poetry

A Great Littleness

Robert Cochrane — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 21:01:21 +0000

A Great Littleness Robert Cochrane June 10, 2022 - 17:01

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Maud Martha

GWENDOLYN BROOKS (Faber & Faber)

First published in 1953 Maud Martha is the sole novel by Pulitzer Prize winning African American Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks 1917-2000. It should seem a quaint period piece about race, sadly it stands as beautifully eloquent and relevant as it did on its first appearance. The conversations it provokes anew, as pertinent in a different century, a sure indication that change occurs slowly, and usually takes backward steps.

Shaped via collection of painterly, personal episodes, thirty-four to be precise. Though often erroneously described as non-linear in construction, more on account of its brilliantly unorthodox sentences, than any absence of actual plot, this is a "coming of age" affair. Truly a poet's flexible collision with prose, an exercise in rendering the mundane profound, capturing great insights from small thoughts and events.

The issues tackled remain thorny. Seen through the eyes of a young black girl in Chicago, the reader is touched by her many realisations about her racial identity. The casual acceptance of her race of the 'n' word so as not to appear techy, the elevation of her pale skinned sister over her darker complexion, and the fact Maud Martha is grateful that her honey colored husband has chosen a wife less pretty and as dark as she.

Brooks writes with a deceptively poetic dreaminess, but one that entails no lack of bite. Her short sections possess a visceral edge honed by astute observations on the meaninglessness, meaningful aspects most lives encapsulate. Her patronage from ignorant white employer, so engrained its perpetrator is oblivious of her crime. Still shockingly pertinent.

The novel ends with the close of World War 2, in a tone of hopeful resolution.

"But the sun was shining, and some of the people in the world had been left alive, and it was doubtful whether the ridiculousness of man would ever completely succeed in destroying the world -- or, in fact, the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower, for would its kind not come up again in the spring? come up, if necessary, among, between or out of -- beastly inconvenient! -- the smashed corpses lying in strict composure, in that hush infallible and sincere."

The flower in question the humble dandelion, the same bloom whose beauty she praises so eloquently at the novel's inception. As humanity continues to destroy its habitat, and those left defenseless, Gwendolyn Brooks' masterful little parable about race, has tendrils that caress the nature of the entire human condition.

A multi-faceted gem, deft, wise and beautiful.

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An L.A. Smile in New York City

Robert Cochrane — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 22:59:31 +0000

An L.A. Smile in New York City Robert Cochrane January 30, 2021 - 17:59

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AN L.A. SMILE IN NEW YORK CITY

for Jerry Brandt 1938-2021.

She looked like a fashion model

on her way home from a photo shoot,

and if she wasn't one she should have been,

blonde hair gracing elegantly tanned shoulders

a thing of beauty and desire,

and she knew it,

as did you and I.

Immediately you shot her

your best porcelain L.A. smile.

She looked at you dismissively

like you were a piece of shit

and walked haughtily by,

and you knew it as did I.

Immediately you let rip

'What is with this fuckin' city now?

You smile at someone and you get that?

Things have changed and I just don't understand it'

But you did and you had,

an elegant man in your mid-sixties

with cachet slowly in decline

despite the lace shirt and fine shoes.

I leant across and whispered

'But Jerry it's the way that you were smiling!'

infering a piranha sensing dinner,

and it became your turn to give me that kind of look.

I sensed another outburst brewing

but it slowly broadened from insulted shock

into a smile accentuated by a lazy shrug

as we sauntered on along in fading sunshine.

- Robert Cochrane

30th January 2021.

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Winters at the York Hotel

Robert Cochrane — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 17:32:46 +0000

Winters at the York Hotel Robert Cochrane January 30, 2021 - 12:32

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From the pen of our resident poet and literary critic Robert Cochrane, here's the first in a series of poems from his imprint The Bad Press.

WINTERS AT THE YORK HOTEL

For William 17-06-1915 - 04- 02 -1985

Colgan,

to those with longer memories

was a spoilt boy gone wrong,

a raggedy andy,

prince of the hedgerows, alcoholic.

Homeless for decades since a squandered inheritance,

an apple gone sour in his dead parent's eyes,

a cadger supreme

stinking of meths in a stained overcoat,

his cap kneaded like dough

should the request require piety.

'The York Hotel' he'd quip if quizzed

of where he spent his night.

