Issue 16

Issue 16, March 2011

www.dur.ac.uk/grove

ENGLISH WRITING • EVENTS COVERAGE TWILIGHT SPECIAL • SCANDINAVIAN AND GERMANIC POETRY TRANSLATIONS

XVI

THE TEAM’S PAGE Issue 16 of The Grove is upon us, and it’s definitely the issue you’ve all been waiting for, perhaps based solely on the fact we have a Twilight Centrefold special...This penultimate issue of the academic year presents its usual array of creative fare: the English Writing editors have chosen poetry and prose extracts drawing on the influence of other academic fields, which is bound to increase our computer scientist fan base. We also have an excellent range of student writing with many new contributors, and, as usual, we are always scouting for new writers, so please feel free to send in your work to: grove@dur.ac.uk!

As previously mentioned, Centrefold boasts a spread of Twilight insight: The Grove is officially the first publication to offer a comprehensive intellectual assessment of the phenomenon, and, as such, has achieved groundbreaking status within cultural circles of the university. Queer theory, sex, we’ve got all the bases covered, so keep on reading to discover more...In the Events section we have some hot-off-the-press reviews of some of the Durham Drama Festival performances, as well as an interview with the writer and broadcaster, Nigel Forde. On top of this, the Translations section focuses on Scandinavian and Germanic poetry, also offering the original texts for those who can speak the native languages.

We are also still looking for editorial members for the team for next year: working with The Grove is a fantastic way to gain some insight into the world of editing, publishing and all-exciting deadlines. If you’re interested in shadowing the next issue and being on the exec., then please email grove@dur.ac.uk. There are many different roles available, so please state which area you’d be interested in.

Enjoy!

-The Grove Team

THE GROVE IS FUNDED BY

2

CONTENTS ENGLISH WRITING

CENTREFOLD

“Numbers” by Mary Cornish “Antidoes to Fear of Death”

by Rebecca Elson “Geology” by Bob King “The Quantity Theory of Insanity”

by Will Self “Times Like These” by Gillian Clake “Apples” by Grace Schulman “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert M. Pirsig “Beautiful Losers” by Leonard Cohen

“More Vampires!”

by Thom Addinall-Biddulph “The appeal of Twilight to teenge girls” by Noémie Duneton “Twilight and Dystopia” by Ruth Darca “Meyer’s Skill” by Emily Sommerville “Homophobia in Twilight?”

by Oliver Warren

page 4 5 6 6 8 8 9 10

25 26 26 27

EVENTS

12

“The Law of Diminishing Departures”

by Nigel Forde “Nigel Forde Interview”

by Rebecca Sheppard “Suicide Letter Love Note Review”

by Rebecca Sheppard “Swan Ache Review” by Alex Mason “Sixty Years After” by Derek Walcott

STUDENT WRITING “September 5th; Eulogy” by Ralf Webb “Emily’s Room” by Joanna Smith “Autumn soirée” by Matthew Griffiths “Search Results” by Avishek Parui “Store of ‘love’’” by Joanna Smith “Untitled” by Sophie Hicks “Searching” by Jan Vincent Felix “Untitled” by Michele Saintamour “Cemetery Confinement”

by Gareth Carter “Monday Morning” by Lydia Knoop “Demeanor” by Joseph Cronin “Tomorrow will be different”

by Anonymous “Who Walk By” by Ralf Webb

24

13 13 14 15 16 17 17 18 19 20

28 28 30 32 33

TRANSLATIONS “Morning” by Karin Boye “Motion” by Karin Boye “Stars” by Edith Södergran “Pan” by Knut Hamson” “Death fugue” by Paul Celan “For those I love, I want a name”

by Neeltje Maria Min “Remembering Maaie A” by Bertolt Breche “Pure” by Sofi Oksanen

21 21 22 22

38 38 39

EVENTS LISTINGS

41

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

42

THE GROVE TEAM ARE Editor-in-Chief: Emily Chester; Deputy Editor: Lyndsey Fineran; Acting Editor: Alex Mason; Deputy Acting Editors: Ettie Holland, Sasha Magill; Section Editors: John Clegg, Rebecca Sheppard, Kate Hutchings, Alexis Grigorieff, Lyndsey Fineran Sub-Editors: Ella Colquhoun-Cole, Will Hanson, Astha Sharma-Pokharel, LeeMey Goh, Louis CampbellStievenard, Emma Charles, Jamie Baxter, Laura Mosley Sponsorship Officer: Tom Trennery Development Officer: Maxime Dargaud-Fons

3

34 35 36 36 36

ENGLISH WRITING As a tribute to all those Grove readers who don’t study English, in this issue your English Section has decided to dip its toes into other disciplines! We’ve scouted about for poems and prose that touch on a variety of other academic areas to give you a taste of how writers have been inspired by, for example, physics, geology, psychology, and music. Perhaps there’s more common ground between our different university subjects than we initially think!

MARY CORNISH

Numbers I like the generosity of numbers.

The way, for example, they are willing to count anything or anyone: two pickles, one door to the room, eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition— add two cups of milk and stir— the sense of plenty: six plums on the ground, three more falling from the tree.

And multiplication’s school of fish times fish, whose silver bodies breed beneath the shadow of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss, just addition somewhere else: five sparrows take away two, the two in someone else’s garden now.

There’s an amplitude to long division, as it opens Chinese take-out box by paper box, inside every folded cookie a new fortune.

4

ENGLISH WRITING

And I never fail to be surprised by the gift of an odd remainder, footloose at the end: forty-seven divided by eleven equals four, with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mother’s call, two Italians off to the sea, one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.

REBECCA ELSON

Antidotes to Fear of Death Sometimes as an antidote To fear of death, I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back, I suck them from the quenching dark Til they are all, all inside me, Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself Into a universe still young, Still warm as blood: No outer space, just space, The light of all the not yet stars Drifting like a bright mist, And all of us, and everything Already there But unconstrained by form.

And sometimes it’s enough To lie down here on earth Beside our long ancestral bones: To walk across the cobble fields Of our discarded skulls, Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis, 5

Mary Cornish

Rebecca Elson

ENGLISH WRITING

Thinking: whatever left these husks Flew off on bright wings.

BOB KING

Geology I know the origin of rocks, settling out of water, hatching crystals from fire, put under pressure in various designs I gathered pretty, picnic after picnic.

And I know about love, a little, igneous lust, the slow affections of the sedimentary, the pressure on earth out of sight to rise up into material, something solid you can hold, a whole mountain, for example, or a loose collection of pebbles you forgot you were keeping.

WILL SELF

Excerpt from The Quantity Theory of Insanity Denver, Colorado A depressing day here at the special interdisciplinary conference. I suppose that as the author of the theory that has generated so much academic activity I should feel a certain proprietorial glee at the sight of hundreds of psychologists, sociologists, social scientists and other less mainstream academics running hither and thither, talking, disputing, gesturing, debating and conferring. Instead I feel only depressed and alienated from the great industry of thought I myself have engineered. And added to that I think the low quality of the celluloid they’ve used for the name badges betrays the fact that the department simply hasn’t allocated a big enough budget.

I spent the morning in the main auditorium of the university giving my address to the assembled conferees. Dagglebert, against my expressed wishes, had put together some kind of video display or slide show to accompany my introductory lecture, 6

ENGLISH WRITING

Will Self

‘Some Aspects of the Quantity Theory of Insanity’. Sadly, even though Dagglebert has irrepressible faith in visual aids, he has absolutely no spatial awareness whatsoever. I kept looking up and realising that flow charts were running over my face, and at one stage I looked down to discover that my stomach was neatly encompassed by a Venn diagram section tagged ‘Manic Depressives in Coventry 1977-79’.

