Poetry Reviews

The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, translated by Ciaran Carson (Granta), hb, 296pp, £14.99

This translation is an achievement on many levels and a very occasional disappointment. Its strengths and weaknesses stem from the same cause: its driven, vivid and idiosyncratic language. Carson juggles the vigour of colloquialism with the poise of metre: at his best he fuses these into an utterly distinctive voice.

It is a voice which deploys the full heritage of Northern Irish English, its access to the sonority of Gaelic and the pith of Scots, and remixes standard English according to its own template. All those tones are deployed here: the result is a highly readable, even page-turning, version of Dante, in which the physical torments of the damned are presented with percussive clarity:

No barrel with its staves all ripped apart
gaped wider than this sinner I saw slit
from chin through belly to the farting part.

But the damned are not physical: as Dante insists, until Judgement Day they remain sundered from their bodies and experience their precisely-doled out agonies in the place it hurts most: the soul. It is the peculiar effect that Dante gets by pitching between a physical horror and its spiritual meaning that informs the unique power of the Inferno. This is particularly resonant in the wood of the suicides, who at the Last Judgement will not be permitted to reinhabit their bodies:

Here shall we drag them to their final rest,
to hang forever in this grove of pain,
each on the thorn of its vindictive ghost.

With this subtle distinction we get the terrible pathos of Paolo and Francesca, the lovers whirling in the ceaseless wind; the weary nobility of Ulysses, speaking unseen from within the flame. Without it we get the gratuitous horror of Clive Barker and the arch cartoon demons of Angel or Charmed:

Then Hogshit, from whose gub two tusks stuck out
like sabres, slashed at him with one - touche!
just to let him know he packed some clout.

Basically Carson's Inferno is strong on physicality -- it's wonderfully muscular and pacey -- but the pity, the dignity, seems muted and sometimes lost. This is particularly apparent in the case of Carson's Virgil, for whom he reserves some of his punchiest language. Here he is addressing Nimrod, one of the giants who stand around the bottom of the abyss:

...'Hey, head-the-ball,
stick to your trumpet; give it a good blast
when you feel it coming to the boil

instead of that incessant blah, blah, blah!'

This is not the only register Virgil speaks in, but the transition to more elevated (and antiquated) tones like his address to Antaeus - 'O you who once inhabited the vale/where brave Scipio became a legend.' - can grate where it should modulate.

Carson presents an engaging new thesis which supports his idiomatic effects. He suggests that the internecine squabbles which tore medieval Italy apart, the struggles between Guelf and Ghibelline which are still being fought in Dante's Hell, strongly parallel the sectarian divisions of Northern Ireland.

Belfast as Florence: it's a persuasive equation. Except little things obtrude. Dante's placing of 'mosques' in the infernal city of Dis. The fact that the soul described above as cut in two is Mohammed. The most problematic contemporary cultural division is no longer between types of Christian, but between a secular West and Islam. Carson's thesis can't really address this. Can the era in which Northern Ireland has played such a paradigmatic literary role be drawing to a close?

This is a rare achievement that only occasionally feels unbalanced: it would be fascinating to see how he traversed the very different territory of Purgatory.

Ice and Whooping

Paul Farley, The Ice Age (Picador, £7.99); Peter Reading, Faunal (Bloodaxe, £7.95); G.F.Dutton, The Bare Abundance: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, £8.95)

These three poets offer very different takes on the long perspective: the gap between species; inhumanly large geological or astronomical distances. Some poets like these chilling views, literal or metaphoric: they promise to restore the grand voice, which poetry has been shying away from for decades (too short a span of literary history for many readers to have noticed). The cosmic viewpoint can, in the wrong hands, become the first refuge of pretention. As Paul Farley comments, 'I've seen the big safe themes walk all over/incest and morris dancing in their ten-league boots.'

When Farley contemplates sunspots, the decline of the house sparrow, the gaze of a monkfish, or the creation of Surtsey, they always compel him to challenge his own take on things. As he says in 'The Ages', 'I yawn and fear the dark/like any good caveman' - but the purpose of taking scary glimpses is to critique and thus re-energise the human voice. And Farley's is one of our most vital and engaging voices, whether revisiting Wordsworth's 'The Thorn' or just visiting the barber: 'I watch a nod begin in the nape mirror'. Even a title can twist at the familiar, commanding our attention: 'The Sea in the Seventeenth Century'. He has the knack of both establishing and undermining the securities of memory purely through turn of phrase:

I could get my wires crossed and hear my mother
whacking the ganglion that grew in her wrist
with our bible, the Freemans catalogue
or the phone book, whichever was heaviest…

Peter Reading's approach has always been to contextualise the mere biographical self among a set-list of non-selves - inhuman humans, ancient poetry, found texts, or, here, minutely-observed birds and animals. How about yet another poem entitled '[Untitled]'?

