PNR

PN Review 193, May/June 2010

To celebrate its 40th birthday, PNR has offered lapsed subscribers a year's subscription at half price and I, liking the idea of a bargain, took them up on it. It is in many ways foremost among poetry magazines with its internationalist, modernist and pluralist agenda and other such desirable things.
Previously, I always appreciated the reviews and essays more than the poems they publish and that continues to be the case as I resume on number 193.
Neil Powell is a longstanding contributor to the free-wheeling and open-ended Reports section, here with memories of schoolboy publishing in the 1950's and as enjoyable as ever; Frank Kuppner muses for a while before improvising on possibilities of words that Shakespeare might have written where 'stuff' is printed in Macbeth and one can almost see a Kuppner poem in the making.
While Les Murray is always of interest in the Poems, there is also Will Eaves here although not with anything that I expect to be returning to with any priority.
Having recently taken it upon myself to berate BBC Radio 5 for careless and mis-leading sports reports and having generally accepted that the BBC is no longer a paragon example of English grammar, I re-read a sentence in the editorial here several times wondering if I was missing some subtle inference, 'Ricks himself, brilliantly, adopts the roll now of a guileless Sancho Panza..' Surely it should be 'role' rather than conjuring images of sausage rolls but who am I to say, apart from thinking that if PNR can't be word perfect any more then what's left to us. But I'm only a part-time, casual sort of pedant.
Among the reviews, Heather Yeung gives us an account of Zachary Leader's (ed) The Movement Reconsidered, reviewed on this website- I have to point out- last September but it is workmanlike at best as a review and I can reassure potential readers of the book that it is not as dull as this report makes it sound. But there are pieces of value and considerable use here, too. Jody Allen Randolph provides a stimulating account of Paula Meehan who outgrows her early influences, like Gary Snyder, to become a finer writer than them and one I will be able to look at again in more detail with some confidence. And the best piece here, by some way, is Iain Bamforth's summary of Robert Crawford's biography of Robert Burns, a useful and well-judged abstract that can do no more than encourage one to look at the whole book.
Bamforth is also good in the notes collected in 'Catchwords', with a particularly percipient insight on insights by the C19th philosopher, R.L. Nettlefield. So, there's fun and worthy work to be had among the grind of scholarship and high church intellectualism. One can only admire the dogged devotion of some academics to their vocation but not all poetry readers are going to find the spectacle entertaining. As an amateur, there comes a time for me when I eventually stop caring and PNR is clearly aimed at a slightly more sophisticated audience than me. The tireless capacity for discussion on internet forums is impressive at first but ultimately exhausting and, as with my trips to conferences over the years, one eventually wants to get back to the simple entertainments of, say, football except all the football pundits are talking that enterprise to a standstill as well.
So, yes, PNR, thank you for another cut price year. I'll look forward to the regular bi-monthly deliveries but I won't always be able to swallow it in one go.