This is not a new book but is worth a slightly belated look. It is seven lectures or talks given in Newcastle, Durham and Ledbury before being brought together in this volume in 2017. Anne begins with a poem called How Poems Arrive that exemplifies much of what she goes on to say about the process of poetry, a brilliant poem the only problem with it being that it is a poem only about poetry whereas something like The Thought-Fox is also about the fox.The recurring theme is how poems are sound, ahead of meaning - 'how poems are not about', and form and content somehow merge. She cites Elizabeth Bishop among others as an exemplar of how poems are best done. She is preaching to the converted when I read her saying so although I wouldn't sign up to any such manifesto and would prefer to stress that any poem can succeed on whatever terms it chooses. Or fail. Poets that write about poetry inevitably tend to make their way of doing it the prescribed way of doing it and tend to close off all areas of the endeavour that don't comply with theirs.
Anne's agenda, in as far as it can be called such, is very close to what I'd like to think is mine, though, and these pieces are as much of a pleasure to see expressed those things I'd like to say but are best left to those who are better qualified to say them, as in the interviews that Norman MacCaig gave elsewhere.
She is more of an admirer of Robert Frost than I am but one comes away more persuaded by someone who you recognize as wise counsel and I was grateful of her insights into Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens, which is a way into his poetry even if it is an early poem not typical of his later, more opaque style. She also explains how certain contemporary poetry, for her and others among us, lost its way,
To my old, bound-to-be-disapproving eyes it looks as if our youth culture, happy with its gunge-level clothes, punk music and junk food, has been pleased to spawn a kind of throwaway poetry that everyone is encouraged to enjoy (as at a poetry slam) but no one much cares to remember.
If, on the one hand, modernism took a high-church, difficult line, it is not to say that any counter-revolution should dispense with rigour completely.
American poets are the focus of much of her discussion, as well as Auden, both as paragon examples and those whose practice she doesn't always approve of. The final piece is a talk re-assessing her biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame, which is no less sympathetic to the role Ted Hughes played in her tragedy but shifts what blame can be allocated more towards the psychiatric treatments of the 1950's.
Anne was one of the first to publish commentary on Elizabeth Bishop's poems and although I have a fair collection of books on Ms. Bishop, I don't have hers. Writing as lucid and intelligent as hers is valuable and not to be missed so I'll soon be having a look at that and whatever else there is, including more of the poems that I don't have enough of.
