Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Another miscellany, which is how I like it.

I tried my best to get to grips with Kay Ryan’s Odd Blocks – Selected and New Poems (Carcanet, 2011), and liked her quirky, playful poetry to start with; but as the book wore on, it felt like I was reading a weird mixture of Lorine Niedecker, Anglo-Saxon riddles, the Martian Poets, Dr Seuss and the utterances of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.

Ryan was one of the poets new to me in the truly excellent anthology, Women’s Work, subtitled ‘Modern Women Poets Writing in English’, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, published by Seren in 2016 and available here. It’s a chunky book, divided up by (loose) themes, and is as readable and enjoyable as any anthology I’ve ever read. Come to think of it, I’ve rarely read an anthology all the way through like I did with this one. Other poets featured whom I was aware of but had never really read before include Dorianne Lux, Ruth Fainlight, Sarah Hannah and Olive Senior. I’ve since bought collections by some of them to add to my TBR pile. It reminded me that the purpose of an anthology should never be an attempt to be fully representative of a cohort or period, because that would be impossible; but rather to shine spotlights, however brief, on poets and poems as little known as some of the others are well-known. It’s that rubbing of shoulders which provides the delights for seasoned readers. That’s not to say, though, that Women’s Work wouldn’t make an excellent introduction for readers who haven’t read much contemporary poetry because it most certainly would.

For the Finding Poetry Book Club of which I’m a member, we read Abigail’s parry’s 2023 collection, I Think We’re Alone Now. On first reading, though I admired Parry’s craft, I didn’t care for the book at all, and thought it was trying too hard to be clever at the expense of feeling. I struggled to puck a poem I liked enough to read when the group of us met online, and then fundamentally misread the poem. However, by the end of the evening, I had a better understanding of, and liking for some of the poems in the collection, which, I suppose, is precisely why book clubs are a good idea.

I also started reading the Selected Poems of Denise Levertov, in a NDP edition from 2002, just three years after she died. I first read some of Levertov’s poems in my teens, but this is the first time I’ve read her in any depth. Like Gunn, Levertov was born and brought up in England and emigrated to America in her early Twenties; this, together with her mixed religious heritage and her own beliefs and values, made for a background which infuses her poetry. I’m not usually a great one for religious poetry of any kind, but her six-part poem ‘The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342–1416’ has an appealing clarity and tone. Levertov had had deep friendships with William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth, and was also associated with both the Black Mountain Poets and New York School, and all of those can be discerned in her poems; yet she was most definitely her own woman:

Julian laughing aloud, glad
with a most high inward happiness,

Julian open calmly to dismissive judgements
flung backward down the centuries—
‘delirium’, ‘hallucination’;

Julian walking under-water
on the green hills of moss, the detailed sand and seaweed.
pilgrim of the depths, unfearing;

twenty years later carefully retelling
each unfading vision, each
pondered understanding

How much this is a self-identification with Julian is hard to tell, but I find it more moving and memorable than, say, her poems of the Blitz, during which she worked as a nurse, and those protesting against the Vietnam War. The same goes for her incredible poems ‘The Change’ and ‘Enduring Love’, both as good as any poem about the dead that I’ve ever read. It seems that, again like Gunn, she suffered from being thought of as ‘English’ in America and ‘American’ in Britain, i.e. that she somehow remained neither one nor the other, and therefore much less significance was attached to her than she deserved. It’s good that Gunn is now belatedly getting more critical attention over here, but Levertov may well still be unjustly under-read and under-appreciated.

Thanks to the library, I read two memoirs in September: Eileen Atkins’s marvellous Will She Do?, which she wrote during the Covid lockdowns when acting was next to impossible, and Janice Galloway’s All Made Up (2012). Atkins’s descriptions of her working-class childhood in Tottenham and her circuitous route into her profession are brilliantly recalled and often very funny. Galloway’s book, detailing her hard early life in Ardrossan in the Sixties and Seventies, is largely memorable for the superb portrait painted of her (16 years older) sister, Cora, whose attitude to life seemed to invoke in Galloway both revulsion and admiration, and for Galloway’s own determination to make her way in the world.

The best novel I read in September was the black comedy Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale, originally published in 1988 and reissued by Daunt Books. It’s another book recommended in a review by the excellent Jacqui’s Wine Journal, here. Dale was 75 when it was published, yet it’s as fresh, masterful and richly funny as if it was the work of a current contemporary, especially in the wonderful dialogue. It’s as fine as any British novel of the 1980s that I can recall.