Russian Poets

Russian Poets
Edited by Peter Washington
Everyman’s Library, May 2009
ISBN: 9781841597805

Close to 180 poems, from just over 30 poets, are to be found in this compact, beautifully designed book.

 Along with the greatest (Pushkin) and the great (for example, Akhmatova and Pasternak and Mayakovsky) there are many poets here who will be unfamiliar to English readers; or at any rate there were quite a few (such as Vyazemsky and Batyushkov and Fet, for three) who were unknown to me.  It will come as no surprise, surely, to learn that favoured themes include love and death and Mother Russia herself.

Only Pushkin would have the nerve and the bottle to write ‘Exegi Monumentum’, a poem at once arrogant (‘And I shall be famed so long as underneath / The moon a single poet remains alive.’), magnificent (as a for instance, when he claims that ‘in centuries to come’ he will be loved ‘For having glorified freedom in my harsh age / And called for mercy towards the fallen.’) and deeply ironic (it is in the last verse that the poet comes clean – kind of – and urges his Muse to ‘not argue with a fool’).  You can tell that Pushkin had a thing for Byron, but this is a poem that echoes  Shakespeare’s fifty-fifth and sixty-fifth sonnets above all, and it serves as a companion piece to both.

The great discovery was Andrei Voznesensky and he happens also to be the sole living poet represented in the volume.  In ‘Dead Still’ two lovers lie close together, their warm contentment ‘like a flame held between hand and hand’; later the poet urges the  souls (sic) of his companion to ‘flutter like the linnet / In the cages of my pores.’  He, Voznesensky that is, fills this poem with a slue of other gorgeous images too.

‘Ballad of the Full Stop’ is a playful poem about the nature of death: ‘Our sentence in nature has no period’, writes Voznesensky.  We are granted no definite guaranteed span, nor any assured neat ending come to that.  There is a vibe akin to A.R. Ammon’s great poem ‘Play’ at work here.

A lovely erotic poem, ‘Her Shoes’, is Voznesensky’s final offering.  And he uses those coveted consumer items, pedestals by another name, that lay like ‘doves perched in the path of a tank’, to celebrate their wearer.  That the poem manages to be both poignant and pervy (e.g. ‘The world is pitch-black, cold and desolate / But they are still warm, right off her feet.’ and that’s not the end of it…) is to Voznesensky’s credit, I feel.

There is an abundance of that much vaunted Russian soul – spiritual and cynical, sometimes both at once; continually celebrating and kvetching about creation – in this fine collection.

And finally, God bless translators!

Life During Wartime by Todd Solondz

Life During Wartime
Directed by Todd Solondz
USA, 2009
Cornerhouse, 25 April 2010

What are men for, and how can they be (good) fathers?

Even while raising questions such as this, Todd Solondz’s film is witty and moving and beautiful to look at.  Somehow, one gets the sense that the film has been composed as a poem, the refrain being a tracking shot of a lake in a park, the scene perhaps of an act of sexual abuse.

We follow Bill (the excellent Ciaran Hinds), a paedophile who has just been released from prison.  He is a kind of Gloria Duplex, a father and a paedophile, a nurturer/enabler and an abuser.  Bill’s visit to his eldest son is one of the strongest scenes in the film; his liaison with Jacqueline (Charlotte Rampling) makes for another couple of outstanding scenes.  And at root the film has an episodic structure, being made up of concentrated, cumulatively significant moments.

Looking more closely, Life During Wartime, for all its wit and humour, is bottom-line downbeat and disconsolate.  By its end, suspicion and distrust have grown, the distance between people has lengthened, their isolation has become starker.  Well, it is one vision of the human condition, and a serious and respectable one.  We are all alone, islands apart from the shore.

Thank God, though, that the power and generosity of Todd Solondz’s art scrambles this message somewhat.  Life During Wartime makes the foolish leap to forgive.  It is a gift.

Dogtooth by Giorgos Lanthimos

Dogtooth
Kynodontas
Directed by Giorgos Lanthimos
Greece, 2009
Cornerhouse, 24 April 2010

It is all very strange and unsettling, this film about an insular Greek family and their routines and celebrations.

Most perceptive viewers are likely to read the relationship between the parents and children as a metaphor for the relationship that holds between the nation-state and its citizens.

Here, the children are kept within the confines of the family home; they play blind man’s buff, stumbling blindfolded and zombie-like into the arms of their waiting mother; later, they are told that a zombie is a small yellow flower, a fact that makes them feel happy and secure.  Misinformation and lies and contrived situations are all part of the mechanism by which the children are controlled and kept in a state of dependence.

But then the stakes are ratcheted up and the giving and receiving of sexual favours, and some rather unpleasant violence, becomes part of the mix too.