Despite these and other drawbacks, it went well. Several hundred hirsute men and woman sat on the edge of their seats for a full three hours while I went over the principal aspects of the theory. If the truth be told I could have gargled and they would have been just as attentive. I’ve now reached that rarefied position in academia where I have the cachet of a lecturing Miles Davis. I could have allowed Dagglebert to project slides for three hours and then sauntered on for five minutes of disjointed and facile muttering - and still I would have been vigorously applauded.

As it was I declined to cash in on the credulousness of my audience. For once I would attempt the truth. I would take a serious stab at stopping the feverish growth of an industry I myself was responsible for helping to create. I would demystify the Quantity Theory myth, and in the process take a few clay idols down with me.

Accordingly, I dealt with the subject personally as well as historically. As with all great theories I felt that it was especially important for an academic audience to understand the personal dimension, the essential humanity of the origin of such an idea. But it didn’t work. Once one has a certain kind of academic status, any statement that you make, if it is couched in the language of your discipline, no matter how critical, how searching, is seen only as an embellishment, another layer of crystalline accretion to the stalactite. To break it off at the root, one’s language would have to be brutal, uncompromising, emotional, non-technical.

So I began by telling them of the grey cold afternoon in suburban Birmingham, when, labouring to complete the index to an American college press’s edition of my doctoral thesis, ‘Some Social Aspects of Academic Grant Application in 1970s Britain’, I was visited in one pure thought bite with the constituents of the theory as we know it today.

At least that would be one way of looking at the experience. Seen from another angle the Quantity Theory was merely the logical conclusion of years of frustrated thinking, the butter that eventually formed after the long rhythm of churning. I have often had occasion to observe - and indeed Stacking has recently and belatedly stated the observation as a tentative syndrome which he expresses (Á → Å). Where Å = a subsequent state of affairs - that events are reconstructed more than they are ever constructed.

7

Gillian Clarke

ENGLISH WRITING

GILLIAN CLARKE

Times Like These Too heavy-hearted to go walking in beech-woods. At night the children’s sleep is racked by dreams. They wake crying of war.

Pushing a pram in 1961, I remember how love weighed, anger shored against helplessness, how we wrote letters to the papers, raged at Strontium 90, the bitter rain that stained our mother-milk.

Yet my daughter’s beautiful, and my daughter’s daughter, even then printed in the womb of the waking embryo, now resolves into her elements.

Shadow on shining, here she comes dancing through the bright window of ultra-sound, fiercer than death and kicking to be born.

In times like these we should praise trees and babies, and take the children walking in beech-woods.

GRACE SCHULMAN

Apples Rain hazes a street cart’s green umbrella but not its apples, heaped in paper cartons, dry under cling film. The apple man, who shirrs his mouth as though eating tart fruit, exhibits four like racehorses at auction: Blacktwig, Holland, Crimson King, Salome.

I tried one and its cold grain jolted memory: a hill where meager apples fell so bruised that locals wondered why we scooped them up, my friend and I, in matching navy blazers.

One bite and I heard her laughter toll, free as school’s out, her face flushed in late sun.

8

ENGLISH WRITING

Grace Schulman

I asked the apple merchant for another, jaunty as Cezanne’s still-life reds and yellows, having more life than stillness, telling us, uncut, unpeeled, they are not for the feast but for themselves, and building strength to fly at any moment, leap from a skewed bowl, whirl in the air, and roll off a tilted table.

Fruit-stand vendor, master of Northern Spies, let a loose apple teach me how to spin at random, burn in light and rave in shadows.

Bring me a Winesap like the one Eve tasted, savored and shared, and asked for more.

No fool, she knew that beauty strikes just once, hard, never in comfort. For that bitter fruit, tasting of earth and song, I’d risk exile.

The air is bland here. I would forfeit mist for hail, put on a robe of dandelions, and run out, broken, to weep and curse — for joy.

KATE CHOPIN

Excerpt from The Awakening “Ask Mrs. Pontellier what she would like to hear me play,” she requested of Robert.

She sat perfectly still before the piano, not touching the keys, while Robert carried her message to Edna at the window. A general air of surprise and genuine satisfaction fell upon every one as they saw the pianist enter. There was a settling down, and a prevailing air of expectancy everywhere. Edna was a trifle embarrassed at being thus signaled out for the imperious little woman’s favor. She would not dare to choose, and begged that Mademoiselle Reisz would please herself in her selections.

Edna was what she herself called very fond of music. Musical strains, well rendered, had a way of evoking pictures in her mind. She sometimes liked to sit in the room of mornings when Madame Ratignolle played or practised. One piece which that lady played Edna had entitled “Solitude.” It was a short, plaintive, minor 9

Kate Chopin

ENGLISH WRITING

strain. The name of the piece was something else, but she called it “Solitude.” When she heard it there came before her imagination the figure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked. His attitude was one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its flight away from him.

Another piece called to her mind a dainty young woman clad in an Empire gown, taking mincing dancing steps as she came down a long avenue between tall hedges.

Again, another reminded her of children at play, and still another of nothing on earth but a demure lady stroking a cat.

The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier’s spinal column. It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth.

She waited for the material pictures which she thought would gather and blaze before her imagination. She waited in vain. She saw no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair. But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her.

Mademoiselle had finished. She arose, and bowing her stiff, lofty bow, she went away, stopping for neither, thanks nor applause. As she passed along the gallery she patted Edna upon the shoulder.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG

Excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I should talk now about Phaedrus’ knife. It’ll help understand some of the things we talked about. The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us-these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road-aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think.

From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that 10

ENGLISH WRITING

Robert M. Pirsig

handful of sand the world.

Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.

The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way, and we can form the same sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles-grades of opacity in different piles-and so on, and on, and on. You’d think the process of subdivision and classification would come to an end somewhere, but it doesn’t. It just goes on and on.

Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.

What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. That is what Phaedrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.

To understand what he was trying to do it’s necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all. To reject that part of the Buddha that attends to the analysis of motorcycles in to miss the Buddha entirely.

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask that question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. About the Buddha that exists independently of any analytic though much has been said-some would say too much, and would question any attempt to add to it. But about the Buddha that exists within analytic thought, and gives that analytic thought its direction, virtually nothing has been said, and it seems no harm and maybe some positive good to add to our historical heritage with some talk in this area of discourse.

11

Robert M. Pirsig

ENGLISH WRITING

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain’s experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts-something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it’s important also to see what’s created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.

LEONARD COHEN

Excerpt from Beautiful Losers Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are you (1656-1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River? Can I love you in my own way? I am an old scholar, better-looking now that when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face. I’ve come after you Catherine Tekakwitha. I want to know what goes on under that rosy blanket. Do I have any right? I fell in love with a religious picture of you. You were standing among birch trees, my favorite trees. God knows how far up your moccasins were laced. There was a river behind you, no doubt the Mohawk River. Two birds in the left foreground would be delighted if you tickled their white throats or even if you used them as an example of something or other in a parable. Do I have any right to come after you with my dusty mind full of the junk of maybe five thousand books? I hardly even get out of the country very often. Could you teach me about leaves? Do you know anything about narcotic mushrooms? Lady Marilyn just died a few years ago. May I say that some old scholar four hundred years from now, maybe of my own blood, will come after her in the way I come after you? But right now you must know more about heaven. Does it look like one of those little plastic altars that glow in the dark?

I swear I won’t mind if it does. Are the stars tiny, after all? Can an old scholar find love at last and stop having to pull himself off every night so he can get to sleep? I don’t even hate books any more. I’ve forgotten most of what I read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world. My friend F. used to say in his hoppedup fashion: We’ve got to learn to stop bravely at the surface. We’ve got to learn to love appearances. F. died in a padded cell, his brain rotted from too much dirty sex.

