round corners and asking to be investigated, and some are, taking the reader down various byways, but others are tantalisingly unexplored: what became of the kind swineherd; who was Tywyllych’s dead husband; where did the great boar end up?

Being a writer very much disinclined to talk down to children, Fisher does not minimise the harsh elements of the tale: the pain of childbirth, the grief of an early death, the animosity bred in individuals by war and conquest, the clash of generations. But she does show how love, friendship, generosity and gratitude can mitigate these. Her favourite character in this huge galaxy is the Arthurian knight Cai – prickly, arrogant, dangerous – for whom she has shown a partiality in other books, but my favourite was a lame though determined ant. It will be no surprise to those who know her as a poet that she is adept at conveying the lyrical side of the story, but for any adults not acquainted with the hard edge of her YA novels, here are Cai and Bedwyr fulfilling one of Culhwch’s tasks by making a leash for the hound Drudwyn. It must be made from the beard-hairs of the fearsome Dillus, and these must be plucked while he is still alive. Fortunately, he happens to be asleep and drunk when they find him:

“Cai took a spade from his horse and began to dig. He dug a deep narrow pit and rolled Dillus into it, upright, and filled in the earth and trampled it down so that only the man’s sleeping head remained above ground.
“Tweezers”, he said. Bedwyr handed them over.
Cai crouched and plucked out a hair from the bristly black beard. Dillus gave a yell of pain and his eyes snapped open. He wriggled and struggled.
But he was buried deep.
Swiftly Cai plucked strand after strand of the beard and gave them to Bedwyr, who was already weaving and plaiting them into a leash.
But the huge man’s struggles were causing earthquakes and tremors. The whole mountaintop was shaking. “When I get out of here,” he roared, “you are DEAD!” Cai kept plucking. Suddenly Dillus roared out and one arm came free. Then the other.
“Look out!” Bedwyr leaped back.
“Do we have enough?” Cai snapped.
“Yes! Yes! Plenty.”
“Good. Then he doesn’t have to stay alive any more.” Cai stood up. With one slice of his sword he took off the man’s head,
Then he turned and walked away.

In the blog, she regrets having to play down the “list” feature so typical of these legends, though she does manage to echo it in one of the poems scattered through the narrative. But given the intended audience, I don’t think she could have done otherwise; most young readers would be unwilling to accept such long pauses in a story full of incident and narrative drive. She uses the poems to echo points where the original narrative is “written in a heightened prose” and to change the pace. They can also serve to see the story from a different angle, rather as Kipling uses poems to comment on short stories, and the first poem, “The Priest Tends the Grave” is a fine example of this. Prince Cilydd has assured his wife Goleuddydd, dying in childbirth, that he will never remarry. She, rating this promise at its true value and not wanting her son to have a stepmother, makes Cilydd vow to remarry only when he sees a bramble growing on her grave; then, unbeknown to him, she lays a duty on the priest attending her to weed the grave. Only after the old man’s death does the bramble grow:

He's busy. Gets there late on an autumn evening.
There are shoots. On his neck her angry breathing.

A decade of dandelion, nettle-sting,
He has grey hair now. His hands, uprooting.

Who can stop this green life? It just comes.
A dead queen torments his dreams
.
Boys play on the graveyard wall. His knees hurt.
Thorns tangle around his heart
.
He’ll be as cold as her next winter.
Every tale has another chapter.

Several of the story’s themes are miraculously condensed here, notably the attempts of the old and dead to control the young and alive, and the resurgence of life against all odds. Like all Catherine Fisher’s books for children and young adults, this has plenty to interest older readers as well.

“So Gaddi began to describe the imagination. He said that it was a lawless place much given to extremes of weather. It was extensive and offered vast opportunities for conquest but most people’s visits there were concentrated in a small number of dismal slums. Its inhabitants seemed more beautiful and more virtuous than those in the real world, but were not to be trusted.”