When my mother pointed out

that 1920's remnant of derelict grandeur

I couldn't comprehend

how he made the the fifteen miles from the coast

to beg a breakfast from her,

learnt it was his code for sleeping with

the sows in the miller's sty.

They kept him warm and probably alive

on many a frosty night.

Once in dire need of drink

he downed the acid from a recently drained battery.

The mechanic's distress heard

the doctor's resigned admission

'I'm sure he's drank worse'

and he had, and he did,

and would do so again.

He got God in the end, and a council house

before God got round to him.

Gave what testament he could recall

from a life once grace itself

though fallen from with none.

Became almost respectable

bar the occasional lapse,

like stealing and eating raw mince

from our outdoor pantry,

old habits of pilfering still strong.

Mum banned him after that

which both knew amounted to a scolding

and a few days exile.

- Robert Cochrane

Published via The Bad Press in his 2016 collection: Colly McGurk & My Interest In Girls

Copies £10 plus £2.50 p&p.

Available on request.

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Through The Sails of the Past

Dusty Wright — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 14:00:00 +0000

Through The Sails of the Past Dusty Wright September 7, 2018 - 10:00

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Do You Remember: The Selected Poems of James Lyons

Edited by Robert Cochrane (Bad Press)

Some artists languish in the dusty bins of used bookstores waiting for their moment. For the Manchester-based poet James Lyons (1896-1918) the wait is finally over albeit 100 years after his passing. Sadly his life was all to brief. Had it not been, perhaps he would have gone on to pave a literally road of greater magnitude. Regardless, fellow Mancunian poet/critic/Mancunian Robert Cochrane has taken on the task of editing and sharing his work with the world in a new book entitled Do You Remember. His simple, but evocative imagery is best captured in this poem appropriately entitled "A Fragment":

"The angels keep their ancient places

Turn but a stone and start a wing!

'Tis we, with our estranged faces,

That miss the many splendored thing!"

It's not wonder that Mr. Cochrane has wisely decided that Mr. Lyons poetry as well as been seen should be heard and be set to music. One might ponder what music Mr. Lyons might have listened to in his short life, what might have inspired his prose. It requires no leap of faith to appreciate how said prose lends itself to musical melodies.

To that end, Mr. Cochrane's produced an extraordinary album of his poetry performed by some of the UK's most beloved singer-songwriters including Bill Fay, Sharon Lewis, John Howard, The Children of Rain, etc. The limited edition CD with book, limited edition vinyl album, and standard issue compact disc are scheduled for release in late summer/early fall.

Life Isn't Good, It's Excellent

Robert Cochrane — Sat, 28 Oct 2017 12:44:47 +0000

Life Isn't Good, It's Excellent Robert Cochrane October 28, 2017 - 08:44

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David Robilliard was a poet and painter who lived from 1952 to 1988.

EATING OUT

You're like a potato.

You'd go with anything.

"David Robilliard was the sweetest, kindest, most infuriating, artistic foul-mouthed, witty, charming, handsome, thoughtful, unhappy, loving and friendly person we ever met. Over the nine years of our friendship David came closer to us than any other person. He will live forever in our hearts and minds."

Gilbert and George wrote the above on July 7, 1990.

"Starting with pockets filled with disorganised writings and sketches, he went on to produce highly original poetry, drawings and paintings. His truthfulness, sadness desperation and love of people gave his work a brilliance and beauty that stands out a mile."

WAITING FOR NOTHING

We're all waiting for

Someone who never arrives

to brighten up our lives.

As poets come and go, David Robilliard arrived all too quickly, and went all too soon. He was discovered, promoted, and praised by the artists Gilbert and George (they described him as "the new master of the modern person"); their involvement alerts even the most casual reader to the presence, now twenty years absent, of a unique and unsettling talent. His poetry and art flabbergasted those in the establishment, since he had no formal training and cared little for tradition. Doing what he did with supreme panache, he felt no need to capitulate to their entrenched expectations.

FASHION

Is just a flash in the pan

When you're standing next to a naked man.

Robilliard's work was funny, ironic and sad, a cross between Jean Cocteau and Andy Warhol in the line of art, and Stevie Smith and Edward Lear in written ones. He, however, detested the comparison to "that dead French artist' (although it was a justified, if lazy compliment), his nature and wit being more closely aligned to the swagger and swerve of the playwright Joe Orton. His short, pithy poems have an air of irreverent Zen.

