Why would anyone want to spend an hour with a self-declared ‘Foppish Buffoon’ in a darkened upstairs room in a pub in Islington on a rainy Thursday evening? Even if he is poet-in-residence on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live. Read on to find out why each of the 60 minutes added up to excellent value for the entrance fee.

My feelings about London are usually distinctly hostile. For me, on my frequent car journeys down to Sussex, it’s a blot on the landscape, the monster that spawned the nightmare of the M. 25. But last Thursday, on one of my occasional jaunts into its heart, I was reminded of how much I enjoy its variety, once I’m there.

As soon as I emerged from the bowels of the earth and climbed the steps to Hungerford Bridge, I breathed in the tang of the sea, the only thing I miss since moving to the Midlands. Then into the Festival Hall to meet my writer friend Crysse Morrison for a catch-up chat, lunch at Waggamamas, and a peaceful hour in the National Gallery relaxing in front of her current favourite, Seurat’s The Bathers. Like most people, I was familiar with the card-sized version of this picture, but I was stunned to see it taking up almost half the wall ( actually about 2 metres by 3). We sat for a long time, enjoying the calming scene and wondering about the lives of those boys.

The highlight of my day took place in the Red Lion in Islington, where our other writing friend, Roger Jinkinson joined us, and, best of all, my son. I had no idea what to expect of The Petty Concerns of Luke Wright, apart from this, taken from his website:

“Featuring some nipple-tweekingly awful teenage lyrics; sarcastic cricket commentators and the death of a very tight pair of jeans. Luke effortlessly mixes comedy and poetry as he tries to look past his own inflated ego and find out what really matters.”

He’s a whirlwind of energy, and I found his self-deprecating delivery hilarious and touching, both the preambles and the poems themselves. These were clearly differentiated by the use of a huge screen, letting us know that the monologue had morphed into the poem it was introducing, by the simple technique of displaying the poem’s title.

To get a feel of what the show was like, you’ll have to check out where it’s going to be performed next, and book your ticket. If you can’t do that, then buy the book. I was delighted to be able to do this, and extend my enjoyment of the evening by reading the poems on the train home.

As it says in the blurb on the cover of his book, “High Performance “ brings Luke Wright’s acerbic wit and high-energy performance style to the page, revealing the formal discipline underpinning much of his verse.

It was enlightening to see what the stream of words looked like on the page, and identify the internal and end-rhymes and half-rhymes. It confirms the importance of the visual aspect of poetry, and how this affects the way the poem works in the reader’s head, presenting more layers of meaning and understanding.

One of my favourites from the book is Family Funeral, with its precise choice of metaphors to pin down nostalgic memories and complex emotions:

“And so, as sure as seasons, they arrive -
relations last seen heavy as trifle
at some mid-childhood Sunday lunch …”

Take a look, and buy the book.

http://www.nastylittlepress.org/books/high-performance/

BEFORE YOU READ ABOUTSutton Park, and ‘Each Year I Forget’,
Click here for my BOOK COVER DESIGN CHALLENGE

and give yourself a LAST CHANCE of winning a FREE copy of Paper Lanterns(CLOSING DATE: 31st December)

Dave has a great way with words – I’d sent him a few short paragraphs about my writing life, and here’s how he introduces his Monday evening guests: “A Laureate, a Plinther, and a mountain climbing Guinness drinker.” (that last phrase is the way he’s chosen to present me – it’s made me quite nostalgic for those far off days in Dublin)

The Laureate and Plinther is Adrian Johnson, “the current Birmingham Poet Laureate and a man with an enthusiasm for storytelling… Earlier this year he became a ‘plinther’ in Trafalgar Square, standing in the sunshine at 3pm on a Saturday - almost exactly 20 years from when the Poll Tax riot erupted on 31 March 1990.” He’s a great performer of his own poems, and from this YouTube video,it looks as though it’ll be a lively evening.

Here’s the more serious part of what Dave has written about me: “Christine Coleman’s first novel The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society came out in 2005. While that was mainly set in Birmingham and Sutton Coldfield, her forthcoming book, Paper Lanterns, was inspired by finding a cache of love letters written in China by two separate women to the same man.”