In the Library
all seem to have some purpose
I, per contra, plot
a visit to the NatWest,
followed by intemperance.

Reading's voice is as distinctive as ever - that unnecessary emphasis on 'purpose', the latinism, the refusal to rhyme (how many poets could have resisted finishing with 'getting pissed'?) - by now you either love the way he loathes things or you don't. As he puts it in 'Axiomatic', 'The Sage seems ridiculous/to the eighth-rate twerp.' He is our most creative curmudgeon, and his rants are at once painstakingly assembled and punkish in their directness: he is the Mark E. Smith of contemporary poetry.

Some themes here have been visited before -- our destruction of the environment in Evagatory, the juxtaposition of bloodthirsty scenes from Classical literature with Anglo-Saxon texts or territories in Last Poems. But Faunal has a tempering note: the repeated references to a bird-watching companion, William Johnston, whose presence haunts and humanises the book, as in this passage about Whooping Cranes:

When they took flight, the trumpets sounded over the marshes,
kerloo kerleeloo, kerloo kerleeloo, kerloo kerleeloo,
and we knew, we knew we would die without seeing the species again.

G.F. Dutton's work eschews these poets' use of formal echoing. Not for him the considered (ab)use of accentual metre; nor the critical reinhabiting of a Romantic stanza. Dutton's poems are in sparse free verse, a honed-down medium that is very much his own but feels rather tied to the Seventies. The poems appear isolated from literary history, as though no-one has looked at 'City', 'Sea', 'Forest' and 'Rock' like this before - and sometimes you're convinced no-one has. This is a substantial selection: its cumulative impact is undeniable and impressive, but I found myself agreeing with the questioner in 'Dialogue':

Enough spruce
cut this winter,
enough ice
and crushed needles, air
biting with resin.
Enough that's brilliant,
sawtooth. What else
on offer?

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From Father to Son and Back Again

Family Business: Selected Letters between a Father and Son: Allen and Louis Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher, Bloomsbury, £25.00

When we think of Allen Ginsberg's life and work, it's sometimes hard to imagine he had a father at all. The impassioned, restraintless riffs of his poetry, the restless travelling and experimentation with hallucinogens, the way his friendships kept spilling over into love affairs and his friends kept ending up in prison for anything from petty theft to murder - well, what would your father say? What Louis Ginsberg said about his son's prophetic posturing as bard of the counterculture was often sharp: 'Your humble smugness in granting such unflawed knowledge, italicised by your dogmatic self-righteousness, really touches my heart!'

But Louis' irritation with what he saw as his son's political naivete is only one element in a dialogue which is continued over thirty years in this fascinating book. Far more important is the fact that Louis was himself a poet who had published two volumes of (rather traditional) rhyming verse by the time Allen was twenty. It is remarkable how little sense of envy there is as the father is eclipsed by the son - indeed, by the mid-sixties he is reduced to congratulating Allen on book after book whilst he scrabbles around for a publisher. It is entirely to Louis' credit that, despite difficulties with the sexual and scatological elements in his son's work, he recognises the particular nature of Allen's genius. Writing before the publication of Howl, and before either of them could have suspected the revolution in American literature which that volume would herald, he says, 'Maybe you are a modern, incipient Whitman? Could be.'

His insistence that Allen should tone things down a little may seem merely generational, on a par with his sometimes antiquated diction - his letters occasionally give the impression Shelley was somehow part of the Beat Generation: ' Especially did I note your mention of a native brew called Ayahuasca…' But often the point of contention is rooted in the trauma both men experienced in relation to Allen's mother, Naomi, and her gradual mental disintegration, which gave rise to his greatest poem, 'Kaddish'. Louis objects to a reference to his wife's genitals, and Allen's reply typifies the openness at the heart of his poetic:

'The line about the 'beard around the vagina' is probably a sort of very common experience & image that children have who see their parents naked…tho not many poets have referred to it but it can do no harm to be brought to consciousness.'