TIME OUT

The end of the day

the end of the night

the tap drips

the clock ticks.

Were he American, David Robilliard would be revered like Basquiat or Kerouac; as it stands his fame is now largely European. In 1995 he was the subject of a massive retrospective of the kind afforded the likes of Cezanne and Turner, A Roomful of Hungry Lookd Looks at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, but since then his reputation has faded. His work, however, remains freshly arch and supremely funny. His approach was unique. He sent out postcards of his poems on a monthly basis, his envelopes stamped in distinctive red with his trademark phrase "Life isn't Good Its Excellent." He contributed to magazines, now sadly defunct, such as The Fred and Square Peg, but was roundly ignored by the mainstream poetry press.

INTENSE DESIRE

The thing that thrilled them

Was the thing that killed them.

Yet this enfant terrible of British art was born in the Channel Islands in 1952. He gravitated to London in the Seventies, worked on building sites, but was always writing and drawing. He met the painter Andrew Heard (1958-1993), with whom he shared a studio around the corner from Old Street Tube, now fashionable and expensive apartments. They were pioneers of the now trendy art district, London's equivalent of New York's Soho. Heard, in turn, led him to Gilbert and George. They recognized his unique talents and nurtured them, publishing his first poetry collection, Inevitable, in 1984. His paintings were bold and brash, a perfect combination of text and color. He had a New York retrospective at Hirsch and Adler in 1990. It proved a sell-out show.

FUCK OFF

Waking up next morning

By a sad and lonely person

Clawing at you

Oh how could I have? And the discomfort of the hangover

Makes you want to say

Please leave immediately

Give me a break

Don't stay for breakfast

You're irritating

My search for... Isn't loneliness a bore.

Like many gay men of the Eighties, Robilliard fell foul of HIV. Such a diagnosis was, in those days, terminal. He made no bones about his condition, and would introduce himself to strangers as "David Robilliaids." His work, which dealt previously with crushes, fun, and disappointment, took on a darker edge. He died November 3, 1988, Gilbert and George at his bedside.

MEMORY OF A FRIEND

A burst of tears

From all your friends

The end.

Robilliard still has a freshness which astounds. His friend, the painter and singer Holly Johnson, reflected recently, "It's important to remember David Robilliard as a pioneer, although inextricably linked to Gilbert and George by merit of their friendship and support of his work, he was one of the few artists living in the now Artist Disneyland of Hoxton before it was a glimmer in the eye of the Trendy White Cube Generation. The draw to the area was as much G&G as it was The London Apprentice, a louche gay pub with dark room tendencies, not photographic dark rooms as could be found in his friend and photographer Alistair Thane's studio but a sexual dungeon of desire. "Expectations," a leather fetish wear shop, was the only commercial premises I can remember operating in Hoxton Square. The streets of cheap warehouse studio space before the boom echoed with a silent emptiness. This was the backdrop to David's daily life and times. A place where the quick witted and charming -- without gushing -- David could recruit or procure the urban male models for G&G'S feverish camera. Living together with the naughty cherub of Andrew Heard, a prolific painter of Dream Cityscapes and childhood memories, there were shared obsessions with pop music and culture, obscure vinyl was pondered over from Agnes Bertaille to Nightmares In Wax. It was "Black Leather" by the latter that they asked me to identify when I visited them circa 1988 after a pop star photo session with Alistair Thane just around the corner. I had earlier purchased Inevitable in a bookshop on The King's Road and became an instant fan of the intensely modern and unique poems and line drawings within. Andrew was working on a large painting of The Munsters and a cast of Carry On characters, David wore jeans and a blue sweatshirt silk screened with Andrew's figures, a relaxed bohemianism in the bright white space. David pissed into the toilet while continuing the conversation in plain view from the waist up in the open plan kitchen cum bathroom cum studio with an awareness that was part openness, part shock tactic. I felt immediately Andrew's optimism and David's wry cynicism were two sides of a coin that would be well thumbed. Sadly, as is the way of the art world, it has taken their untimely deaths, works lost to European art dealers and hidden in archives, for it to be unearthed by the cultural metal detector."