His face turned black, this I saw with my own eyes, and they say there wasn’t much left of his prick. A nurse told me it looked like the inside of a worm. Salut F., old and loud friend! I wonder if your memory will persist. And you, Catherine Tekakwitha, if you must know, I am so human as to suffer from constipation, the rewards of a sedentary life. Is it any wonder I have sent my heart out into the birch trees? Is it any wonder that an old scholar who never made much money wants to climb into your Technicolor postcard?

12

STUDENT WRITING It’s getting close to the end of another Durham term and as the deadlines begin to bite keep calm and enjoy a moment with the latest poetic offerings from our wonderful student writers.

It was lovely to see some new contributors to this issue so whether you’re a Grove old-hat or just getting to know who we are, keep sending us your scribbles! We love reading your work (and it’s equally good procrastination from work for us too - win-win really...)

- Enjoy the rest of term.

RALF WEBB

September 5th; Eulogy What comes quietly to September’s hilt?

A white bound bible in the parson’s drawer led hoping for the rain to end A procession of sunflowers lay crossed on fake mahogany and wilting, fresh pressed shirts exhume perspiration.

It is the early morning visitation of a buzzard perched on the garden fence It is the gesture of moon-washed flesh lighting a fleet of candles that flood thru a valley.

It is the face of a child peering out the kitchen window, waiting.

JOANNA SMITH

Emily’s Room Now these walls of crimson cream, Are tinted by the sun’s stain, And sterile windows, with opal seams, Are sprinkled by the rain.

Within these four small walls, Childish laughter: caught, contained, No one here to grace the floor: The dresses gone, the joy detained.

13

Joanna Smith

STUDENT WRITING

Dashed across summer-strewn grass, Golden slantings in her wake, To think: for just a moment, That she was playing here yesterday.

MATTHEW GRIFFITHS

Autumn soirée Though it is now that she makes her excuses you’ve noticed how tired the sun seemed to be all evening, and with a gleam in his eye like the Pole Star, your host brings her coat.

The air sighs as he ushers her out.

Autumn smiles. It crackles across his tanned features and the ladies of Indian summer are charmed, lingering with you in spite of intentions to head back to basement apartments and eke out the winter on chocolate and sleep.

While they remain, the air tingles with laughter, there’s a sense as you huddle yourselves in the kitchen that you’re somehow as young as you were.

Then the rosé is over, Autumn opens the red.

The girls start to lower their lids.

It is with the cigars that the mood gets reflective, rococo and slow as the mouthful of smoke that your host breathes into a dead glass.

One weatherveined hand on its rim, one its stalk, he tells you he’ll show you a trick.

He holds the bowl of it up to the window, lets the glass gather the heavy-eyed homes, the lamp-posts like candles, the dark shapes that line streets, the tree silhouettes of the parks.

His smoke whispers to each blade of grass.

Tips of leaves redden, flush all over then faint, the flowers grow weak 14

STUDENT WRITING at the knees. Autumn turns, the light catching his coat as it wanes and seeming three colours at once.

The guests shiver. Autumn’s fingers give up their cigar mist. Soon he will show you the door. You will leave stubbed-out stumps of the trees as you go, an aroma of ash that will settle as snow.

AVISHEK PARUI

Search Results When I Google-d you last night a site in the seventh page had somebody who looked like me leaning on a leaner you in a cheap jacket with the greasy glasses that you hated to take off even when we kissed as the curtains fell after Inspector Calls under the tapering ceilings cornerstage and the hands down the hall clapped on...

The watch you wore in the website pic was the one I bought you from the down town shop that sold soft toys and junk jewels and posters of Jesus and Cobain that we glued together along your wet walls whose patchy heads saw us practise parts between the flickers that flew through the slits of blinds that never fully fell till you went off for the flashes from the high windows that saw my shadows slant along a stage where the actors changed...

15

Matthew Griffiths

Avishek Parui

STUDENT WRITING

And the dark sedans took you away from the smell of the cigarettes we rolled together to the velvety floors that hear goldfishes sigh inside rounded glass and the thick folds of printed words that saw you morph to signs by the fire...

I managed to spot though your now-pinned-up face has begun to show the pain I feared you’d never know through the trails of jet-smoke that snaked between me and your fame...

As I stared out through the thinning night it smelt of all that we could have grown if the sedans and the summons hadn’t come to take you away from our cigarette-rolls and the glances we stole on stage through the eyes that never knew when we did not act...

JOANNA SMITH

Store of ‘love’ Two chambers, just so perfectly proportioned, One in public view, patterned on my sleeve, The other, a private place, where I leave My darker cares and life’s cruel distortions.

Together, in harmony, beat, the two, The door left ajar, blowing in the wind, So you can take a look, and dare to glimpse, My humble sins, of which there are a few?

Yes, I admit, to that sudden sharp closing Of the door. Now only whispers seep through 16

STUDENT WRITING Of un-pursued love, of fine unsaid things, Of beautiful names, which I keep from you, And that other room. Because in truth, there is enough Space, for all, in my bounteous store of love.

SOPHIE HICKS

Untitled Let us dive into a pool of delight, Spread our arms and pretend They are wings, To soar above the arches of our lives And glimpse into the deepest crevasses of our souls.

Those winding wombs of secrets silenced By the mind’s cumbersome brain.

The shackles which fold and crease The imagination, So that the far away lands, Whose skies are green and whose seas are gold Cease to exist.

Let us stare into those secrets and Unlock the heart of their wonders.

For all wonders, even the darkest And most shadowed of their kind, Are things we should know JAN VINCENT FELIX

Searching Each day we have cast our nets to the fates, set our minds at the milling stone of storms and struck out for the promise of fish, the magnetic allure of pearls.

Searching, always; but the nets are returned empty for too long now, and the winds are dying.

17

Joanna Smith

Jan Vincent Felix

STUDENT WRITING

Failing So forget the sea, with its foghorns and inexactitudes roll away the pervasive smog and let the sky be our table that we might dine upon mountains!

– ‘your heart will betray you in the end’ calls the albatross, but it is drunk on its own freedom and knows nothing of time.

MICHELE SAINTAMOUR

Untitled I am ablaze with noiseless fire, White hot heat and burning bone.

The earth sleeps, a silent empire, Scared stars hide behind the velvet night.

I squeezed the blood-red sun in my hand, And watched its life drip down my arm.

I drowned the moon in the slumbering ocean, Her last gasps silent silvery ripples.

And I strangled the stars one by one.

Now I grope in the dark for the broken sun, For the bloated moon, its livid death-glow.

Holes in the sky where I cut the stars out.

Poor stars, your corpses now grotesque puppets, Eternally dancing in the midnight tide.

The ocean wakes up to this mocking dirge, She drowns in her own tears And slowly engulfs the earth.

But I am still ablaze 18

STUDENT WRITING

Michele Saintamour

GARETH CARTER

Cemetery Confinement Terraced graves, installed, row upon row, Mourning offers, detached memorium to stone and wood, where better seeds could grow.

What shame it is to deny them.

In older times we were not shy, To commend the flesh out of the chasm, But now we say, “our souls deny” such pleasure, in measure, to Her bosom.

And so these gravediggers extend their toil, To hold within the lively soil, The victims of a perfect plague, Natures cradle, now Human grave.

LYDIA KNOOP

Monday Morning It’s a Monday when we disappear, that nameless no-man’s season between late August and October. The temperature is jibbering up and down the car thermometer and in the mirror I catch myself wrapped senselessly in shorts and scarf. There’s a cafe painted in yellow-white stripes and he’s wearing sunglasses too dark for the sun; beard-dark, and surrounded with stubble. His shirt says: 10 years in rehab and still relaxed. I’m mad at him for lining up powder on a dashboard eight weeks running and planting peripheral dreams in my head with words he can’t even pronounce.

We stop the car on May Street. The station is hot red brick in the sun and I snatch my scarf from my neck, confused by how my skin burns white-hot when he touches my shoulder. I’m sick of working seventeen hour shifts on minimum wage and I know he feels the same.

