The Reader Online

Review by Chris Routledge

Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet is a collection of poems about the war in Iraq. It draws on his experiences there serving with the US Army in 2003 and 2004. Twenty-first century soldier-poets have a tough job. Not only do they have to contend with the legacy of Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and the rest, but modern warfare is conducted on television. While the images seen by civilians may be controlled and mediated, the way war looks and sounds is familiar, at least in a general way, to most adults. In World War I poets provided a human narrative to go with the lists of dead. What can a poet add when war itself is right there in your living room?

The answer is, quite a lot. In ‘Night in Blue’, a poem about flying home, Turner says ‘I have no words to speak of war’, but if that is true then the words he finds to speak of other things say a great deal about war and about this war in particular. What strikes me reading these poems is the clarity of the description and the sense of bright, sharp light. This is a war of waiting and long-distance, of sudden violence and shattered calm. In ‘Hwy 1′ a crane is shot by one of the soldiers as it roosted on powerlines: ‘it pauses, as if amazed that death has found it / here, at 7 a.m. on such a beautiful morning’. Elsewhere, in ‘16 Iraqi Policemen’ Turner describes the aftermath of a car bomb in which ‘the dead policemen cannot be found, / here a moment before, then vanished.’

Beyond the coolness of these descriptions Turner’s sensibility is one of solidarity and shared experience. Several of the poems are from the point of view of Iraqis; several others have a semi-mystical feel to them, as in ‘Kirkuk Oilfield, 1927′:

… the dead are buried deep in the mind
of God, manifest in man and woman,
given to earth in dark blood,
given to earth in fire.

For the most part the soldiers do their jobs as sensitively and simply as they can, muddling along with the Iraqi population and living alongside them. But war is never far away. Its brutalizing effect erupts in the poem ‘Body Bags’, in which soldiers kick the feet of dead Iraqis and mock them. What is best about the collection though is its understanding of how war ties us together, how it changes forever the way we think and feel and remember:

Rockets often fall
in the night sky of the skull, down long avenues
of the brain’s myelin sheathing, over synapses
and the rough structures of thought, they fall
into the hippocampus, into the seat of memory –
where lovers and strangers and old friends
entertain themselves, unaware of the dangers
headed their way …

You can hear an interview with Turner in which he reads from Here, Bullet at the Guardian Books podcast. Here he is reading on YouTube. Another interview is here at Alice James Books. His page at Bloodaxe Books is here.

Brian Turner studied poetics at the University of Oregon before signing up to the US Army at the age of 30. He served for seven years, including tours in Bosnia-Herzegovina and finally in Iraq, where he was an Infantry Team Leader for a year from November 2003. Here, Bullet is Turner’s first collection of poetry and the first published collection to emerge from the Iraq war.

Here, Bullet was first published in the US by Alice James Books in 2005 and in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. Extracts are printed here by permission.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

We’re stretching the definition of ‘poem’ a little bit this week to enjoy this famous speech from Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of Dr Faustus. Near the end of the play Faustus seems to be reneging on his deal with Lucifer. Mephistopheles, trying to keep Faustus’ soul for his Lord thinks out loud: “I cannot touch his soul; / But what I may afflict his body with / I will attempt, which is but little worth.” Faustus chooses Helen of Troy, “Whose sweet embracings may extinguish clean / Those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow, / And keep mine oath I made to Lucifer”. Then she appears and he is lost:

Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium–
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.–
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!–
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy, shall Wertenberg be sack’d;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear’d to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

___

Text courtesy of the Gutenberg Project from the Quarto, 1604.

Posted by Chris Routledge

A call from the University’s press office at noon on a Friday is not a particularly usual occurrence. ‘We’re after someone to talk about Shakespeare, just for a few minutes, as part of City Talk’s discussion on making Shakespeare more accessible to younger people - we thought that Jane Davis would be a good person to do this, is she around?’ Ah. No, Jane’s in Paris. Estelle, the coordinator of our Community Shakespeare project is also unavailable. A little more information required now, as I could see that this interview was to be falling upon my shoulders. So I discover that this has all come about after an article published in The Telegraph about Martin Baum’s new publication Yoof Speak.

I feel that yes, Shakespeare, were he alive today, would have felt “duty bound” to reflect “life as it really is in the 21st century” but as far as I can tell, life isn’t all “innit”, “bovvered” and “geezas” in the 21st century. I am not alone in thinking this, am I? Perhaps I live in a bubble where sentences still have words without a littering of zs and vs. Were he alive today I am sure Shakespeare’s language would reflect our current idioms but still be as poetic and beautiful as it was four-hundred years ago. He may well drop a few ts or swear more frequently but really, “innit”? I doubt it. So, in an attempt to defend the richness of the Bard’s language and to reinforce that part of the enjoyment of Shakespeare is in getting to grips with that language, searching for the meaning and feeling like you’ve achieved something, I took to the stage (as it were). Oh okay, if I must… click here to ‘listen again’ (about 45 minutes in).

