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Since we're adding some reviews... Things of Substance by Liz Cashdan in Orbis

A LIFE WELL-LIVED: REVIEW BY CLAIRE O’CONNOR

Things of Substance: New and Selected Poems by Liz Cashdan, 156pp, £8.99, Five Leaves Publications, PO Box 8786, Nottingham NG 9AW  www.fiveleaves.co.uk

At the heart of this collection is a deep need to teach the next generation about the past. Reading this volume is to be invited into a long-lived life, with its own texture and significance. Objects carry the sense of an era as well as a family history, as in ‘Bakelite Telephone’, 'square and squat with joined / ear and mouthpiece, balanced nicely / on the crossbar of the telephone frog', bringing life-changing news: ‘From Barts it relayed my father’s death, / sealed the selling of the family house.’
   The poet swings through her own past, from object to object, and brings back to the reader a world where a child could have her tonsils removed on the table where she does her homework. There are Wordsworthian moments, as in ‘Lost Time,’ we are recollecting in tranquillity, drawing back from 'years ago' the sound and feel of trekking in the Lake District, where the one-inch map 'is all / I've had to keep the singing beck in tune, to keep / the dizziness of the mountain spinning in my head'. A beautiful image, 'look where the beck slips its stony collars' brings this world with a rush to the mind's eye.
   The new work bring us up to date with the author’s present life, and the predominantly ‘plain style’ conveys the energy with which she relishes the good times and the stoicism of her acceptance of life's inevitable losses - illness, stiff joints, broken bones - she's 'not bovvered.'
   The lived life is there on every page.  There is joy in new experiences, new tastes, the first time she eats an avocado, ice-cream 'slithering' down a sore throat, physical life is embraced and everywhere her celebration of the tangible substance of the natural world.
   Adventurous and educational travel inform us of the poet’s concern for politics and the conditions people endure in diverse cultures and we see many curious things en route, such as Gagarin’s appendix in Moscow. We are invited to the ancient past in ‘The Tyre-Cairo Letters’ sequence. We identify with the fractured relationship between Sadaka and his father in 1090. The poet teases out politics, religious differences and the problems with arranged marriages in this part of the world through epistolatory poems.
   The third section is ‘A Guide to Hospitals.’ It deals with health setbacks, of the poet and others and contemplates the selfless life of Henrietta Lacks, 'She dies but her cancer cells keep / growing’, the black American woman who had her cells removed by the medical profession without her permission and who has unknowingly advanced the study of cancer.
   This collection celebrates a life well-lived: poet, teacher, mother, grandmother, Liz Cashdan reaches out to all of us to urge us not only to get on with things but, despite the obstacles we encounter, to do it with gusto.

The Long Poem Magazine on 1948, by Andy Croft

Timothy Adès on Andy Croft 1948 A Novel in Verse (Five Leaves £7.99.)

A book called 1948,

made of some eighty Pushkin stanzas,

by Martin Rowson illustrate,

riots of rhyme, extravaganzas.

The cover's ruddy bloody garish

and Rowson's drawings quite nightmarish,

obsessive as the text, but still, full

of telling detail, very skilful. 

London Olympics, shocks galore:

spies and political skulduggery,       

trade unions, left-wing mags and thuggery

and Orwell's 1984.

'A, b, a, b, cc, dd,'

it rhymes; 'e, f, f, e, gg.'

Alberti, Attlee, Blandish, Blunden, 

Brecht, Bulldog Drummond, Helen Gahagan,

Greene, Harlow, Marlowe, Lorre, London,

Sartre, Frank Waxman, Ronald Reagan,

Thirkell, not Churchill, Harry Truman,

all rhymed! - it's almost superhuman.

I'm bound to ask: what rhymes with Pushkin?

Stravinsky's violinist Dushkin.

(No triple rhymes, no terza rima:

I could have added Ariane

Mnouchkine, but that must be foregone:

no flagpole on this Iwo Jima.)

Pro-Russian Proms 'have picked The Nose

to bring the season to a close.'

       

So here's my chance to rhyme Onegin,

since these are called 'Onegin sonnets',

with Fagin, or Menachem Begin - 

a donnish jest - quiet flows the Donets! -

He won't be pleased, so please don't tell 'im:

he's miles less mild than Bassa Selim, 

the liberal enlightened Turk

in Mozart's oriental work.

Anyway, as I said before, well-

constructed pacey period thriller -

Winston and Spiller thwart the killer! -

all based on Eric Blair (George Orwell).

Drain down that draught! Hurl hats aloft!

Hail, handicraft of Andy Croft!

Nicholas Lezard on A Modern Don Juan, in the Guardian

I love the way we can’t get shot of Juan; 
Byron’s roaming lad appeals so much 
That even now we think that he is due an 
Update, or a rebrand, or some such. 
He charms us still: each conquest is a new one, 
But you always know that he’ll be back in touch. 
(And there’s something nice about ottava rima; 
It seems to suit a brash romantic schemer.

