English Association Poetry Website

Reviews and Notes from the Use of English

REVIEWS

The Goldfinches of Baghdad, by Robert Adamson: (58.1 Autumn 2006)
Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen: (57.1 Autumn 2005)
Miscanthus: Selected and New Poems, by Anthony Barnett: (57.1 Autumn 2005)
Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight, by James Booth: (57.3 Summer 2006)
The Emily Dickinson Handbook, edited by Gudrun Brabher et al.: (57.3 Summer 2006)
English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning, by Andrea Brady: (58.2 Spring 2007)
Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Colin Burrow: (56.3 Summer 2005)
Catch, by Peter Carpenter: (58.3 Summer 2007)
Collected Poems, by David Chaloner: (57.3 Summer 2006)
John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader, by Paul Chirico: (59.2 Spring 2008)
Bowl, by Elizabeth Cook: (58.3 Summer 2007)
Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, by Donald Davie: (59.2 Spring 2008)
Waterlog, A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain, by Roger Deakin: (59.2 Spring 2008)
Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin: (59.2 Spring 2008)
Shakespeare’s Poems. Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and the Shorter Poems, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen: (59.2 Spring 2008)
How to Read a Poem, by Terry Eagleton: (58.2 Spring 2007)
The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, edited by Archie Evans and Brian Murray: (58.1 Autumn 2006)
New Collected Poems, by W. S. Graham, edited by Matthew Francis: (56.1 Autumn 2004)
Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic: Canon and Genre Formation in Crane, Pound, Eliot, and Williams, by Daniel Gabriel: (59.2 Spring 2008)
James Hogg: A Life, by Gillian Hughes: (59.2 Spring 2008)
The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, edited by Maurice Lindsay and Lesley Duncan: (57.2 Spring 2006)
Vanishing Points, New Modernist Poems, edited by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella: (56.3 Summer 2005)
Wallace Stevens: Poetry and Criticism, by Tim Morris: (58.2 Spring 2007)
Horse Latitudes; The End of the Poem, by Paul Muldoon: (59.1 Autumn 2007)
Poems, by J.H. Prynne: (57.3 Summer 2006)
The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price: (58.3 Summer 2007)
Talk About Poetry: Conversations on the Art, by Peter Robinson: (58.3 Summer 2007)
Twentieth Century Poetry. Selves and Situations, by Peter Robinson: (57.1 Autumn 2005)
Untitled Deeds, by Peter Robinson: (56.2 Spring 2005)
Collected Poems, by Wallace Stevens: (58.1 Autumn 2006)
Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, by Anne Stevenson: (58.1 Autumn 2006)
The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology, by Nathaniel Tarn: (59.1 Autumn 2007)
Cracks in the Universe, by Charles Tomlinson: (58.2 Spring 2007)
There Are Words: Collected Poems, by Gael Turnbull: (58.2 Spring 2007)
Raw Skies, by Nigel Wheale: (58.1 Autumn 2006)
Donald Davie, Modernist Essays: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, edited by Clive Wilmer: (57.3 Summer 2006)
The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem, by Shira Wolosky: (59.1 Autumn 2007)

John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader by Paul Chirico (Palgrave Macmillan £45)

It is now some thirty five years since Clare studies were given a fresh impetus and direction by the publication of John Barrell's The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840. If Barrell's work led to the re-assessment of Clare in the context of eighteenth century topographical poetry, then this new study by Paul Chirico encourages the reader to look with new closeness at the specific environment, both physical and literary,which lies at the root of Clare's poetry.

There is no doubting Chirico's scholarship or depth of commitment, steeped as he is in the breadth of Clare's writing. Indeed, much useful material is drawn from essays and letters, as Chirico builds up a picture of the philosophical landscape from which the poetry emerges. The first four chapters in particular aim to set this theoretical context before Chirico gives more prominence to an examination of the poetry, and it is these early chapters which the reader is likely to find most challenging.

The degree of abstraction in both language and argument could well deter all but the most dedicated of undergraduates, whilst, sadly, enquiring sixth form students are unlikely to persevere. Part of the difficulty lies with Chirico's own prose, which, in its polysyllabic elaboration, not only takes few prisoners, but can also cast an opaqueness over already complex and sometimes speculative patterns of critical argument - One inherent critical danger is implicitly acknowledged when Chirico quotes David Groves's regret at 'the brevity of of Clare's critical comments and their lack of sophistication'. If it is one of Chirico's triumphs that he persuades the reader that Clare's critical basis as a writer was far more coherent and thought out than one has tended to think, then it is pari passu a pitfall that Chirico's enthusiasm may lead him at times to exaggerate the poet's ideological self-consciousness - such straining is, for example, apparent in the section linking Keats and Clare. The desire to combat the popular notion that Clare is merely a naive and intellectually limited figure causes Chirico to champion the poet in terms which may seem to err too far towards the portentous, as in this statement from the analysis of To The Memory of Bloomfield where it is claimed that Clare 'is not able to write of an authentic nature without acknowledging the intermediate, constructive function of artistic representation'. There is here just a suspicion that what Clare actually does becomes overlaid in such an analysis by an improbable degree of conscious philosophical reflection, creating by accident an ironic contrast between the poet's simplicity of utterance and the language of professional literary criticism.

Clare's awareness of, and consequent influence by, contemporary or near contemporary writers meets with detailed exploration. The young poet's response to Bloomfield is tellingly and perceptively detailed, whilst the impact of Gray and Thomson also receives due comment. Perhaps here space might have been found for a more extended comparison of the sharply differing linguistic practices of the poets : to what extent does the determinedly vernacular Clare breathe individual life into the rustic subjects expressed previously in classically embedded language ? One wonders, too, given the scope of Chirico's allusions to comparable poets labouring at this time to raise themselves from educational obscurity to literary recognition, why Clare's recorded interest in the poetry of Henry Kirke White passes without notice. The latter's Clifton Grove certainly relates interestingly to the ballad tradition of Edwin and Emma which Chirico traces in his discussion of The Fate of Amy.

The chapters which focus most sharply upon Clare's poetic practice engage the reader with the greatest immediacy and here one finds stimulating discussion of, in particular, the source and employment of metaphor in such poems as Helpstone, Obscurity and The Shepherd's Calendar. It is language which especially attracts Chirico's notice and he is, by contrast, surprisingly quiet on the topics of structure and verse, pace the final chapter's account of To His Rural Muse, where the unvarying iambic rhythms and missing punctuation can sometimes disconcert and even threaten the effect of imagery, as in these lines from The Fate of Amy :

The humble cot that lonly stood
Far from the neighbouring Vill
Its church that topt the willow groves
Lay far upon the hill

Although it is only fair to point out that in the exploration of Clare's 'sophisticated poetics' the emphasis falls more upon conceptual elucidation in order to validate the epithet 'sophisticated' than upon holistic analysis, Chirico states his wish to address the familiar conflict concerning choice of language which is at the heart of much Clare criticism. Only partially can he be said to have achieved this aim, often leaving unquestioned whether diction is clumsily unoriginal and derivative or fresh in its deliberate and vernacular awkwardness.

As our own age increasingly reassesses and reflects upon our relationship with the environment and with the forces of nature, it is perhaps only to be expected that poets such as Clare should strike us with renewed significance. So too we can respond with understanding to a poet's desire not 'to blush unseen'. If at times Chirico has seemed to adopt an approach so intellectual that the considerable emotional impulses at work in Clare's poetry have been overlooked, he has nonetheless presented compelling evidence from the writings of John Clare which shows how in links with our immediate landscape we can find both cultural identity and continuity. By that presentation he also demonstrates that far from being marginalised and culturally isolated, Clare can challenge us to re-examine by 'willed artifice' our own sense of tradition and placement. Clare's 'offspring' do indeed continue to live.

Jeff Branch
The Use of English 59.2 Spring 2008, 161-163 © The English Association 2008

***Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic: Canon and Genre Formation in Crane, Pound, Eliot, and Williams*, by Daniel Gabriel. (Palgrave, £42.50)**

The reputation of ‘that very rhetorical poet Hart Crane’ is in decline. ‘A kind of benign neglect has set in’, says Daniel Gabriel, by which he means that Crane’s most ambitious production—a ‘mystical synthesis of “America”’ —is now virtually unread. But he holds that The Bridge has been misunderstood, and that a new term is needed to define it—‘modernist epic’: his study amounts to a defence of the poem against the objections raised by Yvor Winters in a refreshingly acerbic review (which dismayed and angered Crane) of the Paris edition. Winters wrote:

The book cannot be called an epic, in spite of its endeavour to create and embody a national myth, because it has no narrative framework…It is not didactic, because there is no logical exposition of ideas…The structure we shall find is lyrical; but the poem is not a single lyric, it is rather a collection of lyrics on themes more or less related…

Daniel Gabriel’s reply, the substance of which is set out in an introduction (‘Hart Crane, Bridging, and History’), is almost as confusing as the poem, and one hesitates to summarise it.

The Bridge “misbehaves” in some ways not unlike its creator…but despite [its] resistance to conventional epic and narrative continuity…it is unprofitable to read it merely as a lyrical sequence…I identify it as a hybrid of lyric and epic modes…These two modes assume a dialectical relationship, and yet form an unconventional synthesis (a disunified unity) through a complex and elusive structure.

He calls The Bridge ‘a perplexed and fractured performance’, but it would be hard to say whether he considers this a strength or a weakness. And exactly what—where a poem is in question—is a disunified unity?
Conceived as a corrective to the ‘pessimism’ of The Waste Land, The Bridge got off to a bad start. There is nothing more depressing, especially in poetry, than healthy optimism; allied to patriotic fervour, it is lethal. Crane appears to have caught the infection from Waldo Frank’s Our America (1919), an uplifting call for cultural regeneration, but ironically it was The Waste Land that provoked the first full-blooded attack of cheerfulness. ‘Eliot ignores certain spiritual events and possibilities as real…now as, say, in the time of Blake’, he writes in January 1923. ‘I cry for a positive attitude!’ And of The Bridge itself: ‘If I do succeed, such a waving of banners, such ascent of towers, such dancing…will never before have been put down on paper!’ The first section to be completed was the impossibly elevated finale, ‘Atlantis’, a celebration of his central symbol:

From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums,
Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare—
Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest
Of deepest day—O Choir, translating time
Into what multitudinous Verb the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
In myriad syllables,—Psalm of Cathay!
O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm…!

This is the ‘positive’ Crane at full stretch, waving banners and scending towers: he called ‘Atlantis’ a ‘mystic consummation’, a ‘sweeping dithyramb in which the Bridge becomes the symbol of consciousness spanning time and space.’ Winters thought it ‘next to impossible to decipher’, but the admirers rule out a strictly ‘verbal’ approach. We are not to ask in what sense a bridge may be addressed as love’s white paradigm, or how it translates time into a verb. ‘We are readers of Crane’s reading’, says Gabriel mysteriously, ‘and together we read the bridge, a kind of ancient hieroglyphic.’
Crane was the first to acknowledge his indebtedness to Eliot. ‘I have been facing him for four years’, he wrote to Allen Tate (a fellow sufferer) in 1922, ‘In his own realm Eliot presents us with an absolute impasse’. But only in that realm. He assured himself, after its publication in 1930, that The Bridge was ‘an affirmation of experience…”positive” rather than “negative” in the sense that The Waste Land is negative’, and that Eliot was behind him. But he was deceived. Take the ending of section 4, ‘Van Winkle’:

Or is it the Sabbatical, unconscious smile
My mother almost brought me once from church
And once only, as I recall—?

It flickered through the snow screen, blindly
It forsook her at the window, it was gone
Before I had left the window. It
Did not return with the kiss in the hall […]

Keep hold of that nickel for car-change, Rip,—
Have you got your “Times”—?
And hurry along, Van Winkle—it’s getting late!

The laboured joke, the contrived signposting of the closing lines barely conceal the echo of The Waste Land (‘HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME’); and when, a poignant irony, Crane reaches for a personal memory in that image of his mother’s Sunday smile, what surfaces—almost certainly unconsciously—is another passage from the poem: ‘I have heard the key/Turn in the door once and turn once only’. Crane’s own contribution, a typically redundant pile-up (‘It flickered…It forsook…it was gone…It/Did not return’), is quite redundant.
He is never far from pastiche of Eliot, and in comparing the two poems as ‘modernist epics’ Gabriel steps on dangerous ground. The unforgettable phrasing of The Waste Land (‘We who were living are now dying/With a little patience’, ‘The awful daring of a moment’s surrender/Which an age of prudence will never retract’) is beyond Crane. And where Eliot’s symbolic waste land rises naturally from the ‘dead land’ of his opening lines, Crane’s ‘symbol of consciousness spanning time and space’ is something of a mirage. It was perhaps a mistake to suppose that Brooklyn Bridge, built for another purpose, would so easily surrender its identity:

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,—[…]

The opening dedication breaks down under the strain (that ‘fury fused’ is more fury than fusion); the poet stays on this side of the threshold, and Brooklyn Bridge is what it always was.

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

And with this humble prayer (misquoted by Gabriel on p. 40), the bridge more or less disappears from view. The poet, or his representative, walks home across it in ‘Cutty Sark’, and it is invoked once more in the sub-Whitmanic ‘Cape Hatteras’ as ‘that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!’ It spans time and space, of course, and we are to think of it as a presence in everything that follows, but this is asking a lot of a mere symbol. When he reaches ‘Atlantis’, Crane only repeats himself (‘One arc synoptic of all tides below’), and in any case it’s too late.
‘In this work’, says an uninviting blurb, ‘Crane assumes a greater political presence than much commentary has entertained.’ The obvious focus is ‘Quaker Hill’, completed at the last moment, and disparaged by Crane in a letter to his publisher. Gabriel thinks he underrated it, and calls it ‘ponderous and stately’, evidently unaware of the pejorative implication; but ponderous it is:

This was the Promised Land, and still it is
To the persuasive suburban land agent
In bootleg warehouses where the gin fizz
Bubbles in time to Hollywood’s new love-nest pageant.

It’s the only satiric section in the poem, a denunciation of modern America from the viewpoint, as R.W. Butterfield observes, of a protagonist ‘who identifies himself more and more closely with the New England aristocracy, until finally the Adams family is named.’

What cunning neighbours history has in fine!
The woodlouse mortgages the ancient deal
Table that Powitsky buys for only nine—
Ty—five at Adams’ auction,—eats the seal,
The spinster polish of antiquity…
Who holds the lease on time and on disgrace?
What eats the pattern with uniquity?
Where are my kinsmen and the patriarch race?

For Crane, this is unusually lucid; but Butterfield asks how he squared the views of ‘a nostalgic, regional reactionary’ with that of The Bridge as a whole. In ‘The Dance’ Crane identifies with the sacrificial Indian chieftain Maquokeeta, symbolically dying with him at the stake. Why should he lament the decline of a New England which had played a large part in the extinction of his race?

Recoiling from the world around him Crane in desperation clutches at any and every unheard, rejected, or defeated spirit—at Maquokeeta, Whitman, Isadora Duncan, Emily Dickinson—even at the assuredly dismayed and unsympathetic ghost of the New England upper class.

Crane was not cut out for satire; he preferred a lyrical approach to history and politics, summed up in a letter to his patron Otto Kahn as ‘a more organic panorama, showing the continuous and living evidence of the past in the inmost vital substance of the present.’ This is as unspecific as you like, apt to a ‘mystical synthesis of “America”’, but hardly qualifying Crane for ‘a greater political presence than much commentary has entertained.’ ‘We cannot help but read The Bridge as a representation of cultural crisis, and in these terms political’, says Gabriel in a defensive footnote. But Crane is more at ease—freer of factual and ideological complexities—with American mythology, with Pocahontas and De Soto and Columbus; and what most excites him is the future.
Gabriel sees this study—like its subject—as a hybrid, an ‘attempt to wed a traditional literary-critical approach with literary theory.’ Does it work? The usual theorists—among them Bakhtin, Benjamin, Frederic (‘Always historicize!’) Jameson, Jacques Lacan—are here in numbers, some of them suffering from translatorese:

In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporary indicators are fused…Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged…

Not one could be described as readable; but the other partner in this marriage, the traditional literary-critical approach, is too narrowly conceived to put up much of a fight:

Crane was about building as much as bridging. He wanted his poem to stand tall among the rippling and “dangerous” waters of the harbour. He needed to give himself a home among the waves.

This is waffle out of Walter Pater, and Gabriel’s assessment of the poem (‘a work that sometimes attains a majesty…a broken but often beautiful music’) belongs to an age before The Sacred Wood. No wonder he is oblivious to Crane’s most disconcerting defect, the outdated diction picked up from Dowson and Wilde and never discarded. ‘O thou steeled Cognizance’, he says to the bridge, ‘Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing/In single chrysalis the many twain.’ How could he ever have been considered modern?

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Crane scholars are divided as to whether the ‘bedlamite’ actually jumps. Is he (or she) the jest that falls, or is the jest some comment from the caravan, the traffic crossing the bridge? It hardly matters: the archaism of bedlamite and caravan removes the scene from anything recognisable as ‘reality’.
Hart Crane was admitted recently to the Library of America series, adding valuable ranking points to his current reputation. Adam Kirsch has even suggested that this honour is in effect ‘a conclusion to the long debate over Crane’s stature.’ The editor is more cautious. He thinks the poems ‘must be repeatedly “introduced” again, brought in, reclaimed…Crane still does not have a place.’ But let the poet have the final word. ‘I can’t help thinking’, he said of The Bridge, ‘that my mistakes may warn others who may later be tempted to an interest in similar subject matter.’

John Constable

The Use of English 59.2 Spring 2008, 167-173 © The English Association 2008

Randall Jarrell, Kipling, Auden & Co. (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1981), p. 237.

Brom Weber (ed.), The Letters of Hart Crane (University of California Press, 1965), p. 124.

R.W.Butterfield, The Broken Arc: A Study of Hart Crane (Oliver and Boyd Ltd., 1969, p. 200.

Brom Weber (op. cit.), p. 353.

James Hogg: A Life, by Gillian Hughes (Edinburgh University Press, £25)

The author of this new life of Hogg states, with absolute truth, at the outset of her work that he was 'a writer who made the resilience of the ordinary people of Scotland, despite oppression and change, a recurring theme of his work.' This theme was no doubt inspired and informed by Hogg's own life, especially his early and formative years, when poverty and hardship dominated. His father, a small tenant farmer in the Scottish Borders, was made bankrupt when the boy was six and from then on Hogg had to struggle for his bread. His employment as a herd meant that he had only about six months of formal schooling in his entire life; this was more than compensated for by the strong oral tradition of song and story that existed in his family and his community. Hughes provides a detailed and fascinating account of Hogg's formation as man and writer, examining the different strains that went into the making of this exponent of 'doubleness' in works such as The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. From his family Hogg inherited both a link with the pagan world of fairy and brownie (his mother's father, William Laidlaw, was 'known for having been the last man in the district to have conversed with the fairies') and a strong Covenanting tradition which was intensified by the time he spent as a shepherd in the Covenanters' heartland of Dumfries-shire. She also lays particular emphasis on his 'man of the people' stance in which he saw himself as a 'tradition-bearer and peasant poet' and successor to James Beattie and Robert Burns (he even falsified his own date of birth to make it coincide with that of Burns). But even here was 'doubleness' for he also had close links with Walter Scott and with the 'literati' associated with Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.
Hogg's divided existence, between the shepherd's life, when he lived in what was literally a hole in the ground, and the life of the Edinburgh taverns and drawing rooms, is examined in fascinating detail. Hogg's first published success was his handbook, The Shepherd's Guide, of 1807, which became 'a classic work for shepherds, store-farmers and agricultural improvers.' The following few years found him in Edinburgh, continuing his education partly by reading but not buying the books for sale in Constable's shop. As Karl Miller put it in his 2003 study of Hogg, Electric Shepherd, 'Here was a man of feeling who used to bite the balls off sheep.' Hughes provides insight into the milieu Hogg inhabited in the course of this first Edinburgh sojourn which makes his later association with the young Tory writers of the Blackwood circle something of a puzzle, unless we accept it as yet another case of 'doubleness.' Hogg was linked to the circle of the schoolmaster James Gray, 'a literary culture for those with more intelligence and talent than money and social position.' This was a politically radical grouping and Hogg's editorship of an associated weekly periodical, The Spy, not only gave a platform for contributors who were 'teachers, women, printers and journalists' it also marked an important stage in his development as a writer of prose fiction.
Five years later, however, now dividing his time between a farm at Altrive and Edinburgh, Hogg took his place in the Tory clique centred on Blackwood’s. At first he took a leading role but soon John Wilson ['Christopher North'] and J.G. Lockhart, Scott's son-in-law, came to dominate the magazine and Hogg found himself increasingly marginalised. He 'felt some discomfort at being reputed a Tory firebrand' according to Hughes, but he did not remove himself from the group even when Wilson and Lockhart took to ridiculing him. Part of that discomfort at being tarred with the Blackwood’s brush may have owed something to his continued sense of the injustices of society and his concern for the oppressed. Both attitudes were displayed in his collection of songs, The Jacobite Relics of Scotland, in which the originals were not 'sanitised' for bourgeois consumption and references were made to the contemporary 'clearances' in the Highlands. Here Hughes shows Hogg retaining 'fidelity to an authentic voice of the people.' At much the same period Hogg produced Cottage Winter Nights, a set of 'rural and traditionary tales of Scotland' which offered 'a national history experienced by the people rather than as determined and interpreted by a political and social élite.' Hogg's writing often demonstrated a departure from literary politeness that appalled his printer and the Blackwood’s circle. In The Brownie of Bodsbeck of 1818, for example, not only is the Covenanting past lauded, by a man who had just celebrated their political opponents the Jacobites, but the heroine's would-be rapist is castrated by the eponymous brownie. She shows, also in this vein, how his Winter's Evening Tales of 1820 provide what has been described as 'an alternative, non-novelistic genre of national fiction, close to its roots in popular print media (miscellanies, chapbooks) as well as in oral story-telling.' There is a strong and consistent thread running through Hogg's prose works of this period which reflects his loyalty to the vibrant and living oral traditions of his childhood and his ancestral inheritance. Hughes’ deep knowledge of Hogg and his work means that she brings a real sensitivity and balance to her study of the making of his complex psychology.
At the same time as he was writing these works he was mixing with the university-educated Tory clique in Edinburgh; indeed, Wilson had gained, through political influence, the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, a post whose duties he was enabled to fulfil only by dint of reading as lectures the weekly letters sent to him by a friend who knew something about philosophy. When they were not ridiculing him, presenting him as 'a boozing buffoon,' this group tended to shift him, like Burns, 'from national poet to Tory icon of an appropriately naive if gifted peasantry that was maligned and misunderstood by Enlightenment whiggery.' In fact, if Hogg was maligned and misunderstood by anyone it was by the Blackwood's clique. Not only did they present him, in the Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of dialogues set in a comfortable Edinburgh 'howff' or tavern, as a coarse, Scots-speaking consumer of vast quantities of food and whisky toddy, alternatively sentimentalised and mocked, they completely misunderstood where his real talent lay as a writer. Year after year in the Noctes, which ran in Blackwood's from 1822 to 1835, Wilson repeatedly boosted the poem Kilmeny from The Queen's Wake, a long poem which Hogg had written in 1812. This was lauded as the finest thing Hogg had ever written while his prose fiction was either ignored or denigrated. Given the circulation of Blackwood's both in the United Kingdom and its possessions abroad, this was to do Hogg a major disservice. It was a view of the writer which existed until well into the second half of the twentieth century: the present writer remembers meeting Kilmeny in an anthology in his primary school in the late 1950s and, indeed, it was read by Miss Jean Brodie to her 'girls' in Spark's novel. The sentimentalising and the ridiculing have been the paradigm for a certain attitude to literature in Scots which exists to this day.
Yet it was at this very period, from 1820 onwards, that Hogg was producing the great novels by which he is best known today. The supernatural Three Perils of Man was followed in 1822 by the more bleak and realistic The Three Perils of Woman in 1822 and then, in 1825, came the novel which eventually, after a century and more of being forgotten, brought Hogg to a world-wide audience, The Private Memoirs ands Confessions of a Justified Sinner. For whatever reason, this work failed with the public and critics at the time; after two years Hogg had made only two pounds out of it. This failure came hard on the heels of the failure of a long poem published in 1824, Queen Hynde, described by one present-day critic as 'Fingal with jokes', and Hogg turned to writing for periodicals, particularly Fraser's. Gillian Hughes provides an interesting account of his successes in this sphere but shows also, I think, how much the writer was a victim of those he consorted with on Blackwood's.
Hughes has here produced the definitive life of James Hogg, the result of decades of research and study. It should be pointed out that this biography is exactly what it says on the cover: 'A Life.' It does not set out to offer a detailed analysis of literary works, and those readers new to Hogg who are looking for some study of the writings should start with Karl Miller's Electric Shepherd. Those already acquainted with Hogg and looking for a fuller understanding of the many conflicting currents that made up the man will be excellently served by Gillian Hughes' biography.

Allan Ronald

The Use of English 59.2 Spring 2008, 173-176 © The English Association 2008

Reek of the Human
Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, by Donald Davie (Carcanet, £12.95)
Waterlog, A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain, by Roger Deakin (Vintage, £7.99)
Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin (Penguin, £20.00)

Without contraries there is no progression. Donald Davie was never afraid to swim against the prevailing critical current. Both these books by him (here appearing without an introductory essay, but with telling retrospective forewords, from 1992 and 1975) remind us how words and ideas fare in their travels over time. How to preserve thoughts and to capture ‘immediacy’ of experience in language; how to render them in memorable forms for readers is a shared central preoccupation. ‘Purity of Diction in English Verse’(1952) was a reaction against excesses of the Apocalyptic poets of the 1940s and was part of ‘an austerity package’ that stemmed from the ‘common sense of ‘old sweats’, ex-servicemen’; rationing moved to poetics, with ‘wartime stringencies…not to be set aside or forgotten’. It does not have the postscript of 1966 (available in the RKP reprint of 1967) which was written still very much ‘’i th’heat’ of an argument with the ‘depraved and depraving London Bohemia’, with its’ tawdry amoralism’ that ‘destroyed’ Dylan Thomas. The postscript is also a counter-blast to criticism of the poetry of the 1950s that Davie helped to shape: this sort of thing from Alvarez’s introduction (‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’) to the seminal ‘New Poetry’(1962): ‘It was, in short, academic-administrative verse, polite, knowledgeable, efficient, polished and, in its quiet way, even, intelligent.’ Davie’s writing may seem a trifle dour in the twenty first century, but its historical moment needs to be taken into account: as critic and poet he proposed an ‘elegance…which is heartfelt’, a style which is the product of something fought for, technically, and more than a whim of fashion.
Behind both books is a row with the ways in which some of the central tenets of Romanticism (views on composition, the self, aims to capture immediacy and sensation) had become excuses for the ‘cult of the improviser’, as Davie puts it in his chapter on Coleridge, and a wilful ‘rebellion against form’. The Romantics, he continues, produced ‘fragments, pieces of poetry rather than poems, preludes to poems that were never written’ and amorphous poems and impure diction are to Davie logically linked: the improviser ‘makes it up as he goes along, and … the thing he makes, is not a poem, a statement, having shape and finality, but…a visitation, the section of a flow of talk, a spasm or a series of spasms’. In such spasmodic productions, not aiming at the ‘consistent development of a single theme’ consistency of diction not merely ‘irrelevant, but positively unwanted’; Davie cites this with veneration for what has been lost thus: ‘It marks the disappearance of the Renaissance conviction of the poem as a made thing, thrown free of its maker, something added to creation and free-standing in its own right.’ When Davie praises Coleridge for ‘Dejection’ it is for a voice emerging from a ‘harrowing personal predicament’ that ‘eschews self-pity’ and is ‘impersonal and timeless, the voice of a language, the voice of Man, of no one and everyone.’ So the paradigm established by Davie is of poetry that is transcendent, arising maybe from profound emotion, yet through responsible constraints achieving ‘prosaic strength, exactness and urbanity’ in verse, qualities lauded in Johnson, Goldsmith, Wesley and other ‘good’ Augustan poets. Another perceived strength is ‘economy in metaphor’ achieved by ‘judgement and taste’, shown forcefully in many examples where ‘the national language’ is purified by enlivening metaphors gone dead, by making readers aware, ‘with new or renewed nicety’ of the ‘meaning of almost any word.’

The moral resonance of ‘purity’ is evident from the start of the book: Davie makes it clear that a choice of diction is linked inexorably to a ‘web of responsibilities’ and that one of a writer’s responsibilities to the reader is not only to give pleasure but ‘deviously or directly, instructions in proper conduct.’ The progress in time of words in his argument ( like ‘deviously’ and ‘proper’ here) makes Davie’s affiliations with eighteenth century poets and poetics even clearer now, but the ramifications of the argument itself ( the relation of art to immediacy, artfulness to sincerity, formal control to the flux of experience ) seem entirely up to date. The second chapter of Davie’s book, ‘The Chastity of Poetic Diction’, is rightly famous and the parallels and distinctions established in the poetics of Goldsmith and Wordsworth brilliantly managed. Safeguards( ‘restraint and economy’ in metaphor ) against ‘frigidity’ in language caused by writers out to shock, generally through ‘hyperbolical and highly metaphorical language’ lie at the heart of the matter: Wordsworth thinking an expression ‘unchaste’ when it departs from the language of prose’ and Goldsmith when it departs from ‘common use’. Cowper’s lines quoted by Wordsworth’s in his Appendix to the Preface to ‘The Lyrical Ballads’ ( ‘But the sound of the church-going bell/These valleys and rocks have never heard’) with the ‘ludicrous image of the bell itself trundling along the road to church’ perhaps made one reader, Philip Larkin, aware with ‘renewed nicety’ of the language here. The title of one of his great early poems, ‘Church Going’ (July 1954 ) beyond its primary meaning is a little puzzling: a nudge-nudge hint at decline in worship?; a similar pun as that used laterin the title ‘Going, Going’ ?). Davie’s unveiling of an ‘unwanted’ ludic element seems an ideal source for a poem that deliberately exploits comic potential and veers in tone from the narrator’s initial ‘awkward reverence’ as he takes off cycle clips and enters the building which is eventually, movingly, acknowledged as a ‘serious house on serious earth’. Other flickers of argument and method emerge in the texture of Larkin’s poetry of this time; such as ‘the frigid wind/Tousling the clouds’ that is left as a matter for conjecture in the imagined life of ‘Mr Bleaney’ (written in 1955), where the emotional chilliness of Bleaney’s apathy and lack of imagination is hinted at in this economical, restrained metaphor. The early poetry of Geoffrey Hill is also, I would argue, heavily influenced by Davie’s dictums, with the clenched puns and a post-war restraint in metaphor evident in poems from ‘For the Unfallen’. ‘Gather the dead as the first dead scrape home’( the last line of ‘The Guardians’, 1956, for example ) is cited and explored as examples of ‘cliché as responsible speech’ by Christopher Ricks , following Davie’s line on ‘enlivening metaphors gone dead’. I have restrained myself as yet from mentioning the Movement, that much mythologised and disparate grouping, for whom Davie’s words acted, however fleetingly and diversely as a point of departure. Read Amis and Larkin and Davie’s own ‘Brides of Reason’, but follow too the path of the late Thom Gunn, discussed in the following way by August Kleinzahler in the 2007 selection of his poetry: ‘His diction is lean and unadorned – chaste as the poet Clive Wilmer describes it – the argument and exposition are clear, trim and direct but the tone may sound oddly formal to the twentieth-century reader.’
The second of the books, ‘Articulate Energy’ ( 1955 ) is joined at the hip to the first; the former a ‘thinly disguised manifesto’ as acknowledged in 1975, and the latter a ‘blundering into ‘excitingly unmapped territory’ that itself does not lie low when it comes to polemic or confrontational judgements (as in a retracted swipe at William Carlos Williams) and is again a reaction, this time to the perception of symbolist poetics as potentially self-enclosed and self-perpetuating, and, for Davie, the misguided desire ‘to make the world of poetry more autonomous’, to lose contact with ‘the outside world’ altogether. The cornerstone of Davie’s argument here is to link the systems of poetry to the quiddities of the world and the ways in which poets are able to render their experiences and thoughts. Thus it is a far more wide-ranging book than its appears to be from the label on the tin and the discussions of Fenellosa and T.E. Hulme, for example, are brilliant examples of ‘scrutiny’, with all its Leavisite connotations, as Davie outlines and then analyses ideas behind , for example, the Modernist fear of abstraction, the relation in poetry between syntax, logic, grammar and music. Sometimes Davie’s own turns on the critical language he uses is confusing ( see Neil Powell’s ‘Carpenters of Light’, especially chapters one and three), but then the concepts themselves are tough. The chapter on T.E. Hulme takes passages from ‘Speculations’ (the key section that starts from an analogy between prose and algebra -- both embodied in non-visual ‘signs or counters’ -- and from this the defining characteristic of poetry as ‘a visual, concrete’ language that ‘ always endeavours to arrest you, to see an abstract thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process’) and then looks at it via its debts to Bergson, the fluffiness of its use of critical terminology, and its impact, as in the etymological play on ‘explaining’ as ‘unfolding’ in Pound. Davie’s distinctions on the varieties of poetic syntax ( subjective, dramatic, objective, like music, like mathematics) may creak a little but they afford some wonderful moments of close reading. None of these is better than his look at Blake’s poems as the product of the eighteenth century, as in ‘The Poison Tree’ and ‘The Human Abstract’ in which the rigorous logic of human laws in Blake’s eyes (‘in no way ‘chancy’or unpredictable’) is mimetically rendered in syntax that is logical and is neither ‘narrative nor propositional, but partaking of both.’ Thus he places Blake next to Pope rather than a symbolist poem that ‘is what it says’.
Davie’s unease with symbolist poetics is eventually given voice via Wordsworth, after a superb series of discriminations on syntax in ‘The Prelude’ with this keynote: ‘What Wordsworth renders is not the natural world but ( with masterful fidelity ) the effect that the world has upon him.’ This lines up the final demolition ( with Northrop Frye as ‘whipping-boy ) of the world of a symbolist poem ‘ closed and self-sufficient, being the pure system of the ornaments and the chances of language.’ This is how is goes : ‘Wordsworth’s poems are ‘impure’ because they have about them the smell of soil and soiled flesh, the reek of humanity. Their syntax is not ‘pure’ syntax because it refers to – it mimes – something outside itself and outside the world of the poem, something that smells of the human, of generation, and hence of corruption.’ It is wonderful to see the way that Davie turns ‘purity’ as a critical term in different contexts from virtue to vice. Contrariwise. (Interesting, also, to place such critical pronouncements in the historical context, given Empson’s ‘Structure of Complex Words’ published in 1951, with its chapter on the use of ‘sense’ in Wordsworth’s verse.) One strand that is constant throughout is his appreciation of language as a medium that provides stern resistance to the ‘maker’ ( thus his lifelong analogies made between poet and sculptor or poet and carpenter ) and his admiration for those poets who continually make the right selections in the face of ‘words thrusting at the poem and being fended off from it.’
‘The marble index of a mind for ever/Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone’: Wordsworth’s telling and profound revision to the description of Newton’s statue ( ‘The Prelude, Book 3, ll. 62-63, 1850 edition ) came to mind when considering these posthumous works by Donald Davie and then the wonderful follow up to ‘Waterlog’ by Roger Deakin, who died last year at the age of sixty three. These lines were added by Wordsworth in the year 1838 to 1839, nearly a third of a century after the first version was published. The kinship with Newton, for whom ‘Nature’ was a matter of laws and scientific enquiry or deduction, might seem odd, even more so when we realise that Wordsworth is echoing Thomson’s elegy on Newton ( ‘The noiseless tide of time, all bearing down/To vast eternity’s boundless sea,/Where the green islands of the happy shine,/He stemmed alone..’). Thomson – one of the poets under the hammer for ‘gaudiness’ and artificiality of diction in the original Preface ! Wordsworth acknowledges his sources, both affinities and differences, tellingly, in the kinship of isolation enacted by the syntax: the placing of ‘alone’ at the end of a sentence that spans seven lines of blank verse. The elements mingle in the reader’s mind in the shift from the hardness of ‘marble’ and the fluidity of ‘seas’; this is allied to the process of thinking itself, made all the more memorable by the enjambment of ‘for ever/Voyaging’. Like Davie, Wordsworth, was good at re-trenching, changing course, and in both, the texture of the writing reveals such ‘movements of the mind’. Davie’s memorable pronouncements on the resistances of language are encapsulated in a 1990 radio interview: ‘The medium, the material, for us as writers is the words of our language in the structures they take on. That is what confronts us as certainly as the marble or the granite confront the sculptor… You are pushing against the language, which has its own grain, its own tendencies, and only up to a certain point can you afford to buck the laws inherent in the material.’
Roger Deakin’s latest book, ‘Wildwood’(2007) reveals a temperament akin to Davie and Wordsworth in many ways: a non-conformist spirit, venturing into ‘excitingly unmapped territory’ bringing with this rebelliousness and an impassioned sense of what it is to be human and a refined sensibility. Deakin’s work was new to me until this summer; his first book, ‘Waterlog’ came out in 1999, but I found it only a few weeks ago. There is an urgency and vitality about his example that infuses the prose, with its frequent and dizzyingly eclectic allusions and digressions. ‘Waterlog’ was a ‘swimmer’s journey through Britain’ inspired initially by John Cheever’s short story, ’The Swimmer’ in which the hero, Ned Merrill, decides to swim the eight miles home from a party on Long Island via a series of neighbours’ swimming pools. (Burt Lancaster plays him in the famous film, full of ennui and despair at the ‘American Dream’.) Thus a literary dream becomes a physical achievement or re-vision, from the moat of Deakin’s farm in Suffolk to a variety of destinations from the Scilly Isles to the Tooting Bec lido. But the physical travel is underpinned by a journeying in the consciousness of one freed from ‘the tyranny of gravity and the weight of the atmosphere’ by immersion in this element, analogous in Deakin’s prose to the ‘terror and bliss of being born’, an act of metamorphosis, being ‘in nature… on equal terms with the animal world around you’, regaining a ‘sense of what is old and wild in these islands’. Bliss it was to be alive…
Metamorphosis is obviously also a key to the writing method in a narrative where dreams, memories, public and private histories coalesce. Travelling amphibiously is explored by Deakin as a metaphor ‘for what Keats called ‘taking part in the existence of things’; his ambition is also curiously akin to elements of Romantic and Modernist philosophies, especially in the culturally sophisticated urge to ‘revert’ to a ‘feral state’, to trust in the elemental and to record, as Davie understands of Wordsworth, the effects of the natural world on himself. Both this book and ‘Wildwood’ a ‘Journey Through Trees’ are suffused not only by the products of study, the lasting and vivid impressions of things being learnt, the ‘reek of the human’, but also by what D.H Lawrence, another non-conformist, a Congregationalist, called the ‘sixth sense’, that it ‘the sense of wonder…And it is the natural religious sense.’ On the first page of ‘Wildwood’ Deakin cites Lawrence, Keats, Edward Thomas and Patrick Leigh Fermor, but there is nothing affected or showy – the allusions are rather part of what Romantics might have called ‘organic form’. Here he is when talking about the Jaguar factory in Coventry, describing the processes used in treating walnut:’ The burr is an excrescence of would-be buds rising from somewhere deep inside the tree like a spring. When cut across the grain by the giant pencil-sharpener as the buds bubble towards the bark of the tree, their turbulence is displayed, with every little eddy and vortex held perfectly still.’ This would have pleased Davie – the exactness, the understatement, the new meaning given to the familiar image of the pencil sharpener, above all, the rich fusion of the real and metaphorical worlds. Many other figures inhabit these pages
( David Jones, Roger Ackling, Adrian Stokes, David Nash, Harry Coy Wright) and just as many examples go before it ( the travelogues of Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies’ accounts of his transformative move to the south coast in ‘The Story of My Heart’, Iain Sinclair’s account of Clare’s journey ‘home’ from Epping Forest in ‘The Edge of the Orison’, the account of Andrew Kotting in Sinclair’s piece, ‘Channel Hopping’ from ‘Buried at Sea’, for example). However, what we have here is authentic, urgent and non-sanitised, with its very own distinctive voice. Also, books follow on from this one. Robert McFarlane ( author of ‘Mountains of the Mind’) has ‘The Wild Places’ published by Granta this autumn, an account of the wildernesses of the country with McFarlane playing De Quincey to Deakin’s Wordsworth on several walks.
Davie complains in the 1975 Preface to ‘Articulate Energy’ that nowadays ‘we travel light’ lamenting the passing of the days when writers such as Pope and Wordsworth were ‘living presences…challenging emulation and guiding practice.’ All four books reviewed here are testament to such ‘living presences’ and our job as teachers and fellow readers is to ensure that sixth formers and those travelling through university literature degrees are not short-changed: we have to find time for them to read in some of the ways encouraged by Davie and Deakin, to make authors ‘living presences’ rather than the matter for murderous dissections. Otherwise further generations ‘travel light’ without such guidance and challenge. Here’s the end of a chapter by Deakin on driftwood; it may convince you that a ‘Power’ has passed from the earth:‘Even a tree, which we think of as a fixed point, rooted as anything can be to a single place on Earth, can be imagined into a drifting nomad, nibbled by fish, wandering the oceans, ending up anywhere from Southwold to a remote beach on Hokkaido.’

Peter Carpenter is the co-director of Worple Press and the 2007-08 Fellow for Creative Writing at the University of Reading.

The Use of English 59.2 Spring 2008, 180-187 © The English Association 2008

Shakespeare’s Poems. Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and the Shorter Poems edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen. The Arden Shakespeare, Thomson Learning 2007, £9.99.

This is a very good time for fresh readings of Shakespeare. The New Cambridge Poems, edited by John Roe, appeared in 1993, the Oxford Complete Sonnets and Poems by Colin Burrow in 2002 (reviewed Use of English 56/3), and now we have the Arden ‘3’ Poems, nearly 600 pages, replacing the poet-scholar F. T. Prince’s mere 200-page effort of 1960. All of this editorial work is entirely welcome, because each of the editions brings something new to these extraordinary works. The current Arden is particularly rewarding for close readers of Shakespeare who like their poetry contextualized. Katherine Duncan-Jones edited the Arden Sonnets (1997) and produced one of the more provocative biographies with her Ungentle Shakespeare (Arden 2001), an ideal companion-read to this edition. H. R. Woudhuysen, with David Norbrook, edited the Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (1993), a ‘remarkably daring edition’ according to Margreta de Grazia, because it provided such a wealth of materials for reading the period’s poetry in new and revealing terms. More recently, Woudhuysen edited Love’s Labours Lost (Arden 2003), and so is very well placed to contribute to this latest interpretation of all the poetry, other than the Sonnets, attributed to Shakespeare.

The editors argue that it was on account of his two ambitious narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, ‘that Shakespeare first became a well-known writer’, yet that, owing to the vicissitudes of twentieth-century literary fashion, the same poems are ‘currently the most neglected items in the Shakespeare canon’ (4). Everyone has a claim to make on this author so, for instance, Jonathan Bate, in the introduction to his revelatory edition of Titus Andronicus (Arden 1995), made the persuasive case that it was this blood-boultered revenge tragedy that truly made Shakespeare’s reputation for the audiences of his time: ‘It was hugely successful … indeed, it perhaps did more than any other play to establish its author’s reputation as a dramatist’ (1).

In the early 1590s, Shakespeare therefore seems to have been making calculated interventions in the contested arena of popular theatre and the more restricted world of verse collections. That we should now appreciate the interrelations between seemingly different cultural spheres is one of the aims of the new edition. But if the poems were so widely admired and associated with Shakespeare’s name, why were they excluded – or at least, not included – in Hemminges and Condell’s First Folio of 1623? Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen suggest that since the poetry was already sufficiently in circulation through sound new editions, there was no need for its inclusion in the collected plays. Alternatively, Hemminges and Condell were intent on promoting their own calling, rather than that of poetry. Or does it indicate that there was already a complicated appreciation of Shakespeare’s achievement, too vast and too mercurial to hold within one perspective, as today? The very fact of publishing the play texts in an authenticated version transformed them into reading materials, dramatic writing already on its way to being understood as a poetry that could be appreciated elsewhere than in the distracting ambience of playhouses. Charles I took a copy of the Second Folio for his private recreation while imprisoned, before his trial, in 1648. Shakespeare’s plays had become a text for study and appreciation, ‘By Appointment to the Crown’. As Milton wrote, in an oddly sympathetic way, Shakespeare became ‘the Closet Companion of these his solitudes’. The First Folio begins the long contention between views of Shakespeare as supreme artist of theatre, and Shakespeare the arch-poet, whose genius was only contingently theatrical.

Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen are therefore keen to establish ‘the interconnectedness of Shakespeare’s writing in all genres’, and they consistently point out ‘poem—play links, some thematic, some generic, many stylistic and linguistic’ (xvi) in what is certainly an ‘unusually full and detailed commentary’ (so much scholarship, for such a reasonable price!) This edition is therefore a splendid guide to exploring Shakespeare’s decisive early years in new, detailed ways, as it demonstrates how closely Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are allied to the three Henry VI plays, Richard III and also to Edward III, a work that we can now more confidently welcome to his play list.

Gabriel Harvey early noted differing readerships for the two poems: ‘The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus, & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet … have it in them to please the wiser sort’ (44 note 1). Venus and Adonis was understandably an immediate success with many different kinds of reader, from Oxbridge and the Inns of Court to the newly literate, print-hungry readerships in London. But it was the sombre, troubling Rape of Lucrece which continued to haunt its author’s imagination, according to the Arden editors, resonating through Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, and as late as Cymbeline, where it continued to feed dark obsessions and imagery.

These two highly wrought poems were almost certainly born of a sharp necessity. Plague closed the theatres for twenty months in 1592/4, and the author was compelled to seek other patronage, other income. Some of the urgency informing the poems can surely be found here, a plague-haunted imagination, in search of new funding. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, each the length of a short drama, are also ‘more patterned and verbally complex than any of the plays’, yet ‘considerably more naturalistic’ (2), uncompromised by the expectations of the playhouse audiences and the exigencies of an acting troupe. The boy players in Shakespeare’s company were highly gifted, well able to personate Rosalind, Lady Macbeth, Cordelia, even Tamora, … but a female role so fully imagined as Venus or Lucrece?

The editors’ Introduction is full of fine insights: for example, while Venus is evoked in a notoriously fleshly style, Lucrece is represented almost exclusively as ‘a consciousness’ (42), more comprehensively so than any role from the dramas, and not excluding Hamlet himself (2). More sympathetic and responsive readings, such as theirs, of the figure of Lucrece (and to some extent of Venus) have been developed by feminist criticism of the last twenty-five years, displacing the nervous dismissiveness of many earlier male editors – ‘few … will respond to such happily wanton fancies as Venus and Adonis’, suggested F. T. Prince in Arden2. Yet there’s an interesting tension here, between the poet so able sympathetically to portray a Venus and a Lucrece, and the calculating, homosocial Shakespeare of Katherine Duncan-Jones’ biography, the highly successful author who, unusually for his time and dearly-won status, permitted himself no charitable works or bequests, and who sought out male patrons exclusively.

The edition is helpful in the ways it locates the poetry in wider cultural perspectives on the time: for example, the narrative poems allude more often than anything else in Shakespeare to painting, perhaps able to make freer use of the Renaissance delight in the rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis, or word-painting (the chosen illustrations are particularly interesting, in support of these arguments). Another comment that seems to locate the poet most richly within the wider artistic climate of the 1590s is when the editors compare the formal delights of the two long poems with those of ‘the varied polyphonic harmonies composed by Shakespeare’s most talented musical contemporaries such as William Byrd and Thomas Tallis’ (7). The fine-grained notes to the poems repay continuous attention: for example, the stanza in Venus and Adonis beginning ‘Touch but my lips … ‘ (line 115) is made up of monosyllables, with the exception of the word ‘beauty’ – varied harmonies indeed. (The note to ‘Sweet bottom-grass’ (line 236) is very illuminating too.) But erotic comedy darkens to sexual tragedy with Adonis’ sacrificial death:

And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine

Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin. (1115—6)

While Venus and Adonis offers a fable in which the libido encounters mortality, a playground for psychoanalytic interpretations (most flagrantly, in Ted Hughes’ mythopoetic Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, 1992), Lucrece, the editors remind us, had a profoundly serious political dimension. The poem is the first of Shakespeare’s works to entertain notions of republican order and liberty, themes that would become more urgent for many Elizabethans as the 1590s drew to a close and with no clear sense of how the royal succession would be managed (56). What else is Hamlet but a meditation on the failure of the traditional forms of monarchy?

This edition also tempts the reader to look more closely at Shakespeare’s poetical out-takes and off-cuts. The Passionate Pilgrime. By W. Shakespeare was published by William Jaggard in 1599, an opportunistic piece of cut-and-paste piracy. (James Shapiro has a lively chapter on the scam in his 1599. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 2005.) Only five of the twenty poems can securely be given to Shakespeare, and this very slim volume (text imposed spaciously, with no poem beginning on a verso) was capitalizing, as the editors argue, on ‘the image of Shakespeare at the end of the 1590s as the supreme master of erotic and amorous poetry’ (85). This seems very likely, and it is tempting to invoke another highly fugitive collection that was registered soon after with the Stationers’ Company on 3 January 1600: Amours by J.D. with certen other sonnets by W.S. (See John Stubbs, Donne. The Reformed Soul, 2006). Was there really a collection of Donne’s love lyrics, coupled with a choice selection from Shakespeare’s sugared sonnets, even then only circulating among his private friends? If you ever find a copy at Abebooks.com, do please let me know.

A large part of the Introduction is given to establishing detailed contexts for what is one of the most superbly enigmatic poems in English, ‘Let the bird of loudest lay’, later titled ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, included in the ‘Poetical Essays’ attached to Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr of 1601. This is challenging text, taking the simplest verse forms to embody the most oblique kinds of argument: Allegoria gives licence to writer and reader alike. A really stimulating reading of the poem relates it to conventions of the medieval bird-mass, Neoplatonism, and Trinitarian theology: ‘Phoenix and Turtle are complex figurae in the best medieval and Renaissance fashion, so that to limit their meaning rigidly would be arbitrary’ (Dronke 1968: 219). The Arden editors, however, have a narrower focus: Love’s Martyr and therefore Shakespeare’s contribution are enlisted in a Welsh election campaign, the attempt of Sir John Salusbury, dedicatee of Chester’s volume, to win a place in Elizabeth’s final parliament. ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ serenely accommodates these wildly disparate readings and remains, thank goodness, a confounding poem.

Most helpfully, this edition also includes a facsimile reprint of the ‘Poetical Essays’, ‘Done by the best and chiefest of our moderne writers’ (536). The two short, equally cryptic poems that precede ‘Let the bird of loudest lay’, ‘The first’ and ‘The burning’, are really very good; signed ‘Ignoto’, they have been given by some scholars to Donne, which is a pleasing thought (119). ‘Shake-speare’s “Threnos”’ appears with a particular authority, heavily bordered by printer’s flowers (540). Here is another new emphasis in the ways we receive and read texts from the past: ‘There is a growing sense among scholars and critics of the importance of typography as a means of articulating meaning: the form words take on the page, including the white space which surrounds them, contributes significantly to the ways in which we read works’ (Appendix 1, ‘The Texts’, 511). This should send us back to facsimile reprints of early modern texts, which can offer up their words in strange or refreshingly novel ways. Finally, a small but gratifying note for any fellow-Midlander of Shakespeare’s is that the editors also strengthen his claim on verse inscriptions for a Stanley family tomb in the south transept of St Bartholomew church, Tong, Shropshire. The boy from (near) Brumagem surely did good.

Nigel Wheale

The Use of English 59.2 Spring 2008, 190-194 © The English Association 2008

The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology, by Nathaniel Tarn (Stanford University Press £14.50)

This new collection of essays substantially alters and updates its predecessor Views From The Weaving Machine (University of New Mexico 1991) and can be usefully read as a companion to Tarn’s Selected Poems 1950-2000 (Wesleyan University Press 2002). Sandwiched between essays that reveal the effects of a double career, as a poet and anthropologist and a substantial interview, are sections that concern the attitudes of selected poets to the ‘primitive’ and the ‘archaic’ and theoretical models of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received. The interview between Tarn and Shamoon Zamir on Anthropology and Poetry, conducted in 1996, offers the easiest introduction the book’s themes.

Tarn’s poetry and criticism is remarkable for its expansiveness and willingness to absorb material from disparate sources and disciplines. This book takes the reader on a journey with both Tarn the anthropologist and Tarn the poet / thinker absorbed in the intellectual currents of the late twentieth century. Tarn is scrupulously aware of his own prejudices, of what he does not know, and shows openness to moving forwards in order to make new connections and readings.

Born in 1928 in Paris of British-Lithuanian and French Rumanian parents, he was educated in France, Belgium and England. After graduating in History and English from Cambridge University, Tarn studied Anthropology at the Sorbonne, LSE and Chicago University, where he completed his Doctorate, based on fieldwork in the Mayan region of Guatemala. He taught at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. After publishing his poetry volume Old Savage / Young City (1964), appearing in Penguin Modern Poets 7 (1965) and a celebrated translation of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu (1966), he became General Editor of Cape Editions and Founding Editor of Cape Goliard Press between 1967 and 1969. Here he published literary, political and anthropological books by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Nazim Hikmet, Vaclav Havel, J.H. Prynne and Tom Raworth. The effort to widen the literary horizons of English letters was not entirely successful and in 1970 he moved to the U.S., becoming an American citizen and professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University from 1972 until his retirement in 1985. Having battled against a Little Englander resistance to the wider world of poetry, he pursued ‘Ethnopoetics’, the accessing of primitive and archaic poetries. Exiled and open to other cultures, through extensive fieldwork in Burma, China, Japan, Cuba and Alaska, in a land ‘full of borrowed’ languages, he espouses a universalism. This expansive and enquiring arc from a French to an English and American poet, owes something to the early inspirations of Olson and Lévi-Strauss. Tarn seems to have a genuine psychological and linguistic curiosity about the human mind and condition as well as an abiding sense of where to find deeper layers of history that look backwards and forwards. His non-conformist lineage may be traced from Blake through Yeats, the French Surrealists, Patchen, Dylan Thomas, MacDiarmid to Olson, Robert Duncan and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and critics.

The book’s second section examines the ethnographic attitudes of Breton, Neruda, Celan, Huidobro, Leiris, Artaud, Paz and Carlos Williams, many of whom were his friends, in essays originally written in French or Spanish. The André Breton essay, ‘Anthropology and the Limits of Culture’ is an overview concerned with broadening the scope of the possible, examining relations that limit or end other possibilities and looking at the quest for the ‘other’ in a world of increasing choicelessness. Tarn points to Lévi-Strauss’ idea that we have the archive and history as another anthropology with different social situations, the silent societies of the natural world, of the earth sciences, and the possibility of an equable humanism with other living beings, as alternatives to the self as the only ‘other’ and ‘elsewhere’. This quest for new social relationships in time and space centred on the earth as home clearly informs Tarn the poet-anthropologist. It immediately links him to two poets of the sacred earth, Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder, with whom he shares many themes and interests. Rothenberg’s preface to Technicians of the Sacred (1968), an early global anthology of ritual, primitive and sound poetry, still providing, for Tarn, the best introduction to ethnopoetics.

Of Celan and others, Tarn impressively masters an array of interpretations to produce overviews to the main developments around particular movements or problems that seek to elucidate and extend. In particular, one wishes that he would write a full work on French Surrealism. He studies the way a given poet conceives of the primitive and carries ethnocentric prejudices. He shows the drama and crises that lead to struggles within a poet-anthropologist, such as Michel Leiris, whereby one vocation wins over another. In Leiris’ case field anthropology in Africa feeds his rejection of Surrealism and quest for an ‘other’ poetry with realism. He looks at Artaud on the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. He finds that Artaud has no stated aim or intention and ignores the historicity and economic relations of the people he visits. He uncovers Artaud’s unreliability and projected fantasies and constructively compares him to William Carlos Williams’ perception of the pagan and primitive in the Paterson area of New Jersey.

He is very good at producing definitions and supporting them with a thorough analysis of materials known to him. Thus ‘Ethnopoetics consists of a vast body of translated ‘primitive’ poetry into a Western language and a search for the roots of poetry, beyond the canons and ethnocentric criteria of the West, in order to reach a ‘Symposium of the Whole’.’ There are linked essays on the Primitive and Translation in its widest sense.
The book’s third section contains the most demanding essays producing theoretical models for poetic production, comparative aesthetics, notes on elsewhere and the myth of presence, and archaeology, elegy and architecture in the lyric. These are diverting essays that deal with the most fundamental questions about the origin of language and poetry and are interwoven with extensive supporting evidence. Of these, ‘The Heraldic Vision: Some Cognitive Models for Comparative Aesthetics’ is the most valuable for memoirists, biographers and teachers in practical terms. Tarn objectifies his range of passions, interests and hobbies into one fundamental trait that he terms ‘heraldic’ and the totality of these preoccupations the ‘heraldic vision’. He uses this classification tool with the shield controlling a wide field of emblematic and archival content. This approach clearly has links to semiotics, totemism and the use of personae or masks in poetics and of roles in sociology and psychology. The joy in reading Tarn comes from his connecting knowledge that produces wide-ranging support for his perspectives. Being both European and American, of course, enriches his perspective. I am still absorbing his work on the ‘vocal’ and ‘choral’.

Tarn is very good on the living dualisms that lock Man’s thought and one senses that he has absorbed the work of William Blake at a deep level. Like Blake, Tarn does not want to be enslaved by another’s system and develops his own models within the structuralism and phenomenology divide. One senses too that he benefits from being a European observer of the American scene. He is the product of an inter-disciplinary education that refuses to be contained by artificial and national boundaries. He has a comparable range to that of his friend, George Steiner, and is similarly compelling.

David Caddy

The Use of English 59.1 Autumn 2007, 92-95 © The English Association 2007

The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem, by Shira Wolosky (Oxford University Press £17.99)

In this scholarly book Shira Woloski makes a close study of some lyric poetry in what she calls ‘the English tradition’. She limits herself to lyrics written in ‘post-mediaeval’ English from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Instead, however, of approaching this chronologically, the structure of her study is arranged differently – which she describes as ‘topical’ and ‘cumulative’, in the manner of ‘building blocks’ or ‘progressive overlays’.
She begins the book with the smallest unit of poetry – the individual word, and how it is selected – diction in fact, pointing out that in poetry language is so highly patterned that there is a reason or purpose for each word put into a poem. Therefore learning to read poetry is to understand the functions of each word within its specific position in the poem. Diction, or choice of words she places on the first level of the construction of a poem.
Wolosky emphasises the historical dimension in diction. For example, she cites the classical literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where the diction in literature was ‘elevated’ according to conventions governing kinds of texts or genres. The ‘high literature’ of epic and tragedy was considered appropriate for kings and nobility and for describing heroic deeds. All this was in contrast to a ‘low literature’ deemed suitable for the description of the everyday life of ordinary people. In this the diction could include colloquialisms, vulgarities and even slang.
She uses several examples to illustrate her points. One which is very compelling is the poem by Henry Reed entitled ‘Today We Have Naming of Parts’, which for many people, including myself, is the most outstanding poem of the Second World War. In this poem it is very clear how words from different contexts and different ‘levels’ of speech can be contrasted, and so play a dramatic role in the poem. For example, the second verse of this poem shows both two ‘levels’ of speech arising from different backgrounds and different contexts:

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see of,
When you given your slings. And this is the piling swivel
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens, their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

The diction used, Wolosky points out, for naming the parts of the gun is ‘technical, choppy, and repetitive’ and not ‘flowing’, whereas the language describing the garden is ‘exotic, lustrous and flowing’. Other poems Wolosky looks at are ones by Frost, Yeats, Pounds andd Eliot. A very illuminating chapter, full of interest for the reader with a good background in English poetry.
Wolosky’s text ‘building block’ in poetic construction is syntax, which she defines as the ‘rules’, units and structures of grammar which work in complex harmony and counterpoint’. But of course, as she points out in poetry, there is rather more freedom in word order than in other uses of language. A poet may reverse the usual word order of subject/verb/object in order to draw attention to a particular word, and also the poetic line can overflow, brining about ‘enjambment’. To illustrate all this, Wolosky gives a detailed reading of Yeats’ poem Led and the Swan with its very complex syntax. This she contrasts with Blake’s poem ‘Typer! Tyger!’ which has a very simple syntax, where phrase and line end together, often punctuated as a sentence or a question, following on the whole a straightforward word order. She gives a very striking example of the almost complete defiance of syntax in Emily Dickinson’s Four Trees. The poet simply refuses to allow the rules of grammar to regulate and order her language. The first two verses of this poem run like this:

Four Trees – upon a solitary Acre –
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action –
Maintain –

The Sun – upon a Morning meets them –
The Wind –
No nearer Neighbour – have they –
But God –

It is particularly clear from this example that, as Wolosky says, working out the syntax is a major part of the experience of reading a poem.
With diction and syntax examined as the first two ‘building blocks’ of poetic construction, Wolosky moves on to another vital aspect – the poetic image, which she describes as ‘the firewords of poetry’. She begins the discussion by looking at images which are very familiar – those images of ‘likeness’ and ‘comparison’. The kind of visual picture which imagery is, changes from age to age according to literary fashion. It can, she points out, also vary from being ‘a small decorative moment’ in a larger argument, to the primary organizing principle in the poem as a whole. There is, she points out, a surprising number of kinds of image, the most familiar of which are the images of comparison and likeness – the simile and the metaphor.
She carries out her usual detailed analysis of several poems illustrating the different ways imagery of comparison and likeness can be used by poets. For example, in Edmund Walter’s seventeenth century poem ‘Song’ the whole poem is constructed as a developing simile comparing a lady to a rose. Here the simile is the primary organizing principle of the poem. But many other poems include many smaller ‘decorative moments’ of imagery. She chooses Wordsworth’s ‘I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud’ to illustrate this point. From this basis Wolosky makes a detailed study of the sonnet, giving a short history of this verse form.
In the central part of the book Wolosky deals with one of the important organizing elements of poetic composition – the figure of personification. Here, an abstract idea like, for example, ‘unity’, or an emotion like ‘despair’ can be represented as a human character – ‘personified’ – for example in Spenser’s Faerie Queen he has characters called ‘Una’ and ‘Sans Joy’. Another example she gives is the poem called ‘Love’ by the seventeenth century poet George Herbert.
Herbert was the natural language of speech in a poetic scheme of highly wrought order and control. But this intensifies the homeliness of the figure of Love, who is portrayed as a gracious host at a banquet, but is also the image of love as an emotion. In this poem Love is a personification of an emotion, but is also a personification of the divine nature. Also, she points out, the Love here is not private or personal, but is grounded in a higher metaphysical principle.
Wolosky sees ‘poetic voice’ and ‘address’ to an audience as important elements of poetic composition. She gives Shelley as an outstanding example of ‘poetic voice’ where it acquires mythological dimensions and powers while retaining strong political and historical commitment. Both these dimensions can be seen, she says, in his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ with the powerful first line:

‘O Wild West Wind thou breath of Autumn’s being’.

Wolosky feels strongly that the question of gender should be taken into account when discussing poetic voice. She asks whether there are particular kinds of imagery that women might use, and whether there is a male stance in some traditional verse. Even more significantly she wonders if there is ‘gendering’ embedded in language in its grammatical orders, usages or constructions. That we now raise these questions at all, she thinks, reflects a shift in critical consciousness. Of course she admits that women’s access to an education, which could serve as the foundation for literary creativity was very limited up to the nineteenth century. Where women did write poems these did not pass into any curriculum or corpus of works which could be transmitted. So each woman writer had to make a new start. To claim poetic authority was a problem in the whole history of feminine roles in culture and society.
Towards the latter part of the book, Wolosky turns to a discussion of poetic rhythm. Here she puts forward an interesting argument that it is a mistake to begin with this topic in the study of poetry. She feels strongly that the full weight of the importance of the rhythm of the words in poetry can only be fully felt if we already are experienced readers of poetry. This I see as a very important point which I shall discuss later when the question of the readership of this book as whole will be raised. To support her argument about rhythm she looks at the work of Browning, Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. She adds that there is an aspect of rhythm which is concerned with ‘sound’. She calls ‘sound rhythms’ the most ‘natural’ and, paradoxically, the most ‘technical’ of poetic features, taking examples from the work of George Herbert, Keats, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, spreading across English and American literary history.
Wolosky finishes the book with a most interesting discussion of the history of the art of reading, which has been subject to historical change as literary tastes and fashions changed. This would happen not only with particular works, but with whole genres and kinds of verse forms. In addition, she adds, changes occur in readership especially after the invention of printing when texts would become more exact, widespread and accessible, and more available to women.
The book contains a useful and very full glossary of terms used in poetics and literary criticism, making clear the distinction between the two. And finally, Wolosky includes a very full annotated bibliography for each chapter, including some very useful background notes, making an important distinction between the history of poetry and the interpretation of poetry. She gives a brief survey of poetics from the New Criticism of the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties, through Structuralism and Deconstruction, Reader-response theory and the New Historicism. All this would be invaluable to the reader, who is an already experienced reader of poetry, and to that minority of students who have a good background in English poetry.
This latter point brings me to my general comments on the book and its proposed readership. It is a scholarly book making demands of both concentration and considerable attention spans for the reader. This is an assumption, I think, that the reader will be experienced in the reading of poetry, which for the university student would mean that the study of poetry would be substantial in his A level English course, or in the case of the future teacher on a PGCE course, a substantial part of his English degree. The book would be a compelling read for the reader well-versed in English grammar and the structure of the English language with a more than average interest in finding out how poetry is constructed and how it works. It is, in my opinion, not an introductory book for those who enjoy poetry but only have a vague interest in how it is constructed, for it is a sophisticated study of theoretical poetics.
To say that it would be a useful introductory book for the average student would be, I think an exaggeration, though for a small minority it might be true. I am sure that it would be of the utmost value both to the teacher of literature and also to practising poets.

Margaret Weldhen

The Use of English 59.1 Autumn 2007, 88-92 © The English Association 2007

Horse Latitudes, by Paul Muldoon and The End of the Poem, by Paul Muldoon (Faber £14.99 and £25.00)

Paul Muldoon once upset the editors of Oxford Poetry by approving the principles of ‘practical criticism’. The Cambridge School were right, he suggested, to insist on the autonomy of the poem. ‘And you’re writing things’ (they asked) ‘which implicitly trash Richards and Leavis?’ Hadn’t he published poems ‘which the reader will misconstrue unless they know the underlying myth?’ ‘Not that I can think of.’ But this was 1984; it’s hard to see how anyone could get through the obsessively allusive ‘Madoc—A Mystery’ (1990), a flat-pack history of Western Philosophy, or that autobiographical monster ‘Yarrow’ (1994), without a shelf of academic explication.

The End of the Poem collects Muldoon’s lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1999-2004), and Oxford Poetry ought to like it. Cambridge is behind him; I.A. Richards is the object of a joke (p. 91), and there are respectful references to Baudrillard, Benjamin, and the theoretical Bloom of The Anxiety of Influence. Impeccably correct, he says that conclusions may not be possible ‘in a post-Baudrillardian world’, wherever that is, and he distances himself from ‘value’ with the term valorization, as in ‘the valorization of human love’ (p. 358) in Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’. Times have changed:

We know that no poem may be read as a completely discrete construct, that no poem may be read without some autobiographical element coming into play, but we also know that part of the function of the poem is to present a construct that is relatively free-standing…

How fee is that? A construct that is relatively free-standing sounds like a house you can’t insure. And what does he mean by ‘coming into play’?

The subject of The End of the Poem is ‘intertextuality’, or what the blurb (catching its transatlantic accent) calls ‘the crosstown traffic between poems’. But it’s always rush hour for Muldoon, as a word here echoes a word there, as one poem reminds him of another; and what’s more, he is in no hurry to get home. Take his account of ‘The Literary Life’, the one successful poem (as it seems to me) in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters.

We climbed Marianne Moore’s narrow stair,
To her bower-bird bric-à-brac nest, in Brooklyn…

Don’t these lines, he asks, recall Wordsworth’s sonnet, ‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room’, and Larkin’s ‘stumbling up the breathless stair’ in ‘Deceptions’? And what about Yeats, the words stair and nest sending us straight to ‘The Stare’s Nest by My Window’ (‘More substance in our enmities/Than in our love’) in The Tower?

The allusion…signals that there’s considerable “substance” in Hughes’s “enmities”, particularly this one for Marianne Moore, and that Marianne Moore’s poetic house, her “nest,” is “empty”, her poetic enterprise bogus and bankrupt.

And so it goes on, every one of his ‘allusions’ documented and defended. It’s close reading of a sort, but the trouble with intertextual analysis is that it muddles the intentional with the imagined reference. It’s not enough for him to say that ‘Deceptions’ ‘would have been much in Hughes’s mind in 1958’, the year of the meeting with Marianne Moore. How much, and how does he know?

Muldoon’s method is a fatal mixture of free association and biographical speculation, and in each of his analyses, the first casualty is the poet in question. In his essay on ‘The Literary Life’, he wonders ‘why Hughes takes such an extraordinarily hostile view of Marianne Moore’; yet instead of listening to the poet, he drags in the Freudian thesis of The Anxiety of Influence, and attributes his ‘enmity’ to mere personal rivalry. But Hughes gets away with this shockingly malevolent performance, as effective in its way as ‘Sporus’ in the Prologue to Pope’s Satires, by presenting a disinterested motive. Or take Muldoon on Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, published in 1867 but almost certainly written in 1851:

I’ll be trying today to determine why Arnold might have suppressed this poem, if “suppressed” is the word, for more than fifteen years.

Might have? If? Either he suppressed it or he didn’t, and if ‘suppressed’ is not the word, what is it doing in this sentence? But on this slim pretext, scarcely a premise, Muldoon ignores the poet’s intention and substitutes his own. He says that Arnold has something to hide—his feelings about the woman he had just married, Frances Lucy Wightman. Free association turns up an allusion, in the phrase ‘On the French coast the light/Gleams and is gone’, to the ‘light’ in Lucy; and a starkly contrasting one, in the evocation of the Sea of Faith which ‘round earth’s shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d’, to Lear’s rant on female sexuality: ‘But to the girdle do the Gods inherit,/Beneath is all the fiend’s.’ Forget Arnold, forget Sophocles on the Aegean, the ignorant armies and the darkling plain, and listen to Muldoon:

It’s hard not to read the poem as a description of lovemaking, perhaps that of “ignorant” newlyweds who “clash by night.” The vocabulary of the poem may be erotically construed, moving as it does from “full” through “lies…upon” and “stand” and “spray” and the rhythm of “begin, and cease, and then begin again [sic]” and “withdrawing” to “the eternal note of sadness” that corresponds to…

It is never quite clear, from the absurdities that make The End of the Poem so engaging as an illumination of its author, how seriously he intends them. Muldoon is the critic as comedian, joking about his inability to get past the opening line of Marianne Moore’s ‘Poetry’ (‘I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle’), and he deviates into seriousness only once. But this, a desultory attempt to define his own conception of the use of poetry—one sense of ‘the end of the poem’—is as unsatisfactory as his 1998 ‘Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’. Compare Larkin’s treatment of the same question in ‘Writing Poems’, a commentary on The Whitsun Weddings, and the deficiencies of Muldoon’s discursive prose are painfully obvious. He is more at home with detail, especially minute detail: one of the better sections is on H.D. and Imagism, a cause to which he manages to recruit ‘Robert Burns, Imagiste’. Muldoon is almost an Imagist himself, and an informed account of H.D.’s associate Marianne Moore (‘The outlandish rhyme of “countenance” and “continence” draws particular attention to both words’) suggests an influence on his own work.

In fact there is plenty in The End of the Poem to interest the reader of his poems, even that joke about I.A. Richards, in which he pretends that he can’t tell the difference between the tenor and vehicle of a metaphor. Go back to ‘The Boundary Commission’, in Why Brownlee Left, and you can see what he means.

You remember that village where the border ran
Down the middle of the street,
With the butcher and baker in different states?
Today he remarked how a shower of rain

Had stopped so cleanly across Golightly’s lane
It might have been a wall of glass
That had toppled over. He stood there, for ages,
To wonder which side, if any, he should be on.

The ostensible subject, shall we say the tenor, of the comparison is here the border between two states, the vehicle the dividing shower of rain. ‘The poem emphasises that borders are unnatural, decreed by boundary commissions and bearing little relation to social and geographical realities’, says Tim Kendall. But Muldoon—hardly emphatic—subtly deflects attention from the formal subject, and the charm of the poem is not in some comment on the border, the thing said, but in the way of saying, in the shower and the wall of glass, in Golightly and Golightly’s lane. And of course the boundary commission itself, and another of Muldoon’s jokes, is an entirely unofficial body, composed of the two speakers (if there are two) whose ‘exchange’ constitutes the poem. Or take the equally lyrical ‘Bran’, from the same volume:

While he looks into the eyes of women
Who have let themselves go,
While they sigh and they moan
For pure joy,

He weeps for the boy on that small farm
Who takes an oatmeal Labrador
In his arms,
Who knows all there is of rapture.

Here, Muldoon lets syntax do the work of metaphor, but again he complicates things, setting up a simple antithesis of innocence and experience only to subvert it. For Tim Kendall, who says that ‘the women fall short, failing to inspire the same “rapture” as the oatmeal labrador’, the antithesis is the poem. But in the equivocal last line, the phrase all there is can either exalt or diminish ‘rapture’. How should we read it? an adult question, ‘Is that all there is?’, intrudes; innocence and experience seem to change places, and the poet sends us back to the first line.

Muldoon’s most original collections, incidentally those that testify to his training in ‘practical criticism’, are the early Mules and Why Brownlee Left. ‘I’m very interested in the Metaphysicals and the conceit’, he told John Haffenden, ‘I look on each poem as being a little world in itself.’ By a little world he didn’t men the shorter poems, but it is here—though Kendall and others unaccountably prefer the mock-Byronic ramble ‘Immram’—that is economy shows best. ‘Promises, Promises’, perhaps the most beautiful, soars above its commonplace occasion:

Yet I am utterly bereft
Of the low hills, the open-ended sky,
The wave upon wave of pasture
Rolling in, and just as surely
Falling short of my bare feet.
Whatever is passing is passing me by…

Muldoon is at a farm in North Carolina, missing—as he discovers in the poem—the ‘one slender and shy’ he has left behind across the Atlantic. The theme is slight enough, but so is that of ‘To His Coy Mistress’, and like Marvell he broadens it in the second of three stanzas. In a thrilling conceit, he is with Raleigh’s ‘little colony’ near the Atlantic:

We are some eighty souls
On whom Raleigh will hoist his sails.

There is no need to draw out the parallels between the speaker of this middle stanza and the poet. The thought of the stranded souls, and the mystery of their disappearance, has an effect like that of Marvell’s ‘And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity’, and there is a natural transition to the last lines:

When someone or other, warm, naked,
Stirs within my own skeleton
And stands on tip-toe to look out
Over the horizon,
Through the zones, across the ocean.
The cardinal sings from a redbud
For the love of one slender and shy […]

‘Promises, Promises’ has been described as ‘a modest rehearsal for ‘Madoc’’—Muldoon’s book-length attempt to turn a Romantic fantasy (Coleridge’s ‘Pantisocratic’ scheme) into reality, if not into a poem. Promises’, a world in itself, is nothing of th sort, and at this stage the relationship of the lyrics to the longer poems resembled that between Graham Greene’s novels and his ‘entertainments’. But as early as Quoof (1983), three years after Why Brownlee Left, the balance of power had begun to shift. Its concluding piece, ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’, a sequence of 49 sonnet-length stanzas strung together in a picaresque narrative, outdoes the 27 lyrics of Quoof in length—but only in length. The rogue hero Gallogly, unlike his relative Golightly, never comes to life; and what interest the poem has, at least for its advocates, may be indicated by Kendall’s observation that ‘it is no coincidence that the fifth line of the tenth stanza—“for thou art so possessed with murderous hate”—happens also to be the fifth line of Shakespeare’s tenth sonnet.’ Despite a sackful of allusions (in alphabetical order, to Elizabeth Bishop, Lewis Carroll, Dante, the Gawain poet, Hawthorne, Heaney, Hopper, Huxley, Ovid, Picasso, Pollock, Stein, Stevenson, Yeats), the weakness of the poem by Muldoon—‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’—is ironically suggested by its title.

The short poem is alive and well in Quoof, though the ground covered in the first four stanzas of the much praised ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ (sonnet-shaped of course) is too patently preparatory, leading too helpfully to the political statement at the close; and the statement itself is asked to tie up too many loose ends. And don’t forget, those lines are spoken by the head of a horse. ‘Glanders’, on a safer, smaller scale, develops the formula later perfected in ‘Profumo’:

When you happened to sprain your wrist or ankle
you made your way to the local shaman,
if ‘shaman’ is the word for Larry Toal,
who was so at ease with himself, so tranquil,

a cloud of smoke would graze on his thatch
like the cow in the cautionary tale […]

The conjuror-poet goes about his business, whispering his patter (‘if ‘shaman’ is the word…’), and the rabbit duly appears from the hat. It’s verbal magic, performance poetry if you like, and Muldoon does nothing to dispel—rather he emphasises—the air of contrivance. But there is nothing formulaic about ‘Sushi’, the best thing, with the possible exception of ‘The Wishbone’, in Meeting the British:

‘Why do we waste so much time in arguing?’
We were sitting at the sushi-bar
drinking Kirin beer
and watching the Master chef
fastidiously shave
salmon, tuna and yellowtail
while a slightly more volatile
apprentice
fanned the rice,
every grain of which was magnetized
in one direction—east. […]

‘Sushi’, with one speaking part, shows up the lifeless finale in Meeting the British, ‘7, Middagh Street’, a series of drifting monologues (seven characters in search of an author) based on the Auden ménage in New York. But ‘Yarrow’, in The Annals of Chile, an ‘autobiography’ in 150 lyric sections, puts Muldoon’s dramatic powers to the test. Its protagonists, vividly realised, are the poet’s mother, a fiercely moral figure breathing fire and ozone and such warnings (yes indeed) as ‘but to the girdle do the gods inherit’; and her necessary opposite, the fanatical, amoral, drug-addicted, unnamed ‘S—‘. The mother’s death is the terminus ad quem, but S— steals the show.

As we neared Armagh, the Convent of the Sacred Heart
was awash in light: nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit
than when S— ran

those five red lights in downtown New Haven: ‘George Oppen,’
she announced, ‘there’s a poet with fire
in his belly’; this was to the arresting ‘officiffer’

who had her try to walk a straight line back to the Porsche;
after calling him ‘the unvoiced “c” in Connecticut’,
she gave our names as Cuirithir and Liadan.

The lament that gets ‘Yarrow’ going, ‘All would be swept aay’, is echoed by another spirited demonstration against mortality in The Annals, the set-piece ‘That’s all that’s left…’ in the elegy ‘Incantata’. Both supply the sort of rhetorical power we associate with Shelley’s Adonais, and Seamus Heaney has remarked a new ‘emotional and musical fullness’, welcoming what he sees as an ‘increasingly rhapsodic spirit’ in Muldoon. And by the look of ‘Sillyhow Stride’, the final poem in Horse Latitudes, we shall have to live with it.

‘I would say it’s not disheartening’, said Muldoon in 1981, when reminded that this term had been applied to his ‘view of the world’, ‘But it’s not always a barrel of laughs, is it?’ There isn’t a lot to laugh about in Horse Latitudes, though in the title poem he manages the odd heehaw, as if oblivious to the horrors it describes. The collection is dedicated to the memory of his sister Maureen Muldoon, who died in 2005 and who appears in three of its poems. ‘Horse Latitudes’ concerns, in part, ‘a former lover, here named Carlotta’, who is suffering from cancer; and the last, ‘Sillyhow Stride’, is an elegy for the composer and musician with whom Muldoon collaborated, Warren Zeon. And there is nothing consolatory about these poems, no obvious gain to set against the losses. The End of the Poem looks sceptically at Arnold’s prophecy that in default of religion we will turn to poetry ‘to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us’. Don’t forget, says Muldoon, ‘the insurmountable fact of the limitations of art’, and Seamus Heaney is brought out in support: ‘But you cannot make the ded walk or right wrong.’

The horse latitudes are the equatorial doldrums, the blurb informs us, not that you couldn’t have guessed it from the poems.

Mulddon…presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill, but where language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current…

But Muldoon seems to have come to a standstill himself. ‘The Eggs’, a lengthy, laboriously obvious anecdote about an alcoholic grandmother, repeats the formula of ‘The Fridge’ (Hay, 1998):

I was unpacking a dozen eggs
into the fridge when I noticed a hairline crack
at which I pecked

till at long last I squeezed
into a freshly whitewashed
scullery in Cullenramer. It was all hush-hush

where my mother’s mother took a potash rag
to a dozen new-laid eggs
and, balancing a basket on her bike, […]

Till at long last? ‘The Treaty’, placed next to ‘The Eggs’, and just as cobwebbed in its phrasing, introduces ‘grandfather Frank Regan’ in ‘the mud-walled house in Cullenramer’

in which, earlier, he had broken open a bolt
of the sky stuff
and held it to the failing light, having himself failed to
balance Gormley’s cuffs.
“This Collins,” Gormley had wagged, “is a right flimflammer.”

The last line bove rehashes the much earlier ‘Cuba’ (‘ “But this Kennedy’s nearly an Irishman,/So he’s not much better than ourselves”’), but without the wit. In ‘The Old Country’ Muldoon’s target is the debased currency of his birthplace—a sitting duck; but again he delays (‘Every slope was a slippery slope’, ‘Every platitude was a familiar platitude’, ‘Every resort was a last resort’, ad infinitum), and the joke backfires. There are exceptions. What, for instance, has become of the childhood lyrically summarised in ‘The Mixed Marriage’ (Mules, 1977), where the poet ‘flitted between a hole in the hedge/And a room in the Latin Quarter’, between a father who ‘knew the cure for farcy’ and a mother who ‘had read one volume of Proust’? He later added a mass of detail in ‘Yarrow’, but ‘The Outlier’ is something new:

In Armagh or Tyrone
on a morning in June
in 1951
I fell between two stones
that raised me as their own.

‘I had one eye, just one/they prised and propped open’, he goes on, ‘so all I looked upon/would turn itself to stone.’ The ‘aggregative’ form, building from two lines to five, only adds to the bleakness of a perspective as bleak (but without his salving comedy) as Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’.

There are usual stunts. In ’90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore’ Muldoon is in Bermuda, and as it happens, in the doldrums: ‘Guess what Easter meant/to horse-mad May and Myrtle./A three-day event.’ A hobbled haiku, this is feeble even as a text message. ‘Sillyhow Stride’, 90 effusive stanzas of ‘Dantesque’ terza rima, compares Warren Zevon at a ‘Grammy’ to ‘John Donne at a junior prom’; and for a while Muldoon justifies his Donne quotations (‘Death be not proud’, ‘what fire shall burn this world…’), adding an occasional ‘yeah right’. But he allows him too much space, and loses control; the result is not so much a poem as a demonstration of Donne’s extraordinary power as a phrase-maker. Even the best things strain for their effects. ‘Turkey Buzzards’ holds its breath for 100 lines, one unbroken sentence starting and ending with the phrase ‘They’ve been so long above it all’. Its subject is mortality (we are all carrion), and Muldoon takes a risk or two, thinking of his sister’s illness as he watches a buzzard

making a
sweeping, too right, a sweeping cut
that’s so blasé

it’s hard to imagine, dear Sis,
why others shrink
from this sight of a soul in bliss…

the argument dips and rises, but sometimes bumps along, and one begins to see why Shelley divided ‘To a Skylark’ (105 lines) into 21 random but manageable stanzas. ‘Hedge School’, a one-sentence sonnet, also about Maureen, is either better than ‘Buzzards’ or easier to take in; and we feel the pathos in this picture of the poet, with worsening news, sheltering from the St. Andrews rain as he tries ‘to come up with a ruse/for unsealing the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary back in that corner shop/and tracing the root of metastasis’, and discovering another rhyme for ‘Sis’. But for Muldoon, contemplating the limitations of his art in this punning and allusive poem, there is painful self-knowledge.

The ambitious experiment of ‘Sillyhow Stride’, the wholesale appropriation of a poet’s work, was perfectly legitimate, and Muldoon’s poetic motive—his strength of feeling—can scarcely be doubted. But there is something of desperation in his self-description, ‘throwing up a last ditch/against the mounted sorrows, for I have more, Warren, I have more…’. Whether or not this master of obliquity can find the means (or the adequate form) to deal as directly with experience as he evidently wishes, remains to be seen.

John Constable

The Use of English 59.1 Autumn 2007, 77-87 © The English Association 2007

Talk About Poetry: Conversations on the Art, by Peter Robinson. (Shearsman Books £9.95)

The cover illustration for Peter Robinson’s Selected Poems (Carcanet 2003) reproduced ‘Apollo and Daphne’, an intriguing panel painting by the fifteenth-century Florentine, Antonio del Pollaiuolo. The god effortlessly carries off his chosen nymph, holding her around the waist. She however looks impassively down, avoiding her abductor’s gaze, which is about to turn to astonishment. Daphne’s anguish is now over, according to this image, she is content to have avoided Apollo’s violation because her upraised arms are, literally, truncated as she metamorphoses into the laurel tree that will immortalize her.

The sexual politics dramatised in this small panel painting must have been complex even in the fifteenth century, and it is an especially poignant emblem for this collection. In his Talk about Poetry Robinson gives many acute insights into how writing occurs, and helpful descriptions of his own practice, including this: ‘I’d be inclined to say that the poems I write attempt to deploy all the means at their disposal to construct counter-weights to [what is] destructive and damaging in experience’ (47). And it is the case that some of Robinson’s most telling poems address issues dealing with a sexual violation, and towards the end of the Selected Poems, with his own experience of recovering from a life-threatening brain tumour. He describes three collections published between 1988 and 1992 as being ‘committed to, and sceptical about, creative activity as a reparative emblem for culpability that is itself circumstantial, deriving from a complicit passivity’ (115). But in fact the range of his poetry is very much wider than these kinds of defensive statement suggest, it is writing that establishes individuals and their contexts with great care: ‘I thought it helpful to try wherever possible to locate the lyrical subject in social space, and to populate the space so that this subjectivity showed for what it is: the words of one among many’ (34-5).

Robinson notes in his Preface to these eleven conversations that, despite all the difficulties presented by a ‘virtual’ form of communication, email has been a blessing for poets, who ‘have immemorially tended to be sustained letter-writers’. Nine of the eleven interviews in Talk about Poetry, all held between 1994 and 2006, were conducted by email and over considerable distances. Robinson welcomes net-exchanges such as these, because they make possible ‘worldwide support networks and collaborative communities’. His life, he says, has been lived fairly continuously on the move, in Italy during the late 1970s and 1980s, and since 1989, in Sendai, Japan with his second, Italian wife and their two daughters. Here he taught Literature in English and English as a Second Language at ‘a private women’s university, owned by a Buddhist temple in Kyoto’ (132). He was preceded as a poet-lecturer in the department by a ‘motley crew’ comprising Ralph Hodgson, George Barker, and James Kirkup; but ‘at least writing poems here is assumed to be natural’ (25). Yet for Robinson, Japan is ‘just the place where I earn a living’, and he has consciously tried to avoid writing ‘Japan-explaining poems’.

In the second conversation, Ian Sansom sketches Peter Robinson’s impressive publication record, which includes the founding and editing of two influential magazines, Perfect Bound and Numbers, two collections from Carcanet, the first winning the 1988 Cheltenham Prize, a book of critical essays with OUP (reviewed in Use of English 57/1; Selected Poems reviewed in UoE 54/3), an edition of Adrian Stokes’ poetry, again with Carcanet, and much else besides. Yet, notes Sansom, ‘your work still seems hardly known here in England’ (21). This low profile may be about to change, with the publication in 2006 of Adam Piette and Katy Price’s The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, reviewed below, and from 2007, with Robinson’s arrival at the University of Reading as a Professor of English and American Literature.

