Enigmas and Promises

The Earth-Owl and other moon-people. By Ted Hughes. (Faber, 15s.) The Place's Fault and Other Poems. By Philip Hobsbaum. (Macmillan, 18s.) - TED HuottEs's latest volume of verse is rather an enigma; it has much in common with his hook of poems for children, Meet My Folks!, yet it is far too macabre and even sadistic in content to be suitable for young people. What is certain is that it has none of that force and violence just held in check which were such marked qualities of The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal. The Earth-Owl and other .moon- people is concerned with fantastic aspects of grotesque plants and animals who are alleged. by the poet to live on the moon. We find, for example, such lines as the following in a poem called--- and right ly—Woon-Horrors' :

Mosquitoes seem dreadful, for they drink at a man as he sleeps.

Night and day over'the moon a far craftier horror

creeps . .

• Beneath the attraction for natural power, and the wish to leave nature alone. there has always, think, been an element of cruelty in Hughes's work; we seldom, for instance, find (at least in his more recent work) that compassion and human warmth which was so evident in Lawrence's beast poems.

1 remember once hearing someone say. 'What will Hughes do when he runs out of animals?' and 1 think they meant that he was dangerously limiting himself in 'subject. The answers he has discovered so far to this problem seem to -be the weird themes of The Earth-Owl and the Poems about the First World War- which have appeared in various periodicals.

Perhaps it is Hughes's obsession with war that is primarily responsible for urging him to re- edit and introduce Keith Douglas's Selected PoemS. Douglas died a soldier's death at the age of twenty-four in Normandy. He had little time to mature, but Ted, Hughes points out, convincingly, his remarkable precocity. 1 think also, however, that he overrates -Douglas's achievement; but as Hughes comments: 'Douglas had no time, and perhaps no disposition, to cultivate the fruity deciduous tree of How to Live. He showed in his poetry no concern for other men in society.' Laurence Lerner, on the other hand, in The Directions of Memory, Is very much concerned With man, -and particularly with man in relation to women. His other poems are occasional ones and perhaps 'illustrate the major weaknesses of much English -poetry that is being written today; poems now often tend to be merely moments of recollection held down like delicate, dead butter- flies. One is very doubtful of their enduring value. However, Lerner's 'Don't Hold My Hand,' about a small boy, and 'Years Later,' another Poem about childbirth, are real and original achievements-They reach out into the world of lonelinesses and violences we all know; there is nothing either pretty or pretentious about them. Philip Hobsbaum, in The Place's Fault, is also what one might term clumsily a social- personal poet. He has clearly been greatly in- fluenced by Philip Larkin, and the following sjanza from 'Moral Detachment' has the now famous Larkin tone of voice, and even the same ethical attitude:

But had we met, years later, both attached In wedlock, bedlock, would we then have stirred Moved by the sight of the other, word unspoken Outside the sympathy of those we'd preferred? Or would we have gazed across a gulf unheeding As blank as two detached islands, two blank rocks Isolated from each other behind our looks?

It would be a grave mistake, however, to give the impression that Philip Hobsbaum is merely a dim imitation of Larkin. Unlike Larkin, he is willing not only to enter fully into all kinds of human experience (rather- than to observe it minutely from a stance of compassion and non-commitment), but the-re is also a hint of violence and imminent destruction in his poems—something one does not often find in Larkin's. Perhaps the truth of the matter simply is that Hobsbaum uses easily the poetic voice and style of his own time; he certainly has something of his own to say in that voice.

Patricia Beer's first book of poems, Loss of the Magyar, brought her quickly before the public eye. This book was much obsessed with the sea, and The Survivors, her new collection, while it has little unity of theme, shows that she has retained and developed her fiercely con- trolled lyric sense; the chaotic is abhorrent to her, and all must be brought beneath the strict control of a careful poetic form. She is essen- tially a lyric poet, a maker of the felicitous poem which seldom extends beyond forty or fifty lines. The most impressive poems in this book seem to me to be 'Life Story' and 'Death of a Nun.' The latter ends:

It should not come as a surprise To see the beads that she has clutched

- Lying across a hand as hard

As any limb that Midas touched. The alchemy of her disease Has worked a long-maturing spell And turned her into gold, yet made No change in anything at all.

One thing bothers me about Patricia Beer's work. Well-made and pleasing as it is, it lacks a central theme. Her voice is clearly her own, but she does not appear to have a subject which she has developed into her own especial territory. I suppose all lyric poets suffer from this danger; they are always close to a dead end. But this is, of course, to judge Patricia Beer by the highest standards.

There is no mistaking the individuality of Adrian Mitchell's voice. He has been much in- volved with the poetry and jazz movement, and one might, therefore, expect his work to be strident, chaotic and demanding. There is irony here, certainly—and anger, too---.--especially in a piece called 'Lord Home Gets £5,000 a Year,' but there is also compassion, a love of language, and a sense of people, qualities which are much more valuable than an abstract concern with 'society' and its problems.

Of all the books under review, I find Adrian Mitchell's the most promising and interesting. His work makes words like 'commitment' seem feeble and irrelevant; one cannot easily separate the man and his style, and his voice and mood are vigorous, unafraid, sometimes highly serious, sometimes humorous. He does not flaunt his poems in his readers' faces, but he un- doubtedly opens their minds and wakes up their

hen rts. ELIZABETH JENNINGS