A selection of recent poetry

William Scammell

My laboratory/ is the dust where I stand, / the sulphur smells of the farmyard' says the narrator of Spring Forest by Geof- frey Lehmann, an ex-serviceman with 'An invitation to poverty — / soldier-settlement farms. / We were back from a war. / Our government said: the young men /saved the country, /they shall farm the country'. So Ross McInerney mortgages his life to 'a low interest loan /with a thirty-year term,' and starts learning how to farm the western slopes of New South Wales.

Geoffrey Lehmann's account of his life and times is a species of pastoral, Australian style, a no-nonsense romance between man, wife, kids, earth, neighbours, livestock, tools, guns, snakes, tall tales, high stars and the low cunning necessary for survival. Occasionally it lurches into sen- tentious poeticism — 'There is a book before our eyes — /the night sky of the universe'; `Man's tools/ are the last stronghold of something ancient' — but mostly it's a wry, affectionate and convinc- ing record of the pleasures and pains of one man's life out in the centre of a nowhere that becomes everywhere. Recommended.

Flying Blues by Rodney Pybus is two books in one (and hence set in disappoint- ingly small type), a sequence about butter- flies and birds, and a narrative poem-in-letters, 'Words of a Feather', about a 1950s marriage which falls apart when the husband's work takes him to Mauritius and a love affair with a local girl.

As a nature poet Pybus is full of good, notebooky detail but a bit too respectful of poetic convention: 'Are they there just to catch the eye/with yellow or/catch inspired yellow itself//which won't be caught/unless you count alchemising/wingbars into gold?' (`Goldfinches'). None of this seems to break through into bird-ness, or manage more than a gesture at the wonder and gratitude such sights provoke. I like him best when he is most relaxed and human ('Never before had we been rich enough/ to eat the whole hotel, consuming these peo- ple/ meal by meal, paying them well with funny paper'), and engagingly engaged with other people, as in the delightful 'Ciao, Fighter!', an ebullient portrait of an irre- pressible Czech writer. He is a scrupulous, admirable poet who needs to let go of some of the old-fashioned props which underpin cultural dignity, and trust more to his own talent.

`How do you change the weather in the blood?' asks Elaine Feinstein in a good vignette of a bad morning: 'Outside, the rain/ and humus taste of old potatoes'. She seldom falls back on received phrases in her Selected Poems, though there is the odd `grace and beauty' (of a son) or 'dream of sunlight'. More often a bracing stoicism blows through her pages — joy/that impu- dence' — which is celebrated in love, trav- el, prayer, reminiscence, 'She listened for a moment like a child, / smiling, and yet I saw /under the blue credulity of her gaze /a writer's spirit, /and that was not deceived', she says in 'Remembering Jean Rhys', and it might serve as her own epigraph. Other tough-tender women, such as Tsvetayeva, are celebrated too, both in tributes and in Feinstein's own translations. There are good things here about her father, about an old onion found under music sheets on top of the piano, and about allowing herself to pray at the synagogue in Cambridge (`most puritan of Protestant centres') hoping 'at least for/perfumes rising from a scruffy hedge/if not from flowering Birds of Paradise'.

Every little breeze seems to whisper "Louise".' lain Crichton Smith in Ends and Begin- nings makes a third in this trio of hon- ourable British poets, not unsung exactly, but all well out of the contemporary media spotlight. He breaks all the rules and shib- boleths of the creative writing classes by announcing his joys and pains in straight- forward, unambiguous lines which look as simple to make as setting a pan on a stove, yet which often — not always — transcend the simplistic. There's a sincerity at the heart of his work which isn't a knack or a technique (though technique comes into it) and this leaves criticism open-mouthed, with little to do but point and admire.

See 'Nurses', for • example, or 'The Spider', an excursus on poetry (`He lives on air as poets do/and the justice of heaven') which could have been tediously symbolic and self-important but which is in the event astoundingly airy and truthful about the spideriness of both those spinners of lines. `Autumn' won this year's Forward prize for best single poem (an impossible category, but let that pass), so he hasn't been entirely out of the limelight. It seems to me a mix- ture of good and bad, stumbling at times into banality, and owing a debt to Andrew Young. Still, he's a poet to learn from, always supposing that honesty can be learnt.

Gerard Woodward's second volume, After the Deafening, continues on the path set by his first, Householder, which took Peter Redgrove's holy-fool brand of drunk- en innocence as its starting point and grew polygamous with ideas and things. This time round it begins to look a little tired and mannered, a short cut to the raised eyebrow and quizzical smile. Redgrove's influence lives on in poems about moths, insects, bathrooms/water and other meta- morphoses. Strong on brevity and wit, weak on the difficult business of getting feelings out into the sunlight, After the Deafening reads too much like a set of variations of a seductive formula.

Ida Affleck Graves has a resonant name, 92 years under her belt, and something of Bloomsbury's lordly way with people and language: 'My Ma two-times with a lover, has taffeta roses/And soft chocs. In this lush neglect I shake with terrors' (Daisy', from A Kind Husband). She's readable, fearless as the old are supposed to be, and strikes out some good lines, especially those about domestic love and old age.

Spring Forest by Geoffrey Lehmann, Faber, £6.99.

Flying Blues by Rodney Pybus, Carcanet, £9.95.

Selected Poems by Elaine Feinstein, Carcanet, £9.95.

Ends and Beginnings by Ian Crichton Smith, Carcanet, £8.95.

After the Deafening by Gerard Woodward, Chatto, £7.99.

A Kind Husband by Ida Affleck Graves, OUP, £6.99.