Critical Survey

Although this last issue in Volume 12 is eclectic rather than the- matic, the articles and interviews all focus on poetry and fiction written in the second half of the twentieth century.

Since the publication of his Selected Letters in 1992 Larkin's opinion of Hughes's poetry has become notorious: "No, of course Ted's no good at all. Not at all. Not a single solitary bit of good. I think his ex-wife, late wife, was extraordinary, though not necessarily likeable. Old Ted isn't even extraordinary." In other letters Lark caricatures his younger contemporary as 'the Incredible Hulk', and the 'the old crow . . . looking like a Christmas present from Easter Island' (SL, 636; 526). Larkin profoundly distrusted Hughes's bardic mystique. Nevertheless, though he derided Hughes the poet in private letters, his relationship with Hughes the man was amicable enough.

Within the critical debate surrounding Sylvia Plath's poetry, the chief bone of contention seems to be whether or not Plath's use of Holocaust imagery is in any sense justifiable. Seamus Heaney's summary remarks on 'Daddy' are typical of the line usually taken against Plath – Heaney writes: 'A poem like 'Daddy', however brilliant a tour de force it can be acknowledged to be, and however its violence and vindictiveness can be understood or excused in light of the poet's parental and marital relations, remains, nevertheless, so entangled in biographical circumstances and rampages so permissively in the history of other people's sorrows that it simply overdraws its rights to our sympathy.'

Ever since the publication of his first novel, Generation X, in 1991, Douglas Copeland's increasingly uneasy relationship with irony and with scepticism has marked him out as something more than just another writer of 'blank' fictions. In texts such as Life after God (1994) and Microserfs (1996), and most particularly in the troublingly supernatural novel that provides the focus for this essay, Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), Coupland has been writing, in a sense, determinedly against the grain of the last decade of the twentieth century; even as he seems to capture so many of its moods and anxieties.

In 1996 Alice Walker published The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, a memoir which describes her experiences leading up to the release in 1985 of Steven Spielberg's film version of The Color Purple, and her reactions to the criticism engendered by the film. This text is significant as a further development of the 'Walker and Purple' controversy which began with the 1982 publication of Walker's Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Walker's achievement of the canonisation and popularisation of The Color Purple earned her the role as a spokeswoman for African Americans and disenfranchised writers.

'A woman attends a funeral. The coffin is lowered into the grave. A man approaches her and says, "He was not your father."' Thus begins a book, On Birth and Madness, by Eric Rhode, an opening reproduced in a review by Angela Carter. In this 'wayward and infuriating book', Carter observes, Rhode is remarkably absorbed by paternity, by Oedipus, by Hamlet and by Freud's LIttle Hans – in a book which ostensibly addresses maternity. Whose child we are, our paternity, Carter counters, is a 'profoundly absurd question' ('Rhode', 202–03).

Livi Michael has written four highly acclaimed novels, Under a Thin Moon (London: Minerva, 1993), Their Angel Reach (London: Martin, Secker and Warburg Ltd, 1994), All the Dark Air (London: Martin, Secker and Warburg Ltd, 1996) and Inheritance (London: Penguin, 2000). This interview was conducted prior to the publication of Inheritance. She has been shortlisted for the John Steinbeck and the John Llewellyn Rhys Awards and is a winner of the Royal Society of Literature Arthur Welton Scholarship. Michael has also been awarded by the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Society of Authors Award.

JZ: I realise that quoting excerpts from other people's essays on your work may seem ironic, as it creates a danger of 'monumentalising' the author and letting others speak 'in your name'. Nevertheless, I would like to take the risk of beginning with the words of Lorna Sage. In her preface to The Life and Loves of a She-Develop Lorna Sage writes: 'Fay's lack of respect for "nature" . . . is one of her greatest strengths: she knows it's fetish and attacks it with its own weapons'. I wonder, could you comment a little on your relation to nature?

Killing the Pig EVAN GWYN WILLIAMS

Pinochet Stumps PETER CARPENTER

Helen Nocturne The Moleskin Marxist MICHAEL MURPHY

Prospectus A Thing Bach Does ARNOLD RATTENBURY

The Iron-Blue Vault: Selected Poems by Attila József. Translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1999), ISBN 1-85224-503-4 £8.95

Fallen among Scribes: Conversations with Novelists, Poets, Critics. David Gerard (Wilmslow: Elvet Press, 1998), ISBN 0951077686 £7.50

Breaking Enmities: Religion, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland, 1967–97. Patrick Grant (London: Macmillan, 1999), ISBN 0-333-69829-0, Hardback £45

The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable. Edited by A. Leak and G. Paizis (London: Macmillan, 2000), ISBN 0-333-73887-X, £15.99

Introduction to Renaissance English Comedy. Alexander Leggatt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), ISBN 0-7190-4965-2, Paperback £9.99

Notes on contributors