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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.

Knedliky, muffins and poetry from Manchester to Newcastle

Susan tells me that Rick was preparing a giant Czech dumpling (knedliky) for supper last night. Lucky them! I remember it well: thick, fragrant and delightfully absorbent slices accompanied some of the lovely meat specialties I had on a couple of trips to Prague, and many more were lurking in the kitchens of the Czech and Slovak Club that was so conveniently situated at the end of my street in London.

What is it about soft doughy substances… I’ve had a week of struggles with muffins. Made my third batch today after failures with apple muffins from the Steinbeck House cookbook a week ago (dry and hard), lemon poppyseed muffins from an internet recipe yesterday (flopped hideously over the rims of the muffin cups). This morning we returned to old faithful, blueberry muffins from the good old New Recipes from Moosewood, and – at last – success. Not perfection, but sweet, warm, edible success.

I came across Michael Schmidt’s Stanza lecture yesterday. His Lives of the Poets is not so much littering as landscaping my personal wasteland of unread works: it is one book that you can honestly say, before you’ve even opened it, has real stature. Apparently last year’s Neil Astley lecture was believed to be at least partially directed at Schmidt, the Mexican-born founder and publisher of Manchester-based literary journal PN Review, and of Carcanet, which is certainly a very different press than Newcastle’s Bloodaxe. Two worlds of opinion in two northern cities.

While enjoying both sides of the argument, I do have a lot more Carcanet on my shelves than Bloodaxe, and the reasons include Gillian Clarke, Eavan Boland, Sujata Bhatt, Les Murray and Elizabeth Jennings.

But I also cherish a number of titles from Bloodaxe: Ken Smith’s Wild Root, collections by Carol Rumens, Stephen Knight, Helen Dunmore. Not to forget Peter Sansom’s Writing Poems and Astley’s own Staying Alive.

Toasting poetry

Just sitting around adding a layer of cookbooks to the layer of poetry books on my desk. A gift from the gods — well, from Susan in Calgary really — arrived in my mailbox yesterday: the gastro-biography Toast, by that most laid back of the British celebrity chefs Nigel Slater. Pretentious is certainly not a word you could use about someone who describes his mother’s chronically burnt toast thus:

“It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. People’s failings, even major ones such as when they make you wear short trousers to school, fall into insignificance as your teeth break through the rough, toasted crust and sink into the doughy cushion of white bread underneath. Once the warm, salty butter has hit your tongue, you are smitten.”

Meanwhile I peruse recipes of a non-toasty nature as I have been smitten myself by an insane plan to cater my own book launch. Will I never learn? I think it was finding a caterer who charged $69 for a smoked salmon cheesecake that unhinged me. So I and my crispy assistant Miss Vicky will take care of things.

I’ve picked up another half-read book. This time it’s the always unpredictable and hugely successful anthology Staying Alive, edited by Bloodaxe’s own Neil Astley (check out his controversial lecture, Guile, Bile and Dangerous to Poetry). I was surprised – favourably – to discover Gwendolyn MacEwan among the contributors; and Anne Michaels, P.K. Page, and lots (7 poems!) of Alden Nowlan. One or two of the section introductions are more confusing than the poems — I have long been baffled by Astley’s assertion that Elizabeth Bishop’s Chemin de Fer could “be read as a ‘coded’ account of female masturbation.” Huh?!? Still, the poems themselves are ones to be grateful for and it is a wonderfully broad selection.

Purdy, Pinsent, prosody and apostles

Al Purdy’s very topical just now. Not only is his Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems, 1962-1996 up for Canada Reads , the CBC is airing a documentary about him called “Yours, Al” this coming Thursday, April 13, on CBC Television’s Opening Night. The show stars Gordon Pinsent as Al Purdy and is on at 8 pm local time across Canada.

Meanwhile, I’ve wantonly picked up yet another book to browse. The house is pretty well carpeted with half-read books on prosody and form these days. Annie Finch, in her new collection of essays, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form and the Poetic Self , kicks off and out with a chapter on metric diversity, arguing against the championing of iambic pentameter as the premier English meter. “The use of the single label ‘iambic’ to include lines in other meters, she says, “…may prove to erase what it assumes to include, just as the generic use of the pronoun ‘he’ – said to include females – arguably erases female presence.”

With Easter coming, English cooks are busy making Simnel Cake, pretty much just a fruit cake with marzipan topping, but something virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Apparently its roots lie in another English holiday, Mothering Sunday, which takes place in March. Serving girls were permitted to visit their mothers on this day and the practice was to bring a simnel cake to prove how clever they were (if they made a good one, it would stay moist and tasty till Easter). Its presence at the Easter meal has to do with the 11 marzipan balls that decorate the top, representing all the Apostles except Judas. Perhaps with the new evidence that surfaced last week we can bring the numbers back to an even 12…

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a… book!

Well, I have it in my hands, Cartography, this product of a 13 year gestation. Delighted I am, but U.A. Fanthorpe captures that sense of our poems never quite living up to the perfection we’d aspired to (which is why we keep trying?!): “As usual, when they’re together, and bound, I feel ashamed of them. Individually, they had a right to exist. But when they gape out at me, cheek by jowl, I feel like a mother with a whole clutch of unsatisfactory children.”

Anyway, it is here, and it is particularly lovely thanks to a cover image by the quite extraordinary Calgary artist Colleen Philippi, whose art has blessed the cover of three of my books now. The launch will be lovely too, and I hope anyone in the area will come and celebrate with me on May 3.

Supper tonight will be arroz con pollo which I haven’t had for a very long time, and which I saw described as the Cuban cousin of paella. I can’t help but admire a meat dish that incorporates both starch and vegetable, yet doesn’t come across as a casserole. Or maybe I’m just falling for an exotic sounding name for good ol’ chicken and rice.

88 years later

Today would have been my mother’s 88th birthday.

In her honour, I made a batch of her oatmeal squares, which I rediscovered in England under the name of flapjacks. These ones are not as sticky as flapjacks, which use golden (or corn) syrup as a bonding agent instead of a glue of brown sugar and butter. Rather they are, at their best, crispy with a slightly raised border and a subtle chew in the middle. And they are wheat and dairy free. Melt half a cup of butter or margarine; add three-quarters of a cup of dark brown sugar and then two cups of quick oats and half a teaspoon baking soda. Press lightly into a square (8×8) cake pan and bake 10-20 minutes at 350f. Cut while warm and remove to a plate or baking rack.

I have been reading a bit of Heather McHugh, who read in Vancouver last year. A poet of terrifying intellect, she is a very funny reader – I think I was responding to some essence of irony that we must surely attribute to her Canadian parentage. It is comforting to know she is just across the water in Seattle.