Saturday 9 July 2016

Ten years of siege in Gaza : End the Blockade



For the last ten years the densely populated Israeli occupied Gaza strip has been  besieged  by Israel, by land, sea and air, 1.8 millions, the vast majority of whom are refugees, are effectively trapped in an area of land, just 40 kilometres long and 9.5kilometres wide.
Two years ago last week the world witnessed Israel's brutal military attack on Palestinians in Gaza in which more than 2,300 Palestinians were killed including 300 children and 100,000 people were displaced after Israel deliberately attacked entire civilian areas in Gaza and inflicted as much human suffering as it could. The explosives that were dropped on Gaza continue to claim lives.The UN and human rights organisations have documented Israel's war crimes during the massacre.  Amnesty International has denounced  the lack of accountability for crimes committed during the assault on the Gaza strip in 2014, in a new briefing  the global human rights group says the impunity enjoyed by those responsible for violations is " indefensible"https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2015/07/justice-victims-war-crimes-gaza-conflict/ 
The siege continues and has almost entirely prevented meaningful reconstruction since the 2014 attack and only a slight improvement in the humanitarian situation has occurred, the Gaza strip remains a disaster area, people are living in tents or caravans that cannot protect them from the heat in the summer, or from the very cold weather in the winter time. The longer Israel maintain its siege of the world's largest open-air prison, the more the international community adapts and accepts Israel's deliberate reduction of Gaza into an uninhabitable prison camp which the Palestinian confined within has to daily endure. The blockade has caused grinding poverty resulting in more than two-thirds of Gazan families being dependent on aid. 
Due to fuel shortages and damaged or destroyed electrical infrastructure, there are power shortages for up to 16 hours per day in most areas of Gaza. 70 percent of households in Gaza receive running water for only 6 to 8 hours once every two to four days. Over 90 percent of the water extracted from the Gaza aquifer is unsafe for human consumption, while needed filtration equipment cannot be imported to Gaza. Nearly 90 million liters of untreated or partially treated sewage is dumped into the sea off Gaza every day, while equipment needed to build new or maintain existing treatment facilities are banned from entering Gaza. As a result of the blockade the economy, education, medical care, agricultural and fishing industries have worsened, in some cases in near-collapse.
Gaza's wealth is largely unreachable as a direct result of Israel's occupation and blockade. Most agricultural land is located in places declared closed  military area ("no go" zones or has been destroyed during military attacks. Access to traditional fishing grounds is restricted by the Israeli Navy. Development of their natural gas reserves is forbidden by the Israeli government. All of this  while the movement of people into and out of Gaza is seveely restricted and both the import of goods and the export of products fom Gaza is strictly limited.
Israel though is not only oppressing Palestinians - it is also exporting its ruthless model of militarized repression to the world. As this Links that Kill fact sheet sets out, Israel is only able to do this because of the massive weapons trade and miltary coperation, including research, it maintains with countries across the world. Over the period 2009-2018, the US is providing military aid to Israel worth $30 bn. EU arms exports to Israel during 2014 alone were worth over $1bn. Money used to maintain oppression. If the world cares  about Gaza's plight, the blockade must not be allowed to continue, it amounts to collective punishment illegal  under the Fourth Geneva Convention. As the occupying power, Israel has obligations to the people  of Gaza, under international law. In the fall, world leaders are meeting to discuss next steps on Gaza. This or chance to take action to ensure Gaza is completely rebuilt and that people are treated with dignity. The blockade must end.

We must continue to support the Palestinian people's non violent struggle for freedom, justice and equality, we can do this  by supporting their call for BDS ( Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) we can make a difference, and please consider signing the two following petitions, cheers.


