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.

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.

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.

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…

Richard Burton
was never quite certain
if he or Liz Taylor
caused their marriage’s failure.

**

Stanley Kubrick
had no particular rubric
except to keep his career
and his home very near.

**

Busby Berkeley
did nothing starkly.
His choreography’s lavish
and can still astonish and ravish.

**

Michael Powell
with Peeping Tom ran afoul
of an idiot censor.
Only osmium’s denser.

**

Charlton Heston
was at his best on
the Planet of the Apes.
The rest was a traipse.

**

Clark Gable
was never able
to cure his halitosis.
He even tried osmosis.

**

Jaques Tati
gets rather ratty
when people say
he’s a French Will Hay.

**

Peter Jackson
got all Anglo Saxon
directing Tolkien. Did he stop it?
Did he fuck! He’s back with The Hobbit.

**

Darren Aronofsky
is no Tarkovsky.
He made molehill from mountain
when he filmed The Fountain.

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.

Then something changed my perspective on the PoSoc – Judith Palmer became the Society’s director. I’d encountered Judith at the Royal Festival Hall in 2000, where she ran the PR for one of my father’s Poetry Olympics events, and had heard more of her on the radio. She was a confident and inclusive voice and the more I knew about her, from all sorts of different perspectives, the more I liked.

Her unstinting enthusiasm for poetry of whatever stripe has been apparent as long as I’ve known of her, so I was intrigued to see what would happen with her in charge of the Society. To my delight, the Society bloomed, became more inclusive, more exciting, more willing than ever to engage with people who might not normally be drawn to poetry. She pulled off sweet stunts like the Knit a Poem project. She made the Society, and poetry, more approachable.

Reader, I stayed with the Society!

So, of course, when Judith suddenly resigned a couple of months ago and no word came out about the reasons, I wanted to know more – a closed off, schtumm Society was not what I wanted. So I joined Kate Clanchy’s group calling for a requisition and an Emergency General Meeting, knowing nothing of the circumstances except that I wanted to know what was going on, alongside 450 or so others. For this I, and many others, have been accused of being unbalanced, wrong-thinking and destructive. All for wanting to know why the truth has been suppressed.

It’s sad to see that the majority of the early press reports on the matter have been thinly veiled churnalism, vapidly repeating one point of view, or gleefuly harping on about middle class beardies. At least that seems to be beginning to change, now that Judith Palmer has released her account of events. It is too easy to fall back on stereotype, and one of the joys of the last three years is that Judith and others have been chipping away slowly at the usual perceptions of poets and poetry. So the hoo-hah about funding and the running of Poetry Review has been a major step backwards.

As I have been writing this, a petition has come in, which I urge you to sign if you are interested in poetry and its furtherance as an art, asking for the immediate reinstatement of Judith Palmer as director of the Poetry Society. She and the Society’s staff have been turning the Poetry Society well on its way to being a 21st century-relevant, open-hearted, open-handed, generous and exciting organisation for anyone and everyone interested in poetry, whatever their creed, colour, race or class. It would be a terrible shame if she were not allowed to continue this good work and the forces of silence and closed doors were allowed free reign.

Click here to sign the petition.

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.

This is the one John Donne poem I’d keep if I was forced to burn my collection to keep warm on a desert island.

Why did the mathematician cross the road?

Because he saw the chicken pi.

Came up with this earlier in response to a Facebook post by Jo Bell about recreational mathematics. It’s silly punnery at its slightest and most ridiculous but it keeps snickering away in the back of my head, so I’m exorcising it here. Can’t find an equivalent joke on Google, so am claiming it as mine…

My brief obituary of Inge Laird appeared in yesterday’s Guardian Other Lives – click here to read it. I originally submitted a longer piece, which I have posted below in a slightly edited version.

INGE LAIRD

Poet and translator

Inge Elsa Laird, who has died of cancer aged 71, was a generous-spirited supporter of the arts and a fine poet, whose minimal verses hid considerable depths under their frail meniscuses.

Born in Düsseldorf in 1939, the younger child of Margarete and Robert Drenker, she spent the war years unaware of the Jewish heritage that her mother’s marriage to her Christian father hid. Shortly after the war was over, her parents separated, and Inge did not see her father again until 1990.

