Sandra Tappenden

I first became aware of Martin Stannard's poetry in the late 90`s, when he read at an Exe Lit event, during a new (but unsurprisingly short-lived) Exeter city poetry festival initially devised by Rupert Loydell. There was a meeting of poets at the then Arts Centre (now The Phoenix) to discuss who we would like to see read. I didn’t know who Martin Stannard was and didn’t suggest him as a reader. Joe Soap`s Canoe had slid right past me while I was experimenting with sonnets…

I first became aware that I rated Martin Stannard's poetry once I bought his pamphlet `Easter`. I fell for the way the Easter poems are able to shift in a few lines between comedy and sorrow, even fear (though never explicit), making the experience one of recognition; there`s the constant rolling tide of human thought, and human be-ing; loving and vulnerability. And a lot of irrepressible laughter.

Martin's work first appealed to me because it was conversational a la Coleridge, (New) Romantic, with an utterly modern sensibility that often made me laugh aloud at the obvious joy of creative play the poems encompass. The poems were and still are chatty, smart, wistful, funny, rounded out with a crafted seriousness. And they continue to challenge written expressions of consciousness and poetic forms, where thoughts are a bubbling pot of light/dark/happy/sad. A funny poignant wordy amalgam. Maybe even a game.

Martin's poetry tends to grasp some ineffable quality about what it is to be sentient, and seemingly effortlessly, which is the core of my fandom or whatever it is; the style points to a genuine delight in what this poet`s brain can do, which acknowledges the ludicrousness, gorgeousness, joy and grimness of living, all the while sitting next to the reader/listener on the same roller coaster. That's quite a complex stunt to pull off. And it's very generous.

Martin's work upholds a particular ‘faith in poetry’, and debate about what poetry is, was, might or can be is a large part of the Stannard-as-reviewer phenomenon. I’ve always envied and enjoyed his poetry-faith however Gonzo it seems at times.

I've read a great deal of Martin Stannard's poems and reviews, and revel in his straight-talking, unfussy, quite often grumpy style. His poems stay with me, like curious, difficult friends you want to both guffaw with and reprimand for their sauce. I love the constant experimenting with form, but whatever, the work is always recognisably Stannard-ish. He's funny. He's deadly serious. I dunno how he does that.

Happy Birthday Martin Stannard and hooray for you.

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Introduction by Ian McMillan

Sometime in the very early 1980’s I was doing a reading for Martin Stannard somewhere in Ipswich and I was staying over at Martin’s house. On the way back from the gig his car broke down spectacularly, gasping and wheezing, then clanking and sighing, then moaning and complaining, then dying. The night was clear and Martin and I stood outside the car waiting for the RAC and gazing at the stars and I realised, not for the first time and not for the last, that I was living in a Martin Stannard poem and that it was an exciting place to live. When I first read Martin’s poems and started subscribing to his wonderful magazine Joe Soap’s Canoe I was excited that he took his influences from absolutely everywhere. At the time a number of us were writing in the shadow of Ted Hughes and The Mersey Poets and our lenses were crowded with our visceral reactions to Thatcherism’s vicious flowering but Martin seemed to look wider than the rest of us; he took in John Ashbery and surrealism, a kind of cra...

David Belbin

There's nothing like getting it wrong . MARTIN STANNARD AT SEVENTY I first encountered Martin through his poems in 1987, when Wide Skirt Press published The Flat of the Land . The title poem, which also opened the collection, was a revelation. The style owed a lot to the New York Poets, who I had recently discovered, but also felt fresh, funny and self deprecating in a very English way. Two years later, John Harvey's Slow Dancer press published a new and selected called The Gracing of Days , then Wide Skirt press published Denying England . I loved both collections: the voice, Martin's laconic yet romantic view of the world, the string of humour tightly laced throughout. I dragged a bunch of my A level students to a Slow Dancer reading in the basement of Nottingham's Old Vic pub. Martin was appearing alongside a young whippersnapper called Simon Armitage, who John had also published a pamphlet by. I primed the students for the reading with a sheet of poems by b...

Alan Baker

I came to Martin Stannard's poetry relatively late, when, at a book fair, I picked up a pamphlet entitled "Easter" (published 1994). The easy, familiar tone and the quick wit drew me in to what was at first just a pleasant read. Then, imperceptibly, the poetry took me to to a zone of wonder and disorientation that was exhilirating. Fast forward twenty-six years and, by 2020, I had the honour of being Martin's publisher, when the third title of his that I published, "Reading Moby Dick and Other Matters", was released. It's a beautiful object (I can say that as the book design was all Martin's). And the title poem, "Reading Moby Dick" has all the features I'd been struck by in "Easter" but with an added sophistication that the intervening years of poetic practice had brought to it. It opens with a knowing dodgy joke - "Call me optimistic..." which sets the tone of irreverence and tongue-in-cheek meandering...

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