I’m tempted to describe this novel as a compendium of all the folk tale motifs to be found in the world. Certainly it would be hard to assign to a genre. It begins in the manner of an Icelandic saga:

“The sheep parted as the riders approached, but a shepherd stood at the head of the track and barred their way. He said no guests were expected at Harald’s place that day. Brand said, ‘I have come to give Harald something which every man receives in the end.’ The shepherd replied, ‘You will not go down to give Harald his gift as long as I am standing here.’”

Far away though, in an Eastern city, another story is unfolding in Arabian Nights style:

“She learned that the city’s thirty-eight aqueducts were all designed by different architects, and that the waters they carried, all minutely different in mineral composition, were each named after their author: Jacob’s-water sat heavy in the mouth; al-Shatir’s-water was sweet as apricots; Musa’s-water dried the throat as if it were sand; Oswaldt’s-water tasted refreshing but smelled of eggs; Vlad’s-water petrified conduits, ewers, goblets, tongues; and Nahid’s-water burst forth like a hibiscus and trickled with the sound of her murmured reproaches.”

While on the road that leads from one to another, the relic-peddler Islip invents legends of more and more unlikely saints:

“Whether he was tailoring the story to suit his audience, or simply keeping himself amused, was not clear. Thus he gave to a minor jarl the heel of Saint Huberic, who was smothered by heathens but continued to preach to them for six days after he was dead. He gave to a rich widow the jawbone of St Anna, who refused to lie with a housecarl even though he kept her in gaol and starved her, and eventually turned into a summer greensward so that when he opened up her cell he was met by a million bright petals, and the waft of flower scent, and a swarm of midges.”

And at regular intervals in each story, we are reminded that most stories exist in many versions, none of which is definitive:

“Abulcasis says they travelled for a hundred years without a single minute going by. Edith of Malmesbury agrees it was a century, but says that the Cole who set out was the great-grandfather of the Cole who finished the tale. Ouyang Xiu says nothing about how long they rambled for, and instead gives at this point a recipe for stewed hare. But Walafrid Strabo, the most reliable of sources and also the dullest, estimates that the Men Without Bonds travelled about a half a dozen years in this aimless fashion.”

Some readers may be reminded at this point of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, in which one tale continually spins off from another. But to my mind this is far more readable. I gave up on The Manuscript Found in Saragossa because its cast of thousands got too much for me. I do get what Potocki was doing: he was imitating the real world, in which everyone we meet has their own story, which in turn depends on many others, and which we can never hope to know in full. But the continual nesting of narrative killed the momentum. Cole the Magnificent is a “journey” story, amongst other things; for most of the time Cole is on his way from his past to an unknown future, and even when his physical travels are over, “Niven could see that his gaze was not on the steading and the work at hand, but on an inward landscape and a journey to the time of long ago”. This gives it enough momentum to withstand the constant digressions.

In fact, where Potocki replicates the structure of real life, Cole the Magnificent replicates that of story, which is frankly more interesting. Some of its humour is that of fantasy and hyperbole; “By now King Egg was so great that he had been divided into parishes. His left leg was stretching in spring sunlight while his right arm was still snoring in the depths of winter. If a man walked round him with a basket of cherries he was liable for a customs charge.” At other times the humour recalls rather the laconic style of saga, as in the unfailing sarcasm of Sigrid’s edgy relationship with Saul:

“The next morning Sigrid was put on a mule with her things, and Saul took up the reins to lead it. ‘I hope you will not think yourself a princess just because you are saved the effort of walking,’ said Saul. ‘I hope you will not think yourself the master just because you hold the reins,’ said Sigrid.”

Yet when Saul feels his death coming on, the same dry, laconic style can be, as it often is in saga, powerfully moving:

“‘It looks like I will be leaving the steading earlier than we thought,’ he said. ‘Will you sing a charm over me so that my farewell is not lonely?’ Sigrid said that matters were not that bad, but if things took a turn for the worse then she would do as he asked. ‘It would be the first time for that,’ said Saul.”

