Toad

By Pocklington Canal

Peacock Butterfly, Near Bielby, Yorkshire

The Product of an Idea: That Man Is Horrible, For Instance

The Highest As Yet Undiscovered Prime Number And Its Implications for Reality As We Know It

Inlatable Bat Sales

The Concept of Dereliction in the Mind of God

Time Please

The Song of Lunch

Mutt: Have you been reading those scripts?

Jeff: Pfft.

Mutt: Anything of... note?

Jeff: Those scripts. Ah yes.

Mutt: I saw this laughable howler. No wait, I’ve forgotten it.

Jeff: Don’t think much of these tortellini.

Mutt: And they call that lunch.

[Jeff tilts forwards gently into his plate and goes to sleep.]

Alas, with dining companions like me feeding him lines these days, I fear Christopher Reid’s The Song of Lunch Redux: The Staff House Days may be a long time coming, longer even than an attractive choice of vegetarian options on the staff house menu. (I tell a lie. The quorn bake is passable.) But as for The Song of Lunch itself, just out from CB Editions, well, let me tell you. It’s a fantastic book. Christopher recently published A Scattering, a book of elegies, with Areté Editions, a volume for which I don’t yet possess an adequate critical vocabulary, and by following it up so soon with The Song of Lunch reminds the world, again, of the lamentable absence of a Selected never mind a Collected Reid (yes I know there was a Stateside Selected, but that was ages ago now).

Literary status anxiety and failure. A boozy lunch with an ex, now married to a successful novelist, in a so-so Italian restaurant in Soho. Wrily lecherous glances at the waitress. Unpromising stuff, isn’t it. I mean, name the contemporary poets who’ve written well about the literary world, its pettinesses and bêtises. Not too many Seamus Heaney poems about the tedium and fakery of book launches, literary croneydom, and academic log-rolling, are there (if only there were). And saeva indignatio has hardly been Christopher’s key-signature over the years, has it. Yet The Song of Lunch pulls it off – humane but scathing, grotesque but believable, its protagonist laughable but no more (no less) so than you or I:

It’s an ordinary day
in a publishing house
of ill repute.
Another moronic manuscript
comes crashing down the chute
to be turned into art.
This morning it was Wayne Wanker’s
latest dog’s dinner
of sex, teenage philosophy
and writing-course prose.
Abracadabra, kick it up the arse –
and out it goes
to be Book of the Week
or some other bollocks.
What a fraud. What a farce.
And tomorrow: who knows
which of our geniuses
will escape from the zoo
and head straight for us
with a new masterpiece
lifeless in his jaws.

Waiting for a waiter. Dramas of the bread stick, a penile peppermill, the love affair of wine and tongue. A marvellous ripple of Ulyssean stream of consciousness:

Tippling, however

He lifts, tilts, gulps.

I take it you’re

Refills own. Not a lot left.

Antidote to all life’s ills!

Another gulp.

Are there so many?

Ha! Funny!

I wasn’t trying to be

I suppose, in number, not many

That’s reassuring.

Just one big

Then, master of ceremonies:

Drink to me only!

Swig.

Seems to help.

Our poet has published one book, many years since, which received ‘One shitty review in the TLS – /The poetry, we assume, /Is in the self-pity.’ I think of Krapp’s ‘Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas.’ Why do readers of that play assume that Krapp is merely a failed writer? Maybe the book is question is fantastic, and maybe that TLS reviewer was wrong too. (Most critics are failed artists, someone suggested to Eliot: so are most artists, he replied.) There is real pathos and humanity in our poet’s predicament, not just cheap laughs at a washed-up old fraud.

Not that the question is left as open as all that. There is the small matter of the ex’s verdict on the slim volume. It is devastating. P. 59. I will forebear from quoting it. Read it yourself. I hereby proclaim The Song of Lunch an instant classic. This is Christopher Reid’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

I also feel duty-bound to point out to Christopher that the waiter in that Italian place we go to on Newland Avenue, La Perla, is, like the waiter at Zanzotti’s, called Massimo. The Italian guy, not the Bosnian, obviously.

Right, who’s for lunch?

Girl on the No. 13 Bus

I’m very grateful to An Sionnach for publishing a group of my poems, in particular a five-page sprawler about County Wicklow: magazine details here. Here’s one of the group. This poem is an unprincipled mugging of a French original by Max Jacob, I might mention.

