A secret

bookish vice

John Whitworth

SELECTED POEMS by David Wright

Carcanet, £4.95, pp. 96

There are two Sixties Penguin antholo- gies of modern poetry on my shelf, the one edited by Alvarez with its notorious intro- duction (Larkin a la lanterne) and the other, broken backed and sellotaped now, where first I found Edwin Muir, W.S. Graham, Patrick Kavanagh and a sonnet by Drummond Allison on Hedley Verity (`You face at last that vast, that Bradman- shaming/Batsman whose cuts obey no natural law'). David Wright, a name then unknown to me, wrote in his three-page introduction (Alvarez required four times the space) that poetry was meant for enjoyment. I was doing my B.A. Eng. Lit.

and could scarcely be expected to believe this — Alvarez, darling of the Sundays, with his Jackson Pollock cover, was so much more obviously of the age. Wright remained one of my secret bookish vices, along with old Wisdens and Dorothy Sayers' detective stories.

I should, of course, have read the whole of Wright's sentence more carefully: 'Poet- ry is not entertainment, but is meant for enjoyment.' So many of us, after killing ourselves with degrees, fell into that sub- Beatle tweeness which has worn so badly, or the alternative scene which was never any good. Not Wright of course, his anthology The Mid-Century: English Poet- ry 1940-60 is much better than any subse- quent essay, and still to be found in second-hand bookshops.

You won't find any of Wright's own poems in it, though I can't think why not. In fact I don't know where you will easily find them at all, except here, 96 pages for £4.95, girded with praise from Wendy Cope and C. H. Sisson and therefore surely the obvious present for a reader of The Spectator's back half. If you would catch the flavour, read aloud these opening lines from the last poem in the book, an elegy for Phillipa Reid, who died in 1985:

These verses you will never read, For you, beloved friend, are dead.

Under a mountain, by a lake, Your ashes for my ashes wait.

I have been silent for too long, Dumbstruck by that oblivion I am to share and never know.

This is about as good as Wright can be and how many of us can write as well? The octosyllabic couplets (always harder than the longer pentameters) are a formal triumph, transforming unsharable private grief into the public utterance of art. So Wright's grief, and the grief of the 17th- century Henry King for his wife, expressed in the same octosyllables, become one, become the grief of us all, making it (perhaps, perhaps) easier to bear, one of the things, it must be, that poetry is for.

Wright is deaf, and has been so since he was seven. Music comes often into his poems, the art considered, at least since Walter Pater, the most pure, the highest, and to the deaf man, of course, now inaccessible.

. . . she did not hear me, for the organ

Was playing in the loft above the rood- screen,

Laying down tones of bronze and gold . . . A music, as he says, 'Inaudible to me, barbarian'. Though he can read it in her elated face, he can no longer know it; this is a paradise others enter at will, but for him the gates are shut for ever. It is just such a sense of exclusion, of being outside some communal jubilation, which informs some of the best poetry of the century, from Hardy to Larkin. 'Deprivation is for me,' said the latter, famously, 'what daffo- dils were for Wordsworth.' But Words- worth had his deprivation too, did he not?

— 'Where is it now, the glory and the dream?' Probably a world of entirely hap- py people would have no need of poets. It's just as well for us that such a prospect is not immediate.

Wright lived in South Africa till he was 14 (1934 that would be), a paradisal place for a white boy, all light and colours. 'Where I was born, and am exiled', he writes, intoning like a magician the strange, lovely names that mean nothing to me, 'the Limpopo and the Megaliesberg' and 'where Pretoria/Veils her white façades with jacaranda'. What does jacar- anda look like, I wonder? Well, Pretoria means something different now, and better obliterated memories than obliterated lives, one's coarser self might retort unfair- ly; unfairly, because a writer cannot choose what it is that moves him, cannot always be moved as a writer by the correct things. Wright offers some decent, liberal lines about a black poet: 'Each of us is the wrong colour,/ He for now, I in future,/ Each disabled by a skin.' He cannot help it if the pressure is not there, if it remains leaden prose chopped to size. But this, in a celebration of Roy Campbell, is where he lives:

Horses and bulls, the sable and impala, Sparkle between his fingers, and a sun That sleeps and rises from the Indian Ocean Gongs the image of his passion.

Generally this is a meditative poet, a man of silences (well, of course), who lives in the slow, careful accretion of small effects. You look in vain for those marvel- lous Larkinian efflorescences of the vulgar ('They fuck you up, your mum and dad'), for Dylan Thomas's, or perhaps Heaney's, singing line. Wright is not major, the river of English Literature has not changed its course because of him, and if you can afford only one book of English poetry from the last 30 years, then this is not the one. But I am pleased to have it and I will take it down from time to time, glad to see the language in such good order, that the real barbarians, the incomprehensibles and the populists, have not destroyed the possi- bility of a good, unsensational poet's selected works being marketed in a pleasant paperback at a price we can all afford. And there are some really memor- able poems here ('Canons Ashy', 'Beeches', 'Encounter'). Who writes more than half a dozen such, asked Robert Graves, in a lifetime?

I wanted to end with a fine sonnet about Ezra Pound at the memorial service for Eliot, but I don't like Pound and this stanza from 'Encounter' is fitter, where the deaf poet comes across some blind children at the zoo:

They disappear, hand in hand, down the avenues Enjoying the feel of the wind, of the sun and shadows, And listening, as I do not, to the queer and sweet cries Of the birds and odd beasts gathered in the garden.