Horizon Archives: Jane Holland reviews Plumly on Keats

A Touch of Irony:

Jane Holland on Stanley Plumly’s creative biography of Keats.

Part of the Horizon Review Archive Project

Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats (Norton, 2008) £16.99

Almost compulsively, it seems, each age must reinvent the great poets for themselves, with fresh biographies and critical studies to trump their antecedents. Stanley Plumly’s latest work, ‘Posthumous Keats’, is among the newest examples of this compulsion and one which amply demonstrates the possibilities and limitations inherent in a work of critical biography. His book - or ‘meditation’ as one critic has it - on the quintessential English Romantic poet, John Keats, takes its inspiration from Plumly’s own response to the tragic young poet’s life and work. From that personal foundation, ‘Posthumous Keats’ radiates out into a creative and often highly imaginative reconstruction of Keats’ last years of life, including the so-called ‘Living Year’ of 1818-19 in which he wrote some of his best-loved poems.

Plumly is not only a lecturer at the University of Maryland but also an experienced poet and writer himself, and his expertise at creative non-fiction is one of the hallmarks of this biography. The early life, that fateful last trip to Rome, the deathbed scenes, and especially the aftermath of Keats’ early death at the age of 25 - all these are imagined with such keen novelistic instinct that Plumly puts himself almost in the position of secret observer rather than scholarly biographer. So in the following, densely-written passage, Plumly conjures up for us the pungent atmosphere of Keats’ daily environs as a young medical student in London:

It is a busy, dark, Dickensian part of town, exposed as much to sewage and garbage as to the prison life of the Clink and the new Marshalsea network of jails, and within hailing distance of the infamous Mint. There is an etching of the borough from 1820 that, in artistic perspective, makes it look like nineteenth-century southern Manhattan along the East River, rather like Whitman’s ideal picture of it in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”.

Nor does Plumly dwell solely on Keats. His account of the later drowning of Shelley and his two unfortunate companions in the Gulf of Spezia is beautifully and sparingly achieved through a combination of official documents and letters, and some artful supposition. Much is made of Keats’ final volume of poems, given to Shelley by Leigh Hunt and found in the drowned poet’s inner pocket after his body is washed up on the beach. The grimly prophetic line ‘I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar ‘ of Shelley’s from the close of his Adonais is recalled. We are reminded, with a touch of irony, that Keats had turned down an invitation to stay with the Shelleys in their Italian coastal villa, perhaps not wishing to die in the other poet’s arms but to remain out of sight for his last few weeks.

The artist Severn’s death and burial - the close friend who famously sketched Keats on his deathbed - is described in no less careful detail. Fanny Brawne’s dying admission of love for Keats is also discussed, and her covert stash of memorabilia - hidden from her husband and children for forty-odd years - is opened and explored for the secrets it may reveal about their relationship. An air of fateful and sinister oppression hangs over these scenes, as it does over the book as a whole, which is at times redolent of an Agatha Christie murder mystery - where all the suspects must gather after the body has been discovered, to be interviewed in turn.

But when there is no mystery, no whodunit to be solved, just a set of unfortunate circumstances that led to somebody’s death, what is to be gained from these meticulous reconstructions of poets’ lives, often many centuries after they have shuffled off this mortal coil?

This is a difficult question to answer without addressing the issue of prurience. But one thing it demonstrates, at least, is that the cult of celebrity was no twentieth-century invention, as this diary entry from a Mrs. Gisborne, encountering the young poet at Leigh Hunt’s home shortly before his best - and final - collection of poems was to be published, confirms:

Mr. Keats was introduced to us the same evening; he had lately been ill also, and spoke but little; the Endymion was not mentioned, this person might not be its author; but on observing his countenance and his eyes I persuaded myself that he was the very person.

Celebrity aside, there is also the important consideration that the significant moments of a great poet’s life - however painfully short - ought to be documented, to be borne witness to, both by those who were there at the time and those who would continue to build on the legend that is The Famous Poet. For somewhere in amongst those lovingly reconstructed details we may find vital clues to our own creative development - clues to how a poet grows into his or her identity and inheritance. As Lawrence Lipking writes in The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago, 1981):

Keats seems to hold the key to everything we would like to know about how one becomes a poet. At twenty he was no more promising than any number of other would-be authors; suddenly, just short of his twenty-first birthday, he left all the rest behind. What happened?

Plumly himself addresses the problematic issues of prurience and celebrity in various oblique asides during the course of this biography. ‘What is the accumulative, acquiring power, forty years on, of a ring, a lock of hair, a miniature of vague likeness?’ he demands, contemplating the way Keats’ inner circle, many of them nonentities in themselves, have stepped into literary history alongside him. So Keats himself, Plumly ironically claims, ‘becomes their biographer’.

But a famous poet’s life - personal in the present, at the point of first contact - has a way of becoming impersonal with time, of passing into new hands, none of whom will have known the person under scrutiny and for whom that life must become - like The Waste Land, which Plumly references here - a heap of broken images rather than an organic whole:

Bric-a-brac, relics, memorabilia, items around which has congregated an aura of light of the most personal depth and value. But what if that value becomes, on its own, not just personal, but universal? Who owns that memory then? These fragments I have shored against my ruins. The pieces and parts of Keats that each of his friends felt proprietary toward fragmented any chance of a coherent sense of his character and career in the living moment after his death.

Keats himself, resigned to his approaching death, may have sensed how such fragments would be all that remained of his life. Breaking away from his friends and from the woman he wanted to marry - but now never would - he retreated to Rome to die a lonely death, burningly aware of the poems he had failed to write. Thus his last letter, addressed to his friend Brown: 
-->

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been - but it appears to me - however, I will not speak of that subject.

As a practitioner himself, Plumly is also acutely aware of the despair Keats felt at his own premature death. There can be few things more poignant, after all, for a poet of Keats’ ability, than to die with the knowledge of great poems unwritten. Plumly’s response - a deeply personal one, as he acknowledges elsewhere - is to comfort and reassure the dead poet even in the impersonal, forensic act of reconstructing his ‘posthumous existence’.

So here Plumly pauses to reprise Keats’ last letter, examining it with such thoughtfulness and intensity that it becomes almost a last poem in his hands:

“It runs in my head we shall die young” - George, yes, but perhaps you too, Brown, and maybe Keats’s sister, maybe Fanny Brawne herself, and all of you back there in life. Can we correct our mistakes? Yet if we die before they can be corrected, they will be forgiven. Death is forgiving. “I can scarcely bid you good bye.” Keats’s exit line, “I always made an awkward bow,” is not unlike his desired epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Both make a gesture, a memorable gesture; both, thus, are poetry; both close without closure; both elevate the moment; and both speak in the past tense, the posthumous tense.

You can buy this book from Amazon UK, Amazon US, or the publisher's website, Norton.

 This article first appeared in HORIZON REVIEW

and has been archived at Raw Light
as part of the Horizon Review Archive Project.

Epicentre Magazine launches!

No, I haven't died, I've just been very busy recently. After much procrastination, not to mention a few tasty Easter eggs, my new literary-poetry venture "Epicentre Magazine" is finally live online.

Edited by me, with Ian Chung as my fearless assistant editor, the first issue features work by fourteen poets, one reviewer and a fiction writer. So Epicentre is starting off as a small but perfectly formed ezine.

