The Columbia History of British Poetry (154 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 600
facile contrasts between languages raw and cooked (his father's awkwardly genuine usage is constantly opposed to his own deviously polished Latinisms); he tends to idealize inarticulateness. That first sonnet, "On Not Being Milton," already raises "three cheers for mute ingloriousness." To praise this silence actively is to endorse, if passively, the same economic and political conditions that have strangled Harrison's people into speechlessness. As though to correct that error,
V.
(1985) recounts Harrison's experience of finding his parent's graves defaced by the local hooligans. He presents their languagerank, clannish, densely vulgaras a speech steeped in the culture of deprivation.
The title
V.
stands for "versus" and puns on "verses." Yet the poem studiously denies itself the New Critical satisfaction of assimilating historical conflicts into forms of aesthetic concord. Unattenuated, the miners' strike of 19841985 provides both a containing context for
V.
and a primary example of unresolved struggle. "Standing up to the unions," the Thatcher government ultimately forced the miners back to work, and this result could be taken to signal, finally and uncompromisingly, the reversal of the whole postwar tradition of social welfare. In this light the indignity of the graffiti scrawled on Harrison's parents' tomb reads as no merely local, motiveless malignancy. It is the sign of lost values, the signature of those fallen, not only through the social safety net, but through the web of human culture. These are the lost people, who include (but are not limited to) the growing homeless population of Britain in the 1980s.
To this historical reality Peter Reading's poems give urgent, terse, and disturbing witness.
Diplopic
(1983),
C
(1984), and
Ukelele Music
(1985) present a panorama of urban violence and hopelessness. Representative scenesan infant sliced with glass by thugs stealing the mother's wedding ring; an octogenarian ritually and gratuitously murderedseem to make his the poetic voice of the 1980s. But his timeliness lies in his manner of presentation: a postmodern diffidence, a deadpan coolness of observation that redeems the mannerisms of that contemporary style with his own greater complexity.
Reading's strategy follows the formula announced in the title of
Diplopic
, whose double vision contrasts an empathic response with a nearly insane scientific detachment, as in "Telecommunication," where news of a grandmother's death, at first making the boy feel "scared, excited, numb. Sad / memories of," issues into a parent's instruction-
 
Page 601
al response: "'Yes, Grandma's bones might fossilize, of course, / like those in your
First Book of Dinosaurs
.'" Stimulating compassion, then disrupting it, he makes the reader question that habituated responsesympathy more than horror is his subject. Earlier Stevie Smith's experiments with idiom hardened the language into a poetic material, leaving it unmoved by the (not always comic) horrors she reported, but Reading's verse moves a turn further, perhaps in response to the currents of his own time. Provoking and denying the consolations of fellow feeling, he forces the reader back to ask the questions that the ideal society of consensus socialism had answered, and whose solutions were being undone through the decade.
Such diffidence also presents a response to the culture of verbal excessto the coercive appeals of commodity sentiment on television; to the vacuous overstatements, equally compelled and compelling, of mass media politics. Silences locate the main points of attention in the social poetry of James Fenton. Sometimes Fenton presents this reticence symptomatically, as in
A German Requiem
(1981), where survivors of the war steer monologues of careful avoidance. At other times his clipped, brisk, abstemious report seems the only tonic response, as in "Dead Soldiers," which recounts an absurdly elegant lunch on a Cambodian battlefield (Fenton attended it).
This manner reveals its center of moral gravity and political conscience in a poem from his 1989 collection
Manilla Envelope
(mailed in a "manilla" envelope to English readers from the Philippines, where Fenton had moved to finance and sustain a local fishing industry). "Jerusalem" overheats the language of contemporary political divisions, allowing its rhythms to run away with the speaker and push him into the intense inane of factional fanaticismsa mania dramatized still more remarkably for being attached seamlessly, in the final lines here, to a voice of self-awareness and self-indictment:
I'm an Armenian. I am a Copt.
   This is Utopia.
   I came here from Ethiopia
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
   Have you ever met an Arab?
   Yes, I am a scarab.
I am a worm. I am a thing of scorn.
   I cry Impure from street to street
And see my degradation in the eyes I meet.
 
