 As Reviewed By: James Rother |
No More than Offhanded Grace Miraculously Transformed into an Ormulu... New British Poetry. Edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic. Graywolf Press, 2005. $16 |
As Reviewed By: James Rother |
No More than Offhanded Grace Miraculously Transformed into an Ormulu... New British Poetry. Edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic. Graywolf Press, 2005. $16 |
It’s
been a while since the relative healthiness of relations between poets on
this side of the pond and those still lodged in the mother country have
been top priorities with editors of American literary journals. Not since
the eclipse of extra-national popularity once basked in by critical organs
like The London Review of Books has the matter raised either much
interest or an appreciable number of hackles. However, since both literary
communities are now burdened with the onus of accommodating themselves to
the unholy alliance that events in Iraq have forced upon England and
America, it’s not surprising that what poets over here think of their
British counterparts and vice versa should fire more curiosity than usual.
What has caused literary relations, once universally taken for granted, to
lapse? Was it indeed attributable, as many think, to the disappearance
during the ‘60s of T. S. Eliot, the single unifying figure with enough
gravitational pull to keep the literary politics separating the various
regions where English was spoken from going centrifugal? The richly endowed Athena and overseer of America’s poetic odyssey, Helen Vendler, tackled some of these questions six years ago in a review-article for The New York Review of Books titled “Anglo-Celtic Attitudes.” Under her purview were three new volumes of verse by poets then drawing fresh attention to a formerly debilitated literary scene in Great Britain: Paul Muldoon, Glyn Maxwell, and James Lasdun. Vendler began by blaming the decline in deference among American authors to things English on the U.S.’s having acquired superpower status after World War II and on American writers no longer feeling that they need to remain current with regard to trends emerging in the British Isles and Ireland. “Auden maintained a hold on the American audience,” she opined, because
he lived here, and Dylan Thomas flashed briefly through the country, but
apart from those two imports, modern British poets made almost no
impression on the United States. We were content to let them (and the
poets of the Commonwealth countries and Ireland) work in their separate
sphere. This depressing situation was compounded by the gradual but
widening divergence between British and American culture, and by the utter
failure, in the service of a mistaken nativism, of American public (and
even private) schools to keep British poetry, in a systematic way, in the
elementary and secondary curriculum. The American presses that still
publish poetry have tended predictably to favor American poets over others
writing in English. . . . Charles
Simic, the American co-editor of the bi-nationally edited Graywolf Press
anthology New British Poetry (his transatlantic counterpart on the
project is the Scottish poet Don Paterson), more or less concurs with this
reading of the relationship and has personally intervened to try to turn
it around. Nevertheless, much as one hates to rain on a well-intentioned
parade, and inasmuch as differences between old world and new have seldom
enjoyed so informative or so blithely spirited an airing, the results of
this effort to further mutual understanding on the poetry front are, to
put the best possible face on it, decidedly mixed. The long and the short
of the anthology's editorial scheme, like the length of views respectively
taken by the co-editors, may be assessed from the unmatched pair of
introductory statements by Paterson (the long) and Simic (the short).
They attest
not just to a joint effort on the part of these collaborators but to a
double-jointed one in which the thumbs-up sign was accorded a particular
selection only when both editors agreed to not disagree too
violently about those poems only half-liked by the one, provided it was
offset by other selections toward which the other was inordinately drawn.
