Editorial

Readers! Where would we be without them? This issue of Horizon Review is dedicated to all the readers out there. Some of you will be writers too. Some of you are not writers, but love reading for the pleasures and provocations it brings into your life. Some of you will be artists, teachers, publishers, playwrights, students, poets, refuse-collectors, theatre-goers, travelling salespeople. Some of you may have come to this page in error. (Yet you are still readers.)

What do we look for when we read? Do men and women look for different things? In our interview section, these are precisely the kind of topics raised. Feminist writer Vicki Bertram, in conversation with the poet Kate Clanchy, says ‘women come down very hard on each other for writing out of their own experience ... The female “I” is still not big enough.’ In that interview we also have Kate Clanchy on Cyril Connolly’s famous ‘pram in the hall’ dictum, on her friend and mentor Carol Ann Duffy, and on the disparity between the sexes in poetry publishing: ‘I need to be able to pick up the TLS and find a poem by a woman that I can admire.’ The acclaimed screenwriter Andrew Davies also touches on reading as he describes how he grew up without a television, devouring literature instead:

In terms of who inspired me, it’s hard to say because I just read loads and loads of stuff; quite old-fashioned children’s books that were around the house. I can remember reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays when I was eight, and I had a kind of horrible fantasy that, you know, one day some stagecoach would arrive and cart me off to this school and I’d be roasted over an open fire by Flashman and his pals!

Sometimes we read in order to meet minds like our own, to find something we can identify with. Sometimes literature fails us in that respect. As Sophie Mayer puts it in her polemic on ‘Queer British Poetry’:

Queer poetry is not, and cannot remain, a ghetto, but needs to be recognised — like queer lives — as part of the stream of human existence.

Some of us may be changed by our reading, or actively use it to change the world around us. The poet and editor James Midgley investigates this phenomenon in ‘Poetry and Prayer’, talking of the poet’s voice and claiming that ‘the reader will be gathered towards that voice and changed according to it; it is easy to see the fairytale danger in the casually abandoned scrap of paper, the written word whose force of character may be such as to eclipse the reader’s, or take control of his body.’ The many poems and short stories in this issue pay testimony to that power, with poems by Daljit Nagra, Jane Draycott, Amarjit Chandan and Fiona Sampson amongst others, and intriguing original fiction from the likes of Elizabeth Baines, David Grubb and Ruth Almon.

Some of us read and feel impelled to subvert that initial act of submission — our humility before another’s mind and talents — and to respond as writers instead. Katy Evans-Bush does this in her astonishing translation of Prufrock into Piratese:

               It’s time we be goin’, me hearty, avast!
When the night’s nailed up its colours to its mast
Like some swab loaded to the gun’les ‘n’ lashed to the plank

Still more of us read in search of a deeper understanding of literature, as Annie Freud does in her thoughtful, writerly exploration of Eliot. Some brave souls read their own writings to others — see our first-ever Horizon Podcast for poems by Fiona Sampson, Annie Freud and Sam Riviere, amongst other things — and some prefer to listen, reading with their ears.

Some may ‘read’ art as though it were literature, and suggest ways for others to do the same, as Richard Yeomans does in his fascinating introduction to the reclusive Symbolist artist Keith Winnett, or as Kathryn Brown does, discussing Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s recent exhibition with Modern Art Oxford. In particular, Cardiff and Miller’s work constructed entirely of books — the title piece of the collection, The House of Books Has No Windows, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ story, The Library of Babel — creates a space for the observer where ‘books are used not as vehicles of language or of storytelling, but as components of a wholly different grammar, namely, that of sculpture itself’.

Wherever your reading leads you in Horizon Review, you will always find something new and different here when you return. This issue contains almost twice as much material as the first, featuring amongst other things a full-length previously unpublished play — Grace Andreacchi’s charming ‘Two Brothers’, based on a traditional Korean folktale — a stunning translation by Alistair Noon of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman’, and a wonderfully diverse collection of reviews, articles and literary comment.

If looking for somewhere to start, I would urge you to enjoy our Horizon Podcast first, hosted by the talented Patrick Hussey and Ellie Watts-Russell, featuring the novelist Gwendoline Riley on misogyny ‘everywhere’ and ‘prick-lit’, plus a controversial interview with Fiona Sampson, poet and editor of Poetry Review, conducted in a cupboard-under-the-stairs at the Poetry Society. ‘When was the last time we had a poetic movement in this country?’ Sampson demands, discussing the domination of British poetry by the after-effects of the New Generation promotion, which she rightly describes as ‘a promotion, not an artistic movement.’ Her solution to nepotism and distortion in the poetry world, to the often dubious practice of recommending students and friends as new poetic discoveries? ‘I think that whoever has any power or influence, you just have to keep being disobedient, you have to keep publishing really, really good verse.’

And so say all of us.

The next issue of Horizon will see two new section editors in place. Nuala Ní Chonchúir, an Irish writer whose third short fiction collection Nude will be published by Salt later this year, comes to us as the new Fiction Editor, while George Ttoouli takes charge of the Reviews section. George is an Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme and co-edits the e-zine Gists and Piths with Simon Turner.

Submissions and review copies to come through me as usual: see Submissions guidelines for details.

Jane Holland