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Asking After Hearts

Asking After Hearts is John Easton’s third collection of poems and the work of a writer confident in his skills. He avoids crass linguistic pyrotechnics to produce a work of rare honesty and clarity. Daylight shines through every line as he delineates, in simple but compelling language, the framework and relationships that set humanity in time.

John Glenday

Asking After Hearts

John Easton
Finavon Print & Design 2006
ISBN 0-9541689-7-6
40 poems on 48 pages
£5.99

Someone once told me that all poems are love poems, even the ones that tear your heart in two. I agree with the quote on the backcover: “Easton can write, all right” and this new collection as the title indicates is all about love. Lyrical, accessible and technically precise; every poem broods with compassion. Though most of the poems are short – less than a page – they range across all our human emotions touching deep chords of recognition.

I welcomed John’s invitation to review his latest book, curious to know what he’s been writing recently. I hadn’t seen any of his work since we read together at the Edinburgh Festival three years ago when he was helping me develop Lapidus Scotland and organising events in Aberdeen. Knowing that he’s a librarian and a wordsmith, I wondered how many times I would need to consult the dictionary: less than five times. I like looking up words, my favourite was “macula” which I have heard used with the word “degeneration”; but Easton masterfully twisted the meaning ending the poem You: macula from generations, / sent to brighten up blue eyes.

The more I read and re-read these poems, the more I like them: their simplicity, clarity of images, serious humour, the everyday made universal like in the first stanza of Certainty:

She’d wanted to be absolutely sure –
needed to be certain
like fingering wet paint
despite the don’t touch signs.

Thirteen dates she’d had with him,
it said so in her diary…

There are many voices in this small book of verse: a spider speaks, night birds sing, mother, father, frightened lovers and a sprinkling of perfectly formed haiku like this one:

short hairs on the soap
so many years together
sharing little things

Asking After Hearts by John Easton is another little thing to share.

Larry Butler

Interview with John Easton, April 2006

John was interviewed by Julie Ross of Creative Cultures

John Easton is a poet based in Aberdeen. Although he is a librarian by day he finds that writing poetry is much more interesting.

Can you describe your creative process?
I think that poetry has to come from the heart to be effective. Other people don’t necessarily agree with that but I find my best poetry is personal stuff: influences in my life, important people and events. I adapt these into art (hopefully).

My writing comes at strange times but I do have to sit down and work at it because a poem is more than just a series of impressions. Impressions are the first thing, and then you have to hone it into something logical and ordered to make it literature, rather than just an outburst. A poem has to be internally logical so that readers and listeners can identify with it. It’s not their particular life but it’s the same as. It can take me a week or so to write a poem although the idea and inspiration can come in a flash. It may metamorphose during the process: what you think you are going to say changes as you write the poem because it goes in its own direction. That sounds a bit clichéd but it does, and you end up saying what you really wanted to say. It’s quite often more positive than what you were looking to do in the first place.

The subject of my work is the psychology of relationships and my philosophy about the modern world, just trying to relate to my feelings and how they entwine with other people in my life. It’s extremely personal: I don’t write much about stamp collecting!

Is writing poetry something that you have always done?
I wouldn’t say that I have been dedicatedly writing since I was a teenager but I certainly remember writing poems at school and at college. I didn’t do it very seriously then, but little snippets come back to me and I sometimes put them into modern poems. About 10 years ago I started going to writing groups and writing workshops. In 1999 I started running the Spring Tides Poetry Group and I have been doing that once a week ever since, on a Tuesday. These are more than performance meetings; we spend time talking about why a poem works and why it isn’t working.

It’s very supportive and I try to encourage people who come to the group to use the “feedback sandwich”: start with the good bits; then, at a stretch, say what the writer could do to make the poem better; then sum up with a positive statement.

Poetry is a mind-set; first of all you have to be constantly aware of what’s going on around you. We do have our eyes open but we are not seeing things in an original way. For me poetry is partly about seeing things in a new way, which paradoxically everybody has known all along but didn’t realise it. To say there’s the river which is setting jelly is not enough, though – we must assume the identity of something to gain new understanding. That’s success. Observe things and make connections: that is the most important attitude. Then write things down, keep practising, make more associations on the page, and keep the ones that have insight. Then work at getting a rhythm – that is equally important. The rhythm aspect of poetry is essential because some musicality will enhance effectiveness. Achieving this comes with listening to it in your head and listening to it from your voice over and over, making changes, hearing the rhythm again, until it is more striking and memorable. The third and final stage is optional: try to get published – and that’s the hardest bit!

