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Well fed in Primrose Hill

Spent another glorious sunny day in London. EVERYone was in Soho Square today (check back for photos one day next week to see what I mean by that) when I walked through. I had lunch with lovely Laurie (anyone need a crack information services consultant in London, let her know) – a sarnie in Soho – followed by a silky caffe latte at the incomparable Bar Italia on Frith Street (check it out at 3 or 4am when some club or other has closed and you want a je ne sais quoi before heading home on the night bus.. and it is an experience beyond words) with a custard tart that looked a great deal better than it tasted after a morning in the display case.

After which I wandered to Foyles, whose bags modestly proclaim it to be The World’s Best Bookstore, and bought a couple of books of poetry (Alison Brackenbury‘s After Beethoven and Lavinia Greenlaw‘s Minsk). Didn’t find what I went in there for, which was an excellent volume called The Ghost Twin by Anne-Marie Fyfe, which Leah had a copy of and which I’ve been reading with much admiration.

Then on to my third spiritual home of the day – Pamela Stevens Swiss Cottage, where Nicci – another of their seemingly endless stream of superb South African trained beauty therapists – gave me my annual facial to die for. Having sprinted around Waitrose for an hour or so collecting various exotic items – mackerel in brine, Hula Hoops, Spanish olives stuffed with anchovies – I walked back from Chalk Farm , stopping for a drop of cider at the Queen, and admiring the picnickers and sun worshippers dotted on the grass of Primrose Hill. I’m now extremely well fed, after Leah’s sublime dinner of pork steaks with mushroom gravy, mashed parsnips, asparagus with red pepper and basil, and melon with blueberries.

London in the sun

I’ve been checking London’s pulse and it’s still bashing away long into the night, particularly hot steamy nights as we had last weekend. That got the sirens going late into early. The plane trees are in full leaf, the sidewalk cafes are heaving and the natives are unveiling the precise pearly shade of the Anglo Saxon post-winter skin, at least the Anglo Saxon natives are. And it’s football madness of course, as the World Cup draws alarmingly near.

But down in the cellars of the Troubadour on alternate Mondays, all is reassuringly still poetry (not to mention accordion music by mega award winning poet C.L. Dalat). This week’s ensemble was Sans Frontieres I, “celebrating the breadth of contemporary European poetry”. First up was Valeria Melchioretto, born in German-speaking Switzerland to Italian-speaking mother and writing compelling poetry in English. Nisia Studzinska was also very fluent, not surprising with her UEA MFA out of the way. Polish born Maria Jastrzebska was raised in Britain and read from her third poetry collection, Syrena, and some new poems as well. Practically a British literary landmark herself, Lotte Kramer has just published her tenth collection, Black Over Red, with Rockingham Press and read us the title poem (about Mark Rothko’s paintings) as well as some of her signature pieces drawing on her German heritage and dramatic pre-war move to London in 1939.

Andras Gerevich was quite a showstopper. Hungarian, he’s lived in five countries and though fluent in English, writes still in Hungarian. He had interesting things to say about translation. He likened it to a favourite recipe (my ears perked right up) which in the hands of a dear friend may produce a similar dish to the one you love, but it will taste different. Likewise he says, although he’s blessed with excellent translators (including no less than George Szirtes) he doesn’t recognise the translations as his own words, so much: the meaning may be right but the prosody is off, for example, and there’s nothing you can do. Start changing the words, he says, and you violate copyright. He remarked as well that because Hungarian is a genderless language, his love poems in his native tongue were androgynous, which had always grieved his gay friends, and he was bemused to discover his poetry had been outed by the English translations, where “he” vs “she” had to be specified.

On Sunday I visited another of my many spiritual homes here, the London Review of Books Bookshop, near the British Museum, where Marilyn Hacker was speaking about form in American poetry. The talk attracted a hearteningly full room despite the £9 ticket price and the perfection of the weather. Hosted by Fiona Sampson, Hacker was flanked and cheered by a good audience of local formalists which included George Szirtes, Mimi Khalvati, and Ruth Fainlight. To me, her most interesting comment was that she preferred form because she never knew where the poem would take her within its constraints: “the collaboration of form and language will take me somewhere freer than free verse, where the conscious mind has to tell you something.” She also observed that “rhyme is fun, but meter is the skeleton” and concluded the afternoon with a short reading from Squares and Courtyards ( a couple of complicated 15 line sonnet-like paragraphs whose form was invented by and results dedicated to Haydn Carruth) and Desesperanto (“Talking to Apollinaire”) .