Robilliard deserves the final word on his own brief sojourn. His work deserves to be better known, and though much has been lost to legal wrangling, the inevitable legacy of many artists, there is enough out there to illustrate his talent, unique and irreplaceable.

THE PEOPLE OF THE '90s WILL BE JUST THE SAME

It's funny isn't it

all you've got is the natural urge

to lay down with someone

and say hello

in a very personal way

and yet life seems to offer

many other alternatives.

Blessings.

Outtakes

Steve Dalachinsky — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 04:07:10 +0000

Outtakes Steve Dalachinsky October 1, 2011 - 00:07

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William Parker: Conversations (Rogueart)

"The memories that stop being memories due to constant use."- Laurie Anderson

"Beauty is a puppet that keeps dangling in front of me." - Anselm Keifer

Not since John Zorn’s Arcana project and Art Taylor's Notes and Tones, a comparison many will make, and which Parker says in his brief intro is the book that inspired him to do this project, has there been a book of interviews so vital, so down to earth and so personal. What we have here are 34 interviews conducted by Parker over approximately the last decade, 30 of which are with so-called free jazzers/improvisers, two with new music composers, one with Patricia Nicholson Parker (his wife, a dancer and an organizer of such events as the ongoing Vision Festival), and one with photographer Jacques Bisceglia who also contributed a beautiful black and white and color centerfold (27 photos) of most of the artists being interviewed.

Though primarily known as an independent cd label out of Paris, France, Rogueart has thus far published three books, the two just mentioned and another, Logos and Language, a collaboration by pianist Matthew Shipp and me. I also had the privilege of collaborating with Bisceglia on another Rogueart project, Reaching into the Unknown (2009).

As Parker points out, these talks represent "oral histories" by artists who have dealt in/with the creative process and all its joys, hardships, knowledge, and discoveries. He states that one necessity for this collection is to bring these artists more out of the realms of myth and more into the realms of reality. Their range runs the gamut of the known to the lesser known to the almost obscure, and hopefully one thing this book will do is familiarize people with their lives and make them want to go out and hear their ART.

We are also fortunate enough to have interviews with musicians who only just recently left us, such as Billy Bang and Fred Anderson, and those like Frank Lowe who departed a few years back and whom Parker got to interview at his hospital bed while he was dying. Lowe quoting Don Cherry says, "You got to be in tune no matter whether it's going outside, inside, crossways or down." He then goes on to say when you are "doing a solo you’re the only one… but at the same time there's power in numbers…a group situation helps to sustain you" and that if “you felt it, you played what you felt. You don't ask about the feelings you just play [them.]” Lowe again: “We are always copying someone…when you see that you have to change up fast.” This is so true for all arts.

The book encompasses many of the first wave of the avant-garde players, including Dave Burrell, Sonny Murray, Alan Silva, and Milford Graves, who states that it’s about what we smell, taste and hear…the sound spectrum…frequency spectrum. Not to recall the same note…to adjust to the vibration and that a musician’s job is to be the receptor of the vibrations of the planet. What we continually learn from these masters, sometimes quite poignantly, is their intense struggles, their complete devotion to their art and why they do what they do. Cooper Moore puts it this way.

"Music gives people great relief…that's why I do it."

What we constantly see is how these artists grew up thrived, learned about and got into their crafts, their fundamental ideas about the music and how they came to play it and/or arrived at their process, or as i tnhe case of Patricia N. Parker and Bisceglia, how they came to play an active role in the “scene.”

Billy Bang, a Vietnam veteran, talks about growing up in Harlem and how his time in Vietnam affected both him and his music (later in life, Billy made two CDs based on his experiences there and used musicians who had also served there). "Vietnam has been such a big influence on me…that’s why I dedicated myself to music." Parker at one point says after hearing the horrific stuff Bang went through, "Those people who sent anybody there should be locked up," to which Billy readily agrees. When Bang talks about why/how he plays the violin, he states that besides the human voice, the violin is an early instrument and that rather than try to become a unique voice on it he decided to dedicate and commit himself to investigate this area and the instrument’s range and tradition.

Each interview is prefaced with a beautiful take by Parker on the musician he will speak to, always asking the question 'why do you do this?' One reply by Chinese composer Ge Gan-ru is simply, "I don't know... but this I do know I cannot live without the music."

