Smartening Up

A Group Anthology. Edited by Edward Lucie- and Kegan Paul, 21s.) Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms. By Rosemary Tonks. (Putnam, 8s. 6d.) Sailing to an Island. By Richard Murphy. (Faber, 12s. 6d.) Against the Cruel Frost. By David Holbrook. (Putnam, 10s. 6d.)

POEMS-it is necessary to say this surprisingly often—are made out of words, language that bears some relation to ordinary speech. When language moves too far away from speech it goes literary, mushy, rotten (like most Nineties verse, Francis Thompson's, or in our time the gilded rottenness of Miss Sitwell's), and this is true whether the themes are private or public, the

poems about childhood experiences or concen- tration camps. Volunteer rescue squads are needed every ten years to take on the job of deflating 'poetic' language, which reinflates again nowadays with alarming speed. The Movement was initially such a rescue operation, a reaction against Miss Sitwell and Dylan Thomas.

The Group bears some relation to the Move- ment. It is a loosely linked collection of poets, mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, who meet regularly to read and comment on each other's work. The procedure sounds un- promising, pompous, solemn. Poetry is an indi- vidual art, unlike drama and the cinema: what can be gained by a co-operative view of poems? Yet the results do a good deal to justify Group practice. There is a unity of tone and language in the Group Anthology which, since it is in the service A common sense and intelligent analysis, ends in some good poems. It is true that in their resolute determination to avoid poetic inflation the Group poets often write descriptive verse on a low and unexciting level: He talks to himself, and splutters when he speaks; Clumps mumbling down the bare wooden stairs, in labour, sideways, lugging his booted club-foot. Fifty, balding, tall, and partly deaf, he bears His defects without grudge—though sometimes (if

upset) He'll stamp round shouting at himself, and slam- ming doors.

In this mood, a fury which is almost madness in him breaks.

Yet this near-prose is still more interesting than most of the verse in the other books under review. In many of the poems something has been experienced and an attempt has been made to assess the experience in terms genuinely per- sonal to the poet. The prevalent style is sharp and ironic, the prevalent emotions are shame, disgust, anger. There is a frequent concern with household affairs, and—oddly, for writers who can have had no war experience—with war. It is difficult to pick out names—the editors, who are, I suppose, the linchpins of the Group, seem to me too slickly clever—but I should say that good Group poems are Mr. Peter Porter's 'John Marston Advises Anger,' and Mr. Adrian Mitchell's 'Veteran With a Head Wound' and Mr. Alan Brownjohn's poem about the Alder- maston march. It is not easy to quote fairly from these poems and poets, because their effect is total, but here are three verses from Mr. Mitchell, which seem to me excellent:

In London, where the trees are lean, The banners of the grass are raised.

Grass feeds the butcher and the beast, But we could conjure down a blaze

Would scour the world of the colour green. For look, though the human soul is tough, Our state scratches itself in bed And a thousand are pierced by its finger-nails. It combs its hair, a thousand good and bad Fall away like discs of dandruff ...

When death covers England with a sheet Of red and silver fire, who'll mourn the state, Though some will live and some bear children And some of the children born in hate May be both lovely and complete?

When Group poetry goes bad it ossifies or iS tidied into rigidity, processes which are painfullY evident in the verse of Yvor Winters. As a critic Dr. Winters is valuable because of the sense one has that an alert mind, not agile but deeP, is facing seriously the problems of criticism and creation. It doesn't seem immensely to matter, any more than it does with Winters 's exemplar Dr. Johnson, that many of his judg- ments are evidently wrong, for the impaa 01 such a mind upon poetry is always important. As a poet, however, Dr. Winters writes often like a man demonstrating a theory, in verse,t0 often painfully formal and sometimes diScon- certingly like a parody of his hero, RohOt Bridges. In half a dozen poems he emerges frOtn self-devised constriction to write memorably: I cannot write your praise

When young men go to die; Nor yet regret the ways That ended with this hour.

The hour has come. And 1

Who alter nothing, pray That men, surviving you, May learn to do and say The difficult and true, True shape of death and power.

This is 'To a Military Rifle,' the best poem ill the book, written on America's entry into the war. It is somehow typical that this poem, la the era of Pearl Harbor and Guadalcanal, should be about a rifle!

Miss Tonks is interesting, Mr. Murphy less so, Mr. Holbrook abysmal. Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms is certainly a very odd book, a jumble of images jittered out from Miss Tonks's sub" or semi-consciousness. Many of them are unin- telligible to me, like `Archbrute of Quadrillion Kingbeats!', some are ridiculous, some impres- sive. 'A lapel dog with goblet eyes of hot secco- tine stamps on brass toes to where a black tree eats gravel; the snout at the urinal shiny as the chinpad of .a violin.' This is characteristic of 3 style that certainly doesn't lack liveliness. The substance of the poems, so far as I understood them, seemed to me pretty thin.

Mr. Murphy's poems are mostly about life la Ireland, Irish ancestors, with more than a touch of Irish blarney. Some, like 'The Woman of the House,' Droit de Seigneur' and a poem about Wittgenstein, are adroit and amusing, hOt nothing more than that. It is typical that thts, book, rather than the Group Anthology, shoula be the choice of the Poetry Book Society. Mr. Holbrook is a poet of startling ineptness.

So many kinds of snow, in this last unease Before two weeks of March shall bring Us 10 unthink it!

These are the first lines of the first poem. Is the awkwardness deliberate, purposeful? Not at all. It can be matched on page after page. Mr. Holbrook, who has no rhythmical sense, who writes neo-Georgian poems about the countl or near-Frostian meditations and colloquies, al in a language totally without distinction, has also been in the past a choice of the poet' Book Society.

JULIAN SYMONS