IAIN CRICHTON SMITH, GARY SNYDER, ELAINE FEINSTEIN, MIMI KHALVATI, SUJATA BHATT, GILLIAN CLARKE, ROBERT MINHINNICK, GWYNETH LEWIS, ANDREW MOTION, DAVID CONSTANTINE
…But irony. It is what British audiences require even of full-blooded performance poets, the poem rising to a point of witty liftoff. It is what critics require, something they can identify and talk about, something that keeps the poem from running too far ahead with the ball. Irony is a crucial element in the “gentility principle” that Al Alvarez stigmatized, the element that sets the reader or the audience and the poet both on the same side of the poem: outside, the poem as closed artifact. A language of complicity, binding reader and poet to the contingencies of an agreed social tone. The victory of the kind of stylistic irony that creates a safe distance between what is said and sayer can seem complete. It is not the irony of Hardy and Housman, the cosmic irony with which reality confronts man; it is smaller, strategic, the stance with which the poet confronts the world, preserving him- or herself from deep engagement, overstatement and responsibility for what is said. In a culture capable of sustaining satire, such ironic poetry would be a sign of health; in a post-Palgrave culture still hungry for the lyric, the inversion has in the end diminished the art of poetry itself, and perhaps the art of fiction, too.
This is especially clear in translation. English English (as opposed to Scottish, Irish or American) translations of the ballads and coplas of Antonio Machado, of Federico García Lorca, or the passionate sad poetry of Luis Cernuda do not exist. The idiom is hostile to them, as it is to the expression of direct feeling and sentiment. Charles Tomlinson translates the intellectual, ironic verse of Jorge Guillén skillfully, but he comes a cropper with Machado, whom he makes into a dry, incomplete voice, not the full-throated popular poet he is in Spain. It is possible to imagine Charles Causley translating the popular poems of Lorca, but among the English no one else since Lawrence. The Surrealist Lorca might just about work—sounding like David Gascoyne on a rare good day; but continental Surrealism is generally rendered silly-sounding in English English. Whole registers of feeling have been drained out of the language, which has its unspoken decorums.
In the United States the poet Stephen Tapscott assembled a brilliant anthology of the poetry of Latin America, largely translated by American writers and best of all by Tapscott himself. Reginald Gibbons’s Luis Cernuda, Robert Bly’s sometimes dazzling Spanish poets, W. S. Merwin’s versions work: readers are ready to make allowances for the American idiom. The Irish poet Michael Hartnett’s Lorca and the Scot Edwin Morgan’s are further examples. Irony is a resource, almost a decorum, for many, perhaps the majority of poets writing today. Its absence has become a resource as well.
For Iain Crichton Smith, the Scottish poet, ironies inhere in experience. He was unusual in his ability to play the whole poetic instrument unapologetically and unself-consciously. Perhaps it is because he was reared bilingual and is a significant poet in Scots Gaelic as well as English. The Gaelic tradition colored his English, as it did for Sorley MacLean, though MacLean did not write in English directly but translated his work. Smith’s most famous long poem appeared in 1962: Deer on the High Hills. It begins with an image that soon explodes into consistent metaphors and figures—wonderful, large-scale, the doomed aristocracy of nature, the doomed aristocracy of France. But the poem exists to give language back a literal valency.
They wore the inhuman look of aristocrats
before a revolution comes, and the people
blaspheme the holy bells in the high steeple.
Before the ice breaks, and heroes in spring
come up like trees with bursting wrongs in their arms
and feed the nobles to the uniform worms.
More brilliant than the Apocalyptics’ work of the 1940s, it is still within romantic earshot of it. The poem moves grandly and steadily through nature, politics and history, until at the end the poet gives the deer back to their own “language,” and his language back to the objects that it names:
There is no metaphor. The stone is stony.
The deer step out in isolated air.
We move at random on an innocent journey.
The rain is rainy and the sun is sunny.
The flower is flowery and the sea is salty.
My friend himself, himself my enemy.
The deer step out in isolated air.
Not nobles now but of a further journey.
Their flesh is distant as the air is airy...
The line of decisive transformation is “We move at random on an innocent journey.” Innocence is a condition that stylistic irony destroys, setting the speaker outside the experience, effecting a fall from the grace of direct experience. But that prelapsarian grace can be achieved, if irony is avoided or somehow circumvented.
