from the introduction to Lit: New Writing from the School of English, Newcastle University 

(I thought it might be worth posting an edited version of this intro, especially as it attempts to make a historical argument for the integrity of the North East as a literary region. (An argument, incidentally, echoed by Seamus Heaney when interviewed during his visit.) Also, even though it's only a year old, events have already begun revising the teritory under discussion, so I've added a couple of paragraphs of update [these are the ones in square brackets]. It's not the principle intention of posting this piece to promote the anthology, though it is a very fine anthology. Those whose interest in piqued, however, can find find details of how to buy it here.)

When I first moved to Newcastle in 1994, I took the train down from Elgin, in the North East of Scotland, and noticed two things: that the North East of England, from my perspective, seemed to be in the centre of these islands (I make no claims for my grasp of geography); and that it had the most thriving and longest-standing literary community I'd experienced outside these islands' various capitals. Further acquaintance has persuaded me that both of these observations were truer than I realised.

There are still those who think literature functions at two poles, the capital and the province. Writers of national significance, it is assumed, gravitate towards the capitals, where the edge is presumed to be cutting. Those understood to be producing merely derivative, old-fashioned or local work, on the other hand, stay put. But for a place to be as magnetic as the North East has proven, drawing writers for decades and, now, increasingly, students of writing, implies there must be a cultural unit between such extremes.

This would be the region, a quasi-autonomous area which stands comparison in quality if not in scale with the nation. According to this argument, London is a region, as is Northern Ireland; Oxbridge and Liverpool-Manchester form curious dyadic regions; Scotland and Wales are composed of several -- and the North East of England is the latest significant centre of literary activity to acquire this status.

One reason this may be the case is that everything that is happening now is built on extremely sure foundations. The work of Basil Bunting, Sid Chaplin, Tom Hadaway and Alan Plater established Tyneside as a significant site for regional literature. Because of their presence, Northern Arts (now ACE NE), in collaboration with Newcastle and Durham universities, invested in a supportive environment that led to new generations of writers developing and settling here. 

Firstly through the Northern Literary Fellowship (the oldest writers' residency in the country), and latterly through setting up the pioneering writers' agency New Writing North, the Arts Council has long recognised that this is a flagship region for literature. Newcastle University, initially through the Fellowship, and now through the founding of the Northern Writers' Centre, has similarly displayed its strong commitment to the written arts. The long-term presence of a figure like Tony Harrison, and the prominence of David Almond and the late Julia Darling, are partly due to that investment.

[It’s regrettable to note that the Arts Council appear to be planning a step back from that close engagement with region, as administration for the north – a larger, vaguer concept – is to be consolidated in Manchester. As with similar centralising contractions in organisations like the British Council, an economic agenda appears to be turning back the clock on, in this case, decades of developing contacts and expertise.]

In the work of Sid Chaplin and its influence on contemporary writers we see how a region's literary identity is first formed, and then developed to the point where it acquires national significance. The strong presence of contemporary women novelists such as Pat Barker, Kitty Fitzgerald and Debbie Taylor, has in recent years been augmented by the arrival of writers like Val MacDermid.

Tom Hadaway's early influence on Live Theatre is just one benefit the area is continuing to reap dividends from. Playwrights like Lee Hall, Peter Straughan and Margaret Wilkinson, have all been nurtured here. In the work of Sean O'Brien and others, Newcastle has become a centre for the unlikely medium of verse drama, catching the attention of the RSC and the National Theatre.

The presence of Basil Bunting led not only to the setting up of the Northern Literary Fellowship, but was an instrumental factor in Tom and Connie Pickard starting up the Morden Tower -- one of the prime if not primal sites for the Sixties' explosion in poetry readings. One result is the region has filled with poets, including Anne Stevenson, Gillian Allnutt and Linda France.

The role of Newcastle University has been augmented by the development of a strong Creative Writing section, which has sought out its staff from writers across all the aforementioned areas -- poetry, prose and drama. It has developed its own cultural agenda, breaking down the town-campus divide, promoting local authors, bringing in writers of international significance for readings and talks, launching new books by its writer-teachers (often to audiences in their hundreds -- the region has a uniquely supportive environment in this respect).

Writers collaborate on performances both with each other, and with film-makers and musicians; there is an unusual amount of cross-fertilisation (novelists writing plays, poets writing novels); and each year a prestigious contemporary poet gives the Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures.

As one of the contributors to this anthology notes in her biographical note, the MA at Newcastle has been in existence since 2000. In that period Creative Writing at Newcastle University has grown, incorporating not only undergraduate but Postgraduate Certificate, MLitt and PhD teaching. Our graduates go on to teach, organise events, and, most importantly, publish.

We are all contemplating the opportunities offered by the Northern Writers' Centre, a dedicated new build on campus open to the public, which will literally cement the relationships we have been attempting to foster between the academic and the literary community of the North East, between new and established writers, and between the School of English and New Writing North.

[History, as this introduction goes on to examine, has an inbuilt reluctance to be predictable, and the Northern Writers’ Centre, due to the recession’s bite on all such necessary luxuries, is no more. So in its place we have set up the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, a research grouping, an events organiser, a publisher, a gallery, an archive and an instrument for outreach into the community through short courses and other teaching. It’s had a spectacular first season, with audiences in their hundreds packing out venues to hear Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy. But events continue to range from such heady spectaculars to the steadier work of supporting local authors and initiatives.]

 …Transformation, in its most benign aspect, is the proper goal of education, and to achieve it, an institution itself must also be subject to transformation, development, reform. There is a tipping point for organisations as for regions, and we feel this anthology makes a modest, emphatic contribution towards Creative Writing at Newcastle reaching that point.

Over the last eight years we have seen writers of real ability emerge across all three of the strands we teach -- poetry, fiction and scriptwriting. The push up the rungs of the ladder that all such courses promise has long been realised here: poets have been shortlisted for national prizes; novelists have found agents and publishers; playwrights have been offered read-through, feedback and performance…

One of the common themes recurring throughout this anthology is how we cope with the unexpected, be it a sudden revelation or simply the unlikely way things have turned out. Illnesses, relationships, ageing, breakdowns, bereavements, even imprisonment, are all explored: all the seismic shifts that take us away from what we know of ourselves or those most close to us, and set us down in the same place, but as though we've never seen it before.

This type of intense transformation (though not as yet imprisonment!) is essentially what writers in North East -- and Creative Writing at Newcastle University -- have been living through. So it turns out that, in this as in much else, our students are instructing their tutors. It is our hope that, in doing so, they will also engage and enlighten you, their newest reader.

(A version of this review appeared in the summer issue of Poetry London)

David Constantine, Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe), 88pp, £8.95; Peter Porter, Better Than God (Picador), 81pp, £8.99; Sheenagh Pugh, Long-Haul Travellers (Seren), 64pp, £7.99

One of the minor reliefs of the last decade has been a sense that contemporary poetry is at last moving on from its twentieth century obsession with beginnings. By this I mean seeing an art form solely in terms of myths of origins, those in which the world either comes into being without awareness of any past, or sees its old gods imprisoned, murdered or emasculated -- and, crucially, deposed.

Whether in the shape of modernism being characterised as simplistic rupture, or the impact of surrealism on Soho (if not the Scots), or the sixties and seventies engagement with US poetics as a social behaviour, rather than as a counter-tradition – our previous century’s poetry was continually attempting to begin again, like a serial monogamist, unable to commit to any muse for more than the few years in which a literary movement can persuade itself it is innovative.

This had the unfortunate effect of characterising that writing not intoxicated by a current excitement as antithetical, as reactionary rather than, as with key figures like Auden or, more recently Donaghy, part of a search for continuity, an attempt to arrive at the middle myths, those concerned with the quest, the labyrinth, the return.

Until acknowledgement is made that the anguished journeys of Gilgamesh, Odysseus and Dante are of continued, indeed especial relevance to the post-Baby Boom, postmodern, post-punk, post-theory culture in which we find (or fail to find) ourselves, there can be no meaningful appraisal of our elder masters, those poets who are now writing about the myths of ending, whether to resist or affirm the one definitive act of closure our culture has to agree on, death.

These three writers concern themselves in very different ways with the matter of the middle myths, and how they reconfigure our understanding of beginnings and prefigure to the point of occasionally ushering in our endings, whether characterised as oblivion or apocalypse.

Sheenagh Pugh’s use of the trope of travel to explore instabilities of identity engages partly with the cultural pressures of our period, and partly with the sheer impact of time, what it means, not just to exist in crisis, but to continue to exist through the passing and arrival of ideologies. David Constantine’s explorations of European sensibility are grounded as much in the ageing body as in his daring, darting syntax. Peter Porter’s marriage of wit (in both its metaphysical and satiric sense) with technical brilliance and a cultural reach that seemingly encompasses everything from broadband to the Bosphorus, is the very definition of what we must call Old Mastery.

Taken together they enable us to consider, yet again, the resonance of symbols that, if they cannot make sense of our world, at least deepen our response to it. The conceptual frameworks they assemble would suggest that poetry is not a matter of harmony or dissonance, of revolutionary rupture or untroubled conservatism, indeed that this kind of dialectic is itself a symptom of being stuck at the beginning.

If books have directions, Long-Haul Travellers would appear to point north. From an elegy to Mackay Brown to a hallucinatory poem possibly set in Leningrad, the northern light of the Scottish islands, of Norway and the Baltic, recur throughout the often short-lined, crisp descriptive verse of Sheenagh Pugh’s twelfth collection: everything seems to sit in the ‘vast white shallow bowl’ of Edinburgh’s Camera Obscura.

But this would be to overlook the injunction which opens the book:

The trick is to take only

what will be scarce

where you are going.

A long central sequence focuses on a northerner who travelled in a contrary direction, Murat Reis, a Dutch slave trader in Algeria, whose identity has undergone such radical shifts, no one, family or victim, can tell exactly who he is: ‘Such fluidity/he thinks in the end/may be a way/of staying the same.’

And the types of crises arising from such juxtaposition of opposites are also the theme of two poems set in the North East – in the Roman camp visible across the Tyne from my window, in fact, Arbeia, ‘fort of the Arab troops,’ where two gravestones depict the figures of Regina and Victor, one a local girl who married a Syrian, the other a Moor who died here aged just twenty:

the glow of triumph on him, this rising star

who’d won his freedom and his master’s love,

wearing his youth like armour. Ave, Victor.

Here, elegiac irony is well-balanced by the depiction without comment of an apparently untroubled multiculturalism. And that subtle exposure of underlying tensions in our sense of identity lies at the heart of Pugh’s oppositions of North and South, passion and intellect, Christian and Muslim. Murat Reis’ meditation on female identity – ‘how used they are/to change their names/…sleep with the enemy’ – is reflected in a poem which teases at a mythic concept, ‘The Girl Taken By An Eagle’.

Sudden mysterious flights have intrigued Pugh for some time – witness the early title ‘Beware Falling Tortoises’ with its allusion to the death of Sophocles. (One of the less successful pieces here is a monologue by a long-lived and therefore sententious tortoise.) Their analogous relation to the enigma of creation is bound up not just with the fluidity of female identity, but the issue of being regarded as subject as well as subjective:

Now it seems,

after all, I was in the wrong story.

The Girl Who Climbed A Mountain – she sounds

bolder, more fun. Maybe I should have been her,

if I’d known. If you ever know.