Don’t go to see Dogtooth if you are easily shocked or offended or unnerved; the director creates and sustains a genuinely foreboding and ominous atmosphere from the start.  Do go to see the film, though, if you are an admirer of Michael Haneke’s films and/or Ben Marcus’s fiction.  You’ll find in Giorgos Lanthimos (and the writer  Efthymis Filippou) a kindred spirit and intelligence.

As an Orwellian allegory on the political uses of fear (alluding to the war on terror, including even the events at Abu Ghraib), Dogtooth is an impressive work.  Maybe even a masterpiece.

Beautiful House by Cathy Crabb

Beautiful House
By Cathy Crabb
Library Theatre Company, 23 April 2010

Photo by Gerry Murray

A brilliant play set in a tower block in Salford.

We follow a middle-aged couple, Bridgette (Janice Connolly) and Ronnie (John Henshaw), as they settle temporarily into their new home.  Their daughter has a terminal illness and will live in their own house for the time being.  Once ensconced, they make the acquaintance of a young couple, Paula (Sally Carman) and Otis (James Foster), on the floor below them.

It is a very funny play, even though it touches on death and bereavement, social aspiration and life chances, children’s parties and injured teddy bears.  All serious matters, you will surely agree.

There is an unusual emphasis on a father’s love (Ronnie and Otis’s) though the Bronte allusion seems without point (their daughters are called Emily and Charlotte).

The whole cast gave strong performances, with the virtuoso piece being a near-monologue from Paula in the penultimate scene of the first act.  As Paula described the myriad improvements she’d made to her flat, Bridgette could only nod and ‘Oh’ and ‘Ah’; one of those conversations where all the traffic is one way.

Dawn Allsopp’s swivelling set was also damn clever.

A tragedy clothed as a comedy, Beautiful House throbs with a vibrant Salfordian heart.  It stands higher than Briar Hill Court.

 Beautiful House by Cathy Crabb is showing at the Library Theatre in Manchester until 8 May 2010.  Details here.

The Ghost by Roman Polanski

The Ghost
Directed by Roman Polanski
France & Germany & UK, 2010
Cornerhouse, 18 April 2010

If you are looking for a well-crafted contemporary thriller that entertains mightily and doesn’t tax the intelligence too much, The Ghost is exactly what the doctor ordered.

But if you expect your cognitive capabilities to be challenged by cinema – and this is a Polanski film, after all – you are likely to be disappointed by what is on show here.

What we have is an intriguing twin mystery – the death of a ghost writer, the key to what makes a former Prime Minister tick – and compelling storytelling.  Polanski marshals all the resources of film to create an atmosphere of suspense: pursuit and strange events, leads that seem to reveal but turn out to be red herrings.  All the cast – Ewan McGregor, Olivia Williams and Pierce Brosnan especially – deliver too.

But there is a bottom-line absurdity in the revelation that closes the film, and the way in which this fact is revealed – a word game along the lines of acrostics – is just plain silly.  Even Colin Dexter could have done better, and that is saying something.  One doesn’t want to see a detailed examination of the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the USA and Britain in a film, but a little nuance and plausibility would have been welcome.

The Ghost is classy tosh, but that is all.

Music’s Spell by Emily Fragos

Music’s Spell
Poems about Music and Musicians
Edited by Emily Fragos
Everyman’s Library, March 2009
ISBN: 9781841597836

There is a splendid appositeness to this anthology, for poetry has its own music and is often song.

At a rough reckoning, there are just short of two hundred poems here and they have been organised under various headings: ‘Music and Love’, ‘Composers’, ‘Voice’, etc.  In total, we have ten such sections.

They are highly portable, these books – the series title, ‘Pocket Poets’, is a bit of a give away in this regard – and can be read on a bus or a tram, during the interval of a play at a theatre or in a cinema when the advertisements and trailers are screened.  When each poem delivers a hit, a discrete jolt of beauty (as happened invariably with the present volume) the day suddenly seems brighter, the neon more sparkly.

You will find it difficult to decide on favourites herein.  Close to the top must come David Wojahn’s poem about the meeting between Dylan and Woody Guthrie at the Brooklyn State Hospital.  Then there is Tomas Transtromer’s poem about Haydn (‘Allegro’), which is quite sublime.  And Dr. Samuel Johnson’s tribute to his beloved friend, Claudy Philips, whose very title has an unmistakable grandeur: ‘An Epitaph Upon the Celebrated Claudy Philips, Musician, Who Died Very Poor’.  Surely a place must be found too for Hardy’s shudder at the immensity of the universe (‘In a Museum’), whose music will never end.

