Review Methods

How I Review a Book of Poetry

(and why…)

 

 

 

Today, readers of poetry may sniff their versy snuff online, through blogs, through audio compilations, or e-books, Youtube clips, or live performances (all of which have their own importance), nevertheless, I am focusing in the HPR on the old-world object of a book. So, the title of this piece says it all – the key word is here ‘book’ not ‘poem’ – this journal of review is about books of poems rather than poems in single form. It is about how poems lean up against other poems inside covers and between title pages, cover notes, biographies, and praiseworthy quotes from other authors - and how all this propinquity builds into something (intended or not) that makes greater sense as a thing in my hands which I paw through in delighted expectation – a book of poetry.  

 

I am very interested here in how a poet firstly constructs a poem, but then carries on in all the joy and dread of composition and constructs a book from all the poems that have been gathered – for what purpose – perhaps we will never really know. All or some of these poems may fit into an enlightening relationship with each other or create an atmosphere in their togetherness that I want to, at the very least, outline if not investigate. Sometimes this process of book construction is carried out by the poet by happy accident – working as some drugged up William S. Burroughs throwing pages on the floor and publishing them in the order that they are randomly harvested. Sometimes a poetry book is made by very obvious theme, sometimes to discretely represent a stage of a poet’s writerly development, sometimes just inexplicably, sometimes by grand narrational intent. It is this last category that fascinates me the most. So, hanging over this enterprise beyond all other spirits I could summon is the ghost of the Australian poet Dorothy Porter (1954-2008). Her poetic novels Akhenaten (1992), The Monkey’s Mask (1994), and A Wild Surmise (2002). These stand as epitomes of the “complete” volume of [contemporary] poetry in my mind. They have had their impact on me and highlight what a ‘book’ of poetry can be as a tight unitary thing. I mention her not because all poetry must be a unity in its narration or theme, but I just want to say that this is something I hunt for.

 

In the reviews on this website will be, I admit it, looking for themes when, perhaps, there are few except for the obvious link of the poet’s own skill and worldview. The opposite of the overall narrative coherence deployed by Porter manifests in a million examples but let me choose one: take A.D. Hope’s A Late Picking (1975). This work seems, at first glance, a much more atomised, random selection of poems. Nevertheless, all these works are united by at least two commonalities. Firstly, they are all by Hope and are representative of his bold modern/Augustan style. Secondly, they are written as his working career comes to an end. This last theme, discrete as it is, still gives the critic a chance to review this work by the way these poems stand against each other and comment upon their author’s increasing age and his retirement. Still, the manner in which the likes of Porter and Hope constructed such books using the building blocks of their poems will be the main concern of this review.

 

Anthologies and collections on a theme built from the writings of many poets will not be covered here. And when it comes to single authors, this journal of review will care much less about “collected” volumes – those books which are put together on the carcasses of a poet’s first books. In these “collected” compilations, the poet themselves or an editor takes bits and pieces of earlier books and shoves them together in a kind of in memoriam trace element of the poet’s essence which is then offered up to posterity. In a world where print-on-demand didn’t yet exist, these works had their purpose in extending the afterlife of a poet’s renown. To give a related example, we might look at The Best 100 Poems of Dorothy Porter (2013). This was an anthology of Porter’s work put together after her death. It is a work built on the graves of those excitements which accompanied the appearance of her original purpose-built editions. It’s title woefully suggests that she wrote poems of varying quality and 100 of them could be said to be the best. I think raised out of their narrative contexts, such an editorial choice becomes fatuous. To celebrate this kind of book then let us have also The 100 Best Bits of Milton or Shakespeare’s Sonnets – Just The Top 99. Of course, since 2013 the publishing world has changed remarkably. So, no doubt the editor of The Best 100 Poems had no greater intent than keeping Porter’s legacy alive and appreciated. But I would rather read and review her original editions.

 

The focus on the “book” of poetry is also driven by the fact that I am a very nutty bibliophile. At my home and at my office, poetry books arrive in the mail as a daily event. And at each landing an excitement courses through me that drives the enthusiasm that powers this review series. These arrivals and excitements are a little celebration. I remain delighted that books of poetry are still, in our Web 2.0 age, being produced. I sometimes hold these books in my hands and ask: How can this be? How do we keep doing this as the world so radically changes? The HPR is a testament to the resilience of the poetry book as cherished object and to the will of poets to keep creating such things. To all poets who have put out an entire book, Bukowski’s words seem most appropriate here – “you are marvellous.”

