Marks out of 10

 Four days without e-mail. I'm not well disposed to staying with Virgin Media at £101/month. 

Meanwhile, if need be, contact me on dg217.888@gmail.com

Farewell Waltz was more novel than essay. Kundera is never less than worth reading but he's a bit too 'chic', if anything. This was a 'black comedy' and I'm grateful that was pointed out because its main theme, centred on persuading a girl to have an abortion, isn't obvious comedy territory.

Preferable in many ways is Ignorance, unerringly drawn towards philosophy as it is but it arranges the usual concerns of male-female relations, Prague and Existentialism into one of Kundera's more attractive patterns.

The arrival of The Festival of Insignificance completes the Kundera fiction collection as far as I know for about £25 which is better value, I think, than the rash decision to pay not quite as much for the Collected Dick Davis.

Prompted by a poem qioted at Anecdotal Evidence, I thought he might be a paragon example of a poet to re-convince me of poetry's value and purpose.

 

Love in Another Language is full of well made pieces, humane and sympathetic. Admired by, and akin to the metrical part of, Thom Gunn, he arrives with fine credentials, obvious craftsmanship and plenty of 'poetry' to admire if one likes that sort of thing.

The problem for me is perhaps that I don't. It's hardly for me to say I've seen it all before when the likes of Michael Schmidt have read everything by everybody, appreciated it and maintained their enthusiasm. But I'm the poet of the deeply non-committal Rainyday Woman that makes Larkin seem ardent and Wordsworthian in comparison.

Dick Davis is like the highly formal Timothy Steele, epigrammatic and stylised. I don't insist on poetry exhibiting the personality of the poet and, in fact, prefer some 'impersonality' but epigrams make all poets sound the same, like epigrams, like Pope. The rounding off on a rhyme that one has seen coming from some distance away might offer some completeness but, poem after poem, it soon begins to look like the same old trick. Poetry is a contrived thing but is at its best when the contrivance is disguised to look natural.

Dick Davis is verse rather than poetry. I'm suspicious of both of them. Verse isn't quite enough and only needs to be clever. Poetry thinks too much of itself and tries too hard.

Marks out of 10, if we have to have such things, need to reach 8 for anything to be 'great'. 9 is very special and 10 is life-changing and miraculous, saved for such work as Tamla Motown, The Dead, Vermeer, J.S. Bach and that Buxtehude Trio Sonata.

Kundera might get the full 7 yet and Dick Davis is about a 6. Good guys, not a problem, but in the vast scheme of things, they are Fulham on a good day and on a bad day respectively, not Real Madrid.