Smith was born in 1928 on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, where “an austere inflexible sabbatical Presbyterianism holds sway,” providing many of his characters and themes. The religion raised “interesting questions of order and spontaneity” and “singleness (on the part of religion) and the marvellous multifariousness of the world.” What is simple becomes treacherous, tyrannical; what is complex accommodates more of experience and more of an unsanctioned truth. His poems are insistently against the tyrannies of singleness. “One-eyed Polyphemus is gaining on rational eternally mobile Ulysses.” In that “eternally” rests all the hope that Smith can muster, real but vulnerable in “this world of untheological plenitude and sometimes terror.”
He was educated at Aberdeen University and after National Service became a teacher. In 1977 he resigned to write full time. His Selected Poems (1985) and Collected Poems (1992) contain the crucial work, and he added two books, a collection, Ends and Beginnings (1994), and a long poem, The Human Face (1996). He died in 1998.
Ends and Beginnings begins in elegy, with the exiles and human losses that characterize many of his collections. It progresses through place, history and imagined change, with an optimism particular and credible. The poet steps out of Scotland, out of Europe. After a trip to the Golan Heights he conceived an extended poem on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, finding an unaccustomed idiom, biblical in cast.
No, it’s not a question of waiting for a voice from the sky as in ancient days,
or sitting at a desk like Virgil while the empire prospered around him.
There is no such voice, objective and distant and impartial,
There are no Muses dressed in imperial blue.
The poet is compelled into the action he can undertake, which is to write not out of security and safety but out of risk. It is in this spirit that he considers the isolated people of his native Lewis, and those isolated in a wider culture—scholars, writers, lovers, the old—whose hunger for communion is thwarted by estranging disciplines or by the depredations of history. Douglas Dunn has commented on “that purity, that touch of originality, which marks poetry at the limits of intuition and imagining.” An innocence committed to the given world takes one risk that irony avoids: it is hit or miss. Irony has the good sense to dispose of the faulty poem in the circular file, but Smith will keep a poem if he feels it tells, however marred it may be, a valuable part of a truth. When there are technical problems in a poem they tend to remain there: an awkward rhyme, a strange inversion in the syntax. It is in his extended experiments, in the prose poem for example, that he comes closest to the irony that invents strategies of distancing, except that in Smith’s prose poem, the prose form is natural to the subjects he tackles.
The Human Face is an impassioned poem-essay in Burns’s most celebrated poetic form.
Man’s inhumanity to man:
his legacy of grief and pain,
worse than the tiger or the lion,
constricts the heart
and makes us often “howling” run
to our safe art...
O see Man as he really is
in all his frightened nakedness...
It is not Burns but innocence that licenses the vocative. Smith conjures up the democratic spirit of Burns in an age starved of tolerance and clarity. This is his most ambitious long poem to date. It risks the scope and sweep of the major poems of MacDiarmid and MacLean, and it is by their measure that he must be judged. Of course there are points of irony and moments of play, but as in all Smith’s poems, what arrests us is a credible, impassioned sincerity. It would never occur to Smith to set himself up as a guru.
If the innocent can evade irony, so too can a prophet or a priest. The priest, that is, who speaks as a priest rather than as a man wrestling with faith. But didactic art is perilous: we must believe not in the truth of what we are told (we can read Dante and Herbert without being Christians) but in the truth of the telling. We are drawn up short by Jeffers, and often by Olson and (differently) by Ginsberg, by Rich, by Baxter. Their approach is at times expository, hectoring, deliberately suasive. Despite his less hectoring didacticism, Gary Synder’s unironic voice assumes a superiority of perception, of value system, of value, which his later poems cannot substantiate.
Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930 and grew up in Washington State and Oregon, a West Coast phenomenon. Like Hughes he studied anthropology—in Portland, rather than Cambridge—and his life subsequently has been as varied, if not as dramatic, as Hughes’s. He has worked as a logger, a seaman on a tanker, a member of a trail crew; at Berkeley he studied Oriental languages, associated with the Beats (though his language is quite different from theirs), studied Buddhism in Japan, and teaches “wilderness thought” at the University of California, Davis. Nature (the Sierra Club variety, largely unpeopled) and contemplation are the cornerstones of his verse. His first book, Riprap, was published in Kyoto. He is the poet Bunting’s Chomei might have become with a few travel grants, access to spiritual stimulants, and a spell at Walden pond.