Robinson was a child of the vicarage, and writes that inevitably, he could never feel he belonged among the communities where he grew up. This dislocating childhood ‘produced a sense of protective detachment from situations that may have helped to stimulate a poet’s stance towards the world’ (10). He gives a helpful description of the ‘scene’ in the 1970s, when poetry ‘seemed a very lively thing to be involved with, something that mattered a lot, and a field that was populated by valuable writers of various older generations who were to be respected and learned from’ (70). By the mid-1970s he was in search of a way of writing poetry that followed ‘a line of non-metropolitan, northern and north-midlands poets that would include Basil Bunting, Roy Fisher, Charles Tomlinson, and Donald Davie’ (41). Of these, Roy Fisher was ‘the poet who most helped me find my way when I was young’ because ‘his poetry positively elbows me out of my habitual thought patterns’ (18). Fisher’s poetic confirmed Robinson’s commitment to what he describes a kind of ‘northern realism’. He now sees these first serious attempts at writing poetry as a ‘non-aligned formal eclecticism’, a highly individual aesthetic even in the fractious world of poetry practitioners. This is a commitment that has stayed with him, and which has given readers and reviewers pause for thought when they attempt to ‘place’ Peter Robinson’s work within British poetry of the last four decades.

One good reason for Robinson’s singularity is his admirable commitment to poetries written in the wide world beyond these islands. By the late 1990s Vittorio Sereni, the most celebrated poet of the post-war period in Italy, had become the writer whose poetry ‘must be the most important in my life’ (45). But ‘the three twentieth-century poets who have taught me most’ (124) are Pierre Reverdy, together with Fisher and Sereni, a truly non-aligned trinity of poets for anyone to take to their heart.

One of Robinson’s responses provides an interesting self-description of his poetic: he writes ‘poems that are like frosted glass: neither polemically opaque nor transparently popular’. (21) He makes poems ‘from atmospheres, from the air of occasion and circumstance’ (122). This is partly tactical, since his poetry can draw on ‘intimate situations’ that need to be protected, and therefore the poems ‘half reveal and half conceal their occasions’ (22). Sansom puts it to Robinson that he seems ‘fascinated by silences, those moments when language falters or fails’, to which he responds that poetry might be a way of speaking the unsayable, or at least, intimating what the reader might be able to intuit. But then, candidly, he adds ‘I’m English, and I can be evasive’! As an Englishman resident in Japan, he is perhaps drawing on some of the reticences of that culture too: ‘In formal gardens here they have a bamboo device that sends a drop of water into a pond at intervals just to emphasize the silence’ (23).

Two dialogues with Marcus Perryman are the most rigorous, perhaps inevitably so, since Robinson and Perryman have translated work by Ungaretti, Sereni, Fortini and Cucchi together. Poetry, as Robinson understands it, ‘cannot be just written’ – like music, it has to be ‘composed’. Poetry is also somatic, that is, it needs to be felt as a frankly physical resonance, for the writer and then for readers. ‘It has to form itself as rhythmical units, preferably in the head’, and these cannot be processed into non-rhythmical constructions, the condition of prose. The words of the poem have to ‘sound together, producing a concerted effect’, and crucially, have to strike that note in the attending poet: ‘So: does the poem correspond with the poet’s mind and body?’ (31) Katy Price, the interlocutor for the eighth interview, clearly knows Robinson’s work well, and she gives a helpful description of this poetry’s quality: ‘There is a watchful nonchalance about your forms that I find very appealing; the poems act as though they are always rediscovering, rather than working to cultivate, their poise’ (101). She also asks one of the most disingenuous questions in the book – ‘Do you think it is hazardous living with a poet?’ Robinson admits that it could have been risky to take up with Verlaine and/or Rimbaud, but the greatest threat to relationships as far as he is concerned is ‘an unusual mental absenteeism that can be observed from time to time’ (108).

He has admirable advice for all poets and readers: ‘I try to read against the grain of my temperament, I try to make a point of reading poets that “I’m not supposed to like”’ (98) and ‘learning to write poetry, and, what’s more, to enjoy writing it, means learning how to behave in relation to words such that the work produced then mysteriously matches, by supplanting it, that inchoate burden’ [of the ‘urge or need’ to write] (130). Talk about Poetry, together with the Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, provides an excellent guide to the work of this serious and committed poet.

Nigel Wheale

The Use of English 58.3 Summer 2007, 251-254 © The English Association 2007

The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price. (Salt Publishing £14.99)

After working in Japan for 17 years Peter Robinson has recently returned to England to take up a professorship at the University of Reading. This has coincided with a wealth of new texts: There are Avenues (Brodie Press), Ghost Characters (Shoestring Press), The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (with Marcus Perryman) (Univ. of Chicago Press), The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (Princeton Univ. Press) and Talk about Poetry: Conversations on the Art (Shearsman Books). The Salt Companion – the first full-length collection devoted to his poetry and prose of thirty years – provides a fitting accompaniment. These fourteen essays explore Robinson’s poetic concerns: notions of place, personal and political responsibility, philosophy of language, music, painting and the translator’s art, and provide clear evidence that Robinson has here the readers he deserves – discerning apostles attracted, presumably, to the subtlety and skill of Robinson’s poems, well reflected in their understanding of his complex take on the world along with, often, superb analysis of individual works.

After a slightly wordy clearing of the throat, the introduction kicks nicely into gear interweaving analysis with biography to track Robinson’s poetic development: growing up in a sixties’ Liverpool with its ‘Beatlemania’, industrial decline and unemployment; the enduring impact of two traumatic experiences – being forced to watch his wife-to-be raped at gunpoint when a student, and a brain tumour operation in 1993; his involvement with the Cambridge poetry scene; the influence of Vittorio Sereni, and Roy Fisher along with the poet painter Adrian Stokes – whose ideas helped Robinson develop his theme of reparation; his emigration to Japan in 1989 and subsequent marriage to his second wife. Piette and Price show how these experiences have contributed to Robinson’s evolving sense of self with respect to place and others. They then pull the book together by grouping the essays into the following sections: space, poetry versus critical prose, reparation, home and abroad, and arts of eye and ear.

Roy Fisher’s sparkling preface is the book’s jewel in the crown, managing in just four pages not only to convince us of how Robinson’s poetry defies chronology in that ‘Individual poems have individual lives’ – illustrated by among other things his use of what Fisher calls ‘absorbed metaphor’ that which ‘lies hidden, absorbing the qualities of, say, a mood into itself and dispensing them informally back into the poem’ – but also providing us with beautifully opinionated criticism of what he sees as the worst in contemporary poetry, what he calls ‘Official Verse Culture’ ‘in which the poems, hung from their titles, propose their occasions, anecdotes, locations or general topics in a disguised version of the way a lecturer will open a subject’.

Starting off with ‘space’, Adrian Poole’s essay, if a little heavier on fruit than cake, provides every nuance of Robinson’s references to roads, travel and associated words (asphalt, tarmac, cross-roads, etc) offering a useful reference guide along with good analysis, while Paul Hullah’s provides close commentary on early poems to critique complex notions of the dualism inherent in interiors and exteriors and Robinson’s initial attempts to articulate this in his poetry.

An introduction to the language philosophers J L Austin and John Searle – so central to Robinson’s thought – would have helped the two critical prose essays, rather than allowing these writers to slip in through the back door. Eric Griffith’s essay – if a little meandering and in need of better signposting – is wide-ranging and intelligent, packed with useful information. He challenges Robinson’s view that ‘there is no other world than this’ via an exhaustive examination of the word ‘world’ and then gives numerous examples of Robinson’s use of ‘heterotonic’ rhyme (rhyme pairs with different stress patterns such as ‘weekday’/’decay’) along with a remarkably thorough, potted literary history of its use. Griffith finally shows how such rhyme avoids neat solutions in Robinson’s work like ‘the phantom stair we put our foot through when there is one step less than we thought’.

Steve Clark, like Griffith, frequently refers to Searle but also brings Austin into his discussion of how Robinson’s treatment of the addressee – whether parent or daughter – contradicts the poet’s claims for speech act theory outlined in his critical prose. Though Clark’s essay is also often brilliant, offering complex, thought-provoking ideas and invaluable close readings of poems, sometimes the reader has to do a ‘double-take’ due to unclear structure and Clark also risks alienating his readers by assuming knowledge, such as his irritating opening reference to Austin’s ‘familiar terminology’ – familiar to whom, he should ask himself.

Similarly Robinson’s own definition of reparation, cited in the fourth essay, might valuably have headed the next section:

an impulse to achieve and restore otherness when, for whatever reason, damage has been inflicted on the wholeness of other people so that their integrity and sincerity have been injured. (In the Circumstances, p. vii)

Once this is clear, the essays hang neatly together helpfully introduced by David Pascoe’s essay on the centrality of Adrian Stokes’ aesthetics to the theme. The discussions then cover personal and political reparation as well as its role in translation.

Jane Davis draws on transcription to discuss her reading group’s response to Robinson’s poem ‘There Again’ which deals with the rape – an inescapable subtext to all references to reparation in the poetry. The members’ tiptoeing around this sensitive subject matter with a mixture of frustration and ‘eureka’ moments assisted by Davies’ unobtrusive facilitating of the discussion (an excellent teaching tool for would-be teachers) offers us the most moving essay in the book.

Adam Piette, when considering the Cold War and reparation in Robinson’s work, gets a little carried away with his own rhetoric at times (beautiful as it is): ‘Europe is haunted by the Cold War’s ghostly song of death, residue of the mourning songs of the world wars’ but he also provides powerful analysis of Robinson’s reticent style when putting forward a political argument. He includes some particularly well-focused analysis of the interplay of consonance and assonance in the poem ‘Writing on the Quiet’, providing yet another example of the kind of engagement with the poetry which is the real strength of this book.

Andrew Fitzsimmons’ essay gives us the clearest general discussion on reparation. He paraphrases Robinson’s view when he states: ‘The making of an English poem from the damaged parts is an act of reparation’ and notes also how Robinson sees the ideal relation between poet and translator as one of friendship. Robinson refers to ‘Lowell’s damage-inflicting envy’ to illustrate a failure in friendship and reparation. Robinson states that Vittorio Sereni’s poetry ‘must be the most important in my life’, and Fitzsimmons homes in on this along with close discussion of selected translations.

By the time we reach the home and abroad section, one has already been convinced that life and location are part of a single interwoven metaphor in Robinson’s work. This section builds on this impression. Ralph Pite discusses Robinson’s new book There are Avenues which is set in Liverpool, arguing that ‘he writes poems that cannot inhabit the dwelling they portray’. The essay is more about dislocation than location but with an affirmative conclusion: where ‘Avenues become options’.

John Roe and Miki Iwata both cover the Japan experience. Roe touches on Robinson’s culture shock in relocating to Japan, arguing that it ‘merely amplifies and continues that concern for familiarity in strangeness, oddity in the habitual, which characterise all his work’. He includes some particularly perceptive observations on Robinson’s use of allusion in his poetry dealing with Japanese subject matter. Iwata also gives an insight into some of Robinson’s teaching methods where Oscar Wilde’s hilarious statement ‘in fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention’ is used to discuss European perceptions of Japanese culture with Japanese students. Iwata, like Roe, also gives some good analysis, slightly undermined by her rather bland and unnecessary conclusion that Robinson’s poetry ‘contributes to international understanding’.

The final section, ‘arts of the eye and ear’, shows Neil Corcoran examining Robinson’s subtle incorporation of painting into his poetry. In the process Corcoran, like Griffith, offers in-depth research into ‘ekphrasis’, refering to any intense pictorial portrayal, here taken to be the use of paintings in poetry, while David Taylor tracks the use of music in his poems, largely covering key sixties musicians such as the Beatles, Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Occasionally some of his connections appeared a little tenuous but, as with Poole, the essay is a useful reference guide.

Katie Price’s essay is the most thought provoking in this section. She draws us in with her relaxed intimate opening where she informs us, among other things, that she has an aversion to poetry readings, but then makes us sit up straight and listen as she begins a subtle spatial analysis of the poetry (comparable to, say a three-dimensional graph) as well as considering the place of the reader in all this. For this purpose she uses the rather novel term ‘optic rhythms’ (though not quite as odd as her repeated references to the poem’s ‘furniture’), and also makes a wonderful contrast between being ‘bossed about by Sylvia Plath’ as opposed to reading Robinson’s poems which ‘clearly want to be a friend’. Like Clark, she might have made her terms clearer in places, but it is certainly an intellectual pleasure to travel inside her head.

By the end of this book the overriding impression of Robinson’s poems is of complexity thinly veiled beneath simple diction. These critics have done a fine job in teasing out the numerous strategies Robinson adopts to achieve this effect. In general this Salt edition has a satisfying cohesion to it so that we are left with a deep insight to his creative process and wide-ranging inclusive sense of his locations and development to date as a poet. It leaves one wanting to know how the next instalment will play itself out as Robinson returns to England (physically at least) to work through his next poetic chapter. This is a valuable book for newcomers and those familiar with Robinson and, most importantly, with the on-the-button analysis of selected texts one useful for aspiring poets who want to compose poems that are difficult to write.

Belinda Cooke

The Use of English 58.3 Summer 2007, 255-259 © The English Association 2007

Bowl, by Elizabeth Cook (Worple Press £10.00)

Elizabeth Cook’s poems in Bowl, enveloped within a delicate diction, insinuate themselves through a reverence for the elemental and those vessels that hold memory. They are substantial, carrying thought above style and image, and yet light, alert to measurement and revelation. It is a striking combination that makes Cook’s work distinctive, pleasurable and worthy of exploration. She gives close attention to the sound and sense of each word used , as one would expect from the editor of John Keats: The Major Works (OUP 1990). It is, though, a clipped diction, holding back from the more overt musicality of her previous book, Achilles (Methuen 2000). The title poem, ‘Bowl’, with its lightly compacted stress patterns, redolent of Cook’s world-view, is worth citing in full:

Give me a bowl, wide
and shallow. Patient
to light as a landscape open
to the whole weight
of a deepening sky.

Give me a bowl which turns
for ever on a curve
so gentle a child
could bear it and beasts
lap fearless at its low rim.

The potential to explore any number of physical, philosophical and natural, relationships through the use of the word ‘mixing’ is declined. The reader is left with a concern for function rather than content. The gorgeous sounds undercut an elemental and latent energy within a movement that is continual and deepening despite the ‘shallow’. It is a poem as a blessing or prayer that is intended to be spoken aloud.
Cook’s range and inventiveness is perhaps best illustrated by the central sequence of this collection, ‘Twelve Degrees Of Loneliness’, written in memoriam to her paternal grandfather. Each of the twelve constituent parts, with titles such as ‘My Giraffe’, ‘A Child’s Grave in Volos: 450 BC’ and ‘Snow’, take a sideways look at loneliness and memory through the narrative of Cook’s grandfather’s death and its aftermath. The third part, ‘Bullet’, scorching over land through place and time, ‘ninety years on, still travelling’, an ‘irreducible particle, / nightmare-carrier, / persist in our blood / where your mute detonations / continue to burn and freeze.’ shows the impact of the fateful bullet. Death here is seen as a presence and absence in and through relationships culminating in the twelfth part ‘Cut Edge’. This is an examination of loss through the re-working of the childhood family garden, that has seen revolution, slaughter, the re-drawing of lines into cabbage stumps ‘and a chaos of splinters and seed’.
The poems either side of this sequence amplify and echo its effects. ‘Bliss and Vegetables’, for example, succinctly argues for multiplicity and individuality in relationships and taste. They lightly delineate a powerful sacramental vision of the world and humanity. By ‘sacramental’ here I mean both ‘of the nature of a sacrament’ and ‘of a powerful binding, of obligation’. This is strikingly described as a vocation in ‘To, Not From’, where the narrator rebels against unwanted physical, moral and intellectual limitation and in ‘Why I Do Not Feel Ready To Leave The World Of Sense’, with its Blakean echoes, demanding the freedom to learn about the natural and physical world, of colours, shapes and objects, and the repeated image of the bowl with its ‘fine suffusion (of cochineal) which – were it not contained by the cream bowl – could stretch to the ends of the earth’. It is this last line of the poem that echoes back to a conception of the whole world and its humanity moving onwards carrying its measure and grain. Poems, such as ‘Essays In Restoration’, with its reminder that ‘memory works / by metonymy’ and ‘Heart of Stone’ take the reader on a perceptual journey to places and things of holiness and restoration. It is a journey of ‘shedding’ and also a probing of language and knowledge, a laying bare of the elemental so that the reader can see a re-birth. The final poem in Bowl, ‘Water’, takes us to the heart of the sacrament, in ‘images of water’ and ‘dream’ where the narrator is poised to be annulled by tidal wave and ‘we were every mountain stream’ ‘joined / into one broad irresistible water / breaking in silver fire’ and where ‘Rain is all the verbs, / all puissance, rushing in lines’. It is an appropriate ending to a powerfully sustained collection.

David Caddy

The Use of English 58.3 Summer 2007, 259-260 © The English Association 2007

Catch, by Peter Carpenter. (Shoestring Press £10.00)

Peter Carpenter’s fourth collection, Catch, builds upon his previous work and explores memory. Carpenter, who read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, works as an English master, now Senior Master, at Tonbridge School, a Visiting fellow at the University of Warwick and co-directs the Worple Press. He is a deft and perceptive critic and an energetic figure within English poetry.

He straddles current divisions within English poetry, and displays his independence and versatility, by offering both closed and open poems. The book’s first part consists of public poems of personal and family memory, full of echoes offamous poems, as in ‘Little Girl Lost’, and poets. His model is that of Betjeman, more than Auden, whom he utilises to muster strong anecdotal sentiment, in such poems as ‘The Sporting Life’, ‘The Lesson’ and ‘Wash and Set’. This approach works well and is typified in ‘Coming Up’, a tongue in cheek poem about his Cambridge days, with its ‘memories of Addenbrookes seen from the train, / a tower wisping smoke, the unannounced rain.’ The closed meaning of these poems is salvaged by a crisp and economical use of language. Poems, such as ‘Away’ and the title poem, ‘Catch’, are pared back to allow for the possibility of extra meaning.

Away

water you left
the tulips in

now pure
halitosis

sitting-room
Orwellian

wisteria going
crazy out the front

The use of ‘Orwellian’ and ‘wisteria’ here combining to produce a period piece with the minimum of effort. The Betjemanesque reaches its pinnacle in the book’s central poem, ‘Horton’. The poem sequence concerns the Horton Cemetery, the location of a cluster of war and mental hospitals, where up to 9,000 patients, war casualties and children lie in unmarked graves in an open field. It is a good subject for a public poem and this one is offered as a prayer to those left to rot in shallow graves. It has the powerful refrain ‘what are we then’ running through its eleven sections and evokes with the minimum of fuss a range of horrors that need absolution. Carpenter has gently kept this issue alive, contributing material to Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital (Granta 2002), which features the site. The issue also surfaces locally when walkers find human remains and call the local authorities.

The book’s third part opens with the deceptively private poem, ‘Public Written Declaration’, an open-ended and private poem of suave richness. It consists of thirteen slogans, as if written on walls, echoing modernist art and poetry’s concerns and seemingly rejecting the poetics that informed the earlier work:

to free art from the dead weight of the real world
to explore flux
to be a machine
to reconcile vertical-horizontal, male-female, heaven-earth

The sudden juxtaposition forms a dislocation that is refreshing and humorous, albeit potentially undercutting the value of earlier convergent themes. I would like to see Carpenter, given his critical background and abilities, become more convergent, metonymic and rhythmic, along the lines of the contemporary Betjeman personae that he so lovingly hints at becoming throughout. He has a good latent sense of rhythm, as in ‘Downs’, which he mostly avoids unleashing. This too often leads to the more prosaic narrative poem that lacks a discursive tangent to open it out. The best poems in the section, such as ‘Summit’ and ‘Valediction’, seem almost throwaway compared to the earlier work. The Betjemanesque in Carpenter seems to be more hard won and heart felt as in the poem, ‘Killer’, written in memoriam to a beloved English teacher, Kenneth Curtis.

It was something else. Ken
you know how words come, unbidden,
a quarter of a century on, how they can settle in
the right order.

Carpenter, like that other Tonbridge writer-teacher, Jonathan Smith, is a figure that commands respect. This book gently reinforces that with the minimum of fuss and effort.

David Caddy

The Use of English 58.3 Summer 2007, 260-262 © The English Association 2007

How to Read a Poem, by Terry Eagleton. (Blackwell £9.99)

Is 'Literary Theory' responsible for a decline in the practice of close reading, especially of poetry, among students of English? Au contraire, says Terry Eagleton, launching the handbook How to Read a Poem: the great theorists were also great readers, as attentive to a poem as you or I or I.A. Richards. Some indeed were 'outstanding stylists' in their own right, as anyone inward with the prose of Foucault, de Man or Derrida will confirm. And anyway, what is close reading?

For Eagleton, it's not how faithfully you stick to the poetic text that counts, but 'what you are in search of when you do so.' If this sounds more like a criminal investigation than a critical inquiry, in many ways (as we find out) it is. Sidelining rhyme and metre, he advocates 'a more subtle attention to poetic form', one that sees it 'as a medium of history itself.' He suggests for instance that Alexander Pope's heroic couplet (everything in its allotted place) reflects 'the traditional world-view of the English landowning and patrician class.' 'Eagleton proves once and for all', enthuses the blurb, 'that close readers and theoretical readers should be partners rather than enemies.' Now if that reminds you of the spider's invitation to the fly, you are not the reader How to Read a Poem has in mind. The treatment is not less theory but more.

his is Eagleton's first book devoted to non-dramatic poetry, and a chance to assess his strengths and weaknesses. He is best on syntax (developing Donald Davie's work on poetic grammar in Articulate Energy), as when he evokes the 'single whirlwind of a sentence' in Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind', where enjambement is needed 'to keep the wind gusting without even the briefest lull'; or on another single sentence, compelled by Yeats 'around the corners and through the syntactical thickets of seven lines of poetry', in the 'look-no-hands' first stanza of 'Coole Park and Ballylee'; or on a third, the opening statement of Collins's 'Ode to Evening':

What this says in bare grammatical outline is: If you would like a song, Evening, teach me one yourself. But … the poem digresses and elaborates so much, taking a circuitous route through one sub-clause after another, that it becomes the song which it is asking to sing.
His weakest point is tone. He says, with some justice, that it is not easy to distinguish tone in poetry from mood, and gives an example. 'Perhaps we could say that the mood of 'Mariana' is melancholic, while the tone is doleful or lugubrious.' But this equates Tennyson with Mariana (who is as doleful and lugubrious as you like). As we shall see, Eagleton has his reasons. What he says about another example, the last lines of George Herbert's 'Love', is more surprising:

'You must sit down', says Love, 'and taste my meat'.
So I did sit and eat.

He draws attention to 'the sudden modulation in tone and metre here, from the formal courtesy of the first line to the quiet, throwaway matter-of-factness of the second'. Throwaway, matter of fact? As if the poet, speaking of Christ, should congratulate himself on getting his feet under the table? No, the poet is intensely moved, in fact overwhelmed, and only understatement can convey his emotion.1 Or take Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'. Eagleton fairly describes the 'glimpse of seductive stasis' the poet has enjoyed and wishes to prolong, but then adds that this glimpse is

almost literally stolen from the owner of the woods, who, he assures himself rather guiltily, will not see him stopping here to take a look at his trees, rather as he would not see him furtively helping himself to some firewood.

I should like to believe that he is joking.

Terry Eagleton introduces himself as a 'politically minded literary theorist', and for the blurb, 'such a theorist is the only person who can really show what poetry is for.' The accent falls on for, and it may be objected at the outset that a work entitled How to Read a Poem ought first to show us rather what poetry is. Take the conclusion of Larkin's 'Days' ('Where can we live but days?'), cited here as 'an example of ambiguity':

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long gowns
Running over the fields.

This may be 'a masterpiece of bare suggestiveness', but it's not exactly Larkin's. Eagleton twice misreads the text, substituting waken for 'wake' in line 3, and gowns for 'coats'. But there is method in his misquotation. He sees Larkin as 'somehow managing to make that pregnant phrase 'in their long gowns' resonant of a lot more than itself.' A great deal more:

Are the priest and the doctor running to bring comfort…to this metaphysical questioner, or are they oppressive, Blakeian figures rushing to bind him into a straitjacket?

A straitjacket? He has decided, on no evidence, that 'Running over the fields' contains 'faintly sinister overtones'.

Is there an implication of panic here, as the middle-class guardians of orthodoxy are pitched into crisis?

What crisis? For Eagleton, the wish creates the thought:

The rural fields and the long gowns perhaps hint at a traditional, pre-modern community, for which such meaning-of-life inquiries may appear impious. So we do not know in what tone to read the last verse, whether grim or equable.

But we do. We know from the exclamation ('Ah,') with which Larkin clarifies his elegiac, unillusioned closing lines. But having re-invented the poem as political melodrama, Eagleton is free to make of it whatever he likes. What matters when you read a poem, remember, is 'what you are in search of when you do so'.

Eagleton's travesty of Larkin stands with the more eccentric student misreadings ('Speculation, however, awoke in some, and the Wild Goose flies high') in Richards's Practical Criticism. What better illustration of the 'irrelevant association' than his Blakeian oppressors rushing across fields, in long gowns, to straitjacket the poet? It is Eagleton himself who manages that. Or take 'Mariana', to which he applies a full arm-lock while (ironically enough) deploring the excessive powers of restraint employed by Tennyson:

…far too coherent. Almost every word, sound and image is remorselessly dragooned into the overall atmospheric effect…The piece lacks the faintest flicker of spontaneity. Nothing in this windless enclosure is allowed to have a life of its own, or to kick back against the stifling climate of woe…

But it's Eagleton, not Tennyson, who won't allow the poem a life of its own. 'This windless enclosure'?

And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway…

The winds and the gusty shadow certainly enjoy a life of their own—unlike dejected Mariana. In the thrilling lines that follow, when the winds are still, 'The shadow of the poplar fell/Upon her bed, across her brow.' But Eagleton's purposes are his own. 'Mariana', which 'succeeds only in being inert about inertia', reflects Victorian England's 'terror of social revolt'. 'People do not tend to say this sort of thing', he jokes of the refrain ('”I am aweary, aweary,/I would that I were dead!”'), 'when they have just been bequeathed a fine old Tudor farmhouse along with several thousand acres of fertile land.' One can only hope that the student, at this point, will put down How to Read a Poem, and read the poem.

Tennyson is an obvious target for the politically minded, and in How to Read he is called in several times to be ticked-off or historically diagnosed. John Clare is another matter, a hero, and Eagleton applauds his unselfconscious manner (contrasted with the 'programmatic' attempt at plain language in Lyrical Ballads), his refusal to 'symbolise' his experiences, and a democratic syntax which will not subordinate any one thing to another. The poem in question is 'Badger', a heart-rending description of the practice of badger-baiting. It is also a savage attack:

When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole, and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by…

Clare has no need to call explicitly on our sympathy: unadorned narrative elicits that, and in the unequal fight that follows ('They get a forkèd stick to bear him down…And bait him all the day with many dogs') Clare raises our hopes that the badger will survive. He 'bites at all he meets', 'fights with dogs for hours and beats them all', and in the second stanza grins and 'drives the crowd and follows at their heels'.2 The drunkard reels, 'the frighted women take the boys away', and only the blackguard laughs. It's all a show of course, and though the badger 'tries to reach the woods, an awkward race', and makes a last stand, we know the inevitable outcome.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,

Then starts and grins and drives the crowd agen;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles, groans, and dies.

Eagleton's response is astonishing.

Apart from a general air of fun and riot,…the verse seems to feel no need to imply any complex attitude to what it records.

But isn't the contempt for badger-baiting obvious? Not to Eagleton, who even suspects that Clare's enjoyment of the fun and riot may be 'a little offensive' to the 'ecologically sensitive' modern reader:

Its present tense catches the turmoil of the hunt…but it is also a timeless present which suggests that the badger-baiting has a venerable tradition behind it. So our sense of dramatic high jinks is blended with a bolstering sense of custom and stability.

Eagleton's disastrous misreading of Clare's poem is a failure to respond to its emotional drama, in short to feel for the badger. Instead, he concentrates on the work's 'metonymic rather than metaphorical' structure, or on its use of the 'simple repetitive copula ('And')'. It's hard to forget his scorn, on page 1, for 'the idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting…a tender feeling'.

But it's a relief to find that in hand-to-hand struggle with a poem, Literary Theory saves no-one. Take the sub-section on 'The Semiotics of Yuri Lotman', a Formalist who held that the 'aesthetic effect' of a poem, any poem apparently, derives from the 'tensions and collisions' between its various elements. We are not to look for some 'harmonious integration' of parts: that was Coleridge's mistake. Yet when Eagleton finds something in a poem that appears not to make sense, or conform to the whole, he wants to know why. The opening lines of Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts', for instance.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood…

'It isn't clear', he suggests, 'how it moves from the idea of suffering to the idea of the aged reverently waiting for the miraculous birth. How exactly is reverent expectancy a matter of suffering? Because suspense is painful? Or is the suffering…the birth itself?' Good question, but he leaves it unanswered, opting to reassure us ('it wants to take the false heroics out of suffering by 'decentring' it…') with theoretic waffle. Yet surely it is not hard to resolve. The opening statement, 'About suffering they were never wrong', governs what comes next ('how it takes place…') but only that. Line 5 brings in a related but distinct reflection on the way in which, in the old masters, the extraordinary and the everyday co-exist: 'How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting…' Connecting Auden's comments on the paintings, then, is not the single phrase 'about suffering', but the hold-all title, 'Musée des Beaux Arts'.3

But if Eagleton can't follow Auden's logic, he can question his motives. Should a poet (he asks) have been saying this sort of thing, virtually condoning 'indifference to human disaster', in wartime? In 1940, when 'catastrophe and the common life came together in the bombing of British cities'? Another poem 'about suffering', Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford', gets off lightly. But Eagleton's sum-up of the last stanza, which he says 'daringly compares a crowd of fetid mushrooms trapped in the darkness of a shed to concentration-camp victims', misrepresents it.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!...

The last line above, he argues, has 'a certain air of anonymity', the force of which is 'to prevent the poem from making too explicit an analogy between the mushrooms and the camp victims.' This may be so, but the analogy extends beyond the victims of Treblinka; it remembers also those of a natural disaster, the eruption at Pompeii. The force of this is to widen the scope of the poem to all the 'disappeared'; and if I may say so, the tone and feeling of this line are peculiarly hard to judge. Treblinka and Pompeii are not the same; and even without the problem of the mushrooms, Mahon is asking too much of the reader.

'Literary theorists', concludes Eagleton in his opening chapter, 'may safely plead not guilty to the charge of having sabotaged literary criticism.' But the verdict is ours, and on the evidence of How to Read a Poem, the plea is far from safe. What can be said to a critic who feels that William Collins, evoking the 'short shrill shriek' of the bat in 'Ode to Evening', 'overdoes the alliteration'? Well of course he does, that's why it's so effective; compare Coleridge's 'The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, the furrow followed free'. And why are we told that in 'The Lotos- Eaters' (st.1), Tennyson 'tries rather too wilfully to create a mood of lethargy, all the way from the repetition of 'afternoon'…to the languid alexandrine of the last line'? Tennyson didn't have to try. The equivocal force of the poem has been brilliantly described by Kingsley Amis:

'The Lotos-Eaters' deals…with another aspect of melancholy, definable as languor, about which it manages to become energetic, ending indeed in a kind of rocket-burst of lassitude and capitulation.4

And Eagleton is hardly even-handed. Tennyson tries too wilfully, whereas Yeats gets away with an 'extraordinarily numerous set of b sounds' (blossoming, body, bruised, beauty, born…) at the end of 'Among School Children'. But then in Yeats 'there is a great deal of busy consonantal activity going on', which can't be said of the languid Tennyson, dangerously close to those spaced-out mariners himself, with his crumbling alexandrines and his rhymes that 'seem to lapse back listlessly upon themselves.' Even Keats comes under suspicion. 'Some', says Eagleton, lingering too long over the 'sweets' in 'The Eve of St. Agnes', 'might find this creamy, curdy, syrupy sensuous riot a touch decadent.' But he gives the morally bracing terminology of Cambridge English a new twist, asking just how much some poets knew about work. Tennyson we can forget. 'We see no signs of labour at all' (how surprising is that?) in the 'Ode to Evening'. And Wordsworth, idling in 'The Solitary Reaper', 'is watching someone else working but not working himself, and the reaper's labour is not the focus of his attention.' I am reminded of those 'New Historicists' who argue that he should have paid more attention, in 'Tintern Abbey', to the charcoal burners he scarcely notices, and less to his own 'sublime' self-consciousness.

And it is here, in his disregard of the poet's intention, that Terry Eagleton is most at fault. What he looks for in a poem is something else, 'the vital hinge between text and history'. But a critic who can describe Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium' (where the journey has a purely symbolic function) as 'one of the great Irish emigration poems' has altogether lost touch with poetry.

Notes

He continues: 'The full stop after “meat” makes the last line a single unit, thus emphasising its terseness and flatness. A comma would have been fatal to the effect.' But Eagleton's text is modernised, in spelling and punctuation: Herbert put a colon after 'meat'.
Selected Poems of John Clare, ed. James Reeves (Heinemann, 1961). This is the version used by Eagleton.
See Elizabeth Bishop on 'Musée' (One Art, New York, 1994): 'it's just plain inaccurate in the last part. The ploughman & the people on the boat will rush to see the falling boy any minute, they always do, though maybe not to help. But then he's describing a painting so I guess it's all right to use it that way. Oh well—'. It is also questionable as art criticism. The figures do not 'turn away' from the disaster: they are unaware of it. The sower, says Arturo Bovi (Breugel, Thames and Hudson, 1971), assumes 'a contemplative serenity, oblivious of the tragedy of Icarus.' However, the tiny figure bottom right has seen it, and raises the alarm.
Tennyson: Selected by Kingsley Amis (Penguin Books, 1973).

John Constable

The Use of English 58.2 Spring 2007, 157-164 © The English Association 2007

Wallace Stevens: poetry and criticism, by Tim Morris. (Salt Publishing, £12.99)

This is a very intelligent discussion of Stevens, tackling the essential nature of his poetical writing and its development through a study of his longer poems – that is, all of the six extended sequences plus two shorter sets, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and ‘Credences of Summer’. The posthumous publications are not drawn on, except for illumination from earlier versions such as ‘From the Journal of Crispin’ which became ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’. In the process, Stevens’ major critics are criticised, and the important influence on Stevens of writings in aesthetics (Valéry, Santayana, Croce, Emerson, Focillon) is examined. Most sections begin with consideration of one of these aestheticians and then pass on to the work of Stevens’ which embodies his interest in them. No secret is made of the fact that Stevens was not himself a brilliant theoretician, and the best way to see his work developing out of the intellectual climate of his times as he knew it, is through these figures. American 19th century landscape painting also comes into it, as appropriate, and approaches are made to the text through archival, biographical, critical and other channels.

But the mainstream of the book is an intensely sustained commentary on the chosen major poems. This should be an invaluable help to anyone studying or teaching Stevens to a fairly advanced level, as to any serious reader. But it is not easy. Morris does not indulge any of the mechanics of biographical criticism or naïve subjective response. He does not deal in things like ‘effectiveness’ or ‘tone’ or ‘themes’, he is not very interested in effects of echo and surprise through prosodic or other displacement, and he doesn’t explain. It is recognised that most of Stevens’ poetry is, in one way or another, difficult, and he doesn’t see it as his job to remove this difficulty, to convert it into an easiness. He doesn’t, as so many modern critics do when dealing with a difficult text, attempt to strip away the difficulty and reveal what the text is ‘saying’ underneath by reductive paraphrase, nor to fill the text out with intrusive associational material, nor any kind of discourse which diverts attention from the pure or abstract nature of the text. It is accepted that Stevens is not engaged in making perfectly ordinary statements by decorated, occulted or diversionary methods, indeed is not ‘saying’ at all, but doing something else, and his task is to know what that something-else is. He recognises, in fact, what he calls ‘the curious resistance of Stevens’ poetry in relation to themes and ideas’ and does not attempt to transgress that. So the difficult poem is, for once, treated as a difficult poem, rather than as a poem in need of repair.

Rather than explain the poem, what Morris does is to set up a parallel discourse. The experience of the poem is translated into a different vocabulary and a more extended syntax. Wherever this comes from (and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory features significantly in the bibliography) it is itself a figured language. It is at times like setting up a poetry to cope with a poetry, but only if we can understand ‘poetry’ as an intellectual discourse freely availing itself of a metaphoricity which, while it does not indulge Stevens’ imagistic elusiveness, will speak in figures without feeling the need for a glossary – ‘It seems to be a muscle of recognition which Stevens insists upon here...’ (p.137); ‘...the priorness of the indeterminate subject is pressed into specious existence by the copula, leaving the powder-burn of intense desire hanging as its after-effect.’ (p.159). It is not a philosophical discourse; it is not a critical discourse (though it does criticise); if it is an aesthetic discourse it is a mixed one, involved in philosophy and criticism.

Probably the best way to show Morris at work is to take a well known and minimal example of Stevens in his earlier imagistic vein, the first section of ‘Thirteen ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ :

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

The idea that this ‘simplicity’ does not require comment would obviously be naïve. Granted, it could be allowed to be ‘absorbed’ by the non-articulating reader to whatever effect that may have, as Stevens might have supposed in setting it there so baldly. But to accept its ‘effect’ without knowing what that effect is or means, or merely to describe that effect, are surely evasions, because what we are presented with is a stark removal, a negation, and a tension without resolution. It is a troubling little piece, hanging between the real and the fictive, as most of them are, and we need to know why we are troubled. Many people might be satisfied to talk about the ‘picture’ here and its minimalism, and the residue of ambiguous or undirected feeling which it leaves behind. The confidence of the prosody might be brought into contrast with this. It might be remarked that having been promised ‘Ways of Looking’ we immediately find ourselves being looked at. And so forth, and this is all perfectly valid of course, but none of it is Morris’s way, because he demands a total account of what is happening in this piece of language, and not to leave it is an instrument knowable only by its effects.

He introduces these lines by saying (p.25),

...each of the thirteen sections rehearses a new appreciation of control, a new balance between representation and its echo

and defines this first section as involved with ‘potential of scale’ –

The mountains, traditionally preserve of the sublime in their physical size, inspiring a terror of scale, are here left impotent as anything but the most abstract landscape, tamed into mute existence by a single moving eye.

Morris is here articulating what we must experience if we focus on the poem, if we allow it to ‘enter’ us – an action, almost a drama, including a statement, which lie implicit in the bareness and stasis of the little poem. It is the critic’s ‘answer’ to the enigmatic suspension of the poem, the sense we get of knowing that ‘something’ (something troubling) has happened which is passed immediately to the reader to unwind rather than be dictated in explicit terms. Thus the author ‘controls’ an entire experience by balancing its representation on the page against its echo in the reader, reduced to a mentioning which leaves both significance and picture unrealised. It is good that Morris does not fall for the old claim that such incompletion ‘liberates’ the reader to supply his/her own complement; it of course does nothing of the sort. It leaves the reader ‘stuck’ in mid-process and unable to move, whereas the full enunciation of thought or description would have left the reader free to discard the issue. Where Morris’s commentary succeeds is in the accuracy with which it realises the nature of this drama. But this is not all.

Many readers of the poem would be content to recognise the pun or ambiguity on the word ‘moving’ – whether it is motion or emotion – as a delightful or cunning trope and leave it at that, a simultaneous endorsement of the blackbird’s attraction. Far from leaving it, Morris takes this as far as it could go. He points out that the two readings of ‘moving’ set up two quite different structures to the poem. If it is motion, the blackbird remains the only bearer of vision and (thus) life in this vast empty landscape except for the absent, non-committal author, the architect of the whole thing. ‘Thus, metaphorically, the poet retains his ability to claim simultaneity of vision and pure agency.’ I take this to mean that the total absence of human agency from the scene leaves the poet in sole charge, as it were, of his own powerful silence. If ‘moment’ is emotion ‘another observer is powerfully implicated and the traditional landscape of a romantic sublime is subsumed by the fluidity of vision, the possibility of change to renew out of an implacable Nature.’ I don’t find this in any way an extravagant structure to hinge on one word. As the blackbird’s eye becomes emotionally moving a whole arena of possible concern and action comes into play and our contemplation of this singular, small creature in a vast emptiness becomes a signal of our (rather than the author’s) potential agency whether for good or ill (to the blackbird or to Nature). It remains a simple idea, but one which needs to be articulated in full if it is not to remain dormant in the poem’s brevity.

Morris’s concern, however high-flown his discourse seems, is with accuracy, to the extent that he finds it important to point out, with regard to this poem, that the bird in question is the American blackbird (species Icteridae) of the family of orioles and grackles, and not the one we see in England, which is a kind of thrush. And this does make a difference.
His conclusion is that in neither reading of ‘moment’ is the scale human, within human grasp and power, and ‘the body cannot be reconciled by vision to both mountains and bird.’ This leaves the poem unresolved, which is itself Stevens’ means of achieving the kind of poetry he wanted to create, one which establishes its own autonomy, an addition to the world rather than a description of or reflection on it. ‘We are reminded that this equivocation is wrung from a compositional encounter in and for the linguistic, not from a real possibility of the visual.’

This is his lesson throughout, that ‘themes and ideas’ are useless ways of understanding this poetry which skilfully evades them even in the most abstract discourse in favour of a writing which refers itself back to the linguistic. Its problems and resolutions are compositional problems and compositional resolutions and this remains true from the initial bid for an imagistic ‘pure poetry’ though to the very different modes of the later work. Even of a work such as ‘Auroras of Autumn’ with its heavy admixture of narrative and discursive techniques, he can say that the language ‘...creates the thought itself, and is not ‘designed’ in an ante-room of writing and tested in application.’ (p.160). and that it manifests ‘...the compositional drive towards an iconography of experience which need not ‘represent’, but become final effigy of that which motivated its making.’ (p.156). The surfacing of thought itself on the textual surface is managed so as to ‘intensify the ambiguity and evasiveness of its vision.’ (p.168).

The poetical events which constitute the diversity and unity of Stevens’ course, his proliferating strategies for referring both writing and world to a written constitution, are many and varied and Morris exhibits them with skill, and not without judgement. I only have two small complaints or doubts about the book. One is that Morris rushes straight to significance, showing little interest in the compositional techniques which actually achieve the condition he discusses – rhythm, word-order, lineation, phonetics, parallelism and echo, colour etc. (The mountains and the bird are abstract and particular, but it is not mentioned that they are also white and black). And possibly, by concentrating on Stevens’ long poems and sequences, we are too much involved with the spectacle of Stevens struggling, or at least striving, to maintain a large-scale structure on a basis of lyrical intuition, which is bound to be a problem, and lose sight of the Stevens of the masterly short poem, such as ‘A Postcard from the Volcano’ or ‘The Men that are Falling’, which transcends his habitual evasiveness and reticence by being grounded in common experience, and might even be said to succeed by relaxing to some extent his habitual drive towards an autonomous poetic.

But Morris is particularly careful in returning again and again to the essential structure of Stevens’ poetry, to make it clear that writing turned towards itself is not the same thing as writing about nothing, and he ends the book with an elegant plea for Stevens as a kind of metaphysician of the imagination, a lyrical questioner of ‘the damage done to experience by representation’. It is thus that Morris locates Stevens aside from his political irrelevance but situated on the edge of a recognition of linguistic harm.

Peter Riley

The Use of English 58.2 Spring 2007, 164-168 © The English Association 2007

Cracks in the Universe, by Charles Tomlinson. (Carcanet, £7.95)

In Charles Tomlinson’s new poetry, the ‘cracks’ of the title are the extraordinary entry-points by which the physical world is continually breaking through to us. American trees ripped open by ice let through the intoxicating smell of spring sap in ‘The Upstate Freeze’, while a limestone pebble in another poem sprouts images of human and animal likeness. Similarly Spanish rock in ‘Santiago de Compostela’ (‘Granite is the stone / in church and fishmarket’) seems to unleash a fast, kindred animal. A lamprey, drawn from its water tub by a market trader, seizes

a dead fish from her slab
in a single swoop
with that primordial sucker,
accurate as Iago
killer of Moors
ancient as granite.

Line clutches line in hard-c grip, as ‘sucker’ holds on to ‘accurate’, and ‘accurate’ ‘killer’. But Tomlinson has also turned the short-line form itself into a kind of small channel or ‘crack’ by which the alarming energies of a land’s history thrust their way into the present, only for the poetry to contain them. For if the Santiago of medieval Catholic Spain seems to release its Iago side in deadly speed—with one Shakespearean Moor instantly outnumbered by the conquest of so many—the whole impetus is arrested in the sound and balance of ‘ancient as granite’.

