A correspondent  writes (as they used to say in Agony columns ahead of a discussion of a complex personal problem, but none of those here) that she would be grateful for a slightly shorter post than the previous one, so here it is….

IT MAY BE daffodils that best declared the arrival of Spring in the south of England this week but for me it’s the sudden, dramatic unfolding of the first leaves of my solitary rhubarb that said it best of all. I grow it for its strength and beauty and take so much pleasure from the creamy-white florets when they appear at the end of summer that I could no more eat the stalks, blanched or otherwise, than cut down a tree…

LINKS: Read this very weird entry in Wikipedia and you may agree with me that honouring rhubarb as a plant rather than eating the insipid  bunches of forced stalks in supermarkets is the right thing to do… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle  Meanwhile, down in the South West of the UK, there are dark goings on in the daffodil fields, or were in 2004 as this piece in The Independent amply showed: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/we-are-free-people-but-this-is-the-work-of-slaves-570025.html 

PATRICK WHITE, the Australian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, has never been especially popular, commercial or comfortable to read, even for his fans. So I was surprised but pleased to see that he is one of six finalists in the ‘lost’ Man Book Prize with The Vivisector (1970).
My introduction to him was very odd. When I was in my ‘O’ level year someone in my class who was as equally bottom-stream as myself, presented me with White’s novel Voss. He explained that a customer in his Dad’s pub had abandoned it unread among empty beer glasses. Rather than throw it away my friend thought maybe I should have it since, ‘you read books’.
In fact, until that moment, I had never read an adult novel in my life. Feeling complimented but obligated by this unexpected gift, I glanced at the book on the train journey home that afternoon. I was immediately captivated by the far-off alien world White made real and by the occasionally strange use of grammar and language; and by something else I shall explain in a moment.

‘There is a man here, miss, asking for your uncle,’ said Rose. And stood breathing. ‘What man?’ asked the young woman, who was engaged upon some embroidery of a difficult nature, at which she was now forced to look more closely, holding the little frame to the light. ‘Or is it perhaps a gentleman?’ .  ‘I do not know,’ said the servant. ‘It is a kind of foreign man.’….. Something had made this woman monotonous. Her big breasts moved dully as she spoke, or she would stand, and the weight of her silences impressed itself on strangers. If the more sensitive amongst those she served or addressed failed to look at Rose, it was because her manner seemed to accuse the conscience, or it could have been, more simply, that they were embarrassed by her harelip.
‘A foreigner?’ said her mistress, and her Sunday dress sighed. ‘It can only be the German.’

It was this last of several narrative hooks, the German, that pulled me into the story and kept me there. For I had been to school in Germany, a fact curiously ignored by my grammar school, leaving me feeling as alien in my own country as ‘the German’, the Voss of the title, felt in Australia.
I read all of White’s novels in the years afterwards including The Vivisector when it was published in 1970, a first Christmas present from my first wife. It was a shock. A story of an artist, Hurtle Duffield, dedicated to the Australian artist Sidney Nolan on whose life it is based. A bitter portrait of an unloving man whose engagement with women and men is about ruthlessly dissecting them as subjects of his work. The language is wonderful, the characters riveting but the work itself bleak and without pleasure. It left me disturbed and I read no more of his work, moving on to new and more cheerful authors.

Years later, by then an author myself, I came across White’s autobiography Flaws in the Glass. The moment I began reading his bitter and cynical self portrait I recognized Hurtle Duffield – and, it must be said, that same tendency many young novelists (including myself then, I fear!) who  cut their creative teeth with a detached, slightly smug and unengaged view of things. My rejection of White was complete.
Then, last year, I saw the original hard back of Voss in an Oxford bookshop and bought it at once. Again, its brilliance and empathy captured me.
Now I find that The Vivisector is the potential ‘lost’ Man Booker Prize winner. Which puts me in a quandary because I rate the author very highly but this particular book still leaves me (I have just re-read it) feeling low. Unlike, say, J G Farrell’s wonderfully funny and warm Troubles (also short-listed for this prize) which for now gets my first vote. But time to read all the contenders I think… with reviews to follow.