This is in the same letter where he describes LSD as 'a very safe drug…like a cosmic movie', displaying his own generation's partial-sightedness. What is clear is that both men were deeply scarred by Naomi's psychosis and as a result expressed their concern for each other with great tenderness.

This, however, does not stop them arguing furiously for decades over American policy in Cuba and Vietnam. Louis, though liberal in his outlook, essentially defended the US role, accusing Allen of being emotionally attached to his mother's communist viewpoint. Allen, whose travels in Latin America, India, and Eastern Europe had left him with few illusions about America as benign global policeman, frequently cuts through the political posturing to express his basic humanity: 'The issue is not the Reds, the issue is the fact that Cubans have 30 years less life span expectancy than USA.'

Even in his late seventies, Louis is still haranguing his son about his attitude towards Israel, and Allen is responding with the same mixture of would-be facts and baffled fury. And yet neither seems to take serious offence beyond advising each other to 'keep your shirt on', and both are always ready to turn to a discussion of poetry in the next paragraph. In the present apathetic political climate, it is salutary to witness the Ginsbergs' passionate dialogue about the crises they lived through.

Louis emerges in these letters as an intriguing character in his own right: not a significant poet but certainly an enabling one, and a loving if irascible father. What we see of Allen rounds out still further this complex, gifted figure. His letters display both the bumptiousness and self-integrity which got him kicked out of Cuba and Prague. They also inadvertently reveal that compassion for the suffering his mother's condition instilled. In one of the Indian letters he and Peter Orlovsky pick up a beggar 'lying in gutter of urinal', bathe him in the Ganges, and pay for his hospital bills.

He displays a blithe indifference to the social norms of all cultures, dragging 'bums from North Beach' into his first creative writing class at San Francisco State College, arguing with Franciscan monks in Assisi, giving LSD to Hells Angels to stop them busting up a peace parade. He happily lectures a clearly-unimpressed Auden on Ischia, and just as happily reads with someone he vaguely identifies as 'MacDiaruided' in a place called 'northern England (Scotland)'. He makes a couple of touching attempts to claim heterosexuality -- 'I seem to be back on girls again (after all!)…' - then claims in Who's Who to be married to Orlovsky.

Readers of Allen Ginsberg's poetry often feel entirely too intimate with Ginsberg the man. The letters humanise his juxtapositions of emotional extremity and spiritual clarity. They do this partly through the agency of Louis, casting a determinedly normal eye on his son's peregrinations; and partly through Allen's attempts to explain himself to this most personal and stringent of audiences, his father.

Keeping the Poets Off Parnassus

(Ian Hamilton, Against Oblivion, Penguin-Viking, £20)

Ian Hamilton was the much-respected editor of the New Review and a fastidious poet who allowed few of his poems to reach publication. Given his acute awareness of the fragility of poetic fame, you might suppose he would have scattered his gifts a little wider in the hope that something would survive. As he says of this book's model, Johnson's Lives of the Poets, 'I was…nonplussed to find that, out of his selected fifty poets, I was familiar with the work of maybe half a dozen.' Essentially, time is our most ruthless editor, and Hamilton appears in Against Oblivion to engage in a laudable activity: finding fifty twentieth century poets who deserve to be spared from that blackest of pens. But that is not what this book is really about.

Hamilton has almost nothing positive to say about the majority of the writers he discusses. D.H. Lawrence? He 'hated being human, hated humans.' Robert Graves? 'As with all poems written to a theory, Grave's love lyrics nearly always have an air of managerial efficiency.' Dylan Thomas? '…usually more interested in how a poem sounded than in what it said, provided that it sounded grand and deep.' William Carlos Williams? '…too many things, too few ideas.' And those are just the ones people may have heard of. With less well-known figures, Hamilton practically hammers down the coffin lid on their disappearing reputations: remember Hart Crane's 'tendency toward facile sonority'? Or the way Randall Jarrell's poems 'don't know when or how to stop'?

Much of this is cutting, ungenerous fun - those with a congenital dislike of poetry will cheer him on. But the unfortunate fact is he loves poetry so much he hardly accepts that anyone has written it. Plato only banned poets from the Republic - Hamilton would keep them off Mount Parnassus too. It doesn't do to be Welsh, the wilder sort of American, or the more eccentric type of Englishman. It certainly doesn't do to be Scots - MacDiarmid gets a very brief dismissal: 'If poetry cannot be wrung from the language Scotsmen speak, no amount of nostalgic pedantry is likely to bring about the cultural reflowering for which MacDiarmid said he yearned.'

