William Wootten http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/william_wootten en <![CDATA[Poetry special: Become an expert]]> http://www.newstatesman.com/node/154599 <div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>William Wootten chooses the best of this autumn&#039;s rich poetry crop</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>So October's poetry events have worked their magic and you're actually going to buy a new book of verse. The autumn poetry releases give you a rich and varied crop to choose from. Michael Longley's <em>Collected Poems</em> (Jonathan Cape, 368pp, £25) is an obvious highlight. Whether as nature poet or war poet, Longley has a sensitive, resonant lyric voice; and his <em>Collected Poems</em> is a reminder of just how formidable the generation of Northern Irish poets that also produced Seamus Heaney has proved to be. Also from Northern Ireland, though now resident in the States, is the altogether more postmodern Paul Muldoon. <em>Horse Latitudes</em> (Faber &amp; Faber, 118pp, £14.99) contains such conceits as text messages to the 19th-century poet Tom Moore and shows that Muldoon has lost none of his flair for riddle, rhyme and technical wizardry. The Australian poet Les Murray is a similarly big name whose bright and varied new book, <em>The Biplane Houses</em> (Carcanet, 91pp, £8.95), does not disappoint.</p> <p>However, in order to find what suits you, it might be worth browsing a little off the beaten track. If you suspect that you like your subject matter raw and your poetic forms well cooked, you should take a look at <strong>Marilyn Hacker</strong>'s <em>Essays on Departure: new and selected poems 1980-2005</em> (Carcanet, 180pp, £12.95). Turning her hand to sapphics, ghazals and pantoums, Hacker can bring order and dignity to the most emotionally charged descriptions, whether of sex or of the effects of cancer. If that seems a bit claustrophobic, you might be better suited to <em>This Life, This Life</em> (Bloodaxe, 224pp, £10.95), the new and selected poems of the novelist and travel writer <strong>Andrew Greig</strong>. Whether he's imagining the pilots of the Second World War or taking his poem up mountains and around the world, Greig's style tends to match the energy of his material. In his quieter, more lyrical moments, he can also be an affective love poet.</p> <p>Poets who are good performers don't always work well on the page, but some do. Guyanese-born <strong>John Agard</strong> brings wit, lightness of touch and an impressive sense of history to <em>We Brits</em> (Bloodaxe, 72pp, £7.95), a book that should be given to anyone liable to muse on the nature of British identity. Simon Armitage's <em>Tyranno saurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid</em> (Faber &amp; Faber, 78pp, £12.99) is considerably more ambitious than the cartoon title might suggest, its varied contents showing a talented and ambitious author able to move between light pieces and darker, weightier works.</p> <p>The ability of such poets to be "accessible" while also repaying rereading is sometimes used to reproach more "inaccessible" poets,especially those who would associate themselves with the notoriously difficult J H Prynne. There is, however, nothing forbidding about the <em>Journals</em> (Shearsman, 144pp, £9.95) of Prynne's friend R F Langley. Not only do they give you a way into Langley's excellent, though frequently elusive, poetry, but their beautiful descriptive passages and attendance to the details of the natural world bring to mind the letters and journals of the Romantics.</p> <p>Poetic translation is not only a service: it can be an art in itself. <em>Orpheus</em> (Faber &amp; Faber, 80pp, £12.99), <strong>Don Paterson</strong>'s "version" of Rilke's <em>Sonnets to Orpheus</em>, puts Rilke into well-made modern English sonnets: poems in their own right rather than pointers to another language. There is also an informative afterword, as interesting for what it says about Paterson as for what it says about Rilke. The poet Michael Hofmann usually translates only German prose. His decision to break this rule in order to bring Durs Grünbein's selected poems, <em>Ashes for Breakfast </em>(Faber &amp; Faber, 160pp, £12.99), into English for the first time is to be welcomed. The flexibility of form and register, style and subject, makes one admire poet and translator alike. The age of poetry certainly hasn't passed.</p> </div></div></div> Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:00:00 +0000 William Wootten 154599 at http://www.newstatesman.com <![CDATA[Reality bites]]> http://www.newstatesman.com/node/154247 <div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>&lt;strong&gt;Collected Poems: 1952-2006&lt;/strong&gt;</p> <p>Alan Brownjohn &lt;em&gt;Enitharmon, 480pp, £25&lt;/em&gt;</p> <p>ISBN</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>One of Alan Brownjohn's better-known poems, "Knightsbridge Display-window", recalls how, in the garden of his thrifty great-aunt, "Potatoes flowered/Blue, white and green,/English republican colours". The poem goes on to celebrate the family's commitment not to grand rhetoric, the crown and its army, but to "cutting bread thinly" and to a "commonwealth of sense". As it is with Brownjohn's bread and potatoes, so it is with his poetry: this is verse kept down to earth and thinly sliced.</p> <p>Distrustful of usurped powers, flummery and pretension, firm on their politics and morals, Brownjohn's poems have some good Puritan virtues. Yet frugality can serve up meagre fare. Those after strong emotion, flashing wit or complex meditation must look elsewhere. And while Brownjohn uses a variety of verse forms, his unexalted tone and diction, unmelodious prosody and fondness for making iambs sound like prose make this a matter of a formidable work ethic rather than of luxuriating in poetry's rich store.</p> <p>As a poet, Brownjohn's true affinities lie with Philip Larkin. Of Larkin's poetry, Brownjohn writes that it "has never been a matter of blinding revelations, mystical insights, expectations glitteringly fulfilled", but is where life "is something lived mundanely". This gets Larkin slightly wrong, but is a good guide to Brownjohn. For where Larkin's poetry habitually entertains the mystical, the revelatory and the glittering while facing up to truth or disillusionment, Brownjohn's dwells on the dullness, vice and disappointment of everyday life. The poems insistently remind one of the superior claims of the moral over the aesthetic, and the desirability of, in the words of <em>1066 and All That</em>'s account of the English civil war, "the right but repulsive" over the "wrong but wromantic".