LINKS: The full list is: Patrick White The Vivisector (Vintage); Nina Bawden The Birds in the Trees (Virago); Shirley Hazzard The Bay of Noon (Virago); Mary Renault Fire from Heaven (Arrow); & Muriel Spark The Driver’s Seat (Penguin); J G Farrell Troubles (Phoenix). Full details of the Lost Man Booker Prize and how you can vote here:  http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1412  There is a good Wikipedia entry on Patrick White at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White and the Nobel Prizes website has an excellent critique of all his books, including The Vivisector,  at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/hansson/index.html

I’m not the only one whose diurnal rhythms are seriously messed up for a few days twice a year by the switch to British Summer Time (last weekend) and back again (due this year early morning Sunday 31st October). I know that because of what friends say and by the incredible number of responses to the MP Tim Yeo’s timely piece in the Guardian last Friday.
Yeo argued that  the Single/Double Summer Time (SDST), proposed by his  private member’s bill in 2006-07  ‘would mean that clocks move forward by one hour throughout the year to GMT+1 in winter and GMT+2 in the summer.’
He added, ‘bringing our waking hours more into line with the hours of daylight would reduce energy demand and cut fuel bills. A Cambridge University study in 2007 showed that both peaks in demand for electricity and actual energy consumption would be lower under SDST, particularly throughout the winter. It was estimated that carbon emissions would be cut annually by 1.2m tonnes at no cost to consumers and without reducing GDP. An earlier study by the Policy Studies Institute also concluded the change would reduce energy use and fuel bills and this was confirmed by the National Grid.’ 

One of the very odd things about that private members bill was the weird way all the members debating it in the chamber disappeared completely from the camera records of the debate for… two hours; as if that was not enough of a time peculiarity the subsequent Hansard report of the proceedings noted that those who voted against voted two hours prior to those who voted for yet the tellers told the tales as being two hours minus the one before plus the two after making it three less one which (of course) is two; and everybody subsequently had tea in the Commons Tea Room at four which would have been six if it had not been two. By a bizarre coincidence the debate took place on April Fool’s Day (the same date as this post) two years ago less one recurred, depending on your point of view. But back to the point…

BST, or to give it its official and slightly mysterious name, Greenwich Daylight Saving Time (GDST) was introduced in 1916 to aid industrial and agricultural production by ‘increasing’ daylight hours for workers. There have been various temporary changes and experiments since but GDST remains. This link sums it all up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time

The reader comments that followed Yeo’s article – you can read them here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/mar/26/british-summertime-change  - run through most of the arguments for and against. My own particular beef is my difficulty of adjusting mentally and physically from one time zone to another, which is effectively what such sudden changes in clock settings require. As a creature of habit, and a lover of the slow processes and cycles of nature, I would prefer no shifts at all. I wish I had the self discipline and bloody-mindedness required to simply ignore government time and stay with ‘natural time’ which is… what?
For me it can be any time standard, provided that once the clocks are set to it they stay where they are – except, that is, for going round and round and reminding us all that while our own personal river of time is getting shorter with each passing year.
It’s about this time every year that I briefly toast the memory of Martial Bourdin, the French anarchist who in February 1894 died when a bomb he was carrying up the hill towards the Greenwich Observatory exploded too early. It emerged that his plan was to blow up the Greenwich Meridian and thus, he seemed to think, disrupt the whole world and possibly time as well. Fantastic! I like to think…

