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Bluer than this
Bluer than this
| Reviews | Buy Bluer than
This
Ghosts of a chance
Ghosts of a chance
| Reading with the band
Poets I go back to...
Poets I go back to...
Smith/Doorstop Books
ISBN 1 869961 87 0 64pp Paperback £5.95/$13.95
"Harvey is a fine poet. What is perhaps most
striking in Bluer Than This
is Harvey's extraordinary empathy.
His insights into the minds and hearts of others — there is a tenderness
here that many British poets do not risk."
JOHN BURNSIDE
"An excellent collection of poems strongly
influenced by contemporary jazz and painting ·
poetry that is neither wistful nor sentimental, rather tender and epiphanic
·
a uniquely readable poet of great integrity."
ANDY
BROWN
"From the heart, now, as well as the hip."
SIMON ARMITAGE
top
Bluer Than This,
my most recent poetry collection was published by Smith Doorstop
in September 1998. It includes a number of jazz-influenced poems, amongst
a wide range of material, some of which takes its inspiration from art
and photography (everything from Vuillard to Robert Frank), from places
as diverse as Downeast Maine and London; some of which deals with personal
issues such as family and lovers, lost and found.
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What would you say of a man who can play
three instruments at once - saxophone,
manzello and stritch - but who can neither
tie his shoelace nor button his fly?
Who stumbles through basements,
fumbles open lacquered boxes, a child's set of drawers,
strews their contents across bare boards -
seeds, vestments, rabbit paws?
Whose favourite words are - vertiginous,
gourd, dilate? Whose fantasy is snow?
Who can trace in the dirt the articular process
of the spine, the pulmonary action of the heart?
Would you say he was blind?
Would you say he was missing you?
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"Many English writers try hard
to create a genuinely transatlantic feel to their work.
John Harvey is one of the very few who succeed, and the results are
marvellous"
Ian McMillan
"Coolness and smoothness have
always been the twin trademarks of John Harvey's
poetry, but I detect in these poems atenderness and warmth that
make the writing
even more worthwhile. From the heart, now, as well as the hip"
Simon Armitage
POETRY LONDON
Born Storytellers & Sensuous Language
Jane
Holland
John Harvey, in his latest collection, Bluer
Than This, (also) relies on narrative for many of his poems,
but stylistically he is on another planet. The tone is sensuous and
assured, but somehow always vulnerable, jerking you back from the
story to the person behind it, in a way that ultimately reminds you
of a world outside the poem without robbing the poem of its integrity:
'His shirt so white that to turn and look / at it would be to be blinded
by the moon' ('Couples'). I have an on-going line-break argument with
Harvey—here, I would have preferred 'at it' on the previous line—but
again, this is a question of risk-taking and how bold choices force
an examination of language and its patterns onto the reader, which
can only be good. It's not simply about variety for its own sake.
It's about finding the right 'sound' for the poem, rather than being
fatally pedestrian and so failing to see how a poem can take off if
given enough space to do so. Harvey is unafraid of making radically
different choices from line to line:
Though dead,
my father is still dying,
oh, slowly, sure and slow as the long fall of rain
('Apples')
Harvey plays with form in a delightful way,
never satisfied with the way he's successfully 'made' a poem before,
but always looking for new ways of 'making' them. I'm using the word
'make' deliberately, of course. Too much emphasis is currently put
on the poet as 'writer' rather than 'maker'. Harvey takes his work
more seriously and does not simply let the words flow in the name
of inspiration. The result is a collection which positively drips
with unexpected shapes; the shape a poem makes on the page forming
part of the whole experience of reading it. Harvey moves quite comfortably
from prose poetry to free verse to the suggestion of a subtle rhyme
scheme without once appearing to strain after form. A mildly laconic
American influence suits Harvey perfectly. There are none of the wild
gestures of youth in a line like this from 'Blue
Settee', with its leanings towards the
metaphysical: 'This kiss starts high at the nape of the neck / and
makes a new map of the world'. With Bluer
Than This, John Harvey has contributed
something admirable, and soothingly readable, to the chaotic and ever-shifting
map of the poetry world.
from A NOTE ON SMALL PRESS BOOKS
by JOHN
BURNSIDE
Agenda, Autumn 1998
The editor at Slow Dancer is John Harvey,
who is himself a fine poet. His second collection, Bluer
Than This, (Smith/Doorstep Books), contains
pieces about jazz, (Chet Baker, Lester Young), painting (Edward Hopper,
Howard Hodgkin), and love; there is a tenderness here that many British
poets do not risk, a keen eye for the details of family life, for
the signs and gestures we live by, and for the moments of insight
and realisation we keep to ourselves:
and when your eyes widen and, uncertain
whether or not to kiss me,
you hold out, instead, your hand,
I will slip into it those remedies I have long carried:
the knowledge that, nurtured, passion flowers
in the darkest place
('The U.S. Botanical Gardens, Washington D.C.')