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The circumstances that force Reading and Fenton to court silence in their political verse may explain, conversely, the appeal of personal lyric, but the same historical moment makes it more difficult to legitimate a song of subjective experience. The lyric voice of Craig Raine is individualized but highly stylized; the zones of perception are idiosyncratic without being private. Strange metaphorsthe oddness of outlook belongs to the alien or "Martian," the label given to a gathering of like-minded poets in the early 1980soffer their exotic likenesses as the stuff of sensuous music. Yet Raine's usual unwillingness to consolidate a person at the core of these perceptions seems to deprive the pyrotechnic of a necessary fiction, an intensity of presence.
Such intensity appears as aim and effect in the poems of Alan Jenkins, whose early lyrics assume a persona at once fictional and true, imaginatively heightened and historically informed. Picaresque lover, the main speaker of
In the Hot House
(1988) is driven through scenes of the post-1960s milieu. This is a story of eros furensof a sexual liberation now jaded and sung in a language of disappointed excitements. Jenkins proceeds to poems of greater personal directness and emotional complexity in
Greenheart
(1990). A lyric elegy to his father, for example, "Keep-Net," alternates his sense of present lossfocused in a fishing rod lost overboardwith the memory of experiences shared with his father, balancing that immediacy of lived affection in a unique and beautiful counterrhythm with memory's sharp melancholy:
                                                            The float bobs, I want him
to catch one too, more than I want to catch them all
myself, I who have caught the past, which is made of him,
maroon or silver flashes in a grey-brown river, into which I dive,
as my rod, in slow motion, disappears, as the spools
of our reels click and whirr, click and whirr,
the Imperial Bruyere has fallen into my lap
as I wake, a book for keep-net, and mouth 
My
 
father
.
The energies of poets coming to maturity in the 1970s and 1980s have not been organized by single critical anthologies like Conquest's in the 1950s, Alvarez's in the 1960s. Literary culture has become decenteredor multicentered. The old hegemony of London-based houses like Faber has been challenged from Manchester, for example, by Carcanet Press, which publishes talents as various as C. H. Sisson and Michael Hamburger and Jeremy Hooker, or from Newcastle-upon-
 
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Tyne, where Bloodaxe Books maintains a commitment to northern poets like Ken Smith and to a political sensibility similar to Harrison's. The increasing democratization of education has simply dissolved the old London-Cambridge-Oxford triangle into the new polygon of provincial universities and local writing groups, and it becomes increasingly difficult to legislate an
ars poetica
for a generation. (The center of gravity in English poetry might be said to have shifted, around 1975, to Northern Ireland, where the political situation served both to unify poets and to challenge the "English" character of their verse.)
The voices of Harrison, Reading, Fenton, Raine, and Jenkins are various and particular; they share common historical ground but, for now, no recognizably common purpose. The groupings of poets from previous decades seem fixed, but the permanence of individual achievements is still uncertain. Of these Larkin and Hughes have proved to be the most popular, addressing their technical skills to subjects at the antipodes of central human experience. The large if diverse audience they share also suggests their equal appeal to current attitudes, their joint mastery over the contemporary, that is, the conventional.
"Tradition" posits a frame of reference and standard of judgment at once more elusive and demanding. Eliot's claim that the "existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) among them' has of course suffered the postmodern challenge to the canonicaltradition proves impermanent, its values arbitrary. Yet these awarenesses replicate those made in the early century by modernists. They also sensed a break between past and present and took these circumstances as the impetus for radical invention, at once delighting in technical experiment for its own sake and using it to revive materials no longer expected to live on their own.
This project continues in poems that orchestrate the mutterings and blasphemies of history into the sweet ceremony of sonnet form; in versets that adjust the rhythms of an Old English psalter to the pace and psyche of contemporary speech; in lines that reconcile the projective energy of American postmodernism to an Augustan diction of civil latinity or the stately cadences of Elizabethan verse. The really new poems, perhaps the most lasting, have come from Geoffrey Hill and Charles Tomlinson.

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