Julia Copus and Deryn Rees-Jones event

On 21^st May, NCLA were delighted to welcome the poets Deryn Rees-Jones and Julia Copus, whose most recent collections graced last year’s T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist. Their highly anticipated reading affirmed to the audience – if we needed reminding – just what poetry can do. Previous collections by Deryn Rees-Jones have been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, won a Cholmondeley Award and received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. A respected critic and editor, she is also Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool.

Rees-Jones read from Burying the Wren, a collection that explores renewal and loss. Many of the poems can be read as elegies to her late husband, the poet and critic Michael Murphy, who died in 2009. They also examine how loss forces us re-evaluate the self to find its new place in a fractured world. The poems are also full of sensual delights: of food and the body in Truffles, which are,

                                    ‘More pungent then, than mountain goats

                                    whose cheese we daub on rounds of bread,

                                    the amoretti which we dip in wine

                                    and where lovers ‘root out treasures’ for themselves.'

 

As we discovered, Rees-Jones is unafraid to challenge her audience. The remarkable – and at times unnerving – Dogwoman re-imagines the self in canine disguise. The sequence is based on the Dogwoman paintings of Paula Rego, where bestial, snarling women bay after an absent man. But the Dogwoman in these poems is not reduced to canine submission, but rather affirms her animal response to loss. She insists on the raw physicality of grief through driving insistence and repetition:

 

                                    ‘Dog tricks and the memory of dogs, dogs dreaming

                                    and not in colour. Dog fetching, dog on a leash,

 

                                    dog watching, dog weeps. Dog fond, dog mother

                                    Dog sniff. Dog holler. God of dogs, dog love.

 

                                    Dog sent to bed in deep disgrace. Dog shock, piss, squalor.

                                    And joy, dearest, tail wag. Dog rhythm, dog riff,

 

                                    dog's domain and death's dominion.

                                    The body's frame's not enough for itself,

                                    these pale fires of horror.’

            There were also poems that delighted in love’s mystery, as in A Chinese Lacquered Egg where:

 

                                    ‘Something is beginning. We feel it in the raw edges

                                    of our dreams, our bodies hostage to light, to weather…’

 

                                    ‘…Between breath and silence it is showing itself.

                                    In these shortened nights it is not unlike rapture,

                                    an unworded prayer its indelible hum.’

 

            She finished her reading with a coda from the title poem, Burying the Wren. It is a call to life beyond grief,

 

                                    ‘… sending you in the longboat of your body

                                    where worlds and words collide, was not

 

                                    the end of love. Yet love

                                    you’ve been with me enough,

 

                                    so I must let you be, remove myself from the

                                    cool earth…’

 

There could be few in the audience who did not respond to Rees-Jones’ bravura reading – a testament the power of both the lyric poem and the spoken word.

 

 Julia Copus is a previous winner of both an Eric Gregory award and the Forward Prize.  The audience warmed to her arresting reading from The World’s Two Smallest Humans. These are poems that reflect the personal: the end of love, loss, childhood and memory, universal themes she develops with great skill and an individual vision. Many of the poems explore different possible outcomes at pivotal moments of our lives. She began with This is the Poem in which I Have Not Left You, which reconfigures the decision to end a love affair through a series of negative assertions, e.g. I do not turn…I dare not speak…we do not part. It takes the reader back to a point where choices must be made, yet the poem’s conclusion undercuts any suggestion of uncertainty or regret:

 

                                    ‘...Then further off, after the rain is done

                                    the voice of the redstart calling do it, do it!,

                                    calling from the smallest tree in the garden.’

 

Copus is sometimes credited with popularising the specula (mirror) form, where two halves of the poem function as a mirror image of each other. The differently punctuated lines in the second stanza of a poem become an exact reflection of the first. This extraordinary formal control allows her to imagine events simultaneously taking place in the both the past and present.  She uses the form masterfully in Raymond at 60, which concertinas both grief and childhood memory – linking both with the central character's obsession with London bus routes! Copus finished with a poem from Ghost, a sequence examining the distress of infertility and the difficulties of IVF treatment. Again, she explored possible outcomes in the final poem Pledge, a sea-sibilant lullaby addressed to a child ‘in the deeps of the future’:

 

                                    ‘…I give myself over, shell and shelter,

                                    child, my own. By and by with the push of the wash

                                    I’ll usher you in.’

 

Like Rees-Jones, Copus finished a fine reading on an optimistic note. It was a remarkable evening that will long be remembered by their appreciative NCLA audience.

‘A Poem Is Never Finished, Only Abandoned’. True North: Literature and The Region

Last night at NCLA there was undoubtedly the sense of a special event occurring. The Curtis Auditorium was packed. With painter Emma Halliday busily capturing the vibrant atmosphere onto fresh canvas there was a true sense of occasion.

Linda Anderson introduced the 15 minute film ‘Proof’. Proof, by Anna Woodford, chronicles how Tara Bergin and Kate Sweeney unearthed the treasures of Bloodaxe Poetry’s archive. Neil Astley’s Bloodaxe Poetry imprint is indisputably a jewel in the North’s literary crown, having released work by poets such as Simon Armitage and Benjamin Zephaniah. The film captured not just the illuminating process of communication between poet and editor, but also the texture of a poetry archive. The film is full of crisp, turned pages. It captures the heaving, physical presence of a rich archive. Sprinkled with insights from poets about what their work means to them, the film also offered a true sense of the landscape that shapes Northern literature- the wild moors and hills. As Val McDermid later commented, these open spaces offer fertile ground for the artistic imagination.

Afterwards Sean O’Brien chaired a wide-reaching discussion along with ‘Wire In The Blood’ writer Val McDermid and Lee Hall of Billy Elliot fame. The topic of Northern sensibility was discussed; how the North has defined itself in contrast to The South, and how Northern writers support one another in the face of adversity. The subject of recent arts cuts was raised, with Hall and McDermid exchanging impassioned views. McDermid raised the point that without libraries, the next generation cannot learn about the world, or even gain access to much needed services. Thereby showing that these issues do not just concern literature, but also the wellbeing of the community.  

But most of all the event was about celebrating the North in literature. This is a subject which- judging from the audiences questions- is keenly felt. It was an event which touched upon many subjects. But the message which remained clear was how literature, in its many forms, is part of a tradition intrinsic to the region.