</p> <p>Ezra Pound declared poetry to be "news that stays news". Reading Brownjohn can be like leafing through old newspapers and magazines. A one-time Labour councillor and parliamentary candidate, he is an engaged and knowledgeable observer of the issues of the day. So if thoughts on "William Empson at Aldermaston" or "Heroic Couplets" on Simon Armitage and the Millennium Dome like to point out how other poets stand in relation to public events, Brownjohn couldn't be accused of hiding how he stands himself.</p> <p>Much of Brownjohn's work can be classed as <em>vers de société</em> or light verse. Nevertheless, his humour is less an outpouring of delight than a compensation for life's lack of it. And while he may pretend that it's best not to be "too satiric" - "Some people think that Elton John is singing,/ Some people can sit straight-faced through a Bob Dylan lyric" - he is incapable of resisting a good snap at whatever happens to irritate him.</p> <p>Brownjohn's great strength has been his hand-ling of age. As he has gone from disgruntled young man to grumpy old one, he has addressed the matters of the moment while keeping his core political and poetic values. The politics and morals can lack nuance, but there is value in his chronicling of how the "sick with power" are busy "afflicting the sad with none", and in some of his critiques of the corruptions and stupidities of the day. It may be, however, that Brownjohn will have to trust the social historians to ensure his posterity.</p> </div></div></div> Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000 William Wootten 154247 at http://www.newstatesman.com <![CDATA[God and the body]]> http://www.newstatesman.com/node/153110 <div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The Mystery of Things</p> <p>Clive Wilmer &lt;em&gt;Carcanet, 96pp, £8.95&lt;/em&gt;</p> <p>ISBN 1857548248</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Well-made, well-mannered and somewhat old-fashioned, the poems of Clive Wilmer have addressed themselves largely to matters of history and religion. If they've had an odour, it hasn't been of incense and sex so much as tweed jackets and C of E hassocks. In <em>The Mystery of Things</em>, Wilmer's old strengths are on show, but his preoccupations have gone south. As he puts it in "A Vision", a poem whose narrator describes watching a blow job in Italy: </p> <p><em>They're funny, Catholics: so<br />literal sometimes<br />About the things of the spirit,<br />even fleshly.</em></p> <p><em>The Mystery of Things</em> is, in this sense, a very Catholic book.</p> <p>Wilmer is a Cambridge don, a scholar of John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. He has helped translate much modern central European, especially Hungarian, poetry into English, and he has been loyal to his English poetic elders, editing the criticism of Thom Gunn and Donald Davie. Wilmer's poems are of a piece with this background; typically they make reference to Miklós Radnóti, or come dedicated to the Bulgarian Lyubomir Nikolov. Moreover, Wilmer evidently sees nothing wrong with starting a poem the way he would a lecture, as an opening line such as "Great Coxwell tithe barn (William Morris said)" indicates.</p> <p>In other words, his poetry has been unlikely to set many hearts racing. Which is why it comes as a surprise when, in "The Holy of Holies" (from the new collection), he juxtaposes an encounter with a prostitute on a building site in King's Cross with Flavius's role in the destruction of the Temple. Suddenly both the history and the setting get a little more heated. "Ravishing a building" and ravishing a woman become one and the same.</p> <p>Part II of the book is given over to "Stigmata", a sequence of poems that addresses religious mystery made flesh through such figures as St Francis and the 20th-century stigmatic Padre Pio, while simultaneously sketching a difficult affair with a woman in Italy. The woman's scarring from a knife wound brings to mind St Teresa's sexualised vision of being stabbed by an angel. Wilmer consciously writes in the tradition of these mystics, but whereas they viewed religious experience in erotic terms, here it is the other way around.</p> <p>Desire is "an unhealed lesion", lovers and saints have a devotion that is close to blasphemy - the poems evince worship mingled with disgust. While this does not always make for a comfortable read, it is, for Wilmer, a valuable departure. The formal constraints have some real constraining to do; the references to art and literature are felt and lived.</p> <p>Elsewhere, <em>The Mystery of Things</em> talks of God and nature rather than God and body. The short sequence "The Falls", in which Wilmer deliberately calls on an American poetic and pictorial tradition, is a respectable effort at something different. Yet its language - "The turbulent water with its bloom of froth/Hung like a curtain . . ." - is not as fresh or as potent as that of the erotic poems.</p> <p>Wilmer's first distinction as a poet was his ability in what an early poem, "Saxon Buckle", called "intricacy worked by skill". His best lyrics have always been like objects whose existence is independent of their maker and the time of their making. "Bottom's Dream" and "Bethel" are two such examples in this collec-tion. However, for all their strength of construction, and that they take their subjects from Shakespeare and the Bible, you can't help but read these new poems in the context of the wider drama of the book. Is it Titania, the divine or the woman in "Stigmata" "who had/ No voice, although she stirred my sense,/Who touched me, though she had no hands"?</p> <p><em>The Mystery of Things</em> is precariously poised between the sturdy and the unsettled, the decorous and the uninhibited. Wilmer remains true to his conservative poetic instincts while striking some rare and unusual notes. If it is no longer quite possible to go along with Ruth Padel's judgement that Wilmer's poems "breath an unfashionable, utterly English faith" in a language of "passionate reticence", that is largely to their credit.</p> </div></div></div> Mon, 01 May 2006 12:00:00 +0000 William Wootten 153110 at http://www.newstatesman.com