Recent poetry on tape
Peter Levi
This review is an amalgam of tapes that seemed interesting or irritating but really are fit only for an omnium-gatherum. The first case is that of ancient reissues which present themselves now as if they were as fresh as breakfast, but really date from as early as the Fifties. Harvard seems to have some part in reissuing bits and pieces of Ezra Pound, and there the poor old lunatic in his sad decline is to be heard declining. I was interested to notice that his Confucian Odes owe something to the voice of Brer Rabbit, whom they actually mention. Per- haps he was an early influence on Uncle Ez?
T. S. Eliot is available and is far less pre- posterous than the others, but the poems are not clearly subdivided, so you cannot tell what he is reading at any given moment unless you know already. When I was a young poet, Eliot was the reigning champi- on and Pound was coming up in an erratic manner on the outside. Now Eliot's reputa- tion has somehow diminished, though none of the frontal attacks on him are worth pay- ing any attention to, and Pound's has more or less disappeared because people think that he was crazy. Well, he was not always crazy, and we shall have to go back to him. Eliot needs standard or classic publication, but I cannot think that his massive critical authority is anything like as durable as Pound's, nor can I stand his cats.
Of all the poets available to me, the one most full of delightful promise, and indeed of massive authority, is James Fenton. He has been persuaded to read the lyric poetry of Auden, and I really do not think that this remarkable tape can be much improved (This Lunar Beauty: Selected Poems, 1927-39, Faber, £7.99). Auden's voice suffered many sea-changes, from its public-school smoothness in youth to its American sound, which was very eccentric and did not remain constant. Fenton's voice clears all that nonsense away, and he is Auden's true successor as a poet. He is also, in my opinion, the best reader of his own or anyone else's poetry alive.
I admit that the death of Ted Hughes made me pause in these judgments, but I suppose that we must place him as a laure- ate somewhere below Tennyson but above poets like William Morris. Perhaps he should be thought level with Dryden? It is too early to come to any certain conclusion because his last work has been so fine, yet I would like to take his recent Tales from Ovid (Penguin, £8.99) as a test at least of his accent, which is almost as odd as Ezra Pound's. To begin with, I had just been lis- tening repeatedly to Simon Armitage with a Huddersfield accent and faint touches of Manchester (Zoom! and Other Poems (Smith/ Doorstep Cassettes £7.95). He was genuine and, I thought, very successful as a reader of his own poetry; indeed he is as close to writing the perfect poem as the young Seamus Heaney was after the first three or four of his books — accent played the same part.
But Hughes has a voice like a piece of powerful machinery: it is nothing like his voice in conversation or reading in church, but is reserved for poetry. It is so broad that I do not remember any Yorkshire countryman who spoke like him, although I well recall how they did speak some 20 miles from the secret part of Yorkshire where he was brought up. There is a touch of Caribbean too, as if his voice had been oiled. At any rate he does read his Ovid wonderfully, and if you do not mind some mighty queer mispronunciations of names, and if you do not know the poetry well enough to realise which bits he has left out and can dismiss the pedantry of school- masters, then he will be seen to have restored Ovid to the most vivid life. That is something I have failed to do in 20 years as a don, and it is a great achievement. These Tales may not be as moving as his autobiographical poems but they are a curious document, wonderful as stories and thrilling as verse. I found that for the first time his metrical sense seemed perfect, due to the strange accent he employs. If this tribute seems grudging, it has been wrung out of me and is sincere. As is usual in life, now that we have lost him we can begin to value him. But consider Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (Chivers Audio Books, tel: 0800136919, three vol- umes, unabridged, £15.95 each). She wan- tonly disregards the fact that both Sassoon and Robert Graves are on record as poets, and the more important fact that they were both forced by the old attitude to homo- sexuality to be the most appalling liars. She has made cardboard figures out of them, ignoring even the known facts. I suspect her reading of Rivers, who was a most interesting scientist, while the psychopathic doctor at the end seemed to me quite incredible.
What is worse than all these crimes is that her version of Wilfred Owen is given by the reader of these awful tapes, Peter Firth, a perfectly smooth English accent. No doubt he may have aspired to one, but Sassoon told Stephen Spender, who told me, that he had been greatly embarrassed by Owen and by his 'appalling Manchester accent'. Other times, other manners. I was some sort of friend of Graves and of Sassoon, and I am sure I would not have minded Owen's accent. I write only to rebuke this reduction of them all to the level of a television medical soap opera. If you like the genuine you can listen to Simon Armitage or Carol Ann Duffy (Selected Poems, Smith/Doorstep Cas- settes, £7.95); if you like powerful stories then turn to Hughes.
Smith/Doorstep Cassettes, The Poetry Business, The Studio, Byram Arcade, West- gate, Huddersfield HD1 1ND Tel: 01484 434840.
`My accountant has advised me against Christmas this year.'
Previous page
