Critical Survey

This issue of Critical Survey seeks to affirm the importance of contemporary poetry. For poetry can make something ‘happen’ – in the sphere of intersubjective awareness, of intelligence, of general ideology. That is not ‘nothing’. As guest editor, I am grateful to academic colleagues and featured poets alike for making this edition possible. The focus here is on British poetry written by men. Although the articles do not engage directly with a recent interest in ‘Masculinities’, it is implicit that poetic exploration of what it is to be gendered male is an important issue.

Anthologies of contemporary poetry may not tell you everything you need to know about the state of the art, but they are bound to tell you something. That is their purpose. I bought my first such anthology in 1956. It was called New Lines and its editor, Robert Conquest, argued in his brief introduction that the work of the nine poets he had chosen for inclusion could be seen to restore ‘a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry, of the principle that poetry is written by and for the whole man, intellect, emotions, senses and all.’And all what, we might wonder? We might also cavil at the phrase ‘the whole man’, especially as one of the contributors to the anthology was Elizabeth Jennings. Still, I do not want to score easy points against New Lines. I remain immensely grateful to Conquest for introducing me to work by poets I was ready to admire; and I was also excited by Conquest’s determination to press the case for a particular kind of poetry, which entailed arguing that some poets were better than others. Conquest championed his poets on the grounds that their work exhibited a ‘refusal to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language, even when the verse is most highly charged with sensuous or emotional intent.’

The history of so-called ‘Mainstream Poetry’ in Britain has been often orchestrated through its representative anthologies. Whether it has been the various Apocalyptic anthologies of the war years, The New Apocalypse (1939) and The White Horsemen (1941), or the less pluralistic New Lines of 1956, which launched ‘The Movement’, the thumbnail version of this history has been articulated in terms of what A. Alvarez characterised as ‘a series of negative feed-backs’ between decades and, by extension, between anthologies.

There is a particular place in Hull which has long ‘enslaved’ Sean O’Brien’s imagination – so much so that it has formed the basis for the titles of two of his four collections so far. It is a Victorian conservatory housing exotic plants and birds, a glass house, an ‘indoor park’, situated on Pearson Park where Philip Larkin lived. Walking into its Turkish-bath feel before its recent renovation, the conservatory conjured up an atmosphere of inaction, boredom, suspension, decay, all the things which made Hull its own myth – the sense of a city so far up the creek that it was at the end of the line with nowhere to go, with inhabitants who just seemed to end up there and never escape, stuck in the fathomless Humber mud. But for O’Brien, the conservatory also epitomises something strange and mysterious, ‘a piece of the exotic stuck right in the middle of the everyday … a kind of Victorian paradox of importing sweat-based plants into a frostbased climate.’ (TE)

‘I am still of [the] opinion’, Yeats writes, ‘that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind – sex and the dead’. Echoing this attitude, Longley states ‘[m]y concerns continue to be Eros and Thanatos, the traditional subject-matter of the lyric’, concerns that are focused for him by ‘the natural world’ and by ‘the catastrophe of the First World War, the influence of that catastrophe on subsequent Irish and European history and politics’. Those two things – the war and the natural world – like love and death, impinge upon each other throughout his work; both inform a psychic landscape that, Yeatsian-style, is always characterised by awareness of its dual possibilities. Paul Durcan notes the grounding of Longley’s aesthetic in the landscape, literal and metaphorical, of the Great War, a grounding which has coloured all his collections from the early No Continuing City through to the recent The Ghost Orchid: ‘Longley’s themes: Of Love and War. The First World War (which was the beginning of the Irish tragedy as indeed it was the beginning of every other convulsion in the western world in the twentieth century) has been the primal landscape of Longley’s poetry from the start’.