There is a great Oriental-seeming simplicity about his poems, as though his imagination has managed to put all the conventional furniture in storage and let itself go in a remote and clear atmosphere. Informal, provisional, the poems take in what the disencumbered eye sees in the Orient, in the unexploited corners of America. The native American wisdom of his verse exists alongside (rather incongruously) the teachings of Zen Buddhism. His “I” is Gary Snyder. He avoids metaphor and symbol, as they distance him from the world he wants to bring closer. “No ideas but in things,” says the Imagist; “No ideas but in these particular things,” Snyder replies. There is a difference: poetry for him is not literary. The strong early poems have given way, after the middle years, to a Green poetry whose politics are as tendentious as Jeffers’s. The natural world outweighs the human world. Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947–1985 gives a clear impression of his trajectory. Famously he declares, “I try to hold both history and wildness in my mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our time.” Nevertheless, what is lacking in his poems is history, and he is complicit in the ignorance he stigmatizes. His world is the great circle of the Pacific. “What use, Milton, a silly story / Of our lost general parents, / eaters of fruit?” The old religion and the old poetry no longer speak. He celebrates the archaic as the most richly enabling. His is an absolute challenge to the ruling values of the age, but his engagement is confrontational, beginning in what is, in the end, an indiscriminate rejection that lives off the very tolerance he will not in imagination tolerate. He is an eloquent victim of the politics of a repressive tolerance that, by tolerating the radical critic, domesticates and neutralizes him. “The comfort of the U.S. For its own.” In “The Blue Sky” and other poems he produces holy writ. It would be churlish to suggest that it is not poetry, but equally churlish to suggest that it is good poetry, or even good Buddhism. Of the latter only the Buddhist can judge, of the former anyone can. The language does not allude to or create a world. It is derivative, a series of footnotes, and the poet is priest; that, or it is private meditation that we overhear; we puzzle less at the content than the purpose of such opaque obliquities. The semantic poverty of the later work, the arbitrary forms, reveal how a poet of substantial talent can go so far along the road less traveled that he is lost—or lost to us. A young reader encountering Snyder—especially the early Snyder—may be dazzled. The older reader is incredulous. Surely this is not the freedom that the struggles of modernism brought us?
With the anti–Vietnam War movement an American counterculture emerged, with which many poets associated. Some of their work reached Britain, not by the established New York or Boston route but from small presses, through alternative magazines, on the international reading circuit. Thus Olson, Niedecker, Edward Dorn and Robert Creeley appeared; thus too Snyder arrived. The imported counterculture, which for a time was almost popular in Britain among poets and audiences, met an emerging British counterculture, with some similar bearings: Williams rather than Eliot as touchstone, and a hostility to the Movement values comparable to the Americans’ hostility to the New Criticism and “academic” poetry (though many counterculturalists were or became academics).
English counterculture began in the academy. Elaine Feinstein says, “When I began to write I was very well aware I didn’t have the right voice for current English poetry... It was partly because I was so influenced by Americans... I started my own magazine, Prospect, not to publish my own poems, but to introduce Olson, Paul Blackburn and others who weren’t yet known in this country. That’s how I came to meet [J. H.] Prynne. In fact, I sold Prospect to Prynne.” By “sold” she meant, “I gave him my overdraft and the title, and on that he built his connections, using my addresses... He made something much more out of them than anything I had.” The addresses she handed on had, many of them (including Olson’s), been suggested to her by Ginsberg, to whom she first wrote.
Not having the right voice: from the 1960s onward, few did have “the right voice”: it had become something of an anathema; the age of Wordsworth’s “voice” as a common language was over, displaced by voice as a particular inflection bearing the traces of cultural origin and individual “character.”
Feinstein was born in 1930, in Bootle, Lancashire, into a second-generation Russian-Jewish family, and grew up in Leicester. She read English at Newnham College, Cambridge, a contemporary of Hughes and Plath. She lectured at a training college and then at the University of Essex (1967–70), appointed by Donald Davie. Since 1971 she has been a full-time writer. Her work is fully represented in Selected Poems (1994) and Daylight (1997).