 

I celebrate the poet and their book because it is clearly a struggle to get a book of poems into our world. Look at publisher websites! It is poets (and playwrights) who are the modern literary equivalent of the Negro, the Polack, the Irishman, or the mangey dog. Just as chauvinistic taverns once refused to serve these outcasts of humanity, now most publishers make clear on their landing pages that only the novelist or the popular non-fiction writing celebrity need apply. Only the prose writer is truly, fully human in the shitty little republic of letters that has been left to us by the cyclopses who guard the present marketplace. To get a book of poems out then, the poet must do it themselves, or appeal to small enthusiastic presses that focus on poetry, or appeal to the small number of brave and dedicated major houses like Faber, like Norton, like Farrar, Straus and Giroux that keep on at the idea that literature extends slightly beyond the door-stop-thick New York Times best-selling word-brick.   

 

A book of poetry then represents a very special triumph of will – it is the poet punching through complex compositional, editing, and production processes, making sure every single word earns its place, and then through the reject-filled minefield of possible acceptance, the careful management of connections in the industry, and through endless and inane schmoozing sessions to achieve something remarkable – a book of poetry. Such enormous personal triumphs should always be acknowledged and, where the book’s quality suggests it, this triumph should be more than just honoured. Given the trouble involved in making a poetry book, that is, putting together a small offering to the immemorial lineage of verse that weaves through the bloodlines of our species – the absolute best praise these books deserve is the praise of being read carefully. Very carefully. And the best way to force myself to read a book of poetry as carefully as I can is by reviewing it. Thus, a review can carry out this kind of honouring – even though to take someone’s carefully constructed verse and recontextualise it into a review is impossible, but here let me be impossible. To get one of these reviews done, I slowly, repeatedly, carefully read and re-read the book at hand. This means I get to engage with these books far more deeply than if I just read them in passing. By committing myself to a slow reading and then a commentary upon a book of poetry, I find delights - plays on words, subtexts, emotional depths, and cleverness that I might miss on the first read. I find metaphors within metaphors and watch the poetry at work deep from within. And sometimes I can develop small theories, expand on social and historical contexts, and put the book into some wider frame – all so the reader of these reviews might appreciate their reading experience a little more when they track down for themselves one of the books I overhaul here.  

 

Because I am focusing in this review on the poetry books that come through my letter box, I will not be displaying any kind of chronological chauvinism in my output. I review here both the new and the old, the second hand, the well-used, the long-forgotten, and I put these in amongst works that were published just yesterday. This will cause problems, my main aim here is to encourage others to read and appreciate books of poetry, but what of supply?

 

Warning: a book that I get my hands on may well be long out of print and hard to track down. I hope, in the very least, Google Books will help you find the original tome in virtual form if nothing else – or that a volume you read about here and afterwards desire to read yourself is waiting for you on some on-line depository for the purchasing, or orderable through your library or through an inter-library loan, or that its poems are archived on a site dedicated to that kind of remembrance.

 

But just as it is exciting to find a book that has been lost to the second-hand shelves, it is equally exciting to review the book of a hopeful first-timer who has just pressed the ‘publish’ button on their online self-publishing distribution interface. The new will feature strongly here but not exclusively.

 

And now – Some of the Biases of the HPR.

 

There will always be biases. I might note a few of the substantial ones that I can see myself. As you read these reviews you will find others. The first is that I am a professional scholar – so I will be coming at the poetry I review here from the position of a reference fanatic, an allusion explainer, and a footnote fetishist. Moreover, I have spent so long studying religion, that it is second nature for me to be the most eager to explain away all mysteries, occlusions, and esoteric dimensions of art. It is what I am paid to do by my secular institution. What may seem like grace to you might be for me more a sociological aberrance… So, I may very well provide solid social reasons for why something that may seem, at first glance, angelic or miraculous, is actually, under sober academic examination, just part of the complex matrix of human experience. Such an approach is not always perfectly helpful to the mystic wishing to engage with the ineffable through poetry. The other problem with being a scholar is that I find it very easy to slip into a register of language that is very far from the everyday. In these reviews, I will try not to shoe-horn the everyday experiences we find in poetry into an elite technical language. But where deploying an elite technical language is the only way I can explain myself, I may find I have no other option. As my main aim is to celebrate poetry and encourage people to read more poetry – I will do my best to explain myself as I go in a language that is open and helpful. But then, English does have one of the most expansive vocabularies on earth, do excuse me if I revel occasionally in the otiose, recondite, and obscure corners of our tongue.

