More Dana

 Where has he been all my life, Dana Gioia. It's like you've been on nodding terms with someone for 30 years and then suddenly find yourself infatuated. It's hard to believe there's another name I'm aware of that I would take to quite so readily if I investigated further but there could be. One would never know.

Barrier of a Common Language is sub-titled 'an American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry'. For once, he might have added because his point is that British poetry has been almost ignored by American readers since about 1945. Except by him, who knows it well and has read most perceptively. It's a slim book, as most of his are but one would rather have a slim book of such insight and, sometimes, humour than three times the quantity without the quality. Evidence by my essay gathers as Larkin is the most referenced poet in the book who, like him, didn't over publish but what he did put in print was all worth having compared to, say, Ted Hughes whose Moortown book elicits precious little sympathy.

Charles Causley and Wendy Cope are praised, as English as any poet could be expected to be; Thom Gunn is admired, as is James Fenton and Craig Raine both appreciated for what he did while also exposed for it. We don't hear much about Charles Tomlinson any more and Gioia sheds some light on Tony Connor and Dick Davis who might never have been widely read in Britain never mind the USA. It's all alarmingly good and all the better, of course, for being on the right side. I'm trying to think of a book one could admire that makes a case contrary to how one sees it oneself. There surely out to be such a thing.

Good books can often lead to others and Gioia directs us to Donald Davie's collected reviews in Poet in the Imaginary Museum. I then sat outside flicking through Letters to Monica to find it derided there but we don't let that worry us because Larkin derided most of his rivals. 

I seem to be ordering these books from sellers who find it difficult to provide them in timely fashion or at all but my impatience doesn't help. I don't know if an essay has ever been compiled quite so slowly, bit by bit, as further material is added. It might have been better to wait until I had the whole picture and then plan the full sweep of it. That would have obviated the necessity of removing claims that turned out to be entirely erroneous. I have an obvious starting point and an idea of where to finish so it's only a matter of fitting in the material in between to get from one to the other.