But you can go the self-published route, and there’s no vanity in that nowadays. Otherwise you might write a book and send it to a publisher and they agree to do it but it could be five years down the line and you wouldn’t even like what you had written by that time. So instead you can bring a book out quite cheaply and still be your own master – pay some money for it, then recoup it from sales. This way you get all the money back on each sale. When a publisher does it, you get 20p or less per sale. It’s also more rewarding to control much of the process yourself. A publishing house can dictate what they want the title to be, which poems they want in and where they want them.

Where can we find copies of your books?
The Public Library has taken in seven copies of the new book; the local collection and branches will have it, as with the previous books; and the university also take it. Copies are deposited in all Britain’s national libraries as well. Bookshops are taking them, if and when they have a lively poetry section.
I am performing on the main bill at the Word Festival in May, was at the Shore Poets in Edinburgh a week ago, and the week before that I was at St Andrews for the Stanza Festival; these events are always excellent opportunities to buy books!

Are there many poets making a living from their work?
Poetry…ah…be very aware that there are only about four poets who are really making a full-time living of it in the UK. They present things on the radio and appear on TV as well. They appeal to the main populist imagination and are in all the bookshops. They’ve cracked it, financially.

Is your writing central to your life?
I can’t imagine not doing it now because there would be a big hole in my life where I would have to put something else in; it’s like giving up smoking – what do you do instead? But I do think I relate to the world slightly at a tangent from many people and that’s kind of crucial in poetry – not just seeing things but seeing things in a lateral way.

I did English at University and poetry was my favourite form there as well because it compresses everything; it’s not a 2-hour film or a novel which you have to spend 10 hours reading; it’s all there and you can use all the words to be as intense as you want. I studied in Aberdeen and have done a lot of writing groups here since, taking them and trying to help people bring on their writing. It is therapeutic to write down your life; so, if you’ve had a big trauma you can’t understand, get it down on the page and make some sense of it.

Is there an educational route that you should follow if you want to be a poet?
You don’t even need an education to write; everyone can write. It may be a bit rough and ready, but just put it down. Have the complete cathartic experience, get everything down on the page, then come back to it later and hone it and that will make the art, and healing, even better still. Writing is accessible to everyone; it’s no gift, it’s a birthright.

You said you write about very personal things. I assume there must be occasions where something is so personal that you have to think of the consequences of publishing it and showing it. Do you have to think about the repercussions of what you are doing?
You could just say publish and be damned, but you might be ostracised by most of the community! I’ve grown out of that largely and all my poems are gentle ones which nobody minds! Seriously, that’s the writing process: what starts off as an angry poem can take you to the deep core of the other person you are writing about, and then all anger is gone.

If somebody said to you that you could make your money out of writing poems would you do it?
It would be great to make real money out of poetry but, as I’ve said, there are very few who do that in this country.
If they gave me a contract for a few years, I’d take a Scottish Arts Council bursary. I’d have to go back to the day job afterwards though, and I don’t know how happy my employer would be for me to take a long sabbatical.

Can you describe your most inspirational moment?
On the big scale, it’s things like finding a partner, understanding the dying process, understanding my own emotions; that’s the big scale. On the much smaller scale, certain things just trigger off and I know that that there is going to be a poem starting soon. I need that sort of hook to get into something. For example, one of the poems in the new book is about a time when I was a teenager in Edinburgh and didn’t wear my glasses; I thought that these white dots I could see over on Arthur’s Seat were sheep! So that memory came back and started me off, and it becomes about distortions, about love and loyalty, and wonder, and the themes emerge.

Is poetry a neglected art form?
I think everyone should try poetry because it is something that you can get down in a couple of hours. Get down all the bones of it and then it’s up to you if you want to work on it over days. But it’s so easy to get impressions down – and yet it’s a neglected art form. People love going to the cinema and they love theatre and books, but what’s happened to poetry? It used to be the main form, from the Middle Ages right through to the romantic poets – we’re just looking for a renaissance today!

We are so bombarded with pyrotechnics that we forget there is a world within. Poetry is something reflective; maybe we are all too far outside our heads in the external world; we need to think and meditate more on what we are doing here to give meaning and purpose to our lives.