 

A lesser bias might sneak in as well… I tend to live my life as a nice, polite, cis-gender- presenting, middle class white man living well on indigenous land whose sovereignty was never ceded. I am housed inside a great isolated and obsessively Anglophone continent that is Australia. These facts will generate their own biases. But there are factors in my life that interrupt these points and help lift me out of my comfort on occasion. The first being that I am only one generation away from being ghetto-dwelling, unpatriotic, Irish-Catholic scum. That is, my immediate ancestors were kept by colonialist authorities a long way away from the white privilege that is, thanks to some powerful social transformations, now all mine. The second point is that I have spent my life working within the multi-cultural suburbs of Sydney and with East Asians in particular to document the history of their sacred systems and translate the scriptures of their faith. So, while I will never be pure of heart in my ability to empathise with all souls at all times, I do have some small amount of cross-cultural competency based on years of embedded living with (mainly) Vietnamese communities - and will try to expand upon these cross-cultural sensitivities as often as I can.          

 

And then we come to the last and perhaps most significant bias here. My main quest is to get people excited about books of poetry. It means that I tend to review works that really get their claw into me and are, as a consequence, worth the review because there is something amazing, or gripping, or compelling, or at least very noteworthy going on. If I really hate a book of poems, if there is no claw put into the soft flesh of my interest - then I probably won’t review the book. That is, my governing instinct is to leave the bad book alone (and I do read many bad books of poetry). Thus, the following reviews will not be about the sneer, the depreciative gaze, the invective trotted out, the withering explanation of why something is sub-standard, or a full-on excoriation about the continued existence of a poet – firstly life is too short and secondly I don’t possess the catty genius of a Jonathon Meads.

 

This journal seeks above all to celebrate and to encourage.

 

And my final bias comes back to the bibliophillia I admitted above. Although we might mainly read a book for the words that are in it, that’s not the entire experience. Not for me anyway. There’s a feel to a book that can be charmingly unique, entrancing, sometimes even confronting. So, in the following assessments, I start the review process not by the virtual idea of a poem, or the digital possibilities of verse but with the concrete idea of a book as it sits in my hands. That is, with an object that almost immediately broadcasts a multiplicity of meanings to us as a real-world object. Virtual objects here are spurned.

 

A book brings with it its age, a chronological context, layout, front, atmosphere, touch, and smell. It tells us in the grey material – the blurb on the back cover, the inside flaps, the author description, its purpose and what expectation we should have when we begin reading it. We hold it in our hands and see that it’s a hardback, paperback, that it has been bound commercially or by hand – that the pages are folded over quires, cut open and with a rusty pair of staples holding it together or…. It may be something like the most informal of chapbooks… or a special edition. It may come fully illustrated, or with a slipcase - as if it is a Classic. The fonts used can unveil secrets of the design - what is it that the poet, designer, and publisher are trying to say beyond words? How noteworthy is the pagination? Does all this signal professional design or amateur enthusiasm? What are the colours used on the cover or the dustjacket and how might they call to our eyes? And the images used… You’ll find in the following reviews that most of these details and experiences are omitted – but where they substantially matter, they’ll certainly become part of my assessment. The sensuality of a book is never far from my mind.

