Poets who write prose

Asda's female gnomes

With just 30 minutes in the library before it closed yesterday I focused on the travel section. The style of writing on my mind right now comes from W G Sebald's cross-genre The Rings of Saturn, translated by good friend and one-time publisher Michael Hulse and re-released at the end of last year with a new cover by Peter Mendelsund.

Actually, I went to travel after I'd found Sebald's The Emigrants, so I had a dose of him to carry home, and then I saw Joseph Brodsky had written an essay on Venice, Watermark. Nostalgic for the place, that came off the shelf and then I was looking for something that doesn't exist, I suspect, something that might give me a context for Road to the north, the book I've just finished a significant draft of. Sebald's been in my mind a lot as I've been writing it, which isn't to say I claim to be at that standard, just that it's been good to have a voice in my head that wasn't always mine, moaning.

I do like prose by poets. I realised, when I had three books, that all of them are by poet/prose writers and the third is Jean Sprackland. Her book is Strands, A Year of Discoveries on the Beach, and this appeals for all sorts of reasons - because I live by the sea, because I met her once a long time ago when she was working for the Poetry Society, because I admire her poetry and now her daughter's work. I've just lent Kathleen Jamie's two books of essays to a friend, she's another poet who writes beautiful prose.

Brighton Marina

There are perhaps far too many books on those travel shelves about walking great distances to make a statement or to change a life. I have come to prefer a less ambitious focus that allows more interesting thought and associations. With a massive mountain in front of you, how can you consider the washing up? But sometimes you need to think about the dregs, the left over bits of lettuce and the rim of oil on the bowl.

Jonathan Swain, a Brighton artist, has a fabulously sideways view of most things, particularly the urban. He walked to Switzerland and recently alerted me to the new developments at Brighton Marina. So the other night I ended up at the marina, after going to watch the starlings. I was at my desk all day, needed to move. When I arrived at the pier it was closed. But I caught the last of the murmuration before they swooped underneath it to roost. Last night I stood on the pier, chatting with a couple down from London for the night. It was freezing but a good show. They seem to intensify the shapes they make just before they roost. And then the pier sings from end to end.

So that was after I got my books out and then I walked home pretty quickly, I was so cold. But the other night, when I couldn't get onto the pier, I needed a much longer walk and after the pier, walked along Marine Drive. It's a little lonely, although joggers use it and I was a little jumpy. Behind me the sky was stormy and by the time I arrived at the marina it was dark. I nipped into Asda for the loo, was greeted by the gnomes and went home on the bus which did an entire circuit of Whitehawk

Asda's male gnomes

and a small turn through the outskirts of Pankhurst, down to Queens Park Road, before ending up on Elm Grove. I'm sure there was another I could have taken. The days have been like this. Writing/work, then an afternoon walk, waking up unsure of what day it is and occasionally mad bouts of either clearing, or yesterday, cutting myself a fringe which really doesn't suit me. The fringe fiasco's as if I need an excuse not to go out for a couple of months while it settles down. It won't grow out that quickly, but I'll have to get used to it and not feel sick about it.

What makes Sebald an early blogger, really, are the photos that go with his prose. Rather like Jack Robinson's Days and Nights in W12
although the CB Editions (his publisher's) website claims it's far cooler than Sebald.

I was given Days and Nights in W12 by the wonderful Nigel Jenkins, now dead, another walker and poet-prose writer who explored Gower, Swansea and in Gwalia in Khasia, the Welsh in India. 

Road to the north is based on four trips to South African between 1994 and 2012 but it's also about growing up in Surrey and finding myself in Brighton. I've been writing it since I began transcribing the diaries in 2012 and finding in them a certain structure and shape, I've been adding to them since.