“This book,” Paterson writes, has
two editors, and these are the poets we agreed on. Twelve more we
disagreed on sometimes deeply. We initially limited ourselves to
twenty-five poets, found ourselves arguing for the inclusion of twenty
more, and found space for eleven. We had to invoke a cut-off—otherwise
this book would have been unpublishably long—and decided all poets we
included had to be born after 1945, and have published at least two books
by the end of 2002. . . . Beyond
establishing an amiable ecumenism governing the anthology’s included and
excluded, Paterson and Simic apparently agonized a great deal over what
should fitly emerge from all that mutual labor aimed at defying the odds
against producing an anthology that would not only give an accurate
picture of the current situation on the ground vis à vis English
poetry, but also avoid remaindered tables and the season in hell books of
this kind generally face. How much genuine ecumenism lies behind its
rictus of congeniality must of course be left to the proverbial anyone’s
best guess; but what isn’t the least in doubt is the degree of animus
which Paterson feels toward the corrosive swindle known everywhere as
“Postmodernism.” It may have originated in the United States, but in
his view it left virtually an entire generation of British poets moldering
soullessly in its swath. Simic, in no small part an offspring of that
climate, one of whose byproducts during the ‘60s and ‘70s was a
decided tropism toward surrealist technique, is not surprisingly silent on
this and related matters. His preface wholly moots the question of who did
what, and with which, and to whom, pursuing instead the more diplomatic
route of rescouring turf already torn up by W. H. Auden’s
“Introduction” to his own Criterion Book of Modern American Verse
in the mid-‘50’s. American poetry is by its very nature
eclectic and therefore “always already” contemporary, whether its
practitioners wish it to be or not. Unlike British verse, its life force
derives less from European crosswinds than from what Simic traces to the
“limitless faith” expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson “in the power of
the individual to make a new beginning, reinventing everything from his
identity to the art of poetry . . . .” Again,
whether this is Simician for “Leave the American postmodern poets alone;
I am, after all, one of them” is something else for the reader to decide
on his or her own. The incessant harping by his British co-editor on the
“Mainstream” positioning of the majority of U.K. poets appearing in
the anthology speaks less for itself, I think, than for the myth of pan-Albionism
that has lodged itself with rather great obduracy in Don Paterson’s
mind. Tant pis or tant mieux, it conduces to very little in
the long run: the contents of New British Poetry will either stand
on their own or they won’t. All the ideologizing rant in the world is
incapable of altering anyone’s opinion as to their poetic value or of
nudging the book’s sales into either the red or the black. But
much of this is quite incidental to the point raised. The only important
questions are: “How truly representative has been the editors’
selection of poets and poems?” and “How many items making up that
selection reflect a preponderance of the golden over mere dross?” At
first blush, it must be said, a skimming of New British Poetry’s
innards proves not all that enticing. A majority of its inclusions seem,
despite the occasional lurch into the memorable, to lack assuredness and
in some cases even basic skills. Under cover of “populism” (i.e.
“grammar school” ties over “public school” ones) a plethora of
skivvies and ragged knickers flaunt their working class threads, as in
“Poem” by Simon Armitage: And if it snowed and snow covered the drive —or Michael Donaghy’s “A Repertoire”: “Play us one we’ve never heard before”
Perhaps the late Donaghy is an unfair choice by means of which to
make this point. A New Yorker of Irish descent, he did not emigrate to
London until 1985, at about the age of thirty. Perhaps an example from the
verse of Alan Jenkins would better reveal the omnipresent specter of Terry
Eagleton, Raymond Williams’s “dwarf alter ego” (a phrase of Norman
Mailer’s) and noted scourge of BBC-3’s pretensions, who morphs in and
out of many guises and disguises, the disaffected (though still repentant)
bourgeois among them: He visited, the man who takes your life
The italicized adverb in Alan Jenkins’s “Visiting” speaks volumes,
nearly all of which would likely appear on Eagleton’s course list for
“Marx & Spencer 101” at some institution of higher loitering or
other. However, the braid of disaffection can be raveled in many different
ways, and there is no discernible shortage in New British Poetry of
things to make and things to do with either crotchety dispositions or the
perennially drab English soulscape a-drip with alienation. A few of
Paterson’s and Simic’s poets do themselves and the British tradition
proud—sometimes with no more than offhanded grace miraculously
transformed into an ormolu or papier maché Norn from some rock
culture Götterdämmerung. Such matte metamorphosis occurs in this
same poet’s “Portrait of a Lady”: She’s been in too deep and out too far, oh
man, This
may not be up there with T. S. Eliot’s early effort with the same title
or Ezra Pound’s “Portrait d’une Femme,” but it does comes across
engagingly as a, if not the, Browning version of detritus
enliveningly retrieved from decades past, with particular emphasis on its
distaff side. The latter, one recalls, drifted from hippy-flotsam to
schizo-jetsam with a determination not often seen on either R. D.