The ultimate source of this laconic perspective on interpretation and the passions is of course Cavafy, and there are several few points where he is evoked, as at the end of ‘The Opportune Moment’: ‘When you go/ashore, take nothing but the knowledge/that where you are, you never will be again…’ or this glimpse of the Romans on Hadrian’s Wall:

One day, someone looks out and admits

the enemy is not coming;

he has changed his ways, or maybe

he was never there at all…

David Constantine has long been a poet capable of the triumphant re-imagining of a distant viewpoint, literary, classical or otherwise, and this new collection is shot through with his characteristic marriage of the ecstatic with the marmoreal. The poems often seem to work in dialogic pairs, one piece picking up and amplifying or challenging the view obtained by another. There is a striking poem on the attempt to domesticate a ‘Roman Sarcophagus’: ‘And no, the idea

Of that in the living room doesn’t stop my blood,

Quite the opposite, several dead

I’d willingly give them house-room and be glad

This seems balanced by ‘Finder,’ in which, with the eighteenth century Scot, Sir William Hamilton, in mind -- and his multiple roles as ambassador to Naples, vulcanologist and archaeologist -- Constantine produces a delicate monologue in which the fragment of a statue (‘a woman’s breast, the left, with some/Clavicle and beginnings of the upper arm,’) is viewed first as a fossil, then imagined as regenerating the whole woman. Echoes of his young wife Emma, who famously danced without undergarments for Goethe as well as becoming the mistress of Nelson, are not hard to find.

Desire and the intellect are combined throughout the collection in a series of portraits of women or parts of women, from Courbet’s ‘L’Origine du monde’ to the translation of two of the poems removed by the censor from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. Goethe appears in ’18 Via del Corso’ arriving in Rome with ‘his writing hand…desirous of learning the other arts.’ This poem is contrasted with ’26 Piazza di Spagna’ where ten minutes walk away and thirty odd years later Keats lies dying, clutching a flower from Fanny Brawne:

He swaps her white carnelian from hand to hand.

He will go under a roof of violets and daisies

(His friend has promised) holding her letters as though

In there he could bear to read them.

In that extraordinary ending, Constantine reveals again his gift for elegy without sentiment. He achieves such effects by juxtaposing human frailties and desire with the inhuman, often using lapidary imagery, but also drawing on the oceans, as his collection’s title suggests. Between a rock and a deep place his protagonists apprehend their needy interactions in poem after poem where they literally warm each other against the endless cold:

He is good in bed

For thawing your toes, he takes them

In at the top of his thighs and nothing

Delights him more than warmly eclipsing

Your cold bum.

That homely monosyllable recurs in an otherwise decorous translation of Baudelaire, ‘her arms, her legs, her bum, her thighs,/Smooth as oil, swanlike, serpentine,’ and points to another distinctive trait. He is drawn to a breadth of vocabulary and an open-ended, flowing syntax which contrasts strongly with the air of terse, classical finish we might otherwise associate with such subject matters. Unusual phrasings like ‘the creatures flair this’ and ‘breakable//As sparrowframe’, terms like ‘a poor wisht thing’ and ‘this little porth’, the repeated use of ‘cicatrice’, the deployment of restless dimeter lines, all illustrate something hinted at in his ‘Three Notes on Lear’:

He became Poor Tom, fished deep

And as in posh old people after as stroke

Up came the vernacular, the dirt, the baby talk,

The horrors.

This is what raises his work above many contemporary practitioners, the sense that here is a writer who has, in his own words, ‘deployed the spine like a diving rod’. The result is a daring collection which occasionally feels less integrated than it might – the savagery of some satiric quatrains doesn’t quite come off – but overall we feel like the

Amiable believer in Atlantis

Who rowed out over a possible upheaval

in 1712 and the boiling water

Uncaulked his boat.

Peter Porter provides his own epigraph to Better Than God, a tercet which reads

As He said of the orchestra

at the Creation, they can play

anything you put in front of them.

Here the relation between Creator and creation (shadowed by the slippage between God and Haydn) is presented as the latter outdoing the former by actually expressing what the former has ‘merely’ composed.  It is a statement of great metaphysical subtlety and, both in terms of its scale versus its scale of reference, and its position as the opening poem of a late collection – a beginning myth seen from a conclusive perspective – very funny.

Porter’s titles are always a delight in themselves – he is one of the few whose contents pages are a better read than most other’s poets’ actual works – and ‘That War is the Destruction of Restaurants’ ‘My Parents Were Walking Islands’ and ‘Henry James and Constipation’ are worthy additions to the catalogue, urbane, lyrical and waspish in turn.

What this collection establishes beyond its initial successes is that mastery of tone is partly mastery of the complex interaction between idea, syntax and (metrical) line, that verse is a method of generating and containing thought as a paradoxical energy, something at once disciplined and unconstrained. This is what enables Porter to engage with the assumptions which underlie our culture without surrendering that lightness of touch which we associate with the lyrical.

This is evidenced by his habit of taking a familiar phrase from philosophy and qualifying it radically. ‘Whereof We cannot Speak’ challenges that urge towards austerity and away from messy humanity we recognise in Wittgenstein. Remarking ‘There is nothing here “whereof”’ he presents language less as a tool for meaning and more as symbiotic part of our composite intellectual being (‘Under the microscope [our species] seems/to be covered in odd parasites/called words’), concluding ‘a philosopher feels on his cheek/the tears whereof he cannot speak.’

Another mark of his command of poetic register is that, although several poems claim to be light verse, none of them on closer examination actually is. ‘To Murder Sleep’ implies it is a satire on shallow experimentalism (‘Panopticon of all that’s new/It gleams in Weekend interview.’ But in its depiction of the poet locked in nightmare re-enactment of ‘some much-applauded dumbing-up’ the poem rejects easy oppositions in favour of miasmic complicities – Porter is not content to conjure the dread that ‘relevance may not go slow’ he must also confess ‘You’re still both Neophile and Dunce.’

Sleep is granted a voice in ‘In Bed with Oblomov’, another poem where the assumed irrelevance of the literary and the historically-distant is first metaphorised, then challenged:

Beyond your windows Russia sleeps

In snows, as drifts, which might not even be,

Surround your resting; vacant deeps

Soul-white but bled into the wintersea,

‘Give up the world, even when awake,’ Sleep cajoles, just as, in ‘Under the Rupe Tarpeia,’ the apparent unreality of real things is discovered to be both our doing, and our undoing: the self, regarding the rock from which traitors to Rome would be flung, remarks ‘“If death is deep,/Why does the fall appear so miniscule?”’

This collection is full of memories of relatives and ancestors, as well as literary heroes and classical antecedents, all of whom must face the same challenge: to be awake to the full complexity of circumstances, not merely clinging, as his great-grandfather, the architect Robert Porter, did, to reassuring ideals, finding ‘no reason why the sun/Now shining in the South changed one/Iota of the Law’ he designed pubs, churches and, as an anti-masterpiece, Boggo Road Gaol.

Two types of doppelgangers help to round out Porter’s portrayal of the truly awake, one comic, the other something more. The monologue ‘The Hungarian Producer goes to Lunch’ contains a perfervid and hilarious self-analysis: ‘Isaiah was Hungarian and Elijah/and Jesus was en route to Budapest/when a passing donkey led him to Jerusalem.’

‘Opus 77’ returns to Haydn and the musical motif of the title poem to deliver a series of poignant and precise utterances on what survives us: ‘What works you did will be yourself when you/have left the present…’.  Again, it finds images for language’s role in our passing, and finds in these a simultaneously moving and stabilising resonance, something which grounds the reader not merely in meaning, but in the meaningful:

They love me, all my words, despite how often

I made fools of them, betrayed them, begged

Forgiveness of them. They are like the million grubs

Which swarm around their Queen. I file them in

Wide boxes where they wait for their Master’s Voice,

Accusing and defending.

Maura Dooley, Life Under Water (Bloodaxe), 64pp, £7.95; Leontia Flynn, Drives (Cape), 58pp, £9.00; Glyn Maxwell, Hide Now (Picador), 68pp, £8.99

(This appears in a slightly tighter form in the Spring 09 issue of Poetry London.)

What we might term the consolation of poetry is an old if not ancient theme, constantly being renewed. What use is high culture to us when we bring it to bear on loss, whether that loss is deeply personal or consists of the horrible sense that a whole way of life is slipping from us? What use is form, the springboards and restraints of metre, rhyme and stanza, the creation and shaping of language it enables and even induces, if what it is being brought to bear on is, on a moment to moment basis, unbearable? These two questions are explored in markedly different ways by the three collections under consideration here.

Many attempts at solutions have been announced for the first question, including the frequent declaration that such materials can no longer be deployed, that all cultural engagement which lacks immediate relevance to what we might term the two types of contemporaneity –youth and its informational equivalent, the news – is obsolete.

Glyn Maxwell’s new book gives the lie to this notion in an emphatic manner, by recurrently bringing a potent myth from our classical heritage into striking juxtaposition with contemporary issues. The role played by Cassandra, the Trojan princess cursed with the self-cancelling capacity for prophecy which will not be believed, is turned over by Maxwell in poem after poem, explored for possible parallels between truth- and tale-tellers of all sorts.

In truth, he nails this book’s colours to the mast in the first poem, where he presents the half-baked ideology that everything we do might be for the best of ends as, ‘Okay the ones like Cheyney, who you mustn’t name/and spoil the poem, do the motherfucking same/as ever…’ Here the knowing explicitness nods to decorum only to blow it out of the poem’s way and set us up for a bracing exploration of what exactly it is we do and, as Tonto asked the Lone Ranger, who this ‘we’ is anyway.

Storytellers and those who listen to stories abound, a recurrent theme in Maxwell’s work. The listeners, the subjects and sometimes the tellers, like Cheney, have guilts and violences of their own to deal with. They, including such figures as Agammemnon, Jim Jones and St Just, take interesting readings from their various moral compasses. Shahryār tells us what it is like to have to listen to the tales of Scheherezade every night; the narrator of ‘Hometown Mystery Cycle’ finishes on a blistering note of denial:

You know your own villages: write your own shit.

I’ve never done much and I didn’t do this,

but you asked where I come from and that’s where it is.

Black humour and the juxtaposition of the literary with the literally horrible are kept to the fore, as in ‘Tale of the Story-of-All-Stories,’ where the device of personifying different kinds of tales allows him to tell us about the nasty, brutish end of a set of short stories who mistake ‘a mindless bandit’ for ‘An interesting take on an old favourite.’ I’m not giving too much away to mention ‘bones/a-jingling in a market.’

Everywhere there is a trademark brilliance of phrasing – in particular the use of abrupt qualification as a sign of equivocation (‘till I envied my brother and I’ve not got a brother’; That’s what I make of what/I kept of it’; ‘Like somebody chronically stupid or clever’, ‘hours of talk I don’t forget and do forget’). His combination of strong rhythmic drive and the carefully manipulated diction of an everyman can make Maxwell’s voice seem confined to cracking the surface of a public discourse – it’s probably this which keeps bringing up the pat comparisons with Auden, yet another of which appears in the blurb.

But, as elsewhere in his work, The Nerve in particular, it is Maxwell’s other masters, Frost and Brodsky, which allow him to access a tender, personal voice which balances with the brusqueness and aggression exposed elsewhere. There is a witty, rueful memory of Brodsky in ‘A Walk by the Neva’, and the personification of a birthday, visiting the poet’s house after his death, emits ‘one puzzled o…kay then…’ The rather lovely ‘Thinking: Earth’ has this poised passage:

Earth. I have a daughter.

