Times Literary Supplement, February 17, 1984solearabiantree.net/namingofparts/pdf/tls/... · a discomfiting unhappiness. Time's Oriel, com ing after a gap of seven years, contains

(c) 1984, Times NewspapersWinter Quarters<br->Time's Oriel<br->Familiars<br->Changing Sides

Doc ref: TLS-1984-0217             Date: February 17, 1984

~ 168 TLS February 17 1984 POETRY ;'i

Luxuriantly designing

-.-J ,

Simon Rae PETER SCUPHAM WlDter Quarters 64pp. Oxford University Press. £4.50. 0192119575 KEVIN CROSSLEY -HOLLAND TIme's Oriel 61pp. Hutchinson . £4.95. 0091532914 . JOHNLEVETI Clumgilll Sides 51pp. Harry ChamberslPeterloo Poets. £3. 0905291433 'PHlLlPGROSS Familiars 32pp. Harry ChambersiPeterloo Poets. £3. 0905291468

In keeping with its title, Summer Palaces, Peter Scupham's last collection dealt in opUlence. Committed to capturing on the page the ex­asperating beauties and perfection of nature ("How should her creatures best express her?"), Scupham unfortunately opened his poems to the sort of diction English poetry has been trying to rid itself of since before the publication of the last Georgian anthology. Typical were lines like "First flowers work their samplers" , "The horses tum their dipping carousel", "Beneath refining decibels of lark­song" . Winter Quarters, the title of his new book, would seem to promise a sparser, bleak­er poetry , and when we discover from the back of the volume that its theme is "war, rumours of war, records of past war , preparations for war, and the ever-present possibility of war in our time", we may indeed expect a more res­traihed exercise of Peter Scupham's consider­able powers. Consider, however, the conclud-

~# . ing lines of "Pathfinder", about listening for the bombers returning from their night raids over Germany:

From this, our common ground, we cannot single That diminution in the homing waves Which 'speaks of tears, which speaks of tears and

flame .

With their obvious designs on us , the repeti­tions in the last line cheapen what , with memories of the Falklands war still fresh , we would otherwise acknowledge as carrying a powerful emotional charge .

"Pathfinder" and other poems about a Cam­bridge childhood during the Second World War lead naturally into a sequence , "Conscrip­tions , National Service '52-'54". Peter Scupham is a great one for sequences. This one runs to twelve poems, which might be thOUght excessive in view of the modest three Henry Reed allowed himself in "Lessons of War" . Where Reed catches poignantly the clash be­tween the civilian mind - bored , irreverent, randily nostalgic for lost freedoms - and the brutish military by bringing the registers of the two antipathetic worlds into ironic juxtaposi­tion , Scupham does nothing to exploit such linguistic possibilities. No creative tension is generated between the very few samples of army language : " 'Take his name , Sergeant , and dismiss' " , " 'Your weapons are given to you to kill the enemy' " - and Scupham's own highly exclusive brand of poetic discourse . A

.~ , laboured attempt at humour- pervades the sequence , along with a sort of knowing allus­iveness. "Assault Course" with its opening, "Tarzan is swinging, all his ululations I On un­dulant display", goes on to take in "Lieutenant Robin and his Batman", Carver Doone, Moriarty, Alan Quartermain and Tom Sawyer. "Sentries" is making better progress when "Let it all pass: ay, that's the eftest way" crops up, precipitating us suddenly into the midst of Dogberry, Verges and the Watch . It's as though Scupham simply cannot perceive a si tuation or event without thinking of its liter-

... ary analogue . Time and again , he interposes his highly literary sensibility between the read­er and the subject.

It's a relief to find a more stringent approach in a later sequence , "Notes from a War Diary", where material from the diary of the poet 's father-in-law is presented in refreshing tele­graphese : "Epernay. Took lorry along Dor­mans road I Under shellfire , dodging shells for a joke". Other poems in Winter Quarters deal with more familiar topics - places and land-

have developed a taste for Peter Scupham's luxuriantly rich descriptive passages and tech­nical virtuosity will find much to enjoy here, especially, perhaps, "Fachwen: The Falls". For those who require a more robust engage­ment with life, the book will prove dis­appointing.

