SIRS – The British countryside has suffered an acute sort of literary embarrassment over the past 75 years. After the excessive bucolic joy of the Romantics, the strong pastoral medium of George Eliot and the heavy – albeit divergent – rural symbolism of Hardy and Lawrence, the non-urban landscape has to a large extent become the butt of literary jokes – especially for the novelist. From Stella Gibbons – who openly mocked the works of Lawrence and Mary Webb – throught to Compton Mackenzie, the repertoire of stock comic country figures became firmly ingrained in the national psyche. By the 1950s the countryside had become largely a landscape of ridicule. This mindset was cemented by, amongst many other things, the ooo-ahr petty charm of the BBC serial ‘The Archers’ – which the bourgeois city dweller thrills to ironically “adore” – and equally the television output of the Carry Ons, Monty Python and, later, Ali G, village idiot, sheep-shagging farces – none of these examples being literature, because, let’s face it, with the exception of Joanna Trollope, who would go near those soggy and incestuous fields?
Today, the green hills and pastures are to a large extent merely ignored. They smack too much of bawdy humour, or – worse – sincerity: the terrain of eco-warriors and watercolourists. To be taken seriously contemporary literature must be urban, tough, streetwise, slangy, witty, up-to-date – and it seems that the countryside doesn’t have a place there. Its only modern literary usage is possibly as a place where ‘weird’ things happen: such as in Ali Smith’s latest novel ‘The Accidental’ where a middle-class urban family step out into the country and strange things occur which ‘turn their lives upside down’ – or Helen Cross’s debut novel ‘My Summer of Love’ – recently brought to the screen by Pawel Pawlikovski – where poor Yorkshire girl with religious ex-con brother (they’re weird in the countryside), meets with a pretty rich mythomane and embarks on a schoolgirl pash (crikey, like a sort of modern twisted Lady Chatterly!). It’s all heavy breathing in the verges, animal sensuality being released and bleak unblinking misery for the peasants. It’s as though the countryside is somehow stuck in a tractor rut, where, after having discovered its talents and beaten its way under the spotlight of fame, it is left, like an ageing rocker, churning out the same tunes – only not quite as well as it did 100 years before.
With this in mind I was refreshed to read the short stories of Stephen Tyson in your latest issue (‘Old Sloop’ and ‘Other Lives’, Vol. I, No. 2). Mr Tyson manages to invoke both the power and the beauty of the countryside – two elements which have too long been lacking in prose. In the description of Robert Vine’s scramble up towards the eponymous Old Sloop there were elements that touched on the very best poetry of Ted Hughes – one of the few modern writers to approach an understanding of how to treat the countryside in art. Yes, there is a sinister edge to his stories – the two girls grinning up at the pastor, the mysterious disappearance of Taffy, the young man parked by the side of the road to collect an unnamed girl from a far off house – but they are not ridiculous, never farce. They just are; they stand impassive. His tales evoke the silence of the country, the lack of brittle urban babble, an effect which, for the modern reader, cannot fail to be disturbing. And, just as the subject matter is silent, so is Tyson’s style – he does not chatter wittily or self-consciously as many contemporary writers seem to feel obliged to do; in fact he doesn’t intrude at all. Like the man building the wall in ‘Other Lives’ he is an observer; and, by so being, he forces the reader too to hold his breath, bite his tongue, and stand back with him to observe in awe.
With best wishes,
S. FULLER,
Paris, France.

SIRS – I was surprised to see my essay (‘The Bran or the Bran-Tub’, Vol. I, No. 1) cited in your recent editorial comment. The notion you referenced, that prose, more precisely the novel, is the literary form most closely associated with rationality, is one that I’m afraid I cannot claim as my own. In questioning the pertinence of poetry to this age I felt it key to stress the genesis of that more popular form, which has now all but completely usurped poetry’s historic predominance in the ever diminishing arena of literary pursuits.
It was a priviledge to present my undercooked version of this idea in your first number. Particularly when I found myself surrounded by the subtle and cloudy contributions billed as: ‘Four Stories by Nizaket Ali’.
