Signed Poetry Books - Douglas Dunn

It was decided over dinner at Oxford that Douglas Dunn would have been a bigger name if Tony Harrison had not been there in his way, and so would Michael Longley had it not been for Heaney.

It wasn't quite so much 'decided' as John Sears made the point and I had to agree. But there are worse things than not being the standard bearer of a generation and Douglas Dunn is a worthy and redoubtable poet and the world would benefit from having more poets like him rather than congratulating him for having a reputation that survived in the shadow of others who were considered somehow greater.

If his Elegies are to remain his best remembered work then Dante's Drum-kit, Northlight and The Year's Afternoon show that he was a genuine artist, one whose work continued to improve and not one who established a reputation with an early book and then tried to continue repeating its success. That is one way I've sometimes differentiated between a class act and a one-trick pony.

Aldeburgh

Gill reports from Latitude on the poets-
Luke Wright, Jackie Kay, Tim Turnbull, Rhian Edwards, Elvis McGonagall- all really good. We will have to take her word for that. The opinions expressed on this website are not necessarily those of David Green (Books).

But the best fish and chips ever were in Aldeburgh and so was Maggi Hambling's Scallop shell.

Matthew Welton

Matthew Welton, 'We needed coffee but...' (Carcanet)

It's tempting to say that Matthew Welton belongs in a category of his own but then, after you have made a list of related poets, composers and artists, it seems like a redundant thing to say.

I was partially but in those places hugely impressed with his first book, The Book of Matthew, having seen somewhere the fairly mainstream poem London sundays. The book proved to be more experimental, idiosyncratic and self-absorbed than that poem had led one to expect but it was an impressive if slightly dubious debut book. Thus the second book, coming along just when one realizes one hasn't thought about the author for quite some time, was ordered on sight with some anticipation.

As with the first book, it proves to divide opinion even among a group of one. Owing more of a debt to concrete poetry and other such avant-garde projects, the book is more 'retro' than 'cutting edge'. This sort of experimentalism has been around a long time now and, as Auden once sagely observed, everything changes but the avant-garde. Thus this book is redolent of the 1960's, kaftans, hashish and I found myself wishing that the Vietnam War could be brought to an end.

In his one-off status, Welton is a bit like Peter Reading but is nowhere near angry enough to emulate him, so it's Frank Kuppner that springs to mind, and John Cage and Philip Glass. In fact, all that the section Four-letter words establishes is that Welton is familiar with Yoko Ono's Grapefruit.

The sequence Virtual airport is ambient poetry evoking a grey, anonymous alienated world in a brave, underwhelming opening.

vier among the Four-letter word poems is an encyclopedic slew of words that look like but aren't swear words that is guaranteed to amuse any intelligent 13 year old boy.

South Korea and Japan 2002 follows the World Cup tournament, cleverly placing its best line,

The wind holds off like an overthoughtful southpaw.

on page 66 so that the reader will return again and again to page 66 like an England supporter still referring back to '66.

The best poem is I must say that at first it was difficult work which is a set of variations on that line in resourceful and ingenious ways. I have posted my own effort in this area One of Oscar's, written some months ago, to illustrate what sort of thing it is. My poem is only 14 lines and the friends I showed it to then were distinctly unimpressed by it so Welton's resourcefulness and ingenuity in this area is clearly much greater than mine.

Six poems by themselves are the most old-fashionedly avant garde in the book, although it is an interesting game to find poems that each of them share their form with. For example, The poem to itself is Larkin's This Be The Verse.

But in Dr. Suss saves it's hypnotic, mesmerising crescendo for the big finale. The book is well-organized enough to have built to a big finish. Its repetitive phrasing and occasionally amusing variations need to be read in full rather than skimmed and it makes for a soothing diversion. Welton comes across as a downbeat personality using his meticulous modernist sensibility to find illuminating, grey music in a dreary, largely soulless world. It is vaguely comforting and as fascinating and meaningless as a drug. On Health & Safety grounds, it should not be read while listening to any album by Moby.

There's no way you could recommend it to a mainstream poetry reader but anyone still enjoying the intoxicating, ground-breaking old 1960's will presumably love it. The mainstream has continued to move on, though.

One of Oscar's

One of Oscar’s

for Gill

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

A pot man arrives in time for a missed pint.
A pet cat’s nine lives are memories of a paw print.
A pope can arrive any time for an appointment.
Apple pie is sublime any time but at this point.
A prank satisfies many things for a miscreant.
A potter can’t abide such a thing as a missed pink.
A poseur isn’t wise when he sings the descant.
An IP’s advertised everywhere on a mouse mat.
A pilot can drive any kind of air transport.
A play can contrive many things from a mad prince.
A plant can thrive anywhere but a Hotpoint.
Ascot is a nice place for a horse race.
A priest can decide anything in a dispute.
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Poetry in the Weekend Newspapers

