Programme for 2010 (scroll on down for reviews for Sept 2009 - Jan 2010)

Wednesday 8 September 2010

 

Parvin Loloi ‘The Influence of Persian Poetry'

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Wednesday 13 October:

Timothy Adès, Translator-Poet, ‘The Excitement of Rhyme & Metre'

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Wednesday 10 November 2010

Will Stone, poet and literary translator, reading poems from his

international prize-winning collection 'Glaciation';

and discussing the art of translating poetry.

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Wednesday 8 December 2010

Bradford-on-Avon, Bristol & Frome Poets ‘From Around the World'

 

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Reviews

 

Wednesday 9 September 2009
Duncan Tweedale on Georg Trakl

Trakl poured forth an extraordinary volume of poems replete with mesmerising imagery and haunting visions. Highly sensitive and morbidly introspective, the young poet took his cue from Nietzsche, Rimbaud and Dostoyevsky. Duncan Tweedale has translated over 100 of his poems. Some were published in the magazine The Poet's Voice in a Georg Trakl issue in 1996. He will read some of his own translations as well as those by others.

Review by Duncan McGibbon:

'On the Ninth September, Duncan Tweedale gave a talk on Georg Trakl and read from his translations of Trakl's poems. Some of these had appeared already in The Poet's Voice Trakl Number in 1996. Duncan began by giving an extensive background to late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Austria. Musil, the novelist, Mahler, Schoenberg , Berg and Webern , the composers and Freud, the founder of psychotherapy were all active in this vast military empire run by a tinpot monarchy in Vienna. Trakl himself was born in Salzburg in 1887 and died at the age of 26 in 1914. Duncan held that Trakl's verse was characterised by dream-like juxtapositions of imagery and the use of colour concepts. The influences on him were Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Mörike, the German lyric poet and Nietzsche. Duncan read some translations by older poets such as Michael Hamburger, whose work he held tended to sacrifice some of the colour symbolism to realism. He then read his own strikingly vivid versions of some of the poet's finest lyrics, such as Elis and Sebastian im Traum.

Duncan presented the group with a tragic figure, a drug addict and a restless and unhappy man who died after taking an overdose in a mental hospital having had a breakdown on the Eastern Front after having been given the sole care of ninety wounded soldiers. Duncan then took questions and answered queries relating to Trakl's influence on his own poetry, Trakl's religious beliefs and the "Gothic "character of Trakl translations. The audience was enthused and appreciative.'

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Wednesday 14 October 2009
Nikki Bennett 'Trans Siberian Train Travels' and Mongolian Poetry

Poems and photos from Beijing, Mongolia, Lake Baikal and Moscow; plus Mongolian Poetry in translation. Nikki's book will be on sale and travelling companion Kate Young, journalist from the Isle of Wight, will also be selling her journal books from the trip, in aid of Earl Mountbatten Hospice, IOW

Review by Nancy and Geoff Catchpole:

'The convener of the poetry group, Nikki Bennett (a poet herself) together with a travelling companion, Kate Young( a journalist) recounted their adventures on a journey in the autumn of 2008 from Beijing to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway.

Both took many photographs of people and places en route, which provided illustrations to accompany stories and poems. Kate had been inspired by the death of a friend to set up a ‘writer's challenge' to raise funds for the Earl Mountbatten Hospice on the Isle of Wight and she kept a diary. Nikki subsequently also had deceased friends to remember and she sketched some poems during the journey, which she later completed to serve as a companion volume (‘Trans-Siberian Travels') to Kate's ‘Trans-Siberian Odyssey'.

Their talks were based upon the events recorded in the two books. Following their flight to Beijing the speakers spent several days visiting famous tourist sites, including the Great Wall, before boarding the train which was to be their home over the next two weeks, as they travelled through China, Mongolia and Russia.

Their journey included several scheduled stops in Mongolia and Siberia, which enabled them to explore the localities, but entailed many prolonged waits, particularly when crossing borders, first from China to Mongolia then from Mongolia to Russia. The seemingly endless form-filling and a lengthy wheel change which were involved all took up much travelling time. Nikki's poems reflected reactions to the changing scenery and to the variety of ways of living encountered on those travels.