 

Somewhere in all this I might start focusing on how the book takes its place in the long history of publishing in the English-language (and, occasionally, other languages I read). I shall consider what this ‘place’ means for the poems? What contribution do they make? Sometimes it can mean a lot. For example, some of the books in my poetry collection come from England in the early 1940s. This period of poetry production amazes me because, if we look to the immediate historical context, the world was engulfed in war. London was burning. Why were war resources being diverted during the blitz, I wonder, to make poetry books? Was poetry that essential? Was poetry one of the things they were fighting for? The possible answers mostly leave me warm and fuzzy – that even in the depth of Luftwaffe raids, English (and Australian, Canadian, and more obviously American publishers) were still hard at work bringing out books of verse – just as necessary as the rest of the gamut of cultural production at that time… and even with the end of civilization wavering on the horizon, the presses still rolled…

 

It is the seeming age of a book also lets me set up a range of expectations – what “fashion” of verse might the book fit into – highly formal, concrete, free... Does the volume look politically challenging, or is it signalling a theme? Will the contents of the book be of its age – or will it sit uneasily – or excitingly out of its times? When the content of a book does not conform to its expected age and place, I tend to like it far more because it signals authorial courage and daring - although this can sometimes turn out to be authorial ignorance.

 

This brings me to ‘place’ and place. By the first concept I mean the work’s place in the history of poetry itself (rather than as a national poetry). This is a gargantuan calculation that I inexpertly make and sometimes avoid – but where does poetry start? For me it is there somewhere in the arrangement of bison, rhinoceroses, and horses we find in the cave art of Lascaux, or Trois Freres, or Chauvet. That’s where poetic language seems to start… At that place where humans depict and re-arrange the world on their own, more abstract, terms. But what can a poem in recent times and in English have to say in light of the thousands of years of the continuous history of, for example, Chinese poetry? Or the Central Asian, South Asian, and Arabic traditions of oral performance where poetry was used to bind tribal groups together and hurled them, stirred-up and blood-thirsty, into war? Or the magical poetry of the shamanic tradition, or the love poetry of indigenous Australia? Or so many other traditions I have so lightly studied from East Asia to South America? An often-unaddressed question still lingers over every book - where might this work fit? Where might one place it in a ‘Western’ tradition (a highly-constructed one) that extends back to the world assumptions encoded in Indo-European language constructions, and Mesopotamian semitic expressions, passes through Greece and Rome and breaks into the various languages of Modernity? It is a question that all books should be able to answer in their own way – but it is an answer that is not always as clear.

 

Then there is “place” – the other place – where does the book seem to be from in a geographical (and chronological) sense. London? New York? Established hubs of publishing – places where it is assumed that “place” doesn’t matter (because ironically it is London or New York). But compare two books that I want to review in the next few instalments of the HPR – consider Peter Hick’s One Hundred Thousand Australian Love Songs. This book signals repeatedly that it emerges from left-wing circles in and around Adelaide in the mid 1970s. This “place” backs up the earnestness of the project – which is local, hand-made, and calling out for social justice and solidarity. Then look at Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche (2019). This work is published by Faber – so we see the old establishment hub of London disseminating the work of one of its stable of poets – but the blurb on the inside cover gives us the idea that the content is going to be closely related to China, to Hong Kong – and this establishes tensions between East Asia, the British colonial heritage radiating from a former colony, and an abiding connection to an old, foggy, Brexity, capital that is presently fighting to relinquish its weird-arse dream of empire as the Tories drag it back into that lone pirate state of the late 1500s. All this has some impact on Mary Jean’s verses – but what? In the following reviews, I think I want to take a case-by-case assessment of much of this and see what themes can be established both historically and in a contemporary sense. 

 

In doing this, I will keep coming back to the fact of the book. And what the poetry book is seeking to do more than most things is to seduce the reader. Perhaps through shock, or radical difference, but most often through sweetness and intrigue and the promise of shared human experience – the poetry book is trying to seem both of its genre (reassuring regards how we place it and begin to understand it) and uniquely different within that genre (a poetry book, yes, but this one is standout cool – buy it! Hold it! Consume it!). Will the layout of the cover convey immediate radicalness or a sense of tradition? Will the trademark of the publisher say so much (Faber [London]) or so little (Unknown Press, Punxatawny, USA). And, for me, the images on the cover can say quite deep things about expectation. Books that have a picture of a (boring, middle-aged, white) male poet seem to me to be trying to be overly worthy and I recoil. A more discrete author photo on the back flap is much less off-putting. And, as we all hail the hetero-normative, patriarchal eye (yes, I’ve got one of those…), any photo of a female author is more than welcome in any size. But proportion again reigns - large photos of poets dominating the covers of their books (or artistic portraits of same) seem to be moving towards the unhinged – unless these poets come from way back in the 19th century – in which case, the larger the oil-paint miniature on the cover the better. Time changes all things.