World leaders lift the Gaza blockade :-

.https://secure.avaaz.org/en/gaza_blockade_aida/?avQoLab

Gaza:End the Siege :-
http://www.palestinecampaign.org/campaigns/gaza/

Thursday 7 July 2016

Mametz Wood: In Parenthesis by David Jones, Artist, Soldier, Poet, ( 1/11/1895 -28/10/74)


           
                                David Jones as a young private

During the First Battle of the Somme, one of the most brutal battles of the First World War, the 38th (Welsh) Division was given the job of attacking Mametz Wood on 7th July 1916 a 100 years ago today, but were forced to retreat because of the intensity of German machine gun fire from the wood.
They were ordered to regroup and attack for a second time on the 10th July and succeeded in reaching the wood. By the 12th July the Germans and their machine guns had been cleared out of the woods but the Welsh Division had lost more than 4,000 men. Whole Welsh communities reeled from losing their young men in this slaughter and it came to symbolise the futility of war.
The poet-artist David Jones, a Londoner of Welsh extraction the son of a Welsh father and an English-Italian mother who had trained as an artist in Camberwell School of Art, Jones joined the newly formed London Welsh Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers in January 1915 and, after a prolonged period of training, much hampered by a lack of equipment, finally embarked for France the following December. After a period in and out of the Line in the La Bassee sector, Jones marched south for the Somme in the summer of 1916 serving as a private. Here, he took part in the attack on Mametz Wood on the 10th/11th July, was wounded in the thigh and was subsequently returned to England to convalesce. On his eventual return to the Line, his unit had been moved to the Ypres salient. Jones would have taken part in the initial stages of the prolonged Passchendale offensive, had he not been held back as part of the battalion’s reserve ‘nucleus’.It would have a profound effect on him  because of it's scarring effect. In all Jones spent 117 weeks at the front,longer than any other war poet and in his adult life he suffered severe bouts of depression, nervous breakdowns  and inactivity which could be traced back to his war years in what today would be considered post traumatic stress. In World War 1 the enemy became the war itself in dehumanised form.
His epic prose poem ‘In Parenthesis’ is virtually unique in First World War literature, evoking the horrors, carnage, camaraderie and heroism of the ordinary soldier, his hopes and fears, laughter and tears. The poem covers the progress of a unit from December 1915 to the Somme offensive in July 1916.  At it's most basic level it is a fictionalised account mirroring his own service as a foot-soldier in the First World War. In Parenthesis though graphic in its depiction of the horrors of war, of the mindlessness of much of the violence resulting from nationalistic pride, it also manages to speaks with an aesthetic voice and wonders if some beauty can be found even in the very instruments of human destruction. Jones is skeptical that this will be possible but sees the attempt as part of his responsibility as a poet in the twentieth century, an age that now must live with “increasingly exacting mechanical devices; some fascinating and compelling, others sinister in the extreme. Jones’s poem speaks with a profoundly humanistic voice, transcending the grotesque suddenness of individual deaths in battle and finding in history a common thread connecting all soldiers to the nobility of being a man or a woman.He focuses on the lives of bottom ranking soldiers, adding a dimension to his heroic epic that both elevates the lowly and critiques the lofty.  In Parenthesis deals with powers that tap into the life force itself, the incomprehensible energies that bring humans into existence and dispatch them just as quickly. The poem might be said to be basically religious,using the war as a metaphor for life itself—to Jones, each is a parenthesis.Throughout the prose poem he applies religious terminology and symbolism to his characters, and makes frequent references to religious rituals, holy days and biblical allusions.He also  has numerous allusions  to what we’d consider of  as medieval romances: Malory’s Morte d’Arthur is often referred to, as is the Welsh poetry of the Mabinogion and Y Gododdin.
His poem suggests that war helps people become more aware of that larger parenthetical condition called life, a condition ultimately as sudden and individually. Despite what he has witnessed throughout he remains alert to the flashes of humanity that light up the wasteland of war. Complex in organization, rich in vocabulary, In Parenthesis demonstrates the rich intricacies of Jones’s work.
In it's climax, Part 7 the protagonist John Ball along with his unit attacks Mametz Wood. As he goes forward, he watches as most of his fellows around him being ripped apart, but Ball somehow makes it through unscathed until that evening. When ordered to take part in a subsequent, follow-up attack, Ball is knocked down, hit in the legs by machine-gun fire, and is greviously wounded begins his long crawl back to some place of safety - as Jones himself did. Along the way he discards most of his equipment (except for his gas mask, which he thinks might come in handy). However, his rifle has special meaning: as any soldier knows, a warrior and his weapon are one: it defines who he is, lose it and he loses his identity. As he retreats, Ball carries on a conversation with himself: should he leave the rifle? He hears the voices of his drill instructors driving home the importance of care of arms, the individuality of each soldier's weapon, the intimacy that he should share with it. . 
The assault on Mametz Wood took three days and the British forces succeeded in pushing back the enemy lines — but at huge cost. Jones's battalion alone lost a third of its men, killed or wounded. 
The poem watches them as they fall. A private who married his sweetheart when last on leave is pierced through by a razor of shrapnel. One man, even as he bleeds to death, still fumbles with the wretched straps of his uniform, trying to loosen the choking buckle of his tin hat. Not far from his prone body lies the severed head of a private grinning "like the Cheshire cat". It was images like this, grotesque, absurd and brutal, that would haunt Jones for decades.
The poem ends with Mametz Wood, but for Jones the war went on.On his eventual return to the Line, his unit had been moved to the Ypres salient. Jones would have taken part in the initial stages of the prolonged Passchendale offensive, and so the routine of sandbags and shelling continued.  In mid-February 1918, Jones came down with trench fever and was evacuated to a base hospital with a 105-degree temperature. There he came closer to death than he ever had in the field. He would not return to the front. Nor would he recover from those three years. Though he never called it shell shock, Jones was diminished and unmanned by all that he had seen. Jones was evacuated and saw out the rest of the war in Ireland. He never saw action again and was released from the army in the January of 1919, aged 23.
After the war Jones would have a conversion to Roman Catholicism and joined a small community of Catholic artists headed by craftsman Eric Gill, first at Ditchling, East Sussex then resettling at  Capel-y-ffin, near Hay-on-Wye among the Black Mountains in Wales, where he began to develop a unique concept of art and the function of the artist. The monastery where he stayed I have been fortunate to visit after numerous visits to the area where Jones took comfort from the singularity of the place as his weakened lungs drew in the mountain air. While resident at the monastery there he painted and illustrated prolifically and later reflected that the landscape had allowed deeper understanding of his Welsh identity.

