John Whitworth
The best new things I have read this year are Kit Wright's poems, Short Afternoons (Hutchinson, £6.95). The method is eclec- tic (a poem about the absence of God, written in the manner of George Herbert, a prep-school childhood celebrated in Country-and-Western), the tone some- times like Stevie Smith, though he cares for poetic craft more than she ever did. Foolish fellows, the sort that a century ago thought Pope and Dryden 'classics of our prqse' say this is merely light verse, but Spectator readers who care about such things know it is poetry and will buy it for their friends and for themselves. What's that? No, I've never met the man.
Someone sent me C.H. Sisson's literary essays, In Two Minds (Carcanet, £18.95), in error it appears. They are stimulating, irritant. How can a man who has translated Horace fall for the old charlatan Ezra Pound? Can there be something in him? Must I read the stuff again? Hum!
I have read too many poor books for money this year; the worst by a consider- able margin is Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (Seeker, £14.95), a novel of unremitting flatulence and sentimentalising self-regard which must have been highly praised in certain quarters.
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