Among the Poetmen

Affinities. By Vernon Watkins. (Faber, 15s.) MR. Slow has a distinct and unfair advantage over the others. His poems come beautifully ac- companied by seven plates of Nolan paintings. When, in 'Landscapes,' he writes, . . and the world unrolls like a •blanket; /like a worn bush blanket, charred at the horizons,' there it is, a whole page of that incredible land designed to be seen only by birds, painters and poets, green- brown stretching into a blue sky of cruel promise. Or 'The Calenture' CA disease incident to sailors within the tropics, characterised by delirium in which the patient, it is said, fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it.' OED): this is one of the most successful poems in the book, though it doesn't lend itself easily to brief quotation. Its language is heightened yet natural, and Nolan's painting of the body drawn into the sea has a dream-like clarity.

Stow is a romantic with a classical control. Some of these poems cannot have been easy to achieve; indeed, the best of them stem from what one senses is a tension within the poet's personality. 'Strange Fruit,' for instance, or `Outrider': My lies bestrew the air; my lies are epitaphs. But the high ironical horseman throws back his head, and laughs.

Though he is still in his twenties, Stow's feel- ing is mature, his language flexible and uncon- cerned with literary fashion. A poet with a future. Michael Baldwin is one of those natural ag- nostics yearning for the cross. Not necessarily the worse for that, of course. He's given us two books in one, or rather two titles for the one book, which seems excessive. At first reading one is inclined to say, too, that the titles of his poems are better than the poems themselves- Skiffie for God in the City,' 'Two Poems for Teds,' `There's No Room For God in My Trousers'—and it's true that he rarely progresses beyond a slick schoolboy cleverness, of which this is a fair example: 0 tell me, Pivoted on your arse, Bloodshot eyes, churchwarden stare And fifty years of unfocused wit, What metaphysics fill up the glass When the beer drains out of it.

Reading him a second time, however, one can- not bel- t, Warming to him, though there are no verbal thrills (or, if there are, they're purely on the level of his asking God 'is there anything,/1 don't care what, but anything you can do/Rather Well, like sing/or rock 'n' roll or screw . . . 7'). Most of the poems—some overtly, others not— are taunts flung at a God whose existence the poet denies. Should the Deity take it into his

head to reply, excitingly. I hope he'll do it rather more

Gregory Corso is likeable, too. Uneven, with apparently no self-critical ability whatsoever, nevertheless he celebrates life in a cunning sort of way, and he does seem able to love—both himself and New York. He's at his best in the little snippets of reportage, elsewhere he finds

it difficult to be himself at any length. The most diverse and unlikely influences flash on and off like the lights on those machines in the sad fun alleys. Here comes e. e. cummings that was. I remember being impressed by 'Marriage' when an actor spoke it as a stage monologue in a revue at Spoleto some years ago. On the page, and now, it seems thinner, uncertain in the wrong way. C. Day Lewis does this kind of thing with more panache.

There are lines in Corso's verse where you can almost hear the sound of the lash as he whips himself into a frenzy. But in places he strikes a note with ease and tenderness: I think of New York city lost in stars forgotten as a bluehaired pet of childhood love— Tonight the night is full; the stealthy mayor in his fine discipline moves in proportion like a large jewel with furry feet.. . .

And there is a nice moment of self-revelation in `I am 25.' '1 HATE OLD POETMEN,' he has said, and the poem ends with his threat that he will

Then at night in the confidence of their homes rip out their apology-tongues and steal their poems.

They ought to try him at the Establishment, he's a damn sight more entertaining than Logue.

The title-poem in Richard Wilbur's Advice to a Prophet is a beauty. Delicate, strong, com- passionate, sane and unanswerable. That he's a brilliant craftsman can now be taken for granted. He's also a poet one can trust. In his earlier volume, Poems 1943-1956, there were traces of an easy sentimentality which marred some other- wise fine poems. This has gone. In its place is an even more precise observation than one met in the earlier work, and an unerring ability in the choice of words, an almost musical inevit- ability.

Though his thought is often complex, Mr. Wilbur is nowhere difficult to read. A surface clarity helps one to see the depths below. His `Ballade for the Duke of Orleans' (who in 1457 offered a prize 'for the best ballade employing the line "le meurs de soif aupres de la fontaine" ') begins: Flailed from the heart of water in a bow, He took the falling fly; my line went taut; Foam was in uproar where he drove below; In spangling air 1 fought him and was fought. Then, wearied to the shadows, he was caught, Gasped in the net, lay still and stony-eyed. It was no fading iris I had sought.

I die of thirst, here at the fountain-side.

This man is surely one of the most considerable poets writing in English today.

Vernon Watkins is a difficult case. In 'Rewards of the Fountain,' he writes Let the world offer what it will, Its bargains I refuse.

Those it rewards are greedy still. I serve a stricter Muse.

I think perhaps it's because he does 'serve a stricter Muse' that I find him somewhat remote, The feeling in most of the poems in Affinities is very generalised, all very proper, suitably poetic and high-minded, the language often stilted and far too consciously literary. The pompous tone of the lines quoted above pervades so much of Mr. Watkins's verse that it tends to obscure his real virtues. His sincerity is un- doubted, his accomplishment, though inter- mittent, is high. The poetic personality displayed is by no means an unpleasant one. If only he would forsake this quasi-Olympian approach : Poet of godlike stillness, anchorite, Son of the world God made before man sinned, Outcast of Hellas, aether's lonely friend, Worshipper wounded at the shrine of light.. .

That was 'To Holderlin' And for most of the time Mr. Watkins is apostrophising dead poets. Heine, Wordsworth, Keats, Browning. Occasion- ally he does so with felicitous perception. But the overall effect of Affinities is, alas, quite ener- vating.

CHARLES OSBORNE