We watch crowds pour through the city, through the hot brick, trampling stairs and insects.

The world must be in meltdown, I say. Everyone’s hanging out their fucking arses.

He smiles and I check the clock.

19

Lydia Knoop

STUDENT WRITING

* The train now standing at platform two is the ten forty-eight to Dundee. Calling at – A nursery rhyme kicks in. Sitting on Grandpa’s knee, seeing spots on his skin dark as cloud on sun.

Please mind the gap between the platform and – He looks into me and puts his hands in that concave place in my back.

Come on, he whispers.

We can’t.

My hands are smooth with sweat and frustration.

He smiles.

We can. Of course we can.

We walk out of the station clutching hands, clutching railings as the pavement pumps sudden rain beneath our feet. His shirt is heavy and deep, deep blue when it touches my skin.

We drive 270 miles and start walking. * We’re on a mass of land bigger and wilder than the sea, with ragged tufts of surf blowing like cotton in our faces. We grab it between our fingers and it sparkles – whitebluesilver – gone. Seagulls hurtle towards the sky and it blossoms black, shameless as flowers at a funeral. The buds of darkness catch one another and silence pulses. My fingertips sparkle.

We circle our wrists and ankles with fire and nudge glow-worms into rows, lining them up to form words we never found before but felt every inch since we began.

Look! We shout to each other. Look! * We sleep distorted dreams of men in white dresses and women lining their faces 20

STUDENT WRITING

Lydia Knoop

with bright paint, putting their feet in sheathes of fluorescent fabric.

In the morning we stumble haphazardly through grass tall as trees, tall as dreams we shot down before they began. There are wheels spinning with light, men forcing thick food in our palms and pushing sweet white things on our tongues.

Fuck, we whisper. Fuck.

We stretch and lick our fingers at the stars, try to wrap our arms around ideas too big for the world, too small for the gods. We walk in straight lines and stagger into curving amphitheatres. We dig our fingers between stones to find anchors of grass and are knocked backwards by water we can’t understand.

He smiles at me, one hand clasping my hip and the other reaching for a long chain that promises parallel worlds, reality with a bittersweet twist.

Come on, he whispers. Come the fuck on!

JOSEPH CRONIN

Demeanor I shouldn’t walk around like this people will think there’s something wrong with me It’s funny because these are the moments I feel happiest I was leaving town when a man in a red hoodie clapped me on the shoulder asked me how I was Jesus I said you’ve got the wrong guy Two days later I can still feel his hand there almost

21

Joseph Cronin

STUDENT WRITING

ANONYMOUS

Tomorrow will be different Could I have ever known that that would turn to this?

Left empty and alone, always searching for your face I imagine your eyes on the back of my neck to keep myself sane For, it is not enough to crave your presence, hear your words, say your name.

You were my hamartia and I regret that now Caught between a desire to be happy and a longing to relive the past Like a caged pet I halfheartedly try to break myself free Though I cling to the painful comfort of your memory, Knowing you were bad for me in too many ways.

Though still, I linger here searching for your face.

Forgetting is always something to achieve Though I fall slave to memory That glistens in an empty heart and blinds my aching mind.

I see you so clearly now, though wished you’d fade away I tell myself that I’ll forget you tomorrow But let me cherish you for one more day.

RALF WEBB

Who Walk By (an extract) So I stood up off my perch and embraced the rain, only for an instant though, a fleeting instant, for moments of such relief come quickly and like moths wings wailing into the night, disappear and are gone. I felt that the darkest hour, dark for its two-tone twilit purgatory was fast approaching, and then I could think of nothing more enlightening than to see James’ hounding face come through the gates, I wished that he’d stroll in, quickly for he’d be excited to see me, and just say “Well hi there ol’ buddy, what’s going on, hmm? How are we feeling? Lets get us a coupla’ beers in.

You have any smokes? I ran out, see, and I figure if I don’t buy anymore people’ll get tired of giving ‘em to me, and eventually...”. But I stared and looked through the drab sheet of rain and knew he wouldn’t come, no, he was gone now, he stayed longer than he needed to and I thanked him for it but now he was gone, and rightly so, for the curse of this town, with its everlasting haze of magpie-feathers, wildflowers and brutishly still midnight hours (soft and piercing like the butcher’s meat-cleaver) will eat you whole, if you don’t escape every so often. Visions of the world, of the poets and their sad pale faces, dull milky eyes, came to me then, anything in that moment, 22

STUDENT WRITING

Ralf Webb

for I felt the anxiety circling above me, and I could only combat it with thoughts of infinity - dreams of the great museums and Susanna bathing, harmonica serenades and the faces of my pretty comrades, anything to keep my jaw from clenching and my leg from shaking - the legacy of my father, my father the star-watcher, my father the mathematician... And I try to remember, the blue of his eyes, the flick of his hair, soft light brown turning grey, that summer when I walked through the fields starry and moon-swept by the forest and valley in all its glory, carrying in my big coat pocket a tattered old copy of Walt Whitman and how I hummed and aahed at it all, at all the majesty, and picking a curd of grass I’d chew on it till dusk, feeling like the pilgrim himself, and later father would come out to join me with his “Hey son why don’t we walk down the lane a while and take a look at the stars now, shall we?”, the innocent thrill in his eyes, the way he threw aside his books and work and dispositions and like the old road-worn careful professor he was, just back from work with his shirt messy and untucked, his tie loosened he’d walk with me and tell me about the heavenly bodies, the stars, the angel’s eyes themselves, a million stars strung out through the immensity of complete black night, the gown of the heavenly lady, and we’d lie in the middle of the road in silence, God bless the father and son crowned forever among the dewey-glazed grass-tufts and weary old road lane, the humbled accomplishment of a starry June night. And sometimes I get scared that I’ll forget the sound of his voice, that the winds will stop, and even his face, youthful and thin like my own, will escape my memory. But reverently the stars chart maps through our skin, through history, and never will the holiness, golden as it was, be erased from that summer’s night.

Across from where I stood strangely, alone in the midst of the rain, I saw the smoky garage on the other side of the road and heard its hum, some greasy oil-stained mechanic was still working away on the engine of an old VW, he twisted and turned his work tools and black smoke bellowed from the exhaust, it ached and moaned dully in the coming eve, and I thought perhaps he had a wife, or lover, and a little baby boy that needed feeding. He stood and wiped his hands on his dirty overalls, and sat on an old rusted barrel in the garage to shelter from the rain, and then leant to his side to turn on a radio. The familiar radio-voice, well-spoken with cynical American overtones, floated toward me, reeling off some report about unrest, and then he quickly began to announce the day’s sport results. I felt lonesome. For only two weeks previous father had died. Francis Shepherd. Thin willowy Francis with his towering intellect and immeasurable fatherhood, the true sad romantic, the lifeless flowers he painted, his generosity, Robin-Hood himself assembled and great in the famous down-and-out figure of Mr Francis T Shepherd, my father. Left alone and sobbing, across the street from the Garage with that perfect image of a grease-stained car-mechanic, pretty girls echoing somewhere in the distance, the agents of war and machinery and gasoline stench, left alone to praise and hold away the dead, shouts and brawls and fights, the whole scary world through my window, darkly through the glass, great prophets with their illegible prophecies, I stood there, left to watch it all alone.

23

CENTREFOLD This month we present to you a series of short essays on the Twilight phenomena and other vampire-related entertainments. Ruth Darca offers a fine analysis of the implications of Stephanie Meyers’ dystopian worldview, while Thom Addinall-Biddulph compares Buffy, Angel and True Blood, and decides (incorrectly) that True Blood is the best. Other articles examine the appeal of Twilight to teenagers along with many other wide-ranging topics.

THOM ADDINALL-BIDDULPH

More Vampires!

