Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970
Edited by Richard Caddel, Peter Quatermain
publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1998
isbn: 0-81952-258-9
price: $22.95
Though England has seen a spate of recent anthologies of alternative U.K. poetry, this collection marks the first published in the States in over two decades.
Editors Caddel, a noted poet, and Quartermain, a prominent critic of postmodern poetry, collect a provocative and diverse range of work that is balanced between such trends as Caribbean dub poetry, the mellifluous, baroque lyric as it has been developed in Cambridge, London-based performance and concrete poetry, and outsider figures such as Bill Griffiths (an independent Anglo-Saxon scholar) and Tom Raworth, who first found strong support among stateside poets like Ted Berrigan.
The compelling introduction traces a nation's literary history that has had to come to terms with a number of factors: the troubled importation of globally influential American poetic practices (Projective, Beat), post-colonialism and the subversions of normative English by dialects or Caribbean "nation languages," and -- perhaps foremost -- the fact of an experimental English tradition that pre-dated twentieth century modernism, and which "stretches back to Claire, Blake, Smart, and the two Vaughans, Henry and Thomas" [tk].
The result has been a "fair field of folk" in contemporary British culture, which the editors see as "packed with chaotic overlays of cultures" -- certainly a different impression than conservative poets such as Larkin, Hughes, Hill or Heaney would ever have us believe.
The selections from the 55 poets are brief yet significant. Barry McSweeney, a self-styled Rimbaudian, is represented by a number of terse, direct poems that flaunt provocative language in a way that suggests his model:
Small
crawling piety, you deserve
many bombs
&
guns.
I ate your Christian fish.
[tk]
Denise Riley's subtle, tradition-conscious ear helps surface lines that are unexpectedly comforting:
Rain lyrics. Yes, then the rain lyrics fall.
I don't want absence to be this beautiful.
It shouldn't be; in fact I know it wasn't...
[tk]
Tom Raworth's "That More Simple Natural Time Tone Distortion," a sonic joy-ride of one-to-three word lines, is a contrast to his traditional lyric "Out of a Sudden":
the alphabet wonders
what it should do
paper feels useless
colours lose hue
while all musical notes
perform only in blue
[tk]
Tom Leonard's Glasgow Scots, not unlike John Agard's Guyanese-inflected idiom, brings to eye and ear a sweet, alien yet confident music that is unlike anything in the States. Leonard's portrait of lower middle class apathy is both vulnerable and boldly realist in a way suggesting Williams:
yi surta
keep trynti avoid it that's
thi difficulty bitty it
jist
no keep findn yirsell
sitn
wotchn thi telly ur
lookn oot thi windy
[...] wiv nay
cookn oil nwi need
potatoes
[tk]
Veronica Forrest-Thomson, a poet and critic who died at 28, cheekily mixes the linguistic investigations of Wittgenstein, the stagey learning of Eliot and the languor of Keats, to create monologues that entertain as they dally with subversion:
Though my deserted frying pans lie around me
I do not want to make it cohere.
Hung up to dry for fishing lines on the side of grey wharf of Lethe.
Old, we love each other and know more.
[tk]
Chris Cheek, Maggie O'Sullivan and concrete poet Bob Cobbing are all well represented, as well as important figures responsible for the influx of New American poetry to the islands, Eric Mottram, Roy Fisher and Andrew Crozier.
This is an important sourcebook to a literature that is probably more marked by the postcolonial condition than that of the United States, with fewer heroes but with, perhaps, more fruitful divergences from the main modernist line.
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