Wodwo Ted Hughes (Faber 25s)
New beasts for old
C. B. COX
Scapegoats and Rabies Ted Hughes (Poet and Printer 2s) Live or Die Anne Sexton (oup 25s) The Colour of Blood George MacBeth (Mac- millan 21s) On the Way to the Depot P. J. Kavanagh (Chatto and Windus 15s) Finding Gold Leslie Norris (Chatto and Win- dus 15s) Poems of Cornwall and America A. L. Rowse (Faber 21s) Time Stopped Ewart Milne (Plow Poems 35s)
Ted Hughes once said that when he first read D. H. Lawrence he felt as if he was reading his own autobiography. Both poets experience shocks of recognition, a mysterious power in a snake or hawk, which reflect a secret force in themselves. But I'm not sure I properly understand Hughes. It's not just the obvious violence of his creatures that makes him so different to Lawrence. Why is the 'bullet and automatic purpose' of a thrush like Mozart's genius? What does 'Blood is the belly of logic' mean in his poem on an otter? Why in 'The Hawk in the Rain' does he repeat references to horizons (as in the horses 'patient as the horizons' or on the jaguar in the zoo: 'Over the cage floor the horizons come')? The animals thrust out to some new kind of vision—beyond human horizons. At times it's as if humans live under the sway of devilish, supernatural agencies, and civilisation merely cloaks this essential truth.
Wodwo, which includes new poems, five stories and a radio play, confirms my belief that the amazing originality of Hughes's poetic world goes beyond normal apprehension. It's seven years since his last book of poems, Lupercal, and the interim has seen an effort at revolutionary experiment, a series of raids on the inarticulate, many of which are not in- cluded in this new collection. The stories here are striking, but not such great art as the poetry; 'Ghost Crabs' must be one of the
best poems written since 1945. Recent poems have been more imagistic, less susceptible to rational explanation. The first section of Wodwo ends with The Bear':
'The bear is a well Too deep to glitter Where your shout Is being digested. The bear is a river Where people bending to drink See their dead selves.'
Such elusive yet compelling images extend the consciousness, initiate us into a unique poetic experience. 'Wodwo' is a word taken from Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, meaning a satyr or troll of the forest. Hughes's new creatures—the green wolf, the bear, the ghost crabs—are now mythical forces, God's only toys, disgorging like the sea's cold bver the nothingness of human lives. There are times, as in the radio play, when the language becomes overheated (and this is partly true of the war poem, Scapegoats and Rabies, printed in a small pamphlet), but for Hughes's admirers this new collection is reassurance that his genius is only gradually being revealed. Wodwo is extraordinary, undoubtedly one of the great books of the 1960s.
Anne Sexton's confessional, dramatic narra- tives, about her breakdowns, her guilt feelings towards her parents, her astonishment at her own motherhood, embarrass by their honesty. Some of these poems—such as the elegy for Sylvia Plath—deliberately affront our sensibili- ties. She appears to envy Sylvia Plat13' her suicide. One critic has complained that her tone in this poem is coy and petulant, even flirtatious, the finale flatly vulgar:
'0 tiny mother, you too!
O funny duchess! O blonde thing!'
But her success is that her tone can encom- pass such a range of unexpected emotions. Her self-exposure gives the persona of the poems (which shouldn't be taken automatically as Anne Sexton herself) a mixture of pathos and absurdity. This is the justification of the apparent stylisation of her rhetoric, the re- peated, exclamatory form of the imagery. There is a kind of wry self-consciousness in such writing which forms an essential element in her honesty. As A. R. Jones has pointed out in the best article I've read on her poetry, her work has a religious dimension, 'an attitude of mind that is neither cynical nor despairing, but which is clearly related to the whole power- ful tradition of Christian stoicism, to King's "Exequy" and Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes." ' The rhetorical excesses of George MacBeth make him an easy prey to facetious reviewers. The Colour of Blood includes the usual self- melodramatisation, the vampires and blood baths, razored air, bat-squeal and owl-spit. At the end we have some imitation Chinese typographical experiments that seem to me com- plete hocus-pocus. There are also some ndtm explaining the dramatic background of Se previous poems. In 'The Blood-Woman,' 'a poet believes he is waiting for a Muse whose embraces will drain his blood'; in The Voyage,' 'a Jewish woman, whose mind is the focus of violence, expects a child.' In my reading, the good poems (and the third section has
several) don't need the notes. MacBeth is ani- mated and powerful when he restrains his fantasies, when the dream quality is frankly admitted, as in 'The Suicides,' The Land-Mine' or 'An Elegy': 'Close by I hear the tune Of falling rain. And when your body comes In gauze like sea-mist from the shore At morning, I put out my sails from slums To clean sea. And below the moon I enter you in joy, as none before.'
There are signs of a new self-control here which make MacBeth a much more successful writer.
P. J. Kavanagh writes with considerable liveliness on a variety of subjects—war in Korea, Oxford landscape, Jehovah's Witnesses. I particularly like the fragments of witty con- versation. Leslie Norris is more conventional, writing nostalgic poems on boyhood and the countryside, as well as an energetic ballad on a boxer blinded in the ring. Hugh Trevor- Roper has put forward A. L. Rowse to be Poet Laureate, which stops a reviewer's mouth. I don't think he's so much a poet as an excellent versifier. I read these lightweight descriptive poems with much pleasure. Finally, Ewart Milne is much more intense in his sequence on a personal crisis after his wife's death. The subject matter is painful, and, I think, beyond Milne's ability to control in language.
Previous page
