F.W. Harvey, Soldier, Poet

 Now that we are almost post-Muldoon and by so much so far too clever for our own good, we need to bear in mind that it wasn't always thus and poetry had to be written in a pre-Ezra, pre-Eliot world in the same way that pop music was once Bing Crosby's easy-going charm before, for instance, Bowie, Beefheart, Funkadelic - by all means provide your own examples - but I'm just back from seeing my great nephew and niece, 8 and 6 years old respectively, for who The Prodigy are a commonplace part of their canon.

I picked up F.W. Harvey, Soldier, Poet by Anthony Boden for its Gloucester interest more than any potential poetic excellence or insight but one ends up admiring him, possibly more as a man and his war efforts but still somewhat for his poems that achieve more than one might have thought, more than his friend Ivor Gurney's perhaps but Gurney's talents might have been more musical than purely literary.

I'm rarely more impressed than when a friend expresses better than I ever could something that needed to be said but I hadn't and Gurney's poems are 'clunky'. No amount of deep love for Gloucestershire makes for good poetry if the rhythm and music aren't there and, for a musician, Ivor can be discordant in his awkward lines but within the limited range of the pre-Modernist language that was thought to be 'poetry' in his day, Harvey is a talent.

By now he's of more interest for his reportage as a prisoner of war, his derring-do and perhaps, for one like me who can admire the waste of talent, how so little came of it in later life, why he's not famous, not even as well-known as Mad Gurney. If he can be regarded as a 'poor man's Edward Thomas', I think he'd be fine with that. That's not a bad thing to have been. One gets the idea that he was very capable. One doesn't have to read the biographies of 'poets' only for the poetry because it's not always the case that the best poems came from the most endearing people.

We should take chances on books more often. But, then again, I'm almost a victim of commercial radio advertising. It was on Times Radio, on an advert, that I first heard there's a new book by Graham Swift so my next job is to order it. I would have found out anyway and surely most like-minded readers would, too. I'm surprised that there's an advertising campaign for a new book by Graham Swift when anybody and everybody who ever read Mothering Sunday will read anything and everything he ever publishes in the hope it will be as good even though it won't be.