Laing’s or Thomas Szazz’s corner of the Atlantic. No Leonard Cohen-ish
parsing of roughage in this mess of pottage, no gloopy homage to Suzanne
as “beautiful loser” or other such pseudonym for demirep out of a
poet’s bag of clichés. It’s all about the doom the distracted can
often read in those anfractuous prolixities that draw unlikely Kundrys to
even unlikelier Parsifals. If Jenkins’s “portrait” can be said to
have a subject at all, it is glimpsable only through what its sinuous
images yield—a farrago best epitomized by a phrase from the title essay
of Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979): “a demented and
seductive vortical tension.” What begins as something marinated in
Beatling brine—the candle-lit Schubertiana of “Eleanor Rigby” or
“Norwegian Wood” hastens to mind—ends, after a spell in the draught
cupboard, thoroughly pickled in Schönbergian angst. Such
angst is largely unknown to these shores, having been long
restricted to that uniquely British twilight zone of class consciousness
undergirded by Socialismus from the top down rather than, as in the
old Soviet Union, from the bottom-feeders up. With the dissolution of the
Auden-Spender-Day Lewis axis and the sputtering of T. S. Eliot into
senescence after Four Quartets, British verse slouched into an interregnum
from which even the underings of endless Milkwood's by Dylan Thomas
clones provided welcome relief. The
further self-promoting of ex-Angries into red- and white-brick sinecures
(the less scholarly among them opting for vantages from which the
fox-hunting upper classes could be stalked as a blood sport) took on the
ruddy-cheeked venosity of literature of, by, and for ageing
Ban-the-Bombers and other dupes of Leonid Brezhnev’s NKVD. From this
feeding frenzy of the bewitched, bothered, and bewildered there soon
emerged a strange new mésalliance of fresh converts to Toryism—Kingsley
Amis, John Osborne, and John Braine, to name but three—and the SoHo
smart set eager to capitalize on the freewheeling tableau vivant of
déjeuner sur l’herbe, ‘60s-style. Thus were those recruited
under the banner of Philip Larkin pitted against those rallying to Ted
Hughes’s standard in an agon further exacerbated by a class war
which, having smoldered resentfully through much of Dame Margaret
Thatcher’s “New Britain,” was stoked to white heat by acolytes of
Raymond Williams such as Terry Eagleton. The resulting Po-Mo-driven turn
to the Left begat, among other prodigies, a spate of poet-populists of the
stamp of Tony Harrison, which, despite some branching off a few recidivist
Edith Sitwells and George Barkers, remained within striking distance of
the high animal spirits realm staked out by followers of D. H. Lawrence
and Robert Graves. In those years British verse remained more or less on
track in keeping relations between Toffs and Yobs suitably intransigent,
which is to say, modeled not all that loosely on Orc-human antagonism in
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. As far back as the early ‘60s,
critics such as Charles Tomlinson had noted problems arising out of
British poets’ having too precipitously dismounted the twin high horses
of ‘20s modernism and ‘30s Noël Cowardice-with-a-Marxist-slant. From
the self-indulgent clamor of the ‘70s had arisen a multicultural road
show only an Edward Lucie-Smith could have conceived, let alone
impresario-ed. Amid acrid waftings from bazaars as far away as Tangiers
and Beirut, British poetry went native in ways unimaginable to earlier
generations whose letters to Lord Byron had borne Icelandic postmarks and
whose adjustment to the brave new world of Yankee corporatism required no
more arduous an adjustment than a crash course in American slang. Gone (it
seemed, for ever) were the simple-minded longings for Arabia Deserta that
had led to Sir Richard Burton’s, and later T. E. Lawrence’s,
outings-in-mufti, or the pleasures which life in the Punjab during
the late Raj afforded the imperial class. All too noisomely in were
the premonitory quiverings of what would soon surface as “subaltern
studies,” a cyst on the face of academe whose suppurations of uppity ressentiment
finally reached gusher levels when the pontificating faux-Palestinian
(by way of Cairo and Oxford) Edward Said, his anti-Israel tirades
emanating from a safe house accorded him by New York's Columbia
University, assumed fountainhead duties as chief issuer of anti-Zionist Arrafatwas
from the United States. Academic I.E.D.’s, like his Orientalism
of 1979 (which apologized profusely for mayhem loosed by such
