Jackie Kay
Professor Jackie Kay MBE is the new National Poet of Scotland, its Makar, succeeding Liz Lochhead. The First Minister Nicola Sturgeon made the announcement at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh where Ms Kay read one of her own poems, ‘Between the Dee and the Don’. Jackie was born in Edinburgh in 1961. Her mother was Scottish, her father Nigerian. She was adopted by Helen and John Kay and brought up in Bishopbriggs, Glasgow. John Kay worked for the Communist Party and stood for Parliament; Helen Kay was the Scottish secretary of CND. Jackie’s was an unusually alert home.

She read English at Stirling and her first book of poems, The Adoption Papers of 1991, won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award. Other poetry awards include in 1994 a Somerset Maugham Award for Other Lovers. She received an MBE in 2006.

She abandoned Glasgow for London because, she said in an interview, she grew tired of having to assert herself as a black person in Scotland. ‘There is a funny thing,’ she said, ‘when people accept you and don’t accept you. I love the country, but I don’t know if the country loves me.’ As a writer, she needed to understand who she was culturally, sexually, politically. ‘There wasn’t anybody else saying the things I wanted to say. I started out of that sense of wanting to create some image of myself.’ Her poetic journey, from the staged originality of The Adoption Papers, can be gauged by the poem ‘Pride’ in the 1998 collection Off Colour. On a night train journey she meets, or dreams she meets, a man not unlike her natural father; she imagines a return to his village, recognising and accepting in the end her own reflection in the train window. ‘There was a moment when / my whole face changed into a map.’

She lives in Manchester and is Chancellor of the University of Salford and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle.

African Poetry Prize
The fourth Brunel University African Poetry Prize shortlist has been announced. The prize, aimed at the development, celebration and promotion of poetry from Africa, has become a prominent feature of the awards landscape. The prize, sponsored by Brunel and Commonwealth Writers, is open to African poets worldwide, who must submit ten poems for adjudication. The Chair of the judges is the energetic founder of the prize, Dr Bernardine Evaristo, Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel. Nine hundred entries were received this year; none of the ten shortlisted poets has published a first collection. The poets listed are Gbenga Adesina (Nigeria), Victoria-Anne Bulley (Ghana), Mary-Alice Daniel (Nigeria), Chekwube O. Danladi (Nigeria), Amy Lukau (Angola), Ngwatilo Mawiyoo (Kenya), Momtaza Mehri (Eritrea/Somalia), Saradha Soobrayen (Mauritius), Warsan Shire (Somalia) and Chimwemwe Undi (Zambia/Zimbabwe/Namibia). The winner will be announced in May. Previous recipients are: 2013 Warsan Shire (Somalia), 2014 Liyou Libsekal (Ethiopia), and 2015 Safia Elhillo (Sudan) & Nick Makoha (Uganda). The winners and most of the shortlisted poets of earlier years have had pamphlets published.

Asif Khan
The new director of the Scottish Poetry Library, succeeding Dr Robyn Marsack in June, will be Asif Khan. Though he grew up in Dundee and studied at Stirling University, his professional career has been in Bristol and London in ‘audience engagement, business development and marketing roles covering the full breadth of the arts, from public libraries and literature to visual art and performing arts’. In 2014 he was invited by the Government of Jamaica to produce a showcase event with the new Poet Laureate, Mervyn Morris and is a trustee of The Poetry Can and sits on the board of the Bristol Poetry Institute.

Mohammed Bashir al-Aani
Middle East Eye reported on 11 March that Islamic State militants had executed the Syrian poet Mohammed Bashir al-Aani and his son Elyas. They were arrested in the eastern town of Deir Ezzor seven months ago and taken to an unknown location. Militants executed the men on charges of ‘apostasy’. Aani was noted for his opposition to the government of President Bashar al-Assad and had published three volumes of lyric poetry. Aani is the most high-profile cultural figure known to have been executed by IS in Syria in 2016.

Dimitris Tsaloumas
Contributed by John Lucas
The Greek-Australian poet Dimitris Tsaloumas has died at the age of ninety-four. Born in 1921 on Leros, at that time ruled from Italy, he was involved in wartime Resistance activities, at first against Mussolini and then the German army of occupation. A chance post-war meeting with Lawrence Durrell, to whom Tsaloumas showed some poems, led to his being given a letter of introduction to George Seferis, who made encouraging noises, and as a result of this Tsaloumas published two collections, both of which he later disowned. Then, in 1952, with the Greek government making life difficult for those it considered undesirable elements, Tsaloumas, a life-long socialist, left Leros for Australia. He taught in schools in and around Melbourne, the city where he made his home, and began to publish poems in Greek. Some were translated and Thomas Shapcott, greatly impressed by these, promoted Tsaloumas’s cause. In 1983 the University of Queensland Press published the dual-language Observatory, which won that year’s National Book Council Award for Australian Literature. As other collections followed, so recognition of Tsaloumas’s worth grew, and in 1989 Con Castan published a critical study, Dimitris Tsaloumas: Poet. Ten years later Helen Nickas edited Dimitris Tsaloumas: a voluntary exile, Selected Writings on his Life and Work, and in the same year Shoestring Press published Stoneland Harvest, a selection of Tsaloumas’s poems in English. In 2000 UQP brought out a substantial New and Selected Poems. Tsaloumas was by then spending each summer on Leros, where he was welcomed as a local hero. Mainland Greek poets, though, tended to ignore him, a cause of some bitterness. His last published collection, Helen of Troy and Other Poems (UQP 2007), is full of his characteristic blend of grand manner and earthy matter. He died, as he would have wished, on Leros.

