Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, Literature, Poetry

Book Review: A Little History of Poetry

LITERARY REVIEW

PICK up this book by John Carey, take a deep breath and hold on tight. The author takes us on a helter-skelter journey spanning some 4,000 years of an art form central to human life since people banged drums and thrilled each other with stories in rhyme and rhythm around a fire.

In a relatively small space, a book of 80,000 words in Yale’s useful Little History series, he skips around the world in a dance to the music of words, quickening to a dizzying whirl at the end. In summary, this is a whistle-stop tour. The inevitable superficiality of Carey’s masterly history of poetry is the book’s inherent weakness.

Its strength, however, is the knowledge of a distinguished professor sharing his passionate belief that great literature is for everybody, if only they would give it a try.

Most books of this sort begin with a long introduction setting out the reasons for the project and a general explanation of the author’s choices and method. Some readers of this book may have liked that, yet still admiring the way that Carey plunges in.

The opening of chapter one is almost brusque: “What is poetry? Poetry relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special, so that it will be remembered and valued . . . Over the centuries, countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This is a book about some that have not.”

From there we start the tour – with the earliest surviving work of great literature, the Epic Of Gilgamesh, dating back to about 2,100 BC. This story of male tyranny, friendship, heroism and grief survived on 12 clay tablets marked with wedge-shaped carvings made with reeds. Think about that for a few seconds . . . miraculous.

Equally awe-inspiring is that the epic’s themes are as relevant today as ever. After all, love and death are staples of all our lives.

When at the end the great ruler Gilgamesh is humbled, “having learned that, though he is mighty and famous, he will be equal in death with all other human beings”, we know that this lesson awaits the richest and most powerful of our own time, wherever they strut.

The next 39 chapters introduce us to roughly 185 names, as well as that talented scribe known as Anonymous. Rather surprisingly, the whole book ends with the recent dead American Mary Oliver and Australian Les Murray.

Sometimes Carey’s ambitious, thematic chapter-groupings include the unexpected too. For example, in the chapter rather oddly called Poets Of The Seen World And The Unseen (which surely includes all poets?) he sums up the work of the anonymous medieval Gawain poet and William Langland – and also plonks down beside them their contemporary Persian poet Hafez, still a favourite in Iran.

It’s so brief as to be almost pointless. Yet if somebody reads some Hafez as a result, that might just be the perfect tonic for encouraging further poetic engagement.

Why read poetry? Even those who don’t have poems at their fingertips still have a primitive need in their hearts for its incantations.

Why? John Carey sums it up in the conclusion of his wise polemic, What Good Are The Arts?

“Literature does not make you a better person, though it may help you to criticise what you are. But it enlarges your mind, and it gives you thoughts, words and rhythms that will last you for life.” Absolutely!

The cover of this exhilarating book features portrait linocuts (by Nick Morley – which enliven the whole text) showing William Shakespeare with a bird perched on his finger, and Maya Angelou with a bird in a cage, invoking the title of her famous autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.

It’s a nicely judged link between the canonical white English male and the modern American black woman, linked by centuries of poetry that make the human spirit soar up there in the rain or the blue – just like a bird.

– A Little History of Poetry by John Carey is published by Yale, 320pp

Standard
Arts, Books, Literature, Syria

Book Review: Syria’s Secret Library

LITERARY REVIEW

Syria Secret Library

Intro: Secret Library that made Syrians feel alive again

THE civil war in Syria is one of the undoubted horrors of our times. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and billions of dollars of damage has been done, essentially to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power.

His face is one which gives himself away. It’s the face of a weak man, promoted well beyond his gifts, compelled to become a bloodthirsty tyrant purely out of fear of the alternative. Does he sleep at night?

Mike Thomson is a widely travelled BBC correspondent who has often reported in war zones looking anxiously worried. His book is about the Syrian town of Daraya, which Assad decided harboured dangerous revolutionaries and so it attacked it with all the weaponry he had.

Most of the population left, but a few thousand remained and stuck it out. The siege lasted for several years before Assad’s superior firepower prevailed.

Astonishingly, Thomson didn’t ever actually go there. He wouldn’t have been able to – it was in lockdown and as tight as a drum. But war in the 21st century isn’t like previous wars. The availability of the internet and mobile phones changes the way things are analysed and reported. Daraya had almost no food or medical supplies, its electricity supplies at best intermittent and fresh water had long been cut off. Those who remained in Daraya rigged up makeshift aerials, allowing at least a rudimentary contact with the outside world.

Thomson made several friends and acquaintances through this method and what these people did was, by any measure, extraordinary. They went around abandoned houses and rescued as many books as they could, then created a secret library in the basement of a ruined building. This was an incredibly dangerous thing to do.

Snipers were everywhere and no one carrying a huge pile of books was going to be moving very fast. Astoundingly, no one was killed. Of even more surprise, Assad’s soldiers never worked out what they were up to.

The Secret Library became a haven for the peacefully inclined to come and read books and feel alive again. It was presided over by a 14-year-old who called himself Chief Librarian and rarely left the building.

There are several photographs of people sitting on sofas, quietly reading of worlds far beyond their own.

Thomson writes breezily of dreadful things, although much of the detail is fascinating.

One woman, whose family lived far away, dared not try to contact them directly, but showed them that she was still alive by changing her Facebook photo image every day.

As food supplies dwindled, one man acquired a small quantity of sheep’s liver. He invited a few friends around to share it and they cooked it slowly to savour the wonderful smell.

Unfortunately, they all left the room at the same moment and, when they came back, they found that the sheep’s liver was gone, and the cat was licking its lips with satisfaction.

If this book has a weakness, there’s not actually very much in it about the Secret Library and some readers may finish it feeling obscurely cheated.

However, the story of Daraya is nonetheless hugely stirring: of people refusing to give in against impossible odds and the appalling consequences of one man’s palpable weakness.

– Syria’s Secret Library by Mike Thomson is published by Weidenfeld, 320pp

Standard