In a journal of literature it may seem odd to talk about television series. Especially television series that are all about vampires. However, I have recently spent many a happy hour watching three very fine television series about vampires, and have noticed how they connect with schools of literature; how television and the vampire have taken on the mantle, in some ways, of the great literature of the past.

These three series are, of course, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and True Blood.

They are all great series and worth watching. They are also all different and have their own inimitable ways - despite Angel being a spinoff from Buffy, it is a show of the same genus but not the same species. True Blood treads an entirely different path and, unlike the other two, is ongoing. However, each represents a way of regarding the world; reflecting similar schools of literature that approach the world on vastly variant vectors.

Buffy is the fantasy novel. It looks at the world as a place that is in many ways really quite comedic, a place where the odd is just that, the odd. It is there and must be dealt with, but it is not given much of its own inner life; it is all an adventure, one that may have genuine tragedy and drama, but is, when it comes down to it, a bit of rollicking fun much of the time. It’s rather like the Discworld series in that regard.

It simply takes the world’s madness and goes with it, not really questioning it but taking it in its wisecracking, sexy stride.

True Blood is the political realist novel. It has an agenda, it’s full of allegory, and whilst it may have a fair bit of humour along the way it is deadly serious in its intent.

It imagines vampires not as a frequently comical common-or-garden villain usually with pantomime makeup, but a minority in our society alongside all the other minorities, and one that has a political role. Life in True Blood is often less about the individual, more the social, hence why its core cast of characters is somewhat larger than Buffy’s. Where Buffy generally just asks us to be entertained, True Blood asks us to examine our conscience (lest I be grossly unfair to Buffy, many individual episodes of the Slayer series examine all sorts of social issues, but in the same way Star Trek does - its overall narrative agenda is more self-contained, and as a result, 24

CENTREFOLD

Thom Addinall-Biddulph

perhaps more universal).

Angel, finally, is the commercially successful but also critically acclaimed novel that doesn’t go for gritty realism but more a sort of psychological realism. It is neither trying hard to be political and grounded in our society, as True Blood is, nor occupying an abstracted fantasy world where you can kill vampires with ease and make a high-school girl joke, as Buffy is. Perhaps because all its characters (apart from Connor, about whom the less said the better) are adults, it’s more about the real world, arguably. Not that Buffy is ignorant of things like money and family responsibility, but Angel tends to treat the demons, vampires et al as part of life; not a politically controversial minority, but just more people who have problems, go to karaoke bars, and need a bit of policing. Demons are almost as likely to be good, more or less, as bad. The show is really just about life (alright, there’s the occasional mystical apocalypse, but even these are treated as something that has to be dealt with).

Thus the three series reflect common types of literature, and with their intelligent plotting and dialogue can match up to much great literature. If literature, like all forms of art, holds up a mirror to ourselves with fictional characters who act out our fears and foibles, then these television series do something similar: since, being visual, they cannot rely so much on our imagination, they abstract things a step further by providing fantastical characters who we can take as avatars for human types.

We then become removed from, but still involved with, them, like characters in texts whom we can only imagine, and see them as mildly exaggerated versions of ourselves and our society, and decide how we see them, and, thus, ourselves. Is life a continual social struggle, where politics and the functioning of communities are unavoidably always at the top of our minds? Is life just what we get on with doing, filled with obstacles to overcome, where the trick is just to do it as well as we can? Is life one great adventure, full of action and comedy, where the bizarre is more often than not fodder for good stories and jokes? The three undead behemoths of our screens make us think about what the world we live in is. And I would rather study Joss Whedon and Alan Ball than Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy any day of the week…

NOÉMIE DUNETON

The appeal of Twilight to teenage girls As a teenager I used to love reading the Twilight novels, way before the whole Twilight craze began. Now I positively hate them but I can see that today’s teenage girls enjoy it as much as I did when I was their age. So why is that? Why is it that these badly written books and horribly performed films appeal so much to teenage girls? I believe it’s because Meyer’s plot is cleverly constructed to target 25

Noémie Duneton

CENTREFOLD

this particular audience. You have Edward the vampire, who represents all that the standard teenage girl wants from a guy. He is handsome, really nice but also has that dangerous edge which makes him more than just a nice guy. Indeed, at a time when you experiment with the world, you want the experiments to be dangerous and outthere but ultimately to be safe. Plus, Edward is the guy that no girl can have, thus the one every girl wants. You also have Jacob the werewolf, who is also gorgeous and attracted to Bella. Now not only do you have one handsome, dangerous-butreassuring guy but you have two! What else could you need? Sex? Well you have that as well. So between the guys and the sex you have yourself the perfect teenage girl fantasy. Dangerous, nice and sexy all at the same time.

RUTH DARCA

Twilight and Dystopia Following Rowling’s infamous Harry Potter saga; Tolkien’s benighted The Lord of the Rings and Ransome’s classic Swallows and Amazons, the ever growing Twilight mythos penned by Yankee authoress Meyer is the latest in a long line of fodder for the ravenous mouths of today’s be-hoodied, crack-addicted teenage literary lotharios. Yet whilst the tradition from which Meyer draws painted an ever optimistic vision of a future (the I.A.S 2010-11 “word of the year”) with liberal numbering systems for station platforms, brotherly love between the vertically challenged and boats, Twilight offers a bleaker perspective.

The structure of the relationship between protagonist blonde-girl and the sexy man-vampire she is involved with or something (I haven’t read any of the books or seen the films, but there was a poster on that phone box at the bottom of Gilesgate last year) stands as a clear acknowledgement, perhaps even endorsement and encouragement, of the growing alienation of the younger generation from their forebears. In recasting a frankly ancient gentleman as a dashing high-school Romeo, Meyer undermines the natural bond between the generations by suggesting that age should be no barrier to wrinkle-free skin and slick black hair. It might not be too far a stretch to say she promotes a society where all those not possessed of smoulderingly youthful sexuality ought to be at the very least corralled somewhere out of sight, if not slaughtered in their thousands. A Washington where the blood of the old runs freely at that special time between day and night? This, it seems, is the real Ameyerican Dream.

26

CENTREFOLD

Ruth Darca

EMILY SOMMERVILLE

Meyer’s Skill Will anyone admit to enjoying Twilight? No. Because it’s no longer a trashy novel to race through on a boring weekend, it’s been appropriated by underappreciated soccer moms looking for a little romance to believe in, and their squealing tweenage spawn. It’s so easy to criticize Meyer for writing ‘Mormon abstinence porn’, ‘one girl’s choice between bestiality and necrophilia’. And I’m certainly not making any argument for the quality of her writing! But as silly as we may agree that it is, people want it. This only proves that there’s room for this crap, there’s something easy and inviting about a world of sparkly, inappropriate trysts between two dull, star-crossed idiots, and the boy-wolf who flings a spanner in the works.

OLIVER WARREN

Homophobia in Twilight?

Make sure you don’t miss out the clear, rampant, underlying homophobic message in it. Edward is clearly gay - it’s why he won’t sleep with Bella. He also ends up (apparently) going to Italy to visit a mysterious cabal of conservative vampires (‘Society at large’) to seek permission to break a crucial social taboo (homosexual sex) by ‘coming out’ into the light, where he “sparkles”, and he is condemned for it.

Pernicious, it is.

27

EVENTS To celebrate the recent wonderful poetry reading with Nigel Forde and Anne Stevenson at St. Chad’s college, entitled ‘Astonishments’, this issue brings you an interview with Nigel, whose forthcoming collection of poems is called Letters from the Mad Musician. We also have a review of the opening production of the Durham Drama Festival, David Head’s Suicide Letter Love Note, and, since Anne chaired the T.S. Eliot prize a short while ago, we thought it only fitting to include a poem by Derek Walcott from his winning collection, White Egrets.

NIGEL FORDE

The Law of Diminishing Departures I make tea from the water that you boiled Before you left; use your special cup.