 

But the additional information around the book remains important as we look at the most recent work of poetry. It is through the grey matter of the book that I (we, all of us) get solid ideas of who the book is directed to. Heteronormative, cis-gendered, white, and pro-patriarchal poetry can easily be identified because none of these identifier terms appear in that grey material – that is, the author or the publisher assumes that their world view is so normal as to not merit comment. Whereas, feminist, gay, queer, indigenous, bi-racial, non-white (the list is long, I’ll stop here) collections of poetry are more eager to express these elements in their grey matter and stress that a particular audience is requested, or a certain openness is required, or a particular sympathetic approach to this worldview is mandatory. Both approaches are noteworthy. The first is able to make a vast range of political statements simply by not having to state things. But sometimes books of the latter category can be a little too earnest in the demarcation of who the book is for, or who it is from. I would argue that any adult reader of modern poetry (a rather elite bunch) is aware of a staggering breadth of poetry’s scope and – seeing that it is poetry – sometimes the book does not need to delineate every single aspect of a book’s ‘community’ as it goes out into the world.

 

Which brings me to titles. Here is where the seduction really begins – because a poet can show us something of their deep wonder in the few words the select to announce the book. How could one not be beguiled by the almost manga-like title of Mark Haddon’s The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea? Or Ilya Kaminsky’s juxtapositional Deaf Republic, or even a meditation on one word like Jay Bernard’s Surge or Larry Levis’ Elegy. I am sure I have bought books such as Paige Ackerson-Keily’s Dolefully, A Rampart Stands simply because I wanted to investigate further the dolefulness of said rampart. And also, I instantly get, in some unexplained way how a poet could see a rampart as “doleful” -  heavy, with a presence that is expected, but ignored - and so, a strange kind of affinity is established between me and Ackerson-Keily – almost at first sight! Although I admit that in many other instances a great title is not required. I do read reviews, descriptions, and author wiki pages before I buy a book – more grey matter that I will also keep in mind as I go – because in one sense I want to account for all that is “seductive” to us about wanting to get into a new book of poetry – no matter how old or second hand it might seem to us when it arrives in the mail or peers at us from a bookseller’s shelf. The title, however, can bring additional excitement and give me a feeling of a whole concept that the book at hand might convey – the possibility that a whole new outlook on life, a whole new sensibility for existence is encoded in the pages of the text I am, just now, opening. And, yes, the title can also be plain and descriptive as well “Collected Verse 1975-1983” or “Sonnets” – are still not off-putting - for here at least I know what I am getting, but sometimes a title can fail. Let me explain by riffing on the “sonnet” theme a little.

 

Anthony Burgess’ Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems (2002) has so few sonnets in it that it would be better titled simply as Other Poems. Pamela Mordecai’s subversive sonnets (2012) could have more subversion and in a form that is more sonnety. And Marylin Hacker’s sonnet cycle on a passionate lesbian relationship was literally “fucking” brilliant, but the title of the book was indecorously bland: Love, Death, And the Changing of the Seasons is quite pedestrian compared to the amazing content. Perhaps that was calculated – but titles are not everything.              

 

There is a feel and a history that’s almost instantly conveyed as the covers are opened. Perhaps a previous reader or a bookshop has covered the book in mylar to preserve the dustjacket. Maybe it is ex-library – with tears showing where the borrowing card was glued in, and the dewey-decimal number still pinned or white-inked to the spine, or as we look inside, we might find no ISBN (self-published? or too old?), or old owners’ names written on the first page, or bookplates stuck in, and – the most delicious thing of all – notes from other readers, commentaries, marginalia, and sometimes there are old but relevant news clippings waiting to fall out as you pick it up. When I find marked copies - rather than feeling that a work of poetry is marred by other reader’s comments – I feel like I am getting two books, maybe three all compressed into the pages I have just purchased. Please reader – write in those poetry books of yours, then send them on…

 