Now, the problem that I have about this mutation of:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

to:

Verona was de turf of de feuding Montagues and de Capulet families. And coz they was always brawling and stuff, de prince of Verona told them to cool it or else they was gonna get well mashed if they carried on larging it with each other.

Is that it’s just not Shakespeare is it? I truly believe that Shakespeare can be accessible for all and is, if the time is given to it and texts or performances are approached in a dynamic and interesting way for those who would be otherwise uninterested and un-enthused. Take The Reader Organisation’s Community Shakespeare project: organised by Get Into Reading, we will be staging two performances of The Winter’s Tale in August, reaching out across the Wirral community to members of our GIR groups, local schools and people who, for various reasons feel socially excluded, in the hope that we will be able to make Shakespeare more accessible to the wider community. Members will take part in a wide range of activities to support the event from costume making, ticket design, painting and publicity. It will be hard work, it will take a lot of time, a lot of planning and energy but it will be, we hope, an invigorating, life-enhancing and enjoyable experience for all involved.

Surely it is better to take the time to read, explain and hopefully, eventually, be able to connect with the words of Shakespeare than to alter the language to such a hideous extent that even the story itself loses its essence? Shakespeare is his language. To alter that alters the entire experience.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

from A Shropshire Lad, A.E.Housman

II. Loveliest of Trees

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Last week I read this poem with a group of men and women who were all well past their three score years and ten. They felt rather smug and were delighted when one of them suggested they were all existing in injury time. That night as I got into bed and opened the long novel I have been struggling with for some time, I was struck by the thought that if I stuck to the Shropshire Lad’s strict rule (with no injury time), ten years was going to be very little room to read everything on my must read list as well as some of the new stuff to be published between now and the final whistle. If time is running out, should I just abandon this book and move onto the next or should I persevere? It is a good book by a respected author but I just can’t seem to make a real connection.

And then by coincidence, a couple of days later, I read this from Nick Hornby in The Observer Magazine:

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they are not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

Now I don’t believe in duty reading but nor do I think that all reading should be easy reading or reading within your comfort zone. Often you have to struggle to reap the best reward. George Eliot’s Romola, for example, is almost impenetrable for the first 100 pages but then it takes off. If I had given up and thrown it aside at page 98, I would have been the poorer for having missed out on something hugely worth reading.

As far as I am concerned, I think the habit of a lifetime (I have started so I’ll finish) is going to be too hard to shake off and anyway, I am not sure I want to have a pile of half read books lying around, mostly because of the nagging suspicion that if I had just pressed on, I might have come to my Eureka moment on the very next page.

Perhaps there is just not enough context in Nick Hornby’s argument, for how can there be a general rule to abandon every book we are not enjoying. I am not arguing back that we should press on stoically with something of no value. Surely, each book has to be considered and decided upon individually.

Meanwhile, back in bed, I have read 261 pages and there are 257 to go and the clock is ticking…

Japan and I have something in common. We both share an obsessive streak that runs to mania about Alice in Wonderland. It’s an obsession from my childhood that I’d all but forgotten about until I arrived here. But after a few weeks I could hardly fail to see how deeply the story and its remarkable iconography have been assimilated into Japanese popular consciousness. When playing cards and chess pieces, as well as the silhouettes of little girls in full skirts decorate everything from bags to mirrors to knee length socks (which I obviously had to buy), you begin to realise that the simple story has transformed into something goes beyond pop culture. Alice is an institution.

In a country that loves all things cute, the little blonde girl who chases after a rabbit was bound to win fans. Showing the students a picture of me in Alice fancy dress from my friend’s twenty-first birthday, coupled with my hair which has turned blonde since I got here, has earned me the nickname of ‘Alice’ amongst some of my kids, or ‘Arisu’ as they pronounce it. Actually Aoi, one of my English speaking geniuses in 3-F class, refers to me as ‘our Alice’, which breaks my heart whenever she says it. With a large collection of Alice-related stationery in school I have embraced the Alice fixation, and at least in this small corner of Japan, become part of it. So it was with a newly acquired copy of Alice in hand I that I set off for a long weekend visit to Osaka.

I wasn’t long into my journey before the Alice iconography to appear. Japan is indeed obsessed with Carroll’s terribly English little girl. Sitting on the Sonic train I had to take to the Shinkansen station I noticed that it had it’s name, the ‘Wonderland Express’, laid into the laminate flooring. Even the super punctual JR Railway service has been taken in by her charm. I really was being taken on my own journey down the rabbit hole.

The Shinkansen, the world famous Bullet Train, hurtled me into Osaka just as I was reading of Alice’s first meetings with the Duchess, and the pig and the pepper. The residents of Osaka are apparently the fastest walkers in the whole of Japan, as I experienced when I was jostled from the train to join the throngs of people in their own private Caucus race, heading off in every direction to be immersed into the concrete labyrinth.