Do you think maybe a lot of people are doing that through music – in the way they write lyrics?
Certainly the best music that I like is great poetry as well. Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison of the Doors all wrote some great lines and the music enhances them. But sometimes music has rather weak lyrics. They can work in the context of the song but if you think about them in isolation they are often just saying chirpy-cheep-cheep.
But then, the other way round, I think Hip Hop is all right lyrically – at least it follows the rhythm of the words and thinks about the words rather than just filling out lines.

We lose the ability that children have to just play with language. Children love rhythm and playing with sounds. That’s where poetry all starts: rhythm – if you listen to a clock it’s going tick tick tick, but we make it go tick tock; that’s what happens in our heads and that’s where all poetry begins, just making rhythm with words.

Late Wake by Sheena Blackhall

This poem burns in to me, keeps demanding to be read and re-read, from the first line, laying out exactly where we are (in Sheena's brother's shoes), as Sheena and he orbited their parents "small raging planets" that have now "ceased to burn", through to the ending, unrhymed and flat,

"...I found I could not water with my tears

This is as close to keening (crying) as it gets."

At first reading, I thought the final line too flat. But on further readings, I found it a counterweight to the rest of the poem. In the second from last line she says she can't cry and in the last line – that this poem is it – all that stored-up emotion. And then I was in tears. That final line is also solitary, unattached to the previous three of the last stanza, so it leaves a strong sense of Sheena's feeling of separation.

The poem has many powerful images – "A human saltire, stretched on a curative bed"

followed by the beautiful "an attempt to train a true from a twisted vine".

Then the use of the next rhyming couplet (italicized) follows on powerfully to reinforce his sense of crucifixion, martyrdom and where Sheena believed he placed the blame. But it also introduces a new pattern, a new rhythm and rhyme which let us keep breathing after the earlier parts of the "torture" scene.

I cannot quote too much, but the use of "self-exile" at the start of the final stanza also introduces the next phase of their relationship simply. As a good story teller, in several of the stanzas, she sets the context within the first few words.

If I had one preference, it would be to see the poem without capitals starting every line as I find it difficult to be sure of pauses when reading.

In these twenty two lines, Sheena shows so much – and my heart goes out to her brother, her parents and to Sheena. But her brother and parents have gone – this is Sheena's voice and she has carried this for longer.

I look forward to re-reading this powerful poem over the years to come and hope many people around the world get the opportunity to read it.

Chris Dodd

The website

The website is amazing. I really like the simple white background and the shape and placing of the black and white image of the wave around the lighthouse. I also like the sparsity of text. I think it's the best-looking poetry site I've seen (and I include ones like The Poetry Society in that).

Chris Dodd

The Theatre

I saw a beautiful poem by John Easton in the Library called The Theatre – I would love to receive that poem and if possible re-produce it in our fundraising literature about HMT.

HMT closes on 13 March 2004 for the major redevelopment and I head up the campaign to raise £500,000 towards the final total.

I would love permission to use this poem in our literature, on the website and to read out at presentations about the theatre.

Andrea H Watt
Sponsorship and Development Manager/Sales and Marketing Manager
Performing Arts Venues

Skin Balaclavas

Skin Balaclavas by John Easton and Sheena Blackhall demonstrates a different view of romantic love, with the cynical 'Glaciation' ending in the paradoxical line 'Love's for ever, while it lasts.'

Easton demonstrates a contrasting love of his native city, Aberdeen, in poems such as 'Aberdeen' and 'River Dee, at Night' with conflicting themes of alienation in 'Portlethen', a critical look at the poverty and weariness of spirit often to be found beneath the surface of such semi-urban northern Scottish towns.

Sheena Blackhall's remarkably good poetry in Doric is reminiscent of Violet Jacob, with poems such as 'The Bawd': "I am the bawd, the fuspert in/The barley's beard, the barley's beard./ O sud ye drive me frae the lan/Derk be yer weird, derk be yer weird!" Her simple use of language and repetition harks back to traditional forms, such as ballads but her Scots is not confined to themes of nature, as has tended to be the case in the literature of our nation.

Pamphleteer, Chapman 100(1), 2002

Easton and Blackhall

If (Michael) Kelly's is the poetry of the working-class Scottish male struggling towards an authentic representation of his soul via the shreds of a culture that he can call his ain, Sheena Blackhall's poetry in Scots might serve as a useful model. In Skin Balaclavas, poems by John Easton and Sheena Blackhall, Blackhall contributes poems in both Scots and English. Whilst a fair proportion of the latter give scope to Blackhall's strengths and display something of the same vitality of outlook and response that characterise her work in Scots, it's in Scots that the relationship between content and form, personality and expression is – at its best (Wye o the Wirm, Cullerlie Wid for me in this collection) – truly dynamic.

