by Adam Horovitz on February 2, 2012
Michael and Adam Horovitz at Broadway Books, Hackney, on February 17th 2012
Welcome to the first shameless plug of 2012. I’m looking forward to this gig – it’s taking place a few days after what would have been my mother’s 74th birthday and my father and I will be reading from her work as well (happily her Collected Poems has just been rereleased, with a CD, by Bloodaxe). This gives me the opportunity to make explicit the links between her Collected and my debut, which are hopefully subtle enough that my book can be read in its own right but explicit enough to be recognisable.
Hope to see you there, dear reader – or somewhere else soon. If you’re in Hereford this weekend I’m reading in Hereford Library at 2pm on Saturday February 4th. Tickets are free but must be booked.
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…
[click to continue…]
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.
[click to continue…]