                                          Capel-Y-Ffin , 1926-27- David Jones

Jones never married, never had children. He lived a monkish existence in a series of guest rooms and bedsits, which he referred to as his "dug-outs". His prints, paintings and poems brought a small income but financially he relied on his parents and then on the generosity of friends and patrons. To the end of his life the clatter of a tea-tray or a foggy day would rend his nerves. Each July the horrors of the Somme and Mametz Wood would return, triggering debilitating insomnia. It is more than likely he was still suffering from shellshock, which today we would call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which leaves many ex soldiers with nightmares, flashbacks and feelings of dissociation or intense anxiety, afflicted by an inner wound from which they never recovered. David Jones remembers breaking down : '‘all gone to pieces and not pulling himself together not making the best of things’and was himself unable in fact to write In Parethesis until many years later. Many soldiers like Jones were not able to settle back into their home life afterwards or make sense of their experiences. Some people carrying this mental ‘shrapnel’ in their minds committed suicide. 
If In Parenthesis was an attempt to exorcise these demons, it failed. The completion of the poem in 1932 brought a shattering nervous breakdown. It took five years for Jones to summon the courage to have it published. T.S. Eliot, who oversaw its publication by Faber, called it "a work of genius". He would retire to Harrow and devoted himself mainly to calligraphic inscriptions in the Welsh language and continued painting until his death in May 1974, a few months after he had been made a Companion of Honour. Often overlooked nowadays, I would urge people to discover this book it, it remains a work of great vision,it remains forever a profoundly moving piece of work. A masterpiece of First World War poetry and literature that we should not forget.  


                                             sketch by David Jones

From In Parenthesis, part 7
   
And to Private Ball it came as if a rigid beam of great weight
flailed about his calves, caught from behind by ballista-baulk
let fly or aft-beam slewed to clout gunnel-walker
below below below.
When golden vanities make about,
you've got no legs to stand on.
He thought it disproportionate in its violence considering
the fragility of us.
The warm fluid percolates between his toes and his left boot
fills, as when you tread in a puddle--he crawled away in the
opposite direction.

