Aidan Semmens’s shortlisted title The Book of Isaac is an extraordinary collection of sonnets that explores the Tanakh and its historical and contemporary resonances, travelling through philosophy, ritual, art, peasantry and recent Russian revolutionary history — it is a very serious literary achievement, filled with haunting, beautiful lines, yet the whole work gathers force as an excavation of spiritual and political legacies. Since his shortlisting for the Crashaw Prize a second collection is to appear from Shearsman, A Stone Dog in April 2011 — however, the judges found that this did not invalidate his entry into the 2010 Crashaw shortlist.
Biography
I got my start in poetry in 1968 at age ten, when I won a writing competition run by the National Society for Mentally Handicapped Children (now Mencap) — Philip Gross, last year’s TS Eliot Prize-winner, was among the runners-up. While still at school, I had a number of poems published in small-press magazines, and when I went up to Cambridge in 1975 to read English I joined the Poetry Society. I succeeded Peter Robinson, now literature professor at Reading, as society chairman and with him edited three issues of Perfect Bound magazine, publishing such writers as Tom Raworth, Christopher Middleton, John Wilkinson, Iain Sinclair and others now deservedly well-respected. I won the university’s Chancellor’s Medal for an English Poem in 1978.
After graduating I went into regional journalism, working in Goole, Barrow-in-Furness, Sunderland, where I was sports editor of the evening paper, and Ipswich. My involvement with poetry waned, although I had a pamphlet published by Pig Press in 1985. I took up my pen again in 2002 after seeing myself described by Peter Robinson, in an interview on the Jacket website, as having “long given up writing poetry”. I have since had work in a number of magazines, notably Shearsman, Great Works, Stride, Shadowtrain… and Jacket, for which I contributed to a memorial to my friend Ric Caddel.
Meanwhile, I have for the past 16 years been a sports sub-editor for the News of the World, and I continue to write a weekly opinion column for the Ipswich Evening Star.
The Interview
“Thanks for talking to me, Aidan. This is an extraordinary book that draws together huge subjects, can you start by telling me the background to the book?”
“I’d had it in mind for many years to write a book about my Russian family, based on letters and sketchy memoirs left by my grandmother. She lived with us all the time I was growing up, but sadly it was only after she died, when I was 18, that I realised just what an amazing life she’d had.
Born in tsarist Russia, to a family of revolutionists, she barely knew her father, who fled to America shortly after she was born to avoid a second Siberian exile. When she was nine years old, her mother was arrested and she was shipped off to New York to live with her father — who, she found, had a second family there. Later, she returned to Russia, only to get caught up in the Revolution, and then the civil war, from which she escaped to England in 1919 by marrying an English sailor.
The more I researched, the more fascinating I found the whole family tale. My grandmother’s elder brother, for example, was an early leader of the US Communist Party, before falling victim to Stalin. Her aunt earned a footnote in history by translating Marx into Russian. But with great gaps in the source material – especially in Russia – I didn’t feel able to write it as a formal history. I considered treating it as a novel, and even wrote several chapters, but kept finding facts contradicted my imaginative leaps. Finally, rather to my surprise, the whole thing seemed to crystallise into a sequence of damaged sonnets.”
“This feels like a very large-scale project to me. What was going on in your life while you were writing the poems?”
“At the start, I was working two days a week at the News of the World — now reduced to Saturdays only – and otherwise occupying my time as dad and househusband. My partner teaches sixth-form at our local comprehensive, and our daughter started there shortly after the book was finished. A lot of my composing takes place in my head while I’m out with the dog.”
“This book is a completely integrated work — of course, the themes, the strands are clear — but can you tell me what for you think were the real driving elements?”
“Two things really combined to make the book the way it is: my growing fascination with the material, and the encouragement I got from the editors of Blackbox Manifold and Free Verse magazines for a method of composition I devised. This involves writing formal sonnets in traditional lines of iambic pentameter, then ‘distressing’ them through the use, or mis-use, of translation software. Since translation, misunderstandings and language difficulties are at the heart of the subject matter, this method seemed particularly appropriate. The use of lines drawn from the apocryphal Book of Esdras to frame the sequence derives from an old habit I have of using Old Testament quotations as titles. Again, the archaic translated text, describing a period of upheaval and oppression in Jewish history, formed an appropriate background.”
“I hadn’t imagined the techniques you’d used. Now, it’s clear this has been a all-consuming project, how long did it take to bring together and give it shape?”
“From inception of the idea to write the story to its completion in present form was more than 20 years. From the point when I began seriously gathering source material, perhaps three years. From starting work on it as a poem sequence, it took about six months.”
“I have to ask, who are your influences? Which writers have been abiding passions?”
“The poets I’ve been most influenced by on the page are probably Roy Fisher and George Oppen. The greatest direct help and encouragement I’ve had came from the late Richard Caddel, a good friend and a fine example as poet, editor and organiser of readings. The poet Tony Baker is another old friend whose support has at times been very valuable.”
“So where to next? Are you working on something new?”
“I haven’t given up on the idea of turning the material that produced The Book of Isaac into a prose work. In the meantime, I have an idea for a sequel, broadening out from the familial to the more general, which might be The Book of Revolution.”
“Thanks very much for talking to me.”
The photo is of Aidan Semmens’ great-grandfather, Isaac Hourwich, the Isaac of the book’s title. Fragments of his writings, both public and private, provide much of the original material the writer has used.
“the bone is pulled out…”
the bone is pulled out, the eye which is dented atrophies,
the spring which has lived flows to become clean
peasants under the same series on how the mere
means of compelling the farmer to work
in the family fundamental sugarcane landless fasting soil
his ironical smile against his fraud
but how the flesh has fallen from his person
standing pride & stature & the sunk eyes weakened
executing ceremony for the calm hand of the long finger
inspect in detail the intended holiness by all documents
where yearning with that lip of the collection
irrational, ragged & of musty page
a young girl cherishes the namelessness
as olives clinging to the tree through winter
[...] Aidan Semmens’s shortlisted title The Book of Isaac is an extraordinary collection of sonnets that explores the Tanakh and its historical and contemporary resonances, travelling through philosophy, ritual, art, peasantry and recent Russian revolutionary history — it is a very serious literary achievement, filled with haunting, beautiful lines, yet the whole work gathers force as an excavation of spiritual and political legacies. Since his shortlisting for the Crashaw Prize a second collection is to appear from Shearsman, A Stone Dog in April 2011 — however, the judges found that this did not invalidate his entry into the 2010 Crashaw shortlist. “Thanks for talking to me, Aidan. This is an extraordinary book that draws together huge subjects, can you start by telling me the background to the book?” “I’d had it in mind for many years to write a book about my Russian family, based on letters and sketchy memoirs left by my grandmother. She lived with us all the time I was growing up, but sadly it was only after she died, when I was 18, that I realised just what an amazing life she’d had. Read more at Salt. [...]