What is perhaps most striking in Bluer
Than This is Harvey's extraordinary
empathy. His insights into the minds and hearts of others, whether
they be family and friends, or figures from the world of painting
or music, are consistently sharp and clear, yet this poet is always
aware of the limits, and the possible limits, of our knowledge: as
much as he wants to understand and penetrate the mystery of the other,
he never forgets that it is this very mystery that makes all communication
miraculous. Bluer Than This is published by Smith/Doorstop Books.
ANDY BROWN
reviews
Orbis, Winter 1998
In an excellent collection of poems strongly influenced
by contemporary jazz and painting, John Harvey presents his tenderly understated
poems exploring intimate and family relationships. The jazz is covered
by poems on Thelonious Monk— ending with the poignant "C
minor, F 7th, B flat / nothing can be bluer than this."— Charlie
Parker and others, with a short poem about Chet Baker who "...knows
this is one of those / rare days when he can truly fly." The painting
poems deal with Bonnard, Vuillard, Edward Hopper, Corot and Howard Hodgkin.
In an astute comment lan McMillan has noted that Harvey's work has a 'genuinely
transatlantic feel.' McMillan is right: the jazz, the art, the thrilling
conversational tenderness of poems like "Seven Year Ache" on
Frank O'Hara:
...O'Hara at fifty,
knocked over by an errant jeep on the beach; his mother
frail from hospital and drying out,
tumbling yellow roses into his grave. Such waste!
Each day that's lived is lived in hope and in regret.
We die each day and not from love but lack of it...
Such great moments resurface throughout this
book and its stories of love known and love lost build up to make this
a deeply moving collection. Whether Harvey gets us there in a poem about
young Americans wrecked on drink, then dead in a car wreck; or "the
duality of grief and joy, relief / and guilt ·" of the couples
in the poems about Hopper paintings, Harvey does it inimitably. As he notes
in "North Coast": "What is never shared, cannot be lost."
The fact that Harvey seems to have shared so much in his life and poems
only intensifies the impact of the losses. That he achieves this in a poetry
that is neither wistful nor sentimental, rather tender and epiphanic, singles
him out as a uniquely readable poet of great integrity.
JIM BURNS
reviews
Ambit No 156, Spring 1999
There's an engaging rolling feeling to the best
of John Harvey's poems, as if each one had started with an idea,
memory, or observation, and then gathered momentum and expanded as it moved
down the page:
Now the rain is falling
and the petals that have already fallen
pink and white, float up around us as we walk,
your smile suggesting how close you are to forgetting
the lover who so recently left you,
and so we continue, ducking into a corner pub
and there, facing you, I catch myself drawn to you
and I can tell we are both wondering
about this dwindling distance between us,
how perilously a kiss would close that space.
The autobiographical content is typical, as is the
directness, and the everyday language. The poems sound like someone talking,
which is to their credit, and the voice that comes through is consistent.
A somewhat melancholy tone is often apparent as relationships come to an
end, the poet looks back on lost loves, and sadness nudges at the narrative.
Harvey's interest in jazz reflects this tendency, with poems about
musicians like Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Chet Baker, who all declined
as the years passed and died in sad circumstances. In one poem, "Blue
Monk", he neatly blends a jazz performance with memories of an old
flame in a way that highlights the last line — "nothing can
be bluer than this".
Harvey does write about other things besides jazz and
love affairs, and there are good reflections on childhood, family life,
visits to America, and art. Corot, Edward Hopper, Vuillard, and Howard
Hodgkin, all get a look in. And what comes through at all times is the
sheer readability of the poems. I freely admit to sharing Harvey's
liking for jazz, films, and American poetry, but it isn't just this
that makes me admire his work. The poems just pull you in and carry you
along with their relaxed but effective approach. They are like good stories:
Once, we stayed here, out of season,
arcades and the Magpie Café closed,
clouds massed like bulkheads in the northern sky
and around the municipal bandstand
only the melismatic cry of gulls.
Close by our feet, winter lay coiled like rope.
At night hope hung across the water like a child.
What is never shared cannot be lost.
It's like the opening of a good film and
it makes me want to know what comes next.
Paul Donnelly
reviews
Tears in The Fence, Summer 1999
Intimacy is one word I often associate with the poetry
of John Harvey. The reader is invited to witness love with its attendant
failures and successes, family and friends, both dead and living and the
commonplace details that make a life. I'm not sure where fact and fiction
blur at times. I'm not sure it matters either.