For both of the adventurers the crossing of Mongolia was a highlight of the journey and Nikki read some native poems, including one by Ghengis Khan, which stimulated her desire to see his kingdom and the people. Her poem ‘Ger tent landscape' emphasised the remarkable silence of the area. The travellers saw and noted the anomalies of traditional ways of living which accompany quite modern developments in places, as in the capital Ulaan Baatar.

In Siberia the writers reflected in particular on the beauty and considerable importance of Lake Baikal. After rejoining the train at Irkutsk they endured three days and nights of unbroken travel on the journey to Moscow, leavening the monotony with views from the train and recurrent meals and drinks. Nikki captured both in her poem ‘Irkutsk to Moscow (1)' which contains recurrent phrases such as ‘birch, pine and larch' and ‘tea, beer and vodka', in rhythms which echo the monotony of the tracks.

Although the Siberian autumn was relatively warm and quite lovely, in Moscow the formidable winter was already advancing, so they were grateful for their flight back to Britain. The full accounts of their travels and adventures are to be found in Nikki's book of poems and in Kate's travel diary, both in support of the Hospice'.

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Wednesday 11 November 2009
Chinese Poetry, Yu Yan Chan and Caroline Heaton

Poets Caroline Heaton and Yu Yan Chen will present a selection of poems by Chinese women in the Tang and Sung dynasties. These include empresses, courtesans as well Taoist nuns. The performance promises to offer our audience a fascinating glimpse into their lives and their work. Come along for a sumptuous feast of classical Chinese verses.

Review by Linda Saunders, BRLSI member, - 'Beyond the Fragrant Boudoir'

Under this delicious title, poets Caroline Heaton and Yu Yan Chen offered the Uni-verse audience a ‘sumptuous feast' - as advertised - of Chinese women's poetry from the Classical tradition. If the audience had doubted that a Classical tradition associated with the sequestered lives (as the under-informed might have imagined them) of Palace consorts and nuns could be a source of sumptuousness, then they were in for a wonderful surprise. Drawing largely on work from the Golden Age of the T'ang and Sung dynasties - a period of some half dozen centuries, dating from 618 AD - the presenters introduced poets who led daring and changeful lives, and who wrote with an extraordinary degree of freedom and modernity in both subject and feeling.

Love poetry ranged from the soulful pining of Autumn Love - ‘Fine rain sifts through the wu-tung trees / And drips, drop by drop through the dusk' - through advice on Curing Yourself When Lovesick by enjoying your own freedom and company, delectably imagined; nor does it blush at overtly sexual imagery or a bold and witty riposte to an ‘Outrageous Come-on', from one Li Biao, ‘a skinny dude on a wasted horse, wearing old cheap hemp'. Celebrations of nature, weather and landscape, and of religious feeling and meditation were as various and moving in their different ways.

In alternating readings, Heaton and Chen introduced each poet with a brief biography, suggesting the great diversity of women's lives at this period. Though some lived within the confines of the Palace as concubines or ‘lesser wives' and women of the household, others were courtesans, entertainers/dancers/ singers, nuns, scholars... They were often well-travelled and subject to both the fortunes of war and of a fluid society. Take the legendary Zhu Shuzhen, whose life was full of (somewhat apocryphal) drama: parents who burnt her work, an unhappy marriage to a merchant who didn't appreciate her talents, a love affair with a man who did... It could be she was a composite figure, as the great number of poems attributed to her might also suggest. Or Cai Yan, who in time of war was captured and carried off to the north and became the concubine of a Huns (Xiongnu) chieftain.

Here's Zhu Shuzhen Rhyming on ‘Snow':
Her fragrant dress and neat petticoat are like a slender crescent moon,
Her steps ripple to and fro and vanish as easily as a cloud's shadow.
The strings quicken and the clappers reach a crescendo, rushing the melody to an
end,
Her sleeves whirl like floating snow.

