One in four people in the UK suffer seriously from depression at some point in their lives. I had a serious bout when I was twenty, suicide note written, sufficient sleeping pills blagged off a friend. Never thought of going to a doctor, couldn’t really talk about it to friends, factors which were, of course, symptoms of the problem. But I kept putting it off, f0r fear of the effect it would have on my family and whoever found me. Then I went home from uni for Christmas and started to feel a bit more positive. Two weeks after I came back I met someone and fell in love. Nothing anywhere near as bad since. Lucky boy. Not many of my closest friends have, to…
Rumer has an amazingly pure voice which doesn’t just channel Karen Carpenter but seemingly reincarnates her. Debut album Seasons Of My Soul went straight into the top 3 last week, thanks partly to the support of Smooth FM (hosting tonight’s competition winners show), Radio 2 and hip music journals like Uncut. Her classy TV performance of Leon Russell’s ‘Masquerade’ at Elton John’s Electric Proms brought her to an even wider audience. I suspect the album’s Bacharachesque ballads will stay in the top ten for some time. Tonight, the question is whether she can sing as well live as she does on record. She does, in spades, with a relaxed stage manner and a crack band. Rumer’s more soulful than The Carpenters ever were, occasionally nearer…
Sue and I helped John Lucas (pictured above) to organise the first Beeston International Poetry Festival, which finished last night with a terrific, packed reading by Matthew Welton and Roy Fisher. John also runs Shoestring Press and the Flying Goose Poetry Reading series. I’ve set up a public ( you don’t have to join facebook) facebook group, which currently has 92 members and features photos and single poem videos from most of the readings (two from Roy!), forming a permanent archive. There are currently 18 videos on there, each taken with a hand held Flip video camera. Many thanks to all of the poets who performed and everybody who came. I’m sure you’ll agree that it was a very enjoyable, unique series of readings. I…
In the first of today’s two National Poetry Day posts I want to tell you about a new poetry prize, announced today. It’s for a first collection, in memory of my friend, the fine Irish poet Michael Murphy. If you’d like to read one of Michael’s poems, there’s one in the post that I wrote shortly after his death. Below is the press release about the prize, which has been set up by friends of Michael and is being run by the English Association. The Michael Murphy Memorial Prize To celebrate National Poetry Day, the English Association announces the inauguration of a new biennial prize of £500 for a distinctive first volume of poetry in English published in Britain or Ireland, in the first instance…
Summer’s in retreat but I still managed to spend most of my last Nottingham Sunday afternoon in the allotment, reading Stanley Middleton’s final novel A Cautious Approach. Meticulously edited by Philip Davis, it brings to an end the 45 novel career of my old friend. Odd, for the first time, not to be able to discuss it with him afterwards. But odder still that, for 13 years, I was able to talk about novels with a writer 40 years my senior, one who I read with huge admiration before I’d begun to seriously write myself. The new novel is beautifully written and, as so often with Stanley’s novels, contains unexpected scenes that shift your perceptions of the characters. Like nearly all of his novels, it’s…