And there’ll be a lot more to squeeze into this couple of hours:
“Amongst the artists we’ll be playing from CD is Coventry based Chris Hoskins from her collection of monologues Relatively Speaking, and singing with the superb a’cappella trio Free Harmony. And there’ll be some of the sort of Christmas literary offerings that you’ll only get on Radio Wildfire as we look at office parties with Roz Goddard; Christmas presents with Brendan Hawthorne; and reinterpret a couple of well worn seasonal tales.”

And now I’d better go and sort out which extracts from my books the listeners might like to hear me reading on Monday evening

It was so sad to hear of the death of two more British soldiers in Afghanistan, today of all days, when we are reminded of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of other men and women killed in wars.

There’s nothing new I can add to this topic – the pros and cons of this war or that - the justifications and condemnations. I can only feel immensely grateful that virtually all my friends and family members are in good health, and (as far as any of us can know) are not in present danger - all except one, a fairly recent addition to our extended family, and he is often in my thoughts, particularly today.

The Sunday Times News Review has lain on the kitchen table all day. My eye was caught by the headline ‘ HIS LAST LONELY WALK’ and a picture of a beautiful young man, Olaf Schmid, who died last weekend, attempting to defuse his 65th bomb, on the eve of returning home on leave.

I was resisting the article – I didn’t want to read about that tragedy. I’ve just done so now, with a big lump in my throat. My heart goes out to his wife, Christina – his parents too. My son is one year older than he was.

What a courageous young man. The newspaper article quotes his words, “I go home, and people go,’ How many f****** Taliban have you killed?’ Well, it’s not really about that. It’s more about how many lives I’ve saved, I think.”

I live not far from Cannock Chase, 26 square miles of woodlands and heather-covered hills, a wonderful place for walking. I’d been visiting the Chase for years before I first came across the German Military Cemetery. Attached to the memorial building, there was a small, obviously lived-in, house probably occupied by a caretaker.

It just happened to be on the last day of the last millennium – a time when the whole country –indeed, the whole world – was in a state of excitement, some anticipating all the computers on earth grinding to a halt, with disastrous consequences, and others getting ready for the party of a lifetime. Hemmed all around by dark pine trees and a wire fence, were the final remains of 5,000 German Servicemen from two World Wars. So many young men. Just a small percentage of all the others from those two wars

There was something unbearably poignant about the headstones in their neat rows – each one shared by two names. This is the poem it inspired.

Millennium Eve in the German War Cemetery, Cannock Chase.

They’ll be restless tonight, mutters
Mr McAllister locking the door.
There are no windows in the back wall
of the bungalow. It looks onto
its own courtyard. Better that way
he said when he took the job.

But all explosions are too far away
to stir the random couples underground -
no trace of sleep inside their hollow skulls.
If they could dream they’d be where only time
can measure distances. They’d watch those stars
whose light has not yet reached our skies, burn out.

What a lovely afternoon it’s been - even the weather cheered up for my long drive to Leicester on a very special occasion: it was the launch of yet another collection of poems by Alice Beer. I wouldn’t normally draw attention to a writer’s date of birth, but this information on the back is relevant to the content of “Window on the Square” :Alice Beer was born in Vienna in 1912, and moved toEngland in 1937. She lives in a flat in Leicester overlooking De Montfort Square

The other important statement on the back cover is:
ALL PROFIT FROM THE SALE OF THIS PAMPHLET
WILL BE DONATED TO HAMLIN FISTULA UK

If you don’t know about this life-destroying condition, (and even if you do) click here to find out more about this charity, and, for a very brief photo story of one young woman’s path to recovery, and a chance of having a normal life restored, click here.

I met Alice in August 1996 at my first residential poetry course with the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire, and, like many others who have fallen under her spell, have kept in touch ever since. This contact was easier to maintain because of the fortnightly poetry group, Soundswrite, that held its first meeting in 2000, and I was delighted to see that Alice also was joining this wonderful group.