Heaven’s what I say it is for her.

Telling her is all it is so far

for me. My only use

for the word forever

is in those conversations.

Maura Dooley is much concerned with what she alludes to in one title as ‘the Blood Jet’. (The blood jet being Plath’s description, via Tsvetaeva, of poetry, and therefore carrying connotations of both wounding and suicide.) Poetry’s role as an articulation in extremis, at once the only expression and the only activity possible, is returned to again and again in this moving, intense volume, which is full of elegies and addresses to the dead, and the necessity for, as much as the ecstasy of, love.

It both explores and exemplifies the directness with which art speaks to us in troubled times, and breaks down the barriers between the crises of the individual and those of a society. That said, it opens with a wonderfully bizarre encounter with Leonard Cohen which resonates with all that artist’s lugubrious sense of the absurd:

As an oyster opens,

wondrous, and through mud

lets glitter that translucent

promise, so the lift doors

close and I am inside

alone with Leonard Cohen.

Elsewhere, her elegies allude with a kind of grave subtlety to the heritage of modern poetry in order to honour the dead. In ‘The Old Masters,’ Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ provides the title and the last line of a piece about the Twin Towers, finding a new tragic resonance in that ‘boy falling out of the sky’, and alluding to the Babel of nations which make up America, and their origins in such places as Breughel, painter of both Icarus and the biblical Tower, would have known. One line, which reads ingrained racist abuse as something approaching a doomed hubristic childishness, is especially daring:

You’ll know the photograph,

legs dangling from girders,

spik, polka, yid, paddy, nigger, wop,

the Rockefeller Building, rising like sap

In ‘Strange Meeting,’ Wilfred Owen’s nightmarish encounter with his enemy as doppelganger is echoed in a mysterious glimpse of the late Michael Donaghy, seen from a train in darkness, ‘our faces, all reflection, meeting in the glass’ – an image Dooley knows Donaghy would have loved. Here the quietness of the allusion to Owen just sends a shiver through the poem, as it makes a tentative gesture beyond religiosity and belief in an afterlife to ‘somewhere/out beyond the bended knee/that you and I were forged with…’

In that last, even more delicate allusion, via Catholicism, to Blake’s ‘mind-forged manacles’ we have an illustration of Dooley’s method, whereby poetry, the imagination’s attempt at an artefact without physical substance, can somehow hold us in a net of cultural reference, even when we cannot hold our world view together. As in ‘UnIrished,’ she keeps going beyond the markers of our identity into spaces where the familiar has become deeply unfamiliar, where ‘I even have to pause/to find the word/you grew with’ and we don’t even know the back of our own hand:

…the cross-hatched stars on your hand growing older,

or the real things, sparking still, as they cool,

it’s how they twinkle, how we wonder what they are.

(‘Familiar Object Seen from an Unusual Angle’)

The book finishes with a long poem, ‘The Source’ which moves between an account of the forming of landscape by water and the symbolic roles of water in terms of spiritual thirst and the ritual cleansing of sins. Auden’s ‘limestone landscape,’ Alice’s pool of tears, and the four tears of the Virgin which, spilt on Hampstead Heath, give rise to ‘a healing holy well,’ all come together in a redemptive appeal for us to engage fully with what we can still mean by a term like ‘faith’.

Those four tears, incidentally, neatly refer us back to an earlier description of the human heart as having ‘four rooms’: the number four (and the image of tears) echoing throughout the book. Thus we are reminded the significance of form in knitting together music, image and allusion into that very particular whole we call a poem.

This serves to refer us back to the second question posed at the beginning of this review: what use is form? This question is the half-understood descendent of a crisis of modernism, the idea that poetic form can no longer have any role to play in these difficult times, that all ‘traditional’ structures must be abandoned and new ones devised which, through virtue of being invented at the same time as the present series of problematic events, will therefore incorporate their difficulty and some hope of continued relevance.

Leontia Flynn’s second book builds instead on the triumphant engagement with form which distinguished her first collection, These Days. Drives amply demonstrates an understanding, perhaps derived from the examples of master technicians like Carson and Muldoon, that rhyme generates not just music but tone, a graph of attitude – these poems are full if not ripe with attitude. Exclamations, italics, bracketed digressions and, of course, rhyme that is both slant and sly, set these poems on their often perilous way:

You woke up just before the driver did.

Your cheapo, backpack, night-time ride through Turkey

shouldn’t have ended this way: on the road

(the bus had turned a corner on its side,

grinding up glass and bone. The driver died.

The girl behind you died…), half-scalped and bloody

and left, when you heard of bombs or trauma, since

with a sixth-sense of how soft it is, a body.

Journeys, estrangements, and the vulnerability both induce, haunt this book, particularly in its first half, which seems to race from capital to capital, to try on restlessly the masks of famous writers – Beckett, Proust, Bishop, Orwell, Plath, Baudelaire – as though pursued by some fury half-glimpsed in poems like ‘Milos’ (quoted above), or in the account of a suicidal leap in the Tate where the author’s ‘sympathetic trace’ is undercut by ‘(read ‘morbid instinct’)’.

If the first half of the book sometimes seems in too much of a hurry to allow the reader much to cling to, that unnerving interest in the suicide’s motivation is echoed in the second half, where, in ‘Spring Poem,’ the possibility of a ‘swallow dive/over the railing’ of a bridge is carefully if not completely rejected. The motivations for this, and for much in the first part, become clearer in two pivotal poems.

Just as the tonal and formal achievements of These Days coalesced in the fine sestina ’26,’ which focussed on her mother and father meeting at a dance, so too in this book there is another magisterial exploration of this riskiest of forms. ‘Drive’ (nearly but subtly not the title poem) again depicts her parents, but this time towards the end of her father’s life when he is stricken by what appears to be dementia, and her mother is reflecting on their life together as a series of repetitive car journeys.

Following the metamorphosis of a key end-word across the stanzas shows how Flynn poises herself between obeying and disobeying the strictures of the sestina: ‘motor’ becomes ‘mother,’ then ‘another,’ ‘together,’ back to ‘motor,’ on to ‘daughters,’ then finally back to ‘mother.’ This enacts the tight cycles of depersonalisation, duty and dissociation the mother experiences as she reviews their marriage.

The second poem, ‘Our Fathers,’ about her father’s declining mental condition, uses a short-lined quatrain, often limited to dimeter, to distend its syntax across stanzas, painfully drawing out its difficult conclusions about how we cling to and yet must release those we love. Cutting into this distension and delay is a simple and very effective quatrain:

my father holds open

the door of himself

and lets his old ghost

pass through

The momentary clarity of this stanza, occurring between others bound up in repetitions and interjections, achieves its undoubted poignancy because of the poet’s confidence in form, in its capacity to contain both the mimetic disruptions the poem enacts elsewhere and this succinct fulfilment of the quatrain’s capacity for balance and poise. This faith in form works in a manner similar to both Dooley and Maxwell’s faith in a cultural heritage which continues to yield new meaning, allowing Flynn to make work of great audacity and directness.

In this manner these books offer not just the consolations of three compassionate, sometimes fiercely literate intelligences, but another way to read our engagement with poetic heritage and form. These are not things to be alluded to as outmoded signifiers of refinement or elitism, but birthrights to be defended as a means of articulating that which does not seem susceptible to articulation, modes of allusion in themselves which lead to further insights, new approaches. Reinterpretation and reinvention in the terms offered by these writers presents the reader with both a continuity of, and a critique of what we mean by, culture.

Nick Laird, On Purpose (Faber), 65pp, £9.99; Sean Lysaght, The Mouth of a River (Gallery), 83pp, £?; Matthew Sweeney, Black Moon (Cape), 68pp, £9.00

That these three Irish poets are so different from each other seems to say something positive about the diversity and energy of contemporary poetry from that island. However, closer examination would suggest that this is more a tale of two conformities and one (fantastical) exception. Sean Lysaght and Nick Laird, both fine writers capable of highly wrought work, point us not just towards the distinctive clarities of their respective mainstreams, but occasionally towards the mannerisms of those traditions. Matthew Sweeney, by following his own darkened satellite, has produced from the creative murk of obsession poetry of real distinction.

Irish poetry has a uniquely resonant iconography to draw on, as well as a duty to preserve and transform the heritage of language and local custom which has nourished that iconography. Sean Lysaght is part of that impressive body of writers from but not contained by the Republic who have drawn on that heritage in order to test and extend it, a task which involves resisting the easy identification of the contemporary with the urban.

In The Mouth of a River, he revisits the myth of the Salmon of Knowledge in order to celebrate the particulars of a river in the West of Ireland, and the individuals who visit it in search of subtle moments of insight. This gives rise to the marvellous 'Midge Charm', the first line of which feels, to anyone who has had to wince through a cloud of the beasties, as though it has risen to our lips from time immemorial: 'Breeze god/get up and scatter the armies of the itchy witch'.

It also gives rise to a thirty two section poem on fishing which takes mimesis a little too far. Of course delay is part of the poet's armoury as well as constituting the fisherman's lot, but there is a lot of it here. For each case of well-observed natural phenomenon ('The foam came down in fluffy stacks/white and stiff like catering hats') or cutting social critique ('"Everything's organic here!"/"Yes," he replied,/"including the typhus."'), there are awkwardnesses in the symbolic machinery. Thus the protagonist and the salmon are linked by a tired-feeling trope of desire ('he wanted her deep, with the whisper of his hackle/on her glides'); and wisdom is conveyed by intrusive admonitory voices: 'Return that life. Show/the restraint you preach. Don't take her now and cancel/the passion you have known.'

The final section of the book is, as the author explains, based on Buile Shuibhne, familiar to most of us from Heaney's translation: 'The idea that Sweeney might have changed successively into different bird species gave me the starting point'. There are indeed some fine acts of metamorphosis in this sequence, and some brilliant snapshots of birds, though the ceaselessness of the changes (several poems repeat the idea of him twitching between half a dozen forms) seems to indicate this is a slight variation on a grand theme.

The overall impression is of a writer entirely at ease in the particulars of his landscape, producing brilliant moments, but not particularly extending his tradition or his reader. As with the 'sparrow on a windy gutter', when his poetry does 'put us to the test', the whole process is enlivened:

little god of Thor,
blown scruffy-head,
ruffle duster,
eye-liner scallopy,
skip yawn,
chirp-in-gale.

Nick Laird's first book, To A Fault, was well received as further proof of the strength in depth of the present generation of Northern Irish poets. His work demonstrated a mastery of form and register together with an adroit political sensibility and a distinctive brusque tenderness. Those skills continue to be evident here, if centred more firmly in London, and ranging from Devon to points north. This serves to bring out a sharp, metropolitan elegance; to realign his muse:

As someone drafts an elegy
a vapour trail above zips shut
the body bag of sky. Cheer up.

But these are poems held together by an exactitude of definition as much as sensibility, much concerned with tone and the telling reference, which leads to some very precise successes, like the image of 'the purest thing': 'like the ghost of a lighthouse//in Atlantic mist,/a full glass of skimmed milk...' or the conceit of

You met a cabbie once who claimed
to have a perfect memory.
He said that on the morning
you were born, it rained,

then described
the clothes he'd worn,
what he'd eaten, what he'd done.