The interviews are of varying lengths, as short as eight pages and as long twenty, and as editor Ed Hazell points out, "were edited for clarity…but the goal was to maintain the character of the musicians' voices."

The accompanying CD contains 45 short tracks containing snippets of the interviewees interspersed with short solo bass pieces by Parker.

This is both a learning and survival manual, or as Parker puts it, "everyone has a story that is part of the continuum…a small piece of the puzzle that is creativity." So if you want to educate yourself a bit more, pick up this book, listen to these 34 songs from cover to cover, then turn the pages and listen some more to the “sound, movement and color” that comes deep out of the well of creativity. And each time you’ll hear (read) something fresh, different, and new. Sound is a very personal thing, and there is a wealth of knowledge to be absorbed, digested, and learned from all these unique individuals, their unrestrained voices, and the candid music of their language, emotions, and thought.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Dusty Wright — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 04:45:48 +0000

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven Dusty Wright February 2, 2011 - 23:45

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Image by Shiloh Jenz

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and sliver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats

(Digital artwork by Shiloh Jenz.)

While My Alter-Ego Gently Sleeps

Robert Cochrane — Tue, 11 May 2010 09:43:52 +0000

While My Alter-Ego Gently Sleeps Robert Cochrane May 11, 2010 - 05:43

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Things I Did While I Was Dead by Rosie Garland (Flapjack Press)

Once there was a vampire lesbian poetess called Rosie Lugosi, who prowled the cellars and subterranean dives of the poetry scene under the discreet but wonderfully protective cover of darkness. Corseted to the point of sublime expiry, she bared her fangs, cracked her whip and, like a fallen angel from one of the better girls' schools of England, lambasted her audiences into quivering submission with her iconoclastic verses. Straight men felt uneasy, and uncomfortably aroused; their women smiled, some in titillation, others to mask their growing sense of having been offended; the gay men approved of the camp spectacle, whilst the Sapphic sisters in the crowd felt all of the above emotions, and more.

Part dominatrix, part refugee from the Rocky Horror Show, Lugosi was also blessed with one of the finest set of lungs in the business, and would break into an operatic outburst which resembled Diamanda Galas morphing into an impish Klaus Nomi. When Rosie again sought the safety of her wooden lid, there walked amongst the merest mortals the fangless but utterly charming Rosie Garland. This Rosie also wrote poetry, but it was always her more bombastic sibling of the soul who gained access to, and recognition from, the printed page. Once Lugosi overslept, died a little, and when her eyes shot open like shutters after winter, "Things I Did While I Was Dead" rested across her folded fingers like a final calling card, a quiet act of literary revenge.

Performance poetry doesn't really allow refined introspection, relying more upon verbal bombast, wit, and vocal dexterity. The poems of Rosie Garland are are conversational, lingering and gentle. She has a neat way of combining distraction with abstraction:

"A smile denoted borrowed time before the hasty morning coffee, a cat's cradle of call-you-laters. I love you equaled Quiet now. Slippery as the syntax I lacked a grip on. The mouth attentive but sandwiching a cold tongue."

In "Being John Doe" she is an astute observer of the sometimes simplistic manners of the male:

"Ask them about shaving, about cars. Dissolve your afternoons in the company of fathers, sons. Observe the way they grip their mugs of tea... Deny yourself softness, questions, the pleasurable quilt of women's conversations."

In Garland's hands the opposite sex is viewed with a sad fascination, but without the usual recourse to rancor that many women writers class as polemic. The poems are witty, tender, and articulate. Themes such as childhood and the need to be loved are contrasted with the dangers of the mundane and the desire to feel alive. In "Serial Monogamy" she moans, "I'm tired of these cries of 'Cut!' interrupting the stumble from one scene of failure to the next." She never offers a soothing line where a realistic one will herald a swifter healing process.

"Love Bites" is a fascinating trip through the fake promises of popular songs, where she turns their sententiousness into statements at odds with their original mawkishness:

"I just don't want the same old line, the same old lies. The doing this because I love you and love will keep us together and love will tear us apart."

There are also moments of astute travelogue. "New York Rude" perfectly encapsulates a tone at tremendous odds with British politeness:

"New York Rude says it loud. And louder. Until everyone is listening. Can't understand why the world swallows words like an apology. What's to be sorry for? Except silence? Speak up, there's someone on the moon can't hear you. What's that you said you wanted? New York Rude can't hear you. New York Rude does not say please. Says thank you when it's earned. New York Rude leans out of its taxi window, gives you the finger, bawls up your asshole New York Rude growls 'butt out lady, stop busting my ass; because you are and you have no idea of its journey from there to here, just how long it took, and what was lost along the way."