Please do go and read some of the contributions, and hopefully leave a few comments. I'd love to hear your opinions. More work will follow in the next few weeks, so do please keep checking for fresh content.

You can find Epicentre's first ever issue HERE.

Mark Goodwin's SHOD reviewed

My review of Mark Goodwin's SHOD from Nine Arches Press is now up at Hand + Star, for those readers who are interested in poetry.

On Reviewing and Lying

Just reviewed ten books all at once, which was quite an epic undertaking, trying to be fair to each within a narrow word allowance, plus flag up weaknesses and strengths. Only one collection really made me want to throw it across the room, and I hope I've made that dislike clear in my review.

You know, I read these puffs on the backs of poetry books and my god, some of them are just jaw-droppingly untrue. You read them as a kind of introduction to the work, and you think 'Aha, okay, sounds good ...' and then you open the book, and it's like they were describing another book entirely. Another poet, in fact. Probably on another planet in a completely different solar system. And not even a poet, but a yellow-striped geologist-cum-lugworm, with three heads and a tendency to spit when conversing.

I know it's hard when a friend, or the friend of a friend, or someone you owe money to, or who's having a nervous breakdown and needs all the help they can get, or who simply gives good head, comes along and says 'Can you write a few words about my new book?'

But do you really have to lie? That much? Like, Tony Blair proportions ...

I didn't lie in my review. That may cost me in some instances. But what the hell. It's not like I've ever been popular! And I was at least circumspect. I didn't say 'Wow, this is shite' - though I wanted to at times. I tried to be kind, which runs contrary to my nature. I also tried to give credit where it was due, for books which were, at least, not actively offensive. I had a strong urge to write 'Mostly harmless' next to some titles, it's true. But I'm being paid to give my expert opinion (stifle your sniggers please, I have been doing this for well over a decade now) so I bore that in mind and wrote accordingly.

David Kennedy reviews Voice Recognition at Stride

Stride continues its good work online with a review by 'New Poetry' anthologist David Kennedy of the recent Bloodaxe anthology Voice Recognition.

Not everyone's cup of tea, since it doesn't conform to the 'praise everything equally' school of literary criticism, but worth a look if you prefer a bit of politics instead with your toasted teacake.

Thanks to Roddy Lumsden for sharing this link on the Poets on Fire forum.

The TITANIC CAFE closes its doors and hits the rocks ...

The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks or: Knife, fork and bulldozer ultra modern retail outlet complex development scenario with flowers is the latest pamphlet out from intrepid new Midlands poetry publishers, Nine Arches Press.

This shiny new offering is from David Hart, so well-known on the Midlands poetry scene that he almost requires no introduction, but for those readers beyond our little region, Hart is a kind of mesmeric, shamanic figure with an Old Testament-style grey beard, poetic idiom and gestures worthy of the great eccentric - mostly northern - mavericks of the last century: Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, Basil Bunting, Barry MacSweeney and their ilk, if rather more jovial than those particular poets had a reputation for being.

So what of this new pamphlet? Well, it consists of a single long poem, demonstrating Nine Arches' continuing commitment to British experimental writing outside the mainstream that both makes sense to normal folk who might come across it - hoorah for that! - and addresses Big Issues rather than what the poet had for lunch. Though, of course, this being a poem about a cafe, lunch does come into it. And tea: strong, sweet, and plenty of it. But what of the poetry itself?

Titanic Cafe is just stunning. Just stunning. I sat down and read the poem in bursts: slipped first towards the end, pulled in by a phrase that caught my eye, trawled backwards a few pages, frowned as I realised the enormity and scope of what I was reading, hurriedly turned to the beginning, leapt ahead uncontrollably, checked myself and went back again, more slowly this time, lost myself somewhere in the middle and couldn't have been happier.

Titanic Cafe is one of the most lightly achieved, unpretentious, mordantly ironic, and relevant contemporary poems I have ever read. It possesses gravitas in spadefuls, yet never fails to laugh at its own futility as a gesture against change - this is the poet as King Canute, both pointing ironically and weeping as the waves sweep in around him, or the bulldozers in this case.


The poem concerns an ancient, tumbledown cafe in Birmingham, which was demolished in 2007 to make way for a giant Sainsbury's shopping complex. With the discipline of a true artist, David Hart treats his subject with a deep and loving nostalgia that is never allowed to dissolve into sentimentality. The result is a poetic call to arms which accepts the inevitability of change whilst stopping to salute fallen comrades like Titanic Cafe in the hope that something, at least, of its spirit and ethos may be encouraged to remain in this world; a call to the memory of a steaming tea urn, or a much-used greasy spoon, in these days of counter queues, hygienic serve-yourself plastic cups and pre-packed, mass-produced snacks.

In pursuit of his nostalgic homage, Hart employs a cornucopia of poetic - and daringly anti-poetic - effects: lists, italics, capital letters, vocal asides, end rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance, local history, mythological references, dictionary definitions, botanical lore, imagined and real conversations, bureaucratic development-speak, publicity posters, billboard messages, statistics, long-dead poets and their inspirations (Offa looms large in this poem, with shades of Geoffrey Hill behind him, though here clearly Hart's own monarch), plus blocks of 'real' poetry, whatever I might mean by that tricksy comment. You'll need to buy the pamphlet to draw your own conclusions on that.

The theatre of THE BEST TEA IN THE UK
        is falling down,
the canal isn't deep enough for the TITANIC CAFE
to sink without trace, there'd be a fine mess.
            All but ready to collapse
            of its own volition. Listen,
a child on a longboat along from Bournville asks,
    What's that?! 'It's a
planks and struts and frames by numbers temple
            to the God of Advertising
where you could buy God's Own Tea
till the God of Storm
                        took it away almost.'

To add to these delights, the 36 page pamphlet is handsomely produced in a smart dark grey card, with excellent black lettering, a fold-out map, and a large number of full-colour plates depicting the life and death of the Titanic Cafe, photographs taken by David Hart. There are also copious, fascinating notes and relevant quotations at the back, some of which almost constitute a prose poem in themselves. I urge everyone to buy a copy and show it to all their friends, to demonstrate the relevance and great good sense of contemporary poetry in the face of all kinds of other nonsense.

Gone now, the Knife and Fork Titanic
without the dignity of sinking even
in shallow water, but knocked down
            and taken away
                in a lorry.
The new Sainsbury's will sell hot tea
              so that's okay.

David Hart's glorious TITANIC CAFE is available now from Nine Arches Press and online booksellers such as Amazon and costs - all those full colour plates, remember! - £8. You can find out more about David Hart at the Nine Arches site, or at his somewhat infrequent blog.

Tom Chivers' "The Terrors"

Tom Chivers is a poet based in London, who has just published a pamphlet of poem-emails entitled THE TERRORS. To give you a flavour of his content, here's the short preface:

What follows is a sequence of imagined emails sent from the author to inmates at London's Newgate Prison incarcerated between roughly 1700 and 1760. All mistakes, typos and anachronisms are deliberate.

Tom Chivers promises - and delivers - anachronisms in these well-presented 30-odd pages of poems - poem-emails, prose-poems, email-musings - with an urban twist well-suited to such disturbing subject matter. For instance, in an email to Babs_Spencer@yahoo.co.uk, Chivers addresses the unfortunate Barbara, who appears to have been imprisoned for forgery, as though they are personal friends. 'Thank god you were throttled before you were burnt', he writes, then leaps straight into another stanza: 'The burger vans hum as I wait for the nightbus, onions caramelising on the grill, faggots and all.'