Underneath the well-judged sardonic edge that undercuts many of these poems there is a further whiff of longing for some version of this London cabbie's extensible Knowledge. This pushes slighter pieces like the lists of 'The Search Engine', the borrowed if not found poem, 'Mandeville's Kingdom' and the plethora of fantastic but feasible American newspapers in 'Press', all of which point towards experiences the poet has not had but wishes to position himself beside. In 'Lipstick' a narrator recounts the incident when female survivors of Belsen were issued with lipstick:

For me at least
It was the darkest ring of something, seeing

How those women lay with no nightdress or sheets
But still that redness on their lips.

The urge toward significance outside the poet's experience feels here like an over-reaching. There is a thinness to the voice which doesn't belong to the persona as much as to the ambition to define a selected monstrosity. In 'The Hall of Medium Harmony,' the same impulse is ironised by a sleepless reader of a guide to China, breathily lost in the illusion of presence, 'in the silence that follows each footstep/let fall on the black lacquer floor//of the now, of the here, where you are,/in the sunlight, blinking, abroad.' The reader's attention, of course, has been drawn to the melancholy of this willed illusion.

The successes of this book hark back more to the verbal ingenuity and imagistic exuberance of his background and peers, as in 'Pug':

You squeak when you yawn
and your tongue is unfurled
in a semi-circle, salmon-pink
on coastal rock, that trilobite

embedded in the slate
roof of your open mouth,
perfect for the mascot
of the House of Orange.

Matthew Sweeney's latest book takes all the anxious uncertainty, the desperate appetites, the misanthropic, paranoid or violent impulses that have always infused his work, and cranks them up to the maximum. These are not poems concerned with any restraint other than that of stripping narrative to the bone, honing pace and register in order to snap the reader into each poem's world within a line and half: 'over the heads of the flying squad/flew a snowy owl'; 'Unlike other times, there was no warning'; 'He posted her a snake instructed not to bite her.'

Situations recur obsessively, like the figure being coerced by a torturer, possibly reaching their final moments; the assassin waiting for or dispatching his usually female victim; the voyager returning, usually to Ireland; the climber attempting to gain perspective, usually over Ireland; the eater or drinker failing to contain their dissatisfaction. The result is liberated writing which exhibits a skewed beauty of its own, a barely-contained world in which spells sit alongside artworks, tanks flank recipes, and his leitmotif of the crashed or sunken craft, together with its decaying crew, finds yet another form, a haunted revision of the moment of the crash:

...no tree would be hit,
nor would fires whoosh through leaves
to the delight of the fool in the hill castle
out with his grappa on the rooftop,
Marlene blaring through the speaker
singing to the crashed pilot in the woods.

As the end of that poem suggests, the book is not focused as much on moments of reprieve as of remission, fate may be delayed for the span of the poem, but not escaped. Realism has given way to vision, and the dead or soon-to-die, the damned or deeply unlucky must act out or re-enact their destinies. Usually (there are ragged edges) that vision feels precisely aligned to the mechanics of craft, its perspective held within the frame of a recognisably lyrical structure in much the way that Cronenburg places his concerns within the horror genre. The analogy with cinema seems particularly apt to a poet drawn to the poem as scene, opened and closed by abrupt cuts.

Black Moon creates its own literary tradition through the intensity of its obsessions. Behind its netherworlds lurk those of writers like Flann O'Brien or Borges, and the veil between the created scenario and some actual scenario from which we might suppose it is derived seems to tremble constantly on the verge of being torn. It is, in short, writing which embraces risk, which suggests portraiture whilst delivering a completed, self-sufficient symbolic world. In this it not only evokes the involuntarily metamorphosing Sweeney of tradition, but echoes the author from whom it derives one of its more horrible images of the desire for oblivion, the Kafka of the Hunger Artist:

I nibble my foul-tasting crusts,
reach out a hand to set spinning
the globe of the moon, close my eyes
to imagine a skeleton slowly walking
across the moon's surface, then climbing
into a crater to lie there and be still.

Alan Gillis, Hawks and Doves, The Gallery Press, 79pp; Fiona Sampson, Common Prayer, Carcanet, 74pp; Lynne Wycherley, North Flight, Shoestring Press, 70pp.

There are a number of now quite stately premisses on which we still rely when we come to read most poems. Yeats' belief that a poem is a 'quarrel with the self', for instance, was predicated on a quite different and decidedly more stable notion of 'self' than that encountered in the work of Alan Gillis. Pound's dictum to 'make it new' makes less sense in a world barely aware of anything more ancient than the last lustrum, and Lynne Wycherley's appeal to a diverse range of old masters and natural phenomena is partly an enquiry into what 'it' might be. Even Rilke's still-astonishing demand 'you must change your life' must now be set against a plethora of volumes claiming to show how to do just that, in which spiritual change is considered from much the same viewpoint as dietary fad. Against such a background, Fiona Sampson's work sets out to renovate the very terms for such acts of alteration.

In their different ways, then, these authors require us to review our ideas in order to appreciate their work fully. We are aware, of course, that there are many poems which demand we abandon these premisses altogether, but their authors often seem to have emphasised this to a degree which negates an even older notion, Wordsworth's conviction that a poem 'must give pleasure.' Thankfully, the quality of these three poets' work enables us to regard such reviewing as part of the normal pleasure of reading a poem. ('Pleasure' itself, unlike 'self' or 'new' or 'change', remains sui generis, but I will gesture towards it in passing.)

Alan Gillis's work plays an important role in the continued development of Northern Irish writing, which has given rise to a new generation of fine poets including Colette Bryce and Sinead Morrissey. Like them, Gillis has managed the astonishing feat of persuading us it is an entirely natural aspect of his writing to display something of the formal subtlety of Muldoon, the extraordinary vocabulary of Heaney, and the fine-grained sensibility of Mahon.

His poetry principally engages with this distinguished heritage by displaying a type of virtuosic verbosity. This sounds like a criticism, but instead I am trying to depict an entirely admirable excess, a dextrous rhetoric within which language carries all before it, as in the almost medieval tour de force where he produces questionable synonym after synonym for the male member:

my d'Artagnan, my explorer of the canyon,

my saxophone, my knick-knack-paddy-whack, my dog and my bone,

my saucisson, my saveloy, my knackwurst, my donger,

my Pinocchio's nose growing longer and longer,

my high and flighty piccolo, my 'just popped out to say hello',

The most interesting and drastic effect of this eloquence is to overwhelm any coherent portrait of the speaker, who passes from the pose of ordinary man through ludicrously boastful Priapus, past ironised caricature and back to still anonymous male without gaining or shedding any insight into the purpose of his copious naming.

Such figures, simultaneously filled with and defeated by language, populate this volume, like the speaker of 'Home and Away' who finds a way to insert 'fuckin' into every line, but leaves it to the reader to consider why such dextrous profanity is necessary. Often anonymous, sometimes gathered into couples or family groups, they inhabit or revisit a Belfast and its hinterland in which the racy particulars of slang have completely intermingled with the idiolects of advertising and technology, where 'branny-faced boys' must deal with 'polytetrafluoroethylene'. The results are extremely lyrical explosions of estrangement:

I had left that town of darkness

full of a darkness of my own

so many times this time I took

forever going over the green-rocked

hills' drop and climb with my Civic's

windows open, chasing the valley fall's

blue slopes and fern banks, gilt and diesel

clouds towards Belfast's open terminals.

This collection attempts to use voice to depict a landscape rather than portray an individual. It shows a culture which is simultaneously localised and globalised, continuously emerging from crisis without ever escaping it, a culture, as one title has it, 'On a Weekend Break in a Political Vacuum'. Such a voice necessarily focusses on the brutal and the funny more than on the sylvan and the tender, and there are moments where you long for less 'clabber' and 'clunt' (though this will not occur to you in the middle of 'Bob the Builder is a Dickhead', the speech of a veritable anti-Polonius to a no doubt stunned son). But at no point do you doubt that such supersaturated richness of speech amounts to anything less than a consistent and stunning picture of a paradigmatic city.

It might be possible to argue that, while Alan Gillis absorbs contemporaneity as an obvious and unavoidable constituent of Northern Irish life, Lynne Wycherley opposes it with another notion of northernness. The title of her second collection, North Flight, echoes Douglas Dunn's crucial volume of cultural relocation, Northlight, and this points to some of its central concerns. Dunn's move to Fife signalled a renewed, subtly spiritual, and largely pastoral engagement with his Scottishness, and Wycherley's travelling also has the air of pilgrimage to a purer sort of realm.

Her writing constantly looks for new ways to leave its point of origin, the Fens, whether turning to the past to re-examine John Clare's relationship with the place, or, more frequently, heading north into the imaginative territories of the Scottish islands and Scandinavia and Iceland. In this there is something of 'flight' as an escape, as well as a migration. But 'north' as a goal is held to with clarity of eye as well as the passion of a vision, as in 'Blue Hare of Hoy':

Ears that would sense you

before you shaved air, a shape in flight

from your breathing. By Stany Hamars

it showed its quick heel. Only love

could prove so elusive or race

such light on a shattered hill.

Such glimpses and freedoms are familiar to us from other travellers like Pauline Stainer or, more recently, Jen Hadfield, and it is in the relationship Wycherley weaves between the pure 'there' of the north and the impure southern 'here' that her work attains depth. Her intense empathy with Clare finds voice in the poem on Glinton Steeple, which 'speaks the south' and draws the empassioned cry, 'A spine -- ray -- sliver of white. Physician/do not heal my eyes: I need love's splintered sight.'

This 'splintered sight' is particularly effective in the personae and bird and animal poems which intersperse the collection, in which displaced, longing or watching individuals are seen with moving insight, from the Arctic fox which, even from a photograph, 'weighs my bones/with his old man's eyes', to the portrait of Darwin, equally isolated from faith and family:

Dear God, mute ghost: I would not

give Him up, but events orphan me.

I see Annie: her face is closed.

Emma, I am lonelier than you know.

The north becomes in this analysis, an corollary for the isolation within, and such poems feel more lived than pieces addressed to the Orkney poets, Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir. In these the depiction of an unproblematically 'good' place or person seems a little too bare. Though perhaps the issue is more one of echoing: the elegy for Mackay Brown and the image of Muir in the bone factory re-explore themes more powerfully presented in their own writing, so these poems feel like they're handling a received iconography. (Of course it is not required of icon painters that they be original, only that they match or surpass the spirituality of their original models.)

The collection reaches a genuine epiphany when in 'Among Arctic Flora' the poet recognises a common plant from her background, and therefore from Clare's, amongst all the  'hard purity' of Iceland:

I stoop with John  Clare:

brown seeds our hands remember

pouched in hearts.

Tacker-weed, Pickpocket,

Poor Shepherd's Purse.

That communion of the shared gesture, the body's experience of its own emotional history and how it echoes and sometimes touches the history of others, is explored over and over again in Fiona Sampson's latest collection, Common Prayer. Alternating between short intense sonnets and more meditative pieces with stepped, careful lines, more reminiscent of later John Burnside than Carlos Williams, she gradually draws the reader into a series of subtle perceptual negotiations. If Gillis's models are mostly Irish and Wycherley's sometimes Scottish, then Sampson combines an entirely English voice with an awareness of the Eastern European, the Mediterranean, even the central Asian. The result is a poetry of extraordinary openness, to influence as well as to experience.