A recurrent highlight was the reading of a few of the poems in Mandarin Chinese by Yu Yan Chen, which gave some impression of the formal complexity, music and rhyme, of the originals. Heaton's readings conveyed with great sensitivity the lapidary value given to each word and image in this intensely economic and lyrical poetry. The complementary style and voices of the two presenters kept the audience alert and entertained throughout the ‘feast'.

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Wednesday 9 December 2009
Anne Armitage - Twentieth Century Russian Poetry

As a second talk on the subject of Russian poetry Anne Armitage will present more of the ‘greats' - Pushkin, Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, and Pasternak - while taking the opportunity to include works of the ‘peasant poet' Sergei Yesenin and some of the mid twentieth-century poets such as Yevgeniy Yevtushensko, Andrey Vosnysensky and the song-writer Bulat Okudzhava. Some of these poets were set to music, and so there will be chance to hear the words sung in Russian.

Review by Nikki Bennett:

‘Eagerly awaited' was the term used for Anne's return to uni-verse, and she did not disappoint her audience.

For those who had not been at the February 09 event, Anne gave a quick summary of Russian Poetry - all that ‘doom and gloom', epic, lyrical poetry with so many influences from it that also so inspires other artists, musicians and the ‘man on the street'.

Then we were off - into the twelfth century with The Lay of Prince Igor, flowing into the works of nineteenth century Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov (The ‘Golden Age' poets), with their musicality and lyricism, then on into the later years of that century with Fyodor Tyutchev's Silentium. We were made aware of the imminent and violent change in Russia, depicted through the ‘chaos of day against night', the wrestling with and challenges of authority, through Andrey Byely, whose protagonist in Petersburg had to plant the bomb that was intended to kill his father.

And so to the twentieth century poets: Sergey Yesenin, a peasant poet, husband of Isadora Duncan, who wrote about ‘low life', in a mood of futility and despondency, and committed suicide at the tender age of thirty; Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Futurist, leading on after the Symbolists, picking up the pieces of the difficulty of ‘moulding life' after the Revolution. Mayakovsky had a big ego, but became disillusioned young and killed himself, as did Marina Tsvetayeva - one of the leading female poets of that era who was innovative, jealous, dramatic, along with Anna Akhmatova whose dramatic life encompassed many affairs but who still held her fast to her religion.

This was emphasised throughout Anne's talk: staying true to certain boundaries. Drama, death, war, love, jealousy, the huge skies, The Milky Way, The Universe, the magnitude of the stars all provide a massive breadth and width of feeling and emotion in Russian poems, but rhyme, rhythm, precision and exactitude hold steadfast, too.

A quick peek into the later twentieth century was all we had time for, with pieces from Boris Pasternak, Yevgeniy Yevtushenko and Andrey Voznesensky - also writing about The Milky Way, the stars, ‘Low Life', death, war etc., but now with the contemporary feel and modern fashion of ‘The Sixties': flick knives, gold-capped teeth.

Anne read some of the poems herself, but encouraged the audience to read, too. We had all been anticipating the renewed delight of Anne reading some pieces in Russian, then came the added bonus of two voices - one from the audience, Nadine Ghertseff, born a Moscovite, now living in Bath.

Even with this ‘whistle-stop' tour, there had not been time for Akhmatova's Requiem, and one or two other pieces Anne had planned to include ‘Ah well ....maybe next time....,' she said. As she delivers with such enthusiasm, we know she will be back - and so shall we, once again transfixed by her love of all that ‘doom and gloom'.

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Ivy Alvarez at Uni-verse in the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution

On Thursday 14th January, the poet Ivy Alvarez came to give a reading, after a postponement caused by the snow.

Ivy was born in Manila, the Philippines, and grew up in Hobart, Tasmania. Her poetry has been published in Australia, Canada, the US and online. In 2000, she won the Great Age Melbourne Writers' Festival Poetry Slam and received an Arts Tasmania Start-Up Youth Grant for Call Me Ephemeral. In mid-2002, Slow Joe Crow Press (Melbourne) published a limited-edition chapbook of her work, Food for Humans. Her poem ‘earth' appears in the 2004 Australian/Pacific Region Literacy Placement Test for Scholarships, initially selected from the anthology Moorilla Mosaic: Contemporary Tasmanian Writing.

