P. J. Kavanagh
NEARLY a hundred writers, over 20 years, in Letters to an Editor (Carcanet, £14.95) open their hearts to the founder of Carcanet Press, Michael Schmidt, proving how deep a vein of intelligence and seriousness (in the best sense) still runs below the surface of British letters. (Donald Davie rumbles dangerously; C. H. Sisson's wry placations barely sheathe the steel.) I opened it doubtfully, and lost a day, so absorbing it was, and encouraging.
Two, annoyingly so-called, 'slim volumes' — as though we preferred our poetry tubby. The slimness of Robert Nye's A Collection of Poems, 1955-1988 (Hamish Hamilton, £12.95) is a guarantee that they refresh the language, so carefully have his poems been winnowed, so precise their cadences, word-choice, tone. (Things which some think, wrongly, lost forever. Let them look and see.) Kit Wright in Short Afternoons (Hutchinson, £6.95) is sometimes an Ogden Nash with bite, some- times a Tom Moore for the unillusioned, always an amiable gun-slinger who can pot a cliché — of thought, or feeling, or word-usage — at 60 paces.
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