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Poetry, please, especially if it's from the Pennines
Ian McMillan BOOKS often thud through my letterbox. Sometimes they crash through my letterbox. Sometimes they avalanche through my letterbox. Sometimes they're too big to get through my letterbox at all and the postman has to knock on the door and I have to take the books inside to add to the pile that's growing daily.
So many books, so little time. I'm sure I've written before in this column about the scary statistic that says if I read about two books a week, that's around 100 books a year. I'm 50 so, with a bit of luck, I'll live to be 80. So that means I'll read 3,000 books before my final chapter is written and my own volume is closed. Three thousand? I got that many through the letterbox this morning.
Sometimes, though, a book thuds into view that makes my heart glow and my soul cheer and such a book arrived this week: Spirit and Emotion, Forty Years of Pennine Poets, written by Mabel Ferrett and edited by Pauline Kirk.
As soon as I picked up the book, I was rushed back to a time in the early 1970s when I was a young lad starting to make my way in the uncertain and slippery world of poetry.
The Pennine Poets were a rock of consistency and high standards in a whirlwind age of little literary magazines that opened for one issue and then closed, and poetry readings in rooms above pubs, and poetry workshops in adult-education rooms with caretakers outside rattling keys as the discussion of sonnets got more and more heated inside.
Mabel Ferrett, 80-years-old and a cornerstone of West Yorkshire poetry for decades, has written a fascinating account of a world that's hidden from the usual literary scene that gets reported on in the posh papers and on the radio and the television.
There are no Booker Prizes here and no BBC4 profiles; instead, we get the story of a group of people who write and read and publish poetry because they love it, and that has to be a good thing.
And (I'm not sure Mabel would be keen on me putting an And at the start of a sentence, but I'm being poetic, not grammatical) what we also get in the book is a list of fantastic human beings. Some people would call them characters, that reductive and patronising word; some would call them eccentrics, which is even worse. I prefer to call them people. Poetry people.
There's the late Cal Clothier, a fine poet and novelist who seemed destined for great things (BBC4 profiles, perhaps) but who sadly died, too young, in 1992.
There's Brian Merrikin Hill, a man who lived for poetry and who thought that poetry was the most sacred of all the arts, and who wrote the most exquisite poems that seemed to glow in the dark, they were so powerful.
There's Ian Emberson, a fine poet and illustrator, possessor of one of the finest beards in West Yorkshire, who booked me for a reading in Huddersfield library right at the start of my career and gave me lots of encouragement and one of the biggest plates of lunch I've ever had at a caf in Huddersfield after the gig. Good job he didn't give it me before.
There's Gerald England, an indefatigable champion of poetry, who edited magazines back in the days when I first started sending out poems and who is still editing and writing, encouraging and workshopping, still doing his bit for poetry, still on the council of the Yorkshire Dialect Society – even though he lives over the hill.
And there's Mabel Ferrett herself, poet, organiser, local historian, critic and journalist, pouring her spirit into the book so that it fizzes and crackles like bonfire night in Heckmondwike.
Of course, some people might say that you could write a book about any group of people with a hobby, and to a certain extent that's true. I bet there are societies of budgie-breeders or milk-bottle collectors or nude flamenco dancers out there who have similar tales to tell.
Actually, I'd like to read the nude flamenco one. Thud it through my letterbox sometime.
Because I work with words, though, I feel there's something special about the Pennine Poets. Literary fashions come and go, rolling in and out like the tide, but groups like the Pennine Poets will carry on championing the idea of well-made verse in whatever style. And I hope they'll carry on for many years to come.
If you're at all interested in poetry, have a look at this book. If you're not at all interested in poetry, have a look anyway because it's a tale of human endeavour, and we all like human endeavour, don't we?
Poetry and nude flamenco especially.
Spirit and Emotion is published by Fighting Cocks press at 12.50. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232. Postage and packing costs 1.95. Order online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk
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Friday 25 May 2012
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