If you’d like to find out more about Window on the Square, and support this very worthwhile charity, this book is available via the link to Alice’s web-page above, and also the link to Soundswrite.

One of the poems that were read this afternoon has helped me to decide which of my own will be Poem of the Week. Alice’s is called Puzzling, and recounts her sighting of a fox on three very different occasions . The most recent of these took place below her window on the square,
‘it trotted off,
not leisurely and not in a hurry, intent
on its own business and left me wondering
why I felt as if the clouds
had lifted on this dark December morning
a gift bestowed on me.’

I, too, am fascinated by the urban fox, and its parallel world –

Shifts
Monochrome foxcubs tumble on the lawn.
Sparrows and finches stir
and test their voices.

Their dreams dissolve above them
and this house, a block of shadow
is rubbed out.

In my latest post, I was talking about re-writing in general, and I mentioned a poetry blog site, How a Poem Happens, that had inspired and impressed me, and I’d intended to write in more detail about this today – But this has been a great week for poetry and that’s now going to have to wait a day or two, as I’m too excited about a package that was delivered by Royal Mail on Friday: I received my own ‘contributor’s’ copy of a wonderful anthology, ‘Cracking On’, in which I’m immensely privileged to have two of my own poems.

It’s edited by Joy Howard, of Grey Hen Press, and this short extract (below) from the Foreword by Guardian writer, Michele Hanson, will give you some idea of why you might want to take a look inside!

“ Outrage is easier for me, but that is here too, particularly in Mind the Gap, which challenges the young head on, rather than fading out quietly and letting them, and everyone else, continue to believe that youth is everything and old age is nothing much at all. Unrepentant, unapologetic, brave, confident and beautiful, these poems show that we older women deserve to live as full and rich a life as any other generation. And the nearer we get to the end, through Sick and Tired, Nearly There and into the Departure Lounge, the braver we get. Or at least these poets do. For those of us who are scared stiff, then these poems can help us through it.”

I’ve not yet had time to do more than dip into a few of these, and what struck me at once was how fresh and unusual these poems are, and how rarely I’ve come across any poems that deal with aging at all, let alone ones which, as Penelope Shuttle is quoted as saying, are ‘Electric, formidable, challenging, witty, sombre, enduring, heart-felt, tender, reflective, valedictory poems.’

No wonder I feel privileged to be among this company! One of mine, (Legacy)has already appeared in a previous post, so this Poem of the Week is the other one from Cracking On.

First Born
For my mother

My other dead are setting out to greet me,
their sprawling years
weighing them down like clay

I’ll mould my lips into the secret smile,
recover that sense of wonder - the key
to heaven. They’ll let me in.

This might seem a bit confusing to some readers if they don’t realise that the ‘I’ of the poem is my mother, and the ‘you’ is her first born child, the one referred to towards the end of ‘Legacy’ as ‘our long-dead brother’.

The journey through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean in this poem was made by my mother as a young woman, travelling out to India to marry my father, who was in the army out there during the war. Throughout our childhood,our oldest brother, who only lived for about three days, was regularly mentioned in night-time prayers.

It was only when I became a mother myself, that I started to realise what a tragedy that baby’s death would have been.

This week there’ve been two quite separate items that have made me ponder the art of re-writing. The first was from a poetry blog, describing a process of drafting and re-drafting that chimed with my own experiences of bringing a poem to completion.(I’ll be giving a link to that in my next post) The second was an article in this Wednesday’s Times 2, and it made me wince. To be more accurate, it was the subject of the piece (Jeffrey Archer) that had this effect on me, (not its writer (Erica Wagner).

I’m all for re-writing both prose and poetry as many times as it takes to reach the state of being ‘as good as it can be’. The real difficulty is identifying the bits that need to be changed or cut out entirely.

I’m often asked how long it took me to write my first published novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society(my third novel for adults). I never have the full story plotted out from beginning to end – I have a general idea of where I’m heading, but I write in order to find out what my characters actually do and how they achieve this. I tend to do a lot of editing as the story unfolds, and I enjoy honing the pages the following day almost more than creating each new scene. It’s an integral part of the creative process for me.