Just how carefully Sampson builds from the senses is evident in 'The Looking Glass,' where metaphoric readings are teased out of the simplest yet most surprising observation:   

the grain in glass

is a secret mark of grace --

you look through it,

see something flawless, thickening to white

only at the cut

This reflecting on the nature of what reflects and what doesn't recurs throughout the book, leading to the strange kiss through glass in 'At the Sex Frontier':

...your face

comes puckering up,

so that I lean across the shiny space between us

towards the image of me

floating in you

This thoroughly MacNiecean play with mirrors exposes the loneliness of the self especially at night, looking through 'a pane of deeper dark in darkness'. The loved ones of these poems, whether lovers or relatives, whether present or absent, whether longed for or not, are frequently seen as quite apart from the self. These poems aren't simply looking for union with the other, but attempt to articulate the unlikely terms in which communion is still possible.

Love in this context is juxtaposed most intensely not with Death, its most obvious old partner, but with Illness, which creates the terrifyingly acute perspective of 'The Plunge' where, as the unidentified 'you' '[telescopes] into your black centre', the I is left to conclude 'We're going to the very edge,/to the darkness/where windows float their little boats.' Here the ancient 'love-feast' or moment of agape is reduced to a solitary saline drip.

In this and its partner piece, 'Scenes from the Miracle Cabinet', we see how Sampson has articulated from the simple terms 'glass' and 'love' and 'darkness' an intense formula describing how we emerge from the ordinary experiences of our lives into moments of change and groundlessness, the realm in which our senses cannot prepare us for what they reveal, and we must have recourse to 'common prayer'.

Just as the domestic in her work keeps yielding up the foreign, even the alien, these powerful sections are echoed by poems either set abroad or imagining the worlds of other cultures. 'Blood Lyrics' from the (possibly fictitious) Tokharian explore  communion through the trope of being consumed by the loved one. A poem on her beloved Beethoven's Opus 131 opens ' One hundred and thirty one approaches/to the problem of God', confirming that art, whether in the creation or the experiencing, is the commonest form of prayer.

All these themes come together in 'Fog-bound', a final contemplation both of the limits of the senses and the urgent needs of the sensibility:

the unknown is always arriving,

a continual rescuing flow round you

and on:

          fog's oozy bloom,

the pages of books --

Between them these three writers define some of the territory we hope to find illuminated by 'the pages of books'. We know there is a difference between a real blast and just bluster, between an intense simplicity and the fall into simplification, between the possibility of a soul and a solipsism of the self. We expect the poet to take on the challenge of defining this kind of difference, and to embody it in the poem. We don't require that their answers avoid difficulty, but we couldn't read them if they were unable to deliver delight. These particular poets do embody, they don't avoid, and they can deliver. That makes them different enough to deserve, maybe even to demand, our full attention.

(First published in Poetry London, Autumn 07)

Tiffany Atkinson, Kink and Particle (Seren), 64pp, £7.99; Tishani Doshi, Countries of the Body (Aark Arts), 64pp, £9.99; Roger Moulson, Waiting for the Night-Rowers (Enitharmon), 93pp, £7.95

First collections offer us a paradoxical reading experience. They are often the result of years of anticipation and elaboration, full of poems which hope to position the new author amongst those he or she sees as influences and contemporaries. Yet they are also the work of someone who is making and has yet to make discovery after discovery about their deep responses to technique and tradition. There are therefore few reading experiences which compare with finding a new author who genuinely has something new to say, and feeling that you are sharing in that narrative of discovery. Each of these three poets gives off something of that delight, in quite different ways.

Tiffany Atkinson is yet another fine poet to appear from Seren, a publisher whose stock continues to rise. Like Carcanet and Bloodaxe, they have effortlessly transcended the category of small regional press, and continue to challenge the hegemony of some metropolitan houses. Atkinson, like fellow Seren author Kathryn Gray, articulates the bruises and brusquenesses of contemporary urban life with a warm urbanity, achieving sophistication without brittleness, and illustrating that much of the most intelligent and accessible poetry of the last five years (one thinks of Polly Clark or Colette Bryce) is being written by young women.

This is primarily a poetry of sensibility, aiming, as she hints, ‘past salt, sweet, sour, bitter, for/umami, the elusive fifth sense.’ The calculation required for recipes recurs, sometimes apparently literally, as in ‘Zuppa di Ceci’, where the patience required to prepare a soup is contrasted with a partner’s lack  of commitment, leaving ‘a platter of reheated stars/and last night’s moon served cold.’ More usually, however, it’s seen in her characters’ attempts to analyse or create satisfying scenarios, either for themselves or for loved ones. So with the gift of a tape in ‘Queen of the Lead Guitar,’ it’s less the man’s choice of music and more the gesture of compilation that engages the speaker: ‘She/leans in, fires his cigarette,/ removes a hair of hers/that frets there.’ And in ‘Then Everything Was Axe,’ it’s the missing ingredient of the practical axe on a spontaneous outing that reveals an unexpected vulnerability in the relationship: ‘Forget//the quietly perspiring Semillon,/the raunchy steaks...’

The collection encompasses a broad sweep of experience, from dealing with children to dealing with parents and even ancestors. Relationships receive unsentimental, often quirkily short shrift, be they with men or rolling tobacco, and the first troublesome nags of ageing underscore many of these poems. Perhaps a central piece in terms of all these concerns is ‘Nine Miles Stationary,’ an account of a distended wait in traffic that unfolds through brilliant observation (‘A girl grits her heels on the hard shoulder/sporting an inexplicable ballgown’ is good, but the little boy forced to pee in public, ‘his face a clap of rage’ is even better). The revelation that the narrator is trying to get to a funeral is quietly and very effectively delivered: ‘Lilies, exhausted, on the passenger seat;/ their scent given up on a wreath of my own heat.’

The less resolved aspect of this book is the poet’s engagement with language, the titular kinks and particles of the demotic. The later poems often show an almost percussive use of vocabulary that can be marvellous and jarring in equal measure. In ‘Cockerel-Man and the Royal Donkey Duck,’ for instance, we have a not entirely convincing inebriation of both narrator and character, ‘Open/your smile my mouse, cried he, quite the rivergreen/ elvis at that angle, be my spiff…’  And yet when she picks up on a Catalan’s inadvertent mangling of English, ‘I would not mind to be in Whales,’ it’s possibly to read this too as part of that search for the elusive detail, be it of register or the emotions, which will yield up moment and milieu.

Tishani Doshi’s book has been the recipient of prizes both in the UK and India, and it’s easy to see why. The poems combine subtlety of tone and vivid scene painting with a strong underlying narrative. That narrative, of difficult personal growth set against a background of familial crises, is recounted in a voice simultaneously disturbed and delighted by circumstances apparently outwith its control. Perhaps the most potent image of this vulnerability is the infant in ‘The Affair,’ crawling at the feet of an arguing couple: ‘He knows nothing -- little kernel of snail --/except to unfurl along his silver trail.’

The theme of adultery recurs throughout in both portraits and first person pieces, from ‘the old Kurdish woman’ on the Edgware Road looking for a former lover, having ‘lost the patterns, the touch/The smooth complexity of him,’ to the ambivalent speaker of ‘London’: ‘Waking beside a broad and empty face/I lie to him about what moves me.’ An arc of gradual release from repressed sexuality, through difficult intimacies to fraught, temporary resolutions, is set against the estrangements of new and unfamiliar landscapes. This gives Doshi’s writing an almost surreal urgency, as in the albino boy of ‘Open Hands’ who ‘holds me in his lanolin arms’:

So we must make meanings of things:

A carcass of a jackal in a baobob tree,

A man’s fingers pushing up the straps of your maroon dress,

A low wood-beamed room full of misgivings.

These difficult places are compared with an India that is conveyed with great vigour and keen detail, but which doesn’t offer solace: ‘I forgot how Madras loves noise’ she remarks, picking out precise detail (Scooters have ‘larynxes of lorries,’) and finding a synaesthetic twist, ‘even colour can never be quiet.’ Home also stirs up the second main theme of the book: madness. Two key poems, one about the suicide of an aunt, and the other about the apparent breakdown of the poet’s brother, give the central section an emotional intensity tempered by objective allusiveness – the aunt’s state of mind being compared to Camus’ at the point of death. The poem about her brother is preceded by two portraits of him as an adolescent and as a young man which end with moments of touching serenity, even communion.

The capacity to objectify and thus make difficult experience accessible to the reader is reflected most neatly in Doshi’s use of title: ‘On the Burning of an Unfamiliar Aunt,’ ‘The Day After the Death of My Imaginary Child.’ When the poetry is less successful, it is because this process of digesting subjectivity and re-presenting it seems incomplete, as in ‘Bamboo Man,’ where a promising and in every sense suggestive dream image seems never quite to escape from the subconscious: ‘This has gone on long enough, I say/I want my dream of the giant snow leopard back. Remember?’ More successful is the lyrical healing depicted in ‘Turning into Men Again’ in which the men silently seek solace of mothers and lovers until

Inside, in the shadows of pillars,

Fathers and grandfather are stepping down

From picture frames with secrets on their lips,

Calling the lost in from their voyages.

Roger Moulson’s Waiting for the Night-Rowers is one of the most mysterious books I read last year. By this I don’t mean that it is obscure, more that its central concern often seems to be the act of perception itself, an interrogation of the difficulty of truly seeing or expressing anything that gives some of these poems an unusual energy. Objects and phenomena appear as enigmas to be approached, evoked, but not necessarily unravelled. It is, I think, salutary to be reminded that the universe is mysterious rather than simply confusing. Certainly, it’s satisfying to find a poet who seems to have meditated on such matters for some time before finding a very individual mode of expression.

A good example of his method is the poem ‘A Glass of Water,’ which recalls the more successful aspects of the Hugh MacDiarmid poem ‘The Glass of Pure Water.’ Both poets attempt to see the almost invisible, but Moulson conveys the experience with a sort of calm rapture that allows other meanings to accumulate without homily or didacticism:

Amazed to find the thing it most desires

light strikes.

Glass rings around it.

The contents accept their shape

but do not own it

as if shape’s the need to be held.

Water does not concern itself

which one holds

and which is held.

This ability to hunt for essences is evident almost from the outset: ‘Turning Over’ depicts roots growing through clay as ‘the candelabra the green world/holds to the dead,’ an image which turns us over in order to see it, making the solid insubstantial, but without seeming fanciful. Such intensity might lead to a kind of imagistic clotting, and it is true that some pieces, the title poem for instance, need a degree of unpacking – it reads almost like a blend between Peter Redgrove and early W.S.Graham. But there is both tonal and referential variety, so that he is able to build a poem round plastic bags being stuck in trees (‘like good intentions worn so thin the good’s/a ghost of nothing’), or the satisfying absurdities of a bird book (‘There’s a king but no queenfisher/a night but not a dayingale’).

Rhythmically, these are often slow, meditative pieces (though there are a couple of fine sonnets that show quicker iambs), which means that the few longer poems need something extra to drive them on – the Beethoven poem, ‘To the Difficult Resolution,’ accomplishes this with much crashing and other intrusive effects on the part of its main character, but the long final poem, ‘Down Addington Steps’, although its capturing of late childhood/early adolescence is entirely convincing, seems to lack sufficient flow.