Middle-Eastern terrorist groups as Fatah and Hezbollah), proved as
disruptive to literary common sense in other parts of the left-leaning
world as they did in the United States. The “mainstream” had morphed
over time into a difficult slipstream for any British poet to stay afloat
in, so choppy had the cross-currents buffeting England from across the
Channel become. Determined to align its national cultures with whichever frissons
of foreignness were most likely to undercut the twin nightmares of a
resurgent Islam and the price of gasoline shooting past three dollars a
gallon, Europe was again acting like a continent sorely racked by
incontinence. Some of these frissons, as it turned out, proved
not inharmonious with certain asymmetric idiolects of the New Left whose dictats
took on particular stridency after the upheaval in French politics
nominalized as “May 1968.” At a stroke, Carlos the Jackal married the
deconstructionist muse and set up housekeeping in the flat in Paris where
Louis Althusser’s wife experienced terminal massage at the hands of the luftmensch
responsible for, among other unstringings of the lyre, Pour Marx and
Lire le Capital. If the cachet of postmodernist Paris and
neo-Marxist Berlin did not originate with these events, the wildly
inflated Student popularity they enjoyed almost everywhere was at the very
least an indirect result of them. Over
forty years ago two Americans and an Irishman attempted to put English
poetry back into the mainstream of European culture. The effect of those
generations who have succeeded to the heritage of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats
has been to largely squander the awareness those three gave us of our
place in world literature, and to retreat into a self-congratulatory
parochialism. In the years following the Second World War, this tendency
has been ever more confirmed, both in the work of the neo-romantics of the
1940s and in the poets who have since reacted against these. As among the
social poets of the thirties, we see no one writer who, while
acknowledging the point to which the art of poetry has been taken by the
three great poet-symbolists, has succeeded in working forward supported by
a consciousness of their achievement and of its technical potentialities.
Instead, in the English poetry of the fifties one has, to use the words of
a recent reviewer, an arbitrary attempt to “criticize the values of
subtopia by those of suburbia.” . . . To
drive the point further home, Tomlinson cites the famous remark of
Kingsley Amis (dropped in Poets of the 1950s) that “Nobody wants
any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art
galleries or mythology or foreign cities or other poems. At least I hope
nobody wants them,” alongside the uni-sententious credo of the eternally
grimacing Philip Larkin: “[I] have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a
common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets.”
If postwar British poetry really did align itself for a time along
fracture lines with Philip Larkin on one side of a great divide and Ted
Hughes on the other, then Jenkins’s “Portrait of a Lady,” with its
penchant for understatement reminiscent of “Church Going” and “Love
Songs in Age,” moves its needle into Larkin territory, eclipsing what is
Hughes-like about his poem as lightlessly as a half-moon lost in a
cloudbank. The
impact of forces emanating from these two radically dissimilar citadels of
English poetic style was felt far and wide and continues to register on
Geiger counters even today, if in much attenuated form. Appendaged to its
fallout was a postmodernism that savagely undercut “mainstream’
poetry”—a phenomenon whose course “in the last century in the U.K.
can be read,” in Don Paterson’s view at least, “as a relatively
seamless evolution.” Mainstream:
a river with tributaries. [Modern British Poetry], for better or
worse, is a mainstream anthology. I’d like to see the word reclaimed
from its detractors, though to do so, we should first make some attempt at
a definition. In the US, one might caricature the mainstream as that broad
swathe of poets who have strung their elegant steps together between the
clumping clog-dance of the New Formalists from the school of Yvor Winters
onwards, and the neurotic ballet of the Postmoderns, from the later Cantos
and the school of Charles Olson onwards; i.e., from that pool of writers
who would include Roethke, Lowell, and Bishop to Anthony Hecht, James
Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Louise Glück, Gertrude Schnackenberg, C. K.
