1 APRIL 1966, Page 23

Grass Roots

Selected Poems. By Gunter Grass. Translated by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Carroll, 21s.)

Christ: A Poem in Twenty-six Parts. By Gavin Bantock. (Donald Parsons, 25s.)

Penguin Modern Poets 7. Richard Murphy, Jon Lindsay. (Faber, 21s.)

Kynd Kittock's Land. By Sydney Goodsir Smith. (M. Macdonald, 6s.) SOME of the most successful writers about the horrors of the last war have abandoned rationality, creating amazing fantasies such as Heller's Catch-22 or Gfinter Grass's The Tin Drain. These novels intermix gloriously comic extravaganza with scenes of nightmare suffering. Here the imagination proves its resilience, con- trolling impossible brutalities (as in many nursery rhymes and fairy stories) by its exuberant in- vention. Grass's own poems, like The Tin Drum, confront us with an objective universe out of control, with zebras in the best room, aborted children in plain glass jars worrying about their parents, an American aircraft carrier and a Gothic cathedral sinking each other in the middle of the Pacific. His poems often have startling openings: 'Those days we slept in a trumpet,' 'Where is my eleventh finger,' Who up-ended the garden seat?' Grass longs nostalgically for a world where objects retain a permanent shape and function, where we might 'experience cherries as cherries,' instead of living on stewed fruit and windfalls. There are occasional moments of lyrical delight:

An empty bus

hurtles through the starry night. Perhaps the driver is singing and is happy because he sings.

But even this has a touch of menace. What has happened to the passengers? Is the bus an earth devoid of life? In Grass's mystifying universe, sinister forces are at work—the floods are rising. the wardrobe has a life of its own, someone will blow us out the trumpet, and death will be comi- cally absurd : How well did Elsie Fenner sing when, in the summer vacation at a great height she took a false step, tumbled into a silent glacier crevasse and left nothing behind but her little parasol and the high C.

These translations, printed alongside the Ger- man versions, necessarily appear a little flat, but much of Grass's incredible imagination is retained.

Translations of continental poetry have been flooding out recently from English publishers, and it's to be hoped some of their originality rubs off on our native writers. In Ruth and Matthew Mead's translations of the East Ger- man poet, Johannes Bobrowski (who died in 1965), lyrical tenderness and melancholy also

look back repeatedly to the horrors of war. These versions abound in romantic landscapes— forests, snow, lakes, moonlight, wolves—without much concrete particularity, so that the feelifig

often becomes diffused in shadows and dark- ness—words repeated too often. But these trans- lations offer much to enjoy, not least the pleasure of entering an imaginative landscape so alien to the English provincial scene.

Gavin Ewart's apparently frivolous excursions into the sexual underworld hide much sensitivity to modern neuroses. After the sexy secretaries, who wiggle their way through poem after poem, have departed, One thwarted, solitary telephone Rings with the message that will never be delivered.' With striking clarity and wit, Ewart satirises contemporary London—the pirate busi- nessmen pacing the fourth floor like a quarter- deck, surrounded by captured typists. A bestiary of eight awful animals (Panteebra, Insex, Masturbon, etc.) reflect by their perversions the invasion of society by inhuman sex. Parodies and jokes about the flesh teeter over into images of destruction, as at a striptease 'the fantastic metal music slices our head-tops like a breakfast egg.' Ewart doesn't like critics, who eat poets for lunch, dull their palate by reviewing, and never get plastered on fine new wine. Help me to prove him wrong by buying his new book, and getting plastered on its black, bubbling brew.

After such orgies, George Barker's new poems, mostly in his elegiac mode, seem like products of another age. In the title sequence, the splendour of the rhetoric, the long mellifluous lines, invite us to savour each colourful phrase, so that often we lose our way, and the meaning escapes us. But there are passages of much beauty and pathos. For Barker, 'all words, and all objects, particularly the most commonplace, carry Invisible robes of theology on their shoulders.' Haunted by the company of the dead, he touches- delicately on moments of vision, as in Four Quartets 'heard, half-heard, in the still- ness Between two waves of the sea.'

Fantasy, nostalgia—must the modern imagina- tion be restricted to such modes?. It's appro- priate that young men should be revolutionaries, and Gavin Bantock's Christ is certainly am- bitious. Cast in heroic mould, the poem depends on symbolic patterns and high-sounding rhetoric. Older readers may feel it's too close to a BBC 3 parody; but Bantock has a surprising command of rhythm and style. Christ is just the kind of extravagant, unsuccessful poem Yeats was writing in his twenties.

Richard Murphy's impressive 'The Cleggan Disaster,' in the latest of the Penguin Modern Poets series, also raises the problem of whether today long, heroic poems can be successful. Murphy's considerable metrical skill re-creates vividly the movement of the sea; but the big words ('Down the white and violet skin of tur- bulence Into the boiling trough') are not sufficiently awe-inspiring. But this anthology in- cludes some tine poems by Murphy, and the two other contributors, Jon Silkin and Nathaniel Tarn, have plenty of talent.

Ireland, Wales and Scotland all seem to be producing more lively regional verse than England. Maurice Lindsay's Modern Scottish Poetry, which first appeared in 1946, is revised and brought up to date. To famous poems by Edwin Muir and Hugh McDiarmid are added a good selection of younger writers. Sydney Goodsir Smith is well represented, and it's pleasant to have in print his rumbustious tele- vision poem, Kynd Kittock's Land. Scottish Poetry, an annual anthology of poems not pre- viously published in book form, makes an ad- mirable new project, including good poems by Edwin Morgan, Sydney Tremayne and fain Crichton Smith.

C. B. COX