Alive to her family origins in the Russian-Jewish diaspora, she developed a close affinity with the Russian poets of this and the last century. Crucial are her translations of the Russian Marina Tsvetayeva, first published in 1971, in which she develops a “gapped” technique to choreograph voice pauses and lengths, and instinctive-seeming but deliberated modernism. She was also drawn to the “new” Americans who were proof against reductive irony. Davie pointed to the Americans, Hughes to Eastern Europe.
The Black Mountain poets intrigued her. She was affected by Objectivists and Projectivists: Williams, Reznikoff. Olson sent her his famous letter defining breath “prosody.” Davie admired her second book, where the stilled deliberate syntax and monotonous phrasing of the first give way to suppler syntax and something like meter. The poems are domestic, but not comfortable, manifesting instabilities of relationship, of habitation itself. There is a tension between “recapturing lost territory” and escaping into imagined territory. Fantasy “encourages a steely rejection of humanism, a fashionable resistance to compassion, which I believe is as much a luxury of an English innocence as the euphoria of the affluent flower generation.” So much for the shortcut mysticisms of Snyder and Ginsberg. Epiphanies are hard-won.
Her “feminism” is diffracted through a sense of her other othernesses: being a Jew, even a liberal, integrated Jew. At the Edge (1972) explores an experiential edge unlike Alvarez’s; by means of montage, bringing together disparate experiences and finding their relation, she makes a space for herself. “If you have escaped the holocaust entirely by the serendipitous chance of your family deciding not to settle in Germany, and if you are conscious of that—as I was from about age nine onwards—you don’t look for suicidal risks much. That’s not exciting. Death is not exciting.”
In water nothing is mean. The fugitive
enters the river, she is washed free;
her thoughts unravel like weeds of
green silk: she moves downstream
as easily as any cold-water creature
can swim between furred stones, brown
fronds, boots and tins the river holds equally.
The trees hiss overhead. She feels their shadows.
She imagines herself clean as a fish,
evasive, solitary, dumb. Her prayer:
to make peace with her own monstrous nature.
Hughes’s Wodwo and Feinstein’s “Patience” have much in common. But she depicts, at the heart of things, conscience. She is increasingly a moral (if not moralizing) writer. She asserts her humanism against a world in which the arcana are valued at the expense of the empirical and human. She fuses mind and body within the mind-and-body of the world; her metonomies are not literary gestures, her images are literal and laden. She is a poet of lyric directness. The passionate voice she brought to the English translation of Tsvetayeva becomes her own. She writes about love, loss, jealousy, the fear of abandonment, and in each book her style becomes more assured. There is merciless vulnerability in “Companionship”:
It was Wordsworth’s clear line I wanted,
nothing to do with mountains, only the quiet
sunshine and silence, but I hated being alone.
The lonely cannot love solitude.
I wanted a garden outside tall windows,
winter sun in leafless branches, a cold spring
with crocus in the grass and the first blossom,
and you at work in the same apartment,
my dearest friend. Today I was watching
a grey squirrel fly in the beech trees when
your words reached into me: “You know,
a poet isn’t much of a companion.”
Ted Hughes said: “Her simple, clean language follows the track of the nerves. There is nothing hit or miss, nothing for effect, nothing false. Reading her poems one feels cleansed and sharpened.” She eluded, though she read English, the chief creative blight of Cambridge at the time. “Newnham undergraduates were not exactly encouraged to attend Leavis’s lectures, but of course we did... I guess we were, all, under his influence. We all read his books. And in my third year I went along to his seminars for practical criticism.” During her years at Cambridge there was no alternative culture. In time she and friends began to provide one. “I edited an issue of the undergraduate magazine Cambridge Opinion; an issue called ‘Writer out of Society,’ based on my enthusiasm for Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett and Allen Ginsberg. Not fashionable preoccupations at the time.”
