THE NEW BOOK: IMPRESSIONS AND CORRECTIONS

My new poetry collection The Last Time I Saw Ipswich' came out this weekend on Alien Buddha Press. It's a good-looking little volume with flattering blurbs from Andrew Darlington and Bryn Fortey and a great cover by ABP helmsman Red Focks. And on the whole I'm really pleased with it.

This morning, though, reading through the book for the first time since it arrived, I noticed some annoying mistakes I'd made when I submitted the manuscript. 

On page 10, I wrote 'tell' instead of 'telly'.

On page 14, I ended the poem with a comma instead of a full stop.

On page 17, I ended the poem 'as she bought our fish' instead of 'as she bought our fish for tea'. The first is sort of okay, but the rhythm is much better with the second.

What happened, I think, was that I was too focussed on correcting a glaring error I'd made in the final poem -- which was corrected -- and too concerned about getting the book out quickly, to pay proper attention to what I was doing. Or to heed most of the advice of Andrew Darlington, who'd pointed out the blunders in the manuscript. That's a lesson learned.

It's probably not a big deal, or as big a deal as I think it is, because 95% of the poems came out really well. But I wanted the book to be perfect. Instead I sat in the darkness this morning with a copy of it in my hands feeling that I'd let myself down just a little bit.

THE BORDESLEY GREEN HAIRTIQUE

Bryn Fortey sent me Yann Lovelock's 'The Bordesley Green Hairtique' (X Press, 1980). It's a fantastic little treasure from the pre-internet age: photocopied pictures front and back, stapled, with typed and copied poems inside. For me there's nothing as evocative as a page of typewritten text, especially when you can see letters put down in error and then typed over as you can here. In those days you had to underline a word to give it emphasis as well; italics weren't an option on the typer. You couldn't avoid the occasional disappearance of half a letter either, or a whole word appearing as if you had deliberately made it bold (which wasn't an option, at least as far as I remember). The ribbon was your master before computers swept that age away.

But what about the book itself? The poems inside are mostly prose poems, a medium I've never even tried because the idea seems too daunting. I'm not a critic, so I won't attempt an analysis, especially not on one reading of the book. But the solid observations of the phenomenal (if not the 'real' world) are immensely pleasing:

   The girl in blue denim sitting cross-legged at the corner of Sandford Road is so absorbed the rest of us are abashed as she combs her hair.

                    ('South by West')

I also really appreciate the more abstract and philosophical musings that are prompted by the acuteness of his eye:

   Somewhere within me there persists a fragment of the Great Pyramid. They say every man must swallow a speck of dirt before he dies.

                      ('Devaluation')

Yann Lovelock was either forty or approaching forty when he wrote this book of poems. I don't know how much success it had at the time, but since success and failure often wear each other's clothes and most people (perhaps me included) wouldn't recognise a good poem from a hole in the ground, the reception a poetry collection gets doesn't really matter.

When I researched Yann this morning - finding to my delight that he is still alive - I did notice that 'Bordesley Green' isn't mentioned in any of the bibliographies. It should be.