But the primordial keeps breaking through elsewhere. In the fantasia of ‘A View from the Shore’ the poet awakes to a modern Ovidian metamorphosis that is transforming Brooklyn Bridge. Now ‘festooned with a fringe of vineleaves’, while ‘an aquatic ivy’ is ‘clasping the stone piers’ and climbing its cables, the bridge is being overrun by the return of a nature that is superseding its superseders. Though not the doom that climate change may bring, it has its own disturbing power, now that here

overnight a crisis in the environment
had found its vent
and out of the hemmed-in cornucopia
that was nature once, had started
unstoppably to pour itself back
through this crack in the universe

—a ‘crack’, moreover, that lets such ‘crisis in the environment’ find its succinct, unexaggerated ‘vent’. Without diffuseness, but with precise channelling of sound and realisation, one goes ‘back / through this crack’ to primal beginnings.

Again one is struck by the poem’s variety of inlets. The ‘stepped-back’ skyscrapers of another New York poem both allow space in and mirror it, making ‘the place / As merciful and beautiful as the universe’. In a group of poems celebrating the American sculptor, David Smith, the artist’s metallic ‘bare boughs’, set in the open air and reflective of changing light, also invite space in, but dance with it—the bareness matched by Tomlinson’s terse layout in ‘Bolton Landing’:

The ballet
of steel
beneath
a winter sky

Yet with a complete change of mood Tomlinson can equally trace the ‘charming ballet’ and pictorial comedy of Douanier Rousseau in the poem ‘Les Jouers de Football’. Douanier’s painting of football players, he observes, has no room for more than four of them, each with an identical moustache inside a miniature pitch with a three-sided ‘wall / of remarkably small autumnal trees’. The tiny enclosure lies open, however, to ‘a turquoise sky’ of tranquillity as well as to the threat of an ominously changing nature without human rules or goals. For one painted cloud obtrudes the warning ‘snout of a beneficent saurian’ (the primordial beneficence still keeping to the spirit of Douanier’s comedy) ‘as nature brews / overhead its unending future’.

What enters the confines of the poetry, therefore, is often a mingling of menace and possibility, or the merciless and beautiful, or hurt and assuagement. It is a weather of mixed feelings, for example, that Tomlinson subtly admits into the poem in the course of ‘The Photograph’ as he contemplates a picture taken at a Staffordshire pit not long after the First World War: ‘Collar-and-tie men from the offices...Miners in mufflers and with caps as flat / And comfortable as their Midland "a"s’. But a sense of stoic, unexaggerated discomfort soon intrudes and alters the perspective by which the long-vanished past is seen. For though ‘All these men are dead’, the one the poet knew (‘Sixth from the left and standing’) begins to stand alive with a physical resoluteness born from injury and need. His Great War past is not distant but here with him in

The wounds he kept concealed to get the job
In a hard time—now fireman down this pit,
The one who lights the fuses and breaks through
Into untouched seams waiting for the pick.

Also breaking through to our attention, though not part of the photographer’s official interest, are the slagheaps behind the pictured group. On these greening hills, in this hard time, faint figures can be seen gleaning the fragments ‘Which, blown into a glimmer, then a glow, / Will feed their fires’: a wider scene of distress endured, and of inward fires contained, to which the individual miner belongs and which is

As unregarded as the shrapnel wounds
The fireman hid. He smiles and keeps his peace,
His good leg braced to move once poses cease.

In the marvellously felt justness of that ending—‘braced’ beyond embitterment but with a sense of suffering’s cost—Tomlinson suggests the resilience that has also come down to him as a native of Stoke. Cracks in the Universe shows very much its distinctly personal dimension when the poems’ openness to the influx of the outer world can equally be seen as his active engagement with circumstance. Then, for him, the overwhelmings from the outside can be the means to define both the limits of the self and its potentiality. So, in ‘The Fruits of Ignominy’, one of a series of poems about his Stoke youth called ‘Lessons’, he recounts what he learned, ironically, from a merciless verbal humiliation. ‘ “An ignominious failure, Tomlinson”’ goes the cry of a maths teacher, bringing in the exam results to a nervous class. Biting back his own thought (‘An ignominious teacher’), the victim finds, however, that the man’s insult, ‘aimed from a doorway coming in’, is the opening into a more valuable realisation. For the teacher’s entrance is that of an actor who

trod the boards and taught me what I am:
Words were the sole abstractions I could use—
Words like ignominious, words and shapes
And what I could not grasp I might transfuse
Into lines and colours.

The words and shapes are not ‘the forgery of silhouettes’ (the description of Tomlinson’s drawing by his art teacher in another poem from ‘Lessons’) but the outlines into which as a poet he has learnt to entice a bodied fullness. He is particularly fitted, therefore, in ‘Recalling Orson Welles’, to celebrate the art of one whose film sets for Citizen Kane ‘brought the ceiling / into the picture’ and space into human boundaries. The American’s talent may have been dissipated when ‘under the vague / ceiling of the years / you’, Welles, the prolific raconteur of interviews and films, ‘went on talking’, as ‘the tales you told / on the screen / lost their conviction / and the meaning / you had gathered once...’ Yet the syntax is not leading, as one might think, to the story of more loss and scattered ability, but to a ‘Recalling of Welles’, compactly and un-nostalgically. For he is being brought back, with a new acoustic intensity, to

the meaning
you had gathered once
into those interiors
sealed and solidified
by the fifth wall
overhead which said:
here you are what you are.

As word hems in word, space really does seem gathered ‘into those interiors’, their finiteness so ‘sealed and solidified / by the fifth wall’ that what ‘overhead it said’ speaks in the open vowels of possibility and limitation (‘here you are what you are’).

Indeed, there is as much freedom here as in the many enclosures opening up constantly in the poems to space and abundance. This is Tomlinson’s way of answering what his last poem ‘Eden’ calls ‘earth’s incalculable invitation’—to take the measure of an inflowing, changeable world, with its refreshment and pain, losses and recoveries. Here in the end are no fruits of ignominy but of a rare poetic mastery.

Richard Swigg

Use of English 58.2 Spring 2007 168-173 © The English Association 2007

There Are Words: Collected Poems, by Gael Turnbull. (Shearsman Books with Mariscat Press, £18.95)

Gael Turnbull (1928-2004), although born in Edinburgh, was a borderer, not between England and Scotland, but between those countries and Canada, the United States and France as well. His father was a Scottish Baptist Minister and his mother was from Minnesota of Swedish descent. He grew up in northern England and Winnipeg, studied natural sciences at Cambridge University and medicine at Pennsylvania University. In 1952 he became a GP and anaesthetist at Iroquois Falls Hospital in northern Ontario. He worked at hospitals in London, Worcester and Ventura County, California, before returning to Worcester, to avoid the possibility of being sent to the Vietnam War as a medical orderly, in 1964. He remained there until his retirement in 1989.

Turnbull was thus an exiled Scot with an internationalist outlook and connections. Raymond Souster’s Contact Press published his first book, Trio, with Phyllis Webb and Eli Mandel, in 1954. Contact magazine and press was Canada’s most significant poet-operated and self-financed small press and helped Turnbull to reach out internationally. Among the most important contacts Turnbull made was with Cid Corman, the translator of Basho and of Things by Francis Ponge, who was just beginning his Origin magazine and press, and through Corman, he encountered Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and post-Poundian modernism. His subsequent collection in 1955, with Jean Beaupré, translations from the French of Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau, Roland Giguére, Giles Henault and Paul Marie Lapointe, is not included in the present volume nor are any other of his translations.

The most important early contact was with Corman, with whom he shares a stylistic affinity, and also a desire to gently advocate the work of others. Turnbull founded Migrant Press in Ventura in 1957, joined by the poet, Michael Shayer, in Worcester, in 1959. Migrant, publishing Roy Fisher and Edward Dorn, was the first transatlantic publisher of predominantly modernist poetry to gain international recognition after 1945. It also served to distribute American and Canadian poetry books that appealed to Turnbull, particularly the poets published by Corman’s Origin. Poetic friendships were central to Turnbull as the poem, ‘Walls’, from I, Maksoud (1969), with its ten numbered parts dedicated to poet friends such as Charles Tomlinson, Creeley, Robert Duncan and Basil Bunting, indicates. Turnbull and Migrant fostered an awareness of Quebecois, French, Black Mountain, Beat, Objectivist and exiled Scottish and English poets paving the way for the English poetry renaissance of the 1960s. As a conduit for both French and American poetry, especially Marianne Moore and that other poet-doctor, William Carlos Williams, he was invaluable to Tomlinson, Fisher, Edwin Morgan and younger poets, such as Jim Burns, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood in finding different ways outside of the Movement’s insularity and into the wider world of the poem which ‘must speak for itself’. Turnbull wanted to produce a poetry that would astonish the reader. The Beats and Black Mountain Poets, in particular, offered ways out of the formal constraints of Movement writing with its reliance upon observation and the stable identity of the perceiver and Turnbull clearly took great delight in opening up the possibilities of utterance within English poetry. Turnbull’s poetry exudes a simple playfulness:

There is no Why

turn, the thought may
burn, the mind’s con
cern, it will not
learn
(it will not learn

know, that love may
go, the heart is
slow, but it is
so
(for it is so

Whereas Tomlinson and Fisher are concerned with the nature of perception and of the perceiver, and Carlos William’s Paterson (1949-63) showed the potential ways to write a poetry of place, Turnbull is more concerned with widening the modes of utterance for the poem. There is in Turnbull a stubborn refusal to be too serious, to be overly grand or monumental. His artisan outlook is altogether quieter and expansive in the small things.

Thoughts on the One Hundred and Eighty-Third Birthday of J.M.W. Turner

A charge was inserted under the foundations and
detonated…
The sun has disappeared leaving part of itself adherent
to several
fragments of vapour. A gold sovereign comes in handy as
replacement.
The sky has been pried loose from the horizon. The blue
has taken
the strain by splitting into radial fissures of indigo. Tack it together
somehow with rivets of carmine.
Then go home, have a glass of sherry, and look at it
again.

Tomorrow we will begin the reconstruction of heaven.
Meanwhile,
This evening, demolition has its attractions.
Accidents, too, can be very useful.

There Are Words brings together work from Trio (1954) to Might a Shape of Words, & other transmutations (2000) and includes selected uncollected work from 1949-1960 and 1990-2004. It has an introduction by Gael’s wife, Jill, a publisher’s note explaining that it is more of a ‘collected books’ approach, authorial and useful editorial notes pointing to revised poems. The work includes prose poems, found poems, ballads, poems that need to read aloud, celebratory poems, shaped poems, short lined, long lined, spatially aware poems, epigrams, prayers and transmuted texts. The prose journal, A Year and a Day (1985) and other published works and uncollected poems are also excluded. He moves from public to private poetry as if such a division were irrelevant and follows Pound’s dictum ‘to make it new’.

Spaces (1986), and other subsequent poems in the same mould, some of which have been excluded here, employs the physical space on the page to indicate a pause or hesitation, perhaps something unsaid or implied, even a shift or dislocation of attention and are popular with children.

Homage to Cid Corman

As surely as

A shadow’s absence

Much of the work has a light touch and starts within perception:

A Well Known Road

Travelling a well known road:
but it isn’t the same –
past the familiar landmarks:
what do they mean?
going back to the place:
where is it now?
and there it is:
and it was –
and it’s all utterly false:
and all so true.

A poem like, ‘Yes, sunshine’, with its awareness of slight change and the preciousness of the moment, points to a deeper human situation and demands a slow reading:

The light changing, decreasing.
A faint breeze. The tide
coming in. The ocean
destroying our footprints,
grinding the sand even finer.
A glow slanting now
on the surf. We touch,
a moment, Goodbye.
a fine afternoon. An hour.
a warmth, and a brightness.

This deceptively simple poem, somewhere between the poetic worlds of Tomlinson and Harwood in the sixties, is difficult to achieve without falling into banality. Turnbull is, as ever, direct and well measured knowing exactly what is necessary. In his brevity he most resembles Corman, who wrote short poems on large subjects, and perhaps Zukofsky, another close friend, in his translations of Catullus, especially in the sequence Briefly (1967):

Be so

Be so
as you are
in my need
when I need
as I need you
now.
Turnbull shares with Corman the ability to write commensurately, that is to find the exact combination of words and no more to fit a specific utterance. They also shared a belief that poems, ideally, should be anonymous and read blind. Both saw wonder in ordinary things and wrote better in succinct mode. Turnbull’s Residues (1976), divided into two long poems, whilst interesting as autobiography and there are references to Corman, lacks Olsonian energy and is too divergent for his spare style. The earlier long poem, ‘Perhaps if I begin’, from To You I Write (1963), is more successful with its more simple playfulness:

I believe in a very ordinary sense that your life has
been a failure, and
in a very extraordinary sense that you have succeeded.
I believe in a very happy sense that you knew what you
were doing,
and in a very sorry sense that you didn’t know where
it would lead
you.
I believe in a very subtle sense that I will never come
to an end with
you, and in a very coarse sense that I finished with
you long ago.
I believe in a very devout sense all that I believe,
and in a very practical
sense that I will never be sure.

Here is a poet who knows his limits and how to instil wonder into the use of words. Turnbull had an abiding belief in the efficacy of words and in small wonder. The title poem, ‘There are words’, from For Whose Delight (1995) sums up his collected work beautifully:

There are words

for a particular size of stone about the size of your
fist
for water only just enough to cover something
for little walks which an invalid could be expected to
take
for a rocky hillocky bit of land still capable of
cultivation for the
most part
for a small triangular piece of land that can be
ploughed only on
one side
for land from which two crops have been taken in
succession
for the left hand side of a furrow
for half a pair
for the night after tomorrow night

David Caddy

The Use of English 58.2 Spring 2007 174-177 © The English Association 2007

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning, by Andrea Brady. (Palgrave Macmillan £45)

‘Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.’ Such was Dr Johnson’s terse verdict on Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, one of the few poems treated in this volume with which readers are likely to be familiar – others being Donne’s ‘Anniversaries’, Henry King’s ‘Exequy’ to his dead wife (given currency by T. S. Eliot) and Jonson’s ‘On My First Son’. Citing nearly forty manuscripts, many of them anthologies in themselves, and dozens of seventeenth-century books never subsequently reprinted, Anthea Brady has exhumed a mass of unfamiliar material. (All the more regrettable, then, that there is no index of poems discussed.) Her wide-ranging chapters survey the rituals of death, funeral and mourning in the period, the literary conventions of elegy and its place in public as well as private mourning, elegies connected with executions in the 1640s (supremely that of Charles I), and the analogy between emotional and literary decorum in aesthetic theory.

Johnson’s objection to ‘Lycidas’ was a surprisingly Romantic one: that a commemorative elegy must be, in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’. Contrivance, it’s implied, casts doubt on the poet’s sincerity. This is uncharacteristically naïve of Johnson. In fact, as Brady shows, this poetic mode was as much governed by tropes as any other, and their deployment says nothing either way about the sincerity of the poems’ authors. Most readers will have found ‘On My First Son’ profoundly moving in ways quite absent from, say, Jonson’s epitaph on the child actor Solomon Pavey; yet it is too simple to say that of course Jonson’s feelings were going to be deeper for his own child than for one who meant nothing to him personally, for ‘On My First Son’ is an imitation of two epigrams by Martial, and is permeated by standard rhetorical devices. The image of coining (‘Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,/Exacted by thy fate, on the just day’) was also used by Denham (on Fletcher), Carew (on Donne), and Cartwright (on Jonson himself). Moreover, Jonson used the trope again in his poem to the King and Queen on the death of their first son in 1629. The comparison of the dead child to a poem (‘Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say “Here doth lie/BEN JONSON his best piece of poetry”‘) is likewise conventional.

Does this mean, then, that Jonson is being ‘insincere’? Although Brady claims that the concept would have been understood at the time, I wonder; or at least, I wonder whether the criteria were the same as ours. To write a poem, no matter what the subject, was to engage in certain formal rules and practices. Elegy was a branch of epideictic – the poem of praise. It did not preclude the hope of material reward, and poets were sensitive to charges of flattery, especially if, as sometimes happened, they had not known the deceased personally. Yet to charge someone with insincerity is to charge them with saying one thing while meaning another; it is not clear to me that the writer of an elegy would have recognised the distinction. The poem, like the rituals of deathbed, lying in the coffin, procession, sermon and interment, was part of the process by which the transition between life and death was publicly marked, and the communal solidarity of the bereaved re-affirmed as the dead person was progressively distanced from the living.

Indeed, far from the adoption of poetic form being an indicator of emotional frigidity, it was often regarded as a necessary means of containing otherwise overwhelming feeling. Prosody, with its mathematical basis, was an ethical as well as an aesthetic matter; the well-turned poem reflected a well-disciplined mind, while irregularity, the ‘not keeping of accent’ which Jonson condemned in Donne, was a sign of licentiousness. Brady quotes Ralph Knevet – ‘Griefe is a passion, and all passions must/Confined be, unto a measure just’ – adding, ‘Like music, prosody draws on the divine order of the cosmos’. Poetry was seen as superior to prose for elegy because its formal properties reflected the underlying principles of Christian mourning; the very line endings ‘provide an experience of finitude and renewal’. Prosody, like the mourning rites themselves, was in a punning sense a matter of ‘keeping time’; the effect of grief on one’s sense of the passing of time forms the subject of one of Brady’s most interesting sections. The Reformation, with its rejection of the belief in Purgatory, had abolished the healing transitional processes – the month’s mind and other commemorative requiems – by which the Catholic church sought to wean the living from their ties of affection for the dead. However, as Brady well says, it could not abolish ‘the need which they served’. Protestant orthodoxy, taking note of St Paul’s injunction, in Thessalonians 4:13, not to grieve for the dead, taught that their blessed state was to be envied, but it is unlikely that more than a handful of people could react in that way, either then or now.

If the funerals of private persons required what contemporary jargon calls psychological ‘closure’, what are we to say about the execution of a monarch? Neither Strafford nor Laud, Charles’s predecessors on the scaffold, provoked such agonising among those left behind. Strafford’s farewell speech was felt to be too militantly political, Laud’s to be spiritually tepid. Writings about the executions made Strafford more penitent and Laud more saintly. Royalist martyrologists welcomed the opportunities afforded by the king’s demeanour, which seemed a perfect combination of Stoic resignation and Christian hope. The virtual deification of the king harked back to medieval political theory as well as to theology: Charles Stuart’s body was dismembered, but the sacredness of the body politic, unified by the principle of monarchy, was almost sacramentally re-affirmed. Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ is the best-known commemoration, but Brady also discusses poems by Quarles, Cleveland and others. It puts Marvell’s poem in perspective, incidentally, to be reminded that he also wrote an elegy for Oliver Cromwell, in which, with breathtaking cheek, he ascribed the Protector’s death to a broken heart brought about by the death of his daughter.

Brady makes some intermittent use of anthropology. She notes Maurice Bloch’s concept of ‘rebounding conquest’, a socially positive reworking of Freud’s agreeably barmy view that mourning is a process of psychic cannibalism. Charles I’s execution again emerges as a type case: the loss of his earthly power was reconfigured as an assumption of Christ-like authority with which to challenge the republicans’ presumed monopoly on godliness. There is a mind-bending passage on elegy as debt or gift exchange, the most intelligible bit of which points out that the poet, like the monarch, requires subjects (readers) to give his utterances meaning. An elegy is itself a liminal rite of passage, bridging the earthly and heavenly lives of the deceased. Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss also make brief appearances; these names seem a touch old-fashioned now.

Brady’s treatment of Henry King provides a good example of her approach to a particular writer. His elegies for his wife (buried in 1624) adopt mathematical language as a means of emotional control; he declares he has ‘no Arithmetick, but Teares’, and is condemned to ‘compute the weary howres’ since his loss. As liturgical time (marked by the cycle of the Church’s festivals) was shouldered aside by civic time (marked by hours of business and the keeping of accounts), people began to see time less internally, Brady claims, and more as an impersonal, inexorable process; in keeping with this, ‘Rejecting the empty, autonomous linear time which has no sympathy for him, King seeks solace in the diurnal cycle which marches him towards his own death’. The relentless metrical drive of ‘The Exequy’’s most famous lines --- ‘But hark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum/Beates my approach, Tells Thee I come’ --- mimics the diminishing distance between him and his wife. His account with God must soon be settled. The prosody bears witness to the logical orderliness of grief, but the tone of voice is less measured.

It is had to sum up this book tidily. The argument is itself accretive rather than linear; the prose style can be clogged, and Brady does not escape the problem of quoting extensively from long-neglected poems: one realises that the neglect had good literary reasons. Nevertheless, this is a scholarly examination of an important area of cultural history. The funeral elegy seems very remote from our modern, sentimental grief rituals, with their teddy-bears and banks of flowers; yet it is notable that these tributes still tend to be accompanied by doggerel verses.

Paul Dean

The Use of English 58.2 Spring 2007 178-181 © The English Association 2007

Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, by Anne Stevenson. (Bloodaxe Books, ₤9.95)

In a recent interview, Anne Stevenson has spoken of how she first fell for the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. In the 1960s, Stevenson – a graduate student at the University of Michigan – was writing a book on Bishop’s work for Twayne’s United States Authors Series; she was also, through the prompting of Marianne Moore, engaged in a fertile correspondence with the poet. But it was to the poems themselves that she kept returning:

What was it about Bishop’s poetry that had completely captivated me? Partly, I felt honoured to be chosen by that seductively intimate voice. Isn’t it amazing how Elizabeth Bishop still manages to elect and then make friends with her readers while never ‘confessing’ to them anything intimate about her self?1

Although the book that Stevenson finally produced was (in her own opinion) a relative failure,2 it nonetheless focused her love of Bishop’s work; it also made possible the present volume. Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop is everything the earlier book was not: it engages passionately and searchingly with its subject, drawing on thirty years’ reading and thinking, and bringing to bear an intelligence at once exact and exacting. Every page conveys an intimacy with its subject. Stevenson has the confidence to get up close, aware that by doing so she will not lose sight of larger designs; indeed, the latter are thrown into bolder relief by her attention to particular detail. Appropriately, she chooses as epigraph the wonderful closing lines of Bishop’s ‘Poem’:

Our visions coincided – ‘visions’ is
too serious a word – our looks, two looks;
art ‘copying from life’ and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?

It is this deliberate ‘coincidence’ of vision – of ‘two looks’ – which gives Stevenson’s book its critical force. Unlike so many academic studies, which retreat from emotional engagement and take refuge in the faceless argot of theory, Five Looks is unashamedly a labour of love, and all the better for it. Stevenson understands the complex ‘intimacy’ offered by Bishop’s work, making it her own: on the one hand she draws close to her subject, making use of the strong affinity she feels and calling attention to rather than concealing her obvious personal familiarity; yet at the same time she reveals little about herself, and there is nothing of the ‘confessional’ about her study. Five Looks is intimate and yet also mysterious, distant; it is emotionally honest and personal, but at the same time full of the kind of critical insight which could only come from periodic detachment.

Rather than marching chronologically through Bishop’s life and work, Stevenson elects to proceed via thematic groupings, weaving deftly between past and present, biography and close reading. One chapter, for example, considers Bishop’s representation of animals; one addresses her sense of time; and another explores memory and childhood. The five ‘looks’ produce illuminating and sometimes surprising connections between texts. Standard critical wisdom dictates that Bishop’s writing developed in a clear line from early, surrealist work to more personal and accessible poems later in her career, the latter showing the influence not only of Marianne Moore, but also of her friend, Robert Lowell; it is often seen as a movement away from the abstract and towards the concrete. Stevenson shows well how this neatly plotted course may suit university teaching programmes and doctoral theses, but is in fact far too simplistic. Themes and concerns that occur in her first volume (North and South) are often to be found in later collections such as Geography III; what we see if we look carefully is a subtle evolution of poetic thought rather than an abrupt volte-face.

This delicate unpicking of the threads of Bishop’s work is achieved in language that is both modest and decorous. Startling insights are ushered in quietly, with a minimum of fuss. Stevenson sounds at her most cautious and self-effacing when making her most original points. Her reading of ‘The Moose’, for example, unusually (and convincingly) links Bishop’s poem to primitive totemic art; but she wavers rather than avers:

One never wants to make too much of terminology, but it may be worth suggesting that in ‘The Moose’ Elizabeth Bishop, in her instinctive way, was reaching back to the very earliest form in which people conceded power to the animals they at once feared and exploited, revered and depended upon. (p. 86)

One never wants to make too much of…but it may be worth suggesting…: this is not false modesty, but genuine hesitancy; it bespeaks the tact of Stevenson’s overall approach, and reminds us that what she is offering are provisional glances, ‘looks’, at Bishop; she is fully aware from another angle ‘The Moose’ may appear quite different (there are, of course, at least thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird). Her caution recalls the nervous heroism of Bishop’s sandpiper, compelled to see the universe in a grain of sand. The eponymous creature in this famous poem mirrors both poet and critic, attesting to the coincidence of their visions:

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.3

Stevenson’s ‘controlled panic’ – her sense that her ‘looks’ are only ever ‘looks’, awkward and questionable – is refreshing after the braggadocio evinced in a number of recent studies of Bishop’s work. Strangely, the poet’s own humility before the world seems to bring out an excess of self-confidence in her critics. Tom Paulin, for example, in an otherwise fine and sensitive essay, declares: ‘Like Wilde, she [Bishop] had absolutely no belief in natural purity’.4 The force of that ‘absolutely’ sweeps aside any who may choose to look differently (among them Anne Stevenson). For while it would be wrong to suggest that Bishop in any way idealizes or simplifies nature – she is among the least sentimental of poets – at the same time it is not enough merely to fall back on the tired argument that ‘nature’ is nothing more than the most artificial of constructs. It is more than this in Bishop’s work, as Stevenson quietly shows, particularly in her discussion of ‘The Moose’.5 Indeed, for Stevenson, Bishop is to be properly located in the line of the American Transcendentalists.

Any criticisms of Five Looks can only ever be minor caviling, but there are a couple of points worth making. Although Stevenson explores the relationship between Bishop and Marianne Moore very effectively, drawing attention to the important differences between these poets (so often overlooked: for Charles Tomlinson, Bishop was simply ‘Marianne Moore on water’), she does not once mention May Swenson, with whom Bishop exchanged over 260 letters between 1950 and 1979. She also at times tidies Bishop’s poems a little too fastidiously, brushing unwanted ambiguities under the carpet. It is, I think, possible to be misled by the formal control and exactitude of the Bishop’s work. Certainly the poet was concerned with rendering the truth of a particular memory or situation; but sometimes this truth might be shifty and multiform, difficult to pin down. She was, after all, the most itinerant and restless of writers, and most unsettled (and unsettling) when writing about dwelling:

On the unbreathing sides of hills
they play, a specklike girl and boy,
alone, but near a specklike house.
The sun's suspended eye
blinks casually, and then they wade
gigantic waves of light and shade.
A dancing yellow spot, a pup,
attends them. Clouds are piling up;
a storm piles up behind the house.
The children play at digging holes.
The ground is hard; they try to use
one of their father's tools,
a mattock with a broken haft
the two of them can scarcely lift.
it drops and clangs. Their laughter spreads
effulgence in the thunderheads,
weak flashes of inquiry
direct as is the puppy's bark.
But to their little, soluble,
unwarrantable ark,
apparently the rain's reply
consists of echolalia,
and Mother's voice, ugly as sin,
keeps calling to them to come in.
Children, the threshold of the storm
has slid beneath your muddy shoes;
wet and beguiled, you stand among
the mansions you may choose
out of a bigger house than yours,
whose lawfulness endures.
Its soggy documents retain
your rights in rooms of falling rain.6

In this poem Bishop responds with quick sympathy to the suffering and poverty she saw around her in Rio de Janeiro; it also shows how her compassion could find oblique expression in the powerfully disciplined form of her verse. Stevenson argues that in the final stanza ‘the squatter’s children, by ignoring Mother’s command and choosing to stay out in the rain, have elected to live in nature’s “bigger house” […] her poem states emphatically that in nature’s house “lawfulness endures.” ’ (p. 108). This attempt to nail a poem down in confident paraphrase is uncharacteristic of Stevenson. For it could be argued that in ‘Squatter’s Children’ nothing at all is ‘emphatically stated’. Are those final lines really so clear? Stevenson feels that ‘lawfulness’ straightforwardly refers to nature, and therefore the ‘endurance’ of its ‘laws’ is to be set against the transience of human ‘lawfulness’. The ‘rooms of falling rain’ breezily stand in for the natural world, which is where the children choose to stay. However, the referent of ‘whose’ in this line (‘whose lawfulness endures’) is ambiguous: it could indeed cast back to the ‘bigger house’ (nature), but it could also refer to ‘yours’, as in ‘your house’, which actually reverses and makes much darker the import of the final three lines. Suddenly the ‘soggy documents’ and ‘rooms of falling rain’ are not metaphorical, but horribly literal: the poor children literally inhabit rooms which won’t keep out the weather. The ‘lawfulness’ that ‘endures’, then, is not necessarily the law of nature; it could also be the oppressive law of the house, and by extension of society. The children cannot escape these, and will eventually have to yield to Mother’s command. Nature, rather than providing a retreat away from society, is in fact collusive with the latter, adding its own oppressive weight.

Overall, however, I would strongly recommend Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop: it is one of the most sensitive and careful readings of Bishop’s work that I have yet encountered. Stevenson’s avoidance of academic jargon makes it accessible to the general reader as well as appealing to the specialist, and the study also benefits from the fact that she writes with the ear (and eye) of a poet.

Notes

Cited at http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=stevensononbishop.
Stevenson, Anne, Elizabeth Bishop (Twayne, 1966).
‘The Sandpiper’, in Bishop, Elizabeth, (1991) Complete Poems. (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 131. Hereafter, Complete Poems.
Paulin, Tom, ‘Elizabeth Bishop: Dwelling Without Roots’. In Paulin, Tom, (1992) Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (London: Faber & Faber), pp. 190-203 (p. 200).
See pp. 83-87.
‘Squatter’s Children’. In Complete Poems, p. 95.

Colin Winborne

The Use of English 58.1 Autumn 2006, 41-45 © The English Association 2006

The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, edited by Archie Bevan and Brian Murray. (John Murray, £35)

Ten years ago Scottish poetry suffered three grievous losses. In 1996, Norman MacCaig, Somhairle Mac Ghill-eain ‘Sorley MacLean’ and George Mackay Brown, born respectively in 1910, 1911 and 1921, all passed on. W. S. Graham, also of this generation, had died a decade earlier. It is impossible to overestimate the scope and variety of the work that these four poets produced between them, a breath-taking achievement in any literature. But it is probably true to say that, of the four, George Mackay Brown could boast the widest readership, though as the most modest and generous of writers, nothing would have induced him to make any such claim. One small indicator: it’s said that R. S. Thomas, Seamus Heaney and Mackay Brown are the only UK poets successfully published in any numbers in Germany, each of them, interestingly, of the Celtic nations.

GMB’s writing has a wide appeal at least partly because of the range of his output: six novels, two of which, Greenvoe and Magnus, are major achievements by any standard; nine collections of short stories, again many of unrivalled skill; four books for children, three plays, five collections of essays and journalism, and an autobiography. Mackay Brown has a world-wide readership, but also a devoted following in the Orkney islands, not least for his much-lamented weekly column in The Orcadian, often remarked on as the only thing worth reading in the paper! His Collected Poems was published last year, scrupulously edited by his friends and executors Archie Bevan and Brian Murray. Rowena and Brian Murray have also written the first book-length study of the poet, Interrogation of Silence. The Writings of George Mackay Brown (Murray 2004), and a helpful biography by Maggie Fergusson also just appeared from John Murray.
For all the variety of his literary activity, GMB was remorseless in focus: his consistent subject was the huddle of islands where he lived, two hours sailing beyond Caithness, and which he rarely left. Mackay Brown’s first, self-published pamphlet, The Storm, appeared from his hometown, Stromness, in 1954, when he was 34, and the title poem already demonstrates the sureness of his own voice:

Next morning in tranced sunshine
The corn lay squashed on every hill;
Tang and tern were strewn
Among highest pastures. (Collected Poems 4)

The lines are closely woven with maximum economy and musicality, evoking the devastation of seaweed and seabirds scattered across fields. This first publication also introduced the characteristic personnel of Brown’s poetry. The final poem is ‘Orcadians: Seven Impromptus’, dedicated to Edwin Muir, a fellow Orcadian and GMB’s teacher and mentor at Newbattle Abbey, where he had studied briefly. The poem features Lifeboatman, Fisherman, Crofter, Doctor, Saint, and ‘Them at Isbister’. If we add a Tinker, a Drunk and a Girl to this gathering, we have pretty much all the kinds of soul that go on to animate Brown’s work over the next four decades.

Despite his concentration on locality, Mackay Brown chose not to be a poet of the (lovely) Orcadian dialect. His poems do treasure many island words, but it may be that to have drawn even more on local idiom would confine the reception of his work: he was determined to be not simply a ‘local poet’. Brown did have an intense value for the poetry of fellow islander Robert Rendall, who wrote some dialect poems, and who deserves to be more widely known: ‘It is possible, I sometimes think, that a dozen or so of his perfect lyrics will outlast all that we have done’ (For the Islands I Sing (1997): 16). Nor was Brown a pupil of the hard schools of Scottish realism or naturalism; his novels are not written in the manner of Neil Gunn or Grassic Gibbon, and are a world away from contemporary Scots writers such as A. L. Kennedy, Alan Warner, Duncan MacLean or Andrew Greig. Greenvoe can seem closer to the allegory and pastoralism of English fiction from the 1920s and 30s, such as Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr Fortune’s Maggot or T. F. Powys’s Kindness in a Corner. Nor do his poems have any of the brawling and sprawling of Christopher Murray Grieve, a.k.a. Hugh MacDiarmid. GMB wove his own myth of Orcadia, a touching fiction that nevertheless possesses an intense kind of reality:

I hoard, before time’s waste
Old country images: plough-horse,
Skylark, grass-growth,
Corn-surge, dewfall, anvil: (Collected Poems 326)

Mackay Brown wrote exemplary poems in this consistent manner throughout his life, a sustained and sustaining song. There are collections with particular qualities, for example the myth of survival and recurrence in Fishermen with Ploughs (1971), but reading through the Collected Poems conveys above all a sense of the persistence of Mackay Brown’s preoccupation. And to read Maggie Fergusson’s biography of the poet is to understand how far he had to travel in order to make a reputation, even while he remained firmly located in the one street and branching wynds of Stromness.

Mackay Brown was very conscious of the rich weave of Scandinavian threads in the tapestry of Orcadian history: the martyrdom of St Magnus, as related in the Orkneyinga Saga, became a fundamental myth for him. It’s therefore tempting to compare some of his characteristic tropes with similar kinds of image in poetry of the Icelandic and Scandinavian heroic age. For the poets of the Sagas, battle is the ‘iron-game’ or ‘the politics of steel’; ‘storm-vat’ or ‘days base’ is the sky; ships are ‘harbour-horses’, making their way over the ‘whale-roof-ridge’ or ‘ship’s slopes’. As Snorri Sturluson says, in the thirteenth-century Skaldskaparmal, or Language of Poetry, ‘these kennings are varied in many ways’. Brown early developed his own forms of ‘kenning’ like these, enigmatic images or periphrases that remove meaning from immediate sense. A poem such as ‘The Net’, again characteristically, proceeds through a sequence of days:

The first day from the weaving of the ling net
Three cod lay on the deck, gulping.
A careful gleam was put in their bellies. (Collected Poems 95)

The ‘kenning’ in the final line here hides, or reveals, a knife, I guess, a delicate trope.

Brown was also a great ‘makar’ in established ballad conventions. His variations on the theme of John Barleycorn have that most elusive quality of great poetry, the authentic note of anonymity:

As I was ploughing in my field
The hungriest furrow ever torn
Followed my plough and she did cry
‘Have you seen my mate John Barleycorn?’
Says I, ‘Has he got a yellow beard?
Is he always whispering night and morn?
Does he up and dance when the wind is high?
Says she, ‘That’s my John Barleycorn. (Collected Poems 82)

Poems like this, and short stories in collections such as A Time to Keep, persuaded Charles Causley to be a confirmed admirer of Mackay Brown: ‘I don’t know anyone writing in this particular genre today who comes within a thousand miles of him’.

The foundation myth of Scandinavian Orkney, and a keystone for Mackay Brown’s poetic vision, lies in the following episode. Magnus Erlendson succeeded to the Earldom of Orkney after the death of his father in the early 1100s. The King of Norway, then ruler of the islands, required that the Earldom should always be divided between two men, in order to maintain his own grip on power more firmly. Magnus therefore ruled in uneasy alliance with his cousin, Earl Hakon. Tension between the two camps inevitably flared, and a peace-making tryst on the tiny island of Egilsay was agreed for Easter 1117. Hakon betrayed terms, and Magnus was shamefully killed. No warrior could bring himself to strike a blow against the innocent man, and so Hakon’s cook was called on to do the deed. Within weeks miraculous healings were being attributed to the power of the ‘martyred’ Magnus. By 1137 he was canonized, and the beautiful edifice of St Magnus was raised in Kirkwall by the same stonemasons who built Durham Cathedral.

Brown returned time and again to this narrative and to the figure of St Magnus. In 1961 he converted to Catholicism, a singular act of faith in the reformed Northern Isles of Scotland. Elements of liturgy, the Passion and sacraments came to play an increasingly important role in his later poetry, for good or ill. It is not too much to say that the figure of St Magnus became a kind of poetic persona for Brown, a figure of tortured solitude, self-sacrificing for a greater vision. The climax of his novel Magnus is a tour de force of different styles and perspectives as the narrative approaches the moment of murder and martyrdom on Egilsay. The penultimate section, ‘The Killing’, begins in pastiche saga style: ‘When that the holy season of pasch was overpast, the jarls busked them both for the tryst’ (p. 123). A little later, there is fake journalism, as if writing again for The Orcadian: ‘There is a black-out of news. Neither of the parties is willing to give anything away’ (p. 130). And during Magnus’s final night, spent in the lovely church on Egilsay after hearing Mass, there is a lengthy meditation which can stand simultaneously for Mackay Brown’s aesthetic and for his testament of faith: these pages attempt to merge the two streams of religious faith and poetic practice into a single artery. Here Brown might be close to the aspirations of a Catholic poet-visionary such as David Jones: ‘perhaps the pain of all history might be touched with healing by a right action in the present’ (p. 141).
This attempt to write a sacramental aesthetic is desperate, and could be read as bathos, but Brown’s artistry transfigures the scene again. Refusing to directly describe the murder of the Earl, his narrative moves on to the murder of a heroic, resisting Lutheran pastor in a Nazi death camp, which is also carried out under duress by a local butcher, as on Egilsay 800 years before. Magnus leaves the parallels between epochs to speak for themselves. And if this too might be felt heavy-handed, Mackay Brown’s concluding section returns to the year 1117 with a beautifully narrated story of two beggars, the first islanders who benefit from Magnus’s new powers. Old, embittered Mary has her sight miraculously restored:

She screeched. She put her hands to her face . . . ‘I’m supposed to be grateful, am I? Well, I’m not. Can I get the dark years back again? There’s one place I do want to see though, more than any other place, and that’s the Birsay ale-house.’ (pp. 205-6)

Mackay Brown’s poetry does often draw on a sense of sacramental grace that he found in ‘timeless’ actions and qualities: bread, barley, mask and sacrifice. This can make his project seem traditional in ways that are potentially limiting: the recurrent use of ‘types’ in his characterizations, for example, or a fascination with the meanings of the liturgical year, which in crucial ways are only eloquent for people of faith. But in the moment of composition, as great poets do, George Mackay Brown often wrote well beyond the bounds of his self-imposed remit, and found other, more irresponsible kinds of poetic truth:

So, image maimed more and more
On the grid of numbers,
Folk must not forget
The marks on the rock. (‘To a Hamnavoe Poet of 2093’)

Nigel Wheale
The Use of English 58.1 Autumn 2006, 46-50 © The English Association 2006

Raw Skies, by Nigel Wheale. (Shearsman Books £9.95)

This is a ‘New and Selected’ that encompasses work from the 1970s to the present, the most recent poems being set in the Orkneys where the poet now lives having moved there from Cambridge. The title may be taken to refer to this northern setting with its connotations of extreme meteorological conditions, and the painting reproduced on the cover is by Calum Morrison, an Orkney artist. But what the painting actually depicts, it is worth noting, is the oil refinery on the island of Flotta at Scapa Flow. Oil more than anything represents the technological and economic forces that shape and, thanks to global warming, that threaten the modern world. And there is the fact that our somewhat shaky prosperity founded on North Sea oil may be in question now that we are becoming no longer self-sufficient. A particular achievement of Wheale’s poetry is to combine the powerful impulse embodied in, for instance, an ecstatic response to this bare northern bird-filled landscape with a sense of present-day political and economic forces. There is a commitment to modernism but at the same time a refusal to abandon the resources of traditional lyric utterance. One of Wheale’s two contributions to Poets On Writing Britain 1970-1991 edited by Denise Riley (Macmillan 1992) is ‘A Curve of Reading’, an autobiographical account of his own poetic formation (the other being an essay on small press publishing, a field in which Wheale has also been active). Here Wheale writes: ‘But this writing is committed to exploring the inner lining of a trajectory and the refusal to be covered by social or psychical description, a perseverance with what we particularly know, and which can’t be given up simply because it can be externally located.’

Elsewhere in this piece Wheale describes his experience as an undergraduate in a Cambridge college: ‘And to pass through the walls there is the novel convention of the double door, a door sandwich (with no filling) arranged for deeper seclusion, beyond it the sound of voices which are the colour of darkened wood; in Cambridge one door is not enough. These were the estate walls in a different perspective. Sleeping in the college for one night after interview, it was a difficult institution to place, neither hotel nor hospital, and certainly not a school.’ Wheale can be identified with a loose-knit group now sometimes referred to as the ‘Cambridge poets’, and as such as a member of a second generation that followed shortly after Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley and others, with the figure of J.H.Prynne, about whose work he has written a good deal, always a presence. ‘Cambridge poets’ is an uneasy descriptive term, the unsatisfactoriness that attaches to any such simplistic grouping amplified by what is implied in Wheale’s reminiscence, namely an awkward relationship with tradition and academic privilege.

This, from ‘A Curve of Reading’ again, might be taken as descriptive of what it is he wishes to take a stand against: ‘Stupefied poems are those which mistake their words for things, primordially naming, spelling their subject as if they conjured what they described – all those contemporary English poems about animals, landscape, “moments”’. Earlier in the same essay he writes: ‘Not to write Englishly, but somehow Russo-German. Words as if hinged and gated, swerving into the page-depth with the speed of their neologism. Why could English not name and shine through?’ ‘Black Thorn’, quoted here in full from the section titled ‘New York / Warsaw Transfers’ – another section is actually titled ‘As If From the Russian’ – combines a sense of Central European lyric with Wheale’s ‘northernness’:

Yeast bloom on the bullace
bright among your murder thorns
a blue that calls with bitterness.

Olives of the north light,
sad grapes, wineless plum
we’ll burn you with rime-frost

Before we’re done.
Then gather your darker sweetness
and extort the blue-red life of wine.

He evokes the history of places:

where mothers’ sons and daughters vanished
into the one-way mirror of surveillance
as beyond the gate women made the great curse
holding their block-print headscarves against the sun.

This evokes Akhmatova waiting day after day outside the prison in Stalin’s time for news of her son. But these are countries now being brought inexorably into the capitalist system:

Dark money waves continually overrun a shoreless country

In the late seventies Wheale published a collection entitled The Windshield Glarestrip Legends, reprinted here. Whatever became of those strips one saw back then pasted across the top of car windscreens with their bizarre and enigmatic inscriptions? ‘Legend’ here could be seen as having a double meaning, and in his more recent work Wheale’s depiction of late capitalism reveals someone revelling in the language of it, albeit given an ironic tilt, as here in ‘The earth seemed unearthly’:

Novalis and I were hang-gliding the walls of data
on petroleum thermals that rose from traffic canyons far below,
collating cloudtop with seasurface,
scanning through our landsat high tensity regard
all that viral writing across insufferably thin architecture
matte entablatures, beige pilastering, no white.

But the domestic may offer shelter in a world full of threat, celebrated here in ‘Outwith’:

A world of air breathes generously
intimately across pages, forearms, cots
Through quiet rooms where curtains pull
pale against half-open windows
In concert with the door against its jamb
and young parents grow into themselves
Waiting in whispered voices
via the nursery intercom.

