Simplicities
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
Tides John Montague (Dolmen Press 22s) Poems from an Island Michael Shayer (Fulcrum Press 21s) The Visitors Barry Cole (Methuen 25s) Lucidities Elizabeth Jennings (Macmillan 30s) John Montague's book is the best of this bunch, and some of his poems are very good indeed. His short, terse lines keep fervent Irish rhetoric at bay, and give the love poems an uncommon precision. The best of these bring something fresh to the worn theme of the transience of love and the nearness of death. In 'Tracks', the act of lovemaking is set against the morning after, in the hotel, where 'giggling maids push/ a trolley of fresh/ linen down the corridor'. And in 'Premonition', one of the most accomplished of the poems, the poet dreams in nightmare of the torture of his girl, while at the same time in the nearby hospital she survives a difficult birth. He sleeps, and then, 'released from dream,/ I lie in a narrow room; Low- ceilinged as a coffin/ The dawn prises open.'
The last two sections are disappointing. When John Montague writes about the sea, he doesn't have anything more to say than most poets writing about the sea. But there is one outstanding ballad poem, taken from the ninth century Irish, called 'The Hag of Beare'. It rings with the implacability of a Norse saga, and is proof enough that John Montague has a wider scope than love poetry in which to write really well.
Anything from the Fulcrum Press deserves attention, but it's annoying to read a blurb Which tries to convince you that Michael Shayer has 'helped move our English concern for poetry to an international level', and that this book, apparently his first distributed outside a coterie, 'shows why his reputation as a poet is held so high' It doesn't help to read in .Michael Shayer's preface that 'I never meant this as a "book of poems" when that's exactly what he has made of it. After this special pleading. the Poems turn out to be interesting and not at
all pretentious. He describes the island with humour and sympathy. The poems are what the Black Mountain crowd would call `location poetry'; in very free verse, hardly more than the jottings from his notebook, but still as good a way as any to put across to us impressions of a small island and its people.
Barry Cole's collection is called The Visitors and we've all been here before. The poems are light and light-hearted, witty after (some time after) a jaunty Liverpudlian fashion. I only take them seriously because I think serious claims may be made for them. We are meant to distinguish a profundity underneath the swagger, and this may come one day, but at the moment there are too many unassimilated influences from a range of poets including Peter Porter and Roger McGough. It is modish to aim for an effect of sophistication through deliberate self- mocking naivety, perhaps because Brian Patten went this way to get down on paper some of the best poems of the 'sixties; but it makes for rather anodyne, entertaining verses unless you're a natural, and it's all too easy to slide down into shallow romanticism ('Fairy Tale') or trite sentimentality (`Azaleas').
There is a directness and simplicity about Elizabeth Jennings's poetry which Barry Cole might envy: but there's not much else one can say about Lucidities except that they are lucid. The poems are slight and perfectly tailored, like children's mittens. The thought is not extreme or original, but it is unfailingly poetic and delicate, sometimes to the point of evaporation. I had hoped that .the Rimbaud translations would inject a needful vulgarity, but I'm afraid the poet has re-created him after her own image, lyrical, silken-tongued. All the same, there must be a wide audience of graduate housewives for Elizabeth Jennings's poetry, and they will not be disappointed by her latest volume.
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