This is contemporary elegy, then, for the long-dead, the unknown, many of them victims of a clumsy, unjust and barbaric legal system.

Geoffrey Hill in his Mercian Hymns phase is, surely, an influence in these poems, structurally at least, if not in tone as well. This is from one of several emails to William Dodd :

I snared the gaping crowd, Will; told Akerman you once danc'd into the living grave wherin we're food for worms. I'd love to see your homely porter, clad in bespoke skin of wolsey grey; strange choirs, guttural outpourings.

I'm what you'd call a fellow traveller; terrestrial stranger with my twin-pack scriptures, ghostly doctrine tagged along the walls. Watch for the pattern and the source, you said.

The pattern: infamy!
The source: infamy!

But not all these email-poems run along such expansive, discursive lines. Some are elegant with impressive one-liners - 'The Chinese say a person with a bad name is already half-hanged' - while others try a different tack, short clauses and place names run together in mini-sentences, creating a breathless, accusatory charge into the past:

Hooded in a whimple. Skirts up to here. It was you, wasn't it?
Gun Street. Spitalfields. Drab or tom.
Findy sides open to the fog. Bundle of kid.

Even though some of these poems are difficult to read, and must have been even worse to write, Tom Chivers does not shy away from the unsettling or the genuinely horrific detail in these quasi-historical accounts; indeed, his outraged sense of injustice permeates THE TERRORS. Here are the opening lines of 'To: Elizabeth Brownrigg/Subject: Murder by inches':

1. The subject is tied up naked, beaten with a hearth-broom, a horsewhip, or a cane, til she is speechless.

Some of the rest of this poem is so horrific, I don't feel able to quote it here. But it conveys, swiftly and eloquently, the atmosphere of Newgate Prison in the eighteenth century, or how we, looking back on such times from the present, can only believe or fear it must have been for the inmates.

Nine Arches Press is to be congratulated for publishing this short collection by Tom Chivers, which is both innovative and disturbing, and which gives a voice to the voiceless, albeit an imagined, anachronistic one. I was extremely pleased to be present at the launch a few weeks ago in London, and to be able to read alongside Tom. Hearing his introductions, and the poems themselves, left me keen to review such a fascinating, experimental collection.

If I had one minor criticism to make, it would be that, on reading these poems, I felt curious to know more about the people to whom they were addressed, including crimes they had been accused of and how they were sentenced. But it's only a minor point, and perhaps a list in an appendix could be added in a later edition.

THE TERRORS is a bold, dark, and deeply unsettling collection which introduces a strong new poetic voice in Tom Chivers. You can buy the book online from Nine Arches Press via Throckmortons bookshop (which will directly support this bold new publishing house).

There is also a short poetry film by Tom Chivers reading from THE TERRORS on location at Newgate, available here.

Online review of CVB at 'Poetry in Progress'

Apologies for the long absence. Christmas preparations have caught up with me and I've been rather neglecting the blog.

But here's a lovely review of my latest collection, Camper Van Blues, at the excellent site of a fellow blogger and poet, who blogs under a pen-name - but whose real name is Marion McCready - Poetry in Progress.

Wherever you are, I wish you all a very happy Christmas and peaceful New Year.

"A dark and lovely book ... "

I was delighted to see a recent post by David Morley on his Warwick creative writing blog, recommending my latest collection, Camper Van Blues, as a Christmas present.

"Jane is an energetic poet with good taste, and she has an engaging way of talking to the dead (poets, historical figures) as if they were in the room with her (didn’t Blake do this for real?) ..."

Many thanks to David, and to everyone who has already bought a copy of CVB. If you do have a copy - erm, and enjoyed it! - it would be wonderful if you could leave a short review on Amazon, or if you have a blog, post your thoughts there and let me know so I can provide a link to it here on Raw Light.

Slam Finals? I'd rather be dead!

It's far too hot to post up anything exciting or intelligent - or both - on Raw Light today but earlier I did manage to blog up a review of a live poetry event in Oxford last night:


Poet-performer Jem Rolls headlines at the Hammer & Tongue Slam Finals.

McDonald's 'Death of the Critic'

Many thanks to Ms. Baroque over on the Baroque in Hackney blog for bringing a review to my attention that was published on March 12th on the TLS online. The review was of Rónán McDonald's 'The Death of the Critic' (160pp. Continuum. £14.99 ISBN: 978 0 82649 279 1) and makes fascinating reading. Or rather, the book under review looks as though it will make fascinating reading.

My particular fascination is that, discussing the history of literary criticism in the early-mid twentieth century, McDonald apparently gives us 'good reasons for the status of its leading figures, such as T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, Lionel Trilling and the New Critics, and he invites us to find insights rather than delusions. “These critics are still paraded before each generation of university students as ideologically befuddled, or reactionary bogeymen.” '

I have long been excited by twentieth century literary criticism - I apologise for any yawns induced by that statement - and can't wait to get hold of The Death of the Critic to learn more about the ones I haven't yet read widely, and hopefully to find suggestions for our own way ahead, as twenty-first century critics and readers of criticism. Perhaps this might be a good time for me to earmark some time to blog about the critics I've really enjoyed reading and learnt from - including some I've already mentioned on Raw Light, like TS Eliot - and discuss some of their ideas and theories in greater depth.

For instance, many people don't realise that Ted Hughes, in addition to his controversial book on Shakespeare and the Goddess, also has a small body of literary criticism - in the form of articles, reviews, lectures, letters etc. - some of which will knock your socks off. More anon.

You can get hold of McDonald's 'The Death of the Critic' in hardback on Amazon.co.uk. A paperback edition is due out in October 2008.

More Dispatches from the Poetry Wars

Tucked out of sight of the snipers, safe for now under my duvet, I continue my reading of Peter Barry's highly dangerous Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court. See previous post for full briefing.

March 13th 2008. Late evening. Skim-reading through Chapter Nine: Taking a Long View. Bombing less heavy tonight. Discussing possible reasons for the marginalisation of experimental poetry both then and now, Peter Barry writes from the quieter trenches of retrospection (pp.183-4):

'Part of the explanation, then, must lie in the specific social formation of avant-garde poets, and to some extent (to return to a point raised earlier) it concerns their attitude to publication, which is often very complex and contradictory, as frequently with avant-garde groups. Some variety of self-publication, in fact, has long been the norm for innovatory writing - it isn't an accident that T.S. Eliot first published The Waste Land in a magazine he was editing himself, or that Virginia and Leonard Woolf ran the Hogarth Press. By definition, almost, the quality of something new will not easily be recognised by major publishers, who must cater for an existing set of public tastes. But these existing public tastes are precisely what an avant-garde despises or distrusts ...

... In Liquid City (Reaktion, 1999), Iain Sinclair, en route to visit Eric Mottram [experimental poet and 1970s editor of Poetry Review during the running battles between what Peter Barry terms 'radicals' and 'conservatives' - JH] with photographer Marc Atkins, explains to Atkins who Mottram is and what he represents:

The names don't mean anything to Atkins. This is deleted history - Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, Barry MacSweeney, the heroes of the 'British Poetry Revival' - have been expunged from the record. Poetry is back where it belongs: in exile. In the provinces, the bunkers of academe. In madhouses, clinics and fragile sinecures.'