‘The Plains of Sight’ evokes the life and work of Gwen John, combining poems and prose commentary. There is a found poem made out of a list of titles of paintings, quotes from Gwen John’s own journals and passages ‘lightly adapted’, as Wheale puts it, from various critics. The sequence coincided with a retrospective of her work at the Tate in 1985 and was presented at the time as a performance with slides and additional poetry at several major galleries. Here again there is also a sense of refuge; her work is seen as combining gentleness, a sense of quietism and withdrawal, with an absolutely uncompromising quality and serving as such as an index of integrity:

A suffused window
a generous breakfast cup
unofficial flowers in a white jug
a chair that waits for no one:
what more could we want?

Sometimes in his work a marvellously relaxed lyric is possible, as in ‘Whose Action Is No Stronger Than a Flower’:

Something like a slight long wave
that has travelled several oceans
had broken within you
and now withdraws leaving the shingle readjusted
but no one could say how

Though even here there is a suggestion of threat represented by the ‘isotopes drifting in at the sea-line.’

The concluding section of the book comprises translations, mainly of classical Arabic poetry made with Walid Abdul-Hamid, an Iraqi resident in this country. Here Wheale’s ability to manage an elevated style together with his skill in handling a long line and its swinging rhythm stand him in good stead. The collection opens where it ends, that is with the most recent poems. The Orkney of these poems is an unpeopled landscape, a place of sea, sky and star-scapes crowded intermittently with bird-life. The local geology and the sea’s behaviour are described in scientific terms:

Then flexures, folding and faulting
contort the passive sediment.
Firths and straits are overdeepened
under glacial stress,
Mountains levelled and gouged
and all is overlain
By thin tills of glacial drift.

The loved one is a constant presence, not directly described but alluded to – she is present in a landscape that is for the time being outside or beyond culture and the play of economic forces. This is where the work rests for now, but taken as a whole it is writing that combines intellectual rigour and political awareness with a passionate commitment to lyric, and when it all comes together the effect is altogether exhilarating.

John Welch

The Use of English 58.1 Autumn 2006, 50-54 © The English Association 2006

Collected Poems, by Wallace Stevens. (Faber and Faber, £20)

‘It is the belief and not the god that counts’, said Wallace Stevens, himself an incurable believer. Bereft of his childhood Christian faith (see the moving last stanza of ‘Sunday Morning’), he set about a secular alternative. Imagination could play the part of faith, the poet that of the Saviour; poetry itself might be a form of prayer. With all but preposterous ingenuity, in a chapter-and-verse parody of Scripture, the parakeet of ‘The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws’ plays the Paraclete, ‘the Spirit of God descending like a dove’. The outlines of this humanistic ‘system’ are clear enough from his prose Adagia (much more readable than the full-dress verse meditation Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction), and Adalaide Morris, in a sparkling study, has demonstrated its subtlety and sheer detail. But how secure was Stevens himself in his ‘magnificent agnostic faith’,1 and how well, in a career of more than forty years, did it serve him as a poet?

‘Sunday Morning’, the earliest and for some the most satisfying statement of his ideas, has been called ‘explicitly doctrinal’,2 but Auden’s definition of poetry as ‘the clear expression of mixed feelings’ might be more appropriate. It is, as a matter of fact, the subject of more critical dissension—not least about its central emphasis—than is sometimes allowed. In ‘Sunday Morning’ the poet conducts a meditation through the woman whose mind is the scene, so to speak, of the meditation, resolving the questions that she raises’, says one of the student guides.3 But it won’t do.

And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is closer to the poem’s mood when she finds not resolution but ‘a lingering suspension’ in these last lines, ‘as a…long sequence of unresolved clauses is brought to syntactic completion, but concluded with a final qualification’. And the ‘ambiguous undulations’ of those pigeons are not its only ambiguity.

To set the poem going, Stevens contrives a scene as charming as that in The Europeans (ch. 2) where Mr. Brand, one spring Sunday morning in ‘New England’s silvery prime’, asks the free-spirited Gertrude Wentworth why she is not going to church. ‘ ‘Because the sky is so blue!’ she said.’

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little…

But this protagonist has no existence independent of the poet. She is a projection, one aspect of him, and in the dialogue that follows (no one-sided contest) Stevens moves freely between his chosen alternatives—the ‘beauty of the earth’ and ‘the thought of heaven’.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit or bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

As questions such as these concerning the nature and ultimate purpose of life are revolved, Stevens sets the loss of his own faith against the gains he has accrued—much as Wordsworth does in ‘Tintern Abbey’. And as with Wordsworth, it is fair to ask whether the feeling communicated in the poem justifies the poet’s clear assertion that the gains outweigh the loss. Take the reply in stanza 4, which according to Frank Kermode ‘dismisses the permanent elysia in favour of the paradise of transience’, but which Yvor Winters more accurately calls a ‘great lament for the lost myths’.

There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

For all the poet’s insistence (‘not any…nor’, ‘that has endured…or will’), it is the haunt of prophecy, not the paradise of transience, that holds his attention: compared to that ‘cloudy palm/Remote on heaven’s hill’, ‘April’s green’ is an abstraction. J.V. Cunningham goes further, suggesting that a nostalgic attachment to traditional Christianity is part of the formal subject of ‘Sunday Morning’, and that its secular humanism (‘felt apprehension of sensory detail in this life’) is qualified by ‘an attempt to preserve in the new setting the emotional aspects of the old values.’4 But it can’t be done. The old values, or at least what sustained them, are expressed in the heartfelt impulse of stanza 5:

She says, ‘But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.’

It’s a traditional impasse; and the promise offered in exchange, of a ‘heavenly fellowship/Of men that perish and of summer morn’, is poetic sleight of hand.

Stevens turns, in the final stanza, from the quasi-religious harmonies of 7 (‘The windy lake wherein their lord delights,/The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,/That choir among themselves long afterward’) to the modern scientific universe.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

Nothing else in Harmonium (1923) quite approximates the planetary beauty of these lines, unless it is the ‘mute bare splendours of the sun and moon’ of ‘On the Manner of Addressing Clouds’—clouds that move, in an oxymoron, ‘across the stale, mysterious seasons’. But there are compensations. ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ (forget the title and every speculation based on it) is Stevens at his most imperious, but for us an invitation to take part—‘Not less because in purple I descended/The western day through what you called/The loneliest air’—in an intoxicating fantasy:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

More true if less strange, and the most economical of the short poems, is ‘The Snow Man’, which encompasses the misery of bleak unmediated reality (‘the nothing that is’) in a single sentence. And ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ is what the title says it is, a set of observations of the bird, and incidentally a celebration of its well known affinity (‘A man and a woman and a blackbird/Are one’) with the human world. M.L. Rosenthal’s comparison of the blackbird in XIII to Satan in Paradise Lost, ‘when he flew up on the Tree of Life in Eden and…huge and evil, brooded over the whole creation’, is quite mistaken.

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

There are the poems about the afterlife, or more precisely the lack of one, notably ‘The Worms at Heaven’s Gate’, its shocking inventory a mere exercise in style (‘here are, one by one,/The lashes of that eye and its white lid’), and ‘Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb’—a polite request to the dead, in their ‘icy Élysée’, for an answer to that most vexing of our questions. And in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, Stevens succeeds for once as satirist, bringing a superfluity of verbal splendour to bear on the butterfly hero Crispin (‘A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown’) in his absurd, hilarious progress from dream to realism. The comic climax comes in section V, ‘A Nice Shady Home’, where Crispin ‘stops short before a plum’ and realises that ‘The words of things entangle and confuse./The plum survives its poems.’

Was he to bray this in profoundest bass
Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems?
Was he to company vastest things defunct
With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?
Scrawl a tragedian’s testament?...
Because he built a cabin who once planned
Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?
Because he turned to salad-beds again?
Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape?...
For realist, what is is what should be.

Not everything in Harmonium is so successful. ‘Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame’, begins ‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’, a stand-up comedy-routine involving a pointless contest between the ‘moral law’ of the Christian and the festive ‘masque’ of the artist, predictably awarding first prize to the latter. ‘This will make widows wince’, the poet decides, ‘But fictive things/Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.’ But there is, too, the brief unexpected tenderness of ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’:

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face…

The detail of these lines, after the chilly abstraction of ‘Let be be finale of seem’ in stanza 1, is subtly corrective. And ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, ‘his first brilliant success’,5 is also his most daring:

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna.

Stevens comes close to indelicacy, in this romantic prelude, when he compares the desire felt by the speaker to the lust of the elders who tried to rape Susanna. But his terms are musical, not moral, and one sense of the word strain (‘That strain again!’) merely introduces the first theme. ‘Peter Quince’ is the most original thing in Harmonium, if only for those descriptive and auditory effects (‘And as they whispered, the refrain/Was like a willow swept by rain’) that both decorate and enact the argument. It stands with ‘Sunday Morning’; and like that poem, it affirms the paradise of transience (‘Beauty is momentary in the mind—/The fitful tracing of a portal;/But in the flesh it is immortal’) with something of an elegiac air.

Yvor Winters defined the central theme of Harmonium as ‘the irremediable tragedy’, the situation of ‘the isolated man in a meaningless universe’—adding that in ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘the universe, though meaningless, is beautiful; there is mitigation’. It’s a surprisingly ‘positive’ Stevens, however, who emerges in an inferior second collection, Ideas of Order (1936). The subjects and preoccupations, even the procedures, are the same: ‘The Sun This March’ (‘The exceeding brightness of this early sun/Makes me conceive how dark I have become’) is ‘The Snow Man’ in disguise. But where is the perplexity, and with it the poetic power, of the original? Or take ‘Evening without Angels’, a reconsideration of ‘Sunday Morning’:

Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?
Sad men made angels of the sun, and of
The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,
Which led them back to angels, after death.

It was the dialogue between the two voices that gave the earlier poem its equivocal force, a statement at once of hope for a secular future and regret for the discredited religion of the past.but here there is no interlocutor, and Stevens can now cheerfully dismiss, without the pang of ‘Sunday Morning’, the darkness of those superstitious myths. ‘Let this be clear’, he says untypically, ‘that we are men of sun/And men of day and never of pointed night’. Yet even as one of the enlightened, not the benighted race who ‘made angels of the sun’, Stevens needed to believe in something.

He found it in the Romantic idea of poetry as a redemptive force, usurping (while also borrowing) the authority of religion. But his attempts to define, or re-define, the relations between ‘imagination’ and its necessary antagonist ‘reality’ would prove as self-defeating, as least poetically, as those of Coleridge before him. The best known statement, a transparent allegory, is ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves…

It is one of his strongest openings. The comparison of the sea to a body ‘fluttering/Its empty sleeves’ is in fact so powerful that it leaves the singer (‘we beheld her striding there alone’) with work to do.

It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Stevens may insist (‘But it was she and not the sea’), but it is the sea we hear, the ever-hooded and the tragic-gestured, and his merely a place by which she walked to sing is merely a phrase. Helen Vendler has noted a certain strain in his representation of the singer’s ‘superior magnitude’, his assertion of ‘the power of poetry over nature’.6 And despite the closing appeal to ‘pale Ramon’ (the reader of course), the simple didactic allegory turns against him.

The problem, inherent in the sheer abstraction of Stevens’s poetic theory, is scarcely solved by the approach adopted in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’. The guitarist, unlike the singer, has only to compete with a coincidental rhyme:

The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

How difficult is that? Reduced to a formula, reality is no match for the ‘lazy, leaden twang’ of the guitar. ‘Things are as I think they are,/And say they are on the blue guitar’ - this is no more satisfactory than the sea’s defeat of the singer at Key West. ‘In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality’ (Adagia). It does here. ‘The Blue Guitar…takes us a long way up-country from Harmonium’, says Frank Kermode, but that is what is wrong with it. We are approaching the surreal arbitrary symbolism of the later poetry, where for instance ‘The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window’ in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction turns out not to be a woman at all but ‘probably the weather of a Sunday morning early last April when I wrote this’.7

The later meditations are a spider’s web in which Stevens traps the antagonist ‘reality’ and devours it. It is a fascinating spectacle, and we watch appalled as he concentrates all the rhetorical power, the eloquence, the sophistry at his disposal. ‘One is never quite heartily admitted to the town’, concedes Kermode of ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’. What town? New Haven is as spectral as the palaz of Hoon, and its inhabitant Professor Eucalyptus (‘ ‘The search/For reality is as momentous as/The search for god’ ’) is Stevens in a philosophical trance.

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek

The poem of pure reality…

And the ‘imagination’, the ‘supreme fiction’, finally eludes him. Do the Notes Toward ever arrive at a definition as complete and lyrical as that of his soaring prayer to a pre-Raphaelite muse in Harmonium, ‘To the One of Fictive Music’?

Now, of the music summoned by the birth
That separates us from the wind and sea,
Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes,
By being so much of the things we are,
Gross effigy and simulacrum, none
Gives motion to perfection more serene
Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought,
Most rare, or ever of more kindred air
In the laborious weaving that you wear…

It comes as a relief when, in his last volume The Rock, Stevens glimpses ‘an end of the imagination’, and there are signs of an earlier feeling for the purely human. In ‘Vacancy in the Park’ (‘March…Someone has walked across the snow,/Someone looking for he knows not what’) he surveys the now empty scene.

It is like the feeling of a man
Come back to see a certain house.

Yet in ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’ he makes his boldest, most blasphemous claim (‘We say God and the imagination are one’), and the old familiar argument is resumed.

That other argument, on the relative value of Harmonium and the later poetry, is likely to continue, and the re-publication of the Collected Poems, along with the valuable Faber reprint of the original Harmonium (2001) is to be welcomed. It is also to be hoped that a new edition of the letters will now follow.

Notes
Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit, Andre Deutsch, 1984, p.16.
Eleanor Cook, Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens, Princeton U.P., 1988, p.109.
Ronald Sukenick, Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure, New York U.P., 1967, p.63.
Irvin Ehrenpreis (ed.), Wallace Stevens: A Critical Anthology, Penguin, 1972, p.192. See also Denis Donoghue, Connoisseurs of Chaos, Faber and Faber, 1966, p.191.
W.C. Williams, in Charles Doyle (ed.), Wallace Stevens: The Critical Heritage, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, p.433.
Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, University of Tennessee, 1985, p.69.
Holly Stevens (ed.), The Letters of Wallace Stevens, Faber, 1967, p.444. Compare his explanation of ‘a sea of ex’ (Blue Guitar, xviii), p.783.

John Constable

The Use of English 58.1utumn 2006, 54-62 © The English Association 2006

The Goldfinches of Baghdad, by Robert Adamson. (Chicago: Flood Editions, $13.95)

In the darkness beyond our garden fence,
a white-tailed water-rat.

Sometimes you can see poetical quality in a flash, and in the most ordinary or uneventful material. Like this opening of Robert Adamson’s poem Winter Night. There are many ways in which you can define it, or fail to. You can talk of rhythm, balance, sound values. In the first line a simple two-stressed rhythmic and phonic structure happens twice as sign of a familiar normality. You would hardly notice such a line, but its song-qualities, which lure us into the poem, are reflected back from the contrasting second line, which breaks the regularity with a completely different rhythm, no longer ‘sprung’ between stresses but iterating four unequal stresses — a quickening and faltering of speech. All the main vowels of line 1 are of the ‘open’ (relaxed, continuing) kind; line two is the antithesis of this, except the first vowel of water which as-it-were ‘captures’ the sonic values of the first line, almost into a rhyming structure. The antithesis already has a small hint of harmony. The alliteration of Ws in line 2, what does that do? The stopped initial consonants are replaced by fluid ones, mental speed of sudden perception set against horological darkness. Or you can talk of imagery. The enclosure (fenced with those initial consonants) is attacked and broken, darkness by white, garden fence by water-rat; the dull, unknown but tense distance leading nowhere breaks into a focus on a contrastive thing, an object, a creature, suddenly, white-tailed like lightning. What difference would it make if our garden were the garden? Not a lot, but a little mutual/domestic tag is attached to the scene which is liable to be challenged by the ensuing visitation. All the time, of course, ‘nothing happens’. There isn’t even a verb.

How important is that? I feel that most British poets, especially the high-profile kind, would not be able to bear to place that full-stop after rat. The animal would have to do something, there would have to be an act. This is because what most British poets are doing most of the time is making speeches; they are operating a rhetoric, and that demands sentences because the sentence is where you form perception into a completed structure and make your claim on it, signalling your power over the listener. Or you could say that the absence of verb results in a different sense of the speaking self, who is not demonstrating before the reader, not making a declaration of any kind, not parading his perceptual abilities, but rather calling the reader in to a mutual witnessing, and participating in a kind of (mild) helplessness which says what is there but has no syntactical leverage on it, no designs on it. It is then a sheer presence and the artistry lies in the unappropriating quality of perception in this exposed condition, its fidelity to implicit world structures. So it is very important. (Some people think this ‘floating’ syntactical mode is American, but I think it derives rather from Central Europe).

This could be a complete poem in the pseudo-haiku tradition — it has the parallelism too, particularly marked in the double-barrelled term which ends each line. And it has implications which could satisfy any analysis of subsumed world perception. It is in fact the first line and a half of a twenty-line poem which goes on to develop the imagistic sense of this opening (‘Stars fracture the sky with light’) and beyond, with plenty of verbs and plenty of indicative rhetoric, but without losing the poised calm of the outset. It becomes a narrative of successive percepts within this little night scene, into which the self is gently, firmly, as if reluctantly inserted, not actually emerging as first-person-singular until just before the last verse -

As I come up from the wharf,

a flying fox rattles in the banana palms--
I hear the long whisper of its beating wings
follow me up the stairs. The stars flicker
letters from a dead god’s alphabet.

That last image is, of course, what the water-rat’s white tail has come to be through the process of the poem, the result of a process offered by the poem as it moves through a whole theatre of images, old and new, natural and artificial: cat, whiskey, river, motor-boat, nightjar... to find writing reflected back to the poet from an immense elsewhere. The impulsion which leads into these final lines is a notation of pain, a hook-wound in his finger that ‘stings like hell’, and then we move into the final pact. He returns to his house, safe in the presence of the furthest possible distance in space and time. There is a kind of unstated morality in it, a chastening, as it attaches the self with all its desires and wounds, as well as its eventless normalities, to the world at its largest extent.

Robert Adamson is an Australian poet of considerable repute in his own country, not so well published elsewhere as he should be. He lives on the Hawksbury River in New South Wales, which is a tropical zone so that the banana palms, flying foxes etc., are not exotica but daily sights of his normal existence. He has almost always lived there, his family fished there and he is a fisherman himself. To give an overview of his poetry is difficult, but it is largely concerned with where he is: the river, the natural environment and creatures, his life and history, his neighbours, love and death. It has little of the ‘pastoral’ feel about it, being obsessively attached to the present condition, and it never gives any sense of a contented settled existence free from urban cares, quite the reverse. There is indication indeed of a quite fraught personal existence, both past and present, without the poetry ever for a moment becoming ‘confessional’. It is too objective for that and too poetic — it always has the world on the edges of its vision, it always brings the poem to an utterance which reverberates across and beyond its immediate focus of attention. Images of the great river and the creatures it attracts, especially birds, are held against various sense of personal pain and loss, seeking through the movement of the poem a settlement with existence, often terminating in a pure, objective notation of the existence of natural objects without any intervening interpretation. But the scope is wide: local humour, international politics or literary comment may emerge at any time. The manner of writing is mostly within the lyrical ecstasis of Winter Night but includes a more leisurely descriptive mode in longer lines.

A substantial selection through his career called Reading the River appeared from Bloodaxe in 2004 and remains his only British book. The Goldfinches of Baghdad is a selection of his later poems, about half of which are also in the Bloodaxe book. Even if you have that, this book is well worth getting for the rest, for Adamson’s standards are consistently high.

One informative and intriguing factor of the new book is its sectioning. It is in three ‘parts’, suggesting a sequentiality, and there are signs of one, from an opening credo through to poems at the end which seem to gather in towards a final pact with images and figures found throughout the book. But the most interesting thing about the sectioning is its elusiveness. The first section, of what I take to be the most recent poems (because they are mostly not in the 2004 selected) has many poems with ‘Eurydice’ in the title or other references to the Orpheus story. But no rational or mechanical consistency emerges — what Eurydice is in one poem she cannot possibly be in the next poem and the only possibility of narrative lies in further reaches of the imagination. Eurydice may be a figure of absence: the lost or departed or maybe just-nipped-out-to-do-some-shopping person, with great temerity and fragility made party to a self-drama which re-emerges near the end of the book. But even this is contradicted by at least one of the Eurydice poems in which she is pictured as present. It is as if this kind of claim to significance is not the poet’s principal interest, which is the poem itself, which whatever material it handles from trivial to mythic, first and foremost is made to exert its own power on the succession of words, and reach its own conclusion out of the perceptual and linguistic materials on offer.

There is also a section of bird poems, which is good to see as it has always been a favourite mode for Adamson of attaching the world outside, to focus on one of these flying creatures with their constant suggestions of distance and souldom. They are to us exotic birds, various kinds of parrot, cockatoo, bee-eater, bird of paradise etc., but they are mostly common enough sights for Adamson where he lives. He describes, wonders, is amazed at their brilliance, familiar with their habits, plays them against his own being, contemplates their reality on the edge of the anthropomorphic, but keeps his distance and returns to what precisely distinguishes them, how integral their nature is to its function, ‘how inhuman / they are, how utterly bird.’ (The Ruff, p.44). Their paradisal richness is both longed-for and distanced from. Ornithology triumphs and is suppressed. The self can only identify with the bird at a high poetic level.

But the main point is that these are not bird poems at all. The bird may fill a poem or be merely glimpsed or thought about in the middle of a quite different matter. Again it is the poem’s sense which defines its purpose, not its object of attention. One of the finest poems in the book, the title-poem The Goldfinches of Baghdad (obviously not a local phenomenon) is a thoroughly ‘poetical’ address to the recently inflicted tragedies of that city. It is a very simple and moving poem. The paradisal, musical, caged birds treasured by the Iraquis, now as in the aristocratic past, are literally on fire, they are burning, and as in other ways in other poems the human presence is delicately, regretfully inserted into the account by an identification which can only be reached at this deathly extremity

Flesh and feathers, hands
and wings. Sirens wail, but the tongues
of poets and the beaks of goldfinches burn.
Those who cannot speak burn along with the
articulate — creatures oblivious to prayer burn
along with those who lament to their god.

And this comes in the end to an apotheosis where the living totality itself is encaged in the mortal poetical music as its ultimate condition--

We sing or die, singing death
as our songs feed the flames.

Peter Riley

The Use of English 58.1 Autumn 2006 62-66 © The English Association 2006

Poems, by J.H. Prynne. (Bloodaxe/Freemantle, £15)

Poems restores to print an edition first published in 1999. Like a coiled spring, that edition of a thirty year body of work is unfurled for a wide and still growing readership, enabling the possibility for this audience of a profound absorption into an unusual soundboard of poetry. The visual and aural quality of J.H. Prynne's poetry would provoke the reader into questioning the result that language could have. A result for a reader can never be a singular one when encountering poetry which possesses, to use Prynne's term, 'inert promise like a flick-knife in milk'.

Poems was published in a large print-run simultaneously in two countries, a print-run that far surpassed the mean average of 500 copies many individual editions had existed in, and was widely reviewed, debated and read. Now, six years later, Poems gathers up twenty-three volumes published between 1968 and 2003, four uncollected works dated and undated, four intercessions into the chronology of the canon. This second edition adds six volumes and one previously unpublished collection. The book jacket refers to each titled work as a 'collection', whereas Prynne refers to the 'six separate volumes published between 1998 and 2003', and the addition of 'one previously unpublished sequence'. Yet he then terms them as 'collections' when referring to an American edition. Then the six works previously mentioned become 'collections'.

It is important to speculate whether Prynne regards his volumes as collections or sequences. He could regard them as both. Is there a distinction between Acrylic Tips or Bands Around The Throat being collections or sequences when the structure of the work contains these similarities and shared characteristics? Bands Around The Throat constitutes a series of titled poems and Acrylic Tips reads as a sequence. However, the index lists the line that begins each page of Acrylic Tips and for that matter every sequence the book contains. Do we, as readers, despite the accumulatory nature of many of the works in the books, begin each new page (the continuation over the page of a titled poem notwithstanding) by starting at zero?

A work like Into The Day consists of two variable blocks of verse per page for a duration of twelve pages, divided exactly halfway into the gutter of the book by a page blank. This constitutes a sequence. Word Order, by using a frequent anchor of an unattached single phrase also appears to be a sequence, by dint of the recurrence of a phrase, acting as a motor for the text at the base of the page. Bands Around The Throat contains fourteen titled poems and therefore this volume is obviously a collection. There are occasions when the reader can decide for himself what constitutes the volume, how to identify what preparation they need for embarking on a particular volume. The Oval Window (1983) may initially appear to be a collection of untitled poems, except that Prynne introduces recurrent images of a window, aperture, frame, screen. In the poetry of Prynne, refrain, to say nothing of reoccurrence, is a rare act. The two main shadows could be the splay of the open window frames:

Low in these windows you let forth
a lifelong transfusion, as by the selfsame
hand that made these wounds.
(p. 316, lines 1-3)

At the onset of the single life
it is joined commonly to what
is untasted, lettered out
along the oval window rim.
(p. 328, lines 1-4)

The dip stands down
in the oval window, in
the blackened gutter stop of the newly born.
(p. 329, lines 26-28)

The oval window is closed in life,
by the foot-piece of the stapes.
(p. 331, lines 3-4)

This second edition of Poems no longer refers to the editions previously published, to the extent of citing original press, printer and editor. The contents list refers to the volumes, not to what they contain, disclosing whether poems are simply poems because they are titled, 'L'Extase de M. Poher' for example, and the index of titles or first lines refers to every page regardless of whether untitled units that might to the reader constitute part of a sequence. Therefore, is every page, like the book's title Poems, a poem?

It is a body of work, a body of poetry; and the reader of Prynne will be comfortable with the fact that each of Shakespeare's sonnets are numbered and have been posthumously ascribed an order which can be shuffled by the reader. But supposing every third line of every otherwise undiverging stanzaic page (set against the left-hand margin) were indented; and there the index of 'first lines' listed the third line instead? Would that enforce the integrity of the page as circular unit? Would that repel the idea that each page began with a significant opening line or phrase? Or would it simply show what Prynne has already shown, despite the contradictions of his own prefatory note that his authorial and editorial intentions are one and the same? If it feels pedantic that Prynne has listed every new page in the index, except in the case of a poem longer than a page, well he's the poet, and John Weiners used to give readings where he collaged bits from various poems as he went, instead of meekly completing one before commencing another.

Sequences like Daylight Songs operate within the rubric of their conception as an integral series of work consisting of sections of poetry. A volume is a book which is a physical object. To reproduce twenty-three volumes and retain the integrity of the volumes, all done to different page sizes and paper grammages is what is attained for here, and is, I believe, achieved.

However, a poet can change his mind as to the formal principal that is being observed in a book and Prynne is not obliged to follow a set of templates for piecing together Poems. Ultimately what has been established is an expanded (by seven volumes) block of writing, punctuated by each volume title and the effect of considerate blank space between the title pages.

This edition of Poems retains the same dimensional format, the rich Garamond semi bold font, and the architecture of the book is unchanged, simply adding, again chronologically, six new units of work. The book has a new cover and displays an illustration from Hu Zhengyan (c. 1582-c. 1672). The previous edition was dedicated to the memory of the French poet Bernard Dubourg. This edition honours the American poet Edward Dorn (1929-1999), 'his brilliant luminous shade'. Four pages later the half-title reads Kitchen Poems. The poems that constitute this volume were composed at Edward Dorn's kitchen table, at a time, just after 1966, when Dorn was working at Essex University.

These five poems are an early poetry by a man young in practice, but already in his early thirties; alert and vigilant to the need to understand how land is utilised and brutalised and how the body malfunctions unless it is incorporated into thought.

we don't burn only
because
we are invisible to each other,
our shoulders no longer so hopeless and
beautiful as they meet at the spine rising
up the dorsal rift: lovely and lonely, until
the whole spread squints into the neck and
vanishes, into the head
(p. 16, lines 1-8)

The urgent pacing, keening, strutting poems are staunch and dauntless. They are also companionable, no matter how ahead of the general time (for the lay citizen) some of the concepts were. Reading these poems again thirty-seven years after publication, as the work proceeds chronologically through five decades there are many elements of a civilization which is evolving as rapidly and profoundly as much as it is swallowing itself whole like Lachesis.

The exhortation, 'Boy, you need quiet frenzy', in one of the letters to the poet Drew Milne published ten years ago in Parataxis, summarises how the writing of J.H. Prynne operates, able to face universal harm and wonderment with a driving syntax, structure and language that is earthed in a slowly accumulating rhythm and assonance which the fleshy Garamond typeface exemplifies.
As the reader proceeds through the book certain constants become characteristic to the nature of this poetry. This nature does indeed operate on a given of frenzy. This is a poetry which has opened out from the preliminary bravado by which it anticipated an obligation to the world as it is read by the word. In as much as the reader may choose whether he approaches and therefore assimilates a volume of Prynne's poetry as a folio of discrete pieces or as sequences, he can also choose how to read the poems. The elegiac nature is a poetry that is by turns ribald, querulous and humane. At other times it is cruel, racked with deceits, which by being articulated are no longer deceits but constitute a philosophy.

Whether a love poetry, declared in part by the relationship the poetry has to metres and phrasing I could choose to associate with Spenser, and in part by its content, its conveyance of what it means to be human and how accept temptation, and whether equally a holistic poetry, by its attitude to the body as cipher and sensor of its position within the natural world, as acute to that right the human has to enjoy, and not despoil the universe, as you would find in the German herbalist Vogel, this poetry is durable and serves a function, to inform the reader.

By what does the poetry mean to inform? What knowledge would it impart? It would convey by its teaching, by its exposition, the strengths and frailties of the human life within the eco-system. The world of monetary value (as in the title 'Down Where Changed'), pollution, trade, representation of the pastoral ideal through consumerism and the shopping mall, to the despoliation of coral reefs quite clearly referred to within the text, and to Arctic icecap melt (again in the early poetry) is borne out by the signifiers of the corpus, the damaged birds, the physical components of the human body and the reoccurrence of snow.

In the same phrase Prynne can refer to consumerism and the shadow memory we carry with us in a line such as 'No one can eat any apples, or remember so much ice'. The 'bribe' of 'incompletion' in consumerism and therefore harvesting haunts the whole book. In taking a theme into layers by his close reading of history, a little changed substance such as snow can become a factor to be utilised.

The fall of snow, as of man in the ice block
and its great cracking roar, is a courtesy;
we don't require the black spiral, being gentle
and of our own kind. We run deeper, cancel
the flood, take to the road or what was before
known as champaign. We stand off the shore
even when turning to our best and most serious
portions of time. …
(p. 170 lines 10-16)

So that when the snow falls again the earth
becomes lighter and lighter. The surface con-
spires with us, we are its first-born. Even
in this modern age we leave tracks, as we
go.
(p. 70 lines 23-27)

Prynne informs us of the wren hunt, of the linnets that are charred, larks that drown, of aerial views portrayed frequently in the poetry. 'Watch any road as it lies on the seam of the earth'. The poem 'On The Nature of Thermal Packing' updates the poetry of World War One while still respecting it, and can be seen in its positioning in the book as a manifesto of Prynne's intent. Also in the volume The White Stones is 'Senor Vazques Speaking and Further Soft Music to Eat By' which anticipates Prynne's later work by its arch and artful twists and turns.

The phrase from Prynne's poetry which I use as title of this piece also shows that it is contained in a language which recognises dual meanings and that because a lot of Prynne's work is affected by contemporary, up-to-the-minute social structure, as we read chronologically, we can refer the work to social and scientific and natural evolution as we perceive it.

Bands Around The Throat, first published in 1987, constituted the first collection of discrete and titled poems since Wound Response thirteen years earlier. This I find an interesting volume of transience, with poems at one hand as cruelly elegiac as 'Fool's Bracelet'

Ah Curly do your day is done. The course
of woe is quickly run. Low without loss
your shining heart Has nothing but the better
part. The star of swords is put upon
his neck. He falls to the ground. Why not?
(p. 342 lines 15-19)

to the minutiae detail so frequently (like his ribaldry) thrown up in the poetry, of 'artifacts of routine behaviour like/side-words on a postage stamp'. 'Marzipan' is a poem of stately metric within the charnel fields, where the victor should 'outright/conciliate a broken enemy, or/destroy them'. The poem 'Ein Heldenleben' I find intriguing as it shares a diction and outlook occurrent in the later Acrylic Tips.
Acrylic Tips, Pearls That Were and Triodes are significant additions to the canon. Triodes is a scabrous trilogy, as enjoyable for its satirical delight as Evelyn Waugh's 1930s novels. Indeed, Unanswering Rational Shore, Acrylic Tips and Biting The Air published chronologically form a speculative triptych in themselves, with Tips at the heart of an excoriating assault on farm commerce. Despite the clotted nature of elements of Shore; I ask how would this sound in the mind of the author measured aloud in his own head

To face the page the desk
the sun on recounted spectral stent the play pro
vokes a circle of conjoint refulgence, to craze
the glass it burns and grind its cutting purse

Why continue after 'spectral stent'? diffident to the banished abstract? Yet the page that begins with this indexed phrase

So by a thousand cuts the sky quivers and re-parts
to shed harvest home

and later phrases like 'harrow at spiny rest' and 'slam off the fuse/partial to compromise and chill out by the water line,/its oozy derelict bed' (lines 1-2, 5/7-9, p. 525) to a later phrase 'All the fun of the pit gets well and then better', the 'felt lining' and 'split finish by large numbers/will cruise to punish the knife' is terse and vital, leading into the savage rhetoric of Acrylic Tips.

It is well documented within the essays, correspondence and semantic influence on three generations of poets of international significance, how crucial to a post Poundian view of poetry Prynne's is. How supremely enjoyable, musical, visual and visceral the poetry is, which for its deposition and surface alone holds us in faith.

There are many ways a lay reader shall eventually find the poetry of Prynne, which are not the obvious ones of the given poetry reading or the anthology. They lie more in the realm of the book as object, the distribution of those objects with an overriding aesthetic form as underlain by this Australian/English edition. Advocacy and hazard has its own paths too. The opening verse to Down Where Changed, (p. 294), overtly evokes T.S. Eliot, and it is a refreshingly sensuous and respectful evocation of a memorable and musical poet.

Ash and thorn, thus idiot pear tree
burnt white and gray you
bear me the way the wind does

with vile shadows and honied smile

This is, to me, a composite of various echoes of different Eliot poems, from 'Preludes', 'Ash Wednesday', The Waste Land. Just as Allen Ginsberg led his readers to William Carlos Williams, the major poetry written in England of Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thompson and Helen Macdonald, for example, would eventually sign younger readers back to the poetry of J.H. Prynne.

Nicholas Johnson

The Use of English 57.3 Summer 2006, 224-231 © The English Association 2006

Collected Poems by David Chaloner (Salt Publishing 2005 £18.99)

David Chaloner's Collected Poems draws upon books and collections published between 1969 and 2001 with the addition of uncollected early poems. Born in rural Cheshire in 1944 and gravitating to the coffee bar, jazz and beat poetry scene of central Manchester in the early sixties, Chaloner emerged as a poet of the immediate in the late sixties and was featured in the Penguin anthology, edited by Michael Horowitz, Children of Albion (1969). He edited One, a magazine of new writing,
moved to London, became a designer, and was published by Andrew Crozier's Ferry Press. He soon became associated with Cambridge poets, such as John James, John Hall, Peter Riley and Denise Riley, and was featured in Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville's anthology, A Various Art (1987). Part of the sixties poetic reaction against The Movement, Chaloner's early poetry is direct, seemingly casual and concerned with the phenomenology of everyday life. It unfolds a phenomenological gaze, its origins in immediate experience rather than historical, as if it were offering some testimony or domestic truth.

the first restless flaws of morning
wipe darkness from the window
a deliberate gesture
that rewards your attention

A typical Chaloner poem unfolds slowly, quietly within its own purity of language and seemingly sufficient to itself.It employs a knowing voice engaged in the matter of everyday life experiencing objects as multi-determinate and through a perceptual framework that is informed by the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), particularly in such works as Phenomenology of Perception (1962) and The Primacy of Perception (1964). An examination of the most commonly used words here show themes and shared concerns.
These words, which indicate recurring themes, include knowledge, knowing, truth, discourse, information, intention, window, door, view, journey, questions, discovery, destinations, direction and time. It is without recourse to an English poetic past. The highly compressed love poems of Dark Pages Slow Turns Brief Salves (1969), which are full of space and quiet, having much in common with English contemporaries such as John Riley and John James.

so hear
the
shudder of
escaping
breath

Like John James, another Ferry Press poet, there is a clear inheritance from William Carlos Williams, George Oppen and the Objectivist poets as the above quotations illustrates. The poetry can be seen as a contribution to the philosophical issues raised by Objectivism on the one hand and phenomenology on the other. Within its economy and deceptive simplicity, abstraction and precise imagery in balance and mostly in harmony with a stable narrative voice, the poem unfolds as a statement or an argument:

it would seem that some one has forgotten
to switch off the light
the underside of the yellow lampshade
a white ellipse of proof

Indeed the poem in question 'Interior: Morning' moves outwards through gesture towards a probing of pictorial light where 'the frame outlines a response' and inwards towards the self framed in light and time anticipating 'our sense of dawn'. Here the use of the collective is a way of binding the poem to a set of values and knowledge implicit in the narrative view of perception. Divided into three eight line stanzas, the third stanza returns to the knowing self via abstraction and a culminating image:

a fixed point will also express variables
and you pass into that position of yourself
which entertains the idea of duality
although the window is distinct and isolate
an independent level of values
the present night and your unending mornings
coexist with a hint of studied calm
as the sun breaks through to summarise

This elegant poem presents itself as embodying some added value around the seemingly ordinary surface of things. It implies rather than coerces and offers light and possibility, a characteristic of the collection.
A poem like, 'dear reader this was to have been a letter' works playfully out of the poetic dictums of Pound and Carlos Williams. Here the speech appears to be direct and everyday and yet is not. It employs a limited range of personal address and description, copious adjectives, and forces the reader to examine the use of vocabulary, detail and seemingly disposable references that work back upon themselves. Yet it provokes and opens possibilities of meaning. The poem speaks of a certain freedom to speak in such a way, invoking the use of 'we' to suggest a shared community, to break rules, with this exchange to the fore, and is entirely of its own time and generation. Another early poem 'The Cast in Order of Appearance' reads like a period television kitchen drama with beguiling narrative interjections. Written at the height of Monty Python's Flying Circus's popularity, it presents itself as high comedy with a balance of abstraction and imagery colliding with an interrupting narrator, who has the air of the lead from a Ray Cooney farce. What makes Chaloner's poetry sparkle is the precise use of an informed and relevant vocabulary. It is honed to perfection.

Her language of the big break returns years later
In a fur coat
Smoking French cigarettes
Posing by the door
Telling us how boring the whole scene is
The spotlight sweeps away from her face
As the curtains swoop
Maliciously

Each unpunctuated line, characteristic of the Collected, forces the reader to select which line to emphasise and is constrained only by the eye following the course of each subsequent line. This operates to force readers to find their own way through the density of possible meaning on the one hand and the extent of musicality on the other. It also acts as a way of differentiating this poetic world from the ordinary language of speech acts and the poetic mainstream.
Whilst early Chaloner presents a phenomenological argument as a contribution to a shared community of writing and thinking, the mature work is open to a wider probing and is capable of astonishing construction, as in such longer poems, as 'Playback', 'Caption Block' and 'Art For Others'. The poem 'Rain', occasioned by the impact of rain upon a journey, for example, develops into a wider social and ideological abandonment beyond the original journey. Here the reader is taken on a journey of abandonment, 'The effects and affects / of post-modernist theories and manipulations / the letters arriving, and the letters / departing, the phone calls and invitations / abandoned', with an ever expanding range of referents. The poem, hugely provocative, returns to the theme of 'Direction abandoned for journeys without / destination' and renews itself through an array of possible abandonment's. A second return to the 'force of circumstance' connected to a journey presents a wide angled vision of an intended and circumscribed journey. Through the creation of a poetic language that is ripe with possibility, the poem impinges upon the reader's knowledge of every day life and rearranges that knowledge so that things can be seen differently.

The neat phrase abandoned.
False information, presented in good faith, abandoned.
The truth, enough of that, abandoned.
Redressing the balance, abandoned.
Clothing, that precarious and diverse apparatus,
abandoned. The conversation you overhear,
eavesdropping at the edge of precipice.
One step wrong that could be the foot in the door
of that sinking feeling.

The poem might be said to concern albeit obliquely the phenomenology of knowledge and the social construction of reality, one of the underlying themes of the collection as a whole. It reminded me of reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Prose of the World (1974), and its chapter on the connections between painting, writing and indirect language. This might well have appealed to someone aware of the Objectivists. For here in 'Rain' there is a testing of or striving for a consciousness and perspective that seeks meaning through a transparent and indirect language. Indeed Chaloner appears to be the embodiment of such a writer who 'assumes and transcends the patterning of the world which begins in perception' and who fashions his work not 'far from things'. His work has a near-conversational style and is continually looking forward as this excerpt from 'Testing Testing Testing' states:

There is no future in memory and recall,
reasoning overtakes the mechanics of the pen.

One truth remains
refusing definition,

retaining integrity, alone
and emerging from eclectic principles.

The outlook is framed
by a hard edge of formal light.
The outlook is the substance of the day,
a collection of cheap tricks.

The day is restless with evidence
that conceals the meaning of passionate
substance. The question is waiting

for the writing to stop

There is a marked development from the early love poems to the full lined, Latin rooted vocabulary of the mature work, such as Delights Wreckage (2001). It is an arc, though, of remarkable consistency of outlook and theme. I have barely touched upon the breadth of this engaging and provocative work. Its hallmarks are the freshness of its language, grounded in the minutiae of everyday life, and an enriching vocabulary, framed within a questioning and open aesthetic, where the destination is unknown. It is a joy to become lost in such riches.

David Caddy

The Use of English 57.3 Summer 2006, 231-235 © The English Association 2006

Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight by James Booth (Palgrave MacMillan, £45)

James Booth is a renowned Larkin scholar whose major credits include as author, the excellent Philip Larkin: Writer; as editor and contributor, the resplendent New Larkins For Old; and as editor and excavator, Trouble At Willow Gables And Other Fictions. Unsurprisingly, therefore, A Poet's Plight is as densely knowledgeable as wide-ranging, invariably illuminating, and in all a most welcome addition to that growth industry, Larkin Studies.

He opens by dwelling on the word 'plight' as signifying both 'commitment' and 'manner of being, condition, state', going on to declare his prime aim – that of contextualising Larkin's poetry in a variety of ways while remaining concerned 'first and foremost with Larkin's texts' (my emphasis). When this applies, which it does for the most part, the results are invigorating and deeply incisive. However, there are other times when the determination to put Larkin's poems in some kind of immediate personal context leads to a limiting, even cramped exegesis of the works themselves. While he steers clear of the kind of literal-mindedness that tarnishes much of Andrew Motion's literary interpretation during A Writer's Life, Booth at times seems uncomfortably determined to domesticate the poetry that has spoken so directly to so many readers and in so many different ways. More on that later.

In an early insight Booth's draws attention to the prodigious number of participles in Larkin's poetry, prompting the deduction that he 'responds to life as a transient process rather than as fixed entity.' That attitude underscores the line in Dockery And Son' which follows the (in)famous 'Life is first boredom, then fear' – 'Whether or not we use it, it goes.' Its surrounding bleakness notwithstanding, I have always heard that line as fundamentally affirmative, indicating that life is for living, for using. The same credo lies at the heart of 'Days' and (though many may demur) both 'Toads' and 'Toads Revisited'. As Booth demonstrates, both directly and obliquely, Larkin was actually highly successful in 'using' his time on earth - be it as poet; scholarly and prolific writer of prose; deceptively inspiring and dynamic Librarian; lover; friend; colleague. He knew how to begin 'afresh, afresh, afresh', no matter how glum the face he often chose to present to the world.

Moreover, such matters reveal how deceptive, even crafty, Larkin could be in his use of mask and persona. Booth is suitably tart about the poet's claim that 'Form holds little interest for me. Content is everything,' calling it 'either the most misleading judgment any artist has made on his own work, or …startling proof of the truism that form is content.' This is masterly criticism, and if I favour the former explanation, that is because it can be coupled with arguably the most disingenuous assertion Larkin made in his entire career: 'There's not much to say about my work. When you've read a poem, that's it, it's quite clear what it all means' (Required Writing, 53-4).

