The Dark Months of May

"Pickard kind of kickstarted the British Poetry Revival. He started when he was, like, 17. He went to go see a guy called Basil Bunting, one of the great modernists. In London, when they were doing T. S. Eliot, in the north of England, they were doing Basil Bunting. So Pickard went to see Bunting, and they ended up in this place called the Morden Tower, a very radical experiment. Ginsberg came over and later said that Pickard is one of the most live and true poetic voices of the time. But then he got really into birds. I think he’s better than anybody at writing about birds. His collection Fiends Fell is just extraordinary. What’s interesting is that nature writing is often such a PG space, whereas in Picard’s erotic poem ‘Lark and Merlin’ there’s, like, a sex cam scene amid this beautiful writing about larks and so on. There’s no home for him, basically—they aren’t going to have him reading on Countryfile . So Fiends Fell is brilliant. He lived for 11 years above a café in Cumbria—it’s so rooted in a place and he’s it in such minute loving and vulnerable details. He’s also obsessed with the wind. Fiends Fell is basically an 11-year exploration of the wind, so if you ever want to write wind better, I really recommend reading that. “People’s own sense of the place they live in is what makes them who they are” But I’ve chosen his collection Dark Months of May . It’s about when his marriage breaks down, and he just sets off to start afresh—it’s a really raw collection. In some senses it’s not about place at all, or rather it’s about the places in between; there’s a great bit about being at the bus shelter while they’re doing renovations, and covering over roads, and a man comes over to say to him: ‘that’s history, that.’ So it’s about liminal places—I think it’s important to recognise how much of a powerful and evocative place a roundabout can be. If someone in a creative writing class said: ‘okay, place: I’m going to write about bus stations,’ it would be a pretty unorthodox choice. But these are very transitory places, places that are ever changing. There’s that cliched idea—attributed to Heraclitus—that a man can’t cross the same river twice; because it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man. I think that’s the beauty of bus stations or service stations—I went to many, many service stations when writing my book actually. Yes. It’s very interesting how he writes about ostensibly prosaic places, but with the most beautiful little passages."