Peering and Seeing

Some Men are Brothers. By D. J. Enright. (Chatto arid Windus, 10s. 6d.)

Seeing is Believing. By Charles Tomlinson. (0.U.P., 12s. 6d.)

THINKING of D. J. Enright's poems, one feels no inclination to talk in terms of 'promise,' for they

are already fully achieved things in themselves. They face up to whatever judgment one makes of them with no petitions in their hands, no defensive pleas based on age or inexperience or

a broken home. The book is divided into four sections—Siam, Berlin, Japan and Displaced— Whose titles might suggest that its author is more of a foiled circuitous wanderer than he appears to be. For while he is strongly aware of the exile

Within him, and who is in all of us, he bridges the gap between him and the ferocious world of the strange, the starved and the brutal with a sympa- thetic irony which puts himself and it in their Places. Sometimes, I guess more and more often, he closes that gap with an understanding compas- sion that has none of the distance in it that irony implies, and, though the ironic ones are charming and witty and not without a weight of meaning,

It IS these others that seem to me the most inter-

esting poems in the book. He is not a man to quote in the small space of a review, for he is not notably a phrasemaker. It is the general tone of the poems, that is to say, fundamentally it is the quality of the mind and the sensibility behind

them that give them their special flavour. That mind is interested in peasants and politicians, landscapes and loneliness, fans and furores, but always as they matter in everyday living. He

recognises their involvement with each other and with him, and these poems therefore are about a real and complex world in which real and com- plex poems are still possible, as he shows.

Charles Tomlinson's immediate references are to informations from our nerve-ends, especially the visual and tactual ones. He lifts an object, even if it is as large as a landscape, close up to his eye and examines it with a peering curiosity, as interested in its texture, its grain, as in its general conformation. He turns it in the light like a crystal, and is instructed in the light as well as in it. There is, indeed, something mineral in 'the quality of the verse itself, as well as in a deal of its imagery; if you can imagine hitting these poems with a hammer, you will imagine them, not spilling down or blowing away or toppling over, but shattering into splinters; it would take a considerable whack to do it, for they are com- pacted close and hard and solid. I don't mean that this close vision prevents him from seeing anything other than the object itself. The object is always in a world which includes experiences other than merely those of sensation, and that is what gives a third dimension to the poems and reverberation to their meanings—as when he writes of a crane . with the Grappling hook hidden also Behind a dense foreground that it Would seem to assure us that 'The future is safe, because It is in my hands.' And we do not Doubt this veracity, we can only Fear it—as many of us As pause here to remark Such silent solicitude For lifting intangible weights Into real walls.

It is the effect of such reverberations, or ex- pansions, that I miss in the poems of Patrick Kavanagh. They 'say -what they say with some pith and more decorum, but the thought, the paraphrasable element, seems to demand a de- velopment which does not come. He sometimes asks an interesting question, but doesn't answer it, or he makes an interesting statement, which should have bred others, and leaves you with it. What a difference in scale there would be if the thought were more rigorously developed: for he has the technique to do it. These poems are not anonymous. Mr. Kavanagh has an excellently subtle sense of the slightly off rhyme ('isn't'-- 'Christened'), a rhythm borrowed from nobody, and a satiric sense which will not allow him to have anything to do with the false and the phoney. He is an Irishman all right, but he wears no Synge-ing robes. He belongs lucidly and naturally in the actual world, but he writes about a simplified version of it.

All but all of Thomas Kinsella's book consists of seventeen poems of eight lines each in divi- sions labelled Faith, Love, Death, Song. There is not much room for development in eight lines, so one expects something 'lyrical' or gnomic or epi- grammatic—or anyway reverberative. Two I'm not sure I understand, so maybe they are the gnomic ones. The others speak in a sort of grave rhetoric, in language which is personal and alive, and they satisfactorily complete their own forms.

None of them, short as they are, are flimsy. And though few of them make us aware of hinterlands of meaning as wide as those in the best of Charles Tomlinson's poems, there are some that do ex- plode in one's face—not a huge explosion, but

an explosion all the same. Sometimes the rhetori- cal last line seems overmuscled for the weight it is lifting, and in some instances, indeed, there is precious little weight to lift, when Mr. Kinsella

is 'throwing skin about a puff of smoke' (a phrase of his own). But the good ones avoid that fault and this deficiency.

NORMAN maccme