Larkin Toad 30: Labyrinth on My Back, St Ambrose Court, Bransholme

Larkin Toad 35: Hull Poem Toad, Prince's Avenue

Larkin Toad 33: The St George's Toad, St George's Road

Larkin Toad 34: The Carnegie Toad, West Park

Larkin Toad 36: Twinkle Toad, Prince's Avenue

Larkin Toad 31: Topographical Toad, Woodcock Street

Larkin Toad 37: Floral, Pearson Park

On the Trail of the Larkin Toads: No. 32, The Newington Toad, Hawthorn Avenue

Greek Street

Approved Coal Merchant

Thinking About David Jones

Like the figure of his Aphrodite, David Jones intended his art to have both a sacrificial and ecstatic function, a synthesis for which only wartime, it seemed, could provide the necessary conditions of intellectual emergency. The name for the highest form of art in Jones's lexicon was ‘sacrament’. In his essay ‘Art and Democracy’ Jones wrote that if only the beaver would add one superfluous twig to his dam it would become ‘a font’, and ‘the creature would enter the “sign world”’. The form of this ‘sign world’ is the artistic sacrament or anathemata, ‘the things set up’ to affirm and exalt ‘the gods’.

Wild Flowers, Near Lund

Caravanserai

The Sahara has shifted
an inch and a continent.

The dune you are standing on,
Ibrahim Ag Alhabib,

is also thousands of miles
from your feet: my windscreen

this morning is coated
in fine desert sand.

Never was shifty heart truer,
or truer to it its far-scattered sons

who touch across oceans of sand.
Among themselves

the Touareg are the Imazighen,
‘the free people’. In Arabic

‘Touareg’ means ‘forsaken by God’.
The sandmen of my youth

are forsaken by the Fassaroe pit,
the last gravel mixed

and the compacted fill
rolled flat. I see again

the brace of wheels
on the weighbridge, the great

engines ticking over,
at bay, and dust

that is no longer sand
in the drivers’ eyes.

I feel its drift, voiceless
and huge, within me,

and know I too
am transported, grain

by grain, and unsigned for,
the docket still in my father’s hand.

Over that brutalized earth
I see the tippers void

the rising clouds of their sandstorms,
a caravanserai

of transients negotiate
sand trails decades since

sand was there:
their mounts departed,

not a Thermos between them,
they and their shallow pits

soon exhausted, tiny-seeming
under the stars.
 

Found Shark, Staithes

Report of the Hull Borough Asylum for the Year 1885

Courtesy of a most intriguing publication I picked up today, the Report of the Hull Borough Asylum for the Year 1885, a list of grounds for summary detention for feeble-mindedness in the late nineteenth century. Good to see an over-enthusiastic bout of self-abuse could land a man in the madhouse back then, in theory at least, even if the 1885 figures show a deplorable shortfall of lunatic masturbators banged to rights. If only these humanitarian sages had been around to help me through my teens. It’s not too late now, even, I suspect. A letter to the Hull Daily Mail may be in order.

Far Ings Grebe

Hessle Road

You can give a man a better new camera but say what you like, the world will always need bad photographs. The Wassand Arms here used to boast a dancing parrot, but no more. There is a parrot in The Ship in Sewerby, but does anyone know of any remaining resident parrots in Hull pubs? I wanted to get pictures too of The Stricky Arms and Rayner’s, redoubtable old watering holes of ill repute, but there were people standing in the door and I didn’t like to disturb them. The pub with the beautiful old Anchor Brewery sign (Anchor Brewery of steam beer fame, presumably?) is The Dairycotes Inn. The Criterion was of coursed named after the literary journal. Geoffrey Hill’s early/late Eliot pitch/tone debate is a very popular theme there, I discover. In fact they speak of little else. Click for big.

Previously Unknown Georges De la Tour Discovered in Hull

Stephen Burt

And now another big long review, of Stephen Burt’s Forms of Youth, here.

The Letters of Louis MacNeice

Monstrously long review of The Letters of Louis MacNeice, by me, here. Now there was a man who loved cats.