Williams, Jorie Graham, Marilyn Hacker, Charles Simic, Mark Doty, and the
apparently unforgivably popular Billy Collins. In the UK, the mainstream
has been shaped and narrowed by the closing banks of that cheery and
generally none-too-clever verse of recognition humour [sic] or undisguised
moral exhortation; and by Postmoderns on the other—and how strenuously
Left—bank. However, as I hope this book will show, it has been narrowed
to a fairly furious and articulate torrent. Had
any anthology editor, even a few years ago, included that many women
poets in a “mainstream,” the timing alone would have caused many
feminists to experience the DT’s. Now, poets like Adrienne Rich, Louise
Glück, and Jorie Graham can take solace from the fact that cracks in the
glass ceiling are continuing to undermine its support system, and that Don
Paterson’s gesture of solidarity with the no-longer-weaker sex is today
more far-reaching than outreaching. Or so it would appear, were his
“relatively seamless evolution” of modern and contemporary in the U.K.
(and the U.S.) not as myth-driven as, say, F. R. Leavis’s “great
tradition.” His spellbinder’s Orpheum of critique also raised English
literature’s distaff side to queanly—if not “queenly”—heights by
allowing such constellar masculinities as James’s, Forster’s, and
Conrad’s to be outshone by dowager princesses like Jane Austen, the
Brontë sisters, and George Eliot. Of course, the trouble with great
traditions is that they only remain Eliotic gestalts when viewed
from exalted heights and only retain their Yeatsian grandeur when swaddled
in free-associational grave clothes whose tenebrous “decorum” Richard
Howard once pretextualized into a brief brought against Donald Justice’s
tendency to cede to enchantment what would be better employed in a day job
with no visionary requirements. Localizing Justice’s praise of Weldon
Kees for his originality “‘in one of the few ways that matter’ as a
question of a ‘particular tone of voice, one we have never heard
before,’” Howard pleads for a return to a poetry of disenchantment: .
. . Bearing in mind the fierce adequacy of this poet’s performance to
his purposes, the inextricability of formal pattern and wild theme, I
should like a little more emphasis on that tone of voice in which we may
hear his poems. . . . There would seem to be a tradition, or at least a
convention, in lyric poetry for dealing with a world thus enchanted, thus
held in thrall, and it is this conventional tone which releases Donald
Justice’s “particular” gentle and ruinous tone of voice, “humbly
aspiring” as James Dickey says, but aspiring to apocalypse out of frenzy
with mortality, aspiring to extirpate everything that might stand between
the naked self and the absolute—which is not humble. We may trace the
articulation of such a convention for dealing with enchantment, in this
century in poems by De La Mare, by Graves, by Yeats before 1916, by Frost
and Ransom in America; the decorum admits of sharp observation, but not
much experiment or originality with the tools of that observation, either
words or senses. The language of this poetry is one already received by
poets, not invented to satisfy new needs (which is why we must except the
later Yeats from this group) . . . .
“Great traditions” always seem most credible when the failure
to hold firm to values in a faithless present causes the unstable and
easily disillusioned to try to recapture a “golden age” that never
was. (With Pound and Eliot, that sublime period was the age of Dante and
his predecessors. Its “subject rhymes” (Pound’s term) in a chain of
Spenglerian parallels included, along with the modernist London Vortex
launched in 1915 by Wyndham Lewis’s magazine BLAST, Confucian China,
Propertius’s Rome, Sigismundo de Malatesta’s Tempio, John Adams’s
and Thomas Jefferson’s America, and Mussolini’s Italy.) Such
tendencies may be as widely observed today in the hero-cults of
contemporary art as ever they were in the hurly-burly of the Soviet
revolutionary period or that of Berlin in the early ‘30s. Within the
American context, orthodox modernism—the idiolect of Pound, Eliot,
Williams, though not, oddly enough, of Zukofsky—is seeming more and
more, as retrospect closes in on 20-20, to have been a mistake, an
unwarranted swerving into territory rife with fractalized flora and fauna
from the world of “strange attractors” unique to chaos theory,
exacerbated by the trauma of World War I and the successes, poorly
digested, of avant-garde movements such as Dada, expressionism,
constructivism, and cubism.