Much of the inspiration for the poems in Kevin Crossley-Hqlland's last collection, The Dream House , was drawn from the isolated communities and wilderness landscapes of the far north . It was a bleak collection, touched by a discomfiting unhappiness. Time's Oriel, com­ing after a gap of seven years, contains more sunlight and has a less oppressive air, though with a translation of "The Wanderer" from Old English (the poet's speciality as a translator) as a backdrop, there's no danger of unwonted optimism breaking out : "Nothing is ever easy in the kingdom of earth . . ./ Here possessions are fleeting, here friends are fleeting, I here man is fleeting, here kinsman is fleeting ... ".

Much of the strength of the original poems can be illustrated by the opening lines of "The Monk's Reflections" : Too much consistency: at last I dared Kick the comfortable restraints, the bells' Gentle hubbub. fraternal silences, Dispersals and reunions.

Here the pentameter is well accommodated to the dramatic speaking voice, which , while seeming to come to us across the centuries, nevertheless addresses us with a contemporary urgency. It is the sort of thing John Fuller can bring off. And there is something reminiscent

of Fuller too in poems about childhood, espe­cially "Grandmother's Footsteps", which evokes the menace lurking in children's games.

Poems arising from visits to Bavaria and In­dia show a widening of geographical horizons for this northward-looking poet, but Crossley-

. Holland still convinces most when operating on familiar territory . "Neenie", an elegy to a much-loved grandmother set against a grudg­ing northern shoreline, displays, along with other poems confronting death , a moving directness of emotional expression without any hint of mawkishness or self-regard . . Time's Oriel marks the welcome return of a poet whose real but unobtrusive qualities should endear him to a growing circle of readers .

"The small, consistent waves I Slap wanly at their shins", writes John Levett in one poem, and that unfortunately is rather the effect of his persistent iambics coming up the page at you. Rhythmical relentlessness , coup1ed with· pre­dominantly end-stopped lines and perfect rhymes, 'make his first collection, Changing Sides, a slightly laborious read. Not that it doesn't contain some good poems. "The Insect House", which won the New Statesman's Pru­dence Farmer Award in 1982, is an example. So too is "Freaks", which begins: Not all of them are genuine, This older woman with a cock Has come apart and shows the join, But then again, not all are fake ....

Levett certainly has a poet's eye for where life shows the join . There's an uncomfortable poem, "A Letter from my Aunts", about the

Calmly passionate William Scammell ALAN BROWNJOHN Collected Poems 1952-83 239pp. Secker and Warburg. £8.95 . 0436071150

Alan Brownjohn's poems are not , for the most part, of the kind that played havoc with the back of Housman's neck . He seldom goes in · for purple patches or Palgravian lyricism, though a quiet tenderness abounds. In the ear­ly poems there is a good deal of direct state­ment ("August is skilful in erasing fear", "Fan­tasy means a landscape disturbed I By one dissimilar element"), and equally bald moraliz­ing; there is also a nice sense of mystery ("Who knows what could become of you where I No one has understood the place with names?"), plenty of wry humour, and an early attachment to narrative. He can top and tail neat rhyming stanzas, too, but sounds more like himself when his discoveries creep up on him , as it were , in a carefully wrought free verse. Occa­sionally he throws off a striking image ("hate and unease will die in time I With the death­rattle of the draining sink"); occasionally the balanced diction is leavened by repetition and the tone of children's poetry; but for the most part he practises the orthodox 1950s rites of the poet as the chap next door , as in "Bad Advice": " If it has come to choosing here , then I Caution

Anthrax

'seems best" , or in the closing stanza of "Moles":

Our minor beings are not wide enough To let great love rear hills on their estate . Their scope includes the gesture and the sigh, But not the fire to leave them desolate .

As the volume proceeds, and we move into the 19605 and 70s, various influences work themseves out (the Movement's and the Group's; Graves's on some of the love poems, such as "Eight Investigations") , and Brown­john's personal , finicky way with syntax is given its head, and its heart . The desire to "sublime this I Craving in verbal charts" ("Epistemology") gets less chart-like and more authentic. "A202" does for a main road, im­probably, something of what Auden does for limestone ; "Lines for a Birthday" , about the life and hard times of an American girl , is an enjoyable miniature novel ; "Letter' to Amer­ica" is as delightful a love poem as "Projection" is effectively sinister. Two of the obsessions that quietly stalk the poems are insomnia and vertigo, which find a verbal counter-part , perhaps, in the poet's fondness for long sinuous ~ntences, choppy line-breaks, and the locutions "sort-of' and "kind-of', dubious qualifiers that crop up again and again .