I choose this book because you read it last.

The fire I’ve kept in for days: these flames Are still the ones you saw. The milk jug? Stet, Because you left it there. I fool myself With charms, connections, that should make you real But punch your absence into every act.

I keep things too long; candles I won’t burn, Logs, ditto, saved for feasts or rainy days; The chances are tomorrow could be worse.

And now it is. I’ve kept you long enough.

I study to enjoy the chilly space That closes round my hand instead of yours, And walk on grass to watch the rising moon Because you might be watching too. Because.

REBECCA SHEPPARD INTERVIEWS NIGEL FORDE So you began your career as an actor. Do you think that this directly shaped or influenced your writing?

Well it certainly helped me as a playwright, and I earn my living from writing plays, as well as a bit of teaching, because you can’t make money from writing poetry.

People like Pinter and Shakespeare, who were actors themselves, tend to have written better plays than a lot of other people. But I don’t think that it helped with the 28

EVENTS

Nigel Forde Interview

poetry.

Still, there is an emphasis on musicality in your poetry. Do you write with a view to your poetry being read aloud?

It is true that I trained to be a violinist originally. Funnily enough, Anne Stevenson, with whom I am reading today, also trained to be a musician – a cellist! But no, I do not necessarily write for my poetry to be read aloud. I know a lot of poets, including Ted Hughes, who say that you should write with this in mind, which I sometimes do. A poem has got to work aloud. I used to do a programme on BBC Radio 4 called ‘Midweek’, where I, as a local poet, read out one of my poems at the beginning of the show. I also wrote another poem about what the presenters were discussing while they were talking, which I then read at the end. All whilst doing The Times crossword puzzle. It was rather fun!

One of your works of criticism, ‘The Lantern and the Looking-Glass’, explores the relationship between literature and faith. Do you think that there is an innate connection between the two?

Yes and no. There has been a huge connection between literature and religion up until fairly recently – all the way through and into the Enlightenment, religion was the point of writing. As well as writing about love, because that’s rather fun, John Donne and all the Elizabethan writers primarily wrote about faith. So the things that Donne was talking about really meant something to him. After the Enlightenment that sort of faded away. There is, still, a connection, but it’s a connection which is broken in a way, and I don’t feel like bringing it back necessarily. I mean, if someone asks me to write a poem on a certain topic I shall say no.

So you don’t write for an intended audience?

No, never. In the recent BBC television series ‘Faulks on Fiction’, where Sebastian Faulks chronicles the history of the British novel, there was this clip of Martin Amis saying that he thought children’s writers must have something wrong with them, because he couldn’t bear to think of writing for an audience. It sounded a bit pompous when he said it, but I quite agree. I don’t write for anybody. I write for myself and anyone who’s interested.

You seem to pursue what is unknown or unidentifiable in your poetry. Do you think, even subconsciously, your poetry searches for some sort of fundamental truth?

Well, all poetry searches for some kind of truth, whether it’s a truth of the moment or a truth of eternity in a sense. I just like looking at what’s scribbled in the margins 29

Nigel Forde Interview

EVENTS

of the world rather than what’s actually in the text. It’s the hinge of the door, not the door itself – it’s where things move; things happen. You takes things for granted and don’t think about them, and then when you start thinking about them: they become very strange. It reminds me of what Emily Dickinson once said; that “Art is a house that tries to be haunted.” I like to write about the dusk rather than day or night; about things in the process of change. So, yes, I suppose I am searching for some kind of truth, but only a momentary truth.

Which writers would you say have influenced you the most?

Norman MacCaig – a wonderful Scottish poet. Possibly Wallace Stevens, although I don’t always understand him! And John Fuller – Roy Fuller’s son. He must be in his seventies now, but we’re quite friendly, and we write each other postcards and send each other books and things. He has influenced me quite a lot because he is so technically clever and astute. I think that’s what I want to write like.

Do you write with an acknowledgement of your predecessors and the literary tradition?

Yes I think I do, and I do quote them a bit here and there for the clever ones. I think a sense of form and intelligence is also important in writing. There are so many people these days who think free verse constitutes poetry. They don’t think whether free verse is the best idea for this particular poem, or consider if it would be better to use iambic pentameter or trimeter or a rhyme scheme. The easy thing is just to scribble it down, which, of course, results in the poem being less interesting than it could be. Not that I haven’t written in free verse in my time!

REBECCA SHEPPARD

Review of David Head’s Suicide Letter Love Note (DDF) As every disciple of student theatre knows, there is a fine line between a mid-term production and a performance fit for public consumption. With virtually all the content of this year’s Durham Drama Festival written, directed and performed by students from Durham University and beyond, one may purport that the foremost challenge for these playwrights was to surpass the standard fare of pretentious twaddle that graces the plethora of kookily-designed notebooks of ambitious, starry-eyed adolescents.

Oh yes, we all take that fated excursion to WHSmith at one stage or another, blinded from the ridiculously extortionate price with hopes of becoming the next Pinter. After which, inevitably enough, you find your creative inadequacy actually staring at you in the face, forcing you to bury the said notebook under a pile of 30

EVENTS

Rebecca Sheppard

dissertation notes and forget it ever existed, and, even then, you entertain dreams of the next tenant of your grotty little flat off North Road unearthing its contents in an Otto Frank-style extravaganza. Anyway, I was keen to find out if the opening act, David Head’s Suicide Letter Love Note, really was deserving of one of those coveted productions at the Assembly Rooms.

According to its press release, Suicide Letter Love Note threatened to offer us “a RomCom about the futility of life” and a nervous, depressive monologue of someone in unrequited love – a preface which even Matthew McConaughey would surely find too mawkish. And admittedly, on the surface, David Head gave his spirited audience exactly what it said on the tin.

The play tells the story of Jack Buchanan (Steffan Griffiths) who, having decided to kill himself, makes a final attempt to win back the love of his life and teenage girlfriend, Susan. Head interweaves scenes in the present, involving Jack analysing his depression and soliciting the attention of the older Susan, with scenes in the past chronicling the development of Jack and the younger Susan’s relationship.

Although it is an undeniably familiar format, Head handled it more than competently, comically introducing each scene with a kind of chapter heading projected onto the back wall of the stage in pure Woody Allen fashion. The separate castings of Vicky Binns and Harriet Tarpy for the younger and older Susans respectively also ensured clarity between the past and present scenes, even if Binns’s and Tarpy’s polarised versions of the same character somewhat undermined the story’s credibility.

Nevertheless, the understated brilliance – yes, brilliance – of this production rested with Head’s oftentimes exquisite dialogue. In Jack, Head managed to convey with frightening accuracy the socially awkward, neurotic male who is simultaneously the biggest freak and the most normal man in the world. As the self-conscious star of his own film, Jack switches from downright hilarious to movingly tragic in the space of a few words. His suicide, we realise eventually, is merely the denouement he has written for himself and feels obliged to act out. After all, as the older Susan points out interestingly, one can be really quite happy living an ordinary life.

Script aside, Steffan Griffiths was an utter revelation playing Jack. Whilst he was delightfully convincing as the misanthropic protagonist, it was during the critical junctures of tension and despair when he really shone. In particular, Griffiths’s solitary moments of silence punctuated the atmosphere in the theatre with almost unbearable pathos and futility.

In fifty minutes, Suicide Letter Love Note had managed to provide me and my fellow audience members with numerous ‘laugh out loud’ moments, as well as coming dangerously close to proving that I had some kind of soul. It set the bar extremely high and, at the time of writing this, it will surely be a strong contender for the ‘People’s Choice’ award come the end of the festival. David Head, I applaud you. I dread to think what you could have achieved with a budget.

31

Alex Mason

EVENTS

ALEX MASON

Review of Nick Arnold’s Swan Ache (DDF) Swan Ache started deceptively. With semi-clothed women running frantically around the stage trying to find clothes, I thought I was watching the aftermath of a women’s rugby team social. However, once composure was regained it morphed into a six-way dramatic monologue. If that makes sense.