That said, it is both over-hasty and erroneous to shovel all
postmodern poetry—the later Cantos and the school of Charles Olson, as
Paterson dismissively puts it—into the single dumpster of well-earned
obsolescence. Nor is all postmodernist criticism of poetry eminently
junkable, a simplism that books like Heather McHugh’s Broken English:
Poetry and Partiality (1993) easily refutes. For one thing, many of
the healthier elements in postmodernist verse—and yes, there are some,
raised eyebrows in the neo-formalist peanut gallery to the contrary
notwithstanding—have attempted to redress the fallout occasioned by the
slapdash action-painting left behind by departing modernists as testimony
corroborating their movement’s artistic veracity. And though it is true
that much of the best work by postmodernists, in America at least, could
just as properly be viewed as “neo-modernist,” whatever name we choose
to call it has little bearing on either its appeal or its originality as
poetry. The British situation has the cards just described falling in
rather a variant pattern of devolution. Given the different lifespan—and
indifferent singularity—of the modernist influence, later literary
developments were fueled by market antagonisms that were on the whole less
Pooh-bearish than John Bull-ish. (Georgianism of the sort epitomized by
Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, and the galère of mostly doomed
First World War poets like Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, never
wholly waned in England; nor did the Scottish, Irish, or Welsh traditions
cease continuing along their own tracks, ruts, or what have you, even with
the age of Eliot and Auden raging stormy and stentorian about them.) For
that and other reasons uniquely English, class warfare trumped all minor
roilings over desirabilities of form and style, with politics refusing to
be upstaged by anything so frivolous and toilsome as “aesthetics.”
Thus, the most fetching poems in New British Poetry are, not
surprisingly, the ones that avoid staging too glitzy end-runs around the
variously posted guards and tackles of postmodern rugby, or that when
pilot-fishing in shark-infested political waters try too violently to
skirt the paired hazards of Hughes-ite rocky wanderlust or the
whirlpool-like suction of the Larkin vortex.
This accounts, one supposes, for the tone and tenor of the
editorial harrumphing by this anthology’s marriage of modes’ better
half, Don Paterson. As suggested earlier on, it is a throat clearing that
in its nearly thirteen pages runs the gamut from triumphalism to grudging
apologetics. It also explains why, after having waded through its nearly
200 pages of verse, the reader of New British Poetry feels less
like he’s had a first-rate literary experience than having been
assaulted by a choral version of the self-gratulatory anthem belted by the
irrefragable Gypsy Rose Lee in the Sondheim musical bearing her name,
“I’m Still Here.” Of course, there are, among the collection’s 36
contributing poets, some names we should watch (or continue watching) on
the strength of their showing here. From this company I exempt—even
where a modicum of promise is perceptible—English knock-offs of American
items already mass-produced in this country (e.g., John Ash, Mark Ford,
and other clones milling about the memory of Frank O’Hara); Glückische
handmaids of feminist expressionism who hold the “truth” that all men
are awful to be inalienable (Carol Ann Duffy and Selima Hill, to name but
two); nationalist Scots whose pibroch tootlings on the pipe of Robert
Burns and Hugh Mac Diarmid might engage some local imaginations but are
otherwise non-exportable (W. N. Herbert and Kathleen Jamie, for example);
and finally, poetic apples that didn’t fall far enough from their trees
(whether Dylan Thomas’s, or whosever) to avoid over-close identification
with their respective fruit. (In this group may be found, among others,
Gwyneth Lewis, Alice Oswald, and, to further belabor the point, Andrew
Motion.)