Tsvetayeva, Feinstein says, “enabled me to write without embarrassment. Because she doesn’t feel embarrassed about sounding undignified.” It was another, crucial step away from irony, toward the candor that has become her keynote. Irony has its place in her novels, not at the level of style so much as in the plotting. The poems are a zone of relative freedom where the “I” is strictly licensed. The rules are inferred: “I listen to [the poem] as I write. And I know it’s finished when it sounds right in my head. But I never can tell which poems are the ones that are going to read well.”
Marked differences of background that, in earlier decades, poets would have reflected in imagery, perhaps in diction, are now expressed in more complex inflections and formal choices. It isn’t easy. The Iranian-born poet Mimi Khalvati in her first book, In White Ink (1991), taking the title from Hélène Cixous, who says that women in the past have written “in white ink,” writes a series of poems in strict metrical forms handled brilliantly. She was forty-seven when the book appeared, and in the years since her task has been to free her voice in an equally formal but less prescriptive verse. As the language becomes freer, the “exotic” details—Iran, Farsi, politics, family—recede. Her interest in drama becomes a focused interest in voice. Her long sequence Entries on Light (1997) is a series of meditations on light, on what it is and does, how—as it changes—it invents and reinvents the things we see, are and were, inscribing our shadows and feelings. The sea- and skyscapes are vivid: dawn, storm, dusk, a pewtery or bright midday. Each demands a different syntax, a distinctive rhythm and rhyme. Khalvati has a well-trained eye: she is also formally a most resourceful poet, able to close her lyrical movements resonantly or, when necessary, to leave a stanza open to changes of weather. At times we think of Constable in the billowing, full stanzas, but also—in short-phrased sections—of the flat skies of Hokusai. Both are resources for her.
One is the glory of the yet-to-be, one
of a past that reminds us
how we’ve seen it in our own lives exactly
as it used to be but were
blinded by those lives, distracted from our own
perfections.
This is not merely painterly or imagistic. It engages the woman and her world in which children have grown up and gone away, and the business of living and repose needs to be reinvented for the life ahead.
Khalvati studied in Switzerland and England, gaining a purchase on her culture by means of acquired languages and cultures. The same process occurs, at a more radical level, in the poetry of Sujata Bhatt. She was born in Ahmedabad, India, in 1956, and spent her early years in Pune. But she lived, studied and worked in the United States and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She now lives in Germany. Point No Point: Selected Poems represents the best of her first three collections, the work of a decade.
How many Indian women writers are married to Indian men? The question of cultural difference is sharply raised. For Bhatt there is always a problem of translation, from Gujarati into English, one culture into another (she has several adoptive cultures), and even from one English (that of her childhood) into another English (American, or British). In her early poem “Udaylee” she evokes the room into which women withdraw during their periods. This custom of monthly exile from the routine of women’s lives has a positive aspect, the consolidation of a “sisterhood” apart, turning a condition to advantage. But this is a release from, not a release into. Bhatt’s poems explore the partial and the whole releases, especially the release into the erotic, with unironic, though often witty, candor.
“Search for my Tongue” is partly a bilingual poem, with Gujarati script, transliteration and translation. Each language, the poem demonstrates, reflects a different reality; translation is at best partial and sometimes entirely inadequate. The word in Gujarati for “sun” carries a burden of associations quite different from the English word. Many Indian poets write separate bodies of work in English and their first or other language. Bhatt, in suspension between the two, combines them and places herself between, enriched and impoverished by what they give and withhold of memory and experience. Here is Indian-English rather than Anglo-Indian poetry.
The modern tradition of Indian poetry from which Bhatt emerges includes some substantial practitioners: Keki Daruwalla, Jayanta Mahapatra, A. K. Ramanujan, Nissim Ezekiel, G. S. Sharat Chandra, Arvind Krishna Mehrota, Dom Moraes and—best known, though primarily for his fiction—Vikram Seth. No substantial critical literature has emerged in India to clarify and consolidate developments: it is only when exported that Indian writers seem to be “affirmed” within a critical context. Criticism clears a space for poet and for reader. Without it there is a kind of void. In Zimbabwe such a critical context is just emerging; in South Africa and elsewhere it has been slow to develop. The essays of Emerson and of Poe did as much for American literature as some of the better poets did, and we might sometimes wish that some of the energy and resources invested in encouraging creativity in Britain, the United States and India (among others) were invested in encouraging reading and (nonacademic) critical activity.