The end of the book at first seems to offer the obvious explanation that “story” is fantasy dreamed up by its creators:

“But Mariana of Warburg asserts that Cole, ‘an old Breton king much given to laziness,’ sat down on a bundle of withies and fell asleep. He dreamed the lives of Sigrid and Niven, Svinkeld and Ludo, Colrick and Gaddin, and while he dreamed his body caught light and burned in the green flames of summer; and his ashes drift down to earth every year as dandelion seeds.”

But we have already, much earlier, been given a strong hint that story can be, or become, more real than this:

“‘Imagine that you and I were to sit here on this terrace forever, talking of astronomy and eating oranges, with no yesterday and no tomorrow, only you and I forever in this conversation.’ Niven thought about this for a long moment, and felt what Gaddi had said actually beginning to happen. Birdsong filled the shade under the trees. There were – three, four, five, six – oranges in the bowl. A bead of condensation clung to the jug. The birdsong went on, and Niven and Gaddi sat in silence as the moment lengthened. There was a spasm of eternity.”

This is an absorbing, entertaining read with a lot to say about the relationship between reality and imagination and the nature of story.

A short journey, before doors slide open and they empty into their lives (“Clay Animation”)

The above line, ending a poem in which the poet speculates about fellow-passengers on the Tube, is a good place to start thinking about these poems. Nearly all are short vignettes, moments, transient but deeply experienced states of being. The title poem, indeed, centres on an Inuit word that describes the state of impatient excitement one gets into while awaiting a longed-for visitor. “I found the word which/starts here and ends when you arrive.” The weird thing is, the poem leaves one feeling that however welcome this visit (and this is a poet who seems, at least in these poems, delightfully and unusually at ease in relationships), it cannot possibly be as enjoyable as this state that precedes it.

Poets who work in a small compass are considerably helped if they happen to be good at coining memorable phrases. It’s a gift that can become a curse if overdone, turning poems into a collection of soundbites, but here it is well used, sometimes as a perfect shorthand for a state of mind (“the sound of listening to nothing at night”), sometimes to provide a close that echoes in the mind, like the ending of “The coast guard found an empty life raft”:

    The coastline called us back.
    Throw out everything you own, lose weight.
    I tipped all my words overboard,
    Lastly, the unreliable narrator.

There are many references to exile and war in these poems, not surprisingly since the poet’s Armenian grandparents fled Turkey for obvious reasons at the start of the twentieth century and settled in Cyprus. Nadjarian, born in 1966, was the second Cypriot-born generation in her family, but then of course politics and divisiveness caught up with them in their new location and the poet ended up being educated in England (she later returned to Cyprus and now lives in Nicosia).  I’m mildly puzzled, by the way, by the dust-jacket’s description of this as a “first collection”, because I know there’s been at least one other (Cleft in Twain, 2003), and thought there were more. The violence of the war imagery, e.g. “a country is being chainsawed”, from “We didn’t die, we levitated”, spills over into poems on other themes, like “Downpour”, which ends “still killing us, this rain, with its bullets”. There are also poems that reference relationship break-ups, and a pervading sense of mortality:

    We were once human and to human
    we may never return
    (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Uncertainty”)

In view of all this, it is perhaps odd that the overriding impression the collection left with me was one of colour and light, joy, even.  I think this is partly because of the vividness of her observation and description which, in defiance of the dictum about happiness writing white, actually seems to work best on that theme. “Hibiscus” is by far the most successful and sensual evocation of sexual climax from a female point of view that I have ever read, and in “The Perfect Child Emerges”, she lifts the everyday mentions of “sucking and sobbing” and “shiny new teeth” with a beautifully oblique allusion to the myth of Apollo’s birth and brief infancy:

  Then, with incredible speed away from you, a tall boy runs from one season to the   next. Away from this baby in the cot sucking its thumb, oblivious to the sudden  earth, the endless sky.

Nuts to Larkin; this is how to use the “myth-kitty” to universalise personal experience.