Lord Byron’s original poem stops abruptly in its 17th canto, after enough words to fill a fat novel, before his death in 1824. A couple of years ago, I read a modern continuation, and it worked very well: you could see how Byron’s structure, the beat of his rhymes and rhythms, obliged the modern poet to think like him, become possessed by him. Because the Byron of Don Juan is so likable, as is the Don Juan of Don Juan, this isn’t a bad thing.

In this collection we have 15 contemporary poets shoehorning their inspiration into the tight but not uncomfortable rhyme scheme. I wasn’t familiar with them all. I’ve written about Andy Croft before, when he reimagined Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the style of Pushkin’s sonnets. George Szirtes and Sinéad Morrissey are TS Eliot prize winners (2004 and 2013 respectively) and Ian Duhig has been shortlisted for the award; the others are all distinguished as either poets or teachers of poetry. Amit Majmudar is apparently “a novelist, poet, essayist and diagnostic nuclear radiologist”, so should his poetic gift desert him, he has a few fall-back positions.

So these are all trustworthy voices, and they have a lot of fun hauling Juan into the modern age (his name is not pronounced in the Spanish fashion, by the way; lines one and three of my doggerel above, an attempt not so much to walk a mile in Byron’s moccasins as to walk 40 feet, have at least the virtue of showing how to get it right). He is called Donny Johnson, or something similar, in a few of the poems here, and is more than once imagined as a DJ (geddit?). He is also rather more of a bounder than I remember Byron making him. In fact, the whole point of Byron’s Juan was to make him more hapless seducee than seducer, but never mind.

Everyone here has put in a lot of hard work, and most of it pays off, some of it handsomely. Croft’s rhymes in particular are laugh-out-loud funny (“Minerva’s Owl”/ “Simon Cowell”; and, the narrator being a prisoner, we get “lecture” to rhyme with “Norman Stanley Fletcher”). And he has a sneer at Guardian critics, which is a poem’s invariable hallmark of purity and authenticity.

So this is really a continuation, or extrapolation, of Byron’s work, which was already, in a way, modern. Byron, in the original Don Juan, was at times almost ridiculously digressive, given over to pontification and moralisation as well as to the occasional outrageous rhyme or enjambement, but his poem was also a way of poking pomposity in the eye and standing up for the oppressed, or the victims of injustice (we find Juan in contemporary austerity Greece in the updated version). And here’s the clever thing: even though the poets are using the same scheme, you get more than a glimpse of how their individual voices sound; of what goes on in their heads. This was always Byron’s great trick: to teach you something when all you think you are doing is having a good time.

A Modern Don Juan is in the shops now...

Crime Scene - the first review

I received a review copy the other day of a new book published by Five Leaves, and written by John Martin. Described as "a reader's guide",and titled Crime Scene: Britain and Ireland, it aims to discuss crime writers past and present on a geographic basis, 'where the setting of the book is crucial, giving the story context and local relevance.' I began by dipping into it rather casually, because reference books like this, even relatively compact ones, can't sensibly be read from cover to cover in a sitting, but I soon found myself absorbed in the wealth of information supplied.

I've never met John Martin, but a biographical note on the cover explains that he is a former librarian, and past judge for the CWA Dagger in the Library. One thing is for sure - he knows a great deal about the genre. Putting a book like this together is not a task for the faint-hearted, not the poorly read. He mentions a great many novels, and my impression is that he has read them, rather than relying on potted summaries by others, because there is a personal 'feel' to the commentary that I find appealing.

I should add that there is an entry about my work which is extremely positive and generous, and this blog also earns a credit, so (being only human) I'm naturally inclined to applaud the excellence of John Martin's judgment! But even if I wasn't mentioned, I'd find a book like this a must-read. It's not dissimilar in some ways from a book published back in 2002, Scene of the Crime, by Julian Earwaker and Katherine Becker. I met Julian and Katherine when they were researching that book, and found them very pleasant company. I can recommend their book too, but of course much has happened in the genre in the past twelve years, and in the absence of a new edition, John Martin has not only spotted a gap in the market, but filled it admirably.

To write a book of this kind, I think you have to be a real enthusiast for the genre. In the entries I've read, Martin's enthusiasm shines through. The emphasis, inevitably, is on relatively modern books, but there is also material that dates back much longer - discussion of Charles Felix's The Notting Hill Mystery from 1865, for example. This book is definitely my cup of tea, and I hope that John Martin's hard work is rewarded by excellent sales. I shall continue to dip into it regularly.

Martin Edwards

http://www.doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.co.uk/

Reprinted from Lipstick Socialist - the best name for a blog!

