Critical Survey

From its first publication, Venus and Adonis has elicited unusually disparate readings. Philip Kolin's 1997 collection of the critical history establishes this work as seemingly inexhaustible. Many readers have noted the unusual number of animals inhabiting the poem. Hereward T. Price comments on the "finely articulated and often interlacing images from nature, especially from wild animals", appropriate to a pagan naturalist myth. Don Cameron Allen's article eon the unifying metaphor of the hunt has been influential. He traces the literary history of the hunt from classical times to the opening of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, finding that Adonis rejects the soft hunt of love, the hunt for the hare, Venus's secret self, and by seeking the boar embraces his death. Despite this, he sees the poem as a moral lesson against yielding to passion, part of a tradition of Christian humanism.

Diana Fuss questions the "tendency to psychologize and to personalize questions of oppression, at the expense of strong materialist analyses of the structural bases of exploitation." While Shakespeare's poem acts in the opposite direction, it is a brave critic who will argue that their depersonalised readings of rape must be recognised to be more progressive or radical than those that focus on the victim. Rape is after all not a literary event, but a terrible reality with real-life casualties.

Anita Loos's tribute to Aldous Huxley appeared in a memorial volume compiled by Julian Huxley in 1966. Among the contributors were Lord David Cecil, Stephen Spender, T.S. Eliot, Osbert Sitwell, Leonard Woolf and Isaiah Berlin. Loos was on eof Aldous Huxley's most famous friends: she was a successful and well connected screenwriter, and the astonishing sales of her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) made her a millionaire and a celebrity. The novel also significantly increased her cultural capital, since it was admired by eminent writers and thinkers including James Joyce, Edith Wharton, H.L. Mencken, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, William Empson, George Santayana and Rose Macaulay. For many years, Loos was one of the best known women in the United States, and 1966 was the year she published her autobiographical volume A Girl Like I, which received enthusiastic reviews and led to retrospectives of her films. And yet, if Anita Loos today stands out from the list of Julian Huxley's contributors, it is because the other names are still so familiar, while hers has become obscure.

Human perception is most commonly shaped by the ostensible "concrete" nature of things, that is, by their existence at specific moments of time and in particular locations in space. In spite of longstanding philosophical enquiry into the issue of "whether time has a continuous or discontinuous structure", there is clearly a close correspondence between the progression of time and moment in space.

Just as her creative work attempts to subvert the authority of the noun, Stein's critical writings disobey a grammar of behaviour. Through her disdain for traditional grammar and her use of eccentric examples she performs a praxis that scares off many critical readers. But her play is serious, both in her critical and creative work, and demands an engagement different from that of traditional criticism. Those who discard her self-analyses rob themselves of some the most innovative and intelligent commentaries ever to be produced on her work.

The dialectic of life and death is a persistent theme in Tony Harrison’s poetry. Some of his greatest poems are dominated by this subject: ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, ‘Cyprus and Cedar’, ‘The Lords of Life’, to name just a few. Critics have repeatedly highlighted this feature: Sandy Byrne’s pioneering book states that ‘most reviews of Harrison’s work begin by saying that it is concerned with division, or that it is dialectical’; she then goes on to state that ‘[m]any of the poems’ protagonists abound in ambiguities, inconsistencies and paradoxes’. In a much quoted interview with John Haffenden, Harrison sketches out that fundamental paradoxical division of his personality

Absent Without Leaving A Dream of Empire MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS

The Form Hope Less LEONARD J. CIRINO

Flare JENNY SWANN

Lone Hero, With Guitar Lose the Lumbering Postbag of Our Lives RENNIE PARKER

Manna MALCOLM CARSON

From the Spanish PAUL McLOUGHLIN

Appearing Soon by Amanda White (Hexham: Flambard Press, 2005), ISBN 1-873226-71-3, £7.00

Yellow Torchlight and The Blues by Emma Lee (Original Plus, 2004), ISBN 0-953359-19-0, £7.00

After Babel by Christine Webb (Cornwall: Peterloo Poets, 2004), ISBN 1-904324-03-7, £7.95

Walking to Snailbeach by Pauline Kirk (Bradford: Redbeck Press, 2004), ISBN 1-904338-15-1, £8.95

Mairi MacInnes: A Tribute edited by Peter Robinson (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2004), ISBN 1-904886-10-8, £10

Notes on contributors