I remain vitally interested in how the author been presented in their biographical details (often it is the author themselves scribbling away about themselves in third person). What is said and who is thanked in the acknowledgements page or on the back cover. Is there a ‘notes’ section at the end of the text explaining all the major allusions the poet has used. God, ‘notes’ sections give me the shits…. Here we find the poet explaining their allusions to us. I can understand why they are there – they tend to be attached to poetry collections where there is an anxiety that shared knowledge between readers is being lost to Postmodern, un-grand narratives (the 1990s in particular). Thankfully after the rise of Web 2.0, we find very few notes and referents and allusions explained – for all these can now be instantly checked online. But still, why on earth would a poet spend the back pages of a book explaining to readers the mysterious heart of their work? You can see this is a personal gripe…. perhaps another bias.

 

Does the grey material around the verse (preface, ISBN, font explanations, author bio, book explanation, enticing quotes from other readers, publishing details) leave something to be surmised, assumed, wondered at – or do they explain it all? Does the book come across as too earnest, as too basic, as too un-poetic?  And smell? New books and old have wildly divergent smells. And what does it feel to turn the pages? And how does the book encourage you to sit aside from the world – or not. And what space is there around each poem to make your own notes? to write in your own poems? I think about all these things when I hold a work of poetry in my hands, but again, I will only mention these features when it is moot.

 

There are two vital areas of my life where poetry thrives. Whilst I am travelling, or whilst I am getting ready for the day. The deliciousness of pulling out a book of poetry as a train pulls out of a station is often overwhelming. I do a lot of train travel – in a bad week 200kms per day, that is a 1000 kilometres a week… (thankfully 2 or 3 days going into the city is more usual). But as a Fire Keeper – one of those humans whose sleep patterns come in two slabs. I get up during the night to check on the silence of the dwelling, the sleeping of the humans, the comfort of the dogs. I’m the one who lets them out for toilet breaks, who stares at the stars and, indeed does actually check the fire in the stove (I live in cold mountains that call for a live fire in the kitchen during certain months). I do most of my thinking about verse during these small hours - as though I am not exactly in the world. I am also a very early riser and poetry reading is part of the extremely quiet times of a busy, noisy house when, once the dogs have taken their breakfasts, I can sit in the garden with a coffee and read as the sun gets itself up. At that time, the right poems read in the right mood seem to justify the day and account for my presence on earth.

 

In the end, I am particularly interested in the spaces inside a poetry book. That is – how is it laid out to not look like a work of prose. To be most clear about this – let me continue to riff off the idea of sonnets and their collection. I’m thinking, first of all, of the Fifty Sonnets of Eleanor Brown depicting a love affair – you can find this cycle in her Maiden Speech (1996). Brown’s sonnets are packed in two to a page and with Roman numerals identifying them – such cramming makes this look like a scholarly edition. Should love be so scholarly in its look on the page? There is nothing relaxed about the layout, and perhaps this design harries the reader into getting through these 50 as quickly as possible – which is a shame. Perhaps the layout makes each 14-line poem too prose-like. Now I’ve just run upstairs to get some other sonnet collections. R.D.Laing’s is one sonnet per page, and although I am not sure that they are as good as Ms Brown’s, the look of them disturbs me less. Some are presented as a 14-line chunk, but most have a space between the first three quartets and coming up the rear is a final couplet – again set apart by a space. But in the end, I’m not sure I like this either – the octet and sestet disappear in these divisions and the fragments of verse seem to have flown in on the winds to give the appearance of sonnetiness. Now here’s a collection of John Berryman’s Sonnets (1952/1967). Each single sonnet takes up most of the page. A gap demarcates the octet and the sestet, Arabic numerals identify each of his 155 sonnets. This is nice, relaxed. The focus of each page is on each sonnet. And they are demarcated by the shift of the eye from verso to recto or by the gesture of turning the page. And now finally, Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (from the 1960s but in a Penguin 2000 collection). Here we are back to roman numerals for identification, but each poem takes up one page and is pushed up the page somewhat leaving a tasty gap of consideration at the bottom. This seems to me another successful layout of sonnets – it encourages contemplation at the end of each 14-line block. And this idea of space is a consideration for all sorts of other volumes too.