O majorette, flexible friend,
leggy lass, o legs without end!
legging it at half past nine
for the bus from Orchard Park to town.
Don’t you miss out girl, I ask you,
on the ride now pulling out of Tesco.
Your swelling heart does karaoke
to its own beats for getting lucky,
and off you speed into the night
that pulses to the Humber’s tide;
and though I’m not about to wallow
I’ve longed too long already, willow.
People of Drypool, Drypool folk!
promise me someone gives a fuck.
Bus-stop queues, go whistle Dixie,
wait for the next one or get a taxi.
When next you see her flick her mane
she’ll have crossed the finishing line
with the yellow jersey on her chest
to join the boy that she loves best,
her toyboy and our bouncing kid.
She may live here but she comes from Brid.
This girl don’t go off on one neither.
Look at those lips. That’s why I bother.

Famous Throughout Yorkshire for His Jumping Skills... Only 39 Inches High... But There Is No Evidence For This!

David Wheatley Has Died

Obituary here.

Tadpole, Rock, Givendale, Yorkshire

'An Actual Survey of the County of Wicklow'

The fairies came by theodolite. Shone
from peak to peak the sappers’ lanterns
seemed a door ajar on the furnaces
of faeryland. The people did not want maps.
To hill farmers the Ordnance Survey meant
the land agent and rent, a quill pen
scratching menacingly at what was once
‘unprofitable bogge and mountain’.

Gaelic Wicklow had no use for cartography,
last county to be incorporated
and most vexatious and warlike of territories.
Conquest brought no campaign maps; Petty’s
survey skirts over unforfeited land.
‘3 counties meet here’, Jacob Nevill
writes of Dublin and Kildare not once
but thrice in 1760, defying all

possibility. In far west Wicklow
the Dean of Christchurch decreed his estate
to lie in Dublin and so the map reads,
a cartouche of cherubs looking on
approvingly, but there is no colour
or relief to be had: where the mountains
loom, the scab-covered head screams
from its great jaw into Carlow.

Here though at least are Roundwood
and Blessington before their manmade lakes,
but the great oak forests are disappearing
or already gone: to be found, or where
they would have been, only in Ptolemy;
his Wicklow misshapen, its place names
and people a wilderness of conjecture,
drawn unseen, but drawn, rendered, mapped.

Papa Was Breaking Stones on Prince William's Seat

The stones, the flat stones, and the skyward arrows to drive you on. For up read sideways, evidently, into the scar, the brushland, the conifers razed and removed, all but one, that gives you the finger. The hillside lets out it belly, fold after fold of it, and you walk the line between valleys, the long apron of Glencree and, past the lead mine and pine forest, the shimmering chaos of Dublin below and the spilt crumbs of its islands. Is it, is it, the esker (est-ce que?) asks and vanishes over the ridge again and again. Thrash in its wake through the calf-high gorse and startle the kite that lifts rustily over the lamb-skull and spine. The swallow hole will, if not swallow, nibble an ankle, bog water gathering under your feet. Can you see us from the car park yet? Still south I went and west and south again, sinking as I went. The huge stones, how did they get there, elsewhere there are railway sleepers, airlifted maybe, unless there are chain gangs, swinging a feeble hammer while the splay-legged deer career down the hillside, leaving me, stuck fast and sunk, and the April sun, fitful and weak, on the stones, the flat stones, Papa was breaking stones on Prince William’s Seat.

Shamelessly Repeated Michael Donaghy Anec(yawn)dote

I am in Ireland, dossing around, and will resume posting properly on Monday. In the meantime though, further thoughts on Micheal Donaghy, who would appear to be going through an Elvis impersonator phase in the above picture.

Something Understood

I hear you
listen.

My Philosophy of Life

Everyone should have a philosophy of life, and this is mine. It is based on thinking about doing something then not doing it, for no reason. I have a brilliant idea for a novel, so I don’t write it. Someone is attractive and intelligent, and I think: how nice it would be to sleep with that person, and then I think: no it wouldn’t, I would hate that. I think: I should live somewhere I like, not where I do, and then I think: no I shouldn’t, I should stay where I am, not because it gives me pleasure but just because. I’m here now and why change that. I reject the human will, in other words, but in a way that aims to exclude any sense of sacrifice or self-denial. The flipside of this philosophy is that when you (which is to say I) actually do something it can’t be because you wanted to, but because it happened when you weren’t looking, behind your back, or that’s what you have to tell yourself. In this way your life can become one long glorious empty accident. And this is my philosophy of life.

St Catherine of Siena

Catherine never saw
without wanting to kiss

a leper’s sore,
she whose flesh

throve on something
so like fresh air

(body of Christ),
any more

was already as much
as she could bear.

To the pure in heart
all is pure.

We are not ourselves.
We are His vessels.

The dead saint’s head
the faithful sever

turns to a bagful
of rose petals.

I the leper am healed
of my evil.

Now heal me as fast
of your cure.

St Lucy

Accept the gouged-out
orbs Lucy

proffers, glassily
facing you down.

Nothing to see here,
say the empty sockets

already passing on.
Shrinking horrorstruck

from your gaze
there was nowhere to look

but into your eyes.