Look at 'Slow' with its twin dedication to
Lee Harwood and Paul Evans.The poem gently connects the strands of their
lives with Harvey's and the presence of another, unnamed, character,
a lost lover maybe.These meetings and memories, reconstructions of the
past, merge with a present and compare scales of loss. Small, intimate
glimpses that also show life continuing, as it must.
This is also evident in 'By The Numbers,' a kind
of diary of a day's events with digressions and remembrances:
Art Pepper's keening saxophone —
Leicester it was I saw him,
eighty one or two...
He brings together music, food, writers he loves, family
and friends:
How many friends
are living, how many have died.
Ray Carver rubs shoulders with Jimmy Stewart and the
'girls I was in love with'. It's a poem which celebrates in the face of
mortality and vows to keep going because there are things to do. It isn't
just the past and present that matters but tomorrow and
all the days that come after —
infinite and
uncountable.
I like the way the poem discloses a life and
its links with so many others, the details that mesh so seamlessly and
the openness — a word often used about Lee Harwood — that
pulls you in.
Of course, you can't read John Harvey without coming
across some of his preoccupations with music and painting. He celebrates
Roland Kirk, Chet Baker and Charlie Parker, not for the first time. These,
or versions of the poems, have featured in previous collections and on
the cassette with jazz quartet Second Nature, Ghosts Of A Chance. Here
he is also revisiting Lester Young in 'Sometimes I'm Happy,' a sort of
synopsis of parts of his life and death. It doesn't matter if you don't
know Young. It's a sometimes tender and Iyrical portrait shot through with
the harshness of his life. The presentation of his brilliant, flawed character
is moving and honest.
Paintings are present in the shape of Edward Hopper
and Howard Hodgkin, both very different artists. Harvey makes use of the
suggestive narrative possibilities of Hopper and responds to the light
and intense colour of Hodgkin's 'After Corot.' Both offer different aspects
of the poet's style and are equally compelling.
I started off with intimacy as a keyword in Harvey's
work and I'd suggest that you read 'Safeway,' a poem that could make shopping
worth it.
In case you haven't guessed I like this collection.
There is more to it than I've mentioned. See for yourself.
is
available in bookshops in both the UK and US.
It is distributed in the UK by Signature Book
Representation Ltd, (2 Little Peter St, Knott Mill, Manchester, tel 0161
834 8767/fax 0161 834 8656) and in the USA by Du Four Editions (PO Box
7, Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, 19425 - 0007, tel (00 1) 610 458 5005,
fax (001) 610 458 7103).
Please support your local bookstore wherever
possible, but if you have trouble finding Bluer Than This go
to the For Sale page.
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Selected poems taken from my various pamphlets,
was published by Smith/Doorstop (Huddersfield, England) in 1992 and
is now, unfortunately, out of print. Just to confuse matters, an audio
cassette of the same title, which features me reading my poems with
jazz backing from the excellent Second Nature quartet is still available;
this concentrates on those poems about the lives and music of such musicians
as Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk, Lester Young and Charlie Parker.
JOHN
HARVEY& SECOND NATURE
I first met up with Second Nature when we were filming Rough
Treatment,
the second of the Resnick crime novels, for television. There was a
scene
in which Tom Wilkinson, as Resnick, met his date in a wine bar where
a
jazz group was playing. We used Jallans as the location and —
wanting to
use a local band — hired Second Nature to do their stuff on camera.
It was
somewhere around then that Mel Thorpe, sax player with the group, asked
if I’d be interested in reading with them, a jazz and poetry sort
of thing.
Maybe he’d been listening to Jack Kerouac with Al Cohn & Zoot
Sims.
Anyway, I jumped at the chance. Many moons ago, before and after college,
I played drums. There was a band who couldn’t make up their mind
if they
wanted to sound like Alex Welsh or Acker Bilk and a trio led by a pianist
who
thought he was Oscar Peterson’s younger brother. As long as we
stayed in
4/4, I was just about all right — anything trickier and I was
flailing in the dark.
The bossa nova finished my percussive career.
But reading with a good band is as close as I’ll ever get to performing;
as
close as I’ll get to singing, since the fact that I’m just
about tone deaf
doesn’t seem to matter. And the fact I can still count the bars
— in 4/4 — helps.
With Second Nature I read a few bits and pieces from the Resnick books
—
there’s a section about Milt Jackson that seems to work well —
but mainly I
concentrate on the poems I’ve written about jazz musicians whose
playing I
love — Monk, Parker, Chet Baker, Roland Kirk, Lester Young. I’m
always
threatening to write something about Art Pepper and maybe one day I
will.
