Menaced Mildness

To judge by his new book, A Sense of Danger, Vernon Scannell seems almost too real to be true, the typical contemporary English poet, his 'whole terrain a wintry cabbage patch.' His favourite method is the anecdote, told with skil- ful spareness (a training as a novelist. as Hardy found, is the best way to learn the poem-as- Story). I say English because of his refusal— honest but obstinate—to elaborate: compare his 'Dead Dog' with Richard Wilbur's poem on the same subject. The American poet's dog glitters 'even in decay, while Scannell's is a mongrel, Ordinary as bread.' He does not start in 'to cry and call its name,' but registers 'a moderate pity, coot not lachrymose.'

The trouble with the anecdotal technique, of course, is its tendency to slip into an 0. Henry slickness (incident in a Saloon Bar'). Scannell's 8aVing grace is that you feel the poems, however .neatlY turned, are necessary to him, gestures ti_owards sanity. For this trim landscape is flaunted by the baby-faced psychopath, the raped !girl like a fallen glove.' This obsession widens an ubi stint lament for 'the enormous dor- !:vittory, of the dead, and a poem on 'The Great c_ar: What terrifies in the latter is the way 'He has transmuted suffering into a romantic travelogue: And through the misty keening of a band Of Scottish pipes the proper names are heard Like fateful commentary of distant guns: Passchendaele, Bapaume, and Loos, and Mons.

At first glance, Richard Kell seems to. inhabit mthei same landscape as Scannell, the menaced _ dness of suburbia with News of the World nIrrionsters in the wood. But he is less resigned, lightly (even boyishly) sensuous. This shows (4,a 211e slightly hectic imagism of the early poems ., _"ve horses spatter jewels from stabbing hooves). e 1°Pilig into the rich, accurate texture of

IlMe for Clipping': Ancl then the blades move in. precise and swift,

0PP1n5 the tough lank fibres, and a drift

shredded silk is loosed above the whish And clack of the clean steel. In tangles wet With hoarded rain—refusing to forget-- Their fragrance lingers like a mindless wish.

Thqueisrebelliousness even leads to a momentary sc wher,1"ing of the whole urban complex: 'But tha,`e Was that clean break to justify/Schemes kic`';vould make an alien of nature?' Although rd

rather Kell's present image for his art is the

it is modish one of 'the alert control tower to the Warmth of impulse, overriding the need eov kwan (as in the poems on the Goddess 8ens'b.iYm). which dictates the shapes of his

What depresses one a little in these two books is the assumption that this guilt-ridden, desolate background is the typical modern place. But cities do not have to look like that : to the foreign observer (Michel Butor, for example) Manchester may be as strange as Mars. One gets a better sense of the city as glittering artefact and centre of human aspiration in Dannie Abse, even if it is only 'Soho's square mile of unoriginal sin.' I am happier with the boulevardier in Poems, Golders Green than with the professional Jew. The only parallel I can think of in recent poetry is Shapiro's Poems of a Jew, but there seems more context for such a gesture in American writing and, despite his slickness, Shapiro has an Old Testament sensuality Abse cannot match. Abse seems at his most characteristic—and most Jewish—in those poems where he addresses God with buttonholing directness: they remind me of the goofy mysticism of Delmore Schwartz:

My littleness makes but a private sound, the little lyric of a little man; yet, like Moses, I walk on holy ground since all earth is, and the world is round I come back to where he began.

Into this thoughtful gathering of young city fathers Ewart Milne erupts, waving something that looks suspiciously like a shillelagh. A Gar- land for the Green has taken a hammering from the critics, and I am not surprised, because Milne's sense of the distance between the original impulse towards a poem and its final achieve- ment seems to have weakened since Diamond Cut Diamond (1950). I am all for 'imitation,' as practised by Pope, and revived_ by Eliot, but it is a particularly delicate problem for an Irishman, because of his double-barrelled tradi- tion: here the echoes (from Yeats and Kavanagh) tend to be deafening.

White rose, English rose, Bright rose of my days, Your Green Fool for longing Cries out in his pain.

And }et there is more to be said for Ewart Milne, and I am glad to say it. He is the only Irish poet of his generation who has published consistently: there is an elementary dignity in battering on. He is also the only poet in the present group who has tried to break from the prison of middle-class subjects and style. As a result, when a poem does conic oll, it has a haunting individuality.

Twice: but each time my hands went through and fell

As if through greylit nothing: where her breasts were, arms were, All was as shadows, though from the wait down something shrank in fear.

But how can the strange, sad music of `Vanessa, Vanessa' be heard above the adjacent rattle, like a Camden Street pub at closing-time? There is only one possible remedy: I sentence Ewart Milne to one letter and one poem every three months, starting with this review.

JOHN MONTAGUE