Review by Jonathan Taylor of "The English Disease" by Lydia Towsey

As with her previous poetry collection, Lydia Towsey’s second book, The English Disease, is full of poems which are musical, lyrical, performative, but which also jump off the page into the ears and mouth of the reader: poems, that is, which work equally out loud or ‘in-loud’ – heard via silently-moving lips in the mind’s-ear of the reader. 

In these poems, the reader hears of modern England’s diseases and their symptoms – as well as possible cures, some which help, some of which make them worse: ‘There must be a shot. / There must be a cure // for the English disease, the English disease.’ Towsey asks diseased England to ‘write back’ to her, so she, like a poet-doctor, can diagnose what is wrong – and what might be right, too. Among the militant nationalists, the ‘men in monocles abusing privilege,’ the ‘treatments / elections and referendums,’ the war-mongering, the failed primeministers, the arms sales, the xenophobia, she traces a counter-narrative, a counter-culture, a half-obscured English tradition of resistance, hospitality, rebellion, subversive humour, courtesy, a ‘decency of queues.’ This is a crypto-Socialist England, not unlike that imagined by George Orwell in his great essay The Lion and the Unicorn, which needs to ‘remember the speeches’:

          We shall welcome them on the beaches. 
          We shall welcome them on landing grounds. 
          We shall welcome them in the felds and in the streets. 
          We shall welcome in the hills. 

          I remember Monty Python, 
          I remember Bowie, 
          I remember Boudicca, 
          I remember Bevan.

Politics, though, is not all speeches and heroes, not all Boudiccas and Bevans and Guy Fawkeses. It does not only happen on a national scale. It is also a uniquely personal force, as universal as gravity, which operates between people in queues, friends sharing cups of tea. And Towsey’s poetry beautifully captures moments of connection between the political and the personal, the macrocosmic and microcosmic. It stands with Jung, when he declares that ‘the psychology of the individual is reflected in the psychology of the nation.’ In Towsey’s poetry, family history, parenthood, eating disorders, tea drinking, queuing, politeness and its opposite all reflect the psychology of contemporary England – a psychology which intermingles all these things with a traumatic history ‘built on broken bones / returning boats to burning homes.’ 

Still, if this national history is reflected in individual actions and, indeed, individual poems, it can also be distorted, refracted, resisted – through utopian moments of friendship, through twisted nursery rhymes, reconceived myths, and a new language that Towsey calls ‘Zomblish.’ Towsey’s are visionary poems which reflect national psychological states, and then go on to shatter them, in order to piece together new, better ones – of ‘Donald Trump saying sorry. / Fiscal reform to favour the many. / My daughter sleeping through the night.’ A better England – a better world – is possible, and Towsey’s poems hold out that hope: 

          Build me a picket fence, 
          form me a queue. 

          Shall we sit for days on end 
          and talk as weather beats on tents?

          The light that sets on the British Empire 
          points from yesterday to a new tomorrow. 
          This land might grow a new beginning. 

          This generation must find a way. 
          There must be a salve.

About the reviewer

Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, critic and lecturer. His books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk. 

Review by Karol Valderrama of the "Reading the Body" event by Lydia Towsey and Scott Brigwood at Attenborough Arts Centre

Everybody’s Reading Festival 2015
26th September – 4th October

Reading the Body:
Attenborough Arts Centre
10am-3:30pm

When I first considered joining this event, I felt attracted by its main topic and the dynamism the programme offered.  However, I must confess I was concerned when I decided to attend, and also when I realised drawing was going to be an alternative but demanding way to interpret and read a female body.

My concern increased when I arrived, as I found out that this was a class with people who have had experience in drawing, even though I could define myself as skilled to do basic traces.  Fortunately, both Lydia Towsey and Scott Brigwood (leading artists of the event) made of the experience something welcoming, simple and significant, even before starting the workshop.  After going into the room, I was invited to grab a drawing board (the first one in my life), some graphite sticks, charcoal, chalk pastels and markers, and so explore a whole new world through white sheets of paper.

Based on Scott’s words, this was an experience of mark-making which aimed to discover the meaning of our drawings and going beyond conventional techniques.  People who attended this event had the opportunity to create a unique signature no matter the background each one of us had.  Several suggestions were given, beginning with the most valuable, I would say: obliterating preconceptions to guarantee the best “babies” ever (which was the name given to our artistic creations by Lydia).

