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This
anthology presents a
decade-by-decade selection of work from the earliest days of Poetry Review, founded as The
Poetical Gazette
in 1909 and once dubbed the 'magazine of record' by Michael Schmidt, through
to the 2000s. One of the pluses of such an anthology, as current Poetry
Review
editor Fiona Sampson writes in her Introduction, is that it brings the work
of important poets and critics 'to an audience which doesn't have access to
them in their original setting.' But other factors are at work here too, as
Sampson admits: 'this anthology represents not necessarily the most important
British poetry of the last hundred years, but rather what has been seen as most
important.' Caveat lector, in other words. That the volume features most of
the big guns of twentieth century poetry in English - Hardy, Kipling, de la
Mare, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, Murray et al - comes as no surprise, but that it
presents so little work by lesser-known or non-mainstream poets is to be
regretted, even given the issue of available space. I will expand on that
later, but since the Introduction has already warned me that this selection
will be 'what has been seen as most important', the real question
ought to be, by whom and with what agenda?
The British poetry scene is divided into those who consider Poetry Review important, and
those who don't, often quite vehemently, so my own enthusiasm for what Sampson
calls the 'fascinating, infuriating institution' that is PR needs to be
stated upfront. Personally, I found this anthology a thoughtfully-arranged
testimony to poetry's shifts and continuities over the past century, and if
the choices are a trifle conservative at times, they are at least in keeping
with the nature of PR itself. Indeed, if we relax our expectation that
one anthology can hit all sweet spots at once, the selection becomes
enjoyable in the extreme.
Rupert Brooke sets a sentimental, still Georgian tone in 1912 with 'The Old
Vicarage, Grantchester': 'Unkempt about those hedges blows/An English
unofficial rose'. The same year,
however, Pound's vigorous 'Credo' from Prolegomena seems almost to
comment on Brooke's nostalgic pastoral: 'No good poetry is ever written in a
manner twenty years old.' Pound may want twentieth century poetry to break
away from the Georgians and become 'austere, direct, free from emotional
slither', but his reactionary stance is later sidestepped by T.S. Eliot who,
being interviewed as an elder statesman in the 1960s, claims: 'I don't think
good poetry can be produced in a kind of political attempt to overthrow some
existing form. I think it just supercedes.' Nonethless, that desire for
manifesto and factionalism remains strong in poetry, as evidenced by James
Fenton's ironic 'Manifesto Against Manifestoes' in the 1980s: 'We feed on our
differences. We imagine battle-lines drawn and strategies adopted.' That all
this is as true a reflection of the British poetry scene today as it has been
for the past century ought to be a sobering thought, except that poets are
human beings, and human beings are, by nature, aggressive and territorial.
Some poetry tribes do manage to integrate with each other, but they do so
slowly and almost imperceptibly, with the creaking shifts of glaciers. As
Craig Raine, heavily referenced in the Fenton piece, puts it in his excellent
'Babylonish Dialects' (1984), 'Nothing is more difficult than being
open-minded. The mind is a vast country whose borders are closed.'
The many delicious extracts from essays and reviews are rewarding enough, but
the poetry itself speaks tellingly among such critical gems. Highlights
include Muldoon's 'Why Brownlee Left', extracts from Geoffrey Hill's 'Speech!
Speech!', Mimi Khalvati's 'Ghazal' and two Forward Prize winning poems, Sean
O'Brien's 'Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright' and Don Paterson's 'Song for
Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze'. From 1989, Eavan Boland's 'What We Lost' is a vivid
poem, richly sensory and oblique in meaning, describing in a leisurely and
somewhat oppressive fashion the
poet's mother as a child, being told a story by her mother - a
story we do not hear, yet still experience through its aftermath in the poem:
The dumb-show
of legend has become language,
is becoming
silence ...
Its soft lyrical assumptions rub up oddly against Jo Shapcott's well-known
'Phrase Book' three years later, an abrupt poem that ends in a series of
short disconnected phrases:
What's the
matter? You are right. You are wrong.
Things are
going well (badly). Am I disturbing you?
In light of the second, the first poem suddenly feels dated, a voice from
another age. Which indeed it represents. Many of these poems play against
each other in the same way, finding connections and common ground, or
fighting in some illuminating manner. So Kathleen Raine aptly precedes Walter
de la Mare, Ashbery follows Heaney - their voices more sympathetic than one
might expect - while Amy Clampitt presses her terse, eliptical birdsong in
'Syrinx' -
those vestiges, last hoverings
above the
threshold of
the
dispossessed of breath
- against the 'sweet
pointlessness' of Billy Collins' 'Silhouette'.
One particularly interesting shift to be noted is how fashions of thinking
have changed, especially when a political element is involved. One of these
shifts is located in the advent of feminism and its reception among male
critics. Larkin on Plath (1982) is a case in point. His piece, entitled
'Horror Poet' and described by Sampson in her Introduction as 'notorious',
was a response to the publication of Plath's Collected Poems in 1981.
Larkin's sour disapproval and distaste for Plath's oeuvre seems based as much
on his perception of her personality as her work, rather spitefully
describing Sylvia Plath as 'ambitious, competitive, compulsive, the girl
(sic) who must succeed, ready to exploit her own traumas if they would make
poems.' (This last begs the question, is writing about one's own experience exploitation, or standard
artistic practice?) On her last poems, those for which Plath is justly most
famous, the dessicated stick that was Larkin at his most fastidious has this
to say: 'How valuable they are depends on how highly we rank the expression
of experience with which we can in no sense identify, and from which we can
only turn with shock and sorrow.' The royal plural, no doubt, since I cannot
possibly identify with that position. Hughes' over-cautious censorship of the
Ariel
poems was problematic enough, but how glad I am that Larkin was never Plath's
editor, or who knows what bowdlerized versions of her work might have come
down to us.