The Dangerous Sports has 87,000 words (308 pages) but the original version was over 20,000 words longer. Click here to read more about how I made the novel much stronger by doing this. When it finally set out on its journey as a published book, it was, in spite of any shortcomings, a done deal.

What I’ve had to learn all over again, with my soon-to-be-published next novel, Paper Lanterns, is that re-writing each section at least once (and often three or four times) as I work my way towards a satisfactory conclusion of the novel, does NOT mean that this version is anything other than a first draft. I’ll expand on that in another post.

Paper Lanterns hasn’t yet been sent to the printers – there are a few more things to be sorted first, such as copy editing, and the cover design – something that’s put me into in a state of high excitement as I’ve only just received some initial ‘visuals’. I’ll be posting these and other versions here soon and will welcome readers’ views.

But getting back to the re-writing - I still feel fully justified in tweaking parts of some of the scenes in this novel, because it’s still in manuscript form and is yet to be delivered into the world as a finished product. Once it’s been printed and bound, with a lovely front cover and informative back cover, and all the pages in between, there’ll be no more re-writing.

What really made me wince in the Times article was an extract from Archer’s re-written book, Kane and Abel. I read it when it came out thirty years ago, and quite enjoyed it as an escapist read. I hadn’t thought it was presenting itself as anything other than that, and I would never have imagined that he would have bothered to write the whole thing again – especially if his explanation for doing so was really the true reason: “30 years later one is a better craftsman, one is better at one’s job’. I’d have thought that a ‘better craftsman’ would have preferred to demonstrate his improved craftmanship by writing a completely new novel.

I could go on, but I think that this article is available on the Times On-line, if anyone wants to find it. As for the art of re-writing, there’s a lot more to be said about the part it plays in the creation of a poem or a novel and still lots more for me to learn.

I was in Sussex visiting my mother this weekend, and for a change, Gardening Husband came with me. I’m always happy to let him drive, because it means that I can have a good long stretch of reading time. (Something I often find hard to do at home). I’d just started Breath, by Tim Winton, and was able to finish it by the time we arrived. I need more time to mull over this book – I found it enthralling, but haven’t sorted out my thoughts and feelings enough to write anything coherent about it yet.

My return journey took me about a third of the way into RJ Ellory’s A Quiet Belief in Angels. I wish we’d been driving up to John O’ Groats, and back to give me a chance to finish it. I don’t think I’ll get much of a chance to read more long chunks of it this week. I’ll just have to be patient, and wait to find out what happens next.

Yesterday was cloudy with an almost gale force wind. Coming down over the brow of the hill towards Seaford, I could see the white horses scattered across the dark green and purple sea, but today has been another one of those Indian summer days, with a clarity of light that I associate with fine weather in October.
That leads me nicely to this week’s poem – especially as it’s the traditional time of Harvest Festivals.
Light Harvest

This morning I escaped into a park
where light lay ripe and waiting for my eyes,
trapped on wet black mud – splintering on dark
green spikes of holly into shards so bright
I’ll feast all winter on this hoard of light.

The original inspiration for this poem came while I was on my MA course at Nottingham Trent. We had one of the occasional Saturday meetings, and went out into the nearby countryside. The sky was absolutely clear and blue, the sun was warm, but there was a hint of chill in the air, and we gradually became aware of strands of tiny threads of cobwebs drifting around us and glistening in the sunlight.

I was delighted when this poem was accepted for publication in Acumen 2000. It’s one that I’m still happy to be reminded of at this time of year.

It’s a funny thing, looking back at poems I’ve written several years ago. The poem of this week is one I wrote for my daughter, and now reading it again I find that it’s the secondary theme of this poem that strikes me first.

Both my ‘children’ now live in London, and I always look forward to their visits home. This weekend, it was my daughter who came with her boyfriend. There were a couple of things on their itinerary which we managed to achieve on Saturday – the first was a guided tour of her dad’s allotment.