*

For more on avant poetry versus the mainstream, here's a discussion of some antithetically opposed contemporary anthologies.

Poetry Wars I

I'm reading Peter Barry's Poetry Wars: 'British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court' this week, published by Salt. It's an absolutely excellent read and I highly recommend it for anyone even remotely interested in the politics of poetry, each page containing fresh hilarities and salacious gossip from the world of 1970s British poetry.

I'm still only partway through it so will probably blog about this again, once finished, but I couldn't resist a few juicy comments now.

Poetry Wars is not a linear read but a satisfying dip in and out read, as recommended by the author, who has constructed the book in several parts. First, you have the linear narrative of how, in the 1970s, the 'radicals' (i.e. those avant-gardists who consider themselves to have descended in a direct line from the gods of early modernism like Eliot and Pound) beat off the 'conservatives' (i.e. the poetic backlash against modernism, advocating a return to normalcy, traditional forms and cucumber sandwiches) to take over the Poetry Society London HQ, then situated in fading gentility in Earls Court. Then you have chapters devoted to various 'themes' connected to that - almost decade-long - battle, with further chapters at the back consisting of dated lists, relevant documents, explanations of terms etc.

Reading this book has clarified for me, in a matter of hours, the terrible enmity that still exists between these two main strands within British poetry. Taking the bulk of its material from Poetry Society and Arts Council archives, memoirs, personal statements, plus a full account of the Witt Panel investigation of the Poetry Society's operations in 1976 - think full-blown McCarthyism in Piccadilly! - this book details, often meticulously, who said what to whom and when. There's rather less discussion of 'why' than I would like, but I suppose these memories must still be raw enough in some people's minds for that question to be approached with delicate circumspection.

And it's not all one-sided. Although Peter Barry is firmly on the 'side' of the radicals, by his own admission, he has tried to present evidence and anecdote in as unbiased a manner as is possible with such difficult material, not trying to hide mistakes by his own party even as he highlights occasionally underhand actions by the more conservative element as they attempted to get back into power.

So here's a quick taster of life at the Poetry Society in the mid-70s, in a marvellous anecdote apparently related by Peter Finch:

'We're sitting in the White House, the hotel bar next to the Poetry Society in Earls Court Square. Criton Tomazos is standing on the mantel piece ripping bits out of a book and chanting. Bob [Cobbing] has drunk almost half a bottle of whiskey and is still standing, or leaning. Jennifer [Jennifer Pike, Cobbing's wife] arrives in her small car to take us home. The vehicle is full of boxes, papers and bits of equipment. We push Bob into the front seat but there's no room for me in the back. I climb onto the roof rack. We drive. Somehow we get back.'

More of this later.

You can buy 'Poetry Wars' online at Salt Publishing.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2008

In his foreword to the Forward Book of Poetry 2008, Chair of the judges, Michael Symmons Roberts, describes the anthology as 'a snapshot of this year's poetry'.

But what sort of snapshot is it? Certainly not 'Six Young Men', but the more typical contemporary assortment of styles, themes and voices, jostling for space in a book running to some 150 pages. And is it possible to pick out predominant or repeated themes over this extended body of poetry? Michael Symmons Roberts mentions 'water', and that's easily confirmed at a glance. But what of styles, forms and themes as opposed to pure content?

I see, in the foreground of this snapshot anthology, two things: firstly, a preference for narrative rather than simple lyricism, closely followed by a tendency towards elegy, in tone as much as actual content.

We may have safely entered the twenty-first century, but we are still in the noughties, the uncomfortable era of zero, in an age where we still have two rather than one to contend with. The noughties would appear to be an occasion for story-telling, to look back at the past, attempting to celebrate, lament or understand it. And as we near the teens, we'll be increasingly under pressure to look ahead rather than back, to break established ties with the poetry of the last century (indeed, the last millennium) and forge new themes, new poetries.

But for now, in this see-saw between nothing and something, our keywords appear to be nostalgia and, perhaps not so surprisingly, conservatism.

For those who missed the memo, the poets shortlisted for the last Forward Prizes Best Collection were Eavan Boland, John Burnside, Luke Kennard, Jack Mapanje, Sean O'Brien (eventual winner, with The Drowned Book), and Adam Thorpe. Best First Collection shortlist consisted of: Joanna Boulter, Melanie Challenger, Daljit Nagra (eventual winner, with Look We Have Coming to Dover), and Eleanor Rees.

The Best Individual Poem was won by Alice Oswald with her beautiful and epic 'Dunt', a poem for a nearly dried-up river. The other shortlisted poets in that category were: David Harsent, Lorraine Mariner, Carole Satyamurti, Myra Schneider, and Jean Sprackland.

Obviously, I can't possibly discuss all these poets, nor the extensive list of commended poems. Nor am I interested in discussing the winners in particular (I've already covered The Drowned Book on this blog, reviewed Daljit's debut in last summer's Poetry Review, and consider 'Dunt' to be one of the most important single poems of this century so far). Instead, I'm going to focus on those highlights which tap into my own thoughts and prejudices about contemporary poetry.

Going back to my observations on narrative, elegy and nostalgic conservatism as keynotes of these Forward Prizes, how do two new(ish) poets, Luke Kennard and Eleanor Rees, fit into that?

At first glance, they don't appear to, except perhaps for the category of narrative. Kennard is adventurous, nonsensical and entertaining, Rees is hard-edged and pithy: in this short selection, Kennard writes about ... well, your guess is as good as mine ... while Rees creates a quasi-mythological landscape where terrible things happen to passive, indifferent women. And in this selection at least, both poets lean towards the story-telling element of poetry.

Luke Kennard's work though does demonstrate conservative tendencies too - if you take conservative here in its associated meaning of controlled and limited; his frivolity appears excessive at first, but it's not the emotional excess of a Ginsberg, howling and letting it all 'hang out'. It reminds me in places of some of TS Eliot's playful non-sequiturs (c.f. 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree' from Eliot, versus Kennard's 'May I never have to bury another leopard' in a list-style poem called 'The Journalist's Prayer'). His poetry mocks serious intent with delightful frothy nonsense, and not even the 'nonsense' we're used to from the likes of Ashbery and Prynne - it lacks that complex allusive density and air of academic pretension. Rather, Luke Kennard is a dazzling young descendant of Frank O'Hara, out to lunch with Ionesco and other proponents of the Absurd, and unlikely to be footing the bill.

Yet despite his emphasis on the poem as sleight-of-hand entertainment, a political agenda is not entirely missing from Kennard's work. One of the two poems reproduced in the Forward anthology is a lengthy poem about a murderer, split into five page-long sections. This being a Luke Kennard poem, of course - he's almost a brand now, you notice - we're not in Carol Ann Duffy's intense 'Psychopath' territory here. Instead, the concept of the murderer is mocked, as are our knee-jerk reactions to the word, and indeed to the poem qua poem:

I take the murderer for coffee.
'Make sure you don't murder your coffee!'
I joke. He likes my jokes.

Later I swing a plank into his face:
This is to stop him enjoying himself –
Which is integral to the rehabilitation process.