It's difficult with the weight of the rifle.
Leave it--under the oak.
Leave it for a salvage-bloke
let it lie bruised for a monument
dispense the authenticated fragments to the faithful.
It's the thunder-besom for us
it's the bright bough borne
it's the tensioned yew for a Genoese jammed arbalest and a
scarlet square for a mounted mareschal, it's that county-mob
back to back. Majuba mountain and Mons Cherubim and
spreaded mats for Sydney Street East, and come to Bisley
for a Silver Dish. It's R.SM. O'Grady says, it's the soldier's
best friend if you care for the working parts and let us be 'av-
ing those springs released smartly in Company billets on wet
forenoons and clickerty-click and one up the spout and you
men must really cultivate the habit of treating this weapon with
the very greatest care and there should be a healthy rivalry
among you--it should be a matter of very proper pride and
Marry it man! Marry it!
Cherish her, she's your very own.
Coax it man coax it--it's delicately and ingeniously made
--it's an instrument of precision--it costs us tax-payers,
money-I want you men to remember that.
Fondle it like a granny--talk to it--consider it as you would
a friendöand when you ground these arms she's not a rooky's
gas-pipe for greenhorns to tarnish.
You've known her hot and cold.
You would choose her from among many.
You know her by her bias, and by her exact error at 300, and
by the deep scar at the small, by the fair flaw in the grain,
above the lower sling-swivel--
but leave it under the oak.
Slung so, it swings its full weight, With you going blindly on
all paws, it slews its whole length, to hang at your bowed neck
like the Mariner's white oblation.
You drag past the four bright stones at the turn of Wood
Support.
It is not to be broken on the brown stone under the gracious
tree.
It is not to be hidden under your failing body.
Slung so, it troubles your painful crawling like a fugitive's
irons.

At the gate of the wood you try a last adjustment, but slung
so, it's an impediment, it's of detriment to your hopes, you
had best be rid of it--the sagging webbing and all and what's
left of your two fifty--but it were wise to hold on to your
mask.
You're clumsy in your feebleness, you implicate your tin-hat
rim with the slack sling of it.
Let it lie for the dews to rust it, or ought you to decently
cover the working parts.
Its dark barrel, where you leave it under the oak, reflects
the solemn star that rises urgently from Cliff Trench.
It's a beautiful doll for us
it's the Last Reputable Arm.
But leave it--under the oak.
Leave it for a Cook's tourist to the Devastated Areas and crawl
as far as you can and wait for the bearers.

 

From In Parethesis, David Jones:  London: Faber & Faber. 1937 part 7, pp. 183-86.



                                                    Picture of David Jones in later life 


                                                Animals going to the Ark - David Jones





The Greatest Poem of World War 1: David Jones's In Parenthesis

Poet Owen Sheers will be tracing the story of David Jones poem  tracing its inspiration from  the English military parade ground to the carnage of the Somme, on a programe on BBC 2 Wales this, Saturday July 10th at  from 9.00 pm to 10.30 pm.

This will be followed at 10.30 by  In Parenthesis: The making of the Opera


 Further reading :-

 Tate Gallery, David Jones (1981)

 David Jones: Vision and Memory - Ariane Banks and Paul Hills, Lind Humphries 2015

 David Jones: The Maker unmade, Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel, Seren, 1995.

David Jones also makes a cameo in the poet and writer Owen Sheers book; Resistance, and Owen Sheers himself  wrote a poem called Mametz Wood a link I enclose here  :-
 http://www.sheerpoetry.co.uk/gcse/owen-sheers/mametz-wood

Link to Poetry Foundation article on David Jones, that explores his life in more detail :-

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/david-jones

Wednesday 6 July 2016

The Chilcot inquiry seems not to be a whitewash. Tony Blair is utterly damned.