In 2005, she received residency fellowships from MacDowell Colony (USA) and Hawthornden Castle (UK ) and is a MacDowell and Hawthornden Fellow. She has lived in Scotland for six months which include at Mhoniack Mhor and a year in Dublin. She then settled in Cardiff, Wales. She edited We Don't Stop Here and A Slice of Cherry Pie, anthologies, inspired by David Lynch's cult TV show, Twin Peaks, and his film, Mulholland Drive and co-edited qarrtsiluni's Insecta issue.

Ivy has showcased her work in Switzerland. In 2008 Wales Arts International helped her tour in workshops and readings at the Booraga Writer's Centre and the Wanderer performance and response project for the Critical Animals symposium in Newcastle New South Wales. Fundacion Valparaison also invited her to a residency in Spain in April 2008. Ivy co-curates Poetry on Tap and contributes words to dumbfoundry. Her poetry is presently featured in anthologies, journals and new media in many countries, including Best Australian Poems 2009, Brilliant Coroners (Laupe House) and Letters to the World (Red Hen Press).

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Red Morning Press, 2006). It was from this collection that she chose to read. Her accounts of the relationship she had with her dying mother moved us all. The poems adopted the personae of Demeter and Persephone and yet reversed the mother-daughter roles. Her poems have a taut, yet spontaneous style that combines the warm humanity of her Philippina background, the concrete immediacy of Tasmania and the subtle rhetoric of contemporary American writing. After an interval in which she answered questions, Ivy concluded by reading from her recent collection, whose publication we anticipate with great interest. While its subject-matter. a massacre is tragic her treatment of it was affirmative and marked a major advance in the scope of her established voice.

Reports of her next chapbook are currently blocking the wires from Cardiff and thankfully won't go away. Apparently, her latest chapbook is what's wrong. The acclaim with which the audience received her tells us there's nothing wrong in a poetic as assured as hers.

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Wednesday 10 February 2010 - Will May 'Travel Poems from USA and Germany'

Will May read a series of poems describing visits to Germany and America. He interspersed his own work with quotations and poems from Elizabeth Bishop and Emerson on the theme of travel, and spoke of religious communities he visited in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Other poems considered the theme of journeying more generally, including a haphazard cycle ride from Newcastle to Edinburgh.

The audience briefly discussed the notion of psychogeography. He then talked about a recent visit to his paternal gandmother's family in Germany, offering poems on language difference and cultural inheritance. His description of this landscape led directly to the second part of his talk, which drew on his text-settings of various poets. He focused on a 2007 song cycle of Sylvia Plath poems he set for soprano and piano, and played a recording of the cycle, called 'The Night Dances'. He considered the challenges in setting particular poets, and talked about Plath's own relationship with her German inheritance.

On Darwin's birthday

I never knew England would become this
But everyone else here must have thought so
With their faith in how stories tend to go,
Hymns that name-check John Keats and earthly bliss
And mouths wide open with celebrating.
Naïve was the first word that I thought of
as I sung; a peculiar sort of
Unitarian cake-decorating
Having it and eating it with aplomb
And only losing the sting of first fruits.
But Science and God work in close cahoots
Here, only looking up once dogma's gone.
The whitest buckle on the bible belt
Pressed my skin tight, but that's not exactly how it felt.

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Wednesday 10 March 2010 - Peter Clark 'Contemporary Arabic Poetry'

by the speaker - Writer, translator and consultant; Trustee of the International Prize for Arabic Poetry; Contributing Editor, Banipal.

Since the 1990s there has been an increase in the amount of contemporary Arabic literature available in English translation. This has been due to the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, to the magazine Banipal, founded in 1998, which specialises in Arab literature, not only in Arabic but also in other languages - two Arab writers, the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif and the Libyan Hisham Matar, have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.   In 2007 the International Prize for Arabic Literature was founded, with links to the Booker Prize, and based on how that prize is run. Funded from the United Arab Emirates, it has completed its third cycle. The prize aims to provide recognition and readership for novelists and readership for their books. This year the winner - after two Egyptians - was a Saudi whose novel is actually banned in Saudi Arabia.   Poetry is hard to translate. Most Arabic poetry has been translated for the eye - to be read - rather than for the ear - to be heard. The session ended with a reading in Arabic of a famous and much translated poem by the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish and then in English translation, intended to be heard as performance poetry. 

