From bad to verse

MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH

Towards Silence Edward Lucie-Smith (our 12s 6d) King Log Geoffrey Hill (Andre Deutsch 21s) Love in the Environs of Voronezh Alan Sillitoe (Macmillan 25s) Poems Harold Pinter (Enitharmon Press/Eric and Joan Stevens, Prospect Road, NW2, 12s 6d) New Poems Roy Fuller (Andre Deutsch 15s) There are now more writers-in-verse than ever before; yet, on past experience, not more than one in 500 of these can expect to be remem- bered as having existed, let alone as a valued poet. This is a fact of which all would-be poets should be aware: those who cannot ignore it, who do not have a natural need to write poetry as well as an ability to communicate through it, are unlikely to be remembered anyway.

Today, however, there is not much verse, failed or successful, that arises from devoted- ness to truth, from the kind of 'high serious- ness' that Arnold wrongly said Chaucer lacked; what little that does originally arise from such seriousness is too frequently corrupted by com- petitiveness, by fashionable rhetoric, by the desire to impress, the impulse to make a poem into a single performance rather than a per- manent record.

There is little point in examining in detail the avalanche of performances by career- versifiers : it is not a part of literature at all, nor is it really ,intended to be in any but a superficial sense. To grumble that the sort of people who write it are frequently `in charge of culture' is to miss the point that clerks and people interested in the administration of writers have no more to do with real culture than the Politburo has to,. do with Russian literature. Nevertheless, any paper that JDn7 sistently refuses to take ;notice of this kind of verse is frequently accused of 'not supporting poetry.' On the contrary, supporting poetry, is precisely what it is doing: by ignoring 4, pro- duct that masquerades, not even very desper- ately, as poetry.

Mr George Macbeth is described in the de- fensive blurb of his new ,book as an 'ever- fertile fertile verse couturier,' `pokel-faced' writer of notes with a 'predilection for the surreal.' As part of a harmless game—I once heard Mr Macbeth describe all poets as in some ret.pects `like Hitler,' and he is on record in print as stating that his main aim in writing verse is to have more power over people (joke?)--this is no more here or there than Bezique or Post- man's JCnock. But it is odd,as'coming from a reputable publisher; or rather, it shows what we have come, to. `LmND Analysis of Thomas Nashe's Song simply prints the Ls, ms, is and Ds present in `Adieu, farewell earth's blisse,' with gaps to represent 'the, number of space units between L, D, m or N. The poem should

be spoken gravely . . . in accordance with the mood, feeling and sense of the original.' This laboured substitute for humour is of psycho- logical interest, but surely even those who wish to contribute to BBC 3's verse programmes will find this choking in their throats.

I reproduce none of Mr Macbeth's more `serious' verses: they seem to me to represent a sometimes clever—in a crossword sense, skilful—amalgam of adolescence and nastiness; underlying the whole collection there is an alarming suggestion of inability to 'respond emotionally to human situations, and a rather pathetic one of wanting to be admired. Surely such a volume as this can exist only in the absence of any serious critical approach to it, in a wholly frivolous climate of thought? It is part of a rather dull game, in which the par- ticipants make remarks such as—I quote— 'I love George, he is so evil.' But one would love George much more if he decided to pack it in, or if he would simply state that he did not wish his verses to be considered as literary, thus sparing reviewers some embarrass- ment.

Mr Edward Lucie-Smith, although recently described as a 'concrete poet' by an announcer on BBC 3, uses in his, hopefully entitled new volume more or less traditional forms. He dis- plays a sort of undergraduate skill, but is, for a publicist of the so-called avant-garde, sur- prisingly conventional. A long narrative poem about Crecy, commissioned by the sec Schools Service, is quite crushingly dull and linguistically uninteresting. Elsewhere, in shorter poems, Mr Lucie-Smith seems for some reason to substitute bizarre fantasy for what he imagines to be the kind of experience poets write about. Your Own Place ends:

`It is before dawn.

There is a cave with a few Bare rocks. Your feet cling to them, Naked, as the rest of you Is naked. Women come laughing Down to the shore. You call out, Expecting to be embraced.

They strip and bathe, brush by you Without a glance or a cry As the light swells and brightens.'

What is this about?

Real experience is also lacking—or denied— in Geoffrey Hill's frigid, carefully executed, super literary poems. Mr Hill's material all seems to come from books, so- that his man- nered way of writing, which is not inelegant in itself, and his authentic sense of style, oper- ate in a void. The realities of emotion are turned into a series of exquisite phrases con- raining., theological or pastoral allusions. At best, warmth in these poems: is like a dying sun seen through a wall Of ice; an impressive barrier of confident, recondite langUage screens the reader from all human, energy. Alan Sillitoe is an astonishingly inept writer of verse. Perhaps realising that he has in the past been characterised as brash and simplistic, he has now retreated into a coIoUrless and tasteless obscurity; his sense of language is

War on cancer, its racist face A whitewinged flamethrower spreading to Swamp blood or innocent veins, A wall-moat hemming victims in ...'

The word `racist' here gives a clue to Mr Sillitoe's unfortunate failure to understand the kind of precision towards which poetry should aim. The less said the better.

Harold Pinter's Poems, most of them written in the 1950s, and Roy Fuller's new book fall into a different category : both deserve to be looked at with a critical eye. Mr Pinter's poems are attractive and mysterious. Their weakness as poems is that they are vague in spite of themselves; but they are genuine attempts to find a mode of self-expression, and A View of the Party (dated 1958), a kind of rehearsal for what Mr Pinter was to do better in dramatic form, is a tour de force and unlike anything else written in its decade. Mr Fuller, sophisti- cated, hopelessly trapped by the influence of the early Auden and by an obsession with rhetoric, ends one poem,

'How much happier I'd have been Had I put my patrimony in low-yielders, And been less kind and considerate, And voted Tory, and stuck to prose.'

These lines well display both his strengths and weaknesses: he is nothing if not honest, and he has a sense of humour, so that he, the lifelong marxist can satirise the :bourgeois within him- self with surprisingly little difficulty and great effect. But he writes, mostly, about not being able to be a poet; ,and,,perhaps his ideas of what poetry is are over-political—more theor- etically socialist, 'onet'might say, than outright anarchistic. But this is a readable, intelligent collection, one genuinely minds when the good moments are swamped with rhetoric.