Blair is currently being decimated thank goodness after the much delayed report by the Chilcot Inguiry into the Iraq war has finally been released
.The UK went to war in Iraq before all peaceful options for disarming Saddam Hussein were exhausted, the long-awaited official report has concluded.The invasion was not the "last resort" presented to MPs and the British public, chair Sir John Chilcot said.The 2003 invasion was based on "flawed intelligence and assessments" that "were not challenged", it argues.
Tony Blair underestimated the impact it would have on Iraq and the wider region despite "explicit warnings", it adds. It seems in no doubt that yes Tony Blair was and remains a war criminal at large and needs to be bought to justice for all his victims, for us now to truly move forwards. He and and all that were compliant with him need to be held accountable and tried for their crimes for all the horror and pain that they wrought, an enduring painful legacy that many still suffer the impact from many years on. 
Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: "It's a tragedy that politicians and their advisers failed to properly assess the human rights consequences of such a massive military operation, including the horrible sectarian violence it helped unleash, and it's also a tragedy that the horrors of Abu Ghraib and cases like Baha Mousa all followed."Hundreds of thousands of people died in Iraq, during the invasion and its extended aftermath, including UK service personnel. It's therefore vital that lessons are learnt after Sir John Chilcot has so comprehensively pointed towards what some of those are."One way of showing that the Government has tried to learn lessons from Iraq would be for it to ensure that all credible allegations of unlawful killing, torture and unauthorised detention at the hands of the UK armed forces in Iraq are properly investigated."Unite union general secretary Len McCluskey said: "Chilcot confirms what millions of us knew in 2003 - the case for war had not been made. It was an unnecessary conflict, launched on the basis of flawed intelligence, secret diplomacy and with no sound legal basis."It has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and made both the Middle East and the wider world less secure."Today our thoughts must be with those who lost loved ones, and with the people now living in the wretched insecurity that followed this war, but it is long past time that those responsible were held to account."
 By the most scientifically respected measures available, the war killed 1.4 million Iraqis, saw 4.2 million injured, and 4.5 million people have become refugees. The 1.4 million dead were 5% of the population. The invasion included 29,200 air strikes. An Iraqi who helped topple a statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003 echoed majority Iraqi opinion this week when he said he'd rather have Hussein back than continue with the catastrophe that the U.S.-led war created. The U.S. and its allies targeted civilians, journalists, hospitals and ambulances. They used cluster bomds, white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new kind of napalm in urban areas. Birth defects, cancer rates, and infant mortality have soared. Water supplies, sewage treatment plants, hospitals, bridges, and electricity supplies were devastated, and not repaired. .
It seems that the many millions like me  who demonstrated and marched for peace were right and we have been vindicated in ways that we have always dreamed off.  It seems that Blair  with his colluders have been found guilty as charge.Our patience and persistence seems to have borne fruit.
This post dedicated to Reg Keys and Rose Gentle and all others who never gave up their pursuit of justice and campaigned tirelessly to prove the war was illegal and to all those who suffered and were killed because of Blair's lies. No apology will be enough from his hollow breath at this moment in time for the pain he clearly caused to the bereaved families that he continually chose not to listen to.
 Never again must so many mistakes be allowed to sacrifice British lives and lead to the destruction of a country for no positive end.
Blair will probably be getting the oxygen of publicity today that he always seems to bask in despite any criticism, always seems to carry on, regardless with that irritating smile off his, may he get the karma that he so deserves.

                                     
                                          Rose Gentle and Reg Keys

 
Here is a link to the website of the Iraq war inquiry :-

http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/ 


Tuesday 5 July 2016

The NHS turns 68 today, happy birthday.