Six chairs, six figures - staring into the eyes of the audience with minimal lighting, no external props, no scene transitions. For a few seconds I thought I was in the wrong show and it was some new-fangled sketch comedy troupe. However the sparse setting complemented the performance and allowed focus to be taken by the actresses.

All of the actresses did a good job of maintaining inidividualism, with a couple of fairly nuanced performances given the limited movement, and though I found myself captivated by one performance in particular I still appreciated the effort on all parts. That said I’m begining to wonder if the one performance I found exemplerary didn’t somehow detract from the rest of the show. The format relies heavily on cohesiveness, with shared mannerisms and at times expressions, and with a constant jumping between speakers in hodge-podge monologue form anything that means I’m not watching the current speaker could be considered a negative. However, it seems counter-intuitive to complain about someone being too good. Also, there was a little over-acting at certain points but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment.

Having to follow Suicide Letter Love Note was unfortunate as David Head’s masterpiece is one of the finest examples of minimalistic/existential theatre I’ve ever seen. That said, Swan Ache had a completely different tone focusing more on selfidentity and aspiration rather than the meaning of it all.

It was all going well until the halfway mark where the novelty promptly wore off and I began to wonder what the substance of the play was. Superficially, it’s about a group of women invited by the same person to the same ballet; each of which was in some sort of friendship group with Mystery Man at the centre of it all in years gone by. But digging deeper, the moral of the story is lost on me somewhat and I’m not sure I felt I’d learned anything by the end. Not every play has to be instructional, but I personally like to walk away either confounded or contemplative and after leaving Swan Ache I didn’t think about it again until sitting down to write this very review.

The script itself was clever in places but not especially witty (although that could be relative due to being overshadowed by Suicide Letter Love Note), and I felt the confinement of the set through the narrative. I also get the feeling I didn’t ‘get it’ with regards to the message. Towards the end the emotion ran high and I felt like an outsider watching through a frosty glass window into a world I had no desire to experience.

Swan Ache is like a tamagotchi: innovative and funny when you first see it, but 32

EVENTS

Alex Mason

after a while the novetly wears off and you’re wondering what it is you’re doing. It’s not a bad play by any stretch of the imagination, but it didn’t hit the sweet spot for me and while I enjoyed watching it I didn’t walk away from it with anything. With the standard set just minutes before it, and what a standard, Swan Ache is a fine example of student theatre done well...but not exceptionally - though who can complain about that?

DEREK WALCOTT

Sixty Years After In my wheelchair in the Virgin lounge at Vieuxfort, I saw, sitting in her own wheelchair, her beauty hunched like a crumpled flower, the one whom I thought as the fire of my young life would do her duty to be golden and beautiful and young forever even as I aged. She was treble-chinned, old, her devastating smile was netted in wrinkles, but I felt the fever briefly returning as we sat there, crippled, hating time and the lie of general pleasantries.

Small waves still break against the small stone pier where a boatman left me in the orange peace of dusk, a half-century ago, maybe happier being erect, she like a deer in her shyness, I stalking an impossible consummation; those who knew us knew we would never be together, at least, not walking.

Now the silent knives from the intercom went through us.

33

TRANSLATIONS We are very happy to have the Translations section focus for this issue on Scandinavian and Germanic poetry, with a whole range of different pieces translated especially for The Grove

by Durham students! For the first time, we have also added the original version of some of the poems, for those of you who speak any of these languages. You will find poems translated from Finnish, from Swedish, from Norwegian alongside a couple of others translated from Dutch and German. Enjoy!

KARIN BOYE (translated by Malin Strombom)

Morgon När morgonens sol genom rutan smyger, glad och försiktig, likt ett barn, som vill överraska tidigt, tidigt en festlig dag – då sträcker jag full av växande jubel öppna famnen mot stundande dag – ty dagen är du, och ljuset är du, solen är du, och våren är du, och hela det vackra, vackra, väntande livet är du!

Morning When the morning’s sun glimpses through the window, happy and cautious, like a child to surprise you early, early a festive day I reach out filled with growing exultation and embrace the day to come for the day is you, and the light is you, the sun is you, and the spring is you, and the beautiful, beautiful life to come is you!

34

TRANSLATIONS KARIN BOYE (translated by Malin Strombom)

I Rörelse Den mätta dagen, den är aldrig störst.

Den bästa dagen är en dag av törst.

Nog finns det mål och mening i vår färd men det är vägen, som är mödan värd.

Det bästa målet är en nattlång rast, där elden tänds och brödet bryts i hast.

På ställen, där man sover blott en gång, blir sömnen trygg och drömmen full av sång.

Bryt upp, bryt upp! Den nya dagen gryr.

Oändligt är vårt stora äventyr.

In Motion The fulfilled day is never the best.

The best day is a day of thirst.

Yes, there is an aim and meaning with our path but it’s the way that is the labour’s worth.

The best aim is a night’s rest, fire lit, and bread broken in haste.

At places, where you sleep but once, your sleep is safe and dreams filled with song Break up, break up! The new day is dawning.

Our adventure is infinite.

35

Karin Boye

Edith Södergran

TRANSLATIONS

EDITH SÖDERGRAN (translated by Reetta Humalajoki)

Stars When night comes, I stand on the steps and listen, the stars swarm in the garden and I stand in the dark.

Listen, a star fell with a clang!

Don’t step barefoot on the grass; my garden is full of shards.

KNUT HAMSUN (translated by Iselin Benedicte Brevik)

Pan The last few days I have been thinking and thinking about the eternal days of the summers in the Northlands. I sit here and think about it and about a cottage I used to live in and about the woods behind the cottage and I start to write something down to make the hours pass and to enjoy myself. Time goes by slowly, I cannot make it pass as fast as I wish even though I do not have any sorrows and even though I live a joyful life. I am quite satisfied with everything and my thirty years is no age. A couple of days ago I received a couple of bird feathers from far away, from a person who does not owe me anything, but two green feathers in a piece of paper sealed with a sticker.

It pleased me also to look at these two devilishly green feathers. And all in all I do not have anything bothering me except from some gout in my left foot from time to time caused by an old bullet wound that healed a long time ago.

PAUL CELAN (translated by Alexis Grigorieff)

Death fugue That black milk of dawn we drink it in the evening we drink it at noon and in the morning we drink it at night we drink and drink we dig a grave in the sky where we won’t feel cramped There is a man living in the house he plays with snakes he writes he writes when night falls on Germany your golden hair Margaret he writes it down and steps out of the house and the stars twinkle he whistles for his hounds 36

TRANSLATIONS

Paul Celan

he whistles for his Jews to come out and dig a grave in the ground he commands us to play up for the dance Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you in the morning and at noon we drink you in the evening we drink and drink There is a man living in the house he plays with snakes he writes he writes when night falls on Germany your golden hair Margaret your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the sky where we won’t feel cramped He shouts hey you dig deeper and you over there sing and play he grabs the iron rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue you there jab your spades deeper and you over there keep playing for the dance Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon and in the morning we drink you in the evening we drink and drink There is a man living in the house your golden hair Margaret your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with snakes He shouts play death more sweetly death is a master from Germany he shouts play your violins more darkly then you shall rise as smoke in the air then you shall have a grave in the clouds where you won’t feel cramped Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany we drink you in the evening and in the morning we drink and drink death is a master from Germany his eye is blue he hits you with a leaden bullet he does not miss you there is a man living in the house your golden hair Margaret he lets his hounds loose on us he offers us a grave in the sky he plays with snakes and dreams death is a master from Germany your golden hair Margaret your ashen hair Shulamith

37

Neeltje Maria Min

TRANSLATIONS

NEELTJE MARIA MIN (translated by Zenobia Homan)

For those I love, I want a name my mother then forgot my name, although my child does not yet know.

