Stanley Plumly: Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me

Stanley Plumley sounds more like a Yorkshire shop-keeper than an American poet, but names are deceptive. He’s one of their best. Plumley is Professor of English at the University of Maryland and published by CCC - an imprint of HarperCollins publishing. Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me is a collection of new and selected dating from 1970 to 2000. It’s arranged in reverse chronological order because the publishers want you to read from the new poems back to the ones he started out with. I tried to read it like that, but found myself giving up and going to the back of the book, reading through his life from young man to old man (he was born in 1939). My favourite poems are from the early period - his first collection ‘In the Outer Dark’.

Many of the poems are autobiographical - which is probably why it makes more sense to start at the beginning. His relationship with his mother is told in personal, affectionate detail as in ‘My Mother’s Feet’

                 ‘How no shoe fit them,
and how she used to prop them,
having dressed for bed,
letting the fire in the coal stove blue

and blink out, falling asleep in her chair.
How she bathed and dried them, night after night,
and rubbed their soreness like an intimacy.
How she let the fire pull her soft body through them.’


his alcoholic father,

‘I watched you humble a man in a fight once -
he went down like an animal whose spirit
world has suddenly collapsed and all that’s left
in the wounded moment after is not quite
animal nor man. He was big, which made
his humility that much larger, and there
was blood but so little that it seemed less like
a fight than a conversion. You had his right
arm at the wrist in your right hand and simply
turned him down onto the floor, which stank of wear
and sawdust. I’d seen you break the back of wood
like that. The man wept, he was drunk, you were drunk
and at the same time sober. He was my size
now. And in his eyes I could see his children .......’

Many of the poems are personal observations of the relationships around him - trying to make sense of them.

‘People are standing, as if out of the rain,
holding on. For the last two blocks
the woman across the aisle has wept
quietly into her hands, the whole
of her upper body nodding, keeping time.
The bus is slow enough you can hear,
inside your head, the traffic within
traffic, like another talk.’

There are prose poems, and beautiful exercises in observation, such as ‘In Answer to Amy’s Question What’s a Pickerel’

‘Pickerel have infinite, small bones, and skins
of glass and black ground glass, and though small for pike
are no less wall-eyed and their eyes like bone.
Are fierce for their size, and when they flare
at the surface resemble drowning birds, .......

But through all of it, the poet’s voice, with a quiet tone of enquiry and exploration, is steady and consistent and extraordinarily likeable. My favourite poem, even after I’d read the whole collection, remains the title poem ‘Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me’.

We lie in that other darkness, ourselves.
There is less than the width of my left hand
between us. I can barely breathe,
but the light breathes easily,
wind on water across our two still bodies.

I cannot even turn to see him.
I would not touch him. Nor would I lift
my arm into the crescent of a moon.
(There is no star in the sky of this room,
only the light fashioning fish along the walls.
They swim and swallow one another.)

I dream we lie under water,
caught in our own sure drift.
A window, white shadow, trembles over us.
Light breaks into a moving circle.
He would not speak and I would not touch him.

It is an ocean under here.
Whatever two we were, we become
our falling body one breath. Night lies down
at the sleeping center - no fish, no shadow,
no single, turning light. And I would not touch him
who lies deeper in the drifting dark than life.

E-Book - Wendy Robertson; Paulie's Web

I’m pledged to read one E-published book a month and this time it’s Wendy Robertson’s novel ‘Paulie’s Web’.  Wendy is a much-published author with more than 25 titles on the bookshelves.  Paulie’s Web is the novel her publishers didn’t want because they thought it too ‘difficult’ for her readership because it’s about women in prison and the challenges they face when released.  It came from several years spent working as a writer in prisons, an experience Wendy describes as ‘challenging and life-changing.’  

‘It has taken me ten years to digest the extremities of my experience in prison,’ Wendy says, ‘and write my novel as true fiction in a way that pays tribute to the many  women I met while working there. If, by the by, it goes some way to cracking the absurd stereotypes of women in prison it will be an extra delight.  While there are dark passages here I make no apologies for the ultimately optimistic tone of this story which is a true reflection of the humour, stoicism and kindness that I was witness to in my prison experience.’

The novel tells the story of 5 women locked in the same white van to be taken off to the remand centre.  One of them, Paulie, has been wrongly convicted and when she’s released, 6 years later, she’s determined to track down the other women and find out what’s happened to them. 

Paulie is a great character.  Wendy says that ‘If you are interested in the experiences of people on the margins of our comfortable lives, you will like Paulie! She is great – clever, resourceful and capable of surviving the hardest challenges that life throws up at her.’  In the prison, Paulie has become a writer and the women’s stories are interspersed with extracts from Paulie’s notebook. 

This is an honest novel - neither a misery memoir - which so many prison books are - or a romanticised version of unimaginably hard lives.  It offers a picture of a sector of society most of us know nothing of - except what we read in the papers.  I grew to love some of the characters - particularly Queenie, the elderly schizophrenic given to wandering and having visions, locked up in prison (like so many people with mental health issues) because there’s nowhere else to go.