With materials at hand, general recommendations and a naked model in front of us, the main task was simple: look at the model and draw.  It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But again, this experience was not just about conventional drawing; not just because it was NOT focused on developing a common or traditional drawing style, but also because it was NOT just about images: It was about an interesting mixture of words and images at the same time. 

Later on, instructions were given clearly and we were all ready to start.  Nevertheless, every new sheet that was taken on the board was becoming progressively more challenging, aiming to change styles, to break paradigms and to contribute from a new individual perspective.  A white sheet was not just a white sheet; it was an experience that led to feelings of freedom or chaotic emotions at the moment of completing every new drawing.  Again, this was not just drawing, as words were coming up, supplementing graphical expression; they were saying something together, so words were images, and images were sentences.

With regards to the model, her natural shape contrasted with some exaggerated poses she gave us at every stage.  What did they really aim to?  Certainly, the physical and aesthetic analysis of her, moved towards a more subjective and original reading of her movement or inactivity; a reading resulting of what she performed, combining our beliefs, multiple contexts and the way we used the given tools.  For instance, the graphite stick enhanced our drawings and it was there as the magic tool to discover what the woman in front really meant… not necessarily nudity… but multiple features or traits within our realities.  This finally became a process of extreme consciousness regarding the female representation and our unconscious ways of examining female bodies.

As it was mentioned in the information given prior to the event, it was indeed a different way to read, write and draw the female body.  Expected or not, these creations ended up being an additional way to understand ourselves via original images, as a consequence of the willingness everyone had to move further on within the experience.  Indeed, no experience was necessary; the key was to strongly believe what both artists mentioned at the beginning: Starting without preconceptions and allowing the mark-making experience to consequently see transformations at the moment of reading.

Now that the workshop is over, several questions come to my mind.  First, how did we, participants, finally understand the body we read during those hours?  How did we depict it?  Did our backgrounds and beliefs contribute to have a different or similar reading among us?  After this, I also thought and asked myself what “reading the body” means today, based on the experience.  Multiple answers could appear, for sure, and much more when visual memories swim through social networks in the current days. 

“Choose the events that might make a difference,” the festival Coordinator, Juliet Martin, stated in the foreword of the brochure.  Clearly, I did not hesitate in following her invitation and focused my attention on this particular one, identifying this as an opportunity to make a multifaceted reading, writing and representation of the female body in one same moment.  Evidently, this experience allowed us to be all readers and mark-makers with no exclusion of gender or creed, to consequently analyse this type of art freely.  We were not more than ten participants, just a few indeed, but enough people to replicate this alternative way of reading humanity in modern times. 


About the reviewer
Karol Valderrama is an English/Spanish teacher from Colombia who lives in Leicester.  She has worked in an interdisciplinary level, completing an MA in Film and Film Cultures.  Additionally, Karol is a PhD Candidate in Modern Languages at the University of Leicester focusing on Latin American cinema and gender studies.

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "The Venus Papers" by Lydia Towsey

I had the honour of introducing Lydia Towsey's first full-length poetry collection, The Venus Papers (Burning Eye Books, 2015), at the launch event as part of Everybody's Reading Festival. The following review is the text of my introduction.

Lydia Towsey's new book, The Venus Papers, exemplifies one of my favourite forms of contemporary poetry: that is, the poetry which manages simultaneously to be both performative and musical, on the one hand, and beautiful, intellectually stimulating and poignant page poetry, on the other. Not many poets manage to sustain this balancing act - but who do succeed in fusing performativity with written lyricism in their work.

Lydia's collection is at once diverse and coherent in its fusing of such musical, performative and lyrical elements. There are various narrative strands which run throughout the book (which makes me glad I read it, for once, cover to cover, not as I'd usually read a poetry book, by dipping into separate poems). These themes include mother-daughter relationships and matrilinearity in general; Hungarian and Welsh heritages; the politics of immigration, filtered through the powerful allegory of Venus turning up in modern-day Britain; travel poems, vivid recreations of South Africa, America, Europe and so on; and, of course, the overwhelming significance of a good cup of tea.

I particularly enjoyed the ways in which Lydia's poems deal with politics: the politics of immigration, of dictatorship, of gender. In poems like "Incanto," "Venus Votes," "Things People Say About Venus in the Tabloids," and "Hungary," to name just a few, Lydia tackles deeply important political subjects, but in ways which are original, poetic, fascinating - defamiliarising what the media inures us to, what TV and newspapers ideologically obscure, often by rendering all too familiar, everyday, banal. Lydia's poetry does the opposite: making the horrific, the tragic, the unjustifiable seem themselves again.