Add to that an annoying woman begging on the bus, the sadness of certain marriages, and wonderful memories of her grandmother, and her range is as dizzying in scope, as it is precise in its accuracy. The final poem, "Queer Thanksgiving" (with special thanks to William S. Burroughs) is a true tour de force, a litany of thanks for the hatred minorities -- especially gay people -- still have to contend with. Rarely has intelligent sarcasm been so witheringly employed.

"Thank you for vocabulary; for shirt-lifter, fudge-packer, shit-stabber, lezzie, rug muncher, turd-burglar, bumboy, poufter, willy woufter, pervert, predator, queer; for Too ugly to get a man, what she needs is a real one, unnatural, diesel, man-hater, deviant, paedo. Thank you for giving us two choices; camp queen or butch lezzer's Thank you for It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve For Are you Arthur or Martha? Thank you for the obsession with what we do in bed. For top shelf girl-on-girl action porn... Thank you for the Pink Triangle. thank you for beheading us in Saudi, hanging us in Iran, forcing us into marriages we don't want in Islamabad and Burnley. Thank you for never going away. Thank you for making us strong. Thank you for our history. We are writing our own future. Thank you for keeping us on our toes."

As the book closes to this counter blast, one is left with a sense of respect for all the rage reserved for the final trio of pages. It doesn't eclipse the sentiments of the other remarkable poems, merely signs off with a connecting defiance. It could almost be a Rosie Lugosi poem, but as the two are constructs of a singular mind one shouldn't be surprised that at the end, the circle has been squared. If Rosie Lugosi is the diva of the damned, then Rosie Garland is the observant laureate of the lost. Hand in hand they both make sense of a world in which that sentiment is too often absent.

Commonplace Exceptions

Robert Cochrane — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:29:27 +0000

Commonplace Exceptions Robert Cochrane March 30, 2009 - 12:29

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Marvin Cheeseman

We Hate It When Our Ex-Lodgers Become Successful

(Cheers Ta Publications)

A sense of fun is all too often absent from poetry. It doesn't have to be difficult or elitist, but humor is mostly seen as a disadvantage to the high-minded, a case of letting the side down. Marvin Cheeseman is a poet who thankfully has been letting sides down with laughter and tremendous aplomb for years. His work has been featured on the BBC, TV and radio. He's even been name-checked by the Ting Tings. A perfect collision of a pop sensibility with a wry twist on the everyday.

Cheeseman is the natural successor to the rock bard John Cooper Clarke masquerading as a bedsit Betjeman. Poets come and go with alarming regularity, but this particular one is still on the journey towards arrival. We Hate It When Our Ex-Lodgers Become Successful is his latest report from the launderette of life. There is something resolutely British about his particular palette. A Mancunian marooned in the Lake District, he is the poetry equivalent of Carry On fun and saucy seaside postcards. He references his beloved Morrissey in "Heaven Knows I'm Middle Class Now":

In my life, why should I waste valuable time, in supermarkets that only stock one type of hummus.

Peopled with fading televisionaries, references to pop songs, and chocolate of various wrappers, he is the patron saint of populism. The collection contains a marvelously adroit series of horoscopes in which the genre is lampooned by skewering the vernacular and tone most astrologers employ. Leo advises,

Venus is traveling through your romance zone right now, so perhaps it's time for some new underwear. In fact it's time for some new underwear anyway, regardless of where Venus is. You should have got round to it when the sales were on when you meant to.

Anxiety remains the symptom he recognizes and employs to engage and unsettle his audience, but then it takes one to know one. Guilt about global warming crops up too in snippets such as, "There's no fuel like an old fuel" and the amusing "Let There Be Light," wherein he pleads, "Let there be light...Banish the gloom. Just don't burn a light bulb in an empty room." The past master of the parody, he has previously sampled Kipling; in this selection he uses Roger McGough as the springboard for "Let Me Die a Coward's Death":

Or when I'm 103, and having lost each and every one of my marbles May I kick the bucket gently and not know a thing Having set the clock to never hear it ring.