The neglect of Indian-English poetry may be due in part to the compromised place of English in India. There are more than two hundred languages that English stands between, beside or over. There is no coherent publishing base for English-language poets. And if modernism has had a rough ride in Australia, it sometimes seems that it has not touched India at all, except in the academy. The Indian writer is accepted at home once he or she has been accepted abroad.
Bhatt has been accepted abroad and on the terms she herself proposes, though her work—exposed as it has been to American and British poetry—is very resourceful. Each of her three separate collections has been substantial; each has had a different shape and purpose. Each has included sequences, narratives, love poems and political pieces. She is not entirely at home with the lyric and not at all at home with English tonalities. Her free verse is fast-moving, urgent with narratives, softly spoken. Her cadence is natural, her diction undecorated. Her sense of the body in the poems is unusually strong: the body rather than the five discrete senses seems to register experience.
But the soul will be the colour of turmeric
spilt on white stone.
And the creature who lives in the soul
will count with her thumb
on the joints of her fingers.
Time will be slow
and Time will be concrete
and Time will be stuck
like a wet crow peering down
from a tree, broken and black...
The Stinking Rose, her third book, takes its title from one of the names for garlic. No one is neutral about it. She explores the mythologies and the magical and practical aspects of garlic in a sequence of poems. The book is also haunted by places, especially Vancouver Island (where she lived and worked for six months), and by India. Europe is present, caught in the middle as it were. There is a persistent dialogue between new worlds and old, the dialogue always intensifying in the linguistically experimental, “bilingual” poems that oppose Gujarati and English, then integrate them.
with my home intact
but always changing
so the windows don’t match
the doors anymore—the colours
clash in the garden—
And the ocean lives in the bedroom.
I am the one
who always goes
away with my home
which can only stay inside
in my blood—my home which does not fit
with any geography.
In a short space of time Bhatt has been recognized as a distinctive voice. She has much to say about India and her native tongue, about America, Britain and Germany. She is, the New Statesman declared, “one of the finest poets alive”; alive in an unusual way to language, to issues of politics and gender, to place and history. She is generous and also unsparingly severe in her quest for the truths of experience.
As generous but less severe in her truth-telling, more conventional in her forms, is the Welsh poet Gillian Clarke (b. 1937). The undervaluing of her work, with that of Robert Minhinnick, Gwyneth Lewis and other substantial writers, is in part due to the pressures of cultural nationalism. Wales has developed an efficient national publishing industry. Many Welsh poets writing in English are handsomely published in Wales but only fitfully exported.
The lane narrows and turns between sunburnt fields.
Two hundred miles behind me, you at the door
rising for breakfast, a late dream in your eyes.
The slate’s already hot. The bees are in the fuchsia.
A rug of sunlight on the bedroom floor, ours
and the widower’s bed spread cool for homecoming.
Gillian Clarke in “Coming Home” displays a quite unusual voice. What at first appears to be in blank verse is an almost casual and wholly assured free verse, effortlessly spoken, effortlessly “musical.” One need not even impose a Welsh lilt upon it. The quality of Clarke’s poems, sometimes written off as merely rural or late pastoral, is rhythmic. Without fuss the poems speak. She can write with metrical regularity but her quietly urgent voice prefers to speak in this way, intimate and precisely modulated. Her Collected Poems (1997) trace her development to a rare prosodic originality.
The Welsh publishing house Gwasg Gomer published her first full collection of poems, The Sundial, in 1978. In the decades since then she has become one of the best-loved and most widely read writers of Wales. “Gillian Clarke’s poems ring with lucidity and power... Her work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical,” the Times Literary Supplement said. Her history includes the unwritten stories of Welsh women. “Her language has a quality both casual and intense, mundane and visionary,” wrote Dick Davis. “There is no gaudiness in her poetry; instead, the reader is aware of a generosity of spirit which allows the poems’ subjects their own unbullied reality.” Her subjects include a landscape that is beautiful and wounded by industry and exploitation. For Clarke, as for Iain Crichton Smith, the rural landscape is peopled, there are villages and isolated farms; landscape makes sense through the people who tend it, and their culture, enriching or impoverishing, becomes part of her culture. It is especially, as in Eavan Boland, the unwritten histories that detain her: regained languages are the most eloquent.