I read these short works with something approaching pleasure, but their immediacy soon parted and I was left with only a vague recollection of their subjects. Then came your second issue and a further four stories by the aforementioned author. His world gradually unfolding. You have already mentioned this author’s sentence constructions – whose heightened rationality manages to, somehow, whilst embracing reason, also defy it – I would like, if you allow me, to briefly and ineffectually comment on their resonance.
Described more vividly in the second set of this cycle, his shadows still stalk a world, perhaps ours, in which their rare interactions are accented by an underplayed melodrama. As when Madame X, shivering and crumb-strewn, receives a dying beast on the door-step of her darkened salon; when Castor, a pale ghost, eavesdrops on a young child’s mission of emancipation; or when little Poly gazes at someone unknown, and for her, unknowable through a window in the city. Reading these newer tales I was revisited by my skeletal memories of, among other things: Castor’s earlier wanderings when, in ‘Revenant’, he enters darkness from light; or Effra, somehow suspended, between an endless sky and the restless lights of the city; I remember trains snaking through the night; empty, fallen faces filled with the dereliction of age but still examining their younger conterparts, whose senses seem sharpened by a spiritual, perhaps moral, exhaustion. Lately I have found myself craving the concision of Mr Ali’s deliberate descriptions.
And yet, for all his precision he discloses very little. His images, though brilliantly projected, appear on somewhat inhospitable screens.
I am no closer to understanding the significance of these compositions, I have not yet comprehended their design. I hope that in future I will manage to map the various relations of these broken images – in the meantime I bid you keep printing them, as long as they are there to be printed.
I am,
Yours very sincerely,
MAXIM BARRAULT
Royan, France.

SIRS/MESDAMES – How charming and unusual to read the collection of ‘Some American Poets’ in your most recent edition of the Ephemera. I am often saddened by the isolation of poetry in modern publications – in the ‘Poetry Workshop’ of the British newpaper, the Guardian, for example, the editors publish one sole poem per writer, from which their poetry editors – and henceforth their readers – are expected to judge the relative merit of the poet. How ridiculous! Of course it is always worthy to consider poetry. It has been so subsumed into the larger category of ‘literature’ that it is most often overlooked. Yet we cannot consider one painting, one poem, one novel in isolation. It is as though we analyse a tree from one bud – “yes!” we cry, “this bud is truly wonderful!”; yet without the root of the tree, the presence of other buds, twigs, branches, this potential flower will die. It will remain the unopened promise of a view from a train that we will not pass by again.
However, in the most recent editon of your magazine, you gave space to art. You allowed the reader to view the development of a poet. To consider their works from a larger sphere. I was most particularly struck by the poems of Ariana Reines. In the first poem, ‘The Base Pairs’, we are struck by her attachment to nature, to the importance of the past:
Bricks
Of inscrutable pigment, gorgeous and undeniable,
Obscure, sure, but to be loosened in another
Age, to be upbraided with pumices...
We see her ability to verily manipulate words – and through them, to create a crystalline image. We feel the pain of the bricks being rubbed away to become ‘hard and gem-like’. We can parallel the bricks with art – destroyed by precise unwielding scholarship into neat sqaure lifeless boxes.
Yet, on its own ‘The Base Pairs’ is but a poem, a simple idea. However, we move on, we read second poem, the magestic ‘The Illuminated Fold’. Here we see Ms. Reines loosen the (excuse the pun) reins of her talent. The poem leads magnificently on from the first, deepening our awareness of her voice:
The virgin has been gouged out....
She is all that's left, and must
Answer for me and the familiar travails
Of a distant foghorn, which is certainly the lowing of a dying lyric
Poet in an age that isn’t ours...
Here we begin to think that we are seing a possible voice, a voice that might endure. A voice that has cohesion and not mere cravings for quick shock or fame. Leading on, we arrive at ‘Deed Bote’, where Reines states more directly her authorial stance:
I haven’t the heft to make care
Come out of jungle bagatelles or out
Of such humid Andean scurf.
And what can the reader say but “At last!”. Enfin! We are given the opportunity to read something which is not, as you write in your most interesting editorial, ‘doodling’ but is in fact the visible development of a voice, the procedure of creation, the seed of something which might and should eventually take root and rise above us when we are no more.
I am happy to be,
yours faithfully,
D. MIADOWICZ,
London, England.