Afterwards I joined Meli and friends for supper at The Duke, a gastro-pub in Clerkenwell. Meli’s pea pancakes were quite amazing – literally green peas within a pancake, topped with haloumi cheese and sweet roasted tomatoes, garnished with shallot marmelade.

Yorkshire been and gone

Photos will follow; can’t seem to post them today. I’m working on a laptop equipped with Office 2003 which for me lacks the most important and useful freebie from the Office portfolio: PhotoEd, which was removed by the software nazis after Office XP, sad be the day. It was replaced by the less than wonderful Picture Manager which is a pain in the jpeg. Here endeth the rant.

Spent last week at Lumb Bank, a baker’s dozen of us on a NAWE writers retreat. A good mix of prose and poetry writers from all over Britain, plus one Canadian, wrote feverishly in a scant week of freedom – for most – from the stopper of teaching duties and family responsibilities. The poets took matters into our own hands and five of us sat round the big library table and constructively admired one another’s work for a couple of hours. There was a kick-off workshop by Paul Magrs the first day, which I sadly missed due to an overwhelming need to nap after the previous day’s long journey to get here. Magrs’ name is known to me because of the Creative Writing Coursebook which he edited with Julia Bell, so I was sorry to miss his workshop. He stayed on for consultations and to give us an entertaining reading in the evening.

We were accompanied in our musings by the cat Ted Hughes who has taken over her namesake’s former home and cosies up to all who dwell here, sadly for the departed dormouse who had an ill fated encounter with her one afternoon and had to be dealt with by two of the writers.

We, as is the custom at Arvon courses, took turns in teams with the cooking, and it has to be said we ate well. Wednesday night’s meal, lovingly prepared by the ro-ro-rho team of Rosie, Rosemary and Rhona, was a Jamie Oliver special, chicken with sweet tomatoes and chillies, and a smoked tofu/falafel variation for the half of us who were vegetarian; tender new potatoes, and carrots and broccoli. Dessert was a heavenly fruit (apple, strawberry, blackcurrent) crumble served with cream, yogurt or ice cream. The night before was a West Country Casserole, which delectably perched grilled sausages on a mixture of onion and apple, accompanied by mashed potatoes. Cheat’s Dessert was a surprising and successful pairing of sliced oranges with crushed gingernut biscuits, smoothed out by ice cream. Vegetarian lasagne was followed by Raspberry Crowdie – raspberries crowded into a bowl of thick yellow cream and sprinkled with oats and cinnamon. We had some spectacular slabs of salmon with perfectly cooked asparagus to end our stay, with a health giving fruit salad to finish.

What there wasn’t was interruption by phone or email: a request to keep phones switched off and the total lack of internet took care of these. Although I had hoped to slink into town to visit the internet café in Hebden Bridge I was thwarted when I learned it had been closed down, and the public library was reportedly out of commission due to renovation work.

Unfortunate. It’s not just the email I wanted to have available, but the resources I’ve become accustomed to using even for poetry – rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia and quotation resources as well as instant research – I need them all. The centre director – who has to balance the needs of a few grown-up writers on retreat as well as school groups and workshop attendees – insists his policy holds firm because he wants to make Lumb Bank an island of undisturbed tranquility amidst the crashing and intrusive waves of today’s technological sea. All very well till you have that one thing you need to deal with from afar…

Vancouver reading

Well Wednesday’s been and gone and so has the Vancouver reading. The Peter Kaye Room was a nice space to read, in a really stunning building (Battlestar Galactica set?? who knew?)… although the partition-weight walls mean you’d better hope you don’t have anything too entertaining going on nearby. Unfortunately for my poetry chickens, the woman who was holding forth on her backpacking trip to a large and grateful audience next door launched into her best jokes just as my reading reached its emotional apex. (I guess on the scale of distraction this is still preferable to the drunks and lunatics who occasionally press body parts to the glass or wander mid-stanza into Mocambo readings.) And when my foot got stuck to the electrical tape holding down the microphone cable, that got audience members wondering what kind of personal dance steps I was perfecting behind the podium.

But other than that I was pleased with the evening. Friendly responsive audience and a satisfactory huddle round the book table, heroically managed by my cousin Deb. Many family members there, and my family of friends (and thanks, Tom, for photo-documenting the event). Celebrity visitors included writers Leona Gom and Heidi Greco and Brian Andre and Allan Brown.