A RISING MOON over Christ Church meadow brought the very successful 2010 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival to a memorable end yesterday.
The great thing about literary festivals these days is that they are no longer just about ‘literature’ or dominated but the literary establishment. Rather the opposite. Their programmes now are celebrations of great ideas and current controversies which offer the reading public the opportunity to listen to and rub shoulders with men and women who (in the main) have recently published books expressing those ideas.
Given the importance of issues like global warming and the recent economic meltdown it’s no surprise that it has been the economists, modern historians, geo-politicians and environmentalists with new books out who have been especially popular with the punters.
The festivals themselves are rarely reviewed as a whole, just the individual speakers. Not surprising since it’s nearly impossible for an individual to attend enough of the events to form an objective overview. But it might be worth saying a couple of things about the Oxford festival as a festival. It was very well organised with really excellent and friendly front of house management: warm greetings, quick ticket service and generally knowledgeable staff.
The important business of book sales, whether in the general books sections or around individual signings (all run by Blackwells Bookshop staff) was efficient and well conducted, never an easy thing.
The individual events were often in the hands of volunteer stewards who proved to be a mixed and occasionally eccentric bunch: some too effusive, others very long-winded about the house-keeping stuff that needs to be said at the beginning of each event and many unable to handle mikes properly or thrown by mishaps and inclined to flap. One got so carried away by the panel discussion that he insisted on asking his own question before parting with his mike so the audience could have a chance. Send him to the naughty step!
But overall the stewards’ wonderful friendliness, enthusiasm for authors and their books and good cheer and charm was what made the festival feel festive. It was just wonderful.
With a single exception the venues proved very good, including the marquee which can sometimes be problematic at such festivals. The exception (as any who attended an event there will know) was Christ Church Hall, whose elongated layout and reverberating acoustics proved disastrous for speakers and audience alike. I understand this venue will not be used again.
The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival was an absolute winner this year which got people engaged with, and talking about, ideas and books for which otherwise busy lives so rarely give proper time. It’s great for Oxford, for books and for authors. But most of all it’s great for the reading public and that’s what matters most.

I FOUND  myself the other night a sleepless guest in a house with a great deal of ambient nocturnal light. It came from two high street lamps, neighbours’ security lights and a lot of passing traffic …

My friend’s glazed front door was simply astonishing, a glowing blaze of fiery light which I found hypnotic. Sleepless as I was with ideas, new characters, old ones paying a friendly nocturnal visit and certain problems of plot and pacing, I diverted myself by taking a photo of the front door.

Later, still awake, I stood at the dining room window looking out onto the street. I would never do this at home lest my neighbours think I’m odd, which is daft really because they probably already think that anyway. But in a strange house it seemed legitimate and so I stood staring out at nothing in particular for quite a long time. Then, turning to head for the kitchen and a cup of tea I caught a brief glimpse of my profile before my movement made it disappear. Intrigued, I decided take a second photo, this one of my shadow, as I was curious to see what is otherwise impossible for me to see.

So here it is, a self portrait of the insomniac writer thinking about (on this occasion) whether the photograph would be worth looking at. Maybe it is, maybe not.

But here’s a thought.

If I make a hard copy of it and put it among others in my loft, then maybe when I’m gone and my children go through my things to clear them out, they’ll see this picture and one of them will say, ‘That’s Daddy! I wonder what he was thinking about!?’ Then, after a pause for thought, one of them might add, ‘I wonder who took it?’

If there’s life after death, which I personally doubt, but if there is… my ghostly voice will answer, ‘An insomniac took it, you knew him well!’

LINKS:  For those who like Al Pacino and thrillers the film Insomnia is worth watching, here’s the link:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0278504/ which includes an excellent trailer. As this post implies, insomnia worries me not at all,  so I won’t offer a single one of the plus-500,000 pages Google lists under ‘Insomnia Cures’. But this Wikipedia entry offers some fascinating insights about insomnia as well as further links of its own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomnia 

A few weeks ago I inadvertently broke the speed limit (37mph in a 30mph area) on the outskirts of Salisbury. Shortly afterwards the Wiltshire Police gave me the option of a statutory fine of £60.00 and three points on my licence or paying a £60.00 fee to attend a Speed Awareness Course with no points and no further questions asked.