This book is most effective when it simply reflects back the strangeness of our lives, as in ‘Rowing Grandma’, where a game in which grandchildren treat their grandmother as a boat inadvertently reveals both her isolation and eventually her frailty. Humour and passion (or lust) combine particularly successfully in poems like ‘Rex Rendezvous’ where dance partners are more the focus than the dancing lessons: ‘Many had bosoms. A few had breasts/like sweets in twists of coloured paper/…we had to leave the floor bent double.’  At such moments we are both estranged from ourselves, and at our most human. In ‘Stepping Stones’ Moulson brings his recurrent water imagery and the trope of desire together in a poem about fording a river which encapsulates the way poetry can renew our engagement with our senses, and how a surprising new voice renews our engagement with poetry itself:

She was cold to touch

as if she’d danced so long her heat had cooled

to some extreme of need.

I was going to say she was all over me

but she would have been the same with anyone.

I heard her beating,

my ear to her dark breast.

I thought she said, Step carefully

but not too carefully.

Lean into me waist to waist.

(First published in Poetry London, Spring 07)

(This review of Kinsella, Hartley Williams and Lumsden appeared in Poetry London in (probably) Winter 2005. On reflection, it was a near-perfect triumvirate of writers to give me, as each of them illustrates some aspect of what I think of as the rough music, that category-bursting energy of verse which can resonate across the cultures and the centuries.)

These three poets write from contexts which are to differing degrees extra-English, and their work offers us a survey of just how extensive the field of writing in other Englishes has become (and, by contrast, just how narrow some of the poetry of these islands is).

John Hartley Williams, still resident in Berlin, has the most recognisably English voice, but this is along the lines of Peter Didsbury or, elegized in this volume, Ken Smith. That is, he is open to both the influence of European poetry and a very British absurdism, both of which mark him as at his own precise angle to the mainstream.

Roddy Lumsden’s work, though seeming to offer the reader seductive variations on the standard English love lyric, is shot through with a quite distinct sensibility which is identifiably Scots. There is something about his forensic dissection of his own and others’ passions, and his frequent recourse to the list, which recalls both the Scottish devotion to reason, and the peculiar thoroughness with which Scots abandon rationality. ‘Facts, dear children,’ he claims, not entirely ironically, ‘is the new religion.’

John Kinsella may well appear the most un-English writer of the trio, writing what seems at times a species of Unglish. But like the ‘Yanglish’ which the Chinese dissident poet Yang Lian can force from his translators, this is often a salutary exercise for poet and reader alike. His characteristic stance is trans-cultural, uniting or confronting discourses, usually those of his rural Australian background and the experimental poetries of the US and Cambridge school. The breadth of the stride required for this has led some to regard him as a unique figure, though it is possible instead to view him as the first of many necessary bridge-builders between the sundered Englishes  of contemporary poetry.

John Hartley Williams’ new book is in two reflective halves. By opening with an extended elegy for Ken Smith and closing with a long fantasia on Dan Dare, he sets out his highly individual deck of cards. In a sense the whole first half of this book confronts tragedy head on, most specifically the suffering of the former Yugoslavia, where he has lived and worked. The second half proffers his characteristic wit and ludic powers not as an evasion of the loss depicted earlier, but rather as a kind of triumph of fancy over terror.

The elegy is a fine piece of work – as it says, a ‘blue archaic rap/on the answering anvil/of a man who likes talking/to a man who likes to talk’. It imitates the lean ranginess of Ken Smith’s voice whilst keeping the distinctive extensibility of Hartley William’s rhetoric. That capacity to conceptualise beyond the borders of what others would say is in evidence in several poems: ‘What I Ate in the War’ with its grotesque list of ‘Revenge soup’ and ‘Rumour parsnips’;  and ‘I Remember’ with its juxtapostions of physical detail and cultural insight leading to the lines

I remember

how Aca Ilic remarked casually, as one might say: ‘This is where we get the tram’ – ‘This is where they shot my cousin.’

The key poem in this part of the book is ‘Sarajevo Dancing’, where the dance dismantles  medieval and recent history, revealing progressively darker pictures of inhumanity.

The transition to poems which deploy fancy and comedy is deftly done by ‘Hungarian’, in which the impossible burdens the poet places on this language seem equally those placed on language by poetry itself, and those placed on any small European language caught up by larger conflicts: ‘I need to groan in Hungarian/...so I can answer/with what I did not know I knew.’

From here to the bizarrre perspectives of ‘Gnome Liberation Society’ or ‘Elbows’ or even the seduction of Dan Dare by Venus herself does not seem far. These are poems which, in the face of Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination, are happy to redeem fancy. Their latter-day surrealism recalls that of the Balkan poet Tomaz Salamun, who finds Pythonesque contortions to be highly appropriate responses to the contemporary world. The darkness of tone which gives this book its title is never entirely forgotten, as in ‘The Mulefish’, a kind of hideous parody of Hughes’ ‘Pike’, but one which seems far more at home in the murky waters where we now find ourselves:

The mulefish is no prized morsel.

It tastes of excrement and daubs

(though no one’s tasted it),

of bricks of electricity, of wrong-fermented wine –

a flavour, they suggest,

of the sweat of someone being crucefied.

Roddy Lumsden’s new and selected poems marks him out as one of the most distinctive voices in  British poetry. The black wit, the brilliant phrase-building and the instantly-recognisably sensibility add up to a territory he has made his own. Tenderly lusting, capable of extravagent loucheness, ‘damaged goods’ as one poem overhears, he is the King of Lachrymosity, presenting both our nagging appetites and our little uglinesses with an expert eye.

The centre of this book is the decidedly un-Whitmanic song of himself, Roddy Lumsden is Dead , an anatomy of melancholy for our time, taking us from ‘My Reptilian Existence’ to ‘My Realm of the Senses’ in thirty-odd uneasy steps. As he admits, ‘I know I know I shouldn’t know such things’, but nonetheless, how seductively he shares them:

...and tomorrow I will wake in the Japanese annexe:

my pomegranate mouth, my yak flank hair,

the skin of my back busy with mill-sweat,

feet beeling and dinging like buck-rabbits

and a dispirited girl will play a Chopin Nocturne

over and over, through in the sunlit lounge

as if someone had written a script.

Sorry: as if someone hadn’t written a script.

His lines are always crawling with precise details, pitiless with themselves regarding their constant self-regard, and twitching between phrases to graph the sensibilities that lesser poets tuck away. Some readers will perhaps locate more of those in the earlier poems – ‘Then she rolled over, laughed, began to do/To me what she so rarely did with you...’;  ‘I’d been guzzling vinegar,/Tipping it on everything, falling for women who were//beautifully unsuitable’. But the more recent work, ‘The Bubble Bride’ and ‘The Drowning Man’ are full of intriguing experiments and unusual shifts in familiar perspectives.

One thing they work with more openly than in earlier poems is the list – a device that will be familiar to those who try to keep up with his spiralling encyclopaedias of trivia in print and on the Net. In ‘The Perfumes of Scotland’, ‘The Kitchens: A Guided Tour’, or ‘Overheard in a Scottish Larder’, the appetite for catalogue is almost as generous as the cataloguing of appetites itself:

Rasps straicht fae the Carse of Gowrie, cries ane.

Rain-fed brambles fae Fife hedgerows, says the ither.

The first goes, dinnae let on what a haggis is,

the ither goes, nivver let on what a haggis is.

A platefu’ o Scotch broth or Royal Game, mibbe?

Naw, a dish o cullen skink or cock-a-leekie!

Says wan, it’ll crawl roond yer hairt lik a hairy worm.

Eat up, yer at yer blind auntie’s, cries the ither.

As the language shift here into colloquial Scots indicates, the energy at the base of Lumsden’s ferocious capacity for lists has much to do with his background. MacDiarmid’s love of lists was merely a late form of that frenzy for particulars we find in Scots writing as far back as the mid-sixteenth century Complaynt of Scotlande. The will to encompass a subject by gathering together all the ways of saying it – all the regional variations of the psyche, as it were – is entirely characteristic of a nation poised between discourses for much of its history. In this sense, these poems enact a slow arc of exile from the self, but return to the sensibility of the nation.

John Kinsella’s two volumes of selected and new poems are typically gargantuan, and would seem to present the two extremes of his highly various art: the experimental work in Doppler Effect, and the more conventional ‘Wheatlands Gothic’ in Peripheral Light. And these volumes come armoured with appropriately-assigned prefaces by that critical doyenne of the US experimentals, Marjorie Perloff, and that unrecalcitrant American canon-builder, Harold Bloom. A British reader might feel outflanked by this combination of Down Under-osity and Over There-ness. But that would be to overlook a poet of great richness.

For one thing, as Marjorie Perloff points out, Kinsella isn’t exactly an experimental poet as she knows it:

‘Kinsella is not quite willing to suspend disbelief, to allow for uncertainty and indeterminacy. For someone as ecologically aware as Kinsella, someone who has strong feelings about the despoliation of Auustralian lands and the killing of the indigenous people, negative capability, Charles Bernstein or even John Ashbery-style, just won’t cut it.’

In other words Kinsella has a subject matter, one not too many thousands of miles removed from that of John Clare or Robert Burns, summed up by the lines of Burns’ which stand as epigram to ‘Akbar’: ‘I’m truly sorry man’s dominion/Has broken Nature’s social union...’ And as for ecology, so for epistemology: Kinsella is deeply opposed to poetry’s self-aggrandising assumptions about the proper way to contain meaning. Hence his restless boundary-crossing and occasionally irresistable energy for experiment.

The other reason to be suspicious of easy categories in Kinsella’s work is that key poems are reproduced in both volumes – ‘Skeleton Weed/Generative Grammar’, ‘Bluff Knoll Sublimity’ and ‘Approaching the Anniversary of my Last Meeting with my Son’ among them.

In other words the distinctions don’t quite apply: for him, the experimental can be just as conventional as the conventional can in turn be experimental. That’s not to say you won’t find numerous dedications to Lyn Hejinian and Jeremy Prynne. It’s just to imply that Kinsella rarely imitates where he can reappropriate and recycle.

The last of those titles, ‘Approaching the Anniversary,’ is a good way for a new reader to approach what is distinctive about Kinsella’s utterance:

It’s almost the anniversary

of my leaving, and you don’t

know my voice on the phone

when you ring Nanna.

Told it’s Daddy,

you say, ‘I’d better go,’

your mother erupting

from another room;

it’s not safe using the phone

during a storm.

The use of distance, both literally and in terms of the setting of intimacy against impersonal phenomenon, occurs again and again in his work, whether in farmlands viewed from the air, or in a different discourse from that conventionally expected of a poem:

and as the host grows wizened

the spores make as if airborne

delivering yesterday’s news

you are only living

through the communications

with a self that offloads

a myriad of voices

into autopilot, collecting

black box date

obsessively

This somewhat reductive picture of the act of writing uses a similar set of distancing devices: plant metaphor, the technologies of flight and recording, and above all a distance of tone, to convey much the same message of the gaps between us and our intentions. Sudden lines will cut across conventional themes: ‘Sontag’s democratizing of beauty/foams like witness’ (in an elegiac piece on Radnoti) is characteristic both in its cultural specificity and its essayistic tone. What Kinsella is doing at such moments is introducing perspective, insisting on a democracy of the elements in a poem. If that sounds somewhat counter to Wordsworth’s principle that a poem should give pleasure, then it’s important to note that Kinsella’s poetry is richly sensuous, almost unable to stop recording intensities of perception:

Sun crisp on the curve of Bakewell

is lymphatic in the gulley – coldest point

fused with flock of pink-and-grey galahs

scattering enigmatically; sear flux

in confused canopy, what is light,

flesh, feathers?