I noticed Bob Dylan features set lists from his concerts on his website so I thought why don’t poets? And here’s mine in case you want to sing along:

(from Old Habits/Crosswords)
Boston School of Cooking Cookbook
(from Cartography)
Craft
Anniversary
Making Sense
Tales
Journeys
Vegetables
At It Again
Suitcase
YEG to YVR
After the Fall
Leaf Cutter Bees
My Kitchen
(from new ms.)
Ache and Pain
London Plane
Hard Cold Realty
(from Creating the Country/Crosswords)
Another Life to Live at the Edge of the Young and Restless Days of Our Lives

On the food side of things, Ana took me round some excellent foodie places in Park Royal, including Whole Foods, a terrifyingly large and pricy American natural/organic foods supermarket chain (with branches in the UK and of course Canada). Although dazed by the lighting and swooning from all the beautiful displays, we were able to wrestle a gorgeous chunk of aged gouda into the shopping basket before we fled into the rain. Heaven on earth.

She’s lent me a promising book – Italian Food Artisans: Traditions and Recipes – which helped ease the trauma of missing the ferry back to Vancouver Island by a niggling 8 cars, followed by a tedious two hour wait for the next sailing. The joys of living on an island.

Now I’m packing my bags for a trip to Lumb Bank, followed by London – where I’ll hear Marilyn Hacker speak and attend a Troubadour reading – before swinging by the League of Poets meeting in darkest Ottawa. Expect intermittent but internationally flavoured posts for the next couple of weeks.

Bananarama

Here’s a swift, simple dessert I found in a wonderful little book, A Sussex Cook’s Calendar, that my dad picked up when we all stayed in a darling thatched cottage with a cat-slide roof in the village of Steyning. I have modified the recipe ever so slightly and converted it to North American measurements. I’ve seen similar recipes where you pan fry the bananas in the butter and rather than baking, then de-glaze the pan with remaining ingredients.

If you’re putting them over the ice cream, and you don’t like the long droopy look of banana slices, you could halve or chunk the slices, then garnish with a sprinkling of dark or demerara sugar.

Baked Bananas (for 4)
4 firm bananas
Juice of 1 lemon
Juice of 1 orange
1/4 c brown sugar or maple syrup
1/4 c butter
2 tbsp Cointreau or Grand Marnier
Cut bananas in half lengthwise; place cut side down in a buttered baking dish. Mix fruit juices and sugar/syrup and pour over bananas. Dot with butter. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes until just browning. Serve warm over or under ice cream.

Reindeer and rainy day ribs

This morning while dog and I waited for the rain to lift, one of those rambling chains of thought and random googling led me to the website of Cyphers, a long-running literary journal edited by a group of Irish notables who have attracted the likes of Eamon Grennan (one of my poetry heroes). My search had begun with the name Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, one of the editors, whose 2001 collectionThe Girl Who Married the Reindeer, published by the excellent Gallery Books (they publish Grennan as well) I happened upon in our very own Munro’s Books. It’s a wistful book, speaks well of loss and transition, and paints a good picture:

In Her Other Ireland

It’s a small town. The wind blows past
The dunes, and sands the wide street.
The flagstones are wet, in places thick with glass,
Long claws of scattering light.
The names are lonely, the shutters blank —
No one’s around when the wind blows…

This is the time of year when I start eyeing the barbecue and readying myself for an annual cook-out. I don’t do much barbecuing, because (or consequently?) I have a smallish charcoal bbq which is a lot of bother. So I found some nice looking ribs and that got me to thinking about Texas bbq, and I found a helpful site that suggests you can parboil them in seasoned water for a speedier finish. It had started raining anyway, so I tried it: parboiled the ribs for about half an hour in water flavoured with onion, garlic, cloves and bay leaves; assembled a sauce with tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, green pepper, garlic, cloves, bay leaves, fig balsamic, chipotle chiles,brown sugar, soya sauce, Worcestershire and some home made plum chutney; cooked the ribs for about 1.5 hours in a 325 oven, and they were falling apart in loads of lovely spice. Not Texas bbq of course, but good ribs.

Perhaps I’ll have to have some authentic Arkansas barbecue when I’m in London, at Bubba’s, in Spitalfields Market, if I can pass up the awesome lamb burgers they serve there. The choice has been made for me in the past, as they only buy small quantities of Welsh lamb for the burgers, and they tend to run out when the market is busy. Which seems to be all the time.