Most nights — when I remember to relax enough to listen to what
the others
are doing — it seems to work pretty well. The musicians and I
certainly have
a good time and usually audiences do too. There’s not a lot more
you can ask.
There’s a photograph somewhere,
taken on my first ever trip to America - early eighties it would be,
quite late on considering the extent to which the States had claimed
such a large part of my consciousness since the late fifties: Howling
Wolf, Elvis Presley, Earl Bostic, Frank Sinatra, William Faulkner, Raymond
Chandler, Charlie Parker, e e cummings, Jack Kerouac. But there it is,
and there I was, three nights in a small hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and ranged along the dressing table, propped against the obligatory
bottle of Jack Daniels, are the books travelling with me. And, sure
enough, amongst the guide books and the paperback copies of the early
Robert B. Parker Boston-based PI novels, are two volumes of poetry:
Lee Harwood’s The White
Room and The
Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara.
Though there are moments now when re-reading, say, Lavinia Greenlaw’s
eerily luminous Night Photograph,
Richard Hugo’s western laments in The
Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, or the
brilliant mediations of Robert Hass’ Praise
and
Human Wishes is what I have to do, it
is still Harwood and O’Hara that I come back to and read for pleasure,
for instruction, for example - for a lesson in the possibilities.
There used to be an arts-biased bookshop in a narrow street just south
of the Trent in Nottingham, the street you walked down to get to the
box office and buy your tickets for the team with Hennessey and Ian
Storey-Moore. Long gone, I think it now sells model railway engines
or Forest Room,
one of so many books beautifully published by Fulcrum. It’s written
on the fly leaf: Nottingham 27.8.75.
What attracted me about Harwood’s writing, then and now, was the
openness of it, the way, often literally with gaps between the words,
the lines, it seemed to invite the reader into narratives he or she
would have to flesh out for themselves. The way his diction found a
voice that was poetry and yet not poetry, a somehow heightened, sometimes
fractured version of normal speech that was, finally, anything but that.
And the way, too, in which it straddled so effortlessly the vast ocean
between Britain and America; conjured up with such apparent simplicity
a world that reverberated on and on.
(“How I Love You … “)
There are poems in this volume that still seem to me to be amongst the
finest I have ever read - Landscape
With 3 People, When
The Geography Was Fixed. I cannot read
or hear or say inside my head the opening lines of As
Your Eyes Are Blue…
without being moved in that self-same
way.Frank O’Hara’s poetry is different:
brittle, often egotistical, a poetry that defiantly, albeit half-jokingly
places the poet himself stage centre and waits for the applause. So
far the opposite of Lee Harwood in this. The cover of my Vintage edition
bears a collage by Larry Rivers, featuring a nude study of O’Hara,
hands raised above his head, his penis semi-erect. Here was a man who
had a prick and was neither afraid to show it nor use it.
It’s easy to see why so many of these poems instantly appealed
to me: they are poems of the city, not just any city, New York City;
poems about sidewalks and cafés and jazz singers, movie stars
and abstract expressionist art. One man’s life in the city: as
O’Hara himself said of them, some of them, first I do this and
then I do that. It’s a diary of an exotic and privileged, artistic
urban life.
I find some of the long, semi-surrealist outpourings boring and not
a little pointless now; I think I always did. But the way he can sometimes
take the smallest moment and render it significant is wonderful to me;
as is the brilliant flair for working so close to the rhythms of ordinary
speech and making them - like Harwood, yet utterly unlike Harwood -
positively sing. And he’s funny, funny in a way that Lee is not.
The more I learn about the cultural life of New York in the fifties
and sixties, the cross-fertilisations between poetry and music, poetry
and art, the more I read O’Hara as a key to, a commentary on those
people and those times. Yet there are marvellous poems that retain their
beauty and their individual strength beyond that, poems like The
Day Lady Died or Why
I Am Not a Painter, which can still make
you gasp at their combination of craft and emotion.
You can’t ask, it seems to me, for any more than that; nor can
you set yourself, as a writer, a would-be poet, any higher ambition.
JOHN HARVEY
20 October, 1997
crossing the frozen river (Paladin,
1988) has an excellent seclection of Lee
Harwood’s poetry. Now out of print, it isn’t too difficult
to track down. Slow Dancer published a 72pp collection, Morning Light,
in April, 1998.
The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara
Edited by Donald Allen (Vintage, 1974) is,
I think, still available.
Praise & Human Wishes by
Robert Hass (Ecco Press, 1979 & 1989) are
only available from the US.
Lavinia Greenlaw’s Night
Photograph was published by Faber
in 1993 and Richard
Hugo’s The Lady in Kicking
Horse Reservoir by Norton
in 1973.
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