There is an errant traditionalist lurking amongst Cheeseman's apparent flippancy. A lover of the limerick, he has included a selection of his own. Football, smut, and movie stars fall victim of his wry outlook. His unkind but accurate take on a Star Trek legend is suitably irreverent:

A TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM SHATNER Captain Kirk was considered a looker But when he became T.J Hooker I think Mr. Spock would have got quite a shock At this podgy wig-wearing old ***ker

This is an annoying use of asterisks in some of the poems. An asterisk is an apology and a fudge. If you use cunt, which he does in another limerick, then print it as you penned it. Don't castrate it, look half-arsed or semi-apologetic. Celebrate the freedom to be a bawd, and revel in the right to appall. What I particularly appreciate about Cheeseman is his discreet sensibility, the adept use of light touches to lampoon the darkest of subjects. Grief gets short shrift in the astute, instantly classic "Some People Just Can't Get Over Things," revealed in all it's asterisk-removed glory, and again suggests a sense of Morrissey.

On the wall in the frame is a goldfish The kids couldn't quite say goodbye Some people just can't get over things Some folk just can't let it lie. Down below, alas, stuffed and mounted Rex is on permanent show Some people just can't get over things Some folk just can't let it go To the left is an urn on a plant stand Filled with ash, Auntie Flo long since gone Some people just can't get over things Some folk just cannot move on To the right in a tank of formaldehyde Uncle Stan's wearing only a beard Some people just can't get over things Some folk are just fucking weird

Marvin Cheeseman has a gently mocking, common touch. In poetry circles, that may be viewed as a slight. It isn't. The ability to connect without unnecessary artifice is all too rare. His work is charming and contemporary. Like Noel Coward, he has a talent to amuse by raising a knowing smile that lingers long in the mind. Wit and warmth. What more could you wish for?

A Man of Few Words

Robert Cochrane — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:59:09 +0000

A Man of Few Words Robert Cochrane February 21, 2009 - 12:59

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Mick Imlah 1956-2009

The poet Mick Imlah, who died on January 12, was a writer of immense concision and talent, but one with a scant regard for the sense of urgency. Compiling just two poetry collections in twenty years, evidencing the respect and effort of his devotions, provided the world with a legacy of rare worth. It has also left his readers with a profound awareness of pleasures unknown, unrealized, and denied.

His scrupulous output revealed a modesty and lack of ego, but he also possessed strong views about the poet's obligations to his public. "Poetry should at least try to be exciting to read" was his simple but profound dictum. Imlah was born in Aberdeen on September 26, 1956 (with a twin sister). The family moved to Beckenham ten years later, although he retained an innate awareness of his Scottish origins.

In 1976 he won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where his tutor, the poet and novelist John Fuller, proved an guiding influence and an early supporter of his work, printing his debut pamphlet The Zoologists Bath via his own Sycamore Press.

Awarded a First in 1979, Imlah could easily have drifted into academia, but literary journalism was the road he chose. In 1983 he succeeded the current Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, as editor of the quarterly Poetry Review. Being the recipient in 1984 of an Eric Gregory award, which recognizes the work of poets of promise under the age of thirty, seemingly destined him for wider and prolonged success. From 1989 to 1993 he worked as poetry editor at Chatto and Windus, after which he joined the staff of the Times Literary Supplement.

The appearance of Birthmarks in 1988 earned him a Recommendation by the Poetry Society, and a garland of positive reviews. It was a success he was in no hurry to repeat. 1995 saw his inclusion in Penguin Modern Poets 3, but there was little there that hadn't already seen the light of print. Only his diagnosis with motor neuron disease in 2007 provoked the assemblage and publication of The Lost Leader the following year. The reviews were proof positive that the long wait had been worthwhile, and the collection reached the shortlists of the Forward and T.S Eliot prizes.

The breadth of vision, coupled with an eclectic eye for detail, cemented his reputation as one of finest poetic voices of his generation. Imlah's courageous appearance at the Forward awards, where he won, was to be his last.

Mick Imlah was one of those rare beings who devoted more time to the work of others than he did to his own. His reputation will rest on a very select canon of work, less than one hundred poems, but then, quality usually prevails in the onslaught of quantity. That much he knew. This we can discover, and more, from his dignified and finely distilled gleanings.