Robert Minhinnick (b. 1952) is alive to his environment: indeed he works for Friends of the Earth. He is more directly political than Clarke and in his later work less Welsh-centered, fascinated by New York and its people in an environment utterly transformed by technology. In Wales he visits various pasts, using the images of archaeology, of mining, and his own biography to uncover less what is lost than what might be reclaimed. He has a vulnerable native ground which terror and violation make him apprehend, as Wordsworth does in The Prelude. As well as nature there are the miners, the dockworkers, the men whose labor made and unmade the land- and cityscapes. Minhinnick’s world is unsentimental. He understands the inevitable materialism of mere survival, the luxury of reticence. He does not allow himself that luxury: the first-person singular is himself, vulnerable and direct; if it is a question of telling a truth or perfecting a poem, he prefers to tell the truth. The voices he sometimes adopts are heard rather than invented. Jarrell said that Elizabeth Bishop’s poems had written underneath them, “I have seen it.” Minhinnick’s have the same caption, from Cardiff to Rio, or perhaps, “I have heard it.”
Sujata Bhatt’s Gujarati is more or less vestigial: she does not write her poems in it, it is a fading part of her linguistic and cultural makeup. Gwyneth Lewis’s Welsh, on the other hand, is a creative instrument that she exercises alongside English. She writes poems directly in English (Parables and Faxes, 1995), but her first language is Welsh and I was first drawn to her poems in translation by Richard Poole. Yet the English poems bring into Anglo-Welsh poetry a subtle harshness that Minhinnick has in narrative but not in diction, and an iconoclastic wit. In her Welsh poems there is a sense of the sacred and the culturally sanctioned; her English allows for anarchy, disrespect. It is as though in Welsh she is (fruitfully) constrained to given themes, as in the magnificent “Ceridwen’s Country,” where in English, as the title of her collection suggests, she can occupy, unconstrained, the modern world. In her Welsh poems she has tried to take “the great strengths of the Welsh tradition and push them on. These would be musicality, precision, wit and the joy of formality.” There is again and very deliberately a flight from irony—in Welsh. “The kind of realism I’m after—spiritual realism—can’t be written about in the mode of dry, ironic social observation.” In her English poems, however, irony flickers like a neon tube. Her “parables” and “faxes,” the poems about foreign parts in particular (English is the language of travel, Welsh the language of home) can’t quite do without it.
It is ironic that Philip Larkin’s biographer and one of the executors of his will should be one of the least stylistically ironic English poets of his generation. Andrew Motion has Larkin’s sense of endings, but instead of fear and despair his speakers express regret, sadness, a stoical acceptance. He has voices and narrative; and he has a subtle ear for speech so that the poems seldom settle into meter but play the elusive double music of imagined speech (with imagined period and social inflection where necessary) and residual meter, a muted iambic: a free verse haunted by memories. Before he wrote his life of Larkin (and later of his beloved Keats), he wrote a revealing account of Edward Thomas. From each of his subjects he has learned different ways of being his own poet in the distinctive sounds the poems make, and the way in which they move from reflection (tonal definition) into sharp visual definition. His is a romantic temperament, defining itself by defining the world in which it moves.
Born in London in 1952, Motion attended University College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate prize. His first book, The Pleasure Steamers (1978), was more political than it might appear. The sequence “Inland,” evoking the lives of a fenland village nipped at by floods and eroded by enclosure, is a paradigmatic poem of the early 1970s, escaping the “bourgeois I” by speaking through and for other experiences, remote in time but pertinent to the issues of the day. The early 1970s were marked by such experiments in impersonality, in emptying out the “lyric I,” which for a time seemed untenable, a kind of cop-out. Plurality of voice within a single poem or sequence is not a characteristic of his work. More in character are the poems that touch on his slow, agonizing personal losses. The Pleasure Steamers opens in several directions and his subsequent books have followed now a lyrical, now an elegiac-political line. Narrative is his favored mode, and his best sustained poem, Independence (1981), embeds its story in the faltering days of the Raj, the English narrator recalling a brief marriage ending in the death in childbirth of his young wife: different scales of loss and of change. The consolation—empty at that—is time.