John Easton's half of the collection shares a good few of the qualities of Blackhall's work. There's a gutsiness about his stronger stuff, particularly these poems that directly address Aberdeen – Aberdeen, you are a butterfly, and also fifty pupae / a summer day, and also weeks of storms – that while it isn't the deep-layered passion Blackhall can bring to things North-Eastern isn't far ahint. Elsewhere the lolloping voice whose struggle to contain the multitudes within brings possibility and personality to often chaotic material is trimmed to the stark economy of Easton's shorter poems. These for the most part work well too – it's only in the middle-ground where the control of the shorter work is eased without ever fully engaging the drive of longer poems like Aberdeen that Easton seems uncomfortable and the poetry too often snatched and lightweight.

Nomad, 2001

Routine Manoeuvres

Winner of Ottakars Local Poetry Competition – October 2001

by Knotbrook Taylor

I'm not a poetry critic but I think Tim's poem is very original. It has a very strong lyrical quality to it which appeals to me musically and overall, I think it's cleverly crafted.

For me, one of the best lines in the poem is "hogging a landscape entwined in their arms". I think this perfectly encapsulates the radiance of the lovers who are embracing the landscape with the same passion they feel for each other. They are so engrossed in themselves that they don't anticipate "the whales of the sky" sweeping down on them. The contrast between the routine RAF world and the unpredictability of the lovers' swim is powerful and gives the poem its edge.

The lovebirds are brought back down to earth after their interruption with "they fell like the rain" which I think is a lovely description because it both captures the cooling of excitement that has gone before and also gives one the impression of a temporary hiccup in their plans as we all know the ever-changing climate in the North East! The poem ultimately celebrates the freedom of individuals to express themselves, of spontaneous love.

The last stanza cleverly binds together the RAF world and that of the lovers, with "who gave the orders on a Monday afternoon to rattle the pebbles and vindicate love" but again, strikingly contrasts them.

In short, I think this is a brilliant poem, with a lot of beautiful imagery.

Catriona Yule

Bringing Up The Tail

by John Easton and Sheena Blackhall

This is a book served up in two parts: the nouvelle cuisine of John Easton's anglicised, contemporary, pared down poetry and the rich, melodious dessert of (mainly) Scots dialect poems by Sheena Blackhall.

John Easton's section of the book has an underlying narrative which concerns a once-happy relationship, destroyed by a femme fatale. The narrator first appears as a 'little icy planet' casting backwards glances at the warm sun just departed, but drawn unerringly by the 'gravitational pull' of the next star he will circle with its 'molten core'.

The aftermath of this event, the rebuilding, the making strong again (as described in the title poem 'Bringing up the Tail') form the backbone of Easton's poem sequence. If this femme fatale is the spider-like voice in the disconcerting poem entitled 'The Cooling Effect', then it seems her prey is most unfortunate:

"Consider your existence
now that of an insect
since you changed your track
since you walked away."

Here, simile is avoided by sleight of hand. In another poignant and original portrait from this broken relationship, 'Your Plant', the narrator considers a pot plant inherited from a previous relationship as if it were the child of that union, and wonders how its previous owner could have given it up. The grain of truth in this skewed concept is revealed as the plant 'glistens with embarrassment' while its leaves are polished by the 'step-parents'.

Occasionally, John Easton's poems can be over-inspired and cramped by clumsy syntax. For example, in the poem 'Soundings': "I listen and they fill with mystic grace". Mystic Grace? Didn't she used to appear on National Lottery Live? But these 'spiritual' poems don't always turn out bright. The short poems 'Rainbow Fish' and 'Shorelights' promise good weather but harbour darker clouds than we expect.

The poems are not afraid to go to strange places.. Poems such as 'Dancing Drums' and 'Still Life' defy clear understanding but are none the worse for that. In one of the best poems, 'Grief Rehearsals', a pared down narrative introduces an old lady found 'half-naked' in the street. She is like the survivor of some tempest but, as we learn, the storm is in her head, memorably captured in the following stanza:

"And still the storm goes on,
uprooting all connections.
The cells not blown away
are you: debris and confusion."

The balance of lines 3 and 4 is perfect, effectively bringing the reader up short, and then working through the storm metaphor to the point where, in the word 'confusion', it has earned its keep twice over. These poems work together and build an original and convincing outlook on the world.