His mouth trickles blood like a tap quarter-turned.
He likes my analogies. 'Hey, Murderer!'
I yell, 'Murdered anyone recently?'

and so on.

This poem develops into a filmic narrative, with the narrator as slightly barmy social commentator, a sinister and uneasy note behind all the jokes. See his full collection from Salt, The Harbour Beyond the Movie, for more of the same. The fractured nature of such narratives, their slippery subtexts and unfunny frivolity, may perfectly capture a certain disturbing note in the Zeitgeist, but is it poetry?

Or rather, since definitions of poetry are no longer definitive and such questions no longer applicable in the minds of most readers, is this the kind of poetry we want to take us forward into the twenty-first century, already war-scarred and in danger of planetary meltdown? Answers on a Martian.

Eleanor Rees' work feels far more like the model the 'reader on the street' - if there were such a thing - would be accustomed to associating with the word 'poetry'. The two selections here from her Salt-published Andraste's Hair demonstrate a lyrical gift that aims to be sparing and allusive, making the most of silence and the white spaces of the page, and in these two poems at least, her intent has a high seriousness. (This is not necessarily a good thing either; I'm merely noting it as I go along.) These two pieces also feel very carefully written, everything controlled, the poem balanced in both hands like a bowl brimming with milk that mustn't on any account be spilt: again, conservative.

If you know Yves Bonnefoy's work, Eleanor Rees - a Liverpudlian - seems to be coming from that rather interesting side of the lyrical tradition, which also shares some territory with Basil Bunting: although potentially an urban poetry, markers that might designate a poem as urban are carefully sidestepped or disguised here, with 'natural' objects taking precedence over the man-made, creating a quasi-mythological feeling of timelessness:

An open moon; burr of grass.
Last reaches of the split day
ending, the last
quiet pitch heard
in deep woods. Wet sod of dirt.
Scent of the sun's fire
passing field ruts and furrows,
seedlings, coiled roots, hedgerows;
flight of night-bird
turning tail into a sea breeze
beak battened to the north.

This poem, entitled Night Vision, has an elegiac tinge to it ('where are your bones, baby? Where are your bones?') and a deeply apocalyptic view of the cityscape (reminding me in places of Jacob Polley's powerful urban imagery) as here, in the closing lines of the poem:

Back alleys of the city burn.
Night boils outside the window.
The streets smoulder as the morning comes.

In terms of narrative technique, there are connections to be made here between Eleanor Rees' poetry and that of Alice Oswald's 'Dunt' - not least in terms of their similarly daring use of white space, hard to reproduce on a blog (particularly in poems from Oswald's last collection 'Woods Etc'). The longer quotation above from Rees' Night Vision displays a desire to get away from 'everyday' conventions of language and to be filmic instead: short bursts of language, concentrated, often lacking definite and indefinite articles, a narrative made up of mini-scenes, mostly uncommented-upon snapshots.

For comparison - though I originally said I wouldn't discuss it! - here is a similar technique at work in Oswald's 'Dunt':

Little hobbling tripping of a nearly dried-up river
not really moving through the fields
having had the gleam taken out of it
to the point where it resembles twilight.
Little grumbling shivering last-ditch attempt at a river
more nettles than water. Try again.

If 'Dunt' is an environmentalist's dream poem, recounting the tenacity and sheer persistence of nature attempting to revive and heal itself even when it appears that all hope must be lost, Rees' title poem for her first collection, 'Andraste's Hair', featured in the anthology, is a complex and unyielding narrative on the fractured relationships between people within a community, and between nature and that community: a woman's hair is burnt in a wood by three unspecified people; she does not struggle; the next day, a plait of hair is lying on a woman's bed, shorn; she carries it through the woods to the river; a boy cries some time later, hearing a song in the woods.

I have a few personal theories about such stylistic and thematic tendencies in current poetry - theories which will no doubt become altered as time passes. Urban and rural traditions within British society are changing and blurring all the time. We can't rely on them anymore for guidance and reassurance. We can no longer second-guess what the future holds by studying the past. The planet is in danger; ergo, we are in danger.

In the Forward anthology, poets like Oswald, Kennard and Rees seem to be presenting us with their own individually-conceived pictures of life in the twenty-first century rather than an overt message: a series of images, in fact, behaving much like a reel of film. This filmic poetry looks to the past for perspective but can't hold onto it; some of it looks to the future but can't envisage it. Or perhaps dare not. It regrets. It alludes. It entertains. It even confronts, at times, and in its own way.

But does it exude intimacy and passion, the sort of poetry we might - for instance - associate with some of the great political poets of the twentieth century, such as WB Yeats or Allen Ginsberg? Does it need to possess those traits or is it time to leave rawness and strength of feeling behind? Most importantly, does it engage?

David Morley's Online Workshop

I was very saddened recently to learn that David Morley - see my blog review of his 'Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing' below - has been struck down with Type 1 Diabetes. However, with fighting spirit, he will still be hosting the Guardian's online workshop this month, which you can find here.

There's also another review - rather lengthier than mine! - of his book, amongst several others on creative writing, by Jeremy Treglown, which first appeared in the Financial Times on January 19th 2008 and which David has quoted on his Warwick University blog this week.

Boudicca on Blogger

I had a lovely surprise today when, logging into Blogger, I found a frequent browser here at Raw Light (Sorlil) had written a short book review on her blog of my latest collection, Boudicca & Co.

I'm off later today to the furthest reaches of Kent, to attend the funeral of my cousin Spike this weekend, who died from cancer a few days ago - only in his early fifties - and who shall be sorely missed. A sad and sombre trip.

While I'm away though, why not check out Sorlil's 'Poetry in Progress' blog and her post about 'Boudicca'?

What Need of Poems in the Dark?

Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book

I’ve just enrolled on a course at Warwick, examining the influence of Dante in the poems of T.S. Eliot. That may be one reason why I kept catching echoes of both those poets in Sean O’Brien’s latest collection, The Drowned Book. His recent verse translation of Dante's Inferno provides another possible explanation to my feeling that the spirit of Dante presides over these poems, riddled as they are with references to the dead, the underworld and its rivers of darkness.



The Drowned Book is O’Brien’s seventh collection and a Poetry Book Society Choice. No stranger to such accolades, the prolific O’Brien has won the Forward Prize twice, for Ghost Train in 1995 and Downriver in 2001, and is wdely considered one of our most important living British poets. In this latest book, he certainly earns that status, his poetry skilfully written, richly layered and impressively accessible given the difficult themes and topics he tackles here.

O’Brien has, at times, the prophetic ‘tongues of flame’ and ‘knowledge like a skull inside a box’ of the ancient scholar he describes in ‘Serious Chairs’, though he often pretends otherwise, distracting us with the humility of the truly talented, most marked in his elegies for dead poets, as here in ‘Thom Gunn’ (another poet whose work at times signalled the influence of Dante):

Let those of us who longed to board but failed
Salute you in absentia, Captain Gunn,
Now attitude and argosy have sailed
Beyond the west.