            Yesterday I went on the course which took place in a non-descript building in Swindon, six other speeders attending, with two trainers taking us through what the rules are, the connections between speed and accidents, how to be a better (ie slower) driver and so on.

            One of many interesting points made during this really excellent three hours was that it is difficult,  perhaps impossible, to change people’s habitual driving styles which are often learnt from their parents. Another was how rarely people check out changes in the law after they have passed their test – a test incidentally which the instructors suggested was pretty low standard.

            The best that could be hoped for was that we, the speeders, would leave the session more aware of the needs of, and the risks to, others in the road, particularly pedestrians. It seems – which surprised me – that most accidents happen in 30 mph urban areas because that’s where the vulnerable pedestrians are – children, old people, shoppers.  It also seems that activities like drinking water, hands free phones, Satnav adjustments, changing a CD often involve drivers taking their eyes off the roads for two or three seconds. That’s six to ten car lengths. That’s time enough to cause  injury or death to someone.

            Listening to this I remembered an incident as a twelve year old when I stepped in front of a lorry on the way home from school. My French master pulled me back onto the pavement and saved my life. Thinking about it yesterday I realized for the first time that had I died then six children, two grandchildren, and the imagined worlds of eighteen novels would not exist; and you wouldn’t be reading this. You can debate  the same question for yourself supposing  you had died at twelve.

            ‘Ah, but that’s hypothetical,’ you might say. ‘You didn’t die…’

            True, but every day something like seven people do die on the roads and that’s not hypothetical. It’s every day. Meaning that every day, as I drive my car, I might be the one who wipes out the young lad who had he lived might have fathered six lovely children, grandfathered two adorable grandchildren and penned eighteen novels…

            Now that has made me think.

I’ve never been a fast driver, nor a reckless one.

            I’m courteous to other drivers, as to pedestrians.

            Aggression is not part of my driving style.

            I’m a nice chap.

            I wouldn’t harm a fly.

            But the hard fact is that ‘inadvertently’ as I put it at the top of this post I drove at 37mph in a 30mph zone. As the trainers pointed out, that’s 25% faster than I should have or, put another way, the equivalent of 85 mph on a motorway.

            Makes you think doesn’t it? It certainly makes me think.

Final tips from the trainers…

            Drive up to the speed limit, not at it.

            Plan journeys ahead, not once you start.

            Have water, tissues etc easily to hand but, if you can,  pull over every time you want to do anything in a car other than drive it.

            Finally, always leave early not late if an important appointment involves you driving a car.

            …and remember most of those drivers who kill those seven people a day are just like you and me: they wouldn’t hurt a fly, they’re nice chaps and chapesses and they think that 37mph in a 30mph isn’t much over the limit really, is it?

            I hate to admit it, but  it  is. Way over the limit.

            Did the course work? For me, it did. I’m more aware and that makes me a lot more culpable if I ever break the speed limit again. I can never again say I didn’t know…

LINKS: Two good links on this subject are www.dft.gov.uk/think – the government departmental website which is the internet portal for driving safety and awareness in all its variations; and the excellent Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents site www.rospa.com which has very good material on driving and its dangers. Be warned … if you google ’speed awareness courses’ you get some  spoof sites which, in fact, are touting other sites which are the opposite of what they seem, seeking to show you how to avoid speed traps, fines and so on. Rather nasty. However Greater Manchester Police, which offers these courses locally,  has a good, simple site which explains the courses well: http://www.drivesafe.org.uk/index.php/home/speed-awareness  Some ferreting around may turn up something in your area.

