Poetry
The Submerged Village. By James Kirkup. (Oxford University Press. 7s. 6d.)
MR. KIRKUP holds a poetry fellowship—the only one in the country— et Leeds University. That it should be possible for poets to be employed as poets is an excellent thing ; but one can see that it might bring its anxieties, and that such a fellow might pass his tenure In an embarrassing semi-silence. But Mr. Kirkup is admirably fitted to be a " resident poet." ' He is anything but inhibited ; Ile has a Confident lao4 of restraint and a genuine poetic loquacity. The reader may not always be able to submit to it willingly, when the Movement becomes too languorous and the texture stretched too tenuously. But it creates a kind of poetic solution, which can crystallise out into a baroque image of unexpected tactual density-- " the candied petals of the winter rose,
pale crystal thorns upon a stern of frost, the freezing mist's perfume-preserving dust, and sugared leaves, dark in their crusted snows "-
and from which whole achieved poems may—and 'do—emerge.
Some of the poems in his last collection do not come off because they are too bodiless ; beneath the dreamy dissolving surface there is nothing graspable. Others totter forth wrapped in a gauzy but clinging veil, and after a few steps collapse in its folds. But when, so to speak, both latent and manifest content are communicated, it is with disturbing success ; notably in The Last Man—a vertiginous cosmic nightmare which rather tails off into abstraction—and the title-poem. (He is always at his best under water.) Besides these there are successes of different kinds—Pentecost, Ursa Major, The Ship, The Conversing Mirrors—and throughout there is imaginative invention and (what one might not expect from casual acquaintance) wit and cunning, too. Some people may find the conventional diction, the- litter of poetic properties, disconcerting ; and they are over-indulged. But the book leaves an inescapable impression of originality and dedication, of fine and varied promise and achievement.
Dr. Comfort is also loquacious, but I feel that he writes much too easily and should curb his magnanimity a little. His impatience with society is impressive, it is informed with both intelligence and emotion, but he seems to be too impatient about the business of writing poetry. It is not enough to raise the voice and assume a minatory rhythm and tone and trust to an important-sounding but static rhetoric. He is at once diffuse and glib. Rhetoric may be a neglected element in poetry, but he and Mr. Yates are rhetoricians rather than poets. That does require talent, certainly, and the poems in Light and Dark show verbal and formal accomplishment. Yet there is something factitious about the passion and intensity, the brilliant lights and brooding darknesses ; and there are too many lines that provoke a general distrust—" The lost Blitz-sinister and crawling globe," Cold in my rags of bankrupt thought," " Walk- ing at midnight by the beggar's Thames."
The Summer Dance is a most attractive collection. The best of Mr. Hall's poems are immediately readable and moving ; this is a not inconsiderable virtue, although a reviewer may tend to overrate it. It may suggest the superficial and the ephemeral, but here it goes with honest vision and serious purpose, and integrity—integrity of workmanship as well as of feeling. They have a surface charm which derives, not from any striking selection of word and image— the diction has an unpretentious propriety, but does not always escape flatness and the wrong sort of inevitability—but from a flair for appropriate form, a skill in organising the shape and rhythm of the part and the whole, of stanza and poem.
" Ambiguous Time, I heard you sighing In a small dry wind one summer's day, As under Montgomery castle lying 1 listened to lonely ghosts astray Hither and thither crying."
But poems of such well-knit form and firm outline need a strong focal point or climax, and this is sometimes lacking. Mr. Clemo is a militant Cornish Calvinist. (He is also a Festival Poetry prizewinner.) He is against Nature and Poetry and in favour of Clay and Dogma. With his clay-pit symbol he challenges " Nature's teeming perfidies." " Our clay-dumps are converging on the land : Each day a few more flowers are killed "—and he exults to see " One patch of Poetry reclaimed by Dogma." One would not expect any surface charm from him. But the repulsive doctrine might conceivably produce interesting work ; something austerely purged of common graces, something, in fact, to justify the apparent dishonesty of existing gt all. Mr. Clemo's clogged and cumbrous verses, however, are full of shop-worn tropes and faded poeticismS—an unpleasant mixture of clay and dead flowers.
RALPH ABERCROMBIE.
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