Flowers and Porpoises

A Vision of Reality. By Frederick Grubb. (Chatto and Windus, 35s.) AT the centre of Jon Silkin's new collection is an impressive group of what he rather apologeti- cally calls 'Flower poems'; they attempt a rejoinder not only to those prophets of 'the thing itself,' nature respected, inviolate, and cleansed of all illustrative impurities, but also to their now less vogue-ish rivals, those anthropocen- tries who only take notice of trees that have Withered arms. Silkin is not perhaps doing any- thing quite as new as his lengthy 'Note on Flower Poems' rather seems to boast, but there is enough cant being talked about this question at the moment for one to be gratified by even this ele- mentary good sense: 'although the pbems are not only, and not simply about flowers, they are not only or simply about human beings and their predicaments.'

What matters is that, by and large, these Poems work and are .the best thing that Silkin has done so far. The flowers, though he bears down upon them from an impassioned enough moral standpoint and works very hard for pre- cise, often intricate physical detail, are yet felt to be independently alive, intact and only grudgingly or helplessly self-revealing. They have Provided Silkin with the concrete materials that lie has been in need of to inflame the often rather muddily portentous' wisdom that he finds so tempting, and. it is significant that he now falls into very few of his old syntactical bogs and is altogether more lucid and self-assured. Now and then, his flowers are made to seem too hugely voracious, too keenly bent on absorbing not just the poet's consciousness, momentarily, but the whole of creation, permanently; it is difficult, for instance, to think of them living amicably to- gether in the same field—his 'Peonies' would surely make short work of his 'Lilies of the Valley': It.has a group of flowers.

Its buds shut, they exudg

A moisture, a gum, expressed From the sepals' metallic pressures. Its colour shows between shields, Cramped where the long neck

Swells into the head. Then they open.

This may seem somewhat tough on peonies, but

the point is that they are still immediately recog- nisable; they have not been conscripted to serve an obsession, but are touched into a peculiar and valuable -set of revelations which they can easily survive. This is the book's great virtue throughout, that its evidence is felt to have been scrupulously suffered; our assent is invited, merely.

This is true, also, of the best poems in Ted

Walker's very promising first collection. His carps and porpoises are finely brought to life by the kind of intent, remorseless visual mastery that distinguishes the animal poems of Ted Hughes, ,ind for this gift alone he is well worth watching. Walker's beasts are more victims than magnifi- cent exemplars; they are no less hist and point- less, finally, than the sea-front detritus, the wrecks and corpses, or indeed the couples doing what

they can against the wall.

There is a good deal of this gratuitous bleak- ness and, where the facts are not to, hand, it often encourages an archly self-conscious sort of vigour (`sucked by the peristalsis of my fear,' for instance, or 'I walked the length of the day's obsession') or, worse, mere rhetorical padding. The persistent use of syllabics does not help, of course, and Walker's line-breaking and general rhythmic sense leave much to be desired. All this aside, though, he is clearly the real thing.

The new books from Messrs. MacBeth and

Enright are very much by way of being repeat performances. MacBeth is slick, inventive, fashion-conscious; he has worked out a brand of cheerful kinkery and shows no signs of letting up or apologising. As he says: I did it just to annoy people. Serious people, and perhaps also

To amuse children. Small children.

For these same kiddies there is, at the end of the book, a kind of snakeskin Snakes and Ladders, a game called Fin du Globe. It involves a pack of post-holocaust postcards and its rules are quite inscrutable, but bits of it are very funny. D. J. Enright's volume maintains the level of wise, sardonic, rather saddened commentary that we have come to expect of him and, perhaps, to take too easily for granted. He' is honest and humane and his work is always read- able. But it is also, I find, forgettable. In 'Works Order' he seems to defend himself against com- plaints that there is too much Life in his poems for them really to be Poetry; he has a good case, of course, but it is somehow typical that he should see the perception 'A poem is a work of art' as meaning 'Never use two words where one would be meaningless.'

Donald Hall's treatment of The Faber Book of Modern Verse supplement is, to say the least, puzzling. It is not just that he prefers Charles Olson to Roy Fuller and is generally too trans- atlantic and up to the minute in his revision of Anne Ridler's choice; he also behaves oddly with Michael Roberts's original selection. He drops Sacheverell Sitwell, to whom Roberts awarded ten pages, because he believes him to be no good, but he finds himself unable to use Stevens's 'Sunday Morning' because it was 'available to Roberts and not chosen by him . . . if I used it I would be revising his opinions.' Strange. And stranger still when one considers that there are still those eight poems from Charles Madge against four from Hart Crane.

Frederick Grubb's book on `liberalism in twen-

tieth-century verse' shows every sign of being a rushed job; quite apart from its commonplace judgments and its general unwillingness to offer any but the most messily generalised definitions of what 'liberalism' here is supposed to mean, the book is appallingly ill-written. The merely ungrammatical one could maybe excuse (though surely somebody in Chatto and Windus must have seen this manuscript on its way to the press); what really wearies is the kind of breath- less, contorted smartness with which Grubb finds it necessary to pack his every sentence, the name- dropping, the Briefed asides, the schoolroom issuing of commandments like this one :

Sixth, avoiding absolutes. daring challenges

within verse which, by injecting dialectic, ten- sion and struggle into the static water of liberalism, will generate the new 'incentives to creation and appreciation' to redeem our society.

It could be that there are some nuggets buried in the pages which I couldn't face reading, but life—though beautiful, of course—is short.

IAN HAMILTON