Michael Donaghy - The Shape of the Dance

Michael Donaghy, The Shape of the Dance (Picador)

Michael Donaghy was the darling of the poetry scene and his reputation still growing when he died at the age of 50 in 2004. One is tempted to think of Marlowe, Keats and Edward Thomas as similar early departures who were likely to go on to achieve much more.

Whereas in olden days a poet's handbook would include definitions of trochee, spondee, metaphor and synecdoche, nowadays it is more likely to be a book like this, a collection of articles and essays describing what poetry is, some indication from a master of how one might write it better and some outline and argument about the various poetry factions so that one might decide whose side one is on.

Donaghy's is thus a useful such guide because he is an intelligent and funny mentor as well as being on the right side. In fact, because these essays were collected from magazines rather than written to be published together, they do become just slightly repetitive of Donaghy's preferences. Also, the idea of 'teaching' poetry composition is an absurdity so, thankfully, Donaghy's advice is kept to fairly general observations so that not all his readers end up writing surrogate Donaghy poems. Clive James, rarely one to let one paragraph suffice where he can run to three, is also a wise and entertaining host and so we don't mind that he covers much of the material that is to come in the introduction.

The best advice Donaghy has to offer poets is, ' whenever you want to say something, stop. Don't. Show it instead. The sad fact is that nobody wants to know what you think'. It is only the old maxim of 'show, don't tell' but it is very much how Donaghy works, we watch his poems reveal themselves rather than sit to hear them announce anything. Similarly, the set of interviews at the end of the book often have him explaining his deft, playful, largely personality-free poetics.

But most important are the essays in which he firmly takes sides with the formal, traditional, amateur poetry against the avant-garde, vers libre, professional academic sphere of poetry. The 'well over 250' creative writing programmes in American Universities produce hundreds of qualified 'professional poets' every year who all produce their slim volumes and go on to teach on creative writing programmes. Donaghy's preference is for the New Formalists, like Timothy Steele, who have returned to established, natural poetic practice now that the avant-garde, Modernist rebels like Ginsberg, Creeley and Olson are the free verse establishment, their lack of forms and discipline having not given them the freedom they sought.

Dana Gioia and Richard Wilbur are other admired Formalists who, presumably given the title of this book, give shape to their dance. In fact even Stravinsky is brought in on the side of form and free verse wasn't even a modernist invention anyway.

Donaghy debunks the sophistry of Imagism, the revolutionary claims of Beats and Language Poets so entertainingly that there is a laugh on most pages and one comes away with one's feelings confirmed. You were right all along but you just weren't confident enough to say so.

Well you can now because you can wave this excellent little book of essays at anybody who won't have it.