There’s an underlying message in the book - Paulie finds redemption through the prison education system - through literature.  Wendy intended the novel to confront the issues of  ‘justice and injustice in ordinary people’s lives’, but it does more than that.

Wendy is an expert story-teller and wordsmith and Paulie’s Web is a delight to read, even though the subject matter is dark.  Hanging and flogging members of the House of Commons should be made to read it.




Wendy has an excellent blog on www.lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com

If you're interested in E-books and authors doing it for themselves, check out www.authorselectric.blogspot.com
           

Now All Roads Lead to France: Matthew Hollis

I'm always happy when I see a biography of a poet written by a poet.   Matthew Hollis is one of the 'poetry whizz-kids' in Britain - someone who has won all the prizes going and has now ventured into biography with this study of Edward Thomas.

It's one of the new breed of biography - that tackles one aspect or one period of a life rather than ploughing through the whole thing.  This one is very cleverly done.  Edward Thomas's whole life is reflected and discussed in consideration of the most important five years of his life - the years just before his death, when he began to write poetry rather than prose.

Central to the story is Thomas's meeting with Robert Frost who had sold up all his possessions and come to England in a gamble to launch his own career as a poet, feeling overlooked in America.  For 5 years the two men talked, corresponded, shared their work and encouraged each other.  There are echoes of their conversations in each other's poetry - compare Thomas's 'The Signpost' with Frost's 'The Road Not Taken'.  The book is very good on their relationship.  But I don't always agree with Matthew Hollis's analysis of the poems.

In the background is the (one can't help but feel) tragic relationship between Edward Thomas and his wife Helen.  The youthful marriage he came to regret so much that he sometimes treated his wife with considerable emotional cruelty, and which seems to have precipitated  long episodes of depression.   Thomas had love affairs with 3 other women (one a very young girl) which may or may not have been platonic, but all deeply troubling to his wife.  One feels pity on both sides.

There is always a narrative hook at the end of a life abruptly terminated.  The question mark -  what would he have written/done/said if he had lived beyond the war?  We can't know.   The question mark hovers in the concluding lines of his own poems and is one reason we are so drawn to them - the other reason is the poignancy of the foreshadowing - the poet's own haunting uncertainty - matched with our own reading of the poems with the knowledge of how the story really ended.

Edward Thomas's poetry is better, much better, than I remembered from reading it years ago.  Let's pass over the much quoted Adlestrop, and his poem 'To Helen' (the meaning of which changes once you know the background).    Thomas's collected poems are available to download in a number of formats, free, at the Gutenburg Project.   Read Bright Clouds, The Long Small Room, Liberty, It Rains, In Memoriam,  Lights Out (written after he went to France, believing he would die), There's Nothing Like the Sun, and the poem that he wrote last to finish the collection 'Words'.  Then read the biography.

Lights Out (excerpt)

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book,
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

Under Storm's Wing: Edward Thomas

A Memoir of a life with Edward Thomas
By
Helen and Myfanwy Thomas

I’ve been reading this as an introduction and another perspective to Now All Roads Lead to France - Matthew Hollis’s account of the last 5 years of Edward Thomas’s life, when he began to write poetry seriously and enlisted in the war that was to kill him with such casual cruelty.

Helen Thomas’s memoir is a personal and passionate account of her relationship with the poet - how they met as teenagers, and became lovers in spite of their parents’ disapproval.  Her frank accounts of their youthful, innocent love making in the open air are quite beautiful, marking her out as a writer of talent in her own right.

They married (secretly) while Edward was still at Oxford, because she was pregnant and, although she was happy to live in a free relationship, Edward wanted to protect her reputation.  It was hard for the two young people.  Edward Thomas found it difficult to get enough free-lance writing work as an essayist, reviewer and hack biographer.  He suffered from depression and often had to go away and live by himself, leaving Helen to cope with the children alone.

 He fell in love with other women, or they fell in love with him - Eleanor Farjeon was one - and, although Helen skims over this - it must have been hard for her to cope with.  Behind her careful sentences there lurks the suspicion that there were times when ET wished that he was free and single and not burdened with the task of supporting a wife and three children. But Helen’s account asserts that they loved each other profoundly and this held them together, like trees strongly rooted in the ground, whatever storms were blowing in the branches. 

Helen writes of ET’s friendship with Robert Frost, who encouraged him to write poetry seriously - though it was never commercially published while he was alive.  The good thing about this edition (bought second hand)  is that some of the letters between ET and Robert Frost are included in a separate section.

The poem ‘To Helen’ was, apparently, written for her and given to her the night Edward Thomas left for France.  He died, not in action, but quietly smoking his pipe outside the observation post, when a shell whistled past him so closely, the blast stopped his heart.

Now to read Matthew Hollis’s biography which, I suspect, since both Helen and her children are long dead, may tell a slightly different story.

Divisadero: Michael Ondaatje

I love Michael Ondaatje's writing - lose myself in the prose like a horse rolling in the grass -  lost also in admiration of the close accumulation of detail that builds a fictional fabric you can almost put out your hand to touch.   Every object has a history - every character a genetic code.