Water and death seem inextricably linked in this book, as the title and suitably spooky-looking cover suggest. A glut of watery poem titles continue the theme, with ‘Water-Gardens’, The River in Prose’, ‘By Ferry’, ‘River-doors’, ‘The Mere’, ‘Eating the Salmon of Knowledge from Tins’, and his magnificent elegy for Barry MacSweeney, ‘A Coffin-Boat’. His elegies include work dedicated to the memory of fallen comrades in contemporary poetry: Ken Smith, Julia Darling, Michael Donaghy and Barry MacSweeney (‘... let the man rest by the waters of Tyne’). Within the subterranean world of this book, O’Brien’s erudition brings a fascinating complexity to the work, his diction both eloquent and contemporary: a heady mix for any reader.

In spite of this strongly themed content, however, The Drowned Book doesn’t flag or begin to sound homogeneous as it progresses. Not content to write the same poem twice - or fifty times as a few of his contemporaries have been known to do - Sean O’Brien is happy here to switch forms and voices, experimenting within his own idiom and making each poem new.

So references to Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ and a heart-felt cry of ‘Thalassa, Thalassa’ (‘Sea, sea!’ from Xenophon’s account of fleeing Greek soldiers at last coming within sight of the sea) jostle for house room with these jaunty Skeltonesque rhyming couplets about death’s inevitability in ‘Timor Mortis’:

Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire
As conscripts of le grand nowhere -
Some on ice and some on fire,
Some with slow piano wire,
Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck
And absolutely out of luck.

In the same poem, O’Brien asks flatly: ‘What need of poems in the dark?’ Yet, whilst reminiscent of Marvell’s stance towards his coy mistress - ‘The grave’s a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace’ - this question is not without its ambivalence. This is evidenced elsewhere in the collection, most notably perhaps in the superb ‘Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright’ - winner of the 2006 Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem - where the dead (presumably here miners) seem not only in need of such earthly pleasures but are actually still involved in them:

The singing of the dead inside the earth
Is like the friction of great stones, or like the rush

Of water into newly opened darkness.

I thought here of other subterranean worlds, of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, and the sinister Mines of Moira in The Lord of the Rings, especially following O’Brien’s marvellously described ‘thud of iron doors sealed once for all’ and the miners themselves, ‘gargling dust’, ‘their black-braided banners aloft’. But are these real human men? Are they memories of those who used to work ‘in the underground rivers/Of West Moor and Palmersville’, or are these the ghosts of fallen miners eternally patrolling the ‘tiny corridors of the immense estate’?

Although most of these poems are not obscure or difficult in themselves, I sometimes felt that a few notes might have elucidated the content or origin of a poem. Not being fully aware of the historical background to ‘Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright’ was an obstacle to enjoying what is otherwise a tremendously powerful and transformative piece of writing. I did perform an internet search on James Wright which gave me some extra information, but should having to google be an expected part of reading a poem now? Some poets don’t mind providing elucidatory notes, others disagree vehemently with the need for them. Personally, I’ve always found more pleasure in collections which are annotated, even if only briefly at the back. In the groping search for understanding, misreadings and missed nuances are always a danger - and a largely unnecessary one, it seems to me.



Many individual lines in The Drowned Book will stay with me a long time, such as this complicated beauty: ‘The city runs like science fiction backwards’. Or this, at once Dickensian and as atmospheric as a Turner oil painting: ‘A boat burning out on the flats’. Echoes of Eliot too, most strongly in the short choral poem ‘Proposal for a Monument to the Third International’, where I couldn’t help thinking of the well-known sequence in Little Gidding, where the narrator is heading home after a long night (Eliot worked as a volunteer rooftop fire warden in London during the war) and meets ‘a familiar compound ghost’ in the street, rather like Dante meeting Virgil, his guide through hell. Is this now Eliot meeting O'Brien or was that not the poet's intention? Even without these inferences, the apocalyptic and other-worldly ‘dream-vision’ quality of the moment, in particular, is what struck me most on reading this:

I rode to the twenty-ninth floor
Of the Hotel Ukraina, then climbed the last steps
To the last locked room
Where a camera obscura portrayed the night sky
As Stalin might dream it himself
From one of the seven dark stars he cast
So high that the heavens themselves
Were extinguished.

I turned to descend and there by the door
Was a wizened old man, sitting smoking.
A red fire-bucket was full of his ash.
He wore two watches and between his eyes
A bullet hole.
He looked indifferently through me.
Brothers, this is all I can recall.


However, the poem which affected me most powerfully in The Drowned Book was ‘A Coffin-Boat’, his quiet-spoken elegy for the poet Barry MacSweeney; not least, perhaps, because I knew the man myself. It’s a slightly longer poem than most, and here, once again, we have to bend our heads to enter its dark landscape - or should that be ‘inscape’? - the sloping low-ceilinged passage that leads down to the underworld:

Today you must go for a walk in the dark. Go in
Where the stream by the graveyard falls
Into the tunnel and hurries off hoarse with graffiti.
You will be hauling a brass-handled narrowboat,
Mounted with twin candelabra, containing
A poet who managed to drink himself dead,
With heroic commitment, at fifty-one.
Packed up with books and manuscripts and scotch,
In his box from the Co-op, a birthright of sorts.

Later in this poem, we get again, foregrounded here, the idea that poetry stops with death. (‘What need of poems in the dark?’) Sean O’Brien makes a good case for that depressing reality - or blessed release? - here:

... down here’s the speechless
History of everything and nothing,
Poetry’s contagious opposite.

An elegant and elegiac book then, but not particularly sinister, in spite of its subject matter. O’Brien has managed to imbue his vision of death and the afterworld with terrible beauty but also a wry sense of humour which refuses to be cowed by its surroundings. To read The Drowned Book cover to cover at one sitting may be a strange and discomforting experience, but it’s one which managed to produce a certain calm inspiration in this poet at least:

On the gathering waters that slide
To the mouth of the Tyne, where the world

Is beginning and ending:
Three lighthouses wearing the weather,
In each of them a table laid

With rosemary and rue,
So that the dead may sit at peace
And watch with us tonight.

*

You can find The Drowned Book online at Amazon.co.uk

Growing A Pearl: Jacob Polley's 'Little Gods' (Picador 2006)

Mother of tides, father of skies:
give me the grit to grow a pearl.
Fill me with fear,
that brain-food, or that dark matter, desire.

As the eminently quotable Don Paterson has told us*, ‘Poetry is the art of saying things once’, and Jacob Polley’s second collection, Little Gods, published last year, seems to provide that perfect balance between under and over-statement to which Paterson, his editor at Picador, was referring.

His poetry is clear-spoken, or rather - since this is poetry - clear-sung across the white space of the page, without straining for emphasis or becoming distracted by those odd peripheral activities that poems indulge in as they are written, as evidenced by the perfect poise and lyrical invocation of the four lines above (from Polley’s ‘Sand’).

It is possible to read Paterson’s little aphorism as an assertion that poetry is about saying things on one occasion and never needing to go down that route again. But then none of us would bother with all these versions or translations of poems that have influenced us, or poems inspired by other poets, ad infinitum.

But of course we do bother, because part of being a poet is positioning oneself within a certain poetic tradition - or, if you are daring and competent enough, outside that tradition - by choosing poets, past and present, with whom you can align yourself.

Jacob Polley understands this venerated practice and leaves us a number of these signposts in Little Gods: two poems directly ‘after Baudelaire’ (‘Spleen’ and ‘The Sun’), and many individual words, lines or tropes which speak to me clearly of the pastoral lyric tradition.