Donald Davie, however, may well have applauded Larkin's negative slant; in an
openly anti-feminist review of Helen Vendler's critical essays, Davie writes
frostily: 'the critical function is only half performed when the critic
refuses to consider poets to whom he (sic) has given a thumbs-down ... A
critic is meant to be that - critical.' Warming to his subject, he goes on to
discuss the rise of feminism with the same bewildered pique that my father
used to display when denigrating women in trousers, describing how the
'earthquake' of feminism had changed the landscape he grew up in and
commenting peevishly, 'I don't like that, I resent it quite bitterly.' Davie
accepts that Eavan Boland, also under review here, is writing in a land (i.e.
Ireland) where women 'are not expected to compose the poems or orations', yet
although he finds her Object Lessons 'attractive', he is 'not sure
... what to do with her confidences' nor with the feminist concepts in her
book, which he understands 'only cloudily and uncertainly.' This is the same
man, lest we forget, who bundled all the ladies under one heading - 'Elaine Feinstein and Women's
Poetry' - in his critical work, Under Briggflatts, and then only
really discussed Elaine Feinstein's translations from the Russian, somewhat
negating his above definition of the critic. It is difficult to imagine his
comments being made in Poetry Review today - yet Davie's review only
appeared in 1995, demonstrating how swiftly political correctness and a
culture of polite, inclusive reviewing has taken hold of poetry.
The rise of feminism also has an impact on the representation of work by
women in this anthology. Before the 1970s, despite Muriel Spark's contentious
and short-lived editorship in the late forties, men greatly outnumber women,
although the usual suspects are in evidence from early on, i.e. Harriet
Monroe, Stevie Smith, Kathleen Raine and Sylvia Townsend Warner. It's only
once we reach the 1990s and 2000s that a clutch of established female voices
break through - Pauline Stainer, Moniza Alvi, Mimi Khalvati, Jackie Kay,
Elaine Feinstein, Alice Oswald et al - though newer or lesser-known female
talent doesn't get much of a look-in.
The same could be said of the avant-garde, whose representation here is not
as straightforward as you might suppose. Poetry Review, as I have
already established, is a basically conservative, mainstream magazine. Yet
that has not always been the case. During the first few decades of the
twentieth century, indeed, the divisions between mainstream and avant-garde
in PR
were not as clear-cut as they are today, allowing Sampson to present us with
Hardy, Pound, Marinetti on Futurism, and Kipling in an eclectic and
astonishing mix. But twice, at least, during its century-long existence, the
editorship has been fiercely pro-avant, first under Eric Mottram in the 1970s
and then with the dual editorship of Herd and Potts in the early-mid 2000s.
In this anthology, however, the non-mainstream selections from the earlier
part of the century are overpowered by later selections, longer and more
conservative in tone, and the pro-avant-garde eras are only very lightly
represented. Indeed, during the Herd/Potts regime (2002-2005), the selection
jumps inexplicably from 2001 to 2004, apparently including only three items
from their time at the helm - poems by Alan Jenkins, Elaine Feinstein and
Mimi Khalvati. Although I fall out of bed on the mainstream side most
mornings, I would have been happy to see more from the avant-garde here, not
least because I was one of those who indignantly cancelled their subscription
between the Forbes and Sampson editorships, and so my knowledge of Poetry
Review's
development at that time is scanty. Mottram's editorship (1971-7) comes out
rather better with his selection, boasting Ian Hamilton Finlay, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg's 'Bayonne Entering NYC': 'blue city-glare
horizoning/Megalopolis' burning factories'. Here we also find the magnificent
'At Briggflatts Meetinghouse: Tercentenary' from Bunting:
...
Look how clouds dance
under
the wind's wing, and leaves
delight
in transience.
Given the culture of the now, it's only to be expected, perhaps, that the
final two decades outweigh all the others, accounting for 160 pages out of
nearly 373. The anthology finale presents our nearest literary heavyweights,
including Sean O'Brien, Robin Robertson, John Burnside, David Harsent, Sharon
Olds, and featuring - with absolute necessity - Part 2: 'The Sound of Sense'
of Don Paterson's controversial essay, 'The Lyric Principle':
One of those
hellish things you learn after ten years in editing -
I hardly dare
confess this - is that you can hold a poem a yard away,
and without
having read a word, know there's a 99% chance that
you won't
like it.
That hilarious passage - and the fact that the piece fairly bristled with
deliberately obscure footnotes following reader complaints about Part 1's
footnotes - probably generated more outraged letters to PR than anything
since Larkin on Plath. I'm guessing, of course. But Paterson's substantial essay seems like a good note to
close on. Respect or despise it, Poetry Review is still very
much the 'magazine of record', and although its fortunes seem somewhat
uncomfortably linked to those of its editors, in its stout leading position
as flagship magazine of the Poetry Society, Poetry Review is unlikely to
be sinking any time soon. This anthology rewrites the magazine's history to a
certain extent, blurring lines which ought to remain distinct, but it does
present work seen as important from a largely mainstream perspective,
which has probably been the dominant ideology of the Review over the past
century, reflecting popular opinions on poetry across the Society's
membership. Nevertheless, contributors from the last few decades who did not
make the anthology this time should not despair. There's always 2109, though
we'll all be beyond caring by then.
©
Jane Holland 2009
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