Peter Forbes

_ Samphire has recently become a fashionable vegetable and I’ve got to like it as a handy accompaniment to fish. Before its recent elevation it was known by most people for one thing only: the passage in King Lear that goes “Half-way down hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade!” That’s halfway down Dover cliff. 

But for me, Samphire means one more thing: it was a poetry magazine of the 1970s and the first magazine of any kind to publish, in 1976, a piece of my writing. Samphire was a typical little poetry magazine of the 1980s. It was edited by Kemble Williams, who was based in Suffolk, and Professor Michael Butler, Professor of German Literature at Birmingham University. Like all little magazines, it had a coterie of writers but the range was wide and I don’t suppose I was the only writer to first-time in its pages. 

I gradually became a regular contributor and following a few poems I began to review for them. This was invaluable experience – I’m a reviewer to his day and Samphire is where I cut my teeth. It had endearing quirks, such as a rather high proportion of misprints: a review of George Barker that I was rather proud of was when printed seemed to be about one George Baker. 

Its three times a year arrival on the doormat was a major event – Samphire was a lifeline to a possible alternative world.

Of course, back then I romanticised the whole literary business and my small role in it to a ridiculous degree. On holiday one year in East Anglia I called on Kemble Williams at his home, Heronshaw, Holbrook. I remember little of the encounter except that it was good to see the office from which the magic magazine emanated. The magazine folded in 1983 after a 15 year run. The next year I set up shop as a full-time writer.

_ Everyone who writes a book hopes that long after the fuss and fret of producing it has gone the book will still working for them, out there, winning new readings and earning a bob or two without any further effort on the author’s part. That is the warm fantasy. In fact, most books have a short shelf life and go out of print.

So it’s a bonus when, having been more or less forgotten by the author, a book comes back into print, relaunched, with a new title and cover and new hope. OK, you know what’s coming next. Ten years ago I was a poetry animal 24/7: I edited Poetry Review, wrote reviews, compiled anthologies. Then I made the change and am now a full-on popular science creature. But, in a pleasant blast from the past – more zephyr with a hint of spring – one of the anthologies is about to re-enter the world of print (also on ebook).

The Picador Book of Wedding Poems is published on January 5. It was first published in 2004 and I had forgotten what many of my choices had been. It came up fresh for so I hope it might work for others too.

_ Reading a wise and trenchant piece by John Lanchester in the New York Review of Books (actually the 4 page section included with the Saturday Guardian) on the financial crisis, I had a déja vu experience. Lanchester was talking about the absurdities of life before the Crash. In Iceland, a waitress (Iceland had the world’s highest per capita GDP before the Crash) was telling him how in those days she used to take the plane at weekends to go shopping on the via Linate in Milan.

This immediately conjured up Han Magnus Enzenberger's mesmerising poem  ‘ A Short History of the Bourgeoisie’ , written in the ’80s: a poem I have always been fascinated by this poem and which I included in my anthology Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the 20th Century in Poetry. It reminded me of Brecht’s bitterly relished fables of the 30s (deliberately on Enzensberger's part, I’m sure).

But the poem never really sounded like then. It was an exaggeration for effect, like a grotesque caricature. It was in love with the excesses it created: “That was the moment when, without / noticing it, for five minutes we were vastly rich, . . .the flown-in Finnish wood blazed / in Tudor fireplace….Flights everywhere. Even our sighs / went on credit cards”.

Well, it duly came to pass. Perhaps this is what poetry does best: to divine deep currents long before they are fully realized. Unacknowledged legislators after all?

When I finished compiling my poetry anthology Scanning the Century over a decade ago I wanted to follow up poets I’d discovered during the process. The one who really caught my attention at the time was Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). The more I learnt the more fascinating she became. She was a pioneer political and feminist activist and she also had a strong interest in science, writing a biography of the physicist, chemist and mathematician Willard Gibbs. There is an urgency in her work that sounds even more compelling now than when it was written:

I lived in the century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices . . .

I wrote an essay on her, ‘Power of a Poster Girl’ which has only now, ten years later, been published, in the anthology The Voyage, edited by Chandani Lokuge and David Morley, published by Silkworms Ink.

A piece in Ian Jack’s The Country Formerly known as Great Britain (p.143) reminds me that Field Marshal Wavell (1883-1950), published a popular anthology of poetry in 1944 called Other Men’s Flowers. This had a certain novelty value and the book’s continuing sales success (still in print today) may owe something to the surprise factor. The contents are the predictable canon of safe, mostly pre-1900 poetry – the kind that a stiff-upper-lip English military man might like.

Wavell is generally regarded as bit of a flop: an old-fashioned soldier. He was not a charismatic war leader and was replaced by Montgomery before the crucial battle of El Alamein. Wavell might have been an awkward stick and his taste in poetry uninspiring but he had one flash of pure genius: on 23 April 1941, he had scribbled a note, a facsimile of which is preserved in the War Office files:

Is it a wild idea that a tank could be camouflaged to look like a lorry from air by light canvas screens over top?  It would be useful; during approach march etc

Please have it considered.

This was more than considered it was implemented as the Sunshield and hundreds of them were used in elaborate decoys before the great battle of El Alamein. Sunshields were erected and at night tanks moved into position under them. Where the tanks had been, they were replaced by dummies. Churchill didn’t have much time for Wavell: meeting him was like “being in the presence of the chairman of a gold club”. But when the battle was won, Churchill paid tribute to “a marvelous system of camouflage”: “The 10th Corps, which he [the enemy] had seen from the air exercising fifty miles in the rear, moved silently away in the night, but leaving an exact simulacrum of its tanks where it had been, and proceeded to its points of attack.”

The story of Wavell and the Sunshields and other war ruses is told in Dazzled and Deceived.