Today's Guardian had a very generous collection of poems on the wars in Iraq and/or Afghanistan by poets invited by Carol Ann Duffy. It made me buy a different newspaper than the one I'd usually get on a Saturday morning. But to advertise Paul Muldoon on the front cover and then find he had only extended himself to two lines caused some disappointment even if we had no right to expect another Incantata.
And it is to be assumed that poets aren't generally in favour of wars these days. I'm not. There is very little reason for British soldiers to be in those faraway places about which our leaders appear to know hardly anything at all. But it doesn't make me want to write poems about the issue and perhaps some of these poems were written because the poets thought they ought to, having been asked. That said, Duffy herself and Ian Duhig made a good job of it and O'Brien turned out some typically O'Brien directives.
Last week, The Observer magazine featured an interview with the highly interviewable Seamus Heaney, at 70. I nearly jumped to it, thinking it was his birthday now, and nearly wrote my own little tribute. But his birthday was in April. However, I'd still like to share my favourite Heaney poem, A Brigid's Girdle, with you, because it is brilliant. And for no other reason.

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/3655/heaney.html

Signed Poetry Books - Wendy Cope

As a bloke poet, faced with the history of Eng Lit in which the vast majority of canonical names are also blokes, one sometimes feels pressured to give special attention to female poets even if 8 out of one's favourite 10 poets, at the very least, are male. (The two are Duffy and Plath, if you really want to know).

The discussion goes on forever about the socio-political reasons why this might be so and I'd like not to involve myself too deeply in that discussion because it's the words I'm in it for, just the words.

So I don't include dear Wendy here as a token, to try to get my quota of lady poets up, it is because I admire her work. She has gained a massive reputation on the basis of a small body of work, much of which one might call 'light verse' and that is quite an achievement. This copy of If I Don't Know was bargainesque on e-Bay and it's a great book even if someone called Tim seems to have tired of it.

At the Barriers - On the Poetry of Thom Gunn

ed. Joshua Weiner, At the Barriers, On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (The University of Chicago Press)

It's always useful to find out that one's been missing the point for the last thirty-odd years. Neil Powell explains in his essay Coming Out Fighting that Thom Gunn's famous lines, 'I praised the overdogs from Alexander / To those who would not play with Stephen Spender' 'is not to attack Spender but to sympathize with him...who wanted to play with the rough boys every bit as much as Gunn did'. I'm still not quite convinced, though, since Gunn himself is quoted much later in the book as saying 'I was against a certain namby-pambiness' and in any case Gunn eventually disowned the poem so it's all over now.
This new collection of essays on Gunn, a few of which we have seen already, offers a number of new and valuable insights, as well as others that we could have managed without. They follow a chronological sequence through Gunn's ever-developing career but with a number of authors each contributing their own view of similar material, using the same reference points, there is a slightly repetitive echo effect going on within it.
Gunn's early career was all about a series of poses, and throughout his career he adopted a variety of attitudes like poetry's answer to David Bowie, superficially looking different but still the same underneath. But the poses were gradually shed as he developed and, if it means anything at all to say so, he was perhaps a Romantic poet working in a classical tradition.
He is a cerebral poet, particularly in his earlier work, and critics are regularly lured into over-intellectualizing. Just how Gunn's Anglo-American position is manifested or how Misanthropos
verbalizes a non-verbal experience are questions that we may never have needed to address but Weiner's essay does it anyway. Misanthropos is a seminal Gunn poem thematically as a man who thought he was the last on earth makes contact with some others, but it isn't a very good one and labouring its significance isn't helpful.
August Kleinzahler is better, highlighting striking comparisons with Baudelaire in Gunn's poems. Paul Muldoon astutely spots a lexical correspondance between Gunn's Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt about a tattoo artist and Ted Hughes' The Thought Fox about a poem being printed. David Gewanter follows a theme through from The Wound to Lament on 'the body's adventure', including a parallel between the openness to experience and the way 'the [AIDS] virus renders the body open and defenceless'. Tom Sleigh veers a little too far from the subject area by discussing how Gunn reconciled the hedonistic lifestyle with domestic stability and makes it a civic issue. But Brain Teare occupies sixty pages of our reading lives with a discussion of 'gay poetry' despite the fact that Gunn had said he didn't regard himself as such but as a 'poet of everything', which any poet worthy of the name ought to be. Gunn at least is far too good to be limited by such a label and it is only much poorer writers that need such epithets to give their work the appearance of some significance. In the same way that there isn't, or didn't ought to be, a need for such a thing as women's poetry, 'gay poetry' is a non-starter, too, but since Teare has won an award for it, he is unlikely to agree. Unfortunately critics and commentators often use their subject as a way of writing about themselves and that is what Teare, to the deteriment of this volume, has done here.
Poetry, above all, is concerned with the words, the words in the poems. The sub-title of this book, On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, suggests that it is going to discuss the poetry but far too much time is spent by academics developing their own avenues of thought away from the poems and such work is of limited use or interest. If it does nothing else, it makes one return gratefully to the poems themselves.