I wouldn't want to be one who bought books because they had won prizes. I had been aware of Three Poems before it won the T.S. Eliot Prize, saw an extract and decided against it but, never knowingly not wanting to give anything a fair chance, I looked again after the award and spent a few days looking forward to its arrival.You, Very Young in New York, the first of the three long poems - and how much credit does Hannah gain by not calling any of them 'sequences', is an impressive piece of ventiloquism, in a voice redolent of Frank O'Hara, August Kleinzahler, maybe John Ashbery and the prolix, late Auden. I was already wondering if this really was the best poetry book of 2018 and I'd missed the boat in settling on Derek Mahon for my own purposes.
New York has seen it all, knows it all and has done most of it and the ennui of Hannah's poem adopts that attitude as well as anybody since Lou Reed,
sated
By self-abjection
- the plenitude of life going on around the sameness experienced inside looks full of potential in long lines accommodated by the book's page dimensions so that they don't need extra indentation but one can only think that the emptiness inside is the same for everybody else.
It is 'poetry-chic', which is not to say that fashionable poetry was ever anything else, from Chaucer importing Italian influences, through Elizabethan sonneteering to Ezra's doctoring of English poetry, and it is not to say that it's anything other than profound pastiche, but it's still chic.
I was interested enough to look up more about Hannah and found, on her Oxford University website entry, that she argues,
that the prosody of modern poetry is, to a large extent, determined by practices of lexical and syntactic repetition: reliance on noun-compounds and left-stressed polysyllabic words; techniques of parallelism and anaphora; and a preference for non-finite over finite verbs.
and then we wonder why the likes of Stephen Fry and Jeremy Paxman accuse contemporary poetry of such things as talking to itself, elitism and having no general appeal.
I don't mind if it does, if it is or if it doesn't but poets can't complain about being marginalized if that's what they do. It is as if the centre cannot hold, it is 150 years since Tennyson was a poet and national figure and because there is a feeling that the elite are playing their own game, the likes of UKIP or Donald Trump are the benefactors of a backlash and thus Kate Tempest becomes the poet to represent what poetry is.
It might have happened before without me noticing but one of the judges of the T.S. Eliot Prize is here the first listed in those acknowledged as having 'scrutinized early drafts of these poems', who is then subliminally evoked in an adjective on page 18. It is a small world, I know, but I hadn't realized that the poetry world folded into itself quite so readily.
The New York poem is a fine thing and is only revealed as pastiche when one embarks on Repeat Until Time, which isn't.
It is an associative, concatenated meditation with something Four Quartets about it, heavier on ideas than it is on music and more concern with talking about 'form' that it is ready to demonstrate, which is notwithstanding the book's admirable stock of good lines, like, the 'diminished Mondrian' or,
The river cracks, slides on, a parquet floor for hens.
One might be surprised that Larkin is cited among those acknowledged for quotations among such as Theodor Adorno, Fitzgerald, Heraclitus, Shelley, Petronius and others valued for other than their uncool fogeyness. But that might be because Larkin is quoted at an angle if not quite misquoted.
Having had possibly The Trees and certainly Days alluded to, the 'almost-instincts of minor poets' are mentioned in order to ready us for,
What will survive of us?
Larkin thought it might be 'love',
But couldn't prove it.
But Hannah, or the 'persona' in her poem (which I doubt there is), is surely reading him backwards. What An Arundel Tomb did was go to great lengths to hollow out from beneath it all that there was beneath the memorable line that Larkin has been remembered for, which is irony upon irony for an ironist, especially when misread by an Oxford professor whose sense of irony isn't much.
The third poem, The Sandpit After Rain, is graphic with the crises of difficult childbirth and, at the other end of the life cycle, difficult dying. If the writing about sex earlier in the book might have challenged Murakami's win in the Bad Sex in Fiction Award had it been fiction or if nearly all writing about sex is surely awful, Hannah is first-hand and vivid on these big events while still carrying forward from New York a cynicism that refuses to Keatsify or pretend it's anything but what it is.
It is powerful writing and not without great lines,
My life is at a distance from my life
Like the Telegraph announcements column,
etc.
but it can seem needily confessional without being Sylvia, sometimes telling without showing as if, having forgotten how well it inhabited other voices in the first poem, it suddenly needs (lordhavemercy) to go back to a workshop to be reminded how to be impersonal.
I am reminded by this book how English poetry now is thought about and done by some very clever people but not, at this level, read by anybody outside of that select constituency. For all the things that I can admire about Three Poems, it raises more negative issues than its good points can compensate for. And, if that is where prize-winning poetry is at the moment, I'll have to very reluctantly be with Fry and Paxman, finish the biography of Tennyson I'm reading and reflect that it was ever thus.
That which is the height of fashion one year can look a bit daft a few years later.