On top of that, there’s the blistering contemporary varnish of ‘burnt-out’ urban decay, reminding me in places of shorter poems by T.S. Eliot such as ‘The Love-Song of Alfred J. Prufrock’ or ‘Preludes’:

October, November: leaves and smoke.
The coalman pulls up in his flatbed truck.
Who would believe I stand where I am,

so long at the window, lost in a coat,
or under a streetlamp, my shadow unstuck?
Only she with her clock and her almanac can.

This is from Polley's 'Skin and Bone'. Here I’m waiting for Eliot's lonely cab-horse that steams and stamps ('Preludes'), ‘And then the lighting of the lamps.’ The last line too, its old-fashioned deferral of the verb giving us an unusual stress on the final word, feels almost ironic, self-mocking. Then, as though to confirm my pinpointing of his influences, we have the closing lines of Polley’s ‘Twilight’:

On the river, lanterns float. The city
lies with its throat cut and wrists open,
feeding streetlight into the water.

Ah, but the rain you prayed for. Do you hear?

Now I’m waiting for rain in the dry mountains, followed perhaps by a quick chorus of ‘Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.’** And who doesn’t remember ‘ When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table’ from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’?

Here we have a highly urban Eliotesque poetry, dark, intelligent and sophisticated, alongside versions of Baudelaire, a poet praised by Eliot for his ‘great genius’ and technical mastery. Some ambitious choices of mentor from Polley here.

But what does Charles Baudelaire represent to us now? A reckless and dissolute young man, his political edge tempered by addiction and the relentless pursuit of luxury in its older sense – that of lust or lasciviousness from the creamy Latin luxuria, meaning excess. ‘Spleen’ is his infamous expression of rage against the world, a dark and slimy place he envisages as an inescapable trap, full of horrors and leading only to death.

So how does all that translate to Jacob Polley’s take on Baudelaire? At first glance, it seems a glaring mismatch of styles. Jacob Polley is a ‘nice’ poet. He writes about owls in trees (yew trees though, associated with Plath, graveyards, longevity) and doesn’t write about unpleasant things lurking in the darkness or ladies with long tresses, the fleshpots and seductive lures of the city. Or does he?

Here are the final two stanzas of one of his more urban poems, the gothicky ‘Black Water’:

The knife’s not a fish,
though it’s cold from the drawer;
and the birch leaves aren’t cymbals, though they’re blown
silver-side-up in the wind, which won’t show you
death in a cistern’s slab of black water:
only your own untroubled face.

And there’s no testing the blade of her shoulder,
there’s no catch hidden in her throat,
and your heart’s no more than meat.

The ‘her’ of these last lines is the first mention of a woman in this poem. She is not named, nor designated as lover, wife or muse, but is described almost as a faceless predator, a suggestion of dangerous nudity in ‘the blade of her shoulder’, and a trap being set for the unwary male where ‘your heart’s no more than meat.’

But Polley is cleverer than that. The narrator’s face is ‘untroubled’ in the ‘cistern’s slab of black water’ and he is not involved with the woman, so cannot be trapped or hurt by that seductive shoulder and throat: ‘your heart’s no more than meat’.

Some critics have seen Ted Hughes in this poetry; I don't, except in individual poems where specific echoes occur, and as a general influence which I consider all-pervasive for younger poets, something you can't help imbibing directly or indirectly via other poets as you learn your trade.

For me, poems like ‘The Turn’, the Plath-like ‘Caldecotes’ - 'Roll over, you dead, for the little ones' - and ‘Twilight’, quoted earlier, simply reinforce that other face to Polley’s work, the darker and less socially integrated side: ‘Here comes the evening, the criminal’s friend'.

The powerful emphasis on metaphor and simile in Polley’s work can seem old-fashioned in this age of unsophisticated, confessional writing. Yet perhaps this is precisely what we need to bring that elusive general readership back to poetry. As twenty-first century poets, we work within a paradox where poetry is everywhere, yet everywhere ignored. A poet whose work is quotable, accessible and nostalgic in tone - whilst also being complex enough to provide any number of hot meals for academics - may be the answer to our prayers.

There are problems associated with that sort of writing, though. For instance, we tend to associate the English lyric with over-simplicity, perhaps a certain lightweight feel to theme or subject. Poetry for more innocent times, for the children we used to be. What we need now - it’s generally assumed - is a spare, muscular, uncompromising poetry. Poetry for the modern age, poetry for grown-ups.

But the truth is, we are still looking to poetry to fill the gaps left by the demise of religion and the old-fashioned intergenerational family unit, mothers who used to sing and teach us nursery rhymes, fathers who told us stories at bedtime, grandparents still available to explain the way it used to be when they were children. The television, video game and computer have largely taken the place of those creative sources. Even the novel is barely in evidence anymore: if statistics are to be believed, we are a nation of non-readers.

So, as adults, we may come to poetry looking for truth and spiritual sustenance - ‘I remember hearing a poem about the sea when I was a child, or was it a dark forest, anyway it made me feel sad/frightened/exhilarated’ - only to wander away empty-handed, bemused by the incredible variety and the sheer vacuousness of most contemporary poetry.

Is Jacob Polley’s poetry too lyrical to be truly contemporary, too simple to carry the weight of what we know now? I don’t believe so. I believe it to be one of the best new collections that I’ve seen coming out of Picador for a few years. It lacks the intensity and laser-like accuracy of Robin Robertson, and the sardonic theatrical flair of Don Paterson, and has almost nothing of the nature of Annie Freud's more recent discursive, anecdotal style. Yet it rolls confidently off the tongue, more Anglo-Saxon than Latinate, and is not afraid to speak in simile and metaphor, or to shift verbs about the line where necessary, regardless of the shades of Georgian poets conjured up by such methods.

Sounds like critical hyperbole? Just take a look at this from his poem ‘April’ (the cruellest month, let’s not forget, for old Tom Eliot and, before him, Geoffrey Chaucer):

Whatever the leaves were saying must wait:
rain has filled the trees with its own brisk word.
There’s thunder in the darkened slates.
The pond’s green eye rolls heavenward.

You can’t charge a page with the hiss, with this
cooling of the city like a new horseshoe.
Rain in the hair, at the neck and the wrists:
for rich and poor, there’s rain to hurry through.

The boil and spit of pavements: mirrored brick.
Every patch of grass is fiercely lit.

Here Polley claims ‘you can’t charge a page with the hiss’, whilst making a creditable job of it, nevertheless. And he’s not alone in this very British concern with the weather. ‘April’, and the poem which immediately follows it in the book, ‘Rain’, both remind me of one of the best pieces of required writing produced by Ted Hughes in his capacity as Poet Laureate, the epic ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’, where ‘Thunder gripped and picked up the city./ Rain didn’t so much fall as collapse./ The pavements danced, like cinders in a riddle’, and then the magnificent ‘A girl in high heels, her handbag above her head, // Risked it across the square’s lit metals.’ I could also point to Seamus Heaney’s opening poem in Spirit Level, the exuberant ‘Rain Stick’, with its torrential euphony of descriptors. Here at least I find Hughes - and Heaney as a sturdier alternative - but if he is elsewhere in this collection, the influence has been well-integrated enough not to shriek Hughes, even to someone steeped in him, someone for whom Hughes is, quite frankly, a god.