THE MOST IMPRESSIVE and memorable of the author presentations I have been to so far at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival (running this week) was by Alex Perry about his book Falling off the Edge: Globalization, World Peace and other Lies (Pan 2010).
Perry is Africa Bureau Chief for Time magazine, which seems to mean that he files reports from wherever instinct, news and whim take him, usually in places of war and economic meltdown which the rest of us might choose to avoid. There he talks to whoever has an interesting and revealing tale to tell, with a strong bias towards, and expertise in, the human realities of normally faceless economic trends. He writes incredibly well, uses statistics to devastating effect and makes the complex issues implicit in the title of his book at once understandable and engaging.
The phrase ‘falling of the edge’ refers to the idea that while advocates of globalization talk positively of ‘flattening the earth’, making it more equal for all, its critics argue that millions of people are disadvantaged by the process and fall off the edge and out of sight as a result of it. The processes he describes concern economic, military, cultural, political and communication globalization. His dark conclusion is that they tend to work together, they make the rich richer and the poor poorer, they undermine democracy by being accountable to no-one, and very frequently globalization is responsible for causing and sustaining war.
He concludes that effects of globalization are so overtly negative in so many countries, mainly developing ones, that they are at the root of much of the revolution and terrorism that besets the world.
Perry’s examples are all first hand and range from Hong Kong and China to India, South Africa and the Congo to Afghanistan. He talks to prime ministers and their financial advisers on one hand and ordinary people on the other, whose lives give the lie to the politicians’ policies.
Perry’s style of live presentation breaks all the rules: little eye contact, rapid speech, few concessions to the less globally literate, brief, non-conciliatory answers if that’s all a question warrants and precious little time wasted on beginnings and endings, which, given the content, clarity of language, challenge of the ideas and breath-taking range of knowledge makes him utterly compelling.
As for the book, which I’m halfway through, it’s shining a light on conflicts and trends other commentators seem to routinely miss. Perry has a good explanation for this: Why do we get globalization so wrong? One reason has to do with the trouble it takes to get it right…. Foreign correspondence is a very imperfect way of writing the history of the world. We send reporters into countries where they’ve never been, know no-one, and don’t speak the language – and expect them to capture the truth, in a maximum of 800 words, within hours…

When he spoke this week Perry suggested that reporters like him are a dying breed because they don’t make a serious contribution to the bottom line. ie they cost. …a very good reason to read his books, his articles and travel to hear him talk while you can.

IT’S AN AWE-INSPIRING business witnessing one of Britain’s premier orchestras recording a major new work by a living composer. But there I was last week in Cardiff, at the BBC’s HQ adjacent to the Millennium Centre, with a select audience of five people, watching the 75-member BBC National Orchestra of Wales record Adrian William’s magisterial and profoundly moving new Cello Concerto ahead of its first public performance at the Bangor New Music Festival later this week. The soloist is Raphael Wallfisch and conductor  is Grant Llwellyn.
Adrian was once described by Yehudi Menuhin as a “master of intricate patterns and forms”. His astonishing talent and quality was recognized early at the Royal College of Music. While studying there he received recognition for his first mature orchestral work, the gritty and ambitious Symphonic Studies, an achievement acknowledged by the RCM director Sir David Willcocks. More recently (2007) he wrote the music for BBC TV’s series about China’s Terracotta Army and a year later the hauntingly beautiful accompaniment to the BBC’s film Trouble in Amish Paradise.
Now his Cello Concerto (2009) marks the culmination of Adrian Williams’ long standing relationship with cello soloist Raphael Wallfisch, an ardent champion of his work. You can get a feel for the power and range of his work at http://www.adrianwilliamsmusic.com