He asks, in ‘Lighting the Bushman Fire Before the Others Rise’, and almost replies later

The door

nudged open, and the wood deposited

at the foot of the Bushman stove. Iron box.

Window to conflagration.

Everything here is Biblical – you don’t

choose to write it.

I quote Kinsella at length to demonstrate what is particular about his approach to writing: it is a poetry of declaration – patterning and juxtaposition of discourses stands in for the blending of tones we often expect. It uses metaphor drawn from strictly delineated areas – usually the Australian landscape. While we perhaps tend to be more opportunistic with metaphor, it contributes directly towards the integrity of a Kinsella poem. Lastly, he is always admitting the process of writing into the subject matter of the poem – in a matter of fact rather than a self-conscious way. So we encounter the subtitle ‘why I despair of poetry having any meaning beyond the page’ in a poem which begins ‘Snakeskin shucked and pinned under tin shed walls...’.

Of the two books I would certainly suggest you start with Peripheral Light: as a one-stop volume it will serve you well whether you remain with a masterpiece like ‘The Hunt’, or use it as a springboard into the related waters of Doppler Effect.

Kinsella has been described somewhat lazily as a phenomenon simply because he has published a great deal. He might more accurately be called a writer in full command of the means of his production, and some of his poetry displays the flaws of such proximate access to print. But Kinsella doesn’t write as many British poets do, with one eye too self-consciously on posterity: he seems happy to let what will fall away, fall away. And while much of what Bloom says about him (like much of what Bloom says) falls into the area of patrician puffery, it is nonetheless the case that this is a major talent.

These three poets would seem to have little in common with each other except their ability to extend our definition of contemporary poetry. That’s not a negligible trait for any writer to possess, but I would suggest it is in the way they challenge preconceptions that their underlying similarity emerges. All three are poets who can push beyond the idea that rhetoric in a poem is only there to persuade us of something: the grim fantasias of Hartley Williams, the eroticised lists of Roddy Lumsden and the distancing critiques of John Kinsella all accrue aesthetic value, setting out a unique grammar of poetry, and finding beauty in it. Accept nothing less.

(John Kinsella, Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 194pp, £15.95); Doppler Effect (Salt, 422pp,); Roddy Lumsden, Mischief Night: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 176pp, £8.95); John Hartley Williams, Blues (Cape, 86pp, £9.00))

 (This appeared in Poetry London in Spring 2006, and looks at Stewart Conn, David Harsent and Piotr Sommer.)

These three poets, one Scots, one English, one Polish, respond in contrasting ways to their shared European context, its heritage and its present moment. The quietistic meditations of Stewart Conn on cultural continuities (and discontinuities) can be contrasted with the anguished, yet controlled vignettes of warfare and brutality depicted by David Harsent. Both authors’ strategies seem to have been digested by Piotr Summer, whose forensic examination of our lives’ minutiae finds us continually threatened by groundlessness. Together these writers’ work amounts to a weighing up of how best to confront our era: humanism, realism and existentialism are all considered and found wanting, as though events won’t allow their imaginations to settle. And yet the result of reading all three is a curious sense of relief: the imagination has been tested – almost to destruction in some cases – and yet the poem has held. Their work celebrates the tenuous victory that what we make can, sometimes, be stronger than we are.

Stewart Conn’s work has long been valued for its capacity to commemorate human values without seeming pietistic, to seek out our virtues without being blinded to our failings, and without lapsing into homily. Ghosts at Cockcrow is a graceful ‘slipping’ as he puts it, into seniority in two senses of that word: at once a coming of old age, and an acquiring of senior status among Scotland’s poets. It is full of high culture, old Europe and wry self-deprecation, visiting Barcelona, Burgundy and the capital to which he played laureate for three years, Edinburgh.

His verse habitually favours direct utterance and indirect rhyme, seeking to draw the reader into a democracy of sensations, in which a Mozart concerto and a cracked tooth receive equal weight, and a woman being lifted from a wheelchair is as keenly observed as an angel high up on a fresco. He seeks out the small traces, however temporary, that we leave of our humanity. As the painted angel tells us: 

Invisible from ground level is a small smudge

on my cheek. His last brush-stroke complete

and before they dismantled the scaffolding

my master leaned up and kissed me gently.

This device of intermingling life with art, allowing the flaws of one to give warmth to the would-be perfection of the other, is turned on its head in a comic piece called ‘The Hill Walkers’ where a wearying line of climbers start to slip on a mud path until they all end up – author last – in a distinctly Breughelesque heap of what another poem calls ‘gnomes in anoraks’.

One of the successes of this collection is a sequence about a late medieval Scottish poet whose works have not survived, Roull of Corstorphin. In these poems the impermanence of art is set against the enduring need to create it, to seek out value in verse ‘the whilk (for a spell at least) made readers rejoice.’

But the reaction of Roull to witnessing two contemporaries, Dunbar and Kennedy, engage in the poetic duel known as flyting, is tellingly self-aware on Conn’s part: he is, he says, ‘of a gentler school/and ill at ease with such crudities’. There is a sense, when Conn’s verse turns to the harsher realities of ‘Kosovo’, that the habitual turn to culture is not sufficient to the task: an account of ‘A fund-raising concert’ with its ‘radiant rendering’ of Bach reads a little too much like a review.

The piece which confronts human suffering most directly, an adaptation of Euripides, feels a little out of place in this book, its portents of dark sacrifice and ‘limbs half-severed, intestines/trailing like an afterbirth’ jarring among the rueful decencies that surround it. Perhaps the most effective confrontation with the ghosts this book summons up is ‘Ministrations’, where the phantoms are those of the faceless doctors and nurses who will attend us at our inevitable end:  

Upon which it is we

who will dissolve, not they.

Best believe in them.

David Harsent’s latest book is diverse both in its poetic and in its subject-matter, possessed of a striking control over voice and form. When its characters address you, you feel compelled to listen, and there is always a frisson of unpredictability as to what you may be told next. The book is divided into three sections: one focussed on war and its aftermath; one on the reading of landscape; and the third consisting of a series of those commanding voices.

It is the first section, ‘Legion’, which dominates: a jagged, historically indeterminate sequence which, though it may touch most directly on recent conflicts in the Balkans, nonetheless has an extraordinary, atemporal resonance, as though Harsent is isolating universal characteristics of conflict, and finding their contemporary framework.

Stylistically, he moves between several modes as though suggesting modern warfare has blown apart our ways of talking about it. There are the fragmented recurrent ‘Despatches’, which borrow the documentary feel of military reports and personal diaries. There are the complicit accounts of a pluralized ‘we’ – the Biblical reference implied in the title should not be forgotten here: ‘My name is Legion, for we are many’. And there are epigrammatically terse quatrains, gathered into an anthology of atrocities:  

Word of mouth has a gut-shot man walk all of ten

miles from the front to his own front door, lift the latch,

find them dead, dig seven graves, fire the thatch,

fill his bottle, sling his gun, walk back again.  

That urgent syntax is emblematic of a compulsive energy to recount which finds its clearest formal expression in Harsent’s use of rhyme. He has a virtuosic gift for the extension of a rhyme sound way beyond the usual decorous limits: in ‘Barlock’ two closely-related sounds are spun out over twenty four lines: the poem begins with ‘next’ and ‘hatch’, and ends with ‘rich’ and ‘dregs’. The effect is of a kind of verbal bombardment, as speaker and reader huddle together in the foxhole of the poem.  

This may all sound unrelenting, but Harsent’s real triumph is to combine two realisations: one is the old truism that, for soldiers, war is ninety percent boredom, ten percent terror; the second is that the truly horrible things, for everyone else, take place between the fighting. The brutalisation of the civilian population, especially along gender and ethnic lines, is the real horror of war, and it is the real heart of this book.

The account in ‘Daisychain’ of women killing themselves ‘as if a word had been spoken, as if it might be infallible’, rather than face an advancing army, underscores the sexual relations depicted in this book’s third section. ‘Sniper’ positions its speaker above the town he knows intimately but, thanks to this inhuman perspective, no longer belongs to:  

they go in fear. They go in fear

of me. And where they go they go by my good grace.

These lines are as powerful as Keith Douglas’ affectless exploration of responsibility in ‘How to Kill’: ‘How easy it is to make a ghost.’ And the comparison underscores why Harsent’s is an important book: war poetry can no longer be defined as in the twentieth century as the poetry of soldiers. The ‘war on terror’ has created a limitless war-zone, its combatants assume that all citizens share responsibility for decisions taken by their political masters, and that all our identities are sufficiently defined by national or religious borders. In such a context we are all confronted by the potential identity of ‘war poet’. David Harsent’s book has simply taken on the consequences of that confrontation.  

The poems in the second and third sections, though overshadowed somewhat by ‘Legion’, carry their own charge. The sequence of block-like texts which describe tors and stone circles depict how enigmatic human traces are outside our narrow historical space. Their borrowings from earlier texts throw us back on our own continual need to interpret, establishing it as, in itself, the most fitting memorial to those we cannot name. The confessions and monologues which make up the final section mirror the driven nature of the opening, finding in intimacy the same potential for destruction and, as the last poem indicates, for love. In ‘Baby Blue’ a mother sees something chillingly reminiscent of Eliot’s ‘skull beneath the skin’ in the colour of her son’s eyes,

then stops on a broken note, her own eyes full

as she catches a glimpse of the sky through the skull.

That sudden moment of doubt or dubious insight, taking the ground away from beneath you, is Piotr Sommer’s signature note. He is one of the most important Polish writers of the last thirty years, not least because of his connection with Literatura na Swiecie (World Literature), a magazine which played a significant cultural role during the communist regime, and which he now edits. But his work, as August Kleinzahler tells us in his introduction to these poems, is not primarily concerned with Polishness.

Identity for Sommer is too fraught a concept to extend to anything as grand as a nation. Perhaps for this reason he has attracted, among others, two very different translators with similar reservations – John Ashbery and Douglas Dunn. These seem ideally suited to his surreal yet colloquial dissections of personal memory, perception and even family ties.

A typical Sommer poem begins off-handedly about nothing in particular, a random observation or account of behaviour which often sits at an odd angle to its title. It is resolutely quotidian in a way which recalls Frank O’Hara’s ‘I do this, I do that’ poems (Sommer has translated O’Hara into Polish), but without that poet’s affectations and enthusiasms. ‘Why make things prettier/than they are?’ he asks in ‘Confirmation’, and we gradually absorb the point. Sommer’s poems work cumulatively on us, nudging us phrase by phrase towards a perspective that is quietly open to transience without celebrating chaos.

It’s hard to catch the flavour of this without quotation. In ‘Standards from the Seventies’, for instance,  the poem opens with an  abstracted description of a conversation whilst coming home that turns on the observation ‘And what does one live?/One lives dead streets, rebuilt now for years,’ before focussing on a series of small details

We get off first: a crossing, a green light,

we take the lift up. A neighbour from the sixth floor

stomps out his cigarette and kicks it down the shaft.  