So Polley’s poetry stretches to meet its predecessors, needing to rival them, to leave his footprint in the pastoral tradition. He succeeds in some places, the stronger poems in his second collection overshadowing the weaker ones to such an extent that we barely notice the flaws. Best of all, his poems are articulate; they connect with the reader, want to give back to them. From such auspicious beginnings, a pearl may be grown, the career of a poet forged:

Darling, d’you think you can’t see as you did?
Then find inside this battered tin,
this tin that smells of cold metal and rust,
these steel-rimmed spectacles. Hook them on,
for I want you to see as you did again.
Others have. Those who’ve aged, or lost,
have worn them a while, and regained
lovers or sons, memories or minds,
then returned to their lives, less vague, less blind.

(‘The Prescription’)


* From ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ by Don Paterson (T.S. Eliot Lecture November 2004).
** The closing lines of ‘The Waste Land’. T.S. Eliot’s note on the text reads: “The peace which passeth understanding is our equivalent to this word (shantih)."

Buy Jacob Polley's Little Gods from Amazon.co.uk.

Paraphernalia by Joanne Limburg (Bloodaxe, 2007): a first sharp look

I still haven't finished that Polley review. It's not some gleaming epic. I just can't seem to get my thoughts about Little Gods into any sort of coherent shape at the moment. It's probably the house move looming, all the tedious arrangements I have to tackle, such as actually finding us somewhere to live. Right now, anything that takes me too far away from my desk is a complete pain in the fundament. And moving house certainly comes into that category.

However, I received a copy of Joanne Limburg's second collection with Bloodaxe today. It's entitled Paraphernalia and is a handsome book with a cheery-looking cover painting by Liz Knox, a domestic scene featuring a kitchen table, but one suggestive of clutter and disarray. I'll probably look at it again in some depth next month, when perhaps hidden virtues may be revealed, but on a first read-through the book has proved disappointing enough to merit comment straightaway.

If this was a first book, I might be inclined to say, well, these poems are rough around the edges and a little dull, but she's not untalented and will no doubt improve. But Joanne Limburg started writing poetry at roughly the same time as I did, about ten years ago. And, to complicate matters, 'Paraphernalia' is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Which leaves me utterly astonished, when I can find lines of the following standard throughout this collection:

Every two hours,
20 by cup,
a little of me,
a note on a chart.

This is from a poem called Milk, about expressing milk to breast-feed a baby. It is by no means an unusual example of Joanne Limburg's work, nor is that topic unusual in a collection dominated by highly personal and domestic poems written so flatly and repetitively that I wonder whether the PBS were looking at the same book.

Perhaps it's intended to be light or comic verse. That might be possible, though I didn't personally find any of these poems funny. But I find it hard to believe that this is meant to be comic verse, as Limburg's poems - especially as you move further into the book - seem pervaded by an ever-deepening sense of malaise and disconnection from reality.

I take no pleasure in not being able to praise this book. Normally I would sidestep the review rather than write something very superficial, feeling unable to say anything positive about the book. Some of you may even be surprised to learn that I no longer possess the same taste for the jugular that got me into so much trouble back in the nineties.

But not wishing to be unkind doesn't mean I can't question the bestowing of a PBS Recommendation on a collection as weak as this. I am a member of the PBS and I don't expect to pay them a tidy sum of money every year only to be sent 'recommended' books through the post which I would put back on the shelf in a bookshop. And, after all, their website declares that 'The PBS offers the best new contemporary poetry to its members.'

Now, I'm perfectly open to hearing opposing points of view about 'Paraphernalia': indeed, I would welcome a debate on the book's merits. And I understand that all these PBS choices must be personal - that's a given in a highly subjective field like poetry - but I'd still be interested to know which selecting poets approved so highly of the poems from which the following extracts are taken, and precisely why:


One trip to the bin is all he needs
to put the lid on a season of chaos.
Now tell me that isn't better! It's better.

(final stanza of 'The Man Who Tidied His Wife's Handbag')

*

I have no mind for anything
but you and the gunge in the sink.

(from 'Nimbostratus')

*

Of course I could still change things - get off this sofa
and, you know, really do something about it.

(from 'Bubble')

*

O Night and Silence
why should I complain?

For though I am empty, and pale as veal,
surely your servants are good.

(from 'Psalm')

*

Despite our attempts
to resolve this matter
you fail to give us
the right response.

We are forced
to take action.

Now we are coming
to cut off your phone
to cut off your power
to cut off your water
to sever your every connection.

(from ATTENTION!, the title underlined and in capitals, a poem 'generated' by unpleasant letters the poet received by mistake from a mobile phone company, which were then apparently 'blend[ed] with a Cherokee "Spell to Destroy Life"' to produce this poem: I apologise for not being able to slightly indent the final lines as they appear in the book)

*

We shall not win security
by offering vermin security.

Sit back. Relax. Our marshals are trained
to handle cabin security.

Through the hissing fast flow teat
he's drinking in security.

(from "Security!", which repeats this end rhyme pattern for 9 couplets, possibly a 'ghazal', possibly not. If anyone knows the correct name for this poetic form, please leave a comment below.)

*

There was a husband - I suppose he left.
Now I'm poor, and sad, and home with mother.
I trudge between my bedroom, and the toilet,
don't even go downstairs until it's late.
I can't be bothered working for my 'A' Levels,
but if I fail again they'll keep the baby.

(from 'Late', a poem of 7 stanzas in the same voice, which is so consistently flat and prose-like that it makes me wonder why Limburg would choose to include it in her collection and why her editor didn't intervene. Perhaps they thought the drearily PC subject matter was enough to warrant its inclusion.)

*

Yes: I use this service.
No: no contact at all.
Always the minimum payment.
My signal is faint to poor.

Often: I think it's important.
My skin is slightly dry.
Whichever is the softer.
Citrus is better than pine.

(from 'Respondent': the conceit is explained by the title. It's an old trick, not particularly amusing, and although I hear and cheerily applaud many similar poems every month from open mic poets, it's hardly the standard of work I expect from a PBS Recommended Bloodaxe collection. Or is it?)

*

I'll stop there. I've had personal contact with Joanne Limburg, who is a perfectly delightful person, and I genuinely wish her all the very best with her writing. I am also convinced that many people will be fans of her work, otherwise she would not have got this far.

But when I read new poetry - particularly, perhaps, when I read other women poets, who have so much lost time to make up - I look for the hard, the ambitious, the unusual, the challenging, the witty, the powerful, the undaunted. So I am naturally disappointed when I find a collection by a woman poet of reasonable prominence which has been singled out for praise as Limburg's Paraphernalia has, yet which appears to possess little to recommend itself beyond a certain wacky modern sensibility and a taste for quirky, repetitively rhymed poems - I counted six poems in total which use the same couplet and end rhyme pattern throughout, a trick which soon palls. Where is the challenge in all this, where is the ambition?

Let me be clear. I am not looking to be needlessly unpleasant here, to trash Joanne Limburg's latest collection for my own purposes. When I get a new book like this, I turn to it eagerly, hoping to be excited and inspired. I desperately want to find strong mainstream women poets with whom I can identify and from whom I can learn. The fact that I'm still struggling to do so after ten years in poetry is one of the quiet everyday despairs of my life. So when I implore women poets like Joanne Limburg to be more inventive, more ambitious and more creatively independent in their poetry, I am also reminding myself of the gap between my own aspirations and the reality of my work.