It was several months since I’d been down there and I was overwhelmed by the amount of vegetables still thriving and demanding to be harvested. Of course, I knew about these, as he’d been bringing samples of them home for supper week after week.

The other was on the request of daughter and boyfriend: a trip to Imran’s in Birmingham’s Balti Belt. It was getting on for two years since we’d been there and it was even better than we’d remembered. I was glad that the honour of Brum was upheld!

So where does Dublin come in to this? It’s not even mentioned in the poem below. Daughter and boyfriend have been together for two years now, and the poem dates from about six years ago. This is a mother and daughter poem, so yes, it is about her, but it has a more general significance, in that it’s about the state of being in love. She looked so glowing with happiness when she arrived that it brought it all back to me (but not, I hasten to add, the previous cause of her joy) .

Take a look at the poem now, and if I tell you that I was at Trinity College in Dublin, and met my husband there, you might get the Dublin connection.

That Place

She’s a sunlamp! Her voice on the phone
emits a radiance that fills the hollow space
behind my breastbone, filters down

and my heart, a supernova,
flaunted itself on my face with such dazzle
that passers-by would flinch and shield their eyes.

Unlike some of my other poems, there’s nothing in this one that I’d want to change. It’s also a good one to read aloud and I find that most people who hear it seem to be moved by it.(It’s funny how little things like a back pockets of a pair of Levis can be forgotten for years, and then make such an impact when they suddenly surface.) Ah, youth!

Like most things in my life, I only get round to making a major change when I’m more or less forced into it by some outside intervention. In this case, it was having double-glazing installed in my lovely little writing room – not just the door and the big window overlooking the garden but also the French windows that we’d never opened in the twenty years since having this room added to the back of the house.

So most of today and all yesterday, I’ve been rearranging everything in this room. It opens onto the garden and is full of light on sunny days, so, with the doors and windows open it almost felt like being outside.

I hadn’t realised quite how long this would take me, and once I’d piled up all my books from the three bookcases onto the floor and every other available surface, I had to carry on. And it wasn’t just the books. The knee-hole desk I’m sitting at now has nine small drawers, and the tiny table I was using as a desk , also has a drawer, and then I’ve got a large carved camphor wood chest, and all these were crammed with accumulated papers and other odds and ends that had to be sifted and sorted.

I feel very pleased with myself now that it’s all finished, but I do regret not being able to catch up on other things I wanted to do, such as writing a post about R.J.Ellory’s inspiring talk to Bookcrossers on Friday night at Hudson’s – but that will have to wait.

Meanwhile, here’s my poem of the week:

Preservation

His mother’s fur coat sleeps under their bed.
Each night she listens as another stitch
that binds those skins together snaps.

Now sun slants in between the blinds
jostles motes of dust, and something
like a boulder is worked loose.

This is a poem that I first wrote at least seven years ago and was published in my small collection, Single Travellers. In spite of it also winning a place in the Ragged Raven Anthology, Writing on Water, (2005) I’d never been quite satisfied by that version (see below) so I’ve spent the last hour chopping and changing it. At the moment, I think this version is more effective, but when I read it again tomorrow,
I’m very likely to want to make other changes. (I’ve just read it again, and am not sure what I think now!)

I’d be very interested in your comments about these two versions.

Preservation

There’s barely room to navigate the decades of newsprint,
calcified narratives stacked on the carpet like
dry-stone walls. Does he believe

they can shore up the present? Beneath accretions of
photos and bric-a-brac, the clenched piano
is choking back old tunes.

Her mother-in-law’s fur coat sleeps under their bed.
At night, lying above those stitched-together
skins, she feels them stir.

Years back, on the edge of Lovers’ Leap, he
told her about limestone crags, billions of
fossils from aeons ago.

Now she’s found them on the net, sea-lilies,
feather stars, swaying and feeding in tropical seas.
All that life!

Sun edges in through smears of condensation,
its slanting shafts jostled with motes of…dust, is it?
or particles of

something more ingrained, intangible,
worked loose at last
from the boulder in her throat