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor's books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015), and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012). His poetry collection is Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. See www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.

Maria and The Mullet, Upstairs at the Western: Reviewed by Charles Wheeler

This review is late. Even later than I was to the event itself. But while my lateness on 3rd October gained me nothing but a few disapproving glances as my awkward search for a seat undermined the enchanting atmosphere of the Western's hidden-gem attic venue, the lateness of this piece has proven useful, providing me with glorious, enriching, relevance-granting context. How fortunate for me.

Y'see, in the weeks since this event (during which I moved house, started a new job, and tripled the amount of pets I own - legitimate excuses to go alongside my myriad apologies to the unreasonably patient Jonathan Taylor), Leicester, host city of Everybody's Reading, City of Culture contender, and my dear, dear hometown, found itself the centre of what I'm told is "controversy", which we know by now to be a synonym for "a ham-fisted Channel 4 documentary". Make Leicester British raised plenty of ire for plenty of valid reasons, and one of the most common seemed to be that people from Leicester simply didn't recognise the city being shown to them. I was one of those people, and as I watched the hopelessly contrived 90-minute bigot-baiting session unfold, I couldn't help musing on the stark contrast between what some TV producers had decided to make some people from Leicester do in a room, and what some other people in a room in Leicester a few weeks earlier had done for themselves.

I found my seat. Shruti Chauhan was on stage already, launching into a heartstring-pulling account of social media-age romance, posing huge, world-shaking questions of self-worth and self-care in a new, commodified dating scene, hitting cultural touchstones that resonated with the world I know from friends, from life, from Twitter. Other pieces spoke of a life I hadn't lived but that I knew from friends and colleagues. Here was a poet speaking truths I recognised, illuminating experiences I've seen transpire around me. Here was artistic and cultural kinship, happening starkly and obviously for one of the first times I can remember. Channel 4 would presumably prefer Shruti and I to be having a challenging discussion about whether we should even be from the same city.

Mere minutes later, we arrived at our first headline act (oops, I was late). Maria Taylor's work, whether on page or in person, is near impossible to summarise, and that's a case of quality as much as quantity. While her observational scope is undeniably massive, it's the detail with which she attends her subject matter that truly impresses. Jumping effortlessly between diverse ideas, Taylor led us by the hand through ever-changing worlds, never once letting us feel alienated, always hitting home. She is a singular poet and a natural, organic performer.

Post-interval (feat. free cakes! Who could possibly object?), James Mcatear and Jitendra Bhatt presented a set of music-verse collaborations that were both delightfully indulgent and grounded in salt-of-the-Earth charm. I'll stop short of saying "only in Leicester", but if multiculturalism is apparently failing, it's doing so with style, heart and a deceptive amount of success round these parts.

Between all this, compère Lydia Towsey held the evening together in her inimitable style, a whirlwind of personality that can be described as "quirky" if one doesn't mind things being described in woefully inadequate terms. Her offbeat humour made for a perfect backdrop to the acts, but was revealed to be little more than sly disarmament towards the end of the night, as she blew the entire room away with a stunning ukelele-led epic poem about her grandfather's experiences in the war.

And so it was on to the veteran, Andrew 'Mulletproof' Graves, to close proceedings. Moving quickly from wry self-deprecation to wry deprecation of pretty much everything else, Graves is nothing short of a spectacle when mid-performance. With a slickness, easy charisma and hyper-assured delivery of culturally cutting pieces, he is nothing short of a consummate professional who somehow manages to remain a hundred times more relevant and believable than any consummate professional should ever be able to.

But while Graves is sharp, and cuts deep, his touch is every bit as deft as the acts around him on this night - and crucially, it leaves them unmarked. Every act who took the stage at Maria and the Mullet managed strikes to the hearts of their various and just issues with the world, but none ever came close to treading on the others' toes. These commentaries, these experiences, sat alongside each other - not in harmony, but in glorious intersecting solidarity.

If it seems trite to suggest that art will bring us together, it's still better than the implicit insistence that diversity will tear us apart. Whether expressed through creativity, commentary or simply conversation, whether integrated with each other or presented in worthy, safe single-issue spaces, it is the voicing of people's lived realities wherein deeper, more engaged understanding is fostered. Maria and the Mullet was a microcosm of Leicester, and was more representative than any unwieldy attempt to "make" Leicester anything.

And that, surely, is as good an argument as any to get everybody both reading and reviewing.