{"id":3603,"date":"2015-10-29T15:55:05","date_gmt":"2015-10-29T15:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=3603"},"modified":"2024-03-05T23:18:54","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T23:18:54","slug":"the-rialto-at-aldeburgh-november-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2015\/10\/29\/the-rialto-at-aldeburgh-november-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rialto at Aldeburgh \u2013 November 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

***STOP PRESS*** 3 November.\u00a0 Helen Macdonald is now taking part in the Rialto-sponsored discussion ‘Language & Nature’ on Friday evening.\u00a0 A chance to remember that she’s not only the award-winning author of H is for Hawk<\/em> but also a powerful and original poet – her collection is Shaler’s Fish <\/em>(Etruscan Press, out of print).\u00a0 There are some poems of hers online here<\/a>; see also the review I wrote of Shaler’s Fish<\/em> a while ago on Displacement<\/a>.\u00a0 She and John Burnside will be in conversation.\u00a0 Unfortunately Richard Mabey has had to pull out (doctor’s orders). *** \u00a0 ***<\/p>\n

When I open my bedroom curtain to a wall of yellow I know it\u2019s time for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.<\/a> The leaves are on sycamores rooted part way down a steep embankment, so I get the full canopy at eye level. This year one big tree has gone brilliant yellow, gold in the early sun, but the other is still green.<\/p>\n

The Rialto will be at Aldeburgh. We\u2019re supporting an event and launching a full collection, and there will be a Rialto stall in the Festival Lounge. I think that amounts to Having a Presence.<\/p>\n

The event is a conversation, \u2018Language & Nature\u2019<\/a>, between naturalist and nature \"ash<\/a>writer Richard Mabey and poet and novelist John Burnside (7pm at Snape, Friday 6 November). We chose to support this because it fits with the Rialto\u2019s connection with nature poetry\u2026 and\/or eco-poetry \u2013 a language question already. The programme says: \u201cThey will address the need to reconsider the countryside, avoid idealising it and respond to today\u2019s environmental emergencies\u201d.<\/p>\n

How will they do all that in one talk? Richard Mabey is a writer who makes interesting connections, so could take us anywhere. The thing I last read by him was in the Guardian a week or two ago: \u2018How plants think\u2019<\/a>. It\u2019s not particularly long but contains cycads, Oliver Sachs and \u2018plant neurobiology\u2019, plants (not) as furniture, \u2018cerebrocentrism\u2019, branching patterns in cave paintings, negative capability, echolocation, plant \/ insect relations and a personal experiment with some fly orchid flowers.\"black<\/a><\/p>\n

Andrew Motion has described Mabey\u2019s prose as \u201cexceptionally watchful\u201d. This could apply to John Burnside\u2019s poetry which reflects metaphysical and ecological concerns. Burnside himself talks about the practice of poetry as \u201can ecological discipline of the richest and subtlest kind\u201d. Here is an extract from \u2018The Last Man to Speak Ubykh\u2019, who<\/p>\n

.. whispered the name of a bird
\nin his mother tongue,<\/p>\n

while memories of snow and market days,
\nhis father\u2019s hands, the smell of tamarind
\nreceded in the names no longer used:
\nthe blue of childhood folded like a sheet<\/p>\n

and tucked away.<\/p>\n

The launch is for Dean Parkin\u2019s first collection The Swan Machine<\/em><\/a>. It\u2019s the festival\u2019s first event<\/a> (4.15 on the Friday afternoon, in Aldeburgh, Peter Pears Gallery). Such pride of place is Dean\u2019s due as the Poetry Trust\u2019s longstanding Creative Director. If you\u2019re a regular festival goer you\u2019ll recognise his countenance, spectacles and stripy scarf in the mugshot on the sensational swan-filled cover, designed by Annabel Dover <\/a>and our own Nick Stone<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dean has gathered poems slowly, over 20 years, a\"swan<\/a> good sign. The title poem is the first in the book. I\u2019m not going to quote from it because that might spoil what for me was enjoyable: starting to read without preconceptions. Except that the poem would contain a swan machine; a what\u2026?<\/p>\n

I like the particularity of these poems. They contain a jumble from past and present of everyday happenings, people and things. A common factor is Suffolk where Dean was born and bred, and lives now; the growing-up poems have an edgeland feel. Coal bunkers, dogs, bikes, mothers, fields, girls, male hairstyles, teenage angst, adult relationships, a creepy bus shelter at night. There\u2019s a stillness lurking among all this (the trailer full of pumpkins in \u2018Quiet Road Home\u2019, a favourite). And there\u2019s weirdness among the ordinary: this from \u2018The Waiting Room\u2019 made me think of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat \u2013<\/p>\n

The story of the father and two sons in search of the cat \u2013
\neach brought back a different one \u2013 and the story
\nof the real cat, which came back while they were out looking.<\/p>\n

And the connection spread to the rest of the poem which is a list of stories, or non-stories.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The story of the warts, of the place
\non your finger where you can still feel you had them.<\/p>\n

A sort of Schr\u00f6dinger effect occurs in \u2018Late for my Own Funeral\u2019 too: the speaker is stuck in traffic, \u201cunable even to text \/ Please start without me.\u201d Humour is always around (as with Dean in real life), poignant in \u2018Sweet Offer\u2019 which hinges on a mishearing of the question \u201cDo you want a murray mint?\u201d (read the poem here<\/a>), louder in \u2018Jimmie Sulphur in the Starlight\u2019, a story of teenage boys:<\/p>\n

.. another Saturday night ending on the sea wall.
\nWe\u2019ll get piles sitting here, I said. Piles of what? he said.
\nWe\u2019re cold, Pod said, our goosebumps have goosebumps.<\/p>\n

So they went to Paradise Kebabs where the eponymous Jimmie<\/p>\n

got a squeezy bottle of mayonnaise squirted down his neck,
\nhis glasses sent flying. Ending up on the floor, he looked
\nsomehow less complicated.<\/p>\n

The poems are controlled but feel relaxed into their free verse forms. They have echoes of Michael Laskey\u2019s style and the Americans whom Dean has programmed at Aldeburgh. One of the perks of the job is a cool American blurb\u2026 from Thomas Lux: \u201cpoems of a generous and garrulous heart\u201d.<\/p>\n

As for the Rialto stall, it will be (with others) in what\u2019s known as the Festival Lounge, the space to the left when you walk into the caf\u00e9 building, outside the Recital Room. Michael Mackmin will be there, and around and about at the festival. I\u2019ll be mostly around and about but also there. Michael tells me that there was a Rialto stall at the very first festival over a quarter of a century ago. Do drop by and say hello to us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I open my bedroom curtain to a wall of yellow I know it\u2019s time for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. The leaves are on sycamores rooted part way down a steep embankment, so I get the full canopy at eye level. This year one big tree has gone brilliant yellow, gold in the early sun, but the other is still green.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":3956,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11542,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603\/revisions\/11542"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}