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 Wednesday 14 April 2010:

Sue Boyle and Frances-Anne King ‘London and Londoners'

 by BRLSI member Rosalie Challis

 

 

Frances-Anne King - ‘London'

It was clear from the outset, with the first lines of the first poem, ‘View from a Roof Garden opposite St Paul's', that Frances-Anne King is a poet well able to communicate monumental scale and in wholly original fashion: 

            ‘Calm in its ownership of space, Wren's dome gleams pale

            against the mustering rain clouds; it tricks the eye -

             65,000 tonnes might, at any moment levitate,

            drift off across the City and settle over Shakespeare's Globe,'

 Next, in ‘Thames', Frances-Anne asked us to imagine with her the essential elements of the Thames river, its ‘sensory neurons/ spread through water-flesh/feeling/the braille of sun and moon'. Its ancient geological past was conjured up by ‘subway stones/chatter-marked by hurricanes;' and ‘the skeletons of sharks,/ crocodiles in clay,/'

The importance of water as a basic part of London's makeup was again underlined in ‘Cusp'  which  refers to ‘..the old vernacular of conduits,/streams and rivers; ...the lost language/of watermills discharging to the Thames.' Then ‘Fleet', told us how the Thames' alter ego, was bricked over in the 18th century. Yet the poet still sensed the river's presence today and she recalled the Fleet's glory days when it could ‘mould itself round wherry-boats/and galleons' and ‘lapped against an orchestra of oars.' In her Second Set of poems, the past for Frances-Anne is again a powerful presence in contemporary London. The Rose Theatre, built in 1587 and the first theatre on the South Bank, lies ‘under an office block'. Yet the excavations are still redolent of the past, of:     ‘the sweat of unwashed bodies - the Admiral's Men -/ Marlowe's ink-stained fingers;/a languid arc of lace, as bows are offered'

The final poem, ‘Bleeding Heart Yard', blended past and present even more dramatically, taking us into unsettling territory reminiscent of Peter Ackroyd's London. Here a young woman in red-soled Louboutin shoes and red linen dress, sits outside a restaurant, waiting for her lover. The red colour prompts thoughts of the legend linked to this Yard of a 17th century beauty dancing off into the night with her lover and found next morning, dismembered, with her heart still beating. The last stanza then returns us to the present with the arrival of the girl's lover, the final phrase creating a palpable frisson as he ‘bends to kiss her cheek,/brushes his hand across the column/of her neck - a fluid motion/like a surgeon's cut.'

That final, electrifiying image is a reminder that this is a poet who writes from firsthand medical knowledge. She trained as an RGN at St Bartholomew's Hospital, and her experiences there feature in three other poems in her readings for Uni-Verse: ‘Barts at 5 a.m', ‘To the Bone' and ‘Hearts and Other Organs'.

 Sue Boyle - ‘Londoners'

Sue Boyle chose for her readings a series of poems she had written about the lives of different Londoners, set in over a dozen, widely varying London districts. The people presented in the First Set are mainly Sue's relatives and those in the Second Set are in part imagined but based on information found in family papers and letters which Sue inherited from her mother.

From the opening pair of poems, ‘The Paradise Gardens, One and Two', we knew this would be no dutiful rollcall of dull facts about remote and shadowy ancestors. In a few short lines, Sue Boyle anchors her grandfather, historically and socially:-

             ‘Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Duchess Sophie

            were a year from Sarajevo when my grandfather

            with his railworker's pass and upright bicycle

            left the sootfall of Beckton Gasworks

            and his father's terraced house in Upton Park

            on his quest for paradise.

and then gives the reason for her grandfather's move west: ‘Ambition had called Richard Callick to Brentford/ and was telling him it was time to take a wife.'