Booth is equally adept in drawing attention to Larkin's antipathy to the 'poetry reading' as an event and, further, his conviction that poetry is more a private than a public medium anyway: poems should be dwelt on at the reader's own speed, engaging brain, emotion and above all the inner ear. Booth's appraisal of the poems always impresses when he does just that, which occurs with satisfying frequency. He soon compels brain and heart on 'Aubade,' 'Going' and 'Money'; later - in what I consider the two finest chapters, 'Poetic Histories' and 'Living Rooms' - he provides a wealth of detailed commentary on 'Large Cold Store', 'Solar', 'Livings', 'Here', 'The Whitsun Weddings' (especially fine) and 'Poetry of Departures'.

So far, so very good indeed. But chapters three and four are problematic and uncomfortably contentious. Here Booth is minded to explore Larkin's relationships with various women, investigating thereby their direct impact on certain poems. 'Loves and Muses I' posits the translation of 'Life into Art,' exploring Larkin's relationships with his mother, Ruth Bowman, Winifred Arnott and Patsy Strang; 'Love and Muses II' extends the practice to his later, long-term affairs with Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan, and what is termed the poet's 'Late Fling' with Betty Mackereth. Though the text is never less than interesting and impeccably researched, two things about it prompt unease. First, the majority of the poems offered in evidence are by no means top-flight Larkin, and even when they are, Booth rarely addresses them with the fierce cogency that distinguishes so much of his analysis elsewhere.

Second, the avowed intent to contextualise Larkin's poetry in this way is less than successful; indeed, in several instances it strikes me as simply a mistake. Though far from Larkin's finest piece, 'This Be The Verse' is about rather more than his relationship with his own mother, just as 'Love Songs In Age' transcends her particular experience, moving though that dimension is. Still more reductive is the notion that 'The Old Fools' and the superb 'The Building' are chiefly to do with Eva Larkin's growing senility; here unease gives way to bewilderment, as it does when Booth identifies the emotional provenance of 'The Whitsun Weddings', 'Afternoons', 'Here' and 'Essential Beauty' as rooted in Larkin's relationship with Maeve Brennan. That may be so; however, it does not follow that these poems are most revealingly 'explained' in the light of such biographical information, nor that such a context is why 'a large faction of Larkin's readers' consider these poems 'his most satisfying poetic achievement.' It is not just that 'faction' is a bizarre choice: both aesthetically and teleologically the judgment fails to persuade or enlighten.

From time to time Booth bravely and fair-mindedly offers contrary interpretations from the people involved. He records Winifred Arnott's rejection of the reading which 'Lines On A Young Lady's Photograph Album' might appear to invite, and also that she fervently denied that she and Larkin had indulged in any 'Flirtation' (Booth's sub-title for this section). Even more significant is Larkin's own declaration, 'I don't really equate poems with real life as most people do – I mean they are true in a way, but very much dolled up and censored.' Booth quotes this at the end of the lengthy, often less than persuasive section 'The Long Courtship'; he does so without any detectable awareness that such lexical complexity might subvert his governing line.

As telegraphed, things pick up almost spectacularly well for the remaining three chapters. Booth suavely demolishes hostile misreadings by such as Eagleton and Alvarez; he is vigorously sceptical about Larkin's alleged membership of the 1950s 'The Movement', observing that Larkin was 'wary of the label' and that the poets concerned were highly disparate. As a considerable bonus, his appreciation of 'Spring' provides a splendid counter to the narrow 'Englishness' still often associated with Larkin; as Booth concludes, 'There is 'nothing here to suggest any particular date … nor even England.' Best of all, he furnishes masterly critiques of 'Church Going' and 'Show Saturday'; in the latter he is trenchantly agnostic about either its elegiac thrust or the celebratory quality others have discerned in it, and I wholly concur.

The Poet's Plight ends with a consideration of Larkin as elegist, finding that mode fundamental to his oeuvre; those who may not agree will still find an abundance of insights into 'Ambulances', 'Next, Please', 'Deceptions' and 'Arundel Tomb'. But the chapter's most riveting moment is provided by John Bayley:

If I am feeling really low I often read 'Aubade' or 'The Building', and they have an immediate and bracing tonic effect: however perverse the process might seem, they at once raise my spirits.
Booth might have dwelt on the remark more than he does, for it surely points to something fundamental. Martin Amis once observed that 'Good literature is incapable of depressing anyone,' by which he meant (as implicitly does Bayley) that a poem, drama or novel that is truly well-wrought will invigorate and even cheer, simply because of what Hopkins in 'The Windhover' called 'the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!'. That explains why a good production of Medea, King Lear or Death of a Salesman will exhilarate, no matter how forlorn or even abject the final vision offered. Larkin at his finest – and there is so much of that – instils the same satisfied pleasure in being alive and able to absorb material that testifies to human accomplishment at its highest.

It is that phenomenon which prompts my reservations about Booth's contextualisation strategy, his many strengths and felicities notwithstanding. Larkin once famously said, 'Don't confuse me with the poems: I'm bigger than they are.' That may very well be true in a variety of ways; so, however, is the approximately palindromic, 'Don't confuse the poems with Larkin's life: they are bigger – and wider – than that was.' Another fine Larkin critic, Jonathan Smith, remarked of his first reading of High Windows, 'He spoke to me.' More than any ingenious contextualisation or 'inside knowledge', it is that directness, that ability to engage heterogenous readers of all ages and most circumstances that explains Larkin's timeless appeal and indeed his greatness. A hundred years from now few readers will know - or care - about what Larkin's family and lovers were like and how they affected him. But the poems will continue to 'speak to' and enrich their consciousness as they do ours.

Richard Palmer

The Use of English 57.3 Summer 2006, 235-239 © The English Association 2006

The Emily Dickinson Handbook, edited by Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle and Cristanne Miller. (University of Massachusetts Press, ₤18.50)

On July 10 1862, Eudocia Converse Flynt – a distant relation of Emily Dickinson – visited Amherst for Commencement, and over the course of the day made the acquaintance of the poet, now in her thirty-second year. On returning to her hometown of Monson, Flynt received an oblique note:

You and I, did'nt finish talking. Have you room for the sequel, in your Vase?
All the letters I could
write,
Were not fair as this –
Syllables of velvet –
Sentences of Plush –
Depths of Ruby, undrained –
Hid, Lip, for Thee,
Play it were a
Humming Bird
And sipped just
Me –
Emily – 1

Judging from her exasperated diary entry that night, Flynt might have benefited a 'handbook' to this poet's work: 'Had a letter from Emily Dickinson!!!!'.2 Such incomprehension is understandable, and Flynt was (and is) by no means the only reader of Dickinson's verse to retreat from its challenge in exclamatory bafflement. For how does one respond to such a letter? It is an erotic 'sequel' to the formal encounter of the two women, and grows out of Dickinson's concern that they 'did'nt finish talking'. One may, therefore, justifiably expect this letter to 'finish' something; but instead it sublimely opens up. The dashes unhinge meaning, refusing any resolution, and throwing impossibly wide the poem's circumference; there is no way that a reader can 'have […] room' for this little sequel. Indeed, Dickinson was never inclined to stop, or close things over; as Robert Weisbuch notes in his superb essay, 'Prisming Emily Dickinson; or, Gathering Paradise by Letting Go', '“The soul should always stand ajar” is something of a motto for Dickinson's endless quest'.3 What she refers to in her poems as her 'stopless' life is also, in her letters, a personal injunction: 'I could not stop for that [mockery of her work] – my Business is Circumference – '. And in another letter: 'Perhaps the whole United States are laughing at me too! I can't stop for that. My business is to love'.4

It is for this reason that I first approached The Emily Dickinson Handbook with a degree of trepidation. For the very notion of a 'handbook' presupposes that the subject in question can be 'stopped' and made handily accessible. But as several of the essays in the Handbook in fact make clear, Dickinson's work resists being shut up in critical prose of any sort. The volume is divided into seven variously authored sections, including 'Biography', 'Historical Context', 'The Manuscripts' and 'Dickinson's Poetics'. As a critical Handbook, it is avowedly aimed at the student market. The editors' Preface informs us that

students of Emily Dickinson have often regretted the fact that there is no one source for quick reference containing basic and up-to-date information on the poet's life, her art, the manuscripts, and the current state of Dickinson scholarship in general. The essays collected here are meant to fill this gap. (p. vii)

One does not ordinarily associate Dickinson's work with 'quick reference'; indeed, there can be few authors less suited to such expediency. The urge to 'fill gaps' is also oddly contrary to the spirit of Dickinson's work, with its potent silences and ellipses. And does one really wish to arrive at what is elsewhere called a 'clear grasp' of the poet's thinking (p. viii)? Despite this editorial heavy-handedness, a number of the essays that follow are sensitive and suggestively open-ended (and open to a sense of their own limitations). They do not attempt a confident 'grasp' of Dickinson's work, but proffer only the shakiest of holds.

Martha Ackmann's useful essay on biography which opens the volume could have joined the four articles grouped under the header 'Historical Context', as this is precisely what Ackmann focuses on (indeed, part of her argument is that 'biographical' and 'historical' contexts are not to be distinguished). Considered more explicitly the purview of 'historical context' in the Handbook are, among others, Gary Stonum's 'Dickinson's Literary Background' and Paul Crumbley's appraisal of 'Dickinson's Dialogic Voice'. Stonum's essay is the most critically astute in this section; it both maps out previous discussions of Dickinson's literary influences, and also offers a series of fresh insights into the subject. Stonum is especially good on Dickinson's allusions to Shakespeare and the Bible, and traces interestingly the poet's relation to such movements as romanticism and Transcendentalism. He is rightly critical of recent attempts to view Dickinson as a more orthodox or conventional poet than she in fact is. Commentators such as Joanne Dobson have portrayed Dickinson as 'largely acquiescing to an orthodoxy against which others often struggled' (p. 58). It would seem, reading Stonum's essay, that critics like Dobson are now increasingly hostile to the strangeness of Dickinson's work, and seek to tame or domesticate it, denying its aesthetic uniqueness (Dickinson herself (fore)saw that 'civilization – spurns – the Leopard!'5). New historicists, cultural materialists – indeed, theorists of all kinds – endeavour to clear what Thomas Wentworth Higginson called in one letter the 'fiery mist' of her work.6 And yet it is this 'mist' which gives her poetry such imaginative force, and with which perhaps we should abide.

The main weakness of Stonum's essay – and it is a problem for the Handbook as a whole – is its failure to provide an adequate definition of 'context'. This matters, as much of the volume is taken up with the issue of contextualization, without it ever being precisely clear what counts as 'context'; the signifier proves (usefully?) shifty. Discussing the work of the critic Joanne Feit Diehl, Stonum writes that the latter's work 'depends upon the notably ahistorical and context-indifferent poetics developed by Harold Bloom' (p. 59). While it is true that Bloom is disparaging of some of the claims of contemporary theory and historicism, it is notquite true to argue that he is completely 'context-indifferent’. In his fiercely original essay on Dickinson in The Western Canon, Bloom provides a close reading of Dickinson’s 'From Blank to Blank – ’, linking the poet’s metaphorical deployment of the 'blank’ to Milton and Shakespeare, and bringing in Emerson, Whitman and Blake.7 What is this if not contextual reading? It is hardly the fetishizing of the isolated poem-object we encounter in New Criticism. Bloom may not be constructing an obviously 'social’ context; but he discusses brilliantly the literary context – the rich allusive field – of one of Dickinson’s greatest poems.

In emphasizing the 'dialogic’ aspect of Dickinson’s poetics, and drawing on Bakhtin’s theories of 'polyvocality’ and 'heteroglossia’, Paul Crumbley aligns himself with Martha Nell Smith, whose essay on Dickinson’s manuscripts is one of the highlights of the Handbook. Like Crumbley, Smith emphasizes the importance of the reader’s active involvement in the production of a poem’s meaning. She writes fascinatingly on the complexity of Dickinson’s manuscripts, drawing attention to their extraordinary array of textual variants, and going so far as to suggest that the poet wrote 'for her manuscript page’ rather than for print (p. 118). Dickinson wanted to leave 'variants from which readers might pick and choose’ (p. 115). The implications of this for the editing of Dickinson are considerable; for 'to produce printed pages, choices must be made among variants and finalized’ (p. 123).

What is striking about the approaches taken by Crumbley and Smith is their alertness to the opacity and ambiguity of Dickinson’s work, and their sense that its 'fiery mist’ might be essential to its beauty. They also, in different ways, draw attention to the illimitable circumference of its meaning, and do not attempt to impose a contextual 'circumference’ of their own. Indeed, their historicizing expands the possibilities of the Dickinson text, making way for its uncanny energies. The same might be said of Robert Weisbuch’s superb essay, 'Prisming Dickinson’, to which I referred earlier in this review. Perhaps more than any other critic in the Handbook, Weisbuch makes it clear that not only does civilization spurn the leopard; the leopard also – more powerfully – spurns civilization (including here the 'civilizing’ forces of Theory). Beginning with the assumption that 'each memorable poet teaches you a new way of thinking’ (p. 197), Weisbuch goes on to eschew all conventional critical approaches to Dickinson’s work, arguing that they tend either to seek out one privileged meaning (the metaphysical 'truth’), or attempt to impose one reductive reading of their own (the 'feminist’ Emily, the 'religious’ Emily, the 'lesbian’ Emily, and so on). But 'no poet ever so fiercely resisted such confinement’ (p. 198); and 'to expect settled truth from Dickinson is to wish for a contradiction in terms’ (p. 219). In place of such acts of critical enclosure, Weisbuch – through exemplary close reading of three of her poems – proposes that we should never look for any one scene or subject in Dickinson’s oeuvre. In fact, the circumference of her best work is infinite. We must therefore 'resist pointing or pinning down a poetry which depends upon expansible meaning’ (p. 205).

Overall, The Emily Dickinson Handbook succeeds in providing a rich overview of current criticism, and is certainly accessible to undergraduates. Its excessive attention to contextual analysis of Dickinson is, however, a little disheartening; I would have liked to see more appreciation of the poet’s aesthetic achievement. So many commentators attempt to find in her work evidence of ideological and social dialogue – but what of its generous solitude? I shall leave the last words to Rilke:

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just to them.8

Notes
1 Cited in Habegger, A. (2002) My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: The Modern Library), pp. 459-60.
2 Cited in Habegger, p. 460.
3 The Emily Dickinson Handbook, p. 223. Hereafter, Handbook.
4 Cited in Handbook, p. 198.
5 Johnson, Thomas, ed. (1970) Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems (London: Faber and Faber), p. 236.
6 Cited in Handbook, p. 21.
7 Bloom, Harold, (1994) The Western Canon: The Books and School of Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace), pp. 291-309.
8 Rilke, Rainer Maria, (1934) Letters to a Young Poet, trans. by M.D. Herter Norton, p. 29.

The Use of English 57.3 Summer 2006, 239-243 © The English Association 2006

Colin Winborn

Donald Davie, Modernist essays: Yeats, Pound, Eliot edited with an introduction by Clive Wilmer (Carcanet £14.95).

This is a fine book and should really be a primer for all those students in the last two years of secondary school and the first years at university who are concerned with modern letters and the impact of modernism on them. The double filter of Wilmer and Davie is also fitting, given that a major consideration of these essays (from 'The Poet in the Imaginary Museum’, based on two radio talks from 1957, up to 'A Son of Ezra’) is the changing relationship between poets and readers over time. Wilmer’s advocacy, via scrupulous and thoughtful editing (juxtaposed poems by Davie, exemplary foot-notes) remind us of the essays’ place in critical history, props for arguments that now may seem standard issue. The freshness of Davie’s approach is exhilarating too when we note his principled changes in critical direction over the years, especially the reaction against Eliot ('a presence in my life more insistently influential than any other writer…’ yet 'We respect, we admire, we do not love’) in the face of Pound ('generously impulsive and foolhardy poet’) who temperamentally might seem at odds with the image of Davie as a severe master. In fact, Davie himself comes over as unbegrudging and warm in many of these essays, severest on himself, open about his own foibles, forgiving of Pound for a quality central to all his admiration: a 'piety toward the past’, as he puts it in a review of Kenner’s ground-breaking The Pound Era.

The quandary of the modern poet in the 'imaginary museum’ (the title taken from Malraux’s essay) is axiomatic and absolutely up to date given the rival pronouncements from Bloodaxe and Carcanet. For those fresh to the problem: the poet, unlike artists in other media, has not had a technical revolution regarding the ability to reproduce the past (as with say music and painting) because the poet is stuck with the medium of language. Thus although he is seemingly 'free to pick and choose among the styles of the past, in a way his predecessors never dreamed of’ and in step with an internationalist, modernist sensibility, the poet is in the 'betwixt-and-between’ position given the medium. The choices are for a chosen 'provincialism’ (citations of Amis and Larkin), forging a style independent of the past (doomed to said 'provincialism’) for 'the good or paradoxical reason that what is specifically modern about the modern age in art is precisely its catholic and uncommitted attitude to all ages of the past.’ Thus an advocacy of early Eliot, the polyglossic nature of what was 'He Do the Police in Different Voices’ and the Cantos ('created and put into action a language that is literally international’).

Pound gets under your skin, into your system: his mistakes, his over-reaching seem to fascinate Davie and a concept of 'mastery’ is established in Davie’s critical terminology that itself has roots in the poems he admires. He distinguishes, with several reservations, between Eliot as passive ('a man who waits for language to present him with its revelations’) and Pound as go-getter ('he would master language…to serve the sounding and shining world which continually throws up new forms which language must strain to register’). Unconsciously though Davie echoes Eliot in his praise of Pound: 'A crowd of twisted things’, including the polished, shining driftwood is 'thrown up’ high and dry by 'memory’ in 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night’; and from 'Burnt Norton’ famously 'words strain,/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden.’ Davie is not alone. In his introduction to The Oxford book of Modern Verse of 1936, W.B. Yeats admits to his troubled admiration for Pound’s achievements in this vision of judgement:

I find more style than form: at moments more style, more deliberate nobility and the means to convey it than in any other contemporary poet known to me but it is constantly interrupted, broken, twisted in to nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion; he is an economist, poet, politician, raging at malignants with inexplicable characters and motives, grotesque figures out of a child’s book of beasts.

The force of 'more deliberate nobility and the means to convey it’ might be overlooked in the light of the 'obsessive’ proliferation of qualifications. In these we feel perhaps unconscious flickers in diction and rhythms to Yeats’ own contradictory 'raging’ specifically in a work concerning an overwhelming apocalyptic horror, 'The Second Coming’ ('a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi…twenty centuries of stony sleep/were vexed to nightmare…And what rough beast’). As Davie points out, Yeats is a 'master’ craftsman, master of his trade, and Yeats’ own highest praise to fellow-craftsmen is caught in a letter concerning Robert Bridges, as one who wrote 'with deliberation’. Such a quality is central also to an understanding of why Davie was attracted not only by the austerity and craftsmanship of Eliot and Yeats, but also to Pound, one who recognised the innate resistance of language, its otherness, akin to a resistant material to a sculptor, and before doing battle with it.

The quandary over the master/apprentice relationship between these three poets is another related issue, given Pound’s shaping of Yeats’ own work from November 1912 and Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land. The power of critical pronouncement is double-edged: perhaps Yeats has a memory of Pound’s review of Responsibilities from 1914: his praise for the 'hard light’, the 'greater hardness of outline’, that Yeats himself acknowledged as 'helping him to get back to the definite and concrete’; there is also a distinction between the kind of self-enclosed systems of a poetry aspiring to music and that akin to sculpture which inform not only some of Davie’s greatest writing on Pound, but also Wilmer’s introduction and that key distinction established between Eliot and Pound. Wilmer spells it out: 'From the mid-1910s Pound is looking for a way of writing that grows from an imaginative engagement with otherness, a search for the real’, something 'out there in the world’. Further to this he views Eliot’s notions of impersonality as concealment of self ultimately a 'diffusion’ of self via concepts such as the 'objective correlative’. I cannot go as far as Wilmer when he sees the 'doctrine of impersonality’ looking like 'the ultimate refinement of Romantic subjectivity’. This is to de-contextualise the pronouncement: to remove it from the surrounds of the other concomitant messages Eliot was sending (the condition of modern poetry to be difficult, the relation of any poem to the past, etc.); as well as its poetic contexts (the Georgian legacy and poetry of the Great War).

This, however, is a minor carp; Davie did much not only to hail Eliot and Pound, but also to criticise them and de-mystify them, to eschew Eliot-worship (in the attack on 'The Dry Salvages’, for example) despite what Eliot meant to him. His great adventure was to champion Pound, despite the misgivings. Reading the Cantos involves 'the edge, uncertainty’, a vague sense of terror: there is so much knowledge and so much of it going on at the same time, an unmatched drama of simultaneous considerations; the imagist juxtapositions are part of an epic reading voyage; the oldest patterns given their newest forms; 'Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end’. To read The Waste Land with no idea, for example, of the importance of Tiresias, in Pound’s poetry dating from 1917, nor to be able to put 'The Fire Sermon’ next to Canto XLVII, is to limit and distort any view of the achievements of both poets. And ways out of Pound include not only the critical overviews of Wilmer and Davie, but their poetry (just as Gunn’s Moly which is a way out of Canto XLVII).

Other factors need to be taken into account: Pound continued writing well after Yeats’ death and Eliot’s poetic silence, following The Four Quartets; poets and academics of the fifties and sixties, such as Davie, had to re-appraise everything that had gone before in the light of the fresh material from the Pisan Cantos through to Thrones. And the marked changes in nature of the writing mode, the confessional mode that embraced jags and flickers of a memory map that incorporated Pound’s contemporaries (including Mr. Eliot and Willy, in Canto LXXX). Davie and others such as Kenner were pioneering; the re-assessments (such as Davie’s fine essay on Hugh Selwyn Mauberley collected here, but dropped by him from the Pelican Guide to English Literature after the 1961 edition—you’ll find an essay by George Dekker in its place) were part of a continuous process, provisional judgements. Wilmer makes clear what a leap it is from Davie the self-labelled 'pasticheur of late augustan styles’, a poet and thinker associated with a cool, no-nonsense, no more myth kitty, no more poems about pictures 'movement’, to embrace Pound. (Furthermore to do this at a time when Pound’s political/anti-semitic pronouncements made him untouchable in certain quarters; interesting now to reckon with re-assessments of Eliot and Yeats in these areas). Wilmer is able to understand Donald Davie’s singular strengths as a 'close reader’ of modernist writing, able to bring to his reading (a point made at length in Wilmer’s essay on Davie for the TLS, 13/05/05) 'knowledge from the craftsman’s workshop’. In all of the essays here we feel the power of judgements formed by someone who has considered the impact that the visual aspects of a text, line endings, for example, may have on a reader’s experience of 'meaning’—the relation between the technical and the spiritual. Pound, Eliot and Yeats: the three are embedded, explicitly and covertly in each other’s lives, essays and poetry and the critical legacy. 'Shades of some dead master’: Eliot may have Yeats in mind, dead in 1939, via the Dante;--fine, but there are shades of a living master too, Pound, whose recently published Canto XLVII has Odysseus entering the porch to the underworld 'to see Tiresias,

Eyeless that was, a shade, that is in hell
So full of knowing that the beefy men know less than he,
Ere thou come to thy road’s end.
Knowledge the shade of a shade…

Most contemporary students of literature entering university know Pound principally, if at all, as editor or agitator/prompter—the man from Idaho who travelled to London purportedly to meet and stir up the greatest living poet, Yeats; the editor who helped to re-fashion a poem of the unreal city anew in his editorial work on The Waste Land. This collection of essays is one to turn the tables, and happily it is as impassioned as it is focused, riding against the grain of one of Davie’s observations in praise of the true master:

Between master and apprentice, between the poet of one generation and the poet of the next or the next-but-one, the only proper relationship is cool and distant, professional. For both are servants of another master yet, the tradition (so Eliot called it), the medium, the language.

Peter Carpenter

The Use of English 57.3 Summer 2006, 243-248 © The English Association 2006

The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry, edited by Maurice Lindsay and Lesley Duncan, (Edinburgh University Press, £19.99)

The introduction to this anthology opens with Dryden’s statement that 'the true, if not the only, end of poetry is delight.’ The editors claim that their collection 'has been designed on Dryden’s precept, rather than on purely academic principles, which may exclude the surprising and the offbeat.’ Leaving aside the stern Knoxian voice, surely ringing in the head of every Scottish reader of a certain age, declaring that poetry is there to instruct, and passing over the validity of the supposed conflict between 'academic principles’ and 'delight,’ how does the anthology stand when viewed according to the editors’ own central criterion? Reading through the book brought many moments of delight and discovery, and, because the poets are listed alphabetically rather than chronologically, some delightfully odd and, at times revealing appositions of unlikely bedfellows. Among the many poems which gave the greatest pleasure, whether through handling of subject or deftness of phrase, sharpness of perception or sheer bravura of expression, were those by Kathleen Jamie, James Robertson, James Aitchison, Kate Clanchy, Robert Crawford, Valerie Gillies and Dennis O’Donnell.

A splendid piece of bravura shot through with real insight into the lot of the Scotswoman is Jamie’s 'The Queen of Sheba’ with its glorious vision of the exotic monarch arriving in narrow, misogynistic Scotland:

All that she desires, whatever she asks
She will make the bottled dreams
Of your wee lasses
Look like sweeties.

Dennis O’Donnell’s 'The Young Men of Blackburn’ captures a central aspect of the culture of the West Lothian towns, their pits closed, their young unemployed. The swagger and curtness of the young men’s style is observed sympathetically and accurately.

Taciturn, not their style
The callow yowling of other cubs.
Theirs is the hauteur of Prussian junkers.
Curtly acknowledging passers-by:
'Peter’, 'Samson’, 'Mrs Pearce’,
Like God giving names to the animals.

In James Aitchison there is the close, almost metaphysical, sort of observation of the natural world which is seen so frequently in Norman MacCaig. Here is the opening of Aitchison’s 'Landscape with Lapwings’:

Another April and another day
With all the seasons in it, with lapwings
Falling out of sunlight into rain,
Stalling on a squall and then tumbling
Over the collapsing wall of air
To float in zones of weightlessness again.

In addition to providing much delight the editors have also given the reader a very broad spectrum of poets and types of poetry; here is a volume of just over four hundred poems by one hundred and fifty eight poets. The breadth and diversity of twentieth century Scottish poetry, 'its range and energy’ as the editors say, has been extremely well served. In particular the editors have shown the growing and powerful presence of women writers, from Marion Angus and Violet Jacob in the first half of the century through to Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, Sheena Blackhall, Kate Clanchy, Carol Ann Duffy, Valerie Gillies and Kathleen Jamie today.

The short, two and a half page, introduction does not really allow the editors much scope to give details of the other criteria used to select poems for inclusion in the anthology. They 'prefer the immediate and unpretentious to the grandiloquent’ and 'share a respect for craftsmanship and deft use of language’ but they do not go into detail about, for example, how they define a poet’s Scottishness or what determines their approach to the question of language. It may just be acceptable to find space for Robert Service’s 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ because the author was of Scots parentage and spent some of his early years in the country before emigrating to Canada. More surprising is the inclusion of Keith Douglas on the grounds that his background was Scots and Scots-Canadian on his father’s side. These are tenuous links and, in the case of Douglas, the notion of Scottishness is so diluted as to be questionable. Some discussion of why these choices were made would have been helpful.

The matter of language is more serious and the editors, in their very brisk tour d’horizon of the history of twentieth century Scottish poetry, can only glance at it. Of course, Scottish poetry of the past century was famously a battlefield for the proponents of a variety of different poetic languages but, ultimately, it was recognised that there was a greater richness in the diversity of tongues rather than in following one supposed exclusively 'Scottish’ poetic language. I recall a reading given in Edinburgh some thirty years ago by Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean and Norman MacCaig; MaDiarmid read poems written in Scots and English, MacLean in his native Gaelic and MacCaig in English. All three were undoubtedly, whatever their medium, Scottish in their thought and approach. Thirteen poems in this collection are in Gaelic, five of them by MacLean; the editors have not included any of the Gaelic poetry of Ian Crichton Smith while selecting five of his English poems. Ninety two poems are in various forms of Scots while the outstanding majority of the poems, some three hundred, are in English. To a great extent the editors are correct when they say 'Poets—whether employing standard English, classical Scots, Lallans, regional dialects, city patois, or any permutation or combination of these—are linguistically relaxed. No place now for the fierce debates of the Muir-MacDiarmid era.’ A much fuller account of the linguistic options open to Scots poets over the past century, how they arose and how they developed, would be helpful, especially for the non-Scottish readers whom they address in their introduction. These same non-Scottish readers, and many Scots unacquainted with the more recondite usage of, say, MacDiarmid’s early lyrics, are not best served by the complete absence of any glossary, whether to individual poems or as an appendix to the collection, to the poems in Scots. Naturally the Gaelic poetry is given with translations but there is not the slightest help for those coming for the first time to, for example, this:

I’ the how-dumb deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht
The warl’ like an eemis stane
Wags i’ the lift;
An’ my eerie memories fa’
Like a yowdendrift.

Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read
The words cut oot i’ the stane
Had the fug o’ fame
An’ history’s hazelraw
No’ yirdit thaim.

Perhaps a desire to avoid the possibly deadening effects of what they describe as 'purely academic principles’ has led the editors to avoid anything like an apparatus criticus [although they have room for over thirty-eight pages of biographical notes on the contributors]. I fail to see, however, in what way the absence of any glossary is going to gain the book the 'much wider readership’, beyond 'native Scots’, that it aims for.

The other point that I would have liked to see discussed in the introduction is the 'rationing’, so to speak, of poems among the various contributors. The 'Big Beasts’ are not allowed to dominate the collection: MacDiarmid has eight poems and an extract from 'The Glass of Pure Water’; MacCaig, MacLean and Muir have six apiece, Mackay Brown five and Morgan four. There is certainly a good argument for limiting the allowance of the famous and more widely anthologised poets so that a fuller range of less well-known writers can be published. That, I think, is the decision the editors have made and on the whole it works extremely well. There are some strange anomalies, however, where certain minor poets are, I feel, over-represented: Rayne Mackinnon has four quite long poems which take up three pages, giving him one page less than MacCaig. I would happily have had only two pieces by Mackinnon if it meant gaining more by MacCaig, or, indeed, by Lochhead or Jamie. Finally, and this is more than simply to play the favourite game of all reviewers of anthologies, there is one work which should not have been omitted. The dust-jacket tells us that 'this anthology will contribute to a clearer concept of Scottish cultural identity’ and I would agree entirely with that statement. How much more powerfully it could have done that had the editors included Hamish Henderson’s 'Freedom Come All Ye’. Set to the relatively modern pipe tune 'The Bloody Fields of Flanders’, it is, as Neal Ascherson has said, 'a socialist battle-song. It was composed at a time when millennial faith in socialism was beginning to decline in Scotland. But the song lives on because it also packs an enormous high-voltage shock of national self-assertion…. It declares that Scottish soldiers are not glorious but have drenched the world with innocent blood for the sake of a racialist empire.’ Breaking free from that imposed role, it looks to a future when black and white are inter-married and Scotland can give a welcome to all of humanity, 'a’ the bairns o’ Adam’. It combines a critical view of Scotland’s past with a challenging vision of her future; as such, it should find a place in any anthology of Scottish verse.

Allan Ronald

The Use of English 57.2 Spring 2006, 161-164 © The English Association 2006

Twentieth Century Poetry. Selves and Situations, by Peter Robinson. (OUP, £50.00).

Peter Robinson’s third book of criticism collects and revises a series of his occasional essays published between 1986 and 2003, presenting them as a sustained enquiry. His collection explores a dilemma posed by two questions put by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his 1990 Locke lectures: 'How should we live, whatever the circumstances?’ and 'Under what circumstances is it possible to live as we should?’ [1] Robinson draws on some interesting reading in philosophy, often from Wittgenstein, to pursue these questions, but he argues that attentive, accurate interpretation of the poetry of our times can also provide solutions to Nagel’s dilemma: 'One of the ways …. to gain a textured understanding of our selves in their situations, so as to ask questions about the world and how to live in it, is to read poetry.’ [21] Is this statement much more than a general rubric under which to assemble an interesting miscellany of chapters? But to follow Robinson’s argument is to be taken through a singular selection of poems, and there won’t be many readers of this study who do not learn a good deal, either about poets with whose work they are already acquainted, or about texts that will be quite new to them. A question for collections such as these must always be: Why these poems and poets and not others? Wouldn’t Les Murray help the case? How might John Ashbery qualify it? Some kind of explicit rationale for the choices made would have been interesting, but the essays do help us to read and contextualise Robinson’s own poetic enterprise, well-represented in his Selected Poems from Carcanet (2003) [reviewed in Use of English 54/3 Summer 2003].

Peter Robinson’s first chapters examine aspects of poems composed at critical moments in their author’s lives, and which, by his argument, call for an understanding of their immediate contexts, both biographical and more generally social. These are William Empson’s 'Aubade’, Ezra Pound’s 'Villanelle: The Psychological Hour’, two ballads from 1930 by Basil Bunting, Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, and W.S. Graham’s 'The Nightfishing’. Discussions of work by Elizabeth Bishop and Allen Curnow are concerned with 'the poetic shaping of the often painful or difficult insights which may come of expatriation or travel’ [18]. Peter Robinson himself has lived and written about his own experiences of 'expatriation’ in Italy and Japan since leaving England in the 1980s, so as with all critical writing by creative poets, it is difficult not to look for the author’s own agendas, perhaps not fully apparent to the poet himself, in the secondary discourse of his criticism. Chapters on Charles Tomlinson and Mairi MacInnes, who may be for many readers one of the welcome discoveries offered by the book, consider poetry and place through the medium of translation and imaginative displacement. A discussion of Tom Raworth’s early poetry in relation to Pop Art 'examines the renewal of interest in early and classic modernist procedures during the 1950s and 1960s’, and the final chapter on Roy Fisher provides a suitably eschatological finale, considering 'last things and the treatment of the dead in poems’. [19]

Robinson’s scrupulous reading of Pound’s 'Villanelle: The Psychological Hour’ seeks to place the poem in a moment of crisis for the poet himself, and provides persuasive detail and intertextual references in support. For Robinson, 'Pound’s poem is a diagnosis of a problem that he may have felt himself to be suffering from; namely, a too aestheticized, psychologized, and depoliticized concept of good art. In this sense, the 'Villanelle’ … is a forerunner of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’. [37] It’s hard to argue with the findings or readings here, as with his careful biographical and political placing of Empson’s 'Aubade’ in the first chapter. But to quote a remark by Wittgenstein that Robinson does not cite, 'Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.’ Robinson’s interpretations are realist and biographical, perhaps reflecting the current success of literary biography both as a genre and way of reading, but are they made at the expense of poetry’s non-referential dimensions? A position to set in dialogue with this kind of reading would be Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice. A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry (Manchester UP, 1978), which heroically proposed to counter all 'bad naturalization’ in the reading of poetry, since 'Contemporary poetry has suffered from critics’ disposition to make poetry above all a statement about the external world … Poetry can only be a valid and valuable activity when we recognise the value of the artifice which makes it different from prose.’ [xi]

In fact one of Peter Robinson’s most distinctive contributions in these readings is his persistent focus on the shaping of lines, rhythm and diction in direct response to immediate contexts and meaning. His discussion of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal is a particularly striking example of attention to poetic form and political circumstances: 'The flexibility of Autumn Journal’s quatrains, in relation to the Munich crisis, generates literary occasions in which ordinary utterances can express the anxiety and anguish of the moment, while simultaneously discovering a shape that counteracts that “chattering terror”.’ [65] This reading of MacNeice makes his Autumn Journal seem like a more interestingly vulnerable response to critical times than Eliot’s slightly later, more hieratic performance in Four Quartets; but does this make it a better poem?

W.S. Graham declared 'The poet or painter steers his life to maim / Himself somehow for the job’ in his wonderful elegy to Peter Lanyon, the Cornish painter 'killed in a gliding accident 1964’. Robinson’s Chapter Five, 'Dependence in W.S. Graham’, considers the punishing isolation of Graham’s own chosen route for writing. The independence of Graham’s life was dearly bought, and for Robinson becomes a necessary condition for the independence of his poetic achievement. As Graham finely wrote in his 'Notes on a Poetry of Release’, 'Let us endure the sudden affection of the language’, and Robinson is at his best when he demonstrates the canny tactics by which Graham invokes and involves a putative reader, for example in his epistolary poems to painter-contemporaries such as Lanyon, Bryan Winter, and Roger Hilton, and, most movingly, to his wife Nessie Dunsmore. These poems, 'like his questions that do not presume or imply an answer, depend not on describing or assuming what the addressee should be like, but on finding her inviolable and inscrutable:

I leave this at your ear for when you wake,
A creature in its abstract cage asleep.
Your dreams blindfold you by the light they make.’ [92]

With 'Tom Raworth and the Pop Art Explosion’ Peter Robinson demonstrates the inclusive range of his poetic sympathies since you might imagine that Raworth’s form of neo-avant-garde practice would be alien to Robinson’s own aesthetic. Robinson’s poems are written with a biographical realism, as you might expect from his critical emphases, and always offer what linguisticians call 'cohesion’, the frank possibility of resolved meanings, even if these are often enigmatic. Raworth’s commitment is to a writing without conscious control or agenda so that the act of writing and reading becomes the effort to find cohesion, or experience the discontinuities of perception, memories, and experience itself: 'I really have no sense of questing for knowledge. At all. My idea is to go the other way, you know. And to be completely empty and then see what sounds.’ [221] Robinson’s essay on Raworth is genuinely helpful, carefully exploring the critical debates around his radical practice and finding that 'his work has not succumbed to an attitudinizing intelligence which would seek to valorize either the discontinuous or the continuous at the expense of the other.’ [129] The final chapter of this collection is a poignant discussion of Roy Fisher’s 'sustained preoccupation with last things’, and perhaps draws on Robinson’s own recent experiences, about which he has movingly written in poems such as 'Before and Operation’, 'A Burning Head’ and 'Convalescent Days’ [see his Selected Poems, pp. 81—8].

Peter Robinson’s criticism is enviably informed, and his knowledge of recent and contemporary poetry in English embraces an impressively wide range of work; he also appears to know Italian, French and Spanish poetry well. Not many academic critics can claim as much. Robinson’s commitment to the value and importance of poetry is admirable, and these essays frequently demonstrate the unique pleasures and insights that careful reading of ambitious poetry can give, an art form which, as Elizabeth Bishop wrote, has always been 'expressly spared’ throughout the ages, precisely because it cannot be commuted into commercial or mass-popular banality.

Note: This book is generally well edited but the adjectival 'Twentieth century’ in the title lacks a hyphen on both the dust jacket and title page; this may be a new design convention, although the phrase is hyphenated throughout the text itself. The inner cover flap also lists Peter Robinson’s 'critisism’ among his works, and it may be that OUP needs to sharpen its design and editorial oversight here.]

Nigel Wheale

The Use of English 57.1 Autumn 2005, 76-79 © The English Association 2005

Miscanthus: Selected and New Poems by Anthony Barnett. (Shearsman Books, £11.95)

Each generation since the mid-Victorian era has produced a literary avant-garde that has become recognised, accepted and eventually established as part of the canon. This process is by no means uniform and involves the filtering out of many styles and approaches along the way. Anthony Barnett’s work is becoming recognised and accepted. It appears in A Various Art (1987) edited by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville; Poets on Writing: Britain 1970-1991 (1992) edited by Denise Riley and Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970 (1999) edited by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain. The work of J.H. Prynne, John Riley, Peter Riley, Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood and others from Barnett’s generation is similarly in the process of becoming recognised and accepted. Barnett has translated Norwegian, Swedish, French and Italian poetry and, as part of Allardyce, Barnett, has published a range of international poetry, music books and edited the journal, Fable Bulletin: Violin Improvisation Studies. He has worked as a percussionist in the 1970s and as a visiting scholar at Meiji University, Tokyo in 2002.

Miscanthus: Selected and New Poems, edited with an Introduction by Xavier Kalck, form another part of that process of recognition and acceptance. Building on the Collected Poems entitled The Resting Bell (1987), Miscanthus draws upon work from six subsequent volumes and adds new poems from two sequences 'And When I Sleep I Do Not Weep’ and 'Florna’. Kalck’s selection begins from Barnett’s fifth collection Blood Flow (1975). Barnett’s work from the mid to late seventies is well represented. It is work that resonates in its purity of language. The poems are marked by a balanced of positioned language in short, condensed utterances where the unsaid, the spaces between the words, is as crucial as what is said. It is work that demands close attention to each word and punctuation and, with its beguiling brevity, works well in a classroom of sixth-formers. Mud Settles (1977) consists of a sequence of thirty four short (3-11 lines) units that move through a seemingly knowing narrative self, alive to the elemental and natural world, experiencing a disrupted perception of self and other. Successive units introduce new elements within a conflict between the self and other. There is

Conflict between
what attracts
and what is already close (page 63)

This is followed by an unfeeling rose that 'stays in the cold’ and in the next unit:

Blood dries on the hot sand.
Blood of my beloved.
But you are nowhere
to be heard. (page 64)

The violence of the contracted self and disrupted other simultaneously can be read as a nature versus culture dichotomy and struggle between the sexes or individuals. It is a raw struggle with 'a trembling at every rise’ and

A terrible orchestra of contradiction
and expansion - (page 76)

that holds a balanced tension of meaning throughout.

From Report to the Working Party. Asylum. Otiose (1979) through A White Mess (1981), Moving Buildings (1982) to North, North, I Said, No, Wait a Minute, South, Oh, I Don’t Know (148 Political Poems) (1985), Barnett’s work becomes more spare, heightened to pitch and resonant. It is the work’s brevity that arrests the reader and demands attention. Barnett is able to render a few words into a high pitch, as in 'Not Godlike’ (page 90):

the poet is not god

you know this
and since god was not there
say the poet is

as ordinary as you are

sanguine, fearful and un-

loved,

you know this.

Through such brevity, the words 'sanguine, fearful and un- / loved’ have to carry great weight. It is Barnett’s skill that they do and are memorable. He is able to write with pristine clarity producing a stunning image, as in the poem 'Imperfect Faith’ (page 93), and compress material to an effective one line or two. There are only a few English poets capable of this level of intensity. One thinks of Thomas A. Clark, Lee Harwood, and John Riley and in a different vein the throwaway comedic lines of Tom Raworth. The mature Barnett poem offers an exemplary weight to each word utilised. It is knowing, playful, fretful, beguiling and sometimes elliptical. It utilises repetition in the manner of an improvising jazz musician. The Quiet Facts (1979) section combines compact simplicity within a poetic movement that echoes the preoccupation of Mud Settles with greater compression. By selecting short phrases Barnett focuses attention both on the individual words, their most obvious social meaning as well as their other possible meanings. There are twenty numbered units each comprising a few words that carry some reference to a social and domestic life and the elemental and natural world. Significantly, they are shorn of references to historical time and place is located through reference to minimal detail, 'The Corsican pine’, 'drift wood’, 'Sandalwood’, 'Salt’ and 'The gull’. The sequence moves through the domestic, with an unidentified addressee, to an implicitly alienated social and political world through a series of perceptual and psychological moments. As exact relationships are only implied by tenuous possibility the openness of the poetry is held through the bulk of the sequence. It is perhaps let down by reliance upon the use of the unmediated pronoun 'we’ that leads to an ultimate closure. However, there is a haunting beauty to the sequence that holds a firm grip on the reader.

You
tremble for another.

For a moment, and
for another moment.

We know and we understand
without knowing the burden.

We say you are a friend
who understands. (page 116)

The following sequence A White Mess (1981) is perhaps less successful with its use of a telling rather than showing narrative self. Contemplative of spring, a first person narrative self looks at the world and a disrupted other. There is less mediation and more ellipsis producing a partial imbalance. Little Stars And Straw Breasts (1993) returns to the familiar territory of distance and disrupted communication between a narrative self and other, in this case a lover. Here forty-two units of 4-9 lines employing from 6-20 words, mostly around 12-16 words, allow some tight metonymical writing to be unleashed. The spaces between each unit allows not only duration, the passing of time, but also a crucial movement beyond the previous unit in spatial terms as well. The gradual filtering of detail in each unit produces a cumulative impact and power. Barnett also takes advantage of the structure to add commentary outside the narrative action that draws in other levels of reference.

Doesn’t the etymology
of two symbols sound
(metaphorically) like
sound as (metonymically)
a pair of cymbals?

Then a great clash.