Naturally, to an unmusical novelist like me, who can just about plod through Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on a piano, and never did get to grips with notation, an invitation to a major recording was something special.
Don’t go in if the red light’s on I was warned. It wasn’t on when I arrived but even so I lingered outside the huge studio, peering through the little windows in the doors, wondering how to get in without being noticed. Orchestras in rehearsal don’t like gawping onlookers for a lot of very good reasons, one of them being that they  start coughing when they shouldn’t, and another, apparently the  ultimate sin: leaving  mobiles on…
Luckily for me there was a traffic jam in Cardiff so several members of the orchestra arrived a few minutes late, including a player of one of the six, repeat six, double basses used in the piece. I hid myself within the shadow of his vast instrument and made my way more or less unseen to the tiered seats to listen and watch.
In addition to the red light outside there were two within, on either side of the orchestra, so that no-one is in doubt when recording is happening. When that light goes on silence reigns and the magic of live performance happens.
Except that in a recording, it seems, you rarely get to hear the whole piece, just bits as each section is recorded to the satisfaction of the producer and composer before moving on to another bit. I saw neither during the playing, just heard their disembodied voices from some other place making comments and  adjustments so technical I couldn’t understand them; or so miraculously precise (like picking up in all the melee of sound that a clarinet was not playing an F-sharp when it should have been, naughty, naughty…) that I could only marvel at it all.
Perhaps most impressive was the sight of so many musicians going back and forth through a complex score and starting again, sight reading with total facility and equanimity. Apparently our orchestral musicians are very, very good at this because budgets are tight, time is short, so sight reading to a very high level is essential.
Rookie audience members like me have our own moments of drama, all self induced. The sudden going on of the red light induces an instant throat-tickle; and what briefly  troubles my soul as we reach the quietest passages of this exquisite music is the ghastly possibility that after all I did leave the mobile on and the builder working at that moment on the house is about to call about the important matter of the siting of the trench for the new waste pipe. I didn’t cough, he didn’t call and almost immediately the music took over again…

As well as the coming performance at Bangor on Friday (details at http://www.bnmf.co.uk/concerts.php  ) Adrian Williams’ Cello Concerto is to be broadcast twice by the BBC over the next month or so and a CD is soon coming out.

‘Wow!’ you say and want to stop the car and grab your camera and capture the uncatchable – an extraordinary sunset just across that field, past those leafless trees, out over the far beyond of the chalk downland you’re driving across, so striking it seems despite all that to be almost within reach.
So you speed up a bit, look for a lay-by, and fail to find one. You look for a turn to the left, there’s not one of those either and the sunset’s shifting, changing, maybe waning before your eyes.
You slow, you take another peek and it all disappears behind some trees casting them into bright silhouette as a young van driver comes up behind you, threatening.
You speed up again and miss the only lay-by because you can’t stop with the van so close and the sky’s turned from blue to weird green and the clouds are haloed in gold and the sun’s rays shoot up out of them like the last moments of an opera when someone was dying but not wanting to leave.
A fingerpost far ahead, indicating a left.
You speed even more, scudding westward around a bend, the van left behind, the sun suddenly threatening your eyes as the sun visor is pulled down with one hand to save your vision and you turn the wheel hard to the left with the other, making the left and looking for a place to stop.
The van roars by behind, a youthful passenger’s jeering fist in the air. The road dips straight ahead Roman-like and then up the rolling landscape. It veers left again and the sunset moves off to the right, the clouds moving too, doing strange things with the rays which spread out, bifurcate, disappear, reappear and settle down to something less than they were a moment before.
A gate to a field, a place to stop, a car coming towards you in the distance, its sidelights already on.
But the sunset’s still amazing.
You grab your rucksack, , the zip sticks, you pull it anyway, it opens with a protesting rasp, and you take out the camera inside, fingers playing automatically with the settings as you climb out into the cold air, round the back of the car and into a great field of grey chalky soil.
You raise the camera and take a shot. Something’s captured at least.
The light’s going, the clouds shifting, the sky utterly magnificent and you’re smaller than an ant out on that wonderful fold of chalk, you’re there, here, now. No better place to be.
Another picture taken against the light and then a third and you look around and remember that a few miles from where you stand is Watership Down, the most famous fictional Down of all.
The clouds shift, the moment seems finally gone but you jump into the car to see if there’s still a different shot at the dying sun.
You stop again and climb out, more slowly now.
The clouds have gone and the sun’s just itself now, no haloes, no rays: its magnificent dying self beyond a hawthorn hedge and you take a few more shots as off to the right, where it’s already shadowed, and down by the hedge, where it’s almost black, rabbits appear: Fiver and his brother Hazel, Bigwig and General Woundwort.
The sun sets swiftly and you stand alone wondering what happened to Richard Adams who offered you lift once in his chauffeur-driven car from a literary gig in Birmingham and talked anthropomorphic story-telling all the way home like no-one before or since; and who paid you the compliment of having read your book as you read his.
The sun is almost gone and the camera’s no use any more.
You watch evening come. Just you and a chalky field whose subtle harrow lines disappear towards the last light in the sky; and a story that set your imagination alight so many years before, as great stories do; the cool breeze in your hair and the scampering of rabbits you can hear but no longer see.