The wife chosen is Lily, whose wayward, fiery temperament was dramatically conjured up, starting with the graphic lines:  ‘...she had/a burning bush at the junction of her/white thighs.'

Some of the ensuing consequences were then detailed in a wonderfully calm, factual manner, leaving us with an unforgettable portrait:    ‘........... /  She smelt of violets/

and had a voice to stop a bolting horse at fifty yards/if she had a mind. She was a bad girl./ The grandaughters inherited/her copper-coloured hair.'

In ‘Maeterlink's The Life of the Bee', we met Rose Callick, Richard's spinster sister, ‘the Baptist schoolteacher/who loved her diminutive pupils', and polar opposite to Lilian. Despite ownership of Maeterlink's book on the bee, ‘with its ecstatic descriptions of apian mating', Rose, memorably,  ‘..offered to no one the key/to the hidden door of her honey-chambered/ self' and ‘never suffered the invasion of a man/- not the glory, not the disgrace of it.'

‘Sixty-Three St Mary's Grove' moved us to 1943 and to Richard Callick's younger son, John, and his journey from Chiswick to join Britain's North Africa campaign. His death is sketched in a brief, poignant reference to:  ‘. a training camp outside Tripoli/above which he would fall from the sky/      burning/            spiralling and burning like Icarus'.

‘The short biography' brings us to Sue Boyle's mother, one of the generation of women who led modest, dutiful lives, focussed on home, husband and family. This poem presented in simple, moving detail the occasion when Sue's mother, towards the end of her life, set out to see the Thames but instead found herself in a road leading to Southwark Cathedral. There she ‘..at last found something for herself/light through high windows, flooding, flooding in - /a space/where a timid soul might spread its wings at last/at the almost last/and clap its hands/ /and sing'

Sue Boyle's First Set ended with ‘Charles Darwin's Theory of Christmas'. Set in Jenny's  Chelsea Embankment house where ‘evolution rules', this poem charted a family's Christmas gathering. From thumbnail sketches: ‘Helena, quite unstrung by unwise love./ Awkward, unmarried Anne, enthused by faith/Slow-on-the uptake-Moll' to the family's ‘coded fomulae' for dismissing unsatisfactory relatives which ended with a familiar, brutal putdown: ‘Not one of us' - this was wonderfully shrewd observation and brilliant comic writing. 

 In her Second Set Sue Boyle concentrated on the life and activities of Mr Marksbury, owner of a town house clearance company in Camden Town. ‘Marksbury and Paul' launched a group of poems which formed a delightul series of period pieces conveying a clear sense of days past when good manners and good taste were particularly appreciated.

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 Note

All of us at this well-attended event, knew that, even by the high standards of the Uni-Verse programme, this was an outstanding double reading which, across 26 poems, show-cased the talents of two exceptional poets. The audience were delighted to learn from Sue Boyle that two of the poems she had read would be appearing in her pamphlet, "Unregarded Lives", due to be published by the Northern publishers Smith/Doorstop this coming summer.

 In addition, Frances-Anne King's stunning sonnet, ‘Hearts and Other Organs', appeared recently in the poetry magazine, The Rialto, with a lengthy, very positive review of the poem by the editor. Let us hope that Mr Mackmin, or another discriminating editor, will very soon commission a pamphlet with more of Frances-Anne King's work but meanwhile, you will find her sonnet on The Rialto website at:  

 www.therialto.co.uk/pages/2010/03/23/from-teh-editor-issue-65/ 

(NB The ‘teh' typo above will still take you to the correct page of the website!)

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    Wednesday 12  May 2010 

 ‘Very English - songs and poems with the essence of England'

David Johnson and Diana Johnstone

 What a wonderful reprieve it was from all the post-election concerns to be able to relax with David and Diana and listen to their music and poems.

The audience was transported off into by-gone worlds of childhood memories of shrimping, ice-creams on the beach, visits to the coasts of Kent, Devon and Cornwall, and long car or train journeys to get there. We were also reminded of radio voices from the late twentieth century and childhood toys, trinkets and musical boxes, and sad but moving stories of former lives.

