The Reader Online

In the run-up to this year’s BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking festival in Liverpool next month, Jane Davis (Director, The Reader), can be heard pitching her case for the promotion and pleasure of books for all, as part of the festival’s People’s Choice debate. Listen to Jane on Radio 3’s Night Waves tonight at 21.45.

Of all the art-forms, only books allow us to fully understand the human experience…

Are you a supporter of what we do? Do you think that The Reader’s hard work and enthusiasm should be further recognised? If so, get voting in the People’s Choice debate during the Free Thinking festival (9th – 11th November)!

The Reader is running ‘Book at Breakfast’ events on Saturday 10th November and Sunday 11th November as part of the BBC’S Free Thinking festival. It is an invitation only event but you will be able to listen to the programmes on Radio 3.

The first of our featured poets in the first of our featured anthologies is Grace Ingoldby. A novelist and poet with an ear for domestic and sectarian violence – she lived in Northern Ireland during the 1970s – Ingoldby’s perceptiveness to the world around her is demonstrated in her writing through stylish humour and original responses. She died in 2005, after a two-year battle with cancer. She faced her struggle with the same vigour and vivacity that she poured into her creative life; laughter was always to be heard but beneath this lay profound personal sorrow and unjustified self doubt. Of Grace’s unique interpretation and spirit for life, Mary Ingoldby says, “Discuss an idea with Grace and and you always came away with something entirely new. She was clever, extremely amusing, and quick to cut through the pretentious and the worthy.” Her poetry was “vital to her”, she would “work and rework”, through different genres in order to get the rythym and tone just right.

The sense of movement that is conveyed in this poem, through the grand expanse of sky and the hunched figure, demonstrates the detrimental power of introspection and insisting the need to throw ourselves open to be rid of pain and sorrow.

Morning be salve to you

On a clear night let the stars be your alibi
Save yourself from yourself by throwing your
Head back, gazing at something many light
Years away, for whatever happens in
This position it is impossible
To cry. Cryers bend forwards, they hug and
They hide themselves, tears leave them ragged, their
Sadness seeps inwards to what’s already
Sodden. At dawn the cocks crow from the grey
Of the orchard you’re leaving; morning be
Salve to you, day be square with you, fair with
You, remember to throw your head back should
Sadness still have its hand on you, for in
This position only the cockerels can cry.

(This poem is reproduced with permission from Oxford Poets 2007: An Anthology, edited by David Constantine and Bernard O’Donoghue, published by Carcanet Press.)

Mary will be reading Grace’s poetry at an event for the launch of Oxford Poets 2007: An Anthology at Foyles Bookshop, London on Monday 29th October.

Nicholas Murray, author of, among other things, biographies of Bruce Chatwin, Franz Kafka, and Mathew Arnold, writes about his book So Spirited a Town, which is published by Liverpool University Press. As an ‘outsider’ who has just finished writing a book about Liverpool I have a particular interest in the subject of So Spirited a Town, since writing about a place ties you to it forever. Here’s what Nicholas has to say about his book (more on his website and his blog):
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I wrote this book about Liverpool to show how it has been seen through the eyes of writers–some indigenous but the majority outsiders–who felt compelled to leave their impressions of my native city. Some were pleased with what they saw, others not, but their written accounts add up to a very rich source and the book was a great pleasure to research. I include Dickens (who gave me my title), Swift, Defoe, Hopkins, Melville, Hawthorne, Orwell, Malcolm Lowry, James Hanley, George Garrett, and countless others. Some are well-known, some almost forgotten. I found room for politicians and priests, poets and preachers as well as professional writers. I spent many hours exploring a range of sources: books, essays, diaries, letters, memoirs, sermons, eccentric guidebooks (particularly good fun), quirky old histories, poems, pamphlets, jokes. Since this is also a very personal book I intermingled with these accounts impressions and memories of my own growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s.

Although I was born in Liverpool and educated at school and university in the city I have not lived in Liverpool since the mid-1970s so don’t expect it to be a finger-on-the-pulse guide to what is currently cool on Merseyside. I leave that to the experts!

But in writing largely about the past I am conscious of how much that past continues to exercise a live influence on Liverpool. I don’t mean that the city is backward-looking but that it is impossible to understand it without knowing what it has lived through. It has often been a harsh tale of unimaginable suffering. Consider the plight of the Liverpool poor throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth century when the port was one of the richest in the world. Or the terrible horrors of the slave trade which created Liverpool’s wealth. As a child growing up in the suburb of Waterloo I felt myself surrounded on all sides by the actual texture of the nineteenth century: Victorian terraces, cobbles, street names, everything that now gets labelled “heritage” but this was at a time when the Beatles were the latest thing. Liverpool, in other words, has always known how to adapt and change without losing its memory.

I have written about my childhood and schooldays and I have explored the accounts of some quite recent writers–like Primo Levi or Nikos Kazantzakis or Karel Capek–whose presence in Liverpool many may not be aware of. It is a hybrid book and I like hybrid books. I also hope it is an entertaining one and will stimulate readers to go back and explore some of the texts to which I refer.

2008 makes Liverpool the European Capital of Culture. We all have our own idea of what “culture” means and mine probably isn’t quite the same as that of the Culture Company–I am after all the biographer of Matthew Arnold author of Culture and Anarchy (who died in Liverpool by the way). ‘Culture’ in the European Year sense seems to be rather more about shopping but then that’s culture too, I hear you say, and of course it is. I hope that my book makes some sort of contribution to the discussion and I look forward to seeing many of the events that are being lined up for next year.

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By Nicholas Murray