How should I therefore remain safe?

Call me, confirming my reality, let my name be like a chain.

Call me, call me, do speak to me, oh, call me by my deepest name.

For those I love, I want a name.

BERTOLT BRECHT (translated by Alexis Grigorieff)

Remembering Marie A. I It was a day in that blue month September silent under a young plum tree, I held her, my love so pale and silent, in my arms like a lovely dream.

And above us in the beautiful summer sky there was a cloud, which I watched for a long time it was all white and very high above us, but as I looked up, it was no longer there.

II Since that day, very many moons have floated silently down and past me.

The plum trees have probably been felled and if you ask me, how is your love?

I will tell you: I can’t remember and yet, of course, I know exactly what you mean.

Her face, I really can’t remember it, I just know that I kissed it one day.

38

TRANSLATIONS

Bertolt Brecht

III And that kiss also, I would have forgotten it long ago if the cloud wasn’t there, I still remember it and will always do it was very white and came from up there.

Maybe the plum trees are still blooming And maybe that woman is now at her seventh child but that cloud only bloomed for a few minutes and when I looked up, it had already vanished in the wind.

SOFI OKSANEN (translated by Reetta Humalajoki)

Pure The girl stared at the glass, not taking hold of it. A fly landed on the rim of the glass.

The girl’s eyebrow twitched, the movement of her ears, which stuck out towards the window, were visible against her hairless head.

“I’ve got to go,” she sighed, “So they don’t hurt you.”

Aliide lifted the glass to her lips and drank slowly, took a long gulp, tried to empty the glass, but couldn’t. Her throat didn’t work. She set the glass on the table. A spider was creeping underneath the table, it disappeared between the floorboards. Aliide was almost certain the girl was wrong, but how could she explain it, that the village boys came to her yard to cause a ruckus. She would want to know why and how and when and who-know’s-what, and Aliide had no intention whatsoever of explaining anything, to a complete stranger, she didn’t explain things to her acquaintances either.

But the girl’s terror was so clear, that Aliide suddenly felt it within herself. Dear God, how her body remembered that feeling, remembered it well, was subject to it immediately on seeing it in a stranger’s eyes. What if the girl was right? What if there really was reason to fear what the girl feared? What if it was her husband out there? Aliide’s own ability to be afraid should have belonged to a time long since past. She had left it behind and didn’t care about the stone throwers one bit. But now that there was an unknown girl in her kitchen, spreading her bare-skinned fear on Aliide’s tablecloth, she couldn’t wipe it away as she should have done, instead letting it wedge itself in between the wallpaper and the old plaster, into the cracks left by hidden photographs later removed and eradicated. Fear settled in to this familiar house. As if it had never left. As if it had just popped out somewhere and returned home for the evening.

39

Sofi Oksanen

TRANSLATIONS

The girl touched her stubble, tied a scarf tightly on her head, scooped her mug full of water from the bucket and rinsed her mouth, spitting it into the waste pail, glanced at herself in the glass of the cupboard, and went to the front door. She had pulled back her shoulders and lifted her head up high, as though she were stepping into battle or standing in a row of pioneers. Her eye twitched, ready, now she was ready. The girl wrenched open the door and stepped onto the stair.

40

EVENTS LISTINGS REGULAR EVENTS Mondays, 7.30-9pm at the Big Jug: Literature Discussion Group. This year, tutor David Crane will be discussing the poetry of Ezra Pound.

2nd Monday of each month: Leonard’s Café Book Group. 6-7.30pm, free. Past reads include How to Paint a Dead Man or The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

See www.northeastbookgroups.com/durham or contact durhambookgroup@newwritingnorth.com Tuesdays, 7.30pm: Creative Writing Society. Whether it’s overcoming writer’s block or getting feedback on your work, CW can help. Contact creative.writing@dur.ac.uk to find out more. Maths building CM107 at the Science Site.

Wednesdays, 7.30pm: Poetry Society. Alternate sessions discussing poems by established poets and poems written by members. Free. Venue: a living room near you. Contact them at poetry.society@durham.ac.uk Thursdays, 7.15pm: World Film Society shows a brilliant foreign film - one of Durham’s best societies. ER141.

UPCOMING EVENTS Fri 4 – Sun 6 March: Musicon Jazz Festival: Durham City’s first jazz festival. On Sunday guitarist John Etheridge performs. Held at St Chad’s College. £10 (students £4; under 18s £1 per day) Friday 11 March, 8pm: Colpitts Poetry presents Linda France and Lucy English.

Held at Alington House, 4 North Bailey. £5 (£3 concessions) Wednesday 27 April, 7.30-9.30pm. Musicon Concert Series presents the Allegri String Quartet, one of the oldest British chamber music ensembles in existence. They will perform Beethoven’s String Quartets. £10 (£4 students; under 18s £1) Friday 4th March, 7.30pm: Elkie Brooks performs at the Gala Theatre. £20 More events at www.dur.ac.uk/whatson For regular events and societies, see our website at www.dur.ac.uk/grove

41

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS COVER IMAGE

Translations section is held by the translators.

“When my fist clenches, crack it open” by Scott Donald & Elizabeth Fleming

EVENTS Nigel Forde, “The Law of Diminishing Departures”. From A Map of the Territory (rep. by kind permission of Carcanet, 2003)

ENGLISH WRITING Mary Cornish, “Numbers”. From Red Studio (repr. by kind permission of Oberlin College Press, 2007)

Derek Walcott, “Sixty Years After”. From White Egrets (rep. by kind permission of Faber & Faber, 2010)

Rebecca Elson, “Antidotes to Fear of Death”.

From A Responsibility to Awe (rep. by kind permission of Oxford Poets, 2001)

STUDENT WRITING Intellectual copyright of all material in the Student Writing section is held by the authors.

Bob King, “Geology”. From Marlboro Review, issue 16, 2005 Will Self, Excerpt from The Quantity Theory of Insanity (rep. by kind permission of Bloomsbury, 1991)

CONTRIBUTORS Gareth Carter enjoys talking in the third person, waxing (both physical and lyrical) and heavy doses of procrastination.

Gillian Clarke, “Times Like These”. From Collected Poems (rep. by kind permission of Carcanet, 1997)

Joanna Smith: Although from meeting her you would think she would have happily forsaken all modern consumer comforts; the fact of the matter is she couldn’t quite give up on culture altogether. That is to say the poetry and, of course, shiraz.

Grace Schulman, “Apples”. From The Broken String (rep. by kind permission of Houghton, 2007) Kate Chopin, Excerpt from The Awakening (rep. by kind permission of Dover, 1994)

Matthew Griffiths would like to have more time to –

Robert M. Pirsig, Excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (rep. by kind permission of Vintage Books, 2004

Ralf Webb: Please don’t feel obliged to read any of his stuff ever again...

Leonard Cohen, Excerpt from Beautiful Losers (rep. by kind permission of Vintage Books, 1993)

Joseph Cronin enjoys being a recluse and often wonders what life would be like had he been born in another century.

TRANSLATIONS

Avishek Parui would like to describe himself as somebody “ineluctably inconsistent boot”

Intellectual copyright of all the material in the

Contact: grove@dur.ac.uk without whose express permission no part may be reproduced.

42

ADVERTISEMENT

43

ADVERTISEMENT

Durham’s online magazine

www.thebubble.org.uk Weekly articles on: Art

Film

Photography

Business and Economics Columns Drama Durham Union Society Ecology

Food History Law and Ethics Literature Music

Politics Religion Science and Technology Sex Television

Features

Philosophy

World Affairs

Write for us!

• Thousands of readers

• An extra something on your CV

• Wide range of subjects

• Articles of 500 to 1,500 words

• A large, friendly editorial team

• editors@thebubble.org.uk

44