Judy Brown, Crowd Sensations (Seren); Ian Duhig, The Blind Road-Maker (Picador)Two recent poetry books that superficially look similar. Two poets with good taste in cover design. They are very different poets, though. We shouldn't compare books by their covers.
Judy Brown's Loudness was an impressive debut. Some people never surpass their first achievements whereas a proper artist will develop and Judy clearly is one of the latter. It's a good idea to begin with one of your best pieces and After the Discovery of Linear Perspective is a fine poem, nostalgic for the old, flat world,
the maidens and saints twisted to press
at the picture plane, all breathy frottage, and damp like flowers under glass
but glad of the new-found space. Perspective is a theme that recurs, as are unseen things and presences that don't register. In One of the Summer People,
It's hard to believe I am a mere foreground flicker
in the place of deep time.
The perspective here is like that of a long exposure photograph on which her passing figure leaves no trace on the vast picture of history. In a parallel way, the burning of old diaries in The Things She Burned That Year, sees the last record of earlier days 'read itself into the blaze'.
The unseen include the third umpire in cricket who, having been shut away indoors and pale all day,
Some nights he walks bare-chested onto the pitch
and touches the square for some last warmth.
At first I was concerned that some poems were trying too hard, striving too much for novelty and ingenuity, which can be a fault with a generation of poets that came from Creative Writing courses that taught them they must 'find their own voice'. The more I looked, however, the more I became convinced that Judy does genuinely meditate on minutiae and makes them significant in language that is both accurate and distinctively her own.
In the best of the poems that came out of her residency at the Wordsworth Trust she demonstrates more of her visual artistry, describing Grasmere from above, shown to her by the devil, as
like a frock cast off and wrinkled on the ground,
which is superb.
And neither is it all cleverness and for effect. There are poems of emotional power, too, about mortality, for example. It doesn't get much more serious than that. But it is a fine collection, memorable in a number of ways and we can be confident that Judy Brown is established and will be around for a long time.
Which Ian Duhig apparently already has been. The Blind Road-Maker explicitly references Piers Plowman, Tony Harrison and Tristram Shandy, and much more than that among his extensive liberal/leftist heritage, but there is no sense in which his work is, like Eliot's, a mosaic of previous literature shaped to his own purposes.Like his last book, Pandorama, this is exuberantly rhythmic, deeply humane, in a tradition of protest and endlessly well-read. If poetry were a more high-profile art form, he would be accorded 'national treasure'status, so let's be thankful that it's not.
Blockbusters uses Harrison's iambic pentameter but not his couplets or rhymes, until the last two lines, which is a good decision as the spirit of the Leeds bard is sufficiently evoked without it becoming too close to mere pastiche.
then, in a flash, like Paul, I saw the light,
through Peter's apophatic paradox
to Stevens' definition of a poem,
a mirror-image of Frost's melting ice,
were not the only lines that made me stop and wonder for more reasons than one. Firstly, which is it and, secondly, how tremendous.
One shouldn't encourage too much poetry about poetry but even though he's at it again in Canto, a state of the nation poem, one forgives Ian Duhig anything because he does it so well and so nicely,
is Prynne why now your average college nerdsworth
shuns Byron to study bloody Wordsworth?
In a wide-ranging survey, Canto shows Duhig's familiarity with the culture of 'young people', that dreaded phenomenon to some of us whose reference points are still in the 70's- although, at least the 1970's- and he was in sympathy with Goths in the last book. It all shows him in the kindest of lights.
The Wold Is Everything That Is The Case takes the famous line from every intellectual's second favourite Ludwig (some may put him first but I don't believe it) and makes lines out of it by omitting letters. It's a good trick if you can make it work, which it does here, but not as well as a poem from a little magazine I had in the 70's that did the same thing with 'Marriage is a natural state for women but an unnatural state for men' that brilliantly produced the grim reflection that,
Marriage ate me.
I wish I could find that magazine and credit the author.
On successive pages, Contracted Silences is three short poems on such things, most notably the Messiah Stradivarius that is contracted never to be played, such is its greatness; The White Page, about stretching out the ink of words into one straight line and re-making them as others,
like letters
Molly Bloom sends herself
with love's blind signature
and Bridled Vows, that makes a very realistic alternative to the somewhat discredited litany of 'love, honour and obey'.
It might have taken a while for me to find some books of new poetry to read this year but, once I put my mind to it, I knew what I was looking for and was not disappointed. That's two for the year's shortlist.
Both admirable books in their different ways. In among the welter burden of poetry being written compared to the incommensurate amount of poetry being read, there's enough to believe that there is sufficient quality if you can find it and I'm sure there's plenty more that I don't know about.
Being tremendously enjoyable, and basically just 'any good' in my chosen demotic, is another thing these two poets have in common.