Nye Bevans legacy came into the world 68 years ago this morning,when he opened Park Hospital in Manchester at a time of rationing and shortages, when we were nearly bankrupt, a jewel  that the war generation left us with, a proud legacy, for us to all to continue to share. It offered for the first time a free healthcare system for all, and has since  played a vital role in caring for all aspects of our nations health. My own father served it well for nigh on 40 years. It has become a source of national pride and is envied around the world.
Remember we paid for it, so it is owned by us, it is our precious commodity, it must survive, we must tear the vultures hands from it. We  cannot reach the day again where people make a profit out of our sickness.It is  one of the pillars of UK society. From helping us when we are in need, to providing employment to over 1.7m people (one of the largest employers in the world), the NHS is the result of what can be possible when we work together for the common good.
But our NHS is currently under attack, facing a massive threat from the Tories and is in grave danger. Dedicated, compassionate staff under increased pressure, leading to low moral. Recent figures have emerged that 2/4s of hospitals have been warned about dangerous staff shortages.
This combined with creeping privatisation, major budget cuts and attacks on staff pay and pensions,..
We should however be proud, that since 1948 that we actually have one of the best health systems in the world, regardless of age, social status, ethnic background or belief. It is ours, and belongs to us,  from the cradle to the grave. We own it and pay for it,providing local medical cover, available free to all, but slowly the Tory's are ripping it from our grasp. In the long term those that need it most, the chronically ill, people with mental health problems,the vulnerable and those from lower socio economic groups and older people will be the ones losing out.
We must defend  and protect it with all our might, so that it can  continue to care for us,that puts people first not profit. We must stop this valuable resource from being plundered in front of our eyes.
In the words of Nye Bevan " It will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it."
I went to a rally last night for Jeremy Corbyn in Swansea was pleased to see so many there,packed to the rafters, young and old who I am sure will not only defend their leader, their movement, when the time comes I have faith that people like this will continue to fight for our NHS too.
Jeremy Corbyn this morning  paid tribute  saying that Labour "will never abandon the NHS, patients or the staff that work in it." I have taken to the man, and believe in the sincerity of his words.

Sunday 3 July 2016

Trespassers


(  dedicated to Boris Johnson among others)

Trespassing over our days
casting splintered division,
vulgar voices of opportunity
transmit conscious ideology,
to pull tomorrow's hope down
abandoning us as days get harder,
because they cannot play out
the role that they promised,
dreams within our reach they steal
taking back all that they see,
storming off with plotted intention
lining grubby pockets with silver,
vacuous morality exposed
wearing gilded smiles,
entrenched deeply
in their deceit and lies.

Saturday 2 July 2016

Sir Geoffrey Hill ( 18/6/32 - 30/6/16) - Poet of complexity R.I.P



Have just heard the sad news that British Poet Sir Geoffrey Hill has died at age 84, on Thursday
Hill, who had often been referred to as the “greatest living poet in the English language”, leaves behind him an extensive amount of poetry extending back into the Fifties that is both inspired and inspiring. Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry from 2010-2015, Hill was also a respected critical essayist, winning the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2009 for his Collected Critical Writings. I first became aware of his work from the edition of Penguin Modern Poets8, which he shared with the poets Edwin Brock and Stevie Smith.
He  has been described as a difficult poet, a  reputation he gained because he used his intellect to make a continuous engagement with the English language often in his work there are references to fairly obscure people, equally obscure texts  plus his facility for Latin and half a dozen European languages which at tmes can seem daunting. His obsession with violence and corruption in history and politics, he was drawn to the life of martyrs, the saints and poets whose word became their bond, their baptism in blood: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Charles Péguy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Simone Weil. and this combined with his darkly Christian sensibility made him somewhat unfashionable, his foreign phrases and allusions were resented by some yet his interest and strong attachment to words placed him among a long intellectual tradition. Anyway what the hell is s actually wrong with being clever, and whatever a poet chooses to do with their skill is in the end up to them. Has not much of the greatest poetry throughout history been difficult? Is it  not the the poets duty to make us think, scratch our heads, question? Is not life  difficult and complex? Do we not try and reflect this in our work? Anyway the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, described him as “in poetry, a saint and a warrior who never gave an inch in his crusade to reach poetic truth”.
Hill had a fantastic range though  from dark meditations on morals, philosophy, religious faith and political violence to rapturous evocations of the English landscape of his native Worcestershire and wonderful poems about love. He was an uncompromising visionary and his work reveals his towering intellect and an emotional complexity that was unrivaled by many of his contemporary's.
Geoffrey William Hill was born in Worcestershire, England in 1932, to William, a police constable, and Hilda Hill, and grew up in the nearby village of Fairfield. where he grew up in constant view of the landscape that is Housman’s Shropshire. He identified himself as working class After earning a first degree in English at Oxford, entering the world of academia meaning a family tradition of joining the police force was closed to him because of deafness in one ear, the result of a childhood illness. he taught for many years, entering first at the University of Leeds for more than twenty years, then at Cambridge.He had married Nancy Whittaker in 1956, and had four children with her. The marriage was dissolved in 1983.He left for for Boston University in 1988, where he remained on the faculty of the University Professors Program. In this year he married Alice Goodman, 26 years his junior.Since 1998, he had also served as codirector of that university’s recently founded Editorial Institute. He made his home in nearby Brookline, returning each summer to England, where he kept a cottage in Lancashire. He eventually moved back to Britain in 2006 and settled in a rectory near Cambridge. He received a knighthood in  2012 in the New Years honors list..
Something I shared with him was his struggle with chronic depression and anxiety, which first emerged for him when he was at Cambridge. It was not until he moved to  Boston University that he was able finally to seek treatment for his debilitating depression with the use of lithium and Prozac which he described as a ' signal/ mystery, mercy of these latter days.' His political views though could not be further than mine he has described himself as a 'hierarchical Tory, his views were  idiosyncratic but you don't need to share these in order to get a lot from his work, his poetry is immensely varied in form and subject matter (he was also our most accomplished nature poet). One of the key features of Hill's politics is his patriotism and his nostalgia for a Britain that never actually existed. His Toryism doesn't sit well with his anger at the poverty of his grandparents which demonstrates a keen solidarity with those who are impoverished by the forces of Capital.
Hill's aesthetic has proved to be controversial owing to the use of violent language, but he maintains that the controversy he creates is unintentional: "I don't ... write poems to be polemical; I write to create a being of beautiful energy."
He is survived by his wife, their daughter, and three sons and a daughter from his previous marriage.
Geoffrey William Hill R.I.P a shining light of fierce intelligence who immersed himself in the complexities and richness of the world, a voice of moral imagination.
Some final words from Hill  and King Offa from Mercian Hymns, 1971

