Poetry Notebook, 4/4/26

New reviews; poetry and place; early modern "sharp simplicity"

If I stick my head out of the upstairs window and look north, I can make out the little huddle of skyscrapers that makes up the City of London. We live on the north slope of a hill south of the river. Technically, it is part of Norwood Ridge, once the site of a forest called the Great North Wood (north because it is north of Croydon). The wood is long gone, cleared first by the city’s appetite for firewood and then by those identikit Victorian terraces which John Ruskin hated and which now feel aspirational to most people. Little pockets of green remain and so do their names: West Norwood, Gipsy Hill. I love the slate roofs, the terracotta finials, the moments when the sunlight astonishes the brickwork.

When I first moved to London — which for me means this part of South London — I wrote about the place all the time. But life moves on and recently I've felt like I’ve been taking the place for granted. More recently still, I've been returning to the subject obsessively — in this review of Tobias Hill’s Collected Poems and then in this (hugely enjoyable) conversation with Jo Bratten. Many thanks to Jo for humouring me and my bugbears, and to Niall Campbell at Poetry London for the initial invitation.

Pissarro, Upper Norwood (Crystal Palace), 1870—things have changed

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A connection with a place is a kind of tradition. For the writer or poet, it provides a vocabulary, a history, a set of shared references to return to. It is not hard to see why such a connection— like a religious background — might be an advantage to a modern poet. There are other advantages too: I am sure I am not the only writer who feels a pressure, real or imagined, to be ‘from’ somewhere (anywhere but London, in fact). Yet so many of us — I want to say most of us — have spent our lives moving around. An old flatmate of mine once told me he had moved once a year for ten years. That experience is hardly unique to millenials or Londoners. Movement is the modern condition and much of it takes place in desperate circumstances. But we are surely the generation that can’t avoid writing about it. What would a poetry of ‘ordinary’ dislocation look like?

In one of my old notebooks, I’ve stuck in a short poem by Luke Allan called ‘Storage King’ (that title is important), cut out from an issue of The Poetry Review. Allan is also typographer, and the editor of Oxford Poetry, which is always beautifully produced. I don’t have the issue itself, which must be a few years old by now. The poem opens with a recognisable experience:

We pack our house into boxes
and carry it out of the house.

They pack up the jewellery first, and end by carrying a mattress ‘like a pane / of glass down the moonlit road.’ Everything feels fragile. But it’s the last lines that I kept the poem for, and they land as a slightly melancholy, charming shrug:

In the end, I guess, you can
call yourself the king of
whatever your heart pleases.

That final word comes as a surprise each time I read it. The reader, surely, expects a different one. But ‘pleases’ is perfect, because it points in two directions. The literal meaning of the line must be whatever your heart desires but the ear can’t help but hear whatever is pleased by your heart — as if the heart itself were trying to make a good impression. It only underlines the sense of transience.

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Two excellent recent mentions for Poems Beautiful & Useful, for which I am grateful. Here is Mathew Lyons in The Broken Compass:

Headless Poet is the new poetry imprint launched by Jeremy Wikeley, and Victoria Moul’s Poems Beautiful & Useful is its first title. Many of you will doubtless be aware of the quality of Moul’s scholarship through her Substack Horace & Friends. She has made a judicious selection here of brief, more-or-less sententious (in its non-pejorative sense) English poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are twenty poems, and the book’s own brevity is part of its strength: these are poems that both embolden and give pause for thought, primarily drawing on a scriptural store of ideas and imagery which few of us now have at our fingertips. Don’t mistake brevity for lack of breadth: this is an exceptionally capacious volume for its size. [Read on]

And here is Henry Oliver in The Common Reader:

The poems I did not know at all have been the least affecting, but also the ones I have spent most time with. I shall be going back to them. And it keeps getting me to open Fowler, visit Poetry Foundation, and so on. Above all, it reinforces the fact that this was a great, great period of English poetry. There is so much good writing, so much that can sustain many many readings. It is not just learned, crafted writing, but full of strong feeling, honed to a fine and sharp simplicity. [Read on]¹

Both are rich reflections on the period and its poetry, and I'm so pleased to see both the pamphlet and the format being well received. From a (micro)publisher’s perspective, recommendations like this are invaluable. Needless to say, Headless Poet does not have a publicity department! But I’m delighted to say there will be an interview with Victoria Moul going out on this newsletter next week.

In the meantime, Poems Beautiful & Useful is available from the Headless Poet website (next post goes out on a Tuesday) and the London Review Bookshop, which took five copies and promptly sold out. Perhaps your local bookshop would like a few?

1. Henry also wrote a generous response to my mixed feelings about ‘The Trees’, which you can read here. I’m still thinking about it.