Carp and Rubato (1995) embraces a fuller line and prose. Whilst it lacks the convergence of earlier work it does show a development in his use of form and music, as in 'Aching Bones’:

In sufficient shelter, in sufficient space. Your
symmetry, your chance, your perfect alibi, your
lame excuse. Silent, incoherent properties of rock.
Upset and set up. Welcoming, unwelcoming.
Aroma, Aurora. Flowers. Flares. (page 199)

Barnett’s late 1990s work shows much more reliance upon prose and is less dramatic. Some of the subsequent poems published for the first time show a return to the qualities upon which Barnett’s reputation in based. Here is 'Often By A River’:

The scent
Under the rose

Broken vessels

Mistakes and I cup my face in my hands

Often where a river

Guilty of reeds and olive stupidity

Turns and runs

Reparations
Locked and looked up

You are so lovely

Always clearing the throat (page 243)

Barnett is undoubtedly at his best an inspiring poet and one whose stature may well continue to grow. The weakness in his poetry is the use of an unmediated narrative self without a wider context to its unreliability or alienation from itself or others. There is also an occasional reliance upon the prosaic and rhetorical. Its great strength is its openness to the world. It is in this sense child-like and alive. It offers students an opportunity to examine relationships to language and to see the stark richness and potential of small units of language. There are no difficult words and meanings here.

The curves,

The occurrences.

They do not harden for us.

The wind rips the branches.

Sighs, and sighs

Turning into mother blackbirds. (page 117)

It is entirely possible to follow the lesions, edges, juxtapositions that Barnett utilises to reach a notion of what the poems mean. There are some poems that resist immediate meaning through the sheer joy of their music and openness. It is also possible through these poems to conceive of the world as a set of shortened or inexplicable connections and struggles. Such a world-view is not entirely inimical to the current generation of texting teenagers.

David Caddy
The Use of English 57.1 Autumn 2005, 80-84 © The English Association 2005

Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. (Carcanet Press £9.95).

In the Poetry Pléiade series Carcanet have just reissued this handsomely presented edition of the selected poems of one of the most intriguing figures of twentieth century American poetry. The volume contains an excellent selection of O’Hara’s most important poems and the editor, Donald Allen, makes it clear in his Preface how difficult a task that selection procedure turned out to be:

After devoting the better part of three years (five would have been even better) to the erection of the splendid palace known as The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, it at first seemed almost impossible to dismantle and reconstruct a selection. Fortunately my neighbour Bill Berkson came to the rescue; between us we managed to saw and hammer a possible structure…Meanwhile, Kenneth Koch generously took a long look at our choices and gave us his certainties, doubts and hesitations. Then Jimmy Schuyler added his suggestions…Thus have we all together at last constructed The Selected Poems.

This selection admirably compliments Mark Ford’s The New York Poets: an anthology, also published by Carcanet, which contains work by John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler as well as O’Hara. The term 'New York School of Poets’ was first used in 1961 and Schuyler said 'New York poets, except I suppose the colour blind, are affected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.’ This imagery is especially appropriate to the work of O’Hara.

In January 1949 the Journal which Frank O’Hara kept during his time at Harvard expressed deep unease at the mutability of life:

The fragility of things terrifies me! However belligerent the cactus, ash from a casual cigarette withers its bloom; the blackest puddle greys at the first drop of rain; everything fades fades changes dies when it’s meddled with; if only things weren’t so vulnerable!

He also recognised the importance of art as a way of translating immediate ephemera into something more permanent:

Simply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!

A prominent example of O’Hara’s style of making the immediate into the concrete arose from a moment in December 1955 when, in response to being teased by Schuyler about being able to write a poem at any time or in any place, he went into his bedroom to compose, in a matter of minutes, 'Sleeping on the Wing’:

The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too. Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.

The image of the iceberg is teasingly effective since it not only suggests that what we see is a consciousness which rides above so much more but also, since it is itself in the process of change, it highlights the need for 'speed’ in order to etch in the ice. The contradictions held in the image are further suggested by the living quality of 'breathe your warmth’ which promotes the disappearing of the ice-etching. This preoccupation with death, disappearance and the extinction of singularity is central to the poetry of Frank O’Hara and it accounts, partly, for that poetry’s haunting elusiveness.

In August 1956, responding to the deaths of Bunny Lang, whom he had known since Harvard days and Jackson Pollock whose fatal car crash happened some days before, O’Hara wrote the first of what he was later to refer to as his 'I do this I do that’ poems. In 'A Step Away from Them’ O’Hara left what his biographer, Brad Gooch, calls 'a record for history of the sensations of a sensitive and sophisticated man in the middle of the twentieth century walking through what was considered by some the capital of the globe.

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-coloured
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.

Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S
CORNER. Giuletta Masina, wife of
Frederico Fellini, è bell’ attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.
There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they’ll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

Gooch refers to the poem’s 'handheld camera fashion’ as O’Hara 'heads on his lunch hour west and then downtown from the Museum, past construction sites on Sixth Avenue, through Times Square where he stops for a cheeseburger and a glass of papaya juice beneath the Chesterfield billboard with blowing smoke, and then back uptown to work.’ The seizing on moments, the tiny objects, the enticing sights and sounds of the everyday bring to life an intensity of gaze, a celebration of the moment. However, for every exotic sight and delightful sensation, there are falling bricks, bullfights, blow outs, armories, mortuaries, and, as the name Juliet’s Corner suggests, tombs. The fragility of the everyday is caught melting between the Puerto Ricans who make the day 'beautiful and warm’ and the end-of-line word 'First’ which heralds the references to the death of three close friends. As with the image of the iceberg, the poet here seems to be not only a step away from the dead but also from the fast movement of the day: sensations disappear almost as soon as they are presented.

The importance of the fleeting moment is perhaps caught with greatest humour in the much-anthologised 'Why I Am Not a Painter’:

I am not a painter. I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. the painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a colour: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

A little like the oil on wood painting. 'Frank O’Hara’, which Elaine de Kooning produced in 1956, presence is registered in absence: 'When I painted Frank O’Hara, Frank was standing there. First I painted the whole structure of his face; then I wiped out the face, and when the face was gone, it was more Frank than when the face was there.’

Ian Brinton

Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Colin Burrow. (OUP, £65.00).

The main purpose of Colin Burrow’s absorbing edition of The Complete Sonnets and Poems is to ask 'What sort of poet was Shakespeare?’ This would seem to be an obvious question, but it is one that in fact has not often been posed. To this end Burrow provides detailed and often revealing contextual materials in his Introduction, for example citing John Clapham’s 'highly Ovidian Latin poem’ Narcissus, in 1591 the first work dedicated to Southampton, as a pre-text for Shakespeare’s own Venus and Adonis, the second work of dedication to Wriothesley. (This name at the time was probably 'pronounced “Risely”’, Burrow informs us, so sadly dispelling any chance of puns on 'rose’ throughout the poetry.) Also as a means of reading Shakespeare’s poetry within its original context, Burrow reproduces all twenty poems of The Passionate Pilgrim, a rather shabby miscellany brought out by the stationer William Jaggard in 1598/9, and attributed to Shakespeare on the title page, though only five of the poems are confidently ascribed to him.

This pamphlet was 'clearly designed to exploit the excitement which surrounded the name of Shakespeare in that year’ [74]. Burrow interestingly argues that the collection 'does give some indication of the kinds of works which could be sold as his at the height of his fame as a poet’ and Jaggard is redeemed, not as a thief and scoundrel, but as a 'sharp publisher and a shrewd reader’. [82] Burrow has a similarly fruitful reading of that unearthly lyric, 'Let the bird of loudest lay’, appended together with fourteen other poems to Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr in 1601. He argues that the poem’s grave abstraction might in part derive 'from the social and financial needs of a poet in this period, to write verses of praise which are both new and sufficiently abstract to … appeal to a number of patrons’, and beyond this, from careful thought 'about where Elizabethan poetry might move next’ [90].

Turning to the Sonnets, Burrow frames his reading of the sequence by arguing that it developed the procedures of Shakespeare’s earlier, narrative poems to a new level of sophistication, to 'a point at which one is not quite sure who is male and who is female, who is addressed or why, and what their respective social roles are’. Reading in this way, all the maddening questions about the protagonists who are involved within the emotional complications of the series become 'an enabling condition of the delighted mystification’ which the sonnets 'repeatedly invite’. [93] Burrow’s edition declines to feed an inflamed imagination with biographical guesswork, possible candidates, or even usual suspects, to fill out the cast list of the 1609 Sonnets and its dedication. By contrast, Katherine Duncan-Jones in her 1997 Arden edition takes a very biographical approach, and endorses William Herbert as the object of our sonneteer’s attentions. If this is what you want, then a very enjoyable version of the game is Anthony Burgess’s 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun, 'A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-life’, highly recommended, in a fantastical vein.

Burrow’s Oxford edition is beautifully designed, the Photina MT fount giving a lovely clarity to the text. The Sonnets are printed one-per-page, en face with a most helpful commentary. A recent study that is virtually a companion volume to Burrow’s edition is Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells’ Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2004) in the 'Oxford Shakespeare Topics’ series. Chapters deal with central issues such as 'Form’, 'Artistry’ and 'Concerns’ of the Sonnets, but also include original, even daring sections on 'The Sonnets in Relation to Shakespeare’s Life’, and 'The Sonnets as Theatre’. In order to test the quality of Burrow’s readings, I compared his commentary on the Sonnets with that of John Kerrigan’s Penguin edition of The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint from 1986. This was a major contribution to our reading of Shakespeare’s poetry – and drama, in fact – since Kerrigan was one of the first critics, even so late in the day, to call attention to the importance of that deeply strange poem, A Lover’s Complaint, which concludes Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 quarto of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Neuer before Imprinted. Burrow makes this very clear, describing Kerrigan as 'the first editor to see that the poem is integrally connected to the sonnet sequence it follows’ [140] and so definitively dispelling any remaining doubts about the status of A Lover’s Complaint. Kerrigan is therefore a very hard act to follow. How do the editions compare in their analysis of the collection?

As Stanley Wells observed in his 1985 OUP edition, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 'A continuous reading of the sequence is not easy, partly because the closed form of the sonnet, with the finality of its concluding couplet, does not lead the mind forward, partly because there is no easy narrative sequence, partly because the mood changes so rapidly. Nor is it a comforting experience’. Both editions are in their different ways invaluable guides to this disconcerting poem-in-154-sonnets. Burrow maintains the common argument that Sonnets 1—17 form the opening manoeuvre of the sequence, in urging the youth to marry. Kerrigan, as so often, reads with an interestingly different emphasis, extending the first group to Sonnet 19, where 'the displacement of breeding by verse, begun in 15, is completed, and the poet feels able to defy Time on his own terms’ [197]. Read in this way Sonnet 19 does seem to function as a strong marker, the poet now confident that his love 'shall in my verse live ever young’.

Kerrigan frequently offers two or more possible readings of lines and phrases, for example 43 line 4, 'bright in dark directed’, where Burrow gives one apparently secure paraphrase of the same line, though the reverse is the case with the troubling ambiguities of 53.14, 'But you like none, none you, for constant heart’, where Burrow offers three options, and Kerrigan privileges the comfortable choice, 'in constancy you exceed everybody, nobody can compare with you in that’. Kerrigan consistently offers more parallels from elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work, and from other texts. Kerrigan also suggests more of the near-philosophical acuity which some of the Sonnets attain. Of the wonderingly anguished 53, 'What is your substance, whereof are you made’, Kerrigan exactly captures the profound nature of this poem’s dilemma: 'One of the most fascinating things about this strand in the volume is its poet coming to realize that, though violently reversed metaphor preserves the particularity and being of the beloved, it denies the tenor of the world, and lets flattery in by the back door.’ [31]

Burrow’s more concise commentary is very helpful in suggesting thematic shifts and developments within the sequence of the Sonnets, small tonal accumulations that can crucially change the emotional range of the series, as we read through. So, the group from 43 'up to 48 deals in simpler antithetical concepts and more straightforward amorous relationships than 29—42’, and this seems a very accurate description, for example, of the archly antithetical 43, describing how the poet prefers to look on the beloved in sleep rather than in bright day, when his eyes, 'darkly bright, are bright in dark directed’. The refusal to note any fault is implicit, neither so anguished nor self-deceiving as 40. Of the 'rival poet’ series, 78—86, Burrow provides more parallels in near-contemporary sequences, and observes that other collections 'do occasionally attack scribbling rivals, although never at such length’. Of 94, an 'elusive poem … perhaps the most discussed in the collection’, whose 'ironies are almost inordinate’ (Kerrigan), there is a plain disagreement over the reading of lines 7—8:

They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.

Kerrigan argues that the antecedent of 'their’ is 'others’ only, while Burrow allows that the antecedent could be either 'others’ or the 'lords and owners’. Kerrigan does provide a lengthy and fascinating comparison of the sonnet with Act Two Scene One of Edward III, now attributed, with increasing confidence, at least in part to Shakespeare.

While Kerrigan’s edition is certainly more copious in providing alternative semantic readings, Burrow is more alert to possible number symbolism, even if this is not fully developed numerology. In commenting on Sonnet 60, Kerrigan misses an obvious numerological trick that is noted by Burrow: 'The sixtieth sonnet is concerned with the passage of minutes. Spenser’s Amoretti 60 is also rich in the passage of years’; nor does Kerrigan point out that 12 dwells on the hours of the day, as Burrow does. The span of life was generally allotted as seventy years, and Katherine Duncan-Jones has noted that Sonnet 71 may refer to this final rite of passage, 'No longer mourn for me when I am dead’. Burrow cites a persuasive article by René Graziani on symbolic numbering in the Sonnet sequence that links 63 to the early modern notion of the 'grand climacteric’, or main crisis in the human body’s development, which does accord with the theme of the poem, where the persona describes himself 'With Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’er-worn’. Sixty-three is also half-way through the 126 sonnets addressed to the fair youth. So, what is the result of this editorial contest? Perhaps that Kerrigan is the more brilliant, Burrow the more grounded of the two scholars. As such they provide perfect foils for what must be our unending reading of this extraordinary poet of drama.

Vanishing Points, New Modernist Poems, edited by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella (Salt Publishing £14.99)

Amidst the plethora of anthologies which flood the British market there are two which stand out, distinguished, alone, separate: the first, Conductors of Chaos (Picador 1996) is now out of print and the second is this recently published delight from Salt Publications, Vanishing Points. Buy it! Keep it with you. Dip into it time and time again.

The title is explained in Rod Mengham’s Introduction:

The vanishing point lies beyond the horizon established by ruling conventions, it is where the imagination takes over from the understanding. Most anthologies of contemporary verse are filled with poems that do not cross that dividing-line, but our contention is that many poems in this volume are situated on the threshold of conventional sense-making. They go beyond the perspective of accepted canons of taste and judgement and ask questions about where they belong, and who they are meant for, often combining the pathos of estrangement with the irascibility of the refusenik.

This lyrical margin can be felt in David Chaloner’s 'Thicket of Time’:

there are many beginnings
exchange of information
is constant
some are here
where we live
sometimes the sound of oral
transactions lasts for days
at night the lull is frightening
a breathless self-contained hush
of resistance a line deleted
by the glare of the inconsequential
the risk of breaking curfew
extreme although probable
this return
co-ordinates in a language of
darkness and ceremony

Of course, exploring the margins is not a new world for modern poetry and, as Rod Mengham puts it, 'Most (arguably all) of the writers in this volume represent a strand in recent poetry that has stayed in touch with the agendas of modernism; they are not postmodernist, but late modernist writers.’ In 'L’Extase de M. Poher’ (Brass 1971) J.H. Prynne had declared:

No
poetic gabble will survive which fails
to collide head on with the unwitty circus:
no history running
with the French horn into
the alley-way, no
manifest emergence
of valued instinct, no growth
of meaning & stated order:
we are too kissed & fondled,
no longer instrumental
to culture in “this” sense or
any free-range system of time:
1. Steroid metaphrast
2. Hyper-bonding of the insect
3. 6% memory, etc
any other rubbish is mere political rhapsody, the
gallant lyricism of the select…

In Nearly Too Much, The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, (Liverpool University Press 1995), Reeve and Kerridge suggest that this passage almost takes on the role of a manifesto:

In order to survive, poetry has to 'collide’ with the powerful instrumental discourses of the culture (smashing them into pieces), rather than dodging into alley-ways while they pass, or lingering in safe places like gardens. Without this confrontation, poetry will decline into overblown, sub-Leavisite rhetoric of the type suggested by 'manifest emergence of valued instinct’. Or poetry will be kissed and fondled like a favourite pet, or given the freedom enjoyed by a 'free-range’ chicken. The charge is summed up by the double sense of 'instrumental’ here: Prynne would want a poetry neither useful to some manipulative power, nor providing musical accompaniment to a commodifying culture.

In similar combative tone in this volume, David Chaloner’s 'Waste’ contemplates the relation of poem to margin:

how many ciphers
scratch the surface
of digital complexity
or fathom choreography’s
sleek shift
determined moves
and yes
the particular
as a shade of mind
oblivious to the obvious curiosities
inherent in such abundance
such determination
stunning light
and gratuitous acts of clarity
negotiation and cynicism
dream this at your peril
spit jets of fervent ideology
across the promised connection
to locate
grounded but able
to propose the impossible
pull me from the margin
boat of language
cruising your reference
to transfer a whereabouts
receding as distance
rejects inclusion

The effect of the best anthologies, like teachers, is to suggest much more than can be contained within their own limits. Vanishing Points keeps prompting the reader to seek further: it sets thoughts on tracks leading to horizons which lie outside the handsomely produced selection of thirty-two poets from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA. For instance, Andrew Crozier’s 'Blank Misgivings’ which appears here (first published in Douglas Oliver’s and Alice Notley’s journal, Gare du Nord) has haunting echoes of his fine earlier sequence, The Veil Poem. Originally published as a Letterpress Pamphlet by Burning Deck, Providence, in 1974, this sequence of ten poems is one of the most challenging and quietly moving explorations of the relationship between the self and the other. In its third section it contemplates a vanishing point:

What hides in darkness and what truths
it veils. Which side of these doors am I?
This arch might be the sky that bends over us
beneath which is our home, it is a wall
and outer skin beyond which we expire
like the breeze at evening. Let the wall be outside
for a change, my mind strangely free
amid this darkness. It has placed me
within these doors, they can have no secrets
from me any more. Though my judgement may falter
my feet are firmly placed and I can
walk with certainty, the cuts on my forehead will
heal easily, leaving no scars.

In the poem chosen for this anthology, 'Blank Misgivings’, we have a contemplation of death which has a similar quiet reflectiveness that throws the much more frequently anthologised 'L’Aubade’ by Philip Larkin into relief as one of those poems which does 'not cross that dividing line’:

Listen to the wagons thunder and the static roar
light outlined burning through the grid
the abandoned garden and the tumbled fence
alike and other unbuilt monuments to hope

The stones rest as they fall, the dying fall
among the dead and I could wish their bones
at rest their day so what there was each find
so be it the unhoped-for be no more than man

One more aspect of a fine anthology is reflected in the temptation to keep on quoting sections! Go and buy a copy for yourselves; you will find the address for Salt Publications at the end of this issue of the journal.

Untitled Deeds, by Peter Robinson (Salt Publications (£8.95)

This intriguing book rewards and invites re-reading. Salt, and here John Kinsella as editor, are once again ahead of the game: the book might not be a headline-catcher, but it will be a cause for celebration among the 'modicum of dedicated and devoted readers’ that Peter Robinson hopes to reach.1 Readers already acquainted with Robinson’s output as poet, translator and critic might be initially wrong-footed by the bulk of this collection, comprising over 350 'sequenced aphorisms, observations and remarks’. A wide variety of topics (from mobile phones to football crowds to nationalism to evil to drink-inspired writing to National Poetry Day, for example) is traced with deftly-placed allusions (Goethe, Borges, Wittgenstein, Pessoa and Duchamp, for example). The key to the whole business is to read it as a sequence, to ponder the relation of the integral parts one to another and to the whole: it then makes sense as an exploration of the nature of reading itself, the relation between literary production and its reception, and the many ways in which it might be said that we 'understand’. Recurrences, turns and patterns, linguistic and semantic, are felt more powerfully at each reading. The cumulative effect is strong and subtle, and there is much rueful, angry and deadpan humour.

It distorts to quote any one of these 'fixes’ discretely as they do not aim necessarily at pithiness or instant memorability. Writing aphorisms is a tricky business. In a veiled allusion to Geoffrey Hill, Robinson alerts his readers to one of them:

9
A poet has said that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic, and that tyranny requires simplification. Quite so. And this would be a nobly democratic idea—if it weren’t a simplification.

Hill’s rejoinder might be that this too is a 'simplification’ of an argument, that has failed in itself to allow any critical rejoinder. A one-sided gloss, not a true invitation to dialogue. Another major hazard in the process is voiced thus by Dannie Abse: 'if they fail, one sounds so sententious.’2 The root of 'sententia’ and the thin line between it and seeming pomposity and self-righteousness is also one of the aphorism’s risks: to fall short of Blake or Cocteau or Cyril Connelly and to end up sounding like a good day with the fridge-magnet poetry set. That Robinson steers clear of both has something to do with ways of reading or receiving literature debated throughout. Take what seems to be a pretty straightforward utterance:

210
Writers might aim both to show and invite understanding.

By itself this aphorism might seem oft thought and perhaps oft as well expressed, but its contexts and the slight hesitation over 'might’ (a 'choice’ in writing or a plea for good manners?) hint at more. Number 211 posits that the 'life of a language depends on its being able to contain conflict…to bear difference in its usages…’. This makes a diligent reader look back and ponder the word 'understanding’ itself and the ways in which Robinson even here is allowing 'difference in usages’ the chance to animate his own observation. To 'understand’ might involve not only perception of meaning but also sympathetic awareness of another; not just the grasp of semantic realisation, but also the giving of full attention. Robinson’s embroiled and subtle allusiveness then ushers us back to Ben Jonson’s first epigram:

1
TO THE READER
Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my booke in hand,
To reade it well: that is, to understand.

The late Thom Gunn, one of the great 'understanders’ of contextual weight put this gloss on Jonson’s notion of 'understanding’:

He is probably the best epigrammatist in English because he does not intend his statements to be light commendations or dismissals, but witticisms (however elegant) placed in the context of a society’s whole experience. Understanding means taking them to heart, means—ultimately—acting upon them.3

Gunn’s 'understanding’ of Jonson is suitably attentive and sympathetic; it is also a wonderful way into Robinson’s work. What we have in Untitled Deeds is not a random show of 'light commendations and dismissals’ but a sequence that is engaged in pondering the many senses of 'understanding’:

123

Perhaps you can’t hope to amend your life by revising a cadence, but there are far worse things to do with your time.

Again, in isolation, this might sound flippant, but the arguments around Auden’s 'for poetry makes nothing happen’ resonate throughout, from the collection’s title into the following sequence of prose poems that follow the aphorisms, exploring as they do a ghostly presence: 'it was only a draft will, no more nor less able to make things happen than a poem’ (p.89). the reciprocal obligations of writer and reader, the delicate relationship between poem, speaker and indicated or implied reader, the yearning for every act of reading to be close reading: all are explored as carefully as the shadow-life of a family tree in the sequence just alluded to. Spending time with words and the effect of time on words are a key note:

My ideal reader has chosen to spend time with these words in particular.

The antithesis then of the aphorism as a 'brief waste of time’ in this age of emails and texting. Around the qualified hope that writers 'might aim’ to 'show and invite understanding’ are many further shows and invitations from Robinson that his own aim is true, and that 'understanding’ has the larger and more complex associations evoked by Thom Gunn:

348

Once upon a time, understanding something meant seeing it in the best light that your culture could cast: but such a light would almost inevitably produce a long and deep black shadow. Nowadays, understanding requires the use of multiple lights placed at various angles created by the distinct and relevant cultural identities of the world’s populations. Though the state of things now absolutely requires this, very few—and hardly any of the nationally powerful, it would seem—look like they’re in a position to appreciate the greater illumination generated by multiple light sources. Perhaps this is one reason why even the few glimpses of understanding we are granted serve to underline a chronic loneliness.

The sequence allows 'multiple light sources’ as well as an awareness of the previous cultural 'long and deep shadow’. Robinson alertly adapts Gunn’s comment on Jonson’s knowable community ('in the context of a society’s whole experience’) through his sensitivity to 'difference’, the variety of political and social forces, the 'nationally powerful’, prepared to bully, falsify and desensitise notions of 'understanding’. The sequence ends thus:

353

People who think they can’t change are plainly the ones who need to most.

354

But the writer is a dogged snail.

One of the implied links here is that 'the writer’ is someone with the power to 'change’ those 'who need to most’, a tenacious, persistent hard-hatted creature. However, in its 'allowed difference’, the term 'dogged’ allows intractability and stubbornness as part of the writer’s own characteristics. Also, it hints at a 'chronic loneliness’ in the lot of the writer persisting over the years despite misfortune, loss and misunderstanding.4 For more explicit glosses and extended analysis I would suggest that any reader new to Robinson goes from here to his Selected Poems or his critical essays,5 or to the prose poems that complete this book, Side Effects. These richly textured pieces have the feel of grainy sepia photographs, edgily resonant and evocative, working in a line out of Roy Fisher’s prose poems ('The Ship’s Orchestra’, for example). Mutability is made even more explicit in 'a set of poems in prose…concerned with the sorts of unexpected damage produced by various life crises’. The title poem starts thus:

When death cuffed me across the face, I didn’t turn the other cheek, but flinched, and from one corner of an eye, the wide field’s blur just shaded into night…

Back to that snail. Somewhere behind this fitting last image we have Thom Gunn’s 'Considering the Snail’6 and a reminder that all the deepest attempts to 'understand’ are imaginative acts. These recognise and are able to celebrate difference:

What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
of that deliberate progress.

Robinson’s book is a slow burn. It is experimental and internationalist in approach, an exploration of possibilities, a tangle of travels and journeys. The incredible variety of its kinships (from Barthes’ 'Lover’s Discourse’ and Baudrillard’s 'Fragments’ to Dr. Johnson and Dante) tell their own story about the sequence’s elusive, provocative nature. It is the product of a poet who recognises one of the gifts reserved for age as coming to know 'the exact map references for the nowheres you inhabit’. Readers prepared to deliberate will want to spend more time tracing Robinson’s careful and illuminating progress.

Notes

[1] See, for example, the blurb surrounding Don Paterson’s new collection, The Book of Shadows published by Picador this year, several months after the Salt publication: 'THE APHORISM IS A BRIEF WASTE OF TIME. THE POEM IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME. THE NOVEL IS A MONUMAENTAL WASTE OF TIME…the acclaimed poet…explains why he is single-handedly striving to revive the aphorism…’ (Daily Telegraph Books, front page, 11/9/04).
[2] Dannie Abse writes twenty-five 'doodles from his workbook’ (NAWE 31, Spring 2004, p.30). Or see W. Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook (Penguin 1967), p.56: 'How sententious you are! One feels your observations should be punctuated with pinches of snuff.’
[3] From The Occasions of Poetry (Faber 1982), p. 110.
[4] Here see number 187 on the persistence of the writer, the compulsion to keep going in the middle years in the shadow of '…the worthless little creature who had to keep doggedly on through years of disappointment and set-back’.
[5] Try the first two essays of In The Circumstances (OUP 1992), respectively on Wordsworth and reparation, and Auden’s revisions of a context.
[6] From My Sad Captains (Faber 1961), p. 39.

Peter Carpenter

New Collected Poems, by W. S. Graham, edited by Matthew Francis. (Faber £25.00).

W. S. – Sydney, only to friends – Graham was born in Greenock, Renfrewshire, in 1918, and his childhood home was a top-floor tenement close by shipyards on the Clyde, where his father worked as a journeyman engineer. Graham left school at fourteen, and was apprenticed to his father’s trade, but an early passion for the arts led him to take evening classes in art history and literature. At the age of twenty he won a bursary to attend Newbattle Abbey, Dalkeith, for one year. Newbattle had been founded in 1936 as a residential Workers’ Educational Association College, offering full-time study for working people in Scotland. Newbattle gave priceless opportunities to its students; for example, in the early 1950s under the benign direction of Edwin Muir poets of the calibre of Tom Scott and George Mackay Brown developed their talents at the College.

During his single year of full-time study Graham followed a historical survey of literature and lectures on Pre-Socratic philosophy; themes from Heraclitus were to reappear throughout his poetry. At Newbattle he also met Agnes (Nessie) Dunsmuir, a fellow student, and they married in 1954. Graham’s first book, Cage Without Grievance, was published in 1942 by David Archer’s Parton Press in London. Archer was a wealthy and generous patron, and a discerning publisher, having already launched the work of David Gascoyne, George Barker, and Dylan Thomas. Graham had situated himself within a highly creative circle of writers, actors and artists in the milieu of Fitzrovia and Soho, and painting and painters became another abiding focus for his poetry. About this time Graham committed himself completely to his vocation as poet, a dedication that would result in a unique body of work, and a desperately precarious existence. He was often a difficult person to be around. One evening he went to have dinner with his brother Alastair and his wife: 'She was preparing a fish dinner, and, discovering she was lacking a certain ingredient, slipped out to the shops. She returned, a few minutes later, only to find he had taken a hammer and nailed the fishes, all three of them, to the kitchen wall. “Ah”, she said, “you couldn’t help but love him all the same.”’

Graham and Nessie Dunsmuir quit the London scene – and the Blitz – in 1944, moving to a huddle of caravans near Praa Sands in Cornwall; they were to remain in West Penwith from 1956 onwards. Graham found himself among another congenial and stimulating group, the artists and sculptors then working in and around St Ives. Tony Lopez has written the best book about W. S. Graham, and he argues that 'Graham is in a special sense the poet of the modern St Ives community and what it represents culturally in post-war Britain.’ Graham went on to write poems for Alfred Wallis, Peter Lanyon, Sven Berlin, Bryan Winter, Roger Hilton and other artists in the area.

In 1949 Graham’s originality and stature, with just three small collections to his credit, were recognised by T. S. Eliot, who chose to publish The White Threshold with Faber. Eliot should be given credit for taking up a poet like Graham, since this was a highly individual poetry. We could associate Eliot’s patronage of Graham at this period with his decision to publish the poetry of Lynette Roberts, whose Poems Faber published in 1944 and later, her strange wartime epic, Gods with Stainless Ears, in 1951. These were perceptive and courageous choices. Faber remained loyal to Graham, publishing The Nightfishing in 1955, and then nothing until Malcolm Mooney’s Land in 1970. As Michael Schmidt notes, The Nightfishing came out in the same year as Larkin’s The Less Deceived, when the tide was flowing for poetry in the manner of Larkin and 'the Movement’, rather than Graham’s more challenging poetic. The fifteen-year gap between books was a kind of response on his part to this changing climate for poetry in the UK.

Tony Lopez argues that W. S. Graham is 'before anything else a Scottish poet’; he returned continuously to the landscapes and idioms of his formative early years around Glasgow, but he deliberately distanced himself from the Scots literary scene, and chose to write as a self-exiled Scot living at the Land’s End of West Penwith. He worked through an impressive range of poetic conventions, including the verse letters to painters, powerfully convincing versions of the border ballad, some of the most moving love lyrics written in the last century (for example 'I Leave This at Your Ear’ and 'To My Wife at Midnight’), and then his most sustained achievements, the ambitious sequences which include 'The White Threshold’, 'The Nightfishing’, 'The Dark Dialogues’ and 'Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons’. Graham began writing with some of the concerns and strategies of Dylan Thomas and the Neo-Romantics of the 1940s, but his poetic rapidly outgrew these origins through the scale of what he envisioned. His most ambitious poems are often structured around journeys or voyages which imply a process of self-discovery, 'a setting-out into adventure as creation, discovery, love, and the entire process with the return, [this] is the principal substance of most of Graham’s major poems … To say that this process is a continual writing about writing (as [Donald] Davie does) is a quarter of the truth.’

In 'Notes on a Poetry of Release’, an essay written in 1946, Graham revealed something of his founding poetics: 'Let me be the poet writing in a disguise of the first person’, and 'a poem is made of words and not of the expanding heart, the overflowing, or the sensitive observer … The poem itself is dumb, but it has the power of release.’ Statements such as these indicate why Graham’s poetry has demanded more attention in recent decades, since his project, formulated so early, seems to have anticipated fundamental concerns of late-twentieth century writing – the performative nature of identity, for example, and the poem’s reflexive concern with language itself. In other words, from some angles, W. S. Graham could be read in the same spirit as we read John Ashbery or Barbara Guest and the 'Language Poets’ of the '70s and '80s, but as Peter Riley argues, this is again only a partial response to the extraordinary range of Graham’s achievement. The Faber New Collected Poems, carefully edited by Matthew Francis, is helpful and timely in presenting so many poems which have remained so far uncollected, or which were omitted by Graham himself from the Collected Poems 1942—1977 published in 1979. Matthew Francis provides useful notes indicating the publication history for each poem, and lightly annotates contextual details and out-of-the-way idioms.

The new edition gives many more readers access to what seems to have been Graham’s very first sequence, The Seven Voyages, which he effectively suppressed and disowned, reprinting only the introductory poem, ' The Narrator’, in the 1979 Collected Poems. Tony Lopez suggests that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 'Wreck of the Deutschland’ was a significant poem for Graham, providing something of a model for his larger-scale sequences, and Lopez also finds that The Seven Voyages establishes what appears to be a programme for the development of Graham’s poetic journey throughout his career. The seven suppressed journeys do make for impacted, intransigent reading, and in a way one can see why Graham withdrew them from circulation, but as Lopez puts it, 'Already in this work, Graham is moving in “language” as much as any real landscape.’

The White Threshold, as Graham’s first publication from Faber, contains many more lovely and winning poems, as well as the ambitious journey-poem that gives the collection its title. Graham throughout his career could make lines of astonishing lucidity and resonance: 'I walk towards you and you may not walk away’, or 'My dear, I take / A moth kiss from your breath’, and The White Threshold contains many such lines:

Listen. Put on morning.
Waken into falling light ….
Listen. Put on lightbreak.
Waken into miracle.
The audience lies awake
Under the tenements
Under the sugar docks
Under the printed moments …
And the song sleeps to be wakened
By the morning ear bright.

There is something of Auden’s ballad manner here, but then it is altogether Graham’s own unearthly song, so much informed by Scots idioms and his Clydeside childhood, as in 'The Children of Greenock’,

Brighter drifted upon her the sweet sun
High already over all the children
So chained and happy in Cartsburn Street
Barefoot on authority’s alphabet.

This New Collected Poems is a really timely edition, and makes available the development of a remarkable poet whose work at its best is intensely rewarding. Graham’s poetry does also offer a kind of poetic intelligence that was always at odds with the prevailing fashions of poetry in its own time, and which continues to refresh the sense of what great poetry can now be.

Nigel Wheale

The Use of English 56.1 Autumn 2004, 49-52 ©English Association 2004

NOTES

Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court, by Peter Barry: (59.1 Autumn 2007)
The Willy Poems, by David Caddy: (56.2 Spring 2005)
Collected Poems, by David Constantine: (57.2 Spring 2006)
A Living Language, by David Constantine: (57.1 Autumn 2005)
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, by Ian Davidson: (59.1 Autumn 2007)
The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill: (55.3 Summer 2004)
The New Irish Poets, edited by Selina Guinness: (56.3 Summer 2005)
The Language of Literature, by Malcolm Hebron: (56.1 Autumn 2004)
Uncertain Poetries, Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics, by Michael Heller: (57.2, Spring 2006)
Necessary Steps, edited by David Kennedy: (59.2 Spring 2008)
Matsuo Basho's Poetic Spaces, edited by Eleanor Kerkham: (59.1 Autumn 2007)
Blake and Modern Literature, by Edward Larrissy: (58.2 Spring 2007)
Anselm Kiefer / Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory, by Andrea Lauterwein: (59.1 Autumn 2007)
Intimate Voices, Selected Work 1965-1983, by Tom Leonard: (56.1 Autumn 2004)
The Work of the Wind, by S.J. Litherland: (57.3 Summer 2006)
Horses in Boiling Blood, by Barry MacSweeney: (56.2 Spring 2005)
Dylan Thomas, Poems selected by Derek Mahon: (55.3 Summer 2004)
Distant Reading, Performance, Readership and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry, by Peter Middleton: (57.3 Summer 2006)
Ezra Pound: a Literary Life, by Ira B. Nadel: (56.2 Spring 2005)
Waiting for My Clothes, by Leanne O'Sullivan: (56.3 Summer 2005)
Reversing into the Cold War, by Tom Phillips: (59.1 Autumn 2007)
Selected Poems 1970-2005, by Elaine Randell: (57.3 Summer 2006)
Ted Hughes, A Literary Life, by Neil Roberts: (58.3 Summer 2007)
Self Into Song, by Carol Rumens: (58.3 Summer 2007)
The Resurrection of the Body, by Michael Schmidt: (58.3 Summer 2007)
No Man's Land, by Tupa Snyder: (59.1 Autumn 2007)
John Dryden, Poems selected by Charles Tomlinson: (55.3 Summer 2004)
Press When Illuminated, New and Selected Poems 1968-2003 by Nick Totton: (56.2 Spring 2005)
Poetry, The Basics, by Jeffrey Wainwright: (56.1 Autumn 2004)
The Eastern Boroughs, by John Welch: (56.1 Autumn 2004)
Turning Leaves, by Jonathan Ward: (56.2 Spring 2005)
Full Stretch: Poems 1996-2006 by Anthony Wilson: (58.2 Spring 2007)

Necessary Steps, edited by David Kennedy (Shearsman £12.95)

—the subtitle to this extraordinarily inviting series of essays is ‘poetry—elegy—walking—spirit’ and one its achievements is to establish ‘poetry itself as the space of solitary self-possession’. As the editor suggests ‘The walking poem that repositions the self in the universe and the elegy that puts the dead in their proper place underline connections between walking, poetry and the spiritual.’ The sixteen essays collected here offer new ways of thinking about poetry’s work and they open up inviting roads which take the reader on a series of fascinating journeys. To give just two examples of the wide-ranging scope offered here I could start with Jeremy Noel-Tod’s ‘Walking the Yellow Brick Road: A Pedestrian Account of J.H. Prynne’s Poems’ where he looks in some detail at early poem, ‘The Holy City’ after referring to T.S. Eliot’s ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many/I had not thought death had undone so many’:

Prynne’s city is not a waste place but a latent one. ‘The Holy City’ in The White Stones (1969) experiences the same act of walking—and pausing—in an urban environment as a kind of earthly Paradise:

Come up to it, as you stand there
that the wind is quite warm on the sides
of the face.

‘Where we go’ at such a moment is, importantly, nowhere: ‘a loved side of the temple,/ a place for repose, a concrete path’. Prynne has been a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College since the 1960s, so his ‘side of the temple’ may well be a Cambridge chapel, enclosing a concrete-pathed grass quadrangle. In the poem, however, it is transformed from any particular spot into an apprehension—‘come up to—of the body. Stopping, the walker feels himself to be a three-dimensional man, not merely a forward vector, with a ‘face’ whaich also has sides (and temples):

          There’s no mystic moment involved: just
that we are
is how, each
severally, we’re
carried into
                   the wind which makes no decision and is
                   a tide, not taken. I saw it
                             and love is
when, how &
because we
do: you
                   could call it Iersulaem or feel it
                   as you walk, even quite jauntily, over the grass.

As Noel-Tod makes clear in this attractively readable piece, what the poet sees is not a landscape but an emotion. By way of contrast, look at the wonderfully immediate and engaging essay on the ‘Occasions of Elegy’ by John Hall:

I walk down in the evening to the graveyard of Holy Trinity Church. The light is fading and there is a hint of Autumn (Fall) in the air. I am reflecting on forms of loss, especially deaths, and the forms and practices of words—and of other ‘texts’—that ‘we’ use to define and negotiate these. This is something I do anyway. I am not unusual in those strands of my reflection which are to do with loss and death; ‘everybody’ does it. Only those interested in writing and/or the precise forms of social and psychic processes which deal with loss are likely to combine the two strands of reflection and put them up against each other. On this occasion I am responding to an invitation for some writing and so the reflection is occasioned and occasional. And actually the walk is not down to the graveyard; it is up. That down is already, perhaps, elegiac. And that present tense, where did that fall from? Actually the walk was two evenings ago as I write this sentence.

Pursuing this attractively meditative excursion John Hall goes on to remind us of the etymology of the word ‘occasion’ with its sense from the Latin of things falling towards each other: a convergence.

Ian Brinton

Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court by Peter Barry (Salt Publishing £16.99)

As Peter Barry puts it in his introduction: ‘By the 1970s, a major resurgence of British poetry was taking place among poets who looked to these various ‘dissenting’ American poets for inspiration and example when the British scene seemed moribund.’ The ‘various’ poets referred to included the Black Mountain poets (Olson, Creeley, Dorn), the New York poets (O’Hara, Spicer, Schuyler), the Beats (Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti) and the Objectivists (Niedecker, Rakosi, Oppen, Reznikoff, Zukofsky). In 1974 Eric Mottram, a lecturer in American literature at King’s College, London and the forward-looking new editor of Poetry Review, christened this resurgence the British Poetry Revival and promoted the work of the new British poets in the magazine. By 1977 the ‘establishment’ had fought back and Mottram’s contract as Editor expired. However, as the blurb on the back of Peter Barry’s book states, although normalcy had reasserted itself the poetry wars had merely gone underground and their impact is still being felt everywhere. Looking back over the six years of his editorship Mottram highlighted what he had felt to be important about the publication of new and challenging poetry:

In Poetry Review anyone concerned with literature as a major function in society could find serious work; it was not a review for those who consumed poetry from time to time as a leisure pastime.
(Poetry Information 1979-80)

Raymond Williams said that what was happening within the Poetry Society was a head-on collision between poetry’s residual and emergent worlds and Peter Barry suggests that the conflict was a key moment in the history of contemporary British poetry, polarizing the rift between the ‘neo-modernists’, who sought to continue the 1960s revival of the early twentieth-century’s modernist revolution, and the ‘neo-conservatives’, who sought to further the anti-modernist counter-revolution of the 1950s. This is a fascinating book and is certainly essential reading for anyone who is interested in the development of modern poetry. One of the delights for the reader is the way that Barry gives a close textual account of Carlyle Reedy’s poem ‘(isle of sheppey)’ and this detailed approach is itself a lesson in how to read a poem.

Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry by Ian Davidson (Palgrave £45)

This is a really thought-provoking introduction to contemporary poetry and it should, perhaps, be read alongside Peter Barry’s fascinating account referred to above. The introduction lays out the central idea:

This book explores the impact of space and spatialization on recent and contemporary poetry and demonstrates the way some poetry, through form and content, engages with some of the most pressing and urgent social and cultural issues. These issues include, but are not limited to, relationships between political, social and cultural structures, between people, language, identity and places, epistemological issues relating to language and ‘reality’ and to the impact of a global economy and environment on everyday lives.

There are so many references in this book that are worth quoting that I am limited to just two. Firstly, referring to Peter Riley’s Alstonefield (Carcanet 2003), Davidson says that ‘comparisons can be made between moving through space and reading a poem, and there are ways in which a poem can be usefully conceptualized as a place within the space of language.’ He goes on to refer to Alstonefield being a village in the North Staffordshire Peak District and the reader entering the poem as night falls, ‘yet it is as if they are entering a performance space’:

Again the figured curtain draws across the sky.
Daylight shrinks, clinging to the stone walls
and rows of graveyard tablets, the moon rising
over the tumbling peneplain donates some equity
to the charter and the day’s accountant
stands among tombs where courtesy dwells.

The last line here reminds me of that other poet of ‘spaces’, Charles Tomlinson, who wrote that ‘reality is to be sought, not in concrete,/But in space made articulate’ (‘Aesthetic’). The closing stanza of ‘The Ruin’ from Seeing is Believing refers to ‘a vase/Cracked into shards’ which

would seem
Baldly to confess, ‘Men were here’,
The arabesque reproves it, tracing in faint lines:
‘Ceremonies and order were here also.’

The second reference is to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson where Davidson deals with how the ‘field’ of the poem develops from the ‘instant’ to incorporate both space and time. With clear and precise illustration from the text of the poems he shows how Olson is ‘not merely developing a new way of representing the local, but developing poetry as a ‘spatial practice’ that, through an examination of the production of spaces, can reveal the sources of cultural, social and economic power and control.’