I have described Sheena Blackhall's contribution as a rich dessert, but this is not served up in the usual manner. The "strawberry trickle" in her excellent poem 'Deflowering' for example, is an especially visceral treat. The poem describes first love in a way that is part vivisection, part last rites. By the time you get to the end, you are gritting your teeth.

This rich vein of description is continued in other poems, such as 'Boar':

"Turning his screwed-up tail towards my face
He flaunts his dribbling bottom, pursed like a sour crone's mouth.
Jiggling between two hams, his balls are breakfast rolls."

Floury breakfast rolls, no doubt! This boar is the sacred animal of the Celtic goddess of inspiration, Ceridwin. The description of his squalid lifestyle is marvellous, and the revelation that the 'straw, dust and dung' are 'the rosebuds of his world' is perhaps the key to understanding the poet's own inspiration. She rewards a cow, for example, for having poo stuck to its tail:

"The brown towe of her tail
swinging medallions of dung."

Several of these poems just burst with joyous life – 'Toun Junction' and 'Duthie Park' for example. There is an exuberant, just-cooked quality to the language which seems to be part-Doric and part-onomatopoetic:

"Pensioners dauchlin, terrapins splashin,
Bunbazed loons watchin goldfish flashin,
Beech tree raxxes in her timmer sark.
Haudin up the Heivens is gey hard wark!"

These are wonderful evocations of a place (Aberdeen) which elsewhere is threatened by the mentality which would think to replace cows and fields by
a patio (Ode to a Patio):

"I do think fields are nasty, with cows that moo for hours.
They poo in awkward places. They pee upon the flowers.
I think I'll make a video called 'Cows and grazing crop'
and then we could incinerate them all and build a shop."

Some would call this doggerel. To me it is satire with bite. Other poems are so simple and fine that they are surely destined for posterity: 'Fey Ferlies', 'Locked Door' and 'The Changeling Kyrielle', for example, all have a calm authority.

A number of the dialect pieces are songs with a tune indicated in case you want to hum along. Poems like 'The Tune that Lowped aff o the Fiddle' and 'Angel-Face' are propelled by strong rhymes and rhythms. I particularly liked the latter. It is about a small child misled by older children into an accident. The poem is related like a child's playground rhyme and ends with the perfect sentiment: "Thank God they fand her, or she'd be oot".

Elsewhere, cheeky humour comes to the fore. 'Rap on the Modern In-Brits in Poetry' gives a run down of the low down on the in-poets:

"Oh the Martian School Boys Reid and Raine,
(Eyes melt down, bodies shriek without pain)
Milkmen deliver penguins to their door,
And a kettle on the Octopus at half past four!"

She seems to suggest they are smug and lack feeling. Can it be true? Blackhall's real hero is that 'living icon' Seamus Heaney, the leader of the poetry pack! Her poem about him (Lead Wolf) is just too love-struck to succeed, but she pulls a trick at the end which convinces: "Down-wind at table, hairs rose on my neck." It's that visceral thing again.

Sheena Blackhall is a very important poet (VIP) who deserves to be known far beyond the sparsely populated regions she frequents.

Jonathan Wonham

Factor 30

Factor 30, by Jonathan Wonham, succeeds in evoking a scene of almost total detachment from the wider world. The characters in it are sunbathing. They are in their own little world, despite the fact that the unrelenting sun is their accomplice, and they are disengaged and reduced to their physical senses. He is concentrating on the small of her back and some minute details of her tan. She is seen to be fanning her face with the least possible effort. The word louche adds to the feeling of decadence.

In the lifelong day of indulgent trivia, there is timelessness. He is counting her one two three four five lower vertebrae! Not as an ordering process, but as a form of mantra, I think, so that we will be held in trance all the way with them to their own pink sunset.

John Easton

Thanks

Thanks for an inspirational evening. Very enjoyable. More to follow, I hope.

Eddie Gibbons

Tuesday

Thanks again for the opportunity to speak to the Tides about my work, and poetry in general, on Tuesday evening. I was impressed with the group – keen, quick, acute, skilled. Oh, and I'm sure Thursday will be a fine launch for a fine book. I would have been there if I could have been there.

John Glenday

Note

Just a short note to say that the 'springtides' site looks good. Keep up the good work. As you will no doubt know, there really is a shortage of platforms/events in Scotland for poetry. The web is one way to have a constant presence. Perhaps you could consider having an e mail list of contacts which could receive a chosen work/s every month. Just a thought. In the meantime all the very best.

John Ferry
Editor, Cutting Teeth