REVIEW OF BOOKS

Peter Ackroyd on some little English versifiers

Since there is not one good poem in this Poetry Supplement*, and since it has been distributed for Christmas in the same spirit as other people give scarves or bottles of gin, it might be charitable to ignore it altogether and to discuss the poets of Zambia or of the Windward Islands. But there are no less than six poetry reviewers and two poetry editors in this collection (if they had not between them devalued poetry beyond the point of endurance, they would make up the 'establishment') and, as a case history, the pamphlet is worth brief comment.

Mr Larkin, in his role as taxidermist, has brought together some specimens of language from which all invention has gone; the poems deal 'wryly' with certain rural or domestic interiors, and within this small space they specialise in that nerveless monotone which passes nowadays as the English 'tone':

She was a small dog, neat and fluid. Even her conversation was tiny:

She greeted you with bow never bow-wow

No, this is not a poem by Norman MacCaig in praise of one of his contemporaries. He has entitled it, in that 'wry' British way, 'Praise of a Collie' and, like some of the other Aesopian gems in this collection, it would show to best effect upon a chocolate-box. We could even create a chocolate montage from some of the livelier moments in the book:

Arnold was John the Baptist, coming late Before became, the country and the town From harvest time to ailing in November Made scientific sense not destiny It is unbearable — well, almost so.

You will notice the common movement of line in these five separate poems, and the fact that their regular rise and fall cannot disguise the flatness of the language. There is a toneless objectivity in the verse which can salvage only the husks of meaning; it is dead poetry because it is predictable poetry, with a conventional language unerringly creating conventional themes. The only way of _making this kind of verse readable is to press it into external shapes, and there is a marked preponderance of tiny forms throughout the volume. But they *Poetry Supplement edited by Philip Larkin (Poetry Book Society 40p) are all smooth and alike; their language has become that worn coin which is passed from hand to hand. How are the poets, in Zambia doing nowadays?

Of course the confluence of poetry reviewers in the anthology may help us to appreciate the recent acclamation of Douglas Dunn as a great poet and the new, bright hope of English verse. In Love or Nothing§ Mr Dunn certainly satisfies the conventional notions of what is 'poetic' and what is not. He concerns himself with certain private and domestic themes ('wryly', of course) and he uses external forms to mark the boundaries of what can reasonably be said in a poetical manner. The effect is that of a thin and single ' voice which is conscientious without being adequately self-conscious. Given the fact that the inherited poetic language has become somewhat strained at this late date, Mr Dunn's tone is necessarily over-emphatic; he uses a great many adjectives where none would do, for all the world as if he were trying to write prose:

sleep walking in plastic darkness and Wrecks of many seas

Here by the silent shipyards.

He is forced back upon a flat and denotative language, of points rather than themes, of 'content' rather than expression, and it is one which can be rescued from prosiness only with the aid of external and rhetorical gestures: The white moon opens over a ridge of bracken Spilling its prodigal rays into the eyes

Now where have I read that before? Where the line is not controlled by an obvious movement of this kind it becomes flaccid and tedious:

Old cities and shipyards, Belfast, Glasgow, fervent closures Of protestantism dispensed with — and so on. At the centre of this poetry, and that of Mr Larkin's anthology, is a language that has become so fatally weakened .that it can only, reflect certain domestic truths and social aphorisms. It has lost its inheritance, it has abandoned all pretence to inventiveness, and so it has resigned itself to being parochial. But the effort to make virtues out of this necessity is one that has largely been lost.

But there is an English poetry which has risen above all that fiddle, and two recent books mark a distinct change of emphasis and of direction. Mr Crozier, in his new collectiont dispels that quaint illusion (shared by many of our 'established' poets, of course) that contem-• porary poetry is necessarily obscure:

Carelessness Can pull down in an hour what enterprise

§Love or Nothing Douglas Dunn (Faber and

• Faber £1.25)

;Printed Circuit Andrew Crozier (Street Editions 90p)

Has taken years to build. A tenor of I will not pass this way again Much to the delight of the audience.

Mr Crozier has created a poetry which is open in the sense that it does not rely Upon the trickeries of regular forms or a heightened 'poetic' language — which is a more schematic way of saying that it is not tied to a romantic notion of the self and a no less romantic (or 'wry') objectivity. It is a quiet and even poetry, and within the unforced texture of the work there is created that illusion, indispensable, to the best poetry, of the familiar being made new again:

If you get lost Bid me despair and I'll despair Under that Cypress tree. The gates are all Suspended. Straw-hatted they sigh and glug Their turkish coffee at home Once more, and done up neatly.

There is no generalised 'meaning' to be divined from the poetry; the lines have not been pressed and flattened into the service of a particular 'point', but create their own space and their own activity. The whole thus becomes more than its parts, setting up a novel relation between the language and our preconceived idea of it:

We are reminded by the frightening personal resemblance of this work detached from experience.

J. H. Prynne's poetry, especially in this most recent volumes, is less open to the casual reader; he has been accused of obscurity (which means simply that poetry reviewers never take any trouble over their reading), but his is a difficult poetry only in the sense that there is a new quality in its language, a power which is undoubtedly there but one which has yet to be brought to adequate recognition:

The apple cap sinks down to your faint hopes, sprawled in the sun on the grassy hillside, shirt over the soft haemal arch. By this vane in the ground the roots start to sicken, snow normal to zulu time stuns soft news of choice all over the earth.

The uses of formal harmony make this a special kind of language, it is clearly 'poetry', but its procedures come from a language and a range of reference which are very different from the inherited modes within Mr Larkin's anthology:

The brietal perfusion makes a controlled amazement and trustingly we walk there, speak fluently on that same level of sound; white murmur ferries the clauses to the true centre of the sleep forum.

The poetry here has slipped out of the demotic and domestic bonds which have trammelled English poetry for many years, and it realises a new force which can lend eyen the most apparently conventional lyric a fresh access of strength: •

0 lye still, thou

Little Musgrave, the grass is wet and streak'd with light

The resonance of this suggests that Mr Prynne is connecting, by indirection or by design, with the indigenous wealth of the language — a wealth which has not been inflated because it has hitherto remained concealed. He would 'certainly not be in place among the thin lines of the Poetry Supplement; by bringing into harmony the varieties of technical and moral vocabulary which have been previously separate and alienated, he creates a poetry which may bring the whole soul of man into activity. Naturally reviewers and editors cannot be expected to notice such things.

Peter Achroyd. is the literary editor of The Spectator.

:I: Wound Response J. H. Prynne (Street Editions 90p)