"He divided his realm. It lay there like a dream. An ancient land, full of strategy. Ramparts of compost pioneered by red-helmeted worms. Hemlock in ambush, night-soil, tetanus. A wasps’ nest ensconced in the hedge-bank, a reliquary or wrapped head, the corpse of Cernunnos pitching dayward its feral horn."

I will end with these three that I particularly appreciate :-

 On seeing the Wind at Hope Mansell - Geoffrey Hill

Whether or not shadows are of the substance
such is the expectation I can
wait to surprise my vision as a wind
enters the valley: sudden and silent
in its arrival, drawing to full cry
the whorled invisibilities, glassen towers
freighted with sky-chaff; that, as barnstorming
powers, rammack the small
orchard; that well-steaded oaks
ride stolidly, that rake the light-leafed ash,
that glowing yew trees, cumbrous, heave aside.
Amidst and abroad tumultuous lumina,
regents, reagents, cloud-fêted, sun-ordained,
fly tally over hedgerows, across fields.

 Ovid in the Third Reich - Geoffrey Hill

non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,
solaque famosam culpa professa facit.

Amores, III, xiv
I love my work and my children. God   
Is distant, difficult. Things happen.   
Too near the ancient troughs of blood   
Innocence is no earthly weapon.

I have learned one thing: not to look down
So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,   
Harmonize strangely with the divine
Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.


Turtle Dove - Geoffrey Hill

Love that drained her drained him she’d loved, though each
For the other’s sake forged passion upon speech,
Bore their close days through sufferance towards night
Where she at length grasped sleep and he lay quiet

As though needing no questions, now, to guess
what her secreting heart could not well hide.
Her caught face flinched in half-sleep at his side.
Yet she, by day, modelled her real distress,

Poised, turned her cheek to the attending world
Of children and intriguers and the old,
Conversed freely, exercised, was admired,
Being strong to dazzle. All this she endured

To affront him. He watched her rough grief work
Under the formed surface of habit. She spoke
Like one long undeceived but she was hurt.
She denied more love, yet her starved eyes caught

His, devouring, at times. Then, as one self-dared,
She went to him, plied there; like a furious dove
Bore down with visitations of such love
As his lithe, fathoming heart absorbed and buried.