David C Johnson is a poet, spoken word performer and BBC Radio 4 playwright. He has featured at poetry and literary festivals throughout the UK and in North America and he is co-founder of Paralalia, a poetry partnership dedicated to promoting and encouraging live poetry performance. He is official poet of Bart Spices Ltd and has been poet in residence at Bristol Poetry Festival.

At uni-verse, he read from his many collections the latest of which is: Holding On and Looking Out. In his biography profile it says:

  ‘David Johnson is a witty and quirky performance poet, who mixes his stand-up humour with his own verse. His inspiration comes from the bizarre world that we live in combined with a wry commentary on change and progress.'

and we certainly appreciated all the gifts he brought us with his images and word pictures of old stately homes, urban foxes, connections between rhyming spice words and Henry VIII's life and wives, English village customs, ‘chocolate-box' pictures of ‘ex-pat' dreams of England. He kept us constantly engaged and surprised with the variety of material and the extent of his subjects, leaving us with the feeling we had been on a journey through many eras.

Diana Johnstone is a singer / songwriter who also took up a career in film and TV, before coming back to music in the late 1990s. On moving to the Bath area she began writing and performing her own material. She has given live performances at Ashton Court, Priddy Folk Festival and Port Eliot Literary Festival, among others, and now has a debut CD  Learning to Walk.

 ‘Her unique style of playing combined with her thoughtful lyrics and mesmerizing voice has already attracted a keen following.' and ‘ "Quintessentially English" singer/songwriter and guitarist Diana Johnstone performs songs in a folky style with "clear as cut glass vocals ". Her warm and engaging performance and honest songs are captivating.'

 These words certainly rang true for the audience at uni-verse as we listened to the stories in her songs that told of saying goodbye to a child, an old china cup, the ‘Turning of the Tide' and a woeful tale of a pregnant young woman, imaginary grandchildren, the pathos of an elegant woman with Alzheimer's waving at cars.

Her music is indeed ‘soulful, poignant and delicate', Diana left us tearful and crying, but somehow smiling, too, moved by its beauty.

What a wonderful combination David and Diana made and how refreshed we felt by their ‘essence of England'.

 

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 Wednesday 9 June 2010

 Euan Tait ‘The Bass Player's Son' 

by Mary Rozmus-West, BRLSI member, Poetry Society member

The 9th of June meeting of uni-verse welcomed the return of Euan Tait, local poet and musician, whose work has been published in Bete Noire, South, Envoi, Abraxas and Obsessed by Pipework magazines.  In 2008 he was shortlisted for a major national poetry prize, the Poetry Business' poetry pamphlet competition.  

In keeping with the international theme of uni-verse, Euan delighted his audience in the first half of his reading with selections from two works-in-progress, The Koningsburg Bass Player and The Bass Player's Son, long poetic works set in and around the German town of Konigsberg (now the Russian city of Kaliningrad), and in Leipzig, where the bass player lives in post war exile.  In the first poem, the character of the bass player returns in his imagination from exile to the city which "no longer exists, that is, it is nothing like what it once was."  As Euan believes, "Travel works are not so much about the places we visit as about our search for own identity."  So it is with the bass player, whose journey is really about finding and re-claiming his identity, following the end of World War II and the ominously hinted-at part he played in it. 

In the second work, the bass player's son continues the journey, trying to rebuild within Leipzig, in communist post-War East Germany, a culture that is believeable after its Nazi corruption.  Each of the son's poetic monologues is based on one of the pictures in the Moritzburg Museum of Art in Halle an der Salle, which Euan visited in 2009 and whose works profoundly inspired him. 

In the last part of his reading, which he called his "Poetry of Celebration", Euan shared some of his poems about relationships, real experiences from his past coloured with imagination and exploring the universal theme of man's urge and struggle to 'connect'.

The members of uni-verse very much hope that Euan Tait will be part of next year's presentations.

 

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 Wednesday 14 July 2010

  Martin Sturge 'A short miscellany of Occitan and French poetry from about 1110 to 2010, with his English translations.'

