Walking on Water: Poems by David Green

Today I present an interview with acclaimed British poet David Green and his new poetry collection 'Walking on Water'. Green, who originates from Nottingham in England, is an acclaimed, and published (South, About Larkin magazines amongst others) prize winning poet (Winner - 2006 Ottakars Portsmouth Poetry Competition). Walking on Water (December 2006) is his seventh published collection of poems since 1991 and is a reflective, intelligent and occasionally melancholic offering.

Distilled with, as one commentator puts it, a "sense of raw vulnerability that comes from unremitting disbelief, a relentlessly scouring scepticism", Green's poems are an obviously literate and stimulating synthesis of deep thought, everyday observations which utilise a variety of conventional and abstract techniques and perspectives to explore across twelve poems, within a variety of contexts, diverse themes as time, change, history, nature, places, materialism, relationships, love and notions of authenticity in art, performance and experience. The Ottakars' prize winning 'The Cathedrals of Liverpool' notably encapsulates many of these themes in one poem:

"That New Year's day eventually
the drizzle changed to rain and back
and just in time we came across
Scott's protestant cathedral
-a vault of air that broods upon
its sinfulness, the height of bricks
too distant for the camera flash
to properly illuminate
which picked out only you..."

Unrequited love is a particularly distinct and sensitive theme within the collection featuring in the reflective 'Anagram':

"The might-be’s and might-not-be’s zoomed about –
You must have been thinking of someone else
But, then again, your small, soft tender mouth
Has said as much. There are too many vowels,
Aren’t there, in I love you?"

and 'Sometime Gone’, inspired by James Fenton's Out of Danger.

Fenton's

"Out of danger from the wind,
Out of danger from the wave,
Out of danger from the heart
Falling, falling out of love."

inspires:

"never mine to to say forever
never mine to watch asleep
never mine to share year's ends with,
never mine to keep."

In my favourite poem from the collection 'Piccadilly Dusk', originally published in About Larkin magazine, Green articulates with considerable insight the authentically inauthentic deceptive, superficial and empty character behind the expensive and famous facades of ultra upmarket central London that have yet to be turned into an armed barricade.

"Fake is sometimes more expensive than real
What looks like more important than what is.
The spray of golden light on each hotel
is international, rented, nobody's.

No nightingale ever sang in this square
in any of the languages you know
Nobody is at home here, it's nowhere
and here it's permanently time to go"

Recently David kindly found the time for a brief interview to discuss Walking on Water, his poetry and influences:

How would you describe your collection ‘Walking on Water’ in one sentence?
It’s relaxed and confident.

Why did you choose the poem ‘Walking on Water’ as the title for your latest collection?
It’s the best title for a collection of all the poems in it. But it also probably refers to the confidence and perhaps, at a push, refers to the thing that poetry at its best can do with language. Like doing the seemingly impossible, although you can see how it’s done if you look closer.

If you could recommend somebody to read just one poem in ‘Walking on Water’ which one would it be and why?
It’s such a short book (and likely to be criticised for that) that it wouldn’t take very long to read it all. But I wonder if ‘Piccadilly Dusk’ is somehow the best thing in it. I hope it translates the moment into something the reader can share and I think it is a well-made thing. I was lucky to have the word ‘expatriate’ waiting in the back of my mind, ready for use, and it fitted in nicely here.

Notions of nature, weather and the seasons are well represented in ‘Walking on Water’ do you have any particular environmental and ecological views?
I remember someone who read ‘Museum’ in 1991 remarking that there was a lot of weather in it. I don’t do it consciously- perhaps it’s an English obsession. Perhaps being a bicycle rider, I’m always looking at the weather with a view to my next ride. Or perhaps the weather and the seasons are moods, easy and useful ‘objective correlatives’, in Eliot’s famous phrase. I think the planet- and our lives on it- has probably been damaged beyond repair already but it’s not meant to be a theme in my poems.

When did you become interested in, and start writing, poetry?
Creative writing was always an easy option at school from the earliest age. I can’t really remember not being interested in words but it wouldn’t have been until I was 14 or 15 that I deliberately set out to write poems. It’s hard to say when, or if ever, I wrote my first successful poem. I began ‘Re-read’, the selected poems, with Ferdinand, which I wrote when I was about 18 but the poems I had in the school magazine for a few years before that were okay for a teenager. I still haven’t written my essay on how ‘ poet is the easiest job in the world’.

Who would you cite as your most significant influences in poetry?
Thom Gunn was the poet who made me want to be a poet in the same way that George Best made me want to be a footballer. After that, the example of Philip Larkin. And after him, many of them. Once I could have pointed out lines here and there where my poems echoed Hardy, Auden or several others but I’ve gradually forgotten where the bodies are buried. ‘Sometime Gone’ in Walking on Water is deliberately homage to James Fenton’s poem ‘Out of Danger’. But I don’t think about other poets in those terms so much now, or try not to.

I understand some readers in the past have been slightly critical of your cerebral approach and technique, contending that you don’t write enough for the ‘common man’ (whatever one of them may be). How do you respond to this accusation?
I know that Martin Stannard wrote in PQR that my Tycho Brahe poems read like ‘biography by numbers’ and that he suggested I wrote too many poems about other works of art. Giles Darvill wrote a review of ‘Re-read’ in South magazine that said the effect was of ‘human feeling and energy packed into the discipline of a silicon chip’. The Darvill was a much more positive review than the Stannard but I don’t see either accusing me of being overly cerebral. If one wants ‘cerebral’ poetry one goes to Prynne, Basil Bunting, Ezra Pound and those who attend the conferences at Cambridge. I’m with Larkin, Edward Thomas and those who would like to be accessible at a first reading, although I’d like to think that one reading is not all that it would take to enjoy a poem properly.

What advice, if any, would you give to any poets, aspiring or otherwise?
You have to enjoy it for its own sake. It certainly doesn’t do any harm to read lots of different poets. But there’s no money in it and it’s a cliquey, small industry so it’s best not to make any plans for a career in it.

Aside from winning the Ottakars (Now Waterstones) Portsmouth Poetry Competition for the second consecutive year, do you have any further poetical plans or ambitions?
Not really. I’ve got a new poem ready for the competition in the hope that there is one this year and, of course, one could always use the £500 national prize rather than just winning in Portsmouth. I’m never sure where the next poem is coming from.

David Green and David Green Books can be found here