Friday 1 July 2016

The senseless tragedy and horror of the Somme




 Today marks the centenary anniversary of the battle of the Somme. At a conference held in December 1915, the decision for a new offensive on the Western Front had been taken jointly by French commander-in-chief, Gen. Joseph Joffre, and his British counterpart, Gen. Sir John French (replaced on Dec. 19, 1915, by Gen. Sir Douglas Haig). It was to be part of a larger strategic offensive by the Allies attacking simultaneously on several fronts to prevent the Germans from switching resources.
The Somme was the first major offensive mounted by the British. By the end of the 18-week-long battle, British and French forces had penetrated only 12 kilometres into German-held territory in one of the bloodiest military operations in history. The British never even reached their first-day objectives. The battle continued long after it had achieved its stated and limited aim of drawing off German forces from Verdun.
Many of the units that went over the top on July 1, 1916 were Pals Battalions, volunteer units raised the previous year from men who lived, worked and socialised together in the same cities, towns and villages across Britain.  The 1st of July 1916  was a bright summer’s day in Picardy, N. France. At 7.30am the sun was well up. Suddenly whistles sounded. Soldiers rose from the trenches and the Battle of the Somme began and and one of military history's greatest disasters and one of the most devastating and bloodiest moments in British history had unfolded before the disbelieving eyes of the Allied High Command. In the next 141 days of horror, although reliable figures are hard to confirm, at a conservative estimate more than a million and a quarter men became casualties of all types on the Somme: perhaps 420,000 British Empire, 195,000 French and 650,000 German. Canadian losses numbered 24,000, nearly 8,000 of them fatal in the middle of a protracted hell. In the opinion of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the Somme was “the most gigantic, tenacious, grim, futile and bloody fight ever waged in the history of war.”
 For some of the thousands killed on the Somme, the battle lasted for mere seconds. For their loved ones, the pain lasted a lifetime.  The following was said by a Canadian nurse who  treated the wounded at the Somme :- " Some terrible cases, oh so much the better dead. One young lad with eyes and nose all gone - one blur of mangled flesh - and body whole and sound ... All are so brave, and yet those who are not badly wounded are so tired of the war, tired in such a hopeless way." 


An aerial view of the shell pocked landscape surrounding trenches on the Somme, fall 1916.                        

All this alone should counter the argument now taking hold among some historians, politicians and media commentators that the Somme centenary commemorations should be used to glorify this pointless mass slaughter as a necessary "sacrifice".
So why did Haig persist, especially in the face of such huge losses? Haig’s detractors—of whom there are many—accuse him of being an unimaginative commander who could see no other alternatives to costly battles of attrition. One of his own justifications for the Somme was that the enemy’s strength had been considerably worn down, a conclusion that was neither accepted at the time nor afterwards. Today, the Somme is generally regarded as a costly failure, and one for which Haig must bear the lion’s share of responsibility.
The Battle of the Somme  finally ended in late November, when rain, snow and sleet made operations impossible. It was difficult to tell victor from vanquished.The Battle of the Somme should be remembered today for epitomising the horror and waste of the Great War.
Following his bestseller No Glory: The Real History of the First World War, historian Neil Faulkner's new pamphlet, Have You Forgotten Yet: The Truth About the Somme, sets the record straight and stands with the victims of imperialism and war – with the workers and peasants of Europe, and with the colonial people of Africa and Asia. It argues that the Somme, by any rational assessment, represents a world gone mad.
It is our duty to remember the futility and tragedy of this occasion, and to remember those who died so senselessly, sacificiced on the altar of imperial stupidity to ensure that the lessons learnt live with us forever. Sadly No time for glorification  time to focus on the horrible realities and the many lives that were affected by this horrific event in the years that followed it. This battle that has come to symbolise the horror, waste and futility of war, it's pity and enduring tragedy this pornography of violence should not be used as propoganda for todays wars..

Siegfried Sassoon  -  Aftermath

 Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same--and War's a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz--
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.