P. J. Kavanagh This year the great excitement for me,
bookwise, is that the American poet Peter Kane Dufault has at last found an English publisher — Looking in All Directions, (Worple Press, £10). I have been a fan for years and find my praise of him quoted on the cover — 'A nature poet for grown ups', which is what he is. Ted Hughes was also a fan — 'so nimble and delicate'. He has gone on for years, resolutely being good in a way considered unfashionable, which per- haps is the case no longer.
There has been bluff editorial comment in this magazine concerning 'rhyme', `metre', suggestive of nostalgia for the hymnody, so here is a short example of PKD in which rhyme (or half-rhyme) and cunning line-breaks are the armature on which the cadences hang, though Hymns Ancient and Modem it ain't — 'More Snow Falling':
One white hush the whole day.
No wind. Just endless in- exorable cliché, the same old stuff again and again ... We need old stuff sometimes. As in liturgy. Or a declaration of love. No frills, just infinity.
Seamus Heaney's Beowulf (Faber, £7.99) was a glorious Entebbe-like raid of cultural rescue, and I liked Bernard Bergonzi's War Poets and Other Subjects because he strolls unalarmed past the thickets of current aca- demic jargon and enjoys what he reads (Ashgate, £42.50).
Penguin are to be congratulated for their reissue of three meaty novels by that demi- urge John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (£12.99), Weymouth Sands (£9.99) and Wolf Solent (£9.99), the last in the World's Classic with an awestruck and accurate introduction by A. N. Wilson
Previous page
