{BOOKS} Previews Top 5
POETS
Across the Book Festival, some top poets are appearing or being lauded. Brian Donaldson picks five of the finest exponents of this ancient form Michael Longley One of the most decorated verse-conjurors at this year’s Festival, the Belfast- born writer (pictured) has the TS Eliot Poetry Prize, a Whitbread and the Hawthornden Prize under his belt as well as being the proud recipient of the 2001 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Should you wish to do a bit of boning up before his appearance, among his celebrated collections are Fishing the Sky, The Ghost Orchid and The Weather in Japan. 18 Aug, 10.15am, £10 (£8).
Robin Robertson The acclaimed editor of James Kelman, AL Kennedy and Irvine Welsh, RR is a feted poet in his own right. We described his last collection, The Wrecking Light, as ‘compelling’, ‘startling’ and having ‘a strongly developed sense of the domestic’. 20 Aug, 10.15am, £10 (£8).
Czeslaw Milosz This year marks the centenary of the birth of Poland’s legendary poet and in a trio of events, the likes of critic Michal Pawel Markowski, philosopher John Gray and the Scottish Poetry Library pay tribute to his genius and legacy. 18 Aug, noon, 3.30pm; 23 Aug, 1.30pm, £10 (£8). Wendy Cope The witty poet was in fine form with her most recent collection, Family Values, which mixes the gently serious with the mildly caustic featuring some light trumpeting of universal emotions. 22 Aug, 7pm, £10 (£8).
John Burnside In 2006, the multi-disciplinary scribe gave us his Collected Poems, a beautiful set which showcased his gift as a chronicler of the natural, human and mystical worlds. 17 Aug, 10.15am, £10 (£8).
For even more Festival reviews see list.co.uk/festival
32 THE LIST 11–18 Aug 2011
L A V I T S E F
NED BEAUMAN Debutant with a palate for the distasteful Ned Beauman’s first novel, Boxer, Beetle, comes prefaced with the rather haughty caveat: ‘This is a novel for people with breeding. Only people with the right genes and the wrong impulses will find its marriage of bold ideas and deplorable characters irresistible.’ The 26-year-old author – speaking from Berlin, where he’s doing a summer writer’s residency – finds some people’s reactions to his book a bit OTT.
he stinks permanently of rotting fish. Thankfully, the plot unravels at a fizzing pace and in such a densely detailed, shamelessly un-PC manner that the characters’ more rancid sides only add to the fun. ‘It never occurred to me that it’d be agitating as I was writing it,’ insists Beauman, who also writes articles for Dazed and Confused and The Guardian. ‘I’ve read plenty books with more Nazis, more violence or more sex. Something like Hubert Selby Jnr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn: now that’s unpleasant.’
‘A few film companies were interested in my book,’ he Boxer, Beetle was nominated for last year’s Guardian
explains, ‘but no one’s bought it so far because they said there were too many damaged people in it, and no likeable characters. A lot of reviews pick up on that too, as if that’s a problem? That just seems like criticising a book because the weather’s always rainy in it or something.’
The characters doing all the off-putting are a collector of Nazi memorabilia, a beetle breeder, a 1930s boxer, and someone with a rare condition that means
First Book Award, and will be published in the States next month, but Beauman isn’t one to rest on his laurels, and has already finished book two. It returns to the 1930s, and focuses on a group of Weimar émigrés who end up in LA. ‘It’s not any purer though, and the human beings aren’t any easier.’ With a laugh, he concludes: ‘That just wouldn’t be playing to my strengths.’ (Claire Sawers) ■ 14 Aug (with Zoë Strachan), 10.15am, £10 (£8).
JOANNE LIMBURG Feeling the fear a little too acutely
We all have stuff we worry about. Job security; an awful accident happening to our loved ones; what tune we should have played at our funeral? That kind of thing. But when it comes to full-on fretting, most of us are rank amateurs next to poet Joanne Limburg. She has pinpointed the bullying at school and a miscarriage as events in her life which may well have contributed to the inner turmoils which led her to constantly believing that bad things were about to happen to her or her family. It took 24 years for her to have OCD diagnosed, and with her memoir, The Woman Who Thought Too Much, she has laid her story out in minute and often too-painful detail.
In an enlightened age when mental illness can be spoken openly by everyone from Stephen Fry to Neil Lennon, Limburg’s memoir acts as a source for those OCD sufferers who may feel, with some justification, that their affliction is merely comic relief next to manic depression or schizophrenia. Those who take an hour to get to bed at night or leave the house in the morning because they’re too busy playing with light switches or rattling locks should grab this book for both comfort and solidarity. (Brian Donaldson) ■ 17 Aug, 5pm, £10 (£8).