Divisadero is Spanish for divided/division - and the novel concerns a loose collection of individuals, only two of whom are genetically connected:   a father who is a widowed farmer, Anna - his motherless daughter,  Claire - an orphaned baby brought from the hospital to be reared with her,  and Cooper - the son of murdered neighbours taken in by Anna's father, who works on their farm, both like and not like a brother.   They operate just like a family, but when Anna is 16 there's a wreck  - the group falls apart and their lives spin off in other directions.   The father is left to manage the farm alone as they become Coop the gambler, Claire the legal detective, Anna the writer, and the second part of the book follows the threads of their now separate lives.

Anna is in France, researching the life of the French author Segura, his wives and lovers, the strange gypsy 'family' he adopts - a web of relationships and broken families whose stories are compelling.  Segura's story forms the third part of the novel which makes parallels with the first.   Families, Ondaatje seems to be saying, are made, not born, and genetic connections are perhaps less important than we think.  In the end we're all alone in pursuit of our own lives.  We're all orphans.

I haven't quite worked it all out yet - the structural pattern the author's drawn - which is obviously deliberate, but isn't completely clear to me.   This is one to read again when there's less going on in my life.  Somewhere in all the interruptions - putting it down to pack boxes and drive on/off car ferries or revise Italian grammar - I feel I've missed some important point in the novel that would have made it all clear.  Dove Grey Reader identifies the Eureka moment as being on page 142, but there are no page numbers on Kindle .......   and maybe I did get the point, maybe I'm just looking for more significance or structural coherence than there is - Ondaatje is a writer who, after all, likes to play with form and genre.

The New York Times Reviewer  (Erica Wagner) called it 'a series of narratives that calls itself, perhaps for convenience’ sake, a novel ....... three tales loosely braided together like slack rope'.  Erica is also seduced by the poetry - 'He is a poet as much as (or even more than) he is a novelist, and the crosscurrents of his writing flow and ripple against each other as poems might.'    And, after all, what do you expect from a novel called 'Division'?

At the moment I'm happy to have read it for the characters and their stories and the prose that is almost poetry.   And it's on my re-read list for the next bout of flu, or anything else that keeps me in bed long enough to need it!

Anne Zouroudi: The Whispers of Nemesis

'It is winter in the mountains of northern Greece and as the snow falls in the tiny village of Vrisi a coffin is unearthed and broken open. But to the astonishment of the mourners at the graveside, the remains inside the coffin have been transformed, and as news of the bizarre discovery spreads through the village like forest fire it sets tongues wagging and heads shaking. Then, in the shadow of the shrine of St Fanourios (patron saint of lost things), a body is found, buried under the fallen snow - a body whose identity only deepens the mystery around the exhumed remains. There's talk of witchcraft, and the devil's work - but it seems the truth, behind both the body and the coffin, may be far stranger than the villagers' wildest imaginings. '


I'm a great fan of Anne Zouroudi's immortal detective Hermes Diaktoros.  I love the Greek setting and the writing never disappoints - in fact she seems to be growing in confidence.  This is detective fiction of a very literary character.  Her latest plot concerns a poet who, tired of the poor returns of his profession, decides on a drastic course of action to boost his sales.   That is, until the Greek gods decide to take an interest.  Nemesis will always find you out.


This is the first of the series that I've read on Kindle - very reasonably priced.  But I'll also be buying the printed version because I love the covers!

Buy from Amazon or on Kindle.

Buy from the Book Depository in paperback or other E-book formats - postage free internationally.

E-Books, Linda Gillard and The House of Silence

Another respectably published author whose publisher didn't think her latest book was 'commercial' enough, so Linda took the business into her own hands and has already sold 12,000 copies of her novel over the internet without any hype, reviews, or marketing campaign.

Linda Gillard is one of my fellow authors over on what used to be 'Kindle Authors UK' before Amazon complained and is now 'Authors Electric'.

I liked the plot summary of House of Silence (Rebecca meets Cold Comfort Farm) so I downloaded a sample and was soon captivated enough to buy the book.   Like a lot of E-books, it's an affordable bargain at £1.90, unlike the outrageous £11.49 you have to pay to read Philippa Gregory on Kindle - twice the price of her paperbacks. How do they justify that?

This is a very well written novel, easy to read with a fascinating plot.  Gwen,  an orphan, meets Alfie, the actor, on the set of a BBC TV historical drama and begins an affair.  Things get a little sticky when he goes home for his annual Xmas visit and Gwen insists on being taken along too.

Alfie's mother is a famous children's author who has written a best-selling series based on her son.  She has four daughters, all outrageously neglected and is currently a senile figure confined to her bedroom (the mad woman in the attic).   Home is a 17th century manor in Norfolk (the aptly named Creake Hall)  and the family turns out to have more secrets than the Pentagon. 

I enjoyed every minute of  this book.  It's written with considerable panache and humour, despite the fact that there's a very serious underlying thread to the book - how do we, as individuals and families, deal with tragedy?

If publishers are going to turn down sure-fire bestsellers like this one (as they seem to be doing) then I'm afraid the industry is in for a crisis.  Authors don't need publishers any more.  Not when they can do it for themselves as successfully as this.


If you're interested in E-books and authors doing it for themselves, check out www.authorselectric.blogspot.com