She lived with her mother, stepfather and brother Günther in a small apartment near a farm, which cemented Inge’s love of the countryside, especially after witnessing the privations of war in urban Düsseldorf. These were happier times, as Inge revelled in school life, sports and the company of her fellow students. She also developed a love of dancing in Düsseldorf’s New Orleans Jazz Bar, listening to the trad jazz of Ken Colyer and others, a love that stayed with her for life. One of my earliest memories of Inge, in the mid 1980s, is of her hopping around the 100 Club, a look of solemn glee on her face, as Ken Colyer played Goin’ Home.

Having started her working career as a teenager scouting out package holiday destinations for a German travel agency, she came to England in 1962 and worked as a portrait model in Richmond, Surrey. She met the musician Michael Laird in 1963 and they married the next year. Their daughter, Nicola, was born in autumn 1964.

Inge settled into British life but never lost her connections with Germany – her accent stayed, though it softened. She worked at W & A Houben, a bookshop in Richmond owned by a Holocaust survivor, and for Lufthansa, which gave her the freedom to indulge one of her greatest pleasures, travelling and exploring the world. She also worked for the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, as a translator and interpreter.

Throughout the 1980s, Inge became increasingly involved in the literary magazine New Departures and Poetry Olympics festivals alongside my father, the poet Michael Horovitz, eventually becoming the co-editor of New Departures. During this time, she also honed her skills as a poet and reviewer.

She also became a fiercely maternal figure for me after my mother died, and would always, if she could, be there to listen and help. I was not alone in receiving these tender ministrations – she was generous with her time with all of her friends and loved ones. And if she needed cheering up, she would put on a record and dance. I cannot now listen to Nina Hagen without seeing Inge, almost levitating around the trumpet-lined front room of her home in Wimbledon, an impish smile on her face as she encouraged my girlfriend and I to join her.

Inge’s sometimes ceremonial joyfulness did not diminish on becoming a grandmother to Benita and Max Laird-Hopkins, born 1992 and 1995 respectively. If anything, it increased. She also found in herself an ever-deepening stillness as a poet and performer, often collaborating with musicians to allow herself, and the words, time to breathe. A recording survives of her reading from her 2001 Elephant Press pamphlet, Poems, accompanied by Oud player Hassan al Hassani (Namiq Hamoodi).

Inge also began to rediscover her Jewish identity – her mother’s Hungarian Jewish ancestry had been understandably suppressed during the Second World War and Inge was only told about it in 1950. Her interest began to flower fully in the 1980s, after meeting members of my father’s family. Much as she enjoyed rediscovering aspects of it she did not let it posses her utterly – she was just as interested in other religions, although much of her time was given to buddhism and yoga.

Despite serious illness in the last months of her life, she retained her beauty and joie de vivre. I was one of several people lucky enough to receive a phone call from her on New Year’s Eve 2010 and she sounded as if she had never been ill, full of hope for the future and concern for others.

She is survived by Michael Laird and her daughter and grandchildren.

Inge Elsa Laird, writer, translator, interpreter, editor; born 19 January 1939; died 3 January 2011.

RB Kitaj's If Not, Not

All praise to the BBC iPlayer! I have just listened again and again to the Poetry Please mash up of T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes and Lia Williams reading The Waste Land and I am in the mood to hug someone.

The poem comes more vividly to life, in the inspired hands of the editor, than I have ever heard before; Eliot may sound like Oliver Postgate with a serious bout of constipation, and he may (surprisingly for someone so fastidious with his explanatory notes) be thoroughly dismal at pronouncing the foreign words he employs but, playing off Hughes and Williams, his somewhat strained intonation becomes infinitely more bearable.

It’s been so long since I listened to Ted Hughes read anything that his voice, which rumbles like small mountains dancing, came as a glorious surprise when I first heard it blasting from the car stereo on the motorway up from Wales on Sunday. Lia Williams, whilst occasionally a little too actorly (she could learn from the simplicity and power of Hughes’s emphasis on meaning over technique), teased an unexpected lightness from the poem.

The three intertwining voices created an atmospheric clarity, a deeper understanding of Eliot’s poem. For me, it felt like rain on my tongue after a long drought. This was great radio; challenging and beautiful. If only there were more broadcasts like it.

To listen again, click here.