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The Quickening Maze Adam Foulds Jonathan Cape Mad, Bad and Dangerous Sebastian Barry’s review of Adam Foulds’ book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word, for which Foulds won the 2008 Costa Prize, is quoted on the back-cover of The Quickening Maze, Foulds’ second and most recent novel. ‘A miracle and a masterpiece’, Barry writes. The same can be said for The Quickening Maze. A few pages into the novel, this reviewer learned of its long listing for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. More recently the short list has been announced with Foulds’ inclusion. Rightly so. The Quickening Maze is an intensely poetic work with a poet as its main protagonist, the famed peasant poet, John Clare. Foulds tells the heartbreaking story of Clare’s slide into mental illness and incarceration in High Beach Private Asylum, on the edge of Epping Forest. The novel follows seven consecutive seasons in the lives of a group of people pivotal in the history of the asylum, namely Dr. Matthew Allen and his fa...

Some wonderful work in the most recent issue of Pedestal Magazine from North Carolina. I have a wee poem in there, too, if you fancy a look: http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=7051 I'm currently writing prose and am missing my poetry-writing, big time. I always find the journey from poetry to prose easy enough - but the journey back to poetry is usually fraught with difficulty for me. Something to do with what Kavanagh said about 'chinks': 'through a chink too wide comes in no wonder' and after a bout of prose I feel I need to narrow my 'chink' (as it were), i.e. contract a little in order to create some pressure and intensity and do the most difficult of all the writing forms (for me anyway) - poetry. I expect my first collection of poems to be out sometime mid-century as a result.

Lately, I've been having this debate in my head: are plays 'low art' or 'high art'? My conclusion was that, mostly, playwriting, the theatre, is 'low' art. Terrible conclusion to come to for a playwright, I know. (And yes, I have these very profound discussions with myself on buses and trains and even on my bike sometimes...) One can not honestly compare some theatre-writing with the work of say, Mozart, Ted Hughes, Martha Graham etc. But then of course SOMETIMES theatre, play-writing is 'high art', and one gets a glimpse of the plays of ancient Greece, the catharsis - all of that, though this rarely happens. What do I mean by 'high art'? Am I some sort of art snob or what? Well, by 'high art' I mean the kind of work that when you see it/ hear it, pins your eye sockets to the back of the wall . You know the kind I mean. And RARELY does a play do this. Ibsen, Beckett, Pinter, Sarah Kane, Edward Bond - a handful of playwrights have ma...

I've been busy slashing away at my first collection of short stories. I say slashing because I'm mostly cutting away at needless lines and phrases I should really have edited before (a lot of the stories have already been published). There's still a lot to do, and it feels a bit like making a patchwork quilt, in that the stories have to suit being beside other stories. One of the things that I kept to the fore of my mind in my most recent edit is something echoed in a recent article by Ian Jack in the Guardian about Diane Athill. Speaking about her accuracy and attention to detail, Jack states: Part of this comes from her considerable gift as a maker of sentences, which are so lucid and direct; some of it is owed to the breaking of taboos that then surrounded female sexual behaviour; most of it, though, stems from her triumphant struggle to "get it right", a lesson she learned from two of the writers she edited. [Jean] Rhys told her that the trick of good writing ...