Going from small town Beppu to Osaka was being transported to another world. Osaka is the image of the country that simply saying the word ‘Japan’ evokes. Buildings tower above your head for twenty stories and more and Shinsaibashi is a maze of bustle and commerce where tourist shops and foreign designer boutiques jostle for your attention alongside traditional crafts and deafening Pachinko parlours. Along the river giant neon signs dominate, garish and mesmerising for unknown products in a language I don’t really understand. Giant faces stare down, tempting you into buying a new camera or TV. I stand to watch a gigantic mechanical crab as it slowly attempts to scale a building. Despite all its best efforts, it doesn’t appear to be getting very far.

In the centre of the chaos stands Osaka castle. A serenity and silence hangs over the castle and its grounds where Buddhist monks stand as rigid and silent as ivory chess pieces around the castle grounds. Despite a highly eventful history the castle is at present not presided over by the tyrannical Queen. Not a single cry of ‘Off with his head!’ was to be heard in the two hours I spent wandering amongst the excited hoards of school children and of middle aged women practising Tai Chi under the trees.

As I sped away from Osaka on the Shinkansen again at the end of my weekend the glaring lights of the city soon reduced to tiny spots in the inky evening light. Over the next couple of hours the cities I passed through grew smaller as I was returned to real life again in my quiet town. While Beppu lacks the grandeur of Osaka’s dreamlike wonderland, it was good to be back home amongst people for whom I am glad to be ‘their Alice’.

___

Kimberley Long is a former Reader volunteer who is currently teaching English in Japan.

April 23 is UNESCO World Book Day and over at the Kenyon Review Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky has a gloriously hangdog post about how books die:

If books are dust, then in this they are more like us than these flashes of light that you now read. Fragile, but strangely enduring, they are made to carry life. (And often made, it seems, with as little care, in momentary acts of commerce between fame and greed.) We’ve found better ways to cast our seeds, but none as moving, just as we’ve created more efficient objects of our inarticulate desires, and yet none so enduring.

Link.

I was assisted in choosing this morning’s poem by Raymond Chapman, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of London, who has written widely on literature and theology. He praises the poem for the way it catches the mood of late nineteenth-century decadence and movingly suggests Wilde’s foreseeing of his own tragedy.

Helas

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?—
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?

–Oscar Wilde, 1881

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I am unable to comment on the similarity between the facility shown in this film and the offices of The Reader. Draw your own conclusions.

Posted by Blogman

News today from Wirral Libraries that Roger Lyon from BBC Radio Merseyside will be appearing to talk about Robert Tressell’s political work The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Widely regarded as a classic of British working-class literature, Tressell’s book was published as socialism was beginning to gain ground and provides a fascinating glimpse into the social life of Britain and the dynamic relationships of the men themselves. Roger will discuss the novel and the issues that it raises for us today. If you would like to grasp this opportunity and can get to West Kirby Library, this free event will be held at 2.30 on Friday 2nd May (refreshments provided). All those who attend will receive a free copy of the book and a booklet pointing to its continuing relevance for contemporary society. For further information or to secure a place for the day, please call West Kirby Library on 0151 929 7808.

As part of the Robert Tressell celebrations being organised in Liverpool this year by PCS and other trade unions, the Writing on the Wall festival brings us three performances of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to the city: Tuesday 6th May and Wednesday 7th May, 7.30pm at The Casa, Hope Street and Thursday 8th May, 7.30pm at the Novas Contemporary Urban Centre, off Parliament Street (all tickets £5, please call 0151 231 6120 for further details).

Some writers claim to be able to write when drunk and a few even claim it helps. I’m not one of them. Clarity and routine are the things that keep me writing. And let’s not even go near the subject of what hangovers do for productivity. But booze features highly in the lives and the books of some of the best writers. Booze may not have made him a happier, healthier person, but its hard to see how sobriety could have improved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose style. Over at The Outfit, where they are celebrating Raymond Chandler’s great novel The Long Good-Bye, Sam Reaves has a terrific post arguing that Chandler’s masterpiece is not only a book soaked in booze, but also a great American novel. The book was written under difficult circumstances–Chandler’s wife, Cissy, was dying, and alcoholism was destroying his health–but the book gods smiled and it worked out fine:

Chandler’s style has spawned so many imitators that it’s easy to forget how incisive and apt and startling the original was. The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back… The book is full of Chandler’s carefully machined similes, so easy to parody and so hard to nail, and on every page he finds new ways of using the language to convey atmosphere or personality with precision: “I couldn’t hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.” Chandler was one of the great stylistic innovators in American literature.

Among the great features of The Long Good-Bye are the passages in which Chandler eulogises on bars and drinking or describes them in loving and often melancholy detail. Reaves quotes this from chapter 13, but there is much, much more:

…you knew that he got up on the bottle and only let go of it when he fell asleep at night. He would be like that for the rest of his life and that was what his life was… There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world..

Here’s the link again.