We can try assessing whether this last observation is to be read as an actual symbol, but Sommer has moved back to the conversation and a comment which seems to explain the title: ‘Even a weak theme, done well,/will play itself’, only to conclude ‘Real life doesn’t’. How serious is this comparison of life to some weak ‘standard’ tune from the Seventies? How emotive was that appeal to the ‘dead streets’? This restless, effortless movement, from the outer world to the inner without placing undue emphasis on either, is entirely characteristic.  

Sommer works in the same way between poems so that images build up resonances that we’re not quite conscious of. It may be that same lift which rouses ‘the old dog’ who ‘favours/the worldly life, but without conviction’ – who in turn reminds us of the opening of ‘Space’:

The sun is burning out and shining through the dust.

The river is invisible, our house was built by little ants.

It’s freezing and almost dark, white figures return to their homes.

The buses can hardly move –

at home dogs have had a hard day.

And so we find a cycle has been described, and we have unconsciously colluded in his exploration of the nature of memory. As a recent poem concludes: ‘Read as if you were to listen,/not to understand.’

Sommer’s poems have a knack of ending well, producing a series of destabilising couplets which remind us that it is in the ordinary moments that all the big questions must be grounded (‘you won’t be read to the music of speech/but to the hubbub of things.’). His poetry’s defence of and deadpan delight in the stubborn difficulty of particulars is a rebuke to those who believe identity is simply a matter of loud adherence to a dominant ideology. In this sense his work is as thorough an exploration of the European experience as Conn’s or Harsent’s. Instead of a stable series of cultural emblems, or the unpicking of a tortuous and violent history, he sees it as a state of mind in which

Suddenly you notice this everyday loneliness, contrary to your self, perhaps,

and contrary to those you’re thinking about.

(Stewart Conn, Ghosts at Cockcrow (Bloodaxe), 96pp, £8.95; David Harsent, Legion (Faber), 82pp, £8.99; Piotr Sommer, Continued (Bloodaxe), 128pp, £8.95.)

(This little review of the NE magister MacSweeney was for Scotland on Sunday, and was written in June 2003.)

Occasionally, in the middle of the night, those who knew Barry MacSweeney would receive questionable phonecalls. He had a wry, lilting voice, capable of great intensity in readings, but in the dark those North-East tones became lugubrious and sinister as he suggested various bizarre crimes against what he saw as the poetry state. That state, whether characterised as ‘mainstream’ or ‘metropolitan’, kept him out of its spotlight for thirty years, whilst he pursued his own elliptical orbit. The result is this bulky selection. Like that voice from the darkness it is by turns terrifying, funny, and terribly moving.

Barry’s areas of concern are present in his earliest work: love as the most extreme emotion; the North of England as a territory opening out to earlier poetries; rock music as the alternative to conventional literary influences; and Thomas Chatterton, the Romantics’ favourite suicidal teenager, as a personal icon. The poem ‘Brother Wolf’ announces many of these obsessions:

There is so much land in Northumberland. The sea

Taught me to sing

            the river to hold my nose. When

it rains it rains glue.

            Chatterton’s eyes were stuck to mountains.

He saw fires where other men saw firewood.

One step ahead in recognising signals.

And leapt into the flames.

In the seventies, MacSweeney’s influences are sometimes worn too openly on his sleeve: the visceral but sometimes melodramatic gestures of Michael McClure’s poetry, with its exclamatory capitals and vertiginous centre-spacing; the syntactically-ambiguous, collage-happy work of Cambridge poets like J.H. Prynne. Nonetheless, what emerges in these experiments is a verse infused with resonant colloquial energy, lines which feel intuitive, unpredictable, yet apt, as at the close of ‘Ode Long Kesh’: ‘Nouveau Flapless in the garments of rich/hunger, living on potatoes & nitro-glycerine.’  

The finest work from his middle period, Ranter, may establish him as the legitimate successor to Basil Bunting, as the poet who applies the musicality of the Northern voice to the vistas of its distinctive history and geography, producing an edgy perspective on eighties Britain. But it is in his later books that he acquires major status. When he addresses Pearl, in that eponymous collection, he appears also to be addressing the Pearl of the medieval alliterative poem; and, in The Book Of Demons, his compassion relates his fellow alcoholic to the figure of Tom in Lear:

Tom I saw you in the Heart Foundation shop

buying a cardigan five sizes too big.

Tom you’re more bent over than when

we sat together in the locked ward.

Tom your coat is frayed like the edges of your mind.

Tom they let you out to the chippy but you’re not free.

Barry died in 2000 from the alcohol-related problems that had beset him for years: demons he confronted in his last books with an unblinking responsibility to his art. These are poems of an astonishing unlocked lyricism and verbal adroitness. They are simultaneously raw and sophisticated, and have an unbending ferocity. But he is also capable of the infinitely tender Pearl poems, about a girl with a cleft palate he knew long before his own grim endgame:

I am Pearl.

So low a nobody I am beneath the cowslip’s

shadow, next to the heifers hooves.

I have a roof over my head, but none

in my mouth. All my words are homeless.

(Barry MacSweeney, Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000, Bloodaxe, 334pp)

(This is evidently a review I did, possibly for Poetry Review, certainly back in January 2002. I like Pessoa a lot more than it would appear to suggest, so I was talking more about contemporary lazy smartnesses.)

Ah, heteronyms, those voices that hang around poets’ heads claiming to be shamanic familiars. I remember my first heteronyms the way I remember old school friends: Calvus, the friend of Catullus whose manuscripts survived in fragments; Ogami, the sixteenth-century haiku master. Funny how these alternative voices are always those of ‘masters’, the way air hostesses and golf instructors turn out to be Nefertiti or King Arthur in a previous life. The same seems true of Pessoa, the master of the heteronym, who invented a whole host to cope with the messy, exposing task of writing.

His first was the Zen-like pastoral poet Alberto De Caiero, an impossible creature even in pre-WW1 Portugal. De Caiero reads like a wish figure from a dead past, Wordsworth translated into Japanese: ‘To think is uncomfortable like walking in the rain/When the wind is rising and it looks like raining more.’ Yet Pessoa regarded this imposing, rather prissy voice as a creative liberation: ‘My master had appeared in me’. Never mind this was a one-note master who couldn’t write much, given the Lisbon-bound poet’s lack of country lore – he simply invented Ricardo Reis to be the master’s pupil and get on with writing those pesky poems. Pessoa’s ironic awareness of the infinite self-recession of this strategy is clear from his depiction of Reis: a ‘Greek Horace who wrote in Portuguese’. The more formal Reis promptly induced a backlash: the ‘Sensationist’ bard Alvaro De Campos, that Whitmanic world-traveller. All three burst into verse – and wrote most of their best work – within a few months in 1914.

Where in this was Pessoa’s own writing, what he termed his ‘orthonymic’ work? It was, apparently, even more controlled than Reis, though it is hard for us to gauge its quality through Jonathan Griffin’s translations, which sometimes snarl up with intricacies that presumably have cadences in Portuguese they lack in English:

What is merges with what

I sleep and am. And I’m

Not feeling; sad I’m not.

But a sad thing I am.  

De Campos comes out best, perhaps because his larger lines don’t tie the translator down so much:

In the house opposite me and my dreams

What happiness there always is! 

…The children who play on the high balconies

Live between vases of flowers,

Without a doubt, eternally.

The voices that rise from within that home

Are always singing, without any doubt.

Yes, they must be singing.

…What a great happiness not to be me!

In that last line we have a key to the heteronymic impulse. It is an attempt to be  someone who could write all the poems Pessoa wanted to, which, because of his self-control, he felt he could not. Because Pessoa, like Magritte or Morandi or Auden, is one of those artists who reduce their lives to a controlled ritual in which as little happens as possible. His working life consisted solely of writing business letters in English and French; he dined in the same restaurant on the Rua dos Douradores; he avoided physical intimacy, probably dying a virgin. His whole focus was directed inward and his self apparently found that unendurable.

Pessoa is partially responsible for a shrinkage of the poetic persona. His work can serve as a justification for poets who wish to define their limits, rather than their largesse. You cannot, he claims, contain all that cultural baggage within your own voice, you must invent others. He appears to support the lazy orthodoxy that the lyric 'I' is simply something other than the poet's 'ordinary' voice, rather than a voice that critiques and augments any notions we may have of such units. There is a subtle metamorphosis that occurs when a poet uses ‘I’ in a poem, and all poets require something of fiction’s freedoms, but equally there is a concern with truth in poetry often passed over to hide behind shallow personae. Reading Pessoa should dispel such irresponsibilities because his heteronyms are not, finally, as convincing as poetic voices as they are as psychological necessities.  

Griffin’s selection is a straightforward reprint of my old 1982 edition – perhaps we could have expected some change or, preferably, expansion, since the publication of Pessoa’s masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet. In the meantime we have discovered Pessoa’s voices did not rest at three, that he was hotching in heteronyms, creating swarms of semi-heteronyms, some of whom may have had hemisemi-heteronyms. The Book points to the unstoppable impetus of this impulse, his extension of the theory to an almost pathological inconclusiveness, because this collection of around five hundred prose fragments is as close to a non-book as it can get.  

Begun the year before the arrival of De Caiero and crew, the Book continued to accumulate until Pessoa’s death, at which point it was a lot of scribbles in a trunk, not even sewn together a la Emily Dickinson. It was ‘written’ by two heteronyms, initially Vicente Guedes and latterly Bernard Soares. Guedes, an assistant bookkeeper, proved too rational for the Book’s symbolist flights: he was fired and the manuscript rested. Then Pessoa employed another assistant bookkeeper (the profession can hardly have been an accident) and carried on. Pessoa’s description of Soares is telling: ‘He’s a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it.’ Like anything we write, then – except, for the fastidious Pessoa, everything lay in the distinction.

And the book that Soares was handed fifteen years after it had been begun? Almost every page is charged with an aphoristic anxiety: ‘I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.’ ‘Everything was sleeping as if the universe was a mistake.’ ‘I’m so isolated I can feel the distance between me and my suit.’ ‘To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.’ ‘I hereby excuse you from appearing in my idea of you.’ Some passages sustain this brilliantly, others seem a little too fin de siecle or over-fascinated by their own alienation. But the main difficulty comes from trying to consider it as a whole.  

The Book of Disquiet celebrates the Pyrrhic victory of narrative voice over novelistic convention. Nothing happens, big time, even in terms of the sensibility or sensibilities which narrate these deeply internalised non-events. The book aspires to be a single gigantic aphorism, and therefore lacks progression. It is caught in one brittle dichotomy: how the world is (too magnificent to live in) and how the voice is (too anxious to act) – one is opposed to the other, forever. This is at once its achievement and its failure: much like anxiety, whilst caught up in it, it is all-consuming; but when you put it down The Book of Disquiet rapidly becomes irrelevant to our own compulsive narratives.  

Which is pretty much how Pessoa left it. The editor, Richard Zenith, confesses in his lucid introduction that he not only had to decipher the manuscript, but also order it. So a significant further link must be added to the chain that separates us from its author. I can’t help but think Pessoa may have regarded editors and readers as slightly too independent heteronyms. Perhaps he should just have got out more.

(Fernando Pessoa, Selected Poems, translated by Jonathan Griffin (Penguin), £7.99, The Book of  Disquiet, edited and translated by Richard Zenith (Penguin), £20.00.)