Richard Adams is now 89 and lives not far from the downland his first novel immortalized. It had many rejections from publishers before it finally found a publishing home with Rex Collings and huge success: a story to warm the heart of every would-be writer. My last meeting with him was at a busy Society of Authors function when I went over to say hello. Fortunately I knew he could be, shall we say, irascible. He peered at me suspiciously and asked what I wrote and I said ‘Duncton Wood’. He replied very tartly, ‘No you didn’t. A fellow called Horwood wrote that.’ I decided it was best not to argue the point. Then, as now, I go to the shelves and hold Watership Down in my hands with pleasure and affection and hope that if the sun is setting finally on its author’s life it is doing so as beautifully, and gloriously as the sunset I chased yesterday across the Downs.

Imtiaz Dharker’s disembodied voice floated into my consciousness  during a moment of insomnia  when I was listening to the World Service.  It kept me awake for an hour. Dharker is  a poet who recites her poetry from memory, like ordinary living speech and not in the dirge-like style of so many poets the moment they get near a public platform. Until then I had never heard of her but after only a few poems some of her qualities became plain: humour, compassion and a rich sense of the many faces of love.

So now I’m reading her latest collection Leaving Fingerprints (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) and find my late-night impressions were right. Her theme here  combines  impermanence and the preciousness of the moment with a strong sense of the presence in that moment of ancestral shadows. As a  restless wanderer through the external landscapes of town and country and the internal territories of the mind, body and emotions,  it’s a theme that appeals to me. 

The room with two doors

Pass the wine, we’ll leave here soon enough.
We were visitors, we always knew,
even though the host welcomed us,
ushered us in, lit candles for us,
plied us with carafes of wine.

It would be a mistake, however,
to imagine we are free to stay
in this room with two doors,
drinking and eating, telling jokes,
exchanging stories for ever.

The wind swept us in through one door
and is pushing at the other.
Outside, it is waiting for us, running
impatient fingers through the trees,

waiting to take our hearts, browse through them
and toss them to the earth like finished leaves.

The blurb with Leaving Fingerprints has a first sentence which opens up so many lines of enquiry that it might be the start of prize-winning literary novel: Imtiaz Dharker was born in Lahore, Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay…. setting up perfectly the following wonderful poem of memory, reconciliation, forgiveness and familial love:

Green spiked hair

So I ran away from home with a man
from another country and a small suitcase
that contained a pair of pink suede shoes,
a passport, the condensed sayings of
Chairman Mao wrapped in red underwear
and a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal  by Baudelaire.

At Heathrow tens years after I had left
I met my father coming off a flight.
Hello? I said. He said Hello, polite as ever,
and walked on. I followed. Excuse me?
I’m your daughter? Ah, he said, not breaking step.
So are you well? And your family?
I’m afraid I need to go now
to catch a connecting flight.

A few years later at another airport
I catch up with him at last.
He had no memory of the incident
when an unknown woman with green spiked
hair accosted him in the transit lounge
claiming to be his little girl

the one he lost
the one who left with a suitcase and
his only copy of the poems of Faiz.

But in the arrival hall the lines come back to him,
Give some tree the gift of green again,
he says, smiling at the words or me,
Let one bird sing.

The green spikes in the hair of his daughter, Imtiaz, may be long gone, but she sings, how she sings.

There’s more about her work and how to obtain it at http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248491 Make sure to watch the short video that runs at the foot of  this link. It’s a brief understated masterclass in how to present poetry.