Dead ends
Emma Fisher
New Poetry 4: An Arts Council Anthology Fleur Adcock and Anthony Thwaite (Arts Council, Hutchinson and P.E.N. £4.50) Springtime in the Rockies Brian Marley (Trigram Press £2.00 paper; £6.30) From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems Tony Harrison (Rex Collings £5.00) The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas Ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford E15.) The fourth Arts Council collection of previously unpublished poems has a homogeneous tone. Many of the poets are wise and perceptive and use words well; they feel, but like to imply or symbolise the magnitude of their feelings rather than scream or sing. They quietly splice the moral and the visible, fitting pathos into every day objects and occasionally delving into the elemental and mysterious hidden underneath. Their favourite forms are loose; what once might have been iambic pentameters, stretched toinclude the rhythm of speech; lightly-sprung, rolling semiprose; if rhymed, rhymed discreetly; if the rhyme-scheme is tight, it is proudly made almost unnoticeable. Sometimes they play rather heavy word games. An example of this tone — and a good poem — is 'The Room' by Zofia Ilinska. She is clearing up the belongings of a dead son, and the clothes and objects, with the unbearable meaning, are lovingly listed. She allows herself to cry: 'The immense shoes! My poor huge darling child!' And she lets her grief form into a litany near the end: 'There is an emptiness: my son is elsewhere./There is a dull defeat: I have no son now./There is a baffled feeling: my son is everywhere/somehow involved with the world.' But the climax of the poem is an image of utter ordinariness to objectify her bursting feelings: 'I pack, I pack/ condensing the decades inside a case./The case bulges with love. I cannot close it.' The impetus behind much of the poetry is the desire to look, and describe what is seen and what it feels like to see it; or to think oneself into another person and try to recreate them from inside or outside. jack Carey's 'Incident at the Zoo', a very exact, picture of birds mating, is a nice example °I. the first: 'Then, not exactly on impulse, not as if/he were suddenly taken with the idea, but/as though he happened to find her in the way/like a chair, he sat down on her back.' The second genre contains quite a few poems about children and schools — Valerie Sinason's 'Sir of the C stream', William Radice's 'A fourteen-year-old boy breaks off his piano practice to reflect on his new piano teacher' — and widens to include scenes, divorces, uncomfortable dinner' parties, hospitals, drama students visiting an old people's home. It may seem wrong t° classify the poems like this; the criterion fer selection was simply that they should be the 'best' submitted, and turning over the alphabetically-ordered poets one does finu surprising, less classifiable and more dash. ing things; but the impression of similar' in aims and attitudes is strong, and presumably reflects the taste of Thwaite and Adcock as well as the self-selection imPoseu by choosing from those who send in poems to the Arts Council. Excess, violence and afflatus are most' excluded; one poem, Gerda Mayer's 'Dili drip or Not Bloody Likely', lists gory Ontations from 'women's anthologies. women's poems etc.' and concludes Fash" ionable blood/is up/to no sort of good • ^ ' Blood is a curse/I don't/let it slop over 10 verse.' Sylvia Plath, feel properly put dowT In fact this is balanced by Geoffrey Adkins s 'Miscarriage' which is bloody enough: , blood is lost monthly./Twelve times a Yr"' she leaves it where best she can,/this prac; tice is part of her . That little clot c" blood/began slowly to drown me.' But again the tone is flat, reticently shocking. Perhaps Peter Porter (‘Stocktaking) should have the last word: 'The words/Keep on coining] despite the Critic's noble hand/An' our Imagist Epoch. Despair/ Keeps its flavour and we are at Stocktakin5 Time./Each depreciation rriarked down,/Each forgotten frailty uncovere and rhyme/Harder to justify . . • Paill feels/The same from Kidderminster t° Kano: watch as/We go round with love, as time withers/On the bone—we make certain shapes from first to last'. Poems of entirely the opposite apProal: damning logic, restraint, even syntax, bubh i' from the pen of Brian Marley; his book s also 'encouraged' by the Arts Council. tie sidesteps sense, sometimes nearly settling on a theme or sentence but switching t°, something bizarrely incongruous just as You might be puzzling it out. Almost any exam' ple will do, as this technique tends to tar; poetry into brightly coloured wallpaper; b the Protean behaviour of his sentence,' makes it hard to extract. The unusuallY short poem 'Hold' from 'Western Ger; many' goes: 'Coming to terminal gra' hung batlike from/the rafters my wheels my Pinions he rubs/at the worried bark calling always for service.' At the foot of the page is a Precise note about fruit machines. He is sometimes funny: 'my socks fall down in winter/by the stipulated overdose sYmptomatic of/the suicidal log' — but does he Mean to be? The joke turns into a dead eind. If he could bear to give a few more clues, almost anything might emerge from the Primal word soup; possibly some exuberant and witty poems. Tony Harrison has written plays, and translated The Misanthrope and Smetana 's Bartered Bride. His poems are clever, ThellewY, good but indigestible like rock buns. Puns and bilingual rhymes provide the currants. Part cf. the book is a selection from a scmoet sequence on 'society, class and lan8,11age'; these are juicy topics and include 'Classics absurdities of classical education, as in ,Classics Society (Leeds Grammar School 1552-1954: 'And so the lad who gets the alphas works/the hardest in the class at his translation/and finds good Ciceronian for Burke's: a dreadful schism in the British umlon.' The schism, it appears, is between WOrkers who are too exhausted to use their vital language and talkative rulers who emasculate it. He mourns languages that have died with their owners and digs at Received Pronounciation; 'You can tell the "cowers where to go/(and not aspirate it) °rIee You know/Wordsworth's matter/water are full rhymes.' He was teased by a master at school for reciting poetry in his own aeeent, i and only allowed to act the Porter n Macbeth; h; but this is a bit of a dead horse — Received Pronounciation is itself a hand'Cap now. A poet is at an advantage who has a Singsong or Northern accent. RP recitation (by Edith Sitwell, for instance) scisillunda Pompous and drawing-roomy, even Y, as does RP singing in English. (Is this Pan of the explanation for the vogue of opera in the original language?). Middlec ass Pop-singers submerge their accents and actors cultivate flat a's and slurred s s. 1.,3at even if one disagrees with Harrison, his grguMents are invigorating. „Reading the collected works of Edward Thomas, oolnast I was reminded often of the Arts cl 11°91 poets; the clear gaze, the careful ;_eseription, the attempt to get inside varlt?t they rustic characters (except that nowadays Y tend to be urban), the painful, stoical Probing of self, are all there. This conscientious edition, with drafts, corrections and Ins prose versions — also his complete :Icflaked 'Y rather cruelly exposes him; the ed and fragile attempts to turn bad lines , to good ones are moving. What a lot he l'ad to work against — sentimentality, a tendency to use phrases like 'sweet as a nut', 0%make and whate'ers. But his ability to .ake. the readers nostrils tingle with his eaeripti0ns of places and weather, espei:a;lly the bleak and stormy, is still stunning. del" a .schoolboy reciting Shakespeare, his theePtivelY simple style appears to allow _t_e grandeur and beauty through without distorting it.
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