I woke at five to a bare house,
luggage already half way home.
My last morning: a delicate stripe
of sky strengthening under my door
and the chowkidar’s shadowy steps
backwards and forwards, his cough,
and the phlegm with its soft scatter.
When I looked out he was gone—
his charpoy tipped to the wall,
and a torn-off tooth-brush stick
thrown on the balcony steps.
Sahib. A voice loud in the hall.
The driver’s come.
I was bowed in the cold yard
as the servants draped their garlands on.
All remembered, all the ironies of experience, life’s ironies, in a voice that those ironies have refined to witness.
Narrative itself can be a snare, and Motion’s Secret Narratives (1983) are “secret” in the sense that they withhold the larger governing narrative. He comes closest to Larkin here in the movement of the different poems, their building toward an often plangent “liftoff.” The development of his poetry has been quiet and decisive, retaining his inimitable prosody but subtilizing narrative, experimenting with fragmentation, with limiting detail; finding essentializing strategies in Geoffrey Hill and (more insistently) expansive patterns in Seamus Heaney, but keeping to his own pace and subject matters, his Englishness of voice, unfashionable, economical, naturally eloquent except when it occasionally (disastrously) tries to be.
Narrative has also partly emancipated David Constantine, like Motion a poet who took shape in the 1970s with the political concerns of the time. Born in Salford in 1944, he read German at the University of Durham and has translated and written authoritatively about Friedrich Hölderlin, whose life and “madness” and whose prosodies help to define the tensions in his own work. Constantine is formally more classical than Motion, his foursquare sense of a poem and of poetic closure (against which he sometimes struggles) reflected too in the closure of his narratives—in terms of the story told, his imaginative investment being in the different perspectives and meanings a single story can have, and the instability that “facts” contain. His long Caspar Hauser sequence (1994) subtly frames, in the mysterious life and death of Hauser, a tale of innocence confronting an unfamiliar world, and that world manipulating, idealizing, corrupting and destroying innocence.
The poems contain extremes: classical intention subverted by romantic temperament, the poem of praise undermined by anxiety, the political vision run aground on social reality. The present is in danger of slipping away between memory, or loss, and longing, that greatest peril for the radical imagination. Yet the past is powerful, accessed initially through the lives and deaths of his grandfather, killed on the Somme, and his grandmother, surviving for fifty years with that memory alive daily in her head. “I don’t mind my poetry being thought of as ‘self-expression’ so long as it is understood that the self being expressed is a large and not merely biographical thing, more a state or condition than a person.” It is the lives of other people, especially their suffering, that draw him forward. The word “condition” suggests that for him each life is a type of other lives, that his characters have not so much psychologies as circumstances and even as they stand, stand for something larger: “Through the successful poem we glimpse the life of myth, of recurrence, archetype, pattern; and the association with myth can act unsettlingly, or like a solvent, upon the biographical and individual life.” Yet that particular individual life, the solid, contingent truth of it, must be respected and included in the poem, must be returned to and accepted. What Motion does with his subtle prosodies Constantine achieves through a syntax that, while correct, is the source of his powerful ambiguities, the tonal plangencies and the “solvent” that eases meanings together and apart:
Once since he died I saw him in a dream
Wherever the dead are, he was jovial,
He clapped me hard between his hands and said:
Stay, but I would not and I came back here
Where the living are. Now it is April
And kneeling on the warm earth in a sort of shame,
Dumb, fearful, not fit for company
For anything opening I begin again
Pulling the ground elder...
Image becomes symbol, the dream of the dead—out of Homer, Virgil, Dante—feeds into an actual world and an activity that delivers release and releases meanings. Classical legend and literary memory: the movement of the poem is very like that of Edward Thomas’s, part of the “self” that Constantine expresses. The “I” can erase itself by borrowing voices, or it can speak with all the voices that it contains, emancipated by poetry’s memory, by antecedent and continuity, from the mere contingencies of “I.” He has an Augustan sense of what voice is (the sense that Wordsworth had), with a romantic instinct for appropriate diction. His very rootedness in complex traditions which he recognizes and accepts enables him to speak naturally, in a whole voice, which is his and more than his.