 

This was how Martin described the programme in the newsletter:

‘The programme will start with Guillaume le Troubadour, Duke William IX of Aquitaine (1071-1127), grandfather of Aliénor (or Eleanor) of Aquitaine.  His early contribution to the bardic tradition resulted from his childhood experiences in southern Spain.  After the return of Christianity to Cordoba, many Arabic-speakers, particularly entertainers, remained in Andalusia, and some of these travelled back with William to his home in Poitiers (today the Palace of Justice).  William's compositions were enriched by his mastery of the Andalusian style, likened to the Arabic tradition of ‘Jazal' (the whispering of the breeze in the tree-tops).  Though referred to as the first of the troubadours, he was considered by Ezra Pound as the most modern.  William endowed the Troubadour tradition with its style of passionate but frustrated courtly longing, though in real life he was a man of much successful amorous enterprise, managing to be excommunicated three times, and married as often.  Eight of his compositions survive, though his authorship of ferai chansoneta nueva is questioned.

Next we pass to another troubadour, Girault de Bornelh (1165-1199), who left some fifty works in Occitan.  Can lo glatz e.l frechs (when ice and snow give way to warmth) is another love-chant, one of whose verses has provided an English wedding poem.  Now we move to the northern French of Clément Marot (1496-1544). Though born in Cahors, where speech was mostly Occitan, his career soon took him to northern France, and into the service of Anne of Britanny, soon to be Queen of France.  His linguistic skills would take a day to describe; suffice it to say that he found himself not infrequently with a tight purse, and had the idea of writing ‘A Small Epistle to the King' , who fancied his own poetic skills.  This little masterpiece of wordplay, in which he subtly referred to his straightened circumstances, caught the Queen's eye, and earned him a place at court for many years.  Next we jump to a great master of French verse, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), seen as a byword for decadence by some, and a beacon of French literature by others, and is compared by many to Stéphane Mallarmé.  His work ‘Les Fenêtres', was discovered in preparing the 2003 BRLSI Poetry Competition, entitled ‘Through a Window', and is written in blank verse, which was his later preference.  The translation presented is one of several renditions of this short, perceptive work, and is in rhyme.

Our last two works are by contemporary poets.  Corinne Vanderwalle, a playwright and poet writing in rhymed French, imagines the eye as a window to the soul and wishes it would open more.  Aurélia Lassaque, a professor of Occitan in her mid-twenties, writing in Occitan rhyme, draws on the interplay between an old lady in her cottage, and the ageing bough of a mulberry tree outside her window, and paints some haunting images with which to conclude.'

The talk and the readings certainly lived up to expectations; Martin's own readings were excellent and he also had the assistance of James Thomas, a researcher of later Occitan poetry (nineteenth century) and a translator currently working on a forthcoming anthology of Occitan poetry in translation, probably for 2012.

James Thomas wrote: ‘It was a wonderful afternoon. A real pleasure to hear Martin's experiences, his translations and his knowledge of Occitan culture. Really enjoyed the other contributions too.'

The audience was very appreciative of the talk and readings. Rosalie Challis, BRLSI member, wrote: ‘I was completely riveted to hear James actually speaking Occitan. When you followed the words on the page, it became yet more fascinating, just spotting some of the possible roots - Old French, of course, +Spanish, Latin, Arabic? Certainly a complete mongrel of a language - rather like the roots of so many of us in the UK....... Also wanted to thank you for allowing me to produce that very last minute 'Lollipop', thanks to the delightful Violette. I also much appreciated Martin gamely producing an on-the-spot translation of the, to me, really poetic text and his own excellent French and translations.‘ 

The second part of Rosalie's comment referred to one of the poems in the Open Mic section which made up the second part of the ‘Bastille Day' uni-verse with further contributions from Nikki Bennett, Janet Cunliffe-Jones, Caroline Heaton, Duncan McGibbon, Linda Snell, and more from James Thomas. 

An excellent and well-attended end to uni-verse 2009/10 programme

Nikki Bennett, convenor uni-verse

 

 

Uni-verse is hosted by Bath Stanza Rep for The Poetry Society, Nikki Bennett www.nikkibennettpoems.com

 

 

contact: 01225 837251

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