 

Of the many considerations of the style and content of verse that is used by critics, one of the most significant I will consider here is the ‘school’ from which and into which the poems seem to pass. A poem by Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) can be recognised by style, allusion, and audience assumed as “courtly” poetry. With their own verses Sidney, Shakespeare, and Marlowe can be seen operating in the same range of problematics and themes. Keats’ work is generally and sometimes very specifically Romantic, and we can go searching for all sorts of stylists who fit roughly into such a category – again because of the issues, tropes and themes they contest. Symbolists such as Mallarme, although writing in French, convey a powerful influence of ‘school’ on the likes of its members – such as the Australian Christopher Brennan. And in the twentieth century, Surrealists, Formalists, Social Realists, West-coast Buddhists all have their ‘schools’ and lines of influence. Why, however, is this important? As I am focusing quite strongly on works from the twentieth and twenty-first century, I think identifying a “school” allows me to more precisely consider the range of issues and thematics that the poet is confronting – and to consider also how, in many ways, the quality of their work comes down to how originally they face these collective issues. In my one foray (so far) into philosophy (so far a series of lectures entitled: Cogitambulation: How We Walked into Our Humanity and Into Western Civilization, 2022) I delineate (towards the end of this study) the Modernist condition as we have suffered it in the West since the 1950s. This is a period best explained by Charles Taylor’s idea of the “subjective turn” – a process of individual disconnection and dislocation from society. It leads to a hyper-individualism that manifests in the economic works of Friedrich Hayek (and decades later Milton Freidman promoting Hayek’s thesis in North America) and this false trend of anti-community triumphs in Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 bizarre public declaration that there is no such thing as society. So here we have the greater problematic – how does a human (a most social creature) built and replicate (or trash) the present prevailing myth of hyper-individualism. Within this problematic, the transcendentalists, the romantics, the surrealists, the existentialists, the modernists, post-modernists, and post-liberal capitalists have all sought to deal in their own way with the social being-versus-hyperindividual paradigm. As these reviews will show, the key reactive agent in this process is the trauma sustained by the generations of the twentieth century. It is not simply war trauma, but as contemporary poet after poet demonstrates – a family trauma, and a trauma woven into the heart of (the myth of?) self-creation and self-presentation. So, we might say then that although there are small schools of immediate influence, there is also the larger school of the age. The Kunstwollen – as Alois Regal puts it or the will of art itself under the condition of its times. Again, where these themes emerge as noteworthy, I will discuss them. My great aim is to explain all this so that you are encouraged to seek out the book yourself, to get excited about poetry, and to be a part also of this great tradition of humans using euphony to explain themselves to themselves.      

 

All this brings me to my final two motivations for reviewing these books.

 

I am doing so to weave myself, just a little, into the eternal poetic tradition where words and life muddy up each other and after that clear and clean our lives as well.  

 

And finally, I am doing it because, as I noted at the start, it is impossible.

 

The Impossibility of a Review

I mean think about it. A good book of poetry is about as complex and dense a piece of writing as any of us are likely to encounter. The only real way of explaining it, the only true way would be to type it out again letter for letter and publish the entire book again as the review. In light of this we should think about Clive James’ definition of a poem:

 

“…any piece of writing that can’t be quoted from except out of context.” (Clive James: Poetry Notebook 2006-2014, London, Picador (2014) p.xiii)

 

As you go through the various entries of the HPR. In many ways, the last thing I want to do when I open a book of poetry is review it. I am overwhelmed with how indelicate it would be to summarise such carefully layered meaning and sound. Only a true bastard, or a self-unaware imbecile would seek to drop such short sharp overviews on works of such consideration and labour. That is, at the exact moment I start a review I am also at that moment when I am most reluctant to begin any kind of critical autopsy. In fact, I most often don’t start. I have to live with a book for a few days before I can summon the power to begin. And I hope you take this reluctance for what it is – a wish to sincerely do a good job. To promote both poet and book, and to get you as excited about these works as I am. So, now, let’s see what I can do …  

 

 

And let us offer our condolences to those poets who have been reviewed in the major presses, but whose books are already out of print or for some reason unobtainable. Sometimes, I read a review, like what I read about a book, and try to buy it – only to discovered that it can’t be had. The frustration for the poet on these supply issues must be intense.

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