Nida Fazli
The Indian Express reported the death of Nida Fazli, a popular figure at the mushairas. Ghazal singer Talat Aziz, who sang and composed many of Fazli’s tunes, said, ‘Here was a man who was not diluting his first impulses. He was writing as a free thinker […] Brilliant is a small word for him. He was the last of the brilliant poets such as Ahmad Faraz and Faiz. I am also of the firm belief that he didn’t get his due despite such great poetry. He deserved much more recognition than he actually got.’ Fazli wasn’t popular just in Urdu literature or for writing Bollywood ghazals. ‘He never played to the gallery. He wrote on his own conditions and never pandered to commercial interests, poet Wasim Barelvi, Fazli’s colleague and friend, insisted.

‘Tadeusz Różewicz Is Dead’
Janusz Drzewucki, trans. Adam Czerniawski

Tadeusz Różewicz has died,
I thought he would never die,
but he did die this morning in Wrocław.

Tadeusz Różewicz is dead, yet the world
is there as ever, except that Tadeusz Różewicz no longer lives in it.

Tadeusz Różewicz has died, I thought
he would never die, since he is immortal, but he died, and yet he is immortal.

[Różewicz died on 24 April 2014]

The Poetry Archive
The Poetry Archive was formally launched as a not-for-profit organisation on 30 November 2005 at the British Library in London. This year it reaches a decade of activity and must be one of the great achievements of the poet laureateship. Sir Andrew Motion catalysed it, leaving it as an invaluable and constantly expanding legacy. During 2016 it will celebrate and be celebrated. The heroes of the enterprise are Motion and the recording producer Richard Carrington, who first met in a recording studio in 1999. Both loved to hear poets read their work and lamented that twentieth-century writers including Hardy, Housman and Lawrence were never recorded. The Archive would seek to ensure that all significant English-language poets alive today are ‘properly recorded for posterity and, crucially, that their recordings are freely available to the widest audience’. In ten years they have recorded more than 350 poets. They have linked with other resource centres world-wide, ‘allowing the Archive to feature increasing numbers of recordings of poets around the English-speaking world. Every week now, somewhere in the world, a poet goes into a studio to record a reading for the Archive.’ And many historic recordings are now available too, including Tennyson (recorded in 1890), Eliot, Sassoon and Ginsberg.

Commenting on the changing face of recording culture, Richard Carrington said, ‘How technology has moved on! In the early days, we were still editing recordings on quarter-inch magnetic tape with a razor blade. Now, the slightest extraneous detail can be edited out […] nothing gets in the way of your enjoying each of our recordings. […] Remembering our launch at the British Library brings back memories of our first Honorary President, […]Seamus Heaney. […] Now we are thrilled to have a new President, the great actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who is already proving to be another incomparable friend to the Archive […] From the start, there have been two words that Andrew Motion and I have often used to describe the Poetry Archive. Those words are “serious” and “fun”.’

Blanco Móvil
The Mexico-based international poetry magazine Blanco Móvil (Moving Target) has reached the age of thirty, with 129 issues to its credit. It has been run by a single editor, Argentine-born Eduardo Mosches. On 3 March he publicly presented a commemorative issue at a well-attended celebration. The magazine has featured poets from many of the nations of Latin America, Europe and the Middle East, and translations from the native languages. Among the poets featured are Juan Gelman, Valerio Magrelli, Verónica Volkow, Coral Bracho, Raúl Zurita, Yehuda Amichai, Pere Gimferrer and Natalia Toledo. Mosches declared, ‘In its thirty years of publication, the inclusion of hundreds of poems in the magazine have constituted a single long poem, the product of a conjunction of creators in different languages […] a long poem that survives in the memory of readers and in the print magazine.’

Title
David C. Ward wrote on the National Portrait Gallery website on 28 March
Writer Jim Harrison, who died on March 27 aged seventy-eight, reworked the legacy of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Wallace Stegner to his own original purposes. Set in his home state of Michigan or in the Southwest, Harrison’s writing charts the life cycles (and life crises) of his characters against an acute observation of the natural world and human society.  His first novel, Wolf (1971), was a fictional memoir of a naturalist tracking wolves in Michigan. Harrison was especially successful as a writer of novellas such as Legends of the Fall (1979), The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990), and The Summer He Didn’t Die (2005).

Although a successful novelist, Harrison considered himself first and foremost a poet. His poetry addresses the deep sense of the spirituality inherent in nature more directly than does his prose; he was strongly influenced by Asian poetry. Harrison was also an enthusiastic cook (especially of game) and an even more enthusiastic eater; his advice for most recipes was to add more garlic.

Although Harrison lost an eye in a childhood accident, his sharp, descriptive sense of the world and the foibles of human character never dimmed. Frequently compared to Hemingway (a comparison he disparaged) because of their shared Michigan roots and interest in the outdoors, Harrison was not as ‘great’ or influential a writer as his predecessor. But in many senses he was the better one, not least because of his ability to write empathetically about complex people (which Hemingway could not), especially people at odds with their family and society; rare for a male American writer, he did especially well when writing about women.

He also had a sly sense of humour and of the ridiculous (again completely unlike Hemingway); his basic world-view was of a comedy, not a tragedy, although many tragic events occurred in his writings. (The influence of Asian cosmology and poetry as well as his pantheism doubtless played a part in his essentially comedic outlook.) His last several books were streaked with his humorous exasperation about the pathos of getting old. Harrison never stopped writing, even with the afflictions and pains (psychic and physical) of old age. His last book of novellas, The Ancient Minstrel, was published this spring.