Matsuo Bashō’s Poetic Spaces edited by Eleanor Kerkham (Palgrave £37.99)

This is a collection of eleven essays by internationally known scholars and it draws one into a fascinating world of sound and sound’s echo. One of the most celebrated of Bashō’s verses is

furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

old pond:
a frog jumps in
sound of water

In Horikiri Minoru’s account of these lines in his essay, ‘Basho’s world of poetic expression’, he says that the focus of the verse is without question the ‘sound of water’:

Generally “mizu no oto” (sound of water) means the sound of flowing or dripping water, but because in this verse it is the tiny sound made when a frog jumps into water, it expresses limitless silence all the more.

Minoru goes on to retell the story of how, some years ago, when the present Japanese emperor was the crown prince, he was present at a conference discussing haiku where one of the contributing scholars suggested that due to their streamlined shape frogs do not make a noise when jumping into water:

One might say that the sound of water that Basho heard was not one audible to the ear, but one that was audible to the mind.

However, myths tell us who we are and it is worth noting the Black Mountain poet, Robert Duncan’s autobiographical essay, The Truth & Life of Myth (House of Books Ltd. New York, 1968), where he refers to a sense of ‘universal humanity’ which is to be discovered in ‘the mixing-ground of man’s commonality in myth’:

The meaning and intent of what it is to be a man and, among men, to be a poet, I owe to the workings of myth in my spirit, both the increment of associations gathered in my continuing study of mythological lore and my own apprehension of what my life is at work there. The earliest stories heard, nursery rimes and animal tales from childhood, remain today alive in my apprehensions, for there is a ground of man’s imaginations of what he is in which my own nature as a man is planted and grows.

Duncan recalls sitting with his sister, ‘my mother between us’, looking at pictures as he is read to. The picture that stays with him is of three young men sleeping on a mat one of whom, Bashō the seventeenth-century Japanese writer of Haiku, has just woken up and the poem of the frog jumping into an ancient pond echoes down the years.
There are some delightful illustrations in this book and Joan O’Mara’s essay, ‘Bashō and the Haiga’ looks at the influence on his work of the seventeenth-century Kyoriku, about whom the poet said:

In painting he was my teacher; in poetry I taught him and he was my disciple. My teacher’s paintings are imbued with such profundity of spirit and executed with such marvellous dexterity that I could never approach their mysterious depths.

Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan, Myth, Mourning and Memory by Andrea Lauterwein (Thames and Hudson £39.95)

This hauntingly beautiful book celebrates the close relationship between the art of Kiefer and the poetry of Celan:

What Kiefer found in Celan were hermetic images, silent because they were so close to the dead, and always out of step with the metaphors that are commonly used to discuss the genocide of the Jews.

Celan himself observed that a poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially a dialogue, can be a message in a bottle sent out in the belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on the shore of a heartland. This stakes an immense amount upon the importance of the poem and Anselm Kiefer’s work responds to this bodying forth in a manner that is both disturbing and charged with a melancholy sense of dasein. Andrea Lauterwein’s text is essential reading for anyone interested in Celan’s poetry as she unwinds the myths which seek to sanitise a poem such as ‘Death Fugue’; she is unafraid to confront the discrepancy between aesthetics and murder. In one fascinating section of the book, Lauterwein looks at how some of Kiefer’s landscapes can be compared with ‘the emotional tonality of the landscapes developed by Celan’ in a poem such as ‘The Straitening’.

Taken off into
the terrain
with the unmistakable trace:

Grass, written asunder. The stones, white
with the grassblades’ shadows:
Read no more—look!
Look no more—go!

Kiefer’s images of ‘The Iron Path’ or ‘Lot’s Wife’ will remain embedded in the memory when you look through this book. For anyone studying work by Primo Levi or studying in History the world of The Holocaust, this book is essential reading and all school libraries should obtain it without one moment’s hesitation.

No Man’s Land by Tupa Snyder (Shearsman £8.95)

There is a lyric intensity to the poems in this delightful little volume and it fully upholds the blurb on the back which suggests that ‘Tupa has a lifelong interest in metaphorical writing: she thinks of poetry as a dwelling space.’ The use of the word ‘space’ here is apt and Tupa Snyder’s interest in how the white page can act as a home for a poem is clearly reflected in ‘Shadows’.

This morning a fall
of chestnuts a hard leaving
this rain of consonants your eyes
crushed frangipani
or shadows on the river

The poem is subtitled ‘After Lee Harwood’ and it certainly brings to mind the older poet’s early work from Landscapes, such as ‘Question of Geography’:

Facing the house the line of hills
across the valley a river somewhere
hidden from view the thickets there
I can’t remember the colours
green a rich brown as the sun shone

It is the pebble-like clarity of sound which connects the two: the careful, patient concentration upon small things behind which emotion is hinted at, delicately. The concentration of the words allows for echoes of meaning where ‘fall’ has a resonance that combines movement, autumn and loss. ‘Shadows’ ends with that echo going on:

a boy hill smoke
or a wisp of grey from ashtray to mirror
you say I leave
things behind your eyes by the window
nickel coins on a child’s loin
strung on a thin black thread

The last line reverberates with the plucked music of an instrument and an image of the art of writing itself.

Reversing into the Cold War by Tom Phillips (Firewater Press £5.50)

The twenty-four poems in this sleek volume trace a journey through the Balkans and the episodic thread connecting them is an unavoidable awareness of the recent history of a war-torn zone. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the poems is their register of how the ordinariness of life goes on despite the recent history of genocide and concentration camp:

Memorials stake their claims:
war dead, lost leaders, partisans.
It’s early yet, dog-walking hour.
Urgency’s elsewhere: the cashpoint,
that bar. On an open-air dancefloor,
teenage couples endure a waltz.
Too young to forget, they retreat
under cover of their parents’ applause.

Shades here of ‘wars annals will fade into night ere their story die.’

Self Into Song by Carol Rumens (Bloodaxe £7.95)

—in the series of public lectures at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne published by Bloodaxe these three pieces by Carol Rumens are well worth looking at. After talking about the childhood of Philip Larkin and the solitude mixed with sociability of Derek Mahon, Rumens interestingly examines the modern world of prosody. Referring to the ‘varieties of silence’ or what is more popularly called ‘the white space around the poem, she suggests

It’s easy to forget the obvious, that the spaces between the words are un-sounded. Unless a metrical expectation has been established…any desired caesura must be deliberately created, by punctuation or additional spacing. Otherwise, separate signifiers run into a single unit of melody until the end of the line.

Rumens goes on to refer to that fine poem of Denise Riley’s from the 1985 collection, Dry Air which concludes

I. neglect. the. house

Towards the end of the lecture there is a brief excursion around the theme of conversational writing inherited from America with due deference being paid to Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery:

Poetry used to orate: now it murmurs and chatters…Numberless English-language poets are currently working in a manner similar to the Projective Verse style outlined by Olson: they approach the new poem as if it were an open area, a field, and work with the energy of the voice.

This is an attractive little book which certainly repays a careful read.

Ted Hughes, A Literary Life, by Neil Roberts (Palgrave £45.00)

—one of the most interesting chapters in this new book on Hughes (‘A must for all students and scholars of the poet’) is the last one which deals with the writing and publication of Birthday Letters. In a letter from June 1998 written by Hughes to Keith Sagar he had written that the preparation of Birthday Letters had given him ‘free energy I hadn’t known since Crow’. In the same letter he said that the poems were something he had ‘always thought unthinkable—so raw, so vulnerable, so naïve, so self-exposing and unguarded, so without any of the niceties that any poetry workshop student could have helped me to.’ Having traced some of the background to the writing of this last major collection by a poet whose work had been prominent in the public eye for some forty years, Neil Roberts concentrates on what he sees as their major strength as poems of mourning. Pointing us to the time scheme in ‘Visit’, where the poet recollects a night in 1956 during which he failed to see Sylvia Plath at Newnham College followed by a realisation of lost opportunity when he reads her journal ten years later, Roberts comments:

This poem has woven together, and almost superimposed, five moments: that of his failed visit and her journal; her death; the child’s question; his reading the journal; and the poem’s own present…Finally, however, the real significance of the ‘printed words’ asserts itself: what Hughes has encountered has all been representation, ‘only a story’. The poem enacts, in Whitehead’s words, ‘a losing over again’.

This convincing close reading of Hughes’s poem commands our attention and brings to mind an echo of Douglas Dunn’s Elegies and even those most haunting of poems which deal with loss, Hardy’s Poems 1912-13. Neil Roberts has a direct style and a precise focus, both of which make this a most stimulating and crisp analysis of Hughes’s work.

The Resurrection of the Body, by Michael Schmidt (Smith/Doorstop Books £8.95)

—in the Stanza lecture given at last year’s poetry festival in Scotland, Michael Schmidt commented upon ways of reading and misreading poetry. Looking at an early reaction to Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ which took the poem to task for failing to have a securely consistent persona, Schmidt commented:

Only later did it become clear that the essential thing about voices in Larkin’s longer and some of the shorter poems is that they change: beginning in resistance, a resolutely ironic stance, they develop in relation to experience and reach an understanding or a point from which understanding might be possible.

This development during the course of a poem is one of the real delights in Schmidt’s recently published volume of poems and is perhaps best revealed in ‘Regression’. Opening with a detached vision of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian the very detachment and its ironic stance become questioned:

Riddled he was, and idling, Sebastian,
Bound to the trunk by laughter and desire.
The missiles struck, their feathered ends
Glittering, the beaks like acupuncture pins
Releasing wheels of lightness, lightness, light.

The ironies are multilayered here ranging from the double meaning of the first word to the enforcement of ‘Bound’ which has a directional quality as well as a restrictive one. The questioning of personal response to what one reads is moved further when that last line is developed three stanzas later into the double-edged

Make light of him? I do make light of him.

This demand for close reading, which does not settle into a consistent persona so needed by that early critic of Larkin, provides us with a haunting beauty which lingers across time and place:

Make light of one who loved the minarets
And temple courts, church towers of Fez, Shemlan,
And loved the festivals, and he could dance,
Who had a sweetheart when they came for him.
He loved his comrades, too, in time. In time

He learned to love his foes and had to die.
I watched them bend him round the broken tree
Early in the day, before the sun,
Before opponents primed the door’d barrage,
Before the world tuned in with blank, cold eye.

The poem ‘Not Yet’ from earlier in the volume is a moving recognition of the magical world of childhood with its needs and its focus on the shifting presence of the seasons: time continues to pass until death cuts its own path across the postponed decision to fell the tree:

My father said he’d have to cut the tree down,
It was so high and broad at the top, and it leaned
In towards the house so that in wind it brushed
The roof slates, gables and the chimney stone
Leaving its marks there as if with intent.

We said, don’t cut it yet, because the tree was so full
Of big and little nests, of stippled fruit.
In spring and summer it spoke in a thousand voices,
The chicks upturned for love, the birds like fishes
Swimming among the boughs, and always talking.

Blake and Modern Literature by Edward Larrissy (Palgrave £45.00)

— this ‘first full-length study of Blake’s influence on twentieth-century literature is fascinating in its range of reference. The history of Blake’s influence from the world of pre-Raphaelitism to that of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ (‘These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree’), from W.B Yeats’s ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ to its following counterpart, ‘The Sad Shepherd’ is dealt with succinctness and energy. However, what for me remains the most intriguing area of this book is the work done on Iain Sinclair, Robert Duncan and Edward Dorn. Professor Larrissy refers to Sinclair as a ‘psychogeographer’ whose novels (White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings, Downriver) and discursive prose (Lights Out for the Territory) deal with the ‘exploration, elaboration and mythologizing of the chains of association emanating from place’. The looming American figure behind this world is, of course, Charles Olson and Larrissy quotes from the Black Mountain Rector’s extended reading list offered to Ed. Dorn:

Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years).

The phrase with which Olson finishes this exhortation, not quoted by Larrissy, is ‘And you’re in, forever.’ This is the idea which perhaps invades Sinclair’s world and the Appendix to the book prints an email from the Eastender to the Leeds academic:

Really, all I can say is that Blake remains fundamental to any mapping of London. That, by choice, I walk through Bunhill Fields at the slightest excuse…Blake as inhabitant, citizen, nonconformist, realist/visionary, self-publisher, married man, walker is a presence I would consider before writing anything about London.

One of the rewarding spin-offs of reading this book, for me, was that it sent me back to the intricate webs of place and myth in Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion.

Full Stretch: Poems 1996-2006 by Anthony Wilson (Worple Press £10)

—the blurb on the back of this attractively presented volume from Worple suggests various qualities which are the hallmark of this quietly distinguished poet from Exeter: his poems ‘get to the heart of human relationships…the way we are alone and together’; ‘an habitual and natural delicacy’; ‘witty, humorous and often poignant’. There is a tone of domestic awareness which never drifts into the mawkish, a quiet register of the relationship between humans and time:

The lives we’re living,
what difference do they make?

We wake up,
throw our children in the air
and catch them laughing
into our arms.

Friends come and go, seasons pass,
the leaves collect silently
in the garden.

Which reminds me,
there’s pruning to be done
and bonfires to build.

The last poem in the volume, ‘Here’ (for Tatiana), has a strength to it which not only celebrates the ordinary quality of life but which also has a teasing sense of hinting at the complacency that lies just beyond the page:

We live here now and everything is going to be fine.
We have a new bed, and more gifts

than we know what to do with.

The car starts first time each morning
and in the evening we cook together
and are easy, two friends.

People show kindness in unmerited ways,
with words and with flowers.
Our neighbours recognise us, and smile.

We drink out of bowls
and we eat off a table that shines.
We have made this and this is our home.

We live here now and everything is going to be fine.

The tone which Anthony Wilson captures is similar to the one which haunts the final pages of Julian Barnes’s 1980 novel, Metroland:

I feel a kind of lazy pleasure too at the smooth, clean, dry expanse of stainless steel in front of me. I rotate on the single leg of the stool, holding tight with one hand, then passing the other one behind my back so that I am gripping with both again. Now I am facing in to the room. The table laid for breakfast, the neat line of cups on their hooks, the onions giving off a crepuscular glisten from their hanging basket: everything is orderly, comforting, yet strangely alive. The spoon by my breakfast bowl implies the grapefruit cut and waiting in the refrigerator, the sugar on its surface already hardening into a crust.

Wilson’s world, like that of Barnes, registers the fact that ‘objects contain absent people’.

Selected Poems 1970-2005, by Elaine Randell (Shearsman)

—Lee Harwood's comments on the poetry of Elaine Randell take us straight to the heart of an individual voice which deserves to be better known in this country. 'Elaine Randell's poetry is about people, that is herself and the lives of those around her. The personal and the words are set in context, in the houses and streets and countryside we inhabit, we move through…'. Harwood also comments upon 'That quality of carefulness'. That decisive and unobtrusive sense of caring for the moment and registering the self's involvement in it is memorably there in 'Early in my life':

So we
are left with action
that device we only know the
carriage of.
The clouds reiterate.
I give up the chase.
Late love early in my life,
pressing as it does leaving me
exquisite fine shadow of hair
the rush of wet road
daily life despite this.
Skilled storage. Shelving
of obligation and all too often
the night goes on by and girls
hover in doorways with tattoos—
O rain damaged heart.
The shadow passes over itself
Dark hot evening a dog barking,
church bells.
These;
cliffs we drown upon,
your arms unfelt.

There is an acceptance of limitation in the use of the word 'device', almost a shade of the shrugged shoulder as we board the only available vehicle which will carry us forward. The sense of movement is felt in the present participles, 'pressing', 'leaving', 'shelving' and there is an Odyssean quality of loss in the image of the last two lines. In this selection of thirty-five years of poetry, the reader is taken on a voyage which celebrates life in sharply perceived moments. Since it is in the small moments that life is lived 'It's not catastrophes, murders, death, diseases that/age and kill us; it's the way people look, laugh and/run up the steps of omnibuses.' ('Which is neither mine nor his but in common'). In one of the prose pieces which punctuate the volume, the poet makes a visit to a remote prison. It is a journey 'across the thick fog of the fens to the high walls of the male prison' and the story which unfolds teeters on the edge of vertigo. Its title is 'I Said Hold Tight'.

Distant Reading, Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry by Peter Middleton, (University of Alabama Press)

—a dynamic account of the history, practice and theory of poetry as performance. This book challenges the reader to think carefully about what is meant by reading poetry:

But the meaning of a poem is not already there latent in the pattern of words, as a dictionary definition is available as a ready equivalent of any ordinary word in circulation. The production of meaning by a poem is an intersubjective process extended over time, many individuals, and only ever partially available for cognitive reflection.

In a series of essays which look closely at the importance of presentation it terms of meaning, Middleton argues 'that many of the processes whereby poetry is performed, displayed in magazines, imperially controlled by the computer, read by consumers, printed on the page, or carefully labelled with anonymity-defying authorial names become integral to the possibility of meaning in contemporary poetry'. There are fascinating pages here on J.H. Prynne's later work (including his 2001 publication on Shakespeare's Sonnet 94) and they remind me of Middleton's earlier 1997 review of a book on Prynne's poetry:

Resistant poetries are not necessarily in need of clarifying subtitles. The resistance is an intrinsic part of what the poetry does.

This is a difficult but highly readable book which should be dipped into by anyone wishing to come to terms with post-modernist attitudes towards the relationships between the reader and the text.

The Work of the Wind by S.J. Litherland (Flambard Press Poetry £8.50)

—when Equipage published Barry MacSweeney's posthumous book of 'translations' from the work of the French poet Apollinaire it soon became clear that Jackie Litherland was central to the poetic impulse of the whole volume. MacSweeney referred to her as 'the best woman poet in England' and classed her as the 'warrior queen'. This volume, divided into four parts, traces a fragmented history of the relationship between the two poets and moves between a deep sense of loss and a raw pain of time remembered. There is something so simply human in the response to betrayal which dominates some of the poems:

I thought betrayal an intense thing. It's slight.
I walk to the Co-op. buy three bottles of white.
The sober thing so dearly bought, the wine so cheaply.

For a day, I honoured my sobriety and lit
two candles, close together as I could fit,
touching on sand. Thanksgiving for a day.

On the second day I announced my sobriety.
I stood undefiled, unprotected but with
a responsible person (I am not responsible).

On the third day, just before closing, I entered
the Co-op. No mistake about what I wanted this time.
I was completely sober, my dear. Nothing remains,

destruction is quick, a cheap exit. You can never say
I didn't choose the wine over you. pure preference.
Yes, I deceived you about the light. As you leave,

leave me in the dark. You lost the final encounter.
Look at the state of the world. I'm back in bed, drunk.

I slipped the cork, I drank the white knowledge.

There is an authentic grief here tinged with mordant humour which seems to act as a type of reply, riposte even, to MacSweeney's own demonic self-lacerations which haunt the Bloodaxe selected poems, Wolf Tongue (2003). In a way, the later poems of that volume (The Book of Demons 1997) and this new publication should be read side by side.

Collected Poems, by David Constantine (Bloodaxe Books £12)

—one of the most immediate introductions to the poetry of David Constantine is to be found in Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998):

The poems contain extremes: classical intention subverted by Romantic temperament, the poem of praise undermined by anxiety, the political vision run aground on social reality. The present is in danger of slipping away between memory, or loss, and longing, that greatest peril for the radical imagination.

Constantine's own words are also of central importance:

I don't mind my poetry being thought of as self-expression so long as it is understood that the self being expressed is a large and not merely biographical thing, more a state or condition than a person.

This Collected Poems contains the whole of the 1994 'Poem in Nine Cantos' which is based upon the mysterious life of Casper Hauser in which innocence is confronted by a manipulating social world. The facts of the enigma of Casper Hauser, the man who appeared in Nuremberg at Whitsuntide 1828 able to write his name and say, without understanding it, one sentence, 'I want to be a rider like my father was', act as outline to this moving story of alienation and vulnerability:

Whit Monday 1828 he stood
In Nuremberg in the biggest empty square
Bang in the middle of it where

They burned people and broke them on the wheel
And showed their hearts and bowels to other people.

A useful and moving prose counterpart to this story would be Conrad's tale of 'Amy Foster'.

Uncertain Poetries, Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics by Michael Heller (Salt £14.99)

—'These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with such major figures as Pound, Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Duncan, Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke and Mallarmé…they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge.' Many of these essays have been previously published in journals such as Sagetrieb, Ironwood, American Poetry Review and Ohio Review spanning some twenty years of considered reflection on the world of contemporary poetry. As Heller points out in his Preface, 'Poetry is always about to happen and also about to disappear, to be drowned out by conventional thought, to marginalize itself or to be marginalized by its writers, readers and critics…A number of themes and currents run through the essays. First, there is no question that the tenor of civilization is marked by its uncertainty, its hesitant mood on matters both cultural and political. Poetry, ever sensitive to the nuances of its surroundings, must limn or bode forth the environmental conditions out of which it arises. That poets, those presumed antennae of the race, might be picking up the signals and putting them somehow into the work seems only too obvious.' Immediately from this opening you recognise that this is going to be a serious book, one which makes clear the importance and integrity of poetry, and this seriousness is endorsed by the quotation from Louis Zukofsky which refers to poetry being 'precise information on existence'. Michael Heller's style is a delight to read and it is also refreshing to find essays on those figures who have seemed to drop away from our immediate focus with all its modish concerns for the 'contemporary'. For instance, an essay on William Bronk reminds us of the spare language and compelling voice which is 'a strangely humane whistle in the dark'. Bronk's work had been much admired by George Oppen who commented on the lines, 'The human loneliness/is the endless oneness of man' that 'once it's been said, you know forever that it's true. That is to say, poetry is a test of truth, not of someone's rhetorical equipment.' This is one of the most stimulating and rewarding introductions to the world of contemporary poetry that you are likely to find.

A Living Language, by David Constantine (Bloodaxe £7.95)

—these three lectures which David Constantine gave at Newcastle upon Tyne form the first in an innovative series where a contemporary poet talks about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. 'Translation Is Good for You' is excellent. Constantine recounts the moment in October 1816 when Keats, training to be a surgeon, spent an evening in Clerkenwell with his friend Cowden Clarke. They were reading together in the 1616 folio of Chapman's works and the following morning Keats wrote his 'On the first looking into Chapman's Homer'. As Constantine puts it:

The sonnet, his most assured to date, is both the mark of an era and an era in itself. The imagery—from astronomy (he alludes to Herschel's discovery of Uranus) and from voyages of discovery (he conflates or confuses Cortes and Balboa)—expresses the particular excitement of a new advance in reading, which itself becomes an image of the new era in his existence as his poetic life gets confidently under way. The agent is a translation, an act of carrying over and passing on. The epics of the 8th century BC, done into the English of Shakespeare's day and age, are brought to life—aloud—two hundred years later by a man with the voice, the bearing, the vocation (as teacher and friend) to do just such a thing for the good of a poet on the threshold of coming fully into his gifts.

As Constantine goes on to point out, it needed the 'recovery of something by then already archaic…for the full novelty of the thing to be brought, with the shock of the foreign, into the present where it could live and work.' It would be interesting to place this thought alongside the 'Lecture on the Philosophy of the Human Mind' by Thomas Brown, published in Scotland in 1820:

When any object of perception is so interesting as to lead us to pause in considering it, the associate feelings which it suggests, are not consecutive merely to the perception; but, as the perception is continued for a length of time, they co-exist, and are mingled with it, so as to form with it one complex feeling.

Brown also refers to the 'burst of overpowering emotion' which can be the result of such perception. Constantine, a poet talking to an audience made up of more than budding versifiers, hails the importance of this sort of shock, the shock of the new:

For every reader some such shock of foreignness is salutary, and poetry has the power to issue it. And for the nation, especially if that nation is English-speaking, the continual shock of the foreign is absolutely indispensable. Too much, too speedy, a domestication is a form of annexation, one-sided, there is no dialectic in it, no give and take.

The New Irish Poets, edited by Selina Guinness, (Bloodaxe Books £10.95)

—as indicated in the notes on the back of this volume, this 'lively collection covers over 30 poets of all ages from all parts of Ireland who've produced first collections over the past ten years, offering rare insights into how the freshest writing talents have responded to a period of profound social, cultural and political change in the Republic and in Northern Ireland.' The introduction by Selina Guinness is excellent and presents us with a sense of perspective which finds a powerful response in the poems themselves. She refers to Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape ('a late evening in the future') and notes the sense of time collapsed in on itself 'or the tentative working towards a barely imagined society where the past as it was actually experienced can be consigned to history' which characterises 'the peculiar gyre of the last decade' with the Downing Street Declaration in late 1993, the ceasefires declared the following year and the establishment of the power-sharing executive in the Stormont Assembly in Belfast, under the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998. This intelligent and wide-ranging introduction provides a deeply moving background to such poems as Tom French's 'Pity the Bastards':

Pity the bastards who clamped buck rabbits' heads
between their legs and funnelled poitín into them
until they bucked , the wide sky shrivelling in their
pissed eyes, who swore blind that spirits sweetened
the meat, bled them through their scraped-out holes
for eyes and tugged the fur off over skulls like tugging
crew-necked knitted jumpers over children's heads.

Waiting for my Clothes, by Leanne O'Sullivan (Bloodaxe Books £7.95)

—Leanne O'Sullivan's work is anthologised in the Selina Guinness volume above but this separate compact volume gives a personal journey through youth and time, pain and reconciliation in such a way that it becomes a notebook of dawning self-awareness. Charting the youthful eating disorder which dominated her life and the low self-esteem which accompanied it, the poet contemplates the past:

I look on it now as I do the people
whose names I can never remember.
The people I knew in that past
are skeletons. They spill like milk
from room to room in some unnameable house.
Even now I cannot remember them well.
I know the empty townlands they contrived,
the epitaphs on the headstones.
But memories have a strange lexicon,
like the old English plays I studied
at school but never understood,
except for the comma, the period,
the exclamation, the aftertaste of emotion.

Look out for the freshness of this volume with its echoes of Antonia White and Janet Frame:

My grandmother's death was everywhere;
it was the absence of traffic, the lone walker
stepping along the path of his torch.
I felt pregnant with the moment
it took for her last breath to grasp us,
uttering something from a great distance,
forcing us to hear.

Turning Leaves, by Jonathan Ward; The Willy Poems, by David Caddy (Clamp Down Press)

—two beautifully presented books of poetry and prose from a small Maine press based at Cape Porpoise.An 'ongoing mapping of a life journey' is the hallmark of the two volumes by the English poets, Ward and Caddy. These volumes are filled with careful and reflective moments which bring communities, both social and domestic, firmly into focus:

it is the hour of shrinking light

we ramble the cemetery
pick gravelled
or leaf-laid ways
avoid mud thinned by rain

our five ages
seventy-one to three months
lie buried here
cut into stone
'Christmas Eve at Nunhead Cemetery' (Ward)

Or again:

Once, out walking, he saw another
out walking and wondered if he too
had noticed that all the signs had gone.

The man looked rough, uncertain.
He half-imagined himself as someone
going somewhere without a shadow.
'Once, Out Walking' (Caddy)

Ezra Pound, A Literary Life, by Ira B. Nadel (Palgrave £ )

—one of the attractive aspects to this new 'life' of Pound is its engagement with the literary texts. Time and again we are presented with biography which is closely linked to the poetry and which brings the poetry alive again for the reader. Referring to 'The Pisan Cantos' which won the first Bollingen Prize, offered by the Library of Congress in 1949:

Technically brilliant, the poems also demonstrate a new, confessional mode emerging from the poet's dark night of the soul, a cry that:

nothing matters but the quality
of the affection –
in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind
dove sta memoria

Press When Illuminated, New and Selected Poems 1968-2003 by Nick Totton, (Salt £ )

—two comments on the back cover of this excellent selection of Nick Totton's poetry highlight what is so special about him. The first, by Ian Patterson, refers to the 'achingly, carefully measured sweeps of syntax' and the commitment to 'a politics of the inner as of the outer person'. The second is by the poet John James (whose Collected Poems were reviewed by David Caddy in the Summer issue, vol. 55, Number 3):

In the glut of babble and turbulent mendacity I read Nick Totton, such unassuming brilliance is scarcity indeed.

The serious and witty commitment of these poems can be illustrated in a quotation from 'Not Slipping Into Something More Comfortable' with its echoes of J.H. Prynne's Kitchen Poems:

So the tap is installed across the grid,
leaking in bits out of the system; tremors
announce rapid energy transactions
on bound and unbound levels, honey and
fire, brilliant spasms dispersed
by correct use of the cream.

Horses in Boiling Blood, by Barry MacSweeney, (Equipage £8)

—'the fractured inventiveness of Apollinaire's writing gave MacSweeney the perfect opportunity to improvise while translating, encouraging him to follow up on his own imaginative guesses, interpretations and interpolations in the spirit of one poet talking to another, one avant-gardist saluting another.' The accumulation of sound and imagery, pun and bitterness, the voice of the outsider singing eerily in the wind is evident throughout this volume of collaboration. Apollinaire's kaleidoscopic range of sounds, sights and sensations finds a blood-brother in these late writings of the poete maudit, Barry MacSweeney whose Selected Poems issued by Bloodaxe were also reviewed in the Summer issue:

Morning again
And the rain falls into the trenches of the hearte
The artillery has been blown to bits
We are blitzed and bombed sorted and invaded
But resisting everything
all the shards of attempted broken spirit
Fight back against the invasions which attempt to smash Thee
When you think nowt remains
There is an inner strength which flies like a seagull or partridge
Fast from the thickness of the heather or the edge of the Farnes
Into the wildness of the Aire
MacSweeney develops a highly personal and poignant element in his response to Apollinaire's lines. For instance, the four short-lined verses of 'L'Avenir' are extended to become a moving poem of love's resilience amidst loss in 'Ode to Snowe' (with its typical MacSweeney hallmark of the Chattertonian neo-Medieval spelling). Here, the first two verses of the original are translated by Anne Hyde Greet for the California Press bilingual edition of Calligrammes:

Soulevons la paille Let's lift up the straw
Regardons la neige And look at the snow
Ecrivons des letters And write some letters
Attendons des ordres Let's wait for orders

Fumons la pipe We'll smoke our pipes
En songeant a l'amour And dream of love
Les gabions sont la The gabions are there
Regardons la rose Let's gaze at the rose

This laconic tone is drawn out in MacSweeney's rendering:

I cannot wait for the froste to come
It will harden the sprouts and cool my ardent heart
But like the vegetables it will harden my sapper's sap
And make my heart truer to you than it has Ever been

Roll the bales of hay for winter
The farms will need them when war is done
Write your letters to dear ones
And stand to attention when told to

The Eastern Boroughs, by John Welch (Shearsman Books £9.95)

—John Welch's fifth collection of poetry contains work written over the last six years and the quietly reflective tone of many of the pieces published here deserves to be more widely known. The twelve-page piece of prose, 'The Sense Of It', has a haunting exactness:

It started with being alone in the house and a sensation of drowning in the November afternoon. Then the darkness moving in took possession of the page and I was sitting there as if transfixed by it. A smell of burning dust when I switched on the electric fire, and a sense of 'here I am', my hand suddenly busy in the fading light. Maybe it is all about distance; you moved in too close or else you were too far away, like a concertina opening and closing. I reach for the switch and turn on the light and here at my desk, beginning to write, the distance is just as it should be.

The piece goes on to describe the lead-up-to and the aftermath of an operation to remove a benign brain tumour and, in its quiet contemplation of self in relation to the surrounding world, it has echoes of the American poet, William Bronk. There is a quality of the painter which shines through one of the later poems, 'Gallery':

This city—it is
The heartfelt pause of sunlight
Out there on a piece of shaped stone.
A shadow of writing
Darkens it like soot
And we are both the tenants
Of this. But I have taken
Myself away from you
This November afternoon
And now it's starting to get dark.

The Language of Literature, by Malcolm Hebron (Palgrave Master Series £15.99)

—an intelligent and comprehensive guide which should be read by all those whose interest is the teaching of literature. The opening paragraph of the introduction sets the scene:

In 1831 a young man wrote to William Wordsworth to ask for his advice on becoming a poet. Having read some of his correspondent's compositions, the great man wrote back, saying tactfully that 'the composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than men are prepared to believe; and absolute success in it depends upon innumerable minutiae' (22November 1831).

One of the delights of this guide is the considerable amount of textual commentary; the detailed readings of texts from different eras show how an awareness of change in language can enrich our understanding of literature. Malcolm Hebron makes the concentration upon small detail a fascinating journey of discovery.

Poetry, The Basics, by Jeffrey Wainwright, (Routledge £9.99)

—a useful book to have alongside Hebron's, the blurb tells us that this guide demystifies the world of poetry. The refreshingly direct Preface introduces a book that is great fun to browse through:

This book is—and I hope it will seem to be—a work of enthusiasm. My overriding aim is to enhance the pleasure that readers gain from poetry. No special expertise is required to read and enjoy a poem, but, as with most pleasures, it can be greatly enriched by knowledge. This book tries to provide some knowledge and some ideas to all who want to read, study or write poetry.

Intimate Voices, Selected Work 1965-1983, by Tom Leonard (Etruscan Books £9.50)

—Edwin Morgan referred to Tom Leonard's 'poems of great precision and compression' and this delightfully produced volume presents us with a man of many styles, 'a restless formal experimenter whose language is laid with surprises, traps, and ironies'. The influence of William-Carlos-Williams is signalled by the sharp humour of the Glaswegian version of the 1934 poem 'This Is Just To Say':

Jist ti Let Yi No

ahv drank
thi speshlz
that wurrin
thi frij

n thit
yiwurr probbli
hodn back
furthi pahrti

awright
they wur great
thaht stroang
thaht cawld

In one of the prose pieces from the Winter of 1976-7, Leonard makes his connection with Williams clear: 'What I like about Williams is his voice. What I like about Williams is his presentation of voice as a fact, as a fact in itself and as a factor in his relationship with the world as he heard it, listened to it, spoke it. That language is not simply an instrument of possession, a means of snooping round everything that is not itself—that's what I get from Williams'. Again, Edwin Morgan picked up on the importance of 'voice' in Tom Leonard's work and the title of this volume is crucial 'in the sense that Leonard's very accurate ear allows him to make use of monologues, dialogues, parodies, casual remarks, and language-games with a minimum of overlay or working-up or pretension'. As an example, try this passage from the 1973 'The Proof of the Mince Pie':

What do a lot of people think of when one mentions the word 'poetry' to them? More than once I've been told it's 'Keats and that'—sometimes I got Shelley, Milton and Shakespeare thrown in. as I heard one teacher put it, she always felt proud that she spoke the same language as 'the byootiful lengwidge of Milton'. And how often do you hear those letters on 'Any Answers' etc. on the radio complaining about the corruption of 'our beautiful English language'? The 'beauty' of a lot of English poetry (particularly the Romantics) for many, is that the softness of its vowel-enunciation reinforces their class status in society as the possessors of a desirable mode of speaking. And of course Keats' 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' goes down a bomb with the 'Any Answers' brigade; where beauty in language is recognised as the property of a particular class, then naturally truth is assumed to be the property of that class also. So a person who doesn't 'speak right' is therefore categorised as an ignoramus; it's not simply that he doesn't know how to speak right, but that this 'inability' shows that he has no claim to knowledge of truth. That supposed insult 'the language of the gutter' puts forward a revealing metaphor for society. The working-class rubbish, with all its bad pronunciation and dreadful swear words, is only really fit for draining away out of sight; the really great artists though, will recycle even this, to provide some 'comic relief' to offset the noble emotions up top.

The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill (Cambridge £15.95)

—as Stephen Gill makes clear in his introduction to this wide-ranging and challenging collection of essays on Wordsworth's poetry, 'contemporary Wordsworth scholarship is vibrant because it is alive to its continuity with that of the past whilst being fully aware of historical distance'. In this respect it honours, of course, a primary force in the creative powers of the poet himself. 'Wordsworth was obsessed with ensuring that nothing was lost from his past; and wrote ' I look into past times as prophets look/ Into futurity'. Memory reaches, chains bind, bonds sustain, links link - the poetry and much of the prose celebrates whatever preserves affinities between 'all stages of the life of man'. In this fine collection, Lucy Newlyn writes about 'community in The Prelude, James Butler about the Lyrical Ballads and Seamus Perry explores the important links between Wordsworth and Coleridge: 'If Wordsworth found in Coleridge a vision and an idiom to exploit, then in Wordsworth, Coleridge found nothing less than "the best poet of the age" and he identified him very quickly.

John Dryden¸ Poems selected by Charles Tomlinson (Faber £6.99)

—in this fine selection of Dryden's work we are given a major twentieth-century poet's registration of the importance of the seventeenth-century's Poundian figure of his age. Tomlinson records the importance of Dryden for him in the world of the 1940s and 50s: 'For a young poet it was necessary to struggle to rediscover an idiom where one could simply say what one meant'. The clarity inferred here is found time and again in the selection and, indeed, is highlighted in the short but full introduction:
In excerpting Absalom and Achitophel, I have drawn chiefly on the varied characters in this allegory based on the turmoils of King David's reign in biblical times. The English became the Jews, Charles II is David and the Earl of Shaftesbury Achitophel, who backs Absalom (Charles's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth) for the succession against Charles's brother, James, who was a Catholic. But the shock of recognition in all this cannot quite affect us with the force that it did Dryden's first readers. What does is his characterisation of human types in their wide variety.
Dryden's final volume, Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) contained a number of translated narrative poems from Ancient Greece, Rome, Italy and medieval England. There is a handsome selection of these here and, as Tomlinson points out, 'For too long, Dryden was looked on merely as a satirist and controversialist (which he magnificently was) but the fire of which Pope speaks was that of a great poet, the measure of whose greatness can only be taken if we see him as a great translator too'.
This selection of Dryden's poems is not only of significant use to anyone studying for the OCR synoptic paper (Satire), it also serves as a timely reminder that Carcanet published Tomlinson's Cambridge Clark Lectures on 'Poetry and Metamorphosis' last year in a volume called Metamorphoses, Poetry and Translation. Tomlinson, like Pound, has an infectious 'way of seeing the past, many pasts, without nostalgia: active now, in the words' (Hugh Kenner, 1970).

Dylan Thomas, Poems selected by Derek Mahon (Faber £6.99)

—Derek Mahon's ten page introduction to this selection is one of the best criticisms of Thomas I have come across. 'It's now fifty years since the death of Dylan Thomas. He's by no means a forgotten figure, of course, and certainly not in Wales: but so recurrent and strangely vindictive have been the attacks on his reputation, we might be forgiven for forgetting to take him entirely seriously. Now that most verse is 'light', those who feel poetry has lost touch with some vital function could do worse than read him again.' Mahon's approach is combative and refreshing and ends with Thomas' own comment: 'The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe'.

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Reviews and Notes from the Use of English

REVIEWS

John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader by Paul Chirico (Palgrave Macmillan £45)

Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic: Canon and Genre Formation in Crane, Pound, Eliot, and Williams, by Daniel Gabriel. (Palgrave, £42.50)

James Hogg: A Life, by Gillian Hughes (Edinburgh University Press, £25)

Reek of the Human Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, by Donald Davie (Carcanet, £12.95) Waterlog, A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain, by Roger Deakin (Vintage, £7.99) Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin (Penguin, £20.00)

Shakespeare’s Poems. Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and the Shorter Poems edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen. The Arden Shakespeare, Thomson Learning 2007, £9.99.

The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology, by Nathaniel Tarn (Stanford University Press £14.50)

The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem, by Shira Wolosky (Oxford University Press £17.99)

Horse Latitudes, by Paul Muldoon and The End of the Poem, by Paul Muldoon (Faber £14.99 and £25.00)

Talk About Poetry: Conversations on the Art, by Peter Robinson. (Shearsman Books £9.95)

The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price. (Salt Publishing £14.99)

Bowl, by Elizabeth Cook (Worple Press £10.00)

Catch, by Peter Carpenter. (Shoestring Press £10.00)

How to Read a Poem, by Terry Eagleton. (Blackwell £9.99)

Wallace Stevens: poetry and criticism, by Tim Morris. (Salt Publishing, £12.99)

Cracks in the Universe, by Charles Tomlinson. (Carcanet, £7.95)

There Are Words: Collected Poems, by Gael Turnbull. (Shearsman Books with Mariscat Press, £18.95)

Thoughts on the One Hundred and Eighty-Third Birthday of J.M.W. Turner

Homage to Cid Corman

A Well Known Road

Be so

There are words

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning, by Andrea Brady. (Palgrave Macmillan £45)

Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, by Anne Stevenson. (Bloodaxe Books, ₤9.95)

The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, edited by Archie Bevan and Brian Murray. (John Murray, £35)

Raw Skies, by Nigel Wheale. (Shearsman Books £9.95)

Collected Poems, by Wallace Stevens. (Faber and Faber, £20)

The Goldfinches of Baghdad, by Robert Adamson. (Chicago: Flood Editions, $13.95)

Poems, by J.H. Prynne. (Bloodaxe/Freemantle, £15)

Collected Poems by David Chaloner (Salt Publishing 2005 £18.99)

Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight by James Booth (Palgrave MacMillan, £45)

The Emily Dickinson Handbook, edited by Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle and Cristanne Miller. (University of Massachusetts Press, ₤18.50)

Donald Davie, Modernist essays: Yeats, Pound, Eliot edited with an introduction by Clive Wilmer (Carcanet £14.95).

The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry, edited by Maurice Lindsay and Lesley Duncan, (Edinburgh University Press, £19.99)

Twentieth Century Poetry. Selves and Situations, by Peter Robinson. (OUP, £50.00).

Miscanthus: Selected and New Poems by Anthony Barnett. (Shearsman Books, £11.95)

Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. (Carcanet Press £9.95).

Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Colin Burrow. (OUP, £65.00).

Vanishing Points, New Modernist Poems, edited by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella (Salt Publishing £14.99)

Untitled Deeds, by Peter Robinson (Salt Publications (£8.95)

New Collected Poems, by W. S. Graham, edited by Matthew Francis. (Faber £25.00).

NOTES

Necessary Steps, edited by David Kennedy (Shearsman £12.95)

Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court by Peter Barry (Salt Publishing £16.99)

Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry by Ian Davidson (Palgrave £45)

Matsuo Bashō’s Poetic Spaces edited by Eleanor Kerkham (Palgrave £37.99)

Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan, Myth, Mourning and Memory by Andrea Lauterwein (Thames and Hudson £39.95)

No Man’s Land by Tupa Snyder (Shearsman £8.95)

Reversing into the Cold War by Tom Phillips (Firewater Press £5.50)

Self Into Song by Carol Rumens (Bloodaxe £7.95)

Ted Hughes, A Literary Life, by Neil Roberts (Palgrave £45.00)

The Resurrection of the Body, by Michael Schmidt (Smith/Doorstop Books £8.95)

Blake and Modern Literature by Edward Larrissy (Palgrave £45.00)

Full Stretch: Poems 1996-2006 by Anthony Wilson (Worple Press £10)

Selected Poems 1970-2005, by Elaine Randell (Shearsman)

Distant Reading, Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry by Peter Middleton, (University of Alabama Press)

The Work of the Wind by S.J. Litherland (Flambard Press Poetry £8.50)

Collected Poems, by David Constantine (Bloodaxe Books £12)

Uncertain Poetries, Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics by Michael Heller (Salt £14.99)

A Living Language, by David Constantine (Bloodaxe £7.95)

The New Irish Poets, edited by Selina Guinness, (Bloodaxe Books £10.95)

Waiting for my Clothes, by Leanne O'Sullivan (Bloodaxe Books £7.95)

Turning Leaves, by Jonathan Ward; The Willy Poems, by David Caddy (Clamp Down Press)

Ezra Pound, A Literary Life, by Ira B. Nadel (Palgrave £ )

Press When Illuminated, New and Selected Poems 1968-2003 by Nick Totton, (Salt £ )

Horses in Boiling Blood, by Barry MacSweeney, (Equipage £8)

The Eastern Boroughs, by John Welch (Shearsman Books £9.95)

The Language of Literature, by Malcolm Hebron (Palgrave Master Series £15.99)

Poetry, The Basics, by Jeffrey Wainwright, (Routledge £9.99)

Intimate Voices, Selected Work 1965-1983, by Tom Leonard (Etruscan Books £9.50)

The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill (Cambridge £15.95)

John Dryden¸ Poems selected by Charles Tomlinson (Faber £6.99)

Dylan Thomas, Poems selected by Derek Mahon (Faber £6.99)

***Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic: Canon and Genre Formation in Crane, Pound, Eliot, and Williams*, by Daniel Gabriel. (Palgrave, £42.50)**

Reek of the Human
Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, by Donald Davie (Carcanet, £12.95)
Waterlog, A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain, by Roger Deakin (Vintage, £7.99)
Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin (Penguin, £20.00)