Someone else who crops up quite frequently is the Old Fox , first cousin to Stephen Potter's gamesman, who finds a variety of ways to out­wit a hostile world. He 's ari appealing charac-

A remote hill-farm. From the stony lane he eyes and eyes the unremarkable flower on potatoes,

its yogurt

and ginger asterisk , then picks his way over the cattle­grid.

He will plant both feet in the Dettol-soaked foam-rubber mat

and stand there for three day . 'Pass no remarks', he says. 'This was my only destiny.'

.. ~ .. J'lftntlTf1t. ·dtlltrwMitM. "l1I~st f.oM· " ... .... .

inability to muster a convincing languag.! in which to reply to the simple well-wishin~ of elderly relations - "And all my' letters back appear as crude, I False essays in sincerity be­side I This gentle and unearned solicitude" . Other poems, on both private and public themes, show a distinctive poetic personality in the making. I only hope that by the time he publishes his second volume, Levett has tem­pered his undoubted technical ability with a little tact.

Philip Gross's Familiars is really only half a book (a full collection is promised from Faber this year), but it makes a good introduction to his work. Like Levett, Gross revels in the exer­cise of formal skills, but employs both rhyme and metre with more subtlety. While several of the poems are concerned with the darker end of history - the wasted lives of tin workers on Dartmoor, or those of transients shuffled across Europe to displaced persons camps, Gross has a lighter side . In "The Golden Age", he muses on a "curious I machine for our de­Iight ,l this garden where Stakhanovite I bees muscle to the job, unanimous, I ecstatic", which has about it something of Christopher Reid's playfulness in Arcadia. Gross also has a good eye for the striking image: a newborn baby's "venerable head, veined parchment , purple-I muddied map of a fabulous country, pulsing"; snails "brace Ion the hawser of them­selves", while jellyfish, "slow-flouncing", appear as "small fantasies I in see-through lace" . It will be interesting to watch this talent developing.

ter, but surely murdering your opponent in the Wimbledon final - as he does at his first appearance - is a little too melodramatic and surreal for such a staunchly empirical Anglo­Saxon as this? Elsewhere he bores committee meetings silly, arranges his own retirement present, and runs rings around the gas com­pany's accounts department. (I look forward to hearing, at some future date , about his Ox­bridge Third and his no doubt appalling love life.) The more directly satirical poems - " In Hertfordshire", "Centre Point", the long sequ­ence "A Song of Good Life" - tend to the prolix and predictable. On the other hand "Office Party" is both amusing and shrewd , and "William Empson at Aldermaston" ("Left and right hands worked busily together I A parliament or two I And there she stands: I Twelve miles of cooling pipes ... ") is perhaps one of the best and most coolly intelligent pro­test poems written during the cold war, anti­cipating, in many of its details, Mailer's high­temperature masterpiece The Armies of the Night.

Having abolished logical commerce between deciarative and prescriptive sentences- what is and what ought to be - David Hume invented the notion of "calm passions" as the engine that powers our moral life . It is precisely the areas indicated by that phrase that Brownjohn's best poems explore . "Dea ex machina", for exam­ple , wittily and tenderly takes apart , and holds together , modern relationships. "Holding Hands with Pregnant Women" - the titles get better too, as the book moves on - anatomizes, again with tender precision , the needs and fears and failures of not-so-young lovers. "A Bad Cat Poem" finds a vivid extended metaphor for sexual frustration . "The Pool" brilliantly reanimates classic intimations of powerlessness and death . Beneath the de­corous surface of many of these poems, there is a deal of frustration and anger spitting and clawing its way out. One wouldn 't want Brownjohn to turn confessional, but it would do him no harm, perhaps, to ration the super­grammatical irony and learn to beat his breast a little more often .

Two more excellent poems by Brownjohn , not included here , in the Poetry Book Society' current Winter Supplement (£1.50. Available from the Poetry Book Society, 105 Piccadilly, London WI or the Arts Council Shop, 8 Long Acre, London WC2) indicate that he is now writing consistently better than at any other time in his career. Over a long period he has made himself into one of our very best makers , and the Collected Poems is a timel, f~'1Ii ~CTr,.of his unshowy virtues . . .