We must have these four certainly, but there are a hundred or so that are as good, from poets as diverse as Rilke, Walter de la Mare and Frank O’Hara (not O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died’, but we do get another poem about Billie Holiday: Rita Dove’s very fine ’Canary’).  Thank the editor and poet Emily Fragos too for including excerpts from a number of Shakespeare’s plays; ‘poetry’ has been defined broadly enough to make this possible. 

Anyone with a liking for poetry and music will love this book.

Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock

Psycho
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
USA, 1960
Cornerhouse, 18 April 2010

There is always something new to see and/or discover in a Hitchcock film.

Here it was the overriding sense that this was not one film but two, admittedly two that had been adroitly cobbled together.

The first was a tragic tale of a failed escape: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) fleeing Phoenix with 40,000 dollars in her handbag.  Just as she had decided to retrace her steps, turn around and face the music, she met her nemesis: a consummate slice of cinematic art still, the terrifying shower scene.  And the tragedy ended with the camera veering away from Marion’s eyeball, scouring the silent room, and coming finally to rest on the ‘Los Angeles’ of the Los Angeles Tribune.

It is as though Hitchcock were saying: God and his angels are a presence and a witness here too; He sees this atrocity in a run-down motel where a young woman has died alone.

For the remainder of the film, it is Norman Bates’ deranged mind that becomes the focus of our attention.  Very well done and all that; lots of thrills and terrors.  But it cannot really compare to the first part of the film.  That is where the heart beats most intensely.

Psycho is at the Cornerhouse until 22 April.  Details here.

Green & Black’s Creamy Milk

Green & Black’s Creamy Milk
30% Cocoa
100g e

This is the first of a soon to be celebrated series: the Jildy Sauce chocolate reviews.  Green & Black’s Creamy Milk chocolate bar was chosen as the lucky debutante.

Consumption of this really rather fine chocolate bar was carried out during the two performances of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba and the screening of Andrew Lang’s Sons of Cuba.  It will therefore forever be associated in my mind with the land that gave birth to the genius that was Jose Raul Capablanca.

The tag line on the Creamy Milk wrapper reads ‘smooth and creamy, it melts in the mouth effortlessly’ and this is, if anything, an understatement.  I’d use the adverb ‘irresistibly’ – as the molten lava that devoured and buried Pompeii was irresistible, as it cascaded down the mountainside.

Of course, here it was the chocolate that was devoured.  Once solid, it became cream and then dispersed and dissolved.  Pleasantly.  Pleasurably.  With much pleasure.

A full description of Green & Black’s Creamy Milk is here.

Sons of Cuba by Andrew Lang

Sons of Cuba
Directed by Andrew Lang
UK, 2009
Cornerhouse, 18 April 2010

What this documentary does is follow three boys, all in their early teens, and all hoping to box for Cuba in the Olympics one day.

The boys are based at the Havana City Boxing Academy, a specialist boarding school, and we know that the head coach, Yosvani Bonachea, is itching to win the National Championships for his school.  They – Havana City – had finished second the previous year.

We are shown the boys’ home life as well as their life at the school.  It seems that all their parents are divorced, or live apart, and none of the boys – not even Cristian, son of the great boxer Luis Felipe Martínez – come from a well-to-do or privileged background.  At the school, training is hard and discipline is strict, though it is clear that the coach is a caring man.

There is something awful about this world: these are boys who must fight other boys for their place in the sun.  And by fight I mean fight: actually fight, literally fight, i.e. FIGHT.  And they must do this as their parents look on and there can only be one winner.  We see the burden of boys who must be men, when actually they are just boys.

A starkly beautiful yet inescapably brutal film for what it shows and reveals about these boys’ lives.

Ballet Nacional de Cuba

Magia de la Danza & Swan Lake
Ballet Nacional de Cuba
The Lowry, 14 & 16 April 2010

A world-class company blending beauty, prowess and grace.  Somehow, they become one.

 There were two productions on show here.

In Magia de la Danza (The Magic of the Dance) we were treated to a medley from the great European repertoire.  Seven excerpts all told, taken from Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty, Coppelia, Don Quixote and three others.

While the second, Swan Lake, was a sumptuous yet traditional rendering of Tchaikovsky’s great score.  It featured wonderful performances by Javier Torres (as Siegfried) and Anette Delgado (as Odette), and by virtually all of the dancers come to that.  And here there arises a troubling dilemma.

It can be expressed thus: when all of the dancers are so outstanding, how can you single out one or two or three for praise?  (Sadaise Arencibia as the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker being another that comes immediately to mind.)  The task of the reviewer becomes impossible in this case.

Ballet Nacional de Cuba is a company that spoils you with beauty, but pity the next ballet production that will be reviewed.  For if it’s not absolutely perfect, dissatisfaction will ensue…