Review of the reads – July 2024

Yusef Sayed’s review of the reads.

Reading Lessons by Carol Atherton
Published by Fig Tree, price £18.99 hardback

Head of English at Spalding Grammar School, Carol Atherton has been teaching classic novels, poems and contemporary fiction to students for almost three decades. In her excellent new book, she shares personal reflections on her vocation and the lessons, joys and challenges that come with studying literature alongside young people in the classroom.

Blending memoir with critical reflections on the curriculum past and present, Reading Lessons guides us through well-known set texts like Great Expectations, a staple of secondary school learning for decades, as well as more recent additions that bring in previously unheard voices, such as Marjorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses.

Attentive to raging debates about diversity, censorship and the capacity of school pupils to engage in focused reading amid all the distractions and anxieties of modern (and teenage) life, Atherton does an admirable job of arguing for the relevance of older books and verse – and the subject of English as a whole, with the increased emphasis now on STEM subjects. The status and implied messages of the once indisputable To Kill A Mockingbird may have been questioned in recent years, but Atherton believes bringing more scrutiny into discussions can only be beneficial.

Proving a fine storyteller herself, Atherton leads into each chapter’s book study with an engaging episode or memory. And while many of the early chapters are more story and theme-focused, her illuminating discussions of Macbeth and The History Boys hone in on the power of the language that the best literature has to offer.

eachers will relate to Atherton’s tales from the frontline, teens will find extra insight to help with their academic studies (and may develop a bit more sympathy for their teachers too) and the general reader will find in Reading Lessons plenty of recommendations for bringing them up to speed with the canon and the most urgent questions about English and its place in our lives. Following any one of these threads would have made Atherton’s book valuable; to weave them all together with sensitivity and humour is hugely impressive.

The Process of Poetry Edited by Rosanna McGlone
Published by Fly on the Wall Press, price £10.99 paperback

What any given poem ‘means’ is often somewhat ungraspable – this can be part of the appeal or frustration of reading poetry, depending on the reader. How poets create their work is just as often mysterious. With a bit more insight into the process, can the pleasures of poems can be shared further, their obscurities made clearer – or does it threaten to dispel some of the ‘magic’?

Lincoln based writer and journalist Rosanna McGlone’s latest book The Process of Poetry seeks to illuminate the working lives of a number of contemporary poets. The spur for her conversations is an early draft of one of their poems, considered side by side with the published version. It is a simple but inspired prompt that allows McGlone to zone in on the fine details, and in this way help to point to overarching techniques, themes and habits.

The state of the drafts are wide-ranging: some are scrawled by hand and barely legible, as with Pascale Petit’s ‘Ortolan’ and Gillian Clarke’s ‘The Piano’; some are radically different to the published piece – sometimes in form, if not the dominant images and phrases. Sean O’Brien explains why a simple switch in the order of the first two lines of the first verse of ‘The Reader, After Daumier’ was essential to the intended effect.

Music is mentioned often, attention paid to how the poems sound. As interesting as it is to see the visual transformations the poems go through, we are reminded of the aural effects too, and how these help convey feeling. What also comes through time and time again is the importance placed on reading other poets’ work. A flash of inspiration from personal experience might spark a new poem into life but the best poetry is typically shaped by a lifetime’s immersion in the works of others, living and dead, and a process of years.

Without reducing the poems to any one reading, McGlone’s book does a fine job of demystifying the work of poets, and the grounding of the process in the everyday lives of these writers should give budding writers encouragment to persist in their creative efforts, whatever their circumstances.

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