Suddenly, one realizes how much time has passed in a lifetime. It's about 40 years since the teenager I was then started reading poetry, when Linden Huddlestone introduced us to Ted Hughes' Lupercal in the third or fourth form and I went from the usual infatuation with the Liverpool poets to the greater sophistication of Thom Gunn.Then, the history of C20th British poetry was summarized for us by Alvarez, who series of negative feedbacks explained how the high church modernism of Eliot had been blended with a more traditional Englishness by the Auden generation and the aberrant apocalyptic generation of Dylan Thomas had been cleared away by the empirical, downbeat Larkin and the poetry that emerged in the 50's. And that, is roughly, where I came in.
Since then, Hughes and Heaney were praised for having less to do with the 'gentility principle' identified by Alvarez, the Martian project with Craig Raine soon led into a cul-de-sac but a more adventurous, post-modern, elusive, allusive playfulness was brought into fashion by Muldoon and Donaghy which has led to roughly where we are now. And there's a hundred years of poetry in Britain simplified down into two short paragraphs. I dare say there was a bit more to it than that.
But, reading Frank Redpath's commonplace, sensible, ever accessible poems serves to remind me, at least, how nothing stands still and whatever you learn at school or find out for yourself is soon out of date. I had wondered why Lanzarote and Comedy of Errors weren't favourites for next year's Champion Hurdle. But one's first loves stay with you the longest. Discovering the world for the first time, one can't help but think it was always like that. By the time of David Bowie, Bill Haley seemed an age ago but it was much less than the time between Oasis and now.
So, reading Frank Redpath for the first time now, his poems look unfashionable but quite refreshingly so. Time was that these rhyme schemes, the metrical discipline and enjambments and, most of all, the understatement and deliberate avoidance of grand gestures or high-mindedness, were very much to the zeitgeist's taste but in 2015, it has to be said, they have an endearing quaintness about them.
I would be an ambitious claim to say that the Larkin, Gunn, Donald Davie generation represented a Golden Age of English poetry when compared with, say, Philip Sidney and Elizabethan sonnet writers, Donne and his metaphysical comrades, the Romantic generations of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Blake or the Modernist revolution dated very precisely circa 1910 but the worth of writing doesn't have to be judged by its place in a vaguely acknowledged canon and great value is to be found elsewhere and, in Larkin's phrase, 'can happen anywhere' and poets like Redpath provide much that we should be grateful for in a period in which one of their tutors has expressed the opinion that the young generation of poets writing now are,
the strongest ever in UK poetry.
Ever !
As Sean O'Brien remarks in his introduction (this volume was published in 1996),
Redpath, to a degree that would be almost inexplicable to the Darwinian young poets of today, was a good deal more interested in writing poems than in publicizing his existence.
Since marketing, networking and Creative Writing debentures sometimes appear as important as poems to poets by now, those words were quite prescient twenty years ago but one might take solace in the fact that it is still not true of all poetry activity and in many places poems can still be valued ahead of mere poetic reputations and the attention they attract.
There is, by all means, a homespun kindness and generosity of spirit in Redpath's poems that is unchallenging and his method involves plenty of use of hyphenated compound adjectives (and nouns), like the 'end-of-winter cloud', the 'long-time-used to loss' or 'between tick and yes-I thought-so tick'. Making his own reference to Larkin, he is not unaware of a debt that shows itself not only in form and style but a number of places in which we can't help but hear echoes of poems like The Whitsun Weddings or Sad Steps. None of which detracts from a highly likeable collection from a very enjoyable poet who doesn't lose much by not being completely original and being, quite possibly, 'minor'. The world would benefit from more minor poets who are as good.
He arrives at some fine endings, as in Knitting,
What's
There all the time? Ah, neither wind nor rain
Which any fool photographer can trap,
But light without place, unmarked on any map.
Such quiet observations, well made and carefully arrived at, happen throughout the book. I can do no more than recommend the book highly while The Rialto still have some in stock.