Tag: Night Brings Home The Crowes

In and Out of the Dark Mud Bath

Sphinx 12 has gone out in all its waspy colours to those and such as those. As usual, the posting process took longer than I could possibly have believed, but it is done.

So it’s back to the poetry pamphlets: Jeremy Page’s In and Out of the Dark Wood is just about done. The second draft went in the post to him yesterday. David Ford’s Punch is sitting in front of me. These two should be printed in May.

Sphinx 12 has gone out in all its waspy colours to those and such as those. As usual, the posting process took longer than I could possibly have believed, but it is done.

So it’s back to the poetry pamphlets: Jeremy Page’s In and Out of the Dark Wood is just about done. The second draft went in the post to him yesterday. David Ford’s Punch is sitting in front of me. These two should be printed in May.

Meanwhile, I have been working on a Selected Ruth Pitter for some time and must get back to that because it will be a lovely thing to have out. It will include a small number of unpublished poems, which may create a little additional interest — that will be thanks to Thomas McKean who copied many poems out of Ruth’s notebooks during his visits to her home. It has been very interesting to see the steady trickle of orders coming in for the Conversation with RP — one never knows how the word gets round but round it does get. And readers have liked it very much, which is gratifying (though not surprising).

Another diversion has been a family publication titled Night Brings Home The Crowes, which is my mother’s memoir about her grandmother’s family, the Crowes, of which there were eleven children — twelve if you count the one who died as a baby. She has been writing up the anecdotes and collecting information about them for at least ten years. Finally, it is all coming together as a pamphlet publication (Sally Evans led the way) but even the family tree, on which much work has already been done, is more complicated than I could have thought. I am not a genealogist but have begun to look at how this family research stuff works. I keep thinking about those seven women in Africa, to whom we are all originally (allegedly) related . . .

And all the while the garden is unfolding into Spring.

 

Thinking about mud baths . . .

Soon the new fence will have things growing up it again. The honeysuckle is recovering. The old clematis has brave little shoots here and there: I am keeping an eye on them. This morning we have rain, but this garden needs the rain so I’m glad of it. I bought a little crab apple tree in Aldi for a fiver, because I’ve always wanted one. It is sitting in a bucket, waiting for me to dig a deep hole, which may prove difficult. We’ll see. I remember the stones just under the top soil the last time. Digging to Australia in this garden would not be an easy task.

One of our games in the summer when we were children was ‘mud baths’. This entailed water (water being the underlying necessity of many serious games) and piles of newly dug (stoneless) earth. First you dig a deep hole, which you half fill with water. Then you put some of the nice loose earth back into the hole, mix the earth and water carefully to the right consistency, spread it over your legs, from foot to thigh and sit in the sun for some time, processing the sensation of mud caking your skin. You watch it start to dry and crack (because your days are endless and you have acres of time to spend on nothing else than this). Finally your sibling, who is playing the role of Mud-bath Attendant, gets the watering can and rinses the mud away. You feel renewed. You feel you could write the reviews that are waiting for your attention. Oops, sudden time jump there . . .

Merriness in Midhurst

This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!

This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!

This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!

It doesn’t rain in Midhurst apparently. Not like here. So we had a very nice time visiting beautiful gardens and I took our photograph on automatic through the teapots.

 

Moving Life with Teapot

 

There was serious work going on too though. For some time, a pamphlet has been in hand called Night Brings Home the Crowes. Written by my mother (Kathleen Curry), it tells as much of the story as we can recover (from her memories and a few other sources) of the Crowe family — that’s my mother’s grandmother and her nine siblings. It will mainly be of interest to family, but there is some lovely period detail that others will also enjoy, I think.

Anyway, one of our tasks this week was careful proof-reading, page by page, and collecting a few more photographs to go in. The publication, with luck, will be finished and go to the printer this week.

And yet another publication under scrutiny this weekend has been my own next collection, which John Lucas of Shoestring Press is publishing. It’s due some time in the autumn – perhaps October – and although I got it together, more or less, a good few months ago (in fact, last summer, I think), I put off finalising it until the ultimatum came.

Which it did, while I was dipping in and out of A Field of Large Desires, an anthology of Greville Press poems, brought out just a few months ago by Carcanet (I thoroughly recommend it — the contents are different from anything you will find elsewhere). Astbury’s Greville Press is, of course, chiefly and justifiably renowned for poetry pamphlets. In the preface to this book-length volume, Grey Gowrie says,

Poems are best read [ . . . ] with but few of their fellows. The great collections of great poets are useful for reference but hell to read. A slim vol is okay; a pamphlet best of all.

Increasingly, I agree. My Shoestring Press book will be a slim volume, but even at that, it’s weighing down the world with more poetry. I hope Plot and Counterplot justifies its place. We’ll see. When your main task has come to be publishing other people’s work, you end up feeling bizarrely guilty writing poems yourself. Like counselling people to smoke less, while cultivating your own cigar habit on the side.

Anyway, this week I’ll also be working on the Thomas Hardy pamphlet, amongst other things. Thankfully, the submission period is now over, so letters to poets are off the agenda, unless they’re poets in progress, as it were. I’ve been amused to find that several people have congratulated me for publishing Selima Hill’s winning pamphlet, which of course I did not. I haven’t even seen it: it hasn’t come in to Sphinx for review. Speaking of which, there are a couple of reviews nearly ready to go up too. Another task for today.

I’ll conclude with a bit of James Reeves (another under-rated poet) from the Greville Press Anthology. It’s titled ‘The Prisoners’, and every second line should be indented, but I can’t make WordPress do that for me (if anyone reading this knows how, please tell me):

Somehow we never escaped
Into the sunlight,
Though the gates were always unbarred
And the warders tight.
For the sketches on the walls
Were to our liking,
And squeaks from the torture-cell
Most satisfying.