Left for the Rising Sun, Right for Swan Hunter. The Plebs League in the North East of England 1908/1926 £6.99.

Mark Twain said; I've never let my schooling interfere with my education.
In 2014 all the educational doors that I managed to get through are rapidly closing to the new immigrants and the poor working class in this country. And it is not just that access to education has a hefty price tag, it is also the downgrading of many jobs that working class people could get into. In this I include many public service jobs and professions that are melting away in the government's agenda to make the poor pay for the austerity.

But for me education is not just about the collection of a series of certificates and the race to get a middle class job. Brought up in an Irish family my political education was as important as my father teaching us to write our name before we went to primary school. Like many people who were denied an education he got his on his travels across this country, in his experiences at the bottom heap of society and in his constant battles for respect and equality for himself, his family and his community.

In this very important book, Left for the Rising Sun; Right for Swan Hunter; The Plebs League in the North East of England 1908/1926, historian and communist (a winning combination) Robert Turnbull tells the exciting story of how this amazing organisation played an important role in the political education of working class people.

The Plebs League started in 1908 when a group of students challenged the teaching at Ruskin College which until then was a major player in labour and trade union history. Their aim was to "bring about a more satisfactory relationship between Ruskin and the wider labour movement". Their slogan was;"Educate, agitate, organise".

This led to a the creation of the Central Labour College (CLC). The divide being between the reformists and the revolutionaries with very differing views of what the purpose of education is. Should it be solely to equip people to get better jobs or should it be part of a political education to turn society upside down?

Central to this story is the north-east of England and the coalfields of Northumberland and Durham which fed the shipbuilding, heavy engineering, chemicals, railways and glassmaking industry. Waves of immigrants from Ireland and Scotland went there to find work, becoming part of a community that sought to educate itself and build a strong trade union movement. The Plebs League responded to this;
"Education is and must always be a means to an end. To some it is a means to personal satisfaction, to others a means to a living; to us it is a means to the Great End, the emancipation of the workers."

Robert shows how this was not that straightforward and that there were to be battles, not just with the capitalist class but also with organisations such as the WEA which had the support of the political and educational establishment.

This new independent working class education was quite different from the liberal curriculum of the WEA. It was "about workers equipping themselves with the necessary intellectual and cognitive skills so that they could meet the capitalist class on their own terms for the showdown that was coming."

The Plebs League were following in a tradition of working class education that had its roots in the creation of the Mechanics Institutes in the late 1840s. Robert shows how radicals such as Joseph Cowen believed in the emancipation of working class people through education. He founded the Wincanton Literary and Mechanics Institute in 1847 which offered both men and women (very progressive in its day) classes in politics, science and technology. As Robert says; "Without the pioneering work of the Mechanics Institutes it is doubtful if the Independent Working Class Education movement in the North East would ever have got off the ground".

Central to the story of the IWCE across the country was the political atmosphere with the growth of organisations such as the Independent Labour Party, the Social and Democratic Federation, and newspapers such as the Clarion. Political unrest from 1910-14 was reflected in industrial unrest, the ongoing suffragette campaign and the Home Rule for Ireland movement.

The IWCE thrived in the revolutionary era of 1908-1920 but then declined, partly as it became a more centralised organisation and partly because of events such as the defeat of the General Strike of 1926 led to the shattering of ideas of unity across the labour movement and a sense of hopelessness in their ability to challenge the capitalist class.

Today it is hard to find the hope and political committment that drove the IWCE in the early part of the 20 Century. In response to the privatisation agenda of both past Labour governments and the present Con/Dem government there has been the growth of many new organisations such as the Peoples Assembly, UK Uncut as well as many single issue campaigns against fracking, NHS privatisation and so on. But what is missing from most of these organisations is any sense of class consciousness. There is a growing sense of anger at the inequalities of society but this hasn't been transferred into a politicised view of society. One of the reasons I believe that these organisations fail to sustain themselves beyond organising meetings and marches is that few, if any, offer their members a political education, something that the Communist Party was very good at. Across the country there has been attempts to set up an IWCE network but without working class people at its heart I am not sure that this will address the importance of giving people back a sense of their own worth and a respect for their own political heritage.

I have been involved in the Mary Quaile Club, an informal group trying to make working class history more accessible through talks, films and music. Each event has an element of history and a link to present day activism. We hold our events across the Greater Manchester area and try to engage with people and communities that do not normally go to history events.

Left for the Rising Sun is an important contribution to the present day movement to revive a sense of history and political commitment to those people who really need it, the working classes. Books like this, I think are inspiring and are crucial to working class people taking back their history and redefining it for the 21 Century.

Buy it from Five Leaves Bookshop, an independent bookshop in Nottingham. see

Robert Turnbull is speaking at the WCML in Salford on 29 October see

lipstick socialist | October 2, 2014 at 10:31 am | Tags: Five Leaves Bookshop