by Adam Horovitz on November 9, 2011
Over the Mountains
an album for children by Ceilidh-Jo Rowe and Matthias Weston
If your children aren’t already completely succoured and suckered by the colder excesses of pop culture, here is a children’s album to give them that will help inoculate against full-scale descent into the shallows of this attention deficit century.
Over the Mountains never patronises for a moment, yet still manages to accommodate enjoyable action-based songs such as ‘My Hat’, which won’t make any sense unless you read the songbook, alongside exquisite evocations of nature and songs that should appeal to anyone with an ear for a catchy tune and a taste for freedom; songs like ‘The Green Tree’, ‘Come Little Senerin’, ‘Working on the Railway’ and ‘Freedom Train’.
Ceilidh-Jo Rowe’s approach to singing folk music is wide-eyed and clear-voiced and is complemented beautifully by the guitar of Matthias Weston. There are songs here that will get your children moving, bits of songs that are easy for them to play on the piano themselves and songs that will possibly last them a lifetime – ‘Wind in the Trees’, for example, is an apparently simple round made hypnotically lovely by the multi-layering of Ceilidh-Jo’s voice. It builds into one of the most hauntingly joyful songs I have heard in many years.
Over the Mountains is a wonderful album, possibly even better than their first for children, A Land Very Close. Buy it for your children or for yourselves. The less self-conscious amongst you – those adults whose inner child dances closest to the surface – will have a wonderful time dancing along in their front rooms – and for those of you who who can’t cope with that, well… you can always make an iPod playlist for the songs that don’t require actions!
A version of this review was published in today’s Stroud News and Journal. To see the original, click here.
by Adam Horovitz on November 1, 2011
A review of the Pied Flycatcher EP by Kate Doubleday
Imagine Joanna Newsom channeling the spirit of Edward Thomas and you should have a reasonable idea of just how hypnotically lovely Kate Doubleday’s Pied Flycatcher EP is. This is a devastatingly gentle but potent EP, full of melodies and lyrics that pluck at your spine and lift you delicately up.
The title track is a closely detailed look at the life of the Pied Flycatcher. Put like that, you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be slightly dull. It isn’t – Kate Doubleday invests the story of the Flycatcher’s migration with a powerful emotion pull. The shiver-inducing swoop of her voice infuses the words with such resonance that she even gets away with the use of ‘thee’ to rhyme with ‘tree’. The song itself clearly longs to fly South for the winter. And it would, if it could only get past The Dunes.
The Dunes is a quietly hypnotic song. Bottles and flute blow the scent of the sea at you and the lyrics bed your feet in the sandy earth. Listen to it and you’ll feel like you’ve come home to a cool house after a long day in the sun, drifting in, dreaming of summers past.
The third track, Freefalling, reminded me of flying dreams I’d had as a teenager, of the sense of freedom in the sky that were frustrated the moment you woke up. Here, though, you can revisit the dream whenever you want by just starting the CD again, as I have, many times now. This sensation has overridden any ability to analyse the song, other than to say that listening to it makes me very happy.
Kate Doubleday has been working towards this EP over two albums of bright, atmospheric and poetic folk- and jazz-inflected songs. Both of these have great moments of beauty, but nothing she’s recorded before matches this – the Pied Flycatcher EP is simply exquisite.
It is also extraordinarily immersive. I was drawn in by the delicate poetic sensibility Doubleday has for birdlife and landscape, but even more by the simple seeming and utterly compelling music which never allows the poetics to get in the way of it being able to fly.
If Kate Doubleday’s next album is all as resonant, confident, beautiful and quietly powerful as the Pied Flycatcher EP, it will be magnificent.
by Adam Horovitz on September 29, 2011
Ah, amusing games on Facebook, they pass the time so well when work should be happening. However compelling I find Bejewelled Blitz, mind you, there is something out there that is even more addictive: the Clerihew competition.
For those not in the know, a clerihew is a whimsical four line biographical poemlet and, thanks to George Szirtes, I have discovered the creation of them is as addictive as cocaine. Like cocaine, the clerihew compulsion rapidly leaves one’s system – but in the heat of the moment, it is almost impossible to stop making them.
The thread started by George Szirtes on Facebook yesterday ended up containing well over 100 clerihews on film directors and actors. There were quite a few people repeatedly posting away, hooked and unable to stop for a good two hours. Here are mine, to get them out of my system. Now for a rest…
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by Adam Horovitz on July 27, 2011
I joined the Poetry Society in 2007 as an experiment – for years I had been wary of it and uncertain whether it spoke to or for me. I was slowly beginning to find surer feet as a poet at the time and thought it would be worthwhile seeing what the Society had to offer.
At first I wasn’t sure it could offer me that much – the Poetry Review, whilst a worthwhile organ, was not enough on its own to hold my attention and my fee. There are plenty of other magazines out there, and it’s only through the reading of all of them that one can see what a broad church poetry can, and should, be. Magma, Tears in the Fence, Acumen, Ambit, The North, Poetry Review and any number of other, smaller magazines help oxygenate modern poetry in the same manner as a rainforest helps us keep breathing. Only by accepting diversity can poetry survive.
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by Adam Horovitz on March 26, 2011
One of the icons of my childhood imagination, Diana Wynne Jones, has died. She was, in my opinion, the finest writer of fantastical fiction for children of any age – a creator of wise, funny, tender and occasionally scary books that expanded my consciousness and my perception of the world immeasurably.
Of all the books from my childhood, hers are the ones which have survived, which remain living, breathing books. Everything she wrote gave me pleasure and stood rereading regularly. The Chrestomanci series played relentlessly with moral perceptions and blurred the boundaries between hero and villain with wit and verve – I loved those as a child. Later, the Dalemark books caught my imagination – deep political intrigue, a family of troubadour poet/musicians, a dreamy young red-headed hero in Cart and Cwidder – what was there for the dreamy, red-headed son of a poet/troubadour not to like? I was heart-broken by the (perfect) ending to the series when it came out – moved to tears by the fate of the red-headed musician boy, despite the fact that I was 22 when it came out and a little more streetwise and thick-skinned.
The books that stick with me most are The Time of the Ghost, a haunting, semi-autobiographical novel that scared me silly as a child and Fire and Hemlock, a dreamlike retelling-of-sorts of the Tam Lin myth. She wore her learning lightly and thrilled me into learning more.
Diana Wynne Jones was my hero as a child, and I was lucky enough to meet her – her husband taught my father at Oxford, and she had come to the memorial reading for my mother in the Colston Hall in 1983 and readings I gave in Bristol with my father. At one, in 1992, she told me I had the makings of a lyric poet and commented in detail on a couple of the poems I’d read. Sadly, I forget exactly what was said, but I remember that I was thrilled to be given generous and useful feedback by my hero.
She was one of the few writers I’ve met who appeared, in person, just like the person who wrote the book, someone who would inhabit the worlds she wrote about with ease. She was kind, funny, sharp, interested and just a little scary. Not for nothing did Neil Gaiman dedicate his Books of Magic series to four witches, one of whom was Diana.
I treasure the few signed copies of her books that I have and the satirical postcard she sent me, gently berating me for my organisational skills. Needless to say, I only found that card recently, under a huge pile of papers.
I will miss the regular arrival of new books by her, which were as much an obsession and release day ritual for me as Harry Potter was more recently for millions of children. I’m also sorry that I never got the chance to send her my new book, due out later this year, with the letter I had been planning, thanking her for the help her writing gave in keeping a flame of magic alive in my head for the last 32 years.