That leaves some rather old and “dark familiars” (to cop a
phrase from Malcolm Lowry), such as Simon Armitage, Christopher Reid, and
Michael Hoffmann, all of whose unassuming and accomplished work stands
head and shoulders above much of the whatever filling out the
anthology’s body of text. Of their poems, the most outstanding are,
respectively, “The Dead Sea Poems,” “Mermaids Explained,” and
“Lament for Crassus.” Several others by these three run them a close
second. A few poems that seem openly derivative—Robin Robertson’s
“Fall (After Rilke),” for instance—almost make up for the often
painful absence of anything approaching a singular voice in so many others
in New British Poetry: The leaves are falling, falling from trees That’s
Rilkean all right; I’m just not sure how Robertsonian it is in
compensation for the sizeable draft drawn on its indebtedness. An
example of just how strong as pull stars recently ascended into the
British firmament can exert may be seen in the work of Andrew Motion,
better known, in America at least, for his association with Larkin than as
a poet in his own right. Try as this poet might, he is powerless to stop
the biographer from tumbling into the biographee’s ravening maw. Any
Motion poem, chosen at random, will reveal the same uncontrolled
swallowings of the master’s tongue until the massing of choked-up
effects convinces that in such poetry everything sucks. One would
like to give poor be-Larkined Motion the benefit of the doubt and cede him
a place in the Empyrean as a satellite planet, but minor astronomical
finds don’t convert easily into Galilean prodigies. The problem isn’t
with unreasonable emulation; for while Motion can toll the Larkin angelus
with the best of parting-daysters and assume with poise the very image of
the tabloid medallion he helped strike, his halting facsimiles show
Larkin’s tight-lipped constipations are not in mere cross-section par
for the English course of things: November, and the Sunday twilight fallen Nor
does he seem capable, when following his master chef into the kitchen, of
not conflating a fricassee with a soufflé. Watch what happens when in
“Mythology” an inversion of a god-slight is unpacked. Larkin knew
better than to quicken into metamorphosis: Earth’s axle creaks; the year jolts on; the trees Could
the subject here be Larkin himself? As a haunted, harried, and hunted
laureate of rust and the flakes of flakes, he certainly knew what Ovid was
memorializing when versing the turns taken by hounding in running afoul of
the determinedly chaste. But a piece like “Mythology” is so slickened
with burnished complacency, so smug in the tutelary inclemency of its
bookish fatality that conjuring even a credible referent for its “you”
seems beyond all summonable magic. Very nearly in poem titled “A
Wall,” does Motion’s dark motility come into its own and court more
than just the possibility of parity with the come-ons of demons that are
merely old, new, borrowed, or blue: I have forgotten whatever
Similarly adept at bringing lattes of existentialist
resignation to froth are John Glenday, Roddy Lumsden, Alice Oswald, and Jo
Shapcott. The remainder of those represented range poetically from the
tolerably and intolerably competent to the merely unaccomplished and
therefore intolerable. As with anthology production on our side of the
Great Mouth, Paterson and Simic seem in the grip of cultural forces
determined to have flat-lining memorabilia and time-serving in short lines
trump substance and the true memorability. Often, such time-serving serves
up time pre-packaged and with all the predictable additives (e.g., halting
rhyme) in evidence, as in Jamie McKendrick’s “Sky Nails,” where,
other than watching phantom meaning being “nailed” to nothing’s
beaten airiness, there is little to divert the reader from marveling at
the ease with which that prodigy of formlessness, the contemporary poem,
rolls off the assembly line. The first day, to break me in, Described in an editorial head-note as “an unmistakably English poet—self-perplexed, somehow melancholic in tone even when being humourous, [who] writes with a beautifully understated poise and a lightly worn but highly acute and scholarly intelligence,” McKendrick, even when preoccupied with the sordidness of hotels (as in “The One Star”), can leave one moaning to the unhouseled shade responsible for having dropped in our laps such miracles as “Church Going”: O Larkin, how thine hour never quite come round/ Expireth in driblets, crumbled scones, life left/ Droozling on the hob . . .”
Yet
once in a while—once in a great while—in New British Poetry,
served time is allowed sublimely to run in place, just as it appears to do
in a divertimento for winds by Mozart, or a poem about what is
“Piquant” by Roddy Lumsden: Just as, surely, sweat is consommé Sometimes, to award the cigar to the chief metonymist of the phallus, enough said is just . . . enough said.
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