Peter Reading’s work provokes two questions about poetry; what is it and what is its role in the modern world? Perhaps the very fact that his writing poses these questions provides a positive answer to his query ‘am I art?’;1 since it is part of the job of art to raise fundamental issues. But art also has other qualities of transformation and transcendence which Reading’s work seems to lack. ‘I DO NOT’, he asserts, ‘transcend pain with poetry’ (‘On the Other Hand’, CP1, 167). We need to distinguish here between at least two traditions in British poetry, one lyrical and the other conceptual. Reading’s work partakes of both but favours the latter. In many ways, he is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot in the choice of subject matter, classical allusion and mixture of registers. The difference is that whereas Eliot believed that poetry could be a vehicle for the redemption of modernity, Reading gives it no such privileged status. It does not stand apart from other discourses but confronts, embraces and is contained by them. Hence we find in Reading, among other registers, those of geology, chemistry, physics, biology, ornithology, medicine, Latin quotations, journalese, letters from local newspapers, adverts offering country barns at knock down prices and the demotic. The effect is, to say the least, jarring but it does serve, perhaps, to negate social meaning by the elevation of form, which is normally invisible in our dominant ‘realistic’ representations. It also challenges our traditional ideas of verse as do his prose poems, collages, typographical experiments and crossings out – the latter finding an echo in Derrida’s idea that writing should always be presented under erasure.

Matthew Sweeney wants to know what it feels like to be stranded on a rock off the coast of Donegal, unable to swim, and your mates, unable to save you, only watching and waiting as the tide slowly rises. He wants to know what it feels like to lie dying in a hospital bed, having drunk weedkiller because your wife was sleeping with your neighbour, and he wants to know what it feels like for her too, the neighbour also having drunk weedkiller to show her how harmless he thought it was. And he wants to know what it feels like to fall from the twentieth or thirtieth floor, having leapt for whatever reason. Fortunately, he has some friends with similar interests, including the American poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch, who has fondly recorded one evening in County Clare, over lobsters and a bottle or two of Puligny-Montrachet, when Sweeney probed his professional knowledge of ‘death by misadventure’, particularly defenestration and other related tumbles from vast heights. It was Sweeney’s hope and prayer that death came calling before the concrete pavement did and Lynch did his best to reassure him with medical evidence that suggested the system pretty much shut down in such situations, only coming back to consciousness if there was anything left to come back to.

Robin Robertson’s first book, A Painted Field, was published in 1997 and was awarded the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year award. The collection includes Camera Obscura, a long sequence – originally published separately in a limited edition – based on the life of the pioneering Edinburgh photographer David Octavius Hill.

In the past few years a number of poets who were also selfless facilitators of poetry have died. George Macbeth and Eric Mottram in particular spring to mind. However, it is appropriate for this particular issue of Critical Survey to memorialise the author of Poetry, in the ‘Teach Yourself Books’ series (1963), and editor of the Penguin anthologies of 1930s and 1940s poetry. There was a time when every other issue of Critical Quarterly seemed to include poems by Robin Skelton. Robin, like Tony Harrison more recently, liked to define himself simply as ‘Poet’ (though he was a superb critic too). But he also had a missionary vision of a poetic Everyperson.

How I’m Doing

An Old Lady Reminisces

Minotaur

The Figure In The Carpet

His Walking Sticks

Winter Riddles

A Head Of Steam

Prologue

Letter To An Old Pen-Pal

Down From Mars

Fagus Sylvatica

Days

Great Grey Shrike

Domestic

The Dominant

John Anderson, The Shadow’s Keep, Black Pepper, $15.95, ISBN 1 876044 12 8

Emma Lew, The Wild Reply, Black Pepper, $15.95, ISBN 1 876044 13 6

Alison Croggon, The Blue Gate, Black Pepper, $15.95, ISBN 1 876044 18 7

Jean Sprackland, Tattoos for Mothers Day, Spike Books £4.99 ISBN 0 951 89785 3

K. F. Pearson, The Apparition’s Daybook, Black Pepper (Melbourne) $15.95 ISBN 0 646 24049 8

Notes on contributors