Ian Hamilton’s criticism of Hugh MacDiarmid boils down to a distaste for the Scottish engagement with language. Yet this is a useful by-product of our proximity to and difference from standard English. It drives not only MacDiarmid but also Edwin Morgan, W.S. Graham, Tom Leonard, and most of the contemporary poets for which Scotland is currently being lauded. But Hamilton proves himself oblivious to that.

He does gets in a good joke, suggesting MacDiarmid’s use of ‘foch’ (meaning ‘turn’) would have an interesting effect in the Gorbals. (Mind you, the joke is dependent on its speaker not being able to pronounce their fricatives, not a charge I would like to make against a Glaswegian.) But the idea that a Scottish poem can only be judged by delivering it to a working class audience reveals Hamilton’s tendentious grasp on what’s ‘authentic’. Hamilton was that kind of Englishman who presumes Scottish culture is and ought to be limited to the inside of a bar. Our poetry has, for hundreds of years, been exploring what it really means to be authentic: Burns for instance happily borrowed from the learned vocabulary and formal range of Robert Fergusson. Perhaps he thought it better to be inauthentic than self-satisfied.

Of course Hamilton was, as he says of Wallace Stevens, a 'spiritual aristocrat', a mandarin who presumed he was a better judge of the uses of Scots than MacDiarmid, and that it was not really possible for Kipling to use working class speech. What this really means is that he is unconvinced by anything not emanating from or comparable to his own background. So what exactly is he in favour of?

In two words, Philip Larkin, whose talent is defined as 'accommodating real speech into metre without even the faintest hint of toil and strain' - a great gift exactly put, although we understand that Hamilton's definition of 'real speech' excludes much of the finest poetry of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Bishop and Louis MacNeice may have had something going for them, and he is not entirely contra Wilfred Owen or some bits of Robert Lowell. Oh, and Norman Cameron, the only other Scot in the book, of whom Hamilton says, 'Oddly, the poet he most resembles is Philip Larkin'. Oddly? Really?

This book suffers from an arrogance sometimes encountered in poets who claim to value terseness as Hamilton did: they just can't trust posterity to judge what's good. It's certainly entertaining, and pleasurably augmented by the poems illustrating each writer's oeuvre, but its author was far too in favour of oblivion to stand as any poet's last defence.

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The Frighteners Strike Twice

(Sean O'Brien, Downriver, Picador, £6.99)

Sean O'Brien winning the Forward for the second time might mean Downriver could be picked up by his worst enemies: those able to rest content that, 'between money and morals/A fissure has been driven.' But, with the exception of Kenneth Baker, such types traditionally feel little need to catch up on the best in contemporary poetry. Their loss: this, his fifth collection, is driven by an undiminished anger and lyric responsibility to people who can only be content, 'The way those who live with industrial parks and asbestos/Are happy, because if they weren't they would die.'

It is a magisterial exposition of O'Brien's recurring themes: the fragility of human dignity, the willing ignorance of power, beauty as something mined from the apparently unappealing (also known as the 1950s). It contains some great train poems ('Thalassa! Thalassa! Railways! Railways!'), and a blunt, elegiac sequence about football: 'Who gives a toss what any of it means/While there are Platinis and Dixie Deans?' There are tributes to peers, Peters Didsbury and Reading, and to one of his masters, Peter Porter - an occasional poem which points to a constant concern: he is uncompromisingly against those 'made to feel/Anxious and sweaty and dim/By poems regarding the past and future as if they were real.'

O'Brien is driven by a duty, not just to working class history, 'the names perpetually denied/a hearing...', but also to a literary heritage that is being ignored into obscurity. Downriver is haunted by, among others, Eliot and the Auden of The Orators, particularly in a litany of magnificent pub names:

Time in the Letsby Avenue now
Time in the Dying Gaul
On Scotswood Road and Percy Street
Let time go by the Wall.

There may be delicate readers out there who wish this book had found fewer rhymes for 'cock' -- if so O'Brien is anxious to massage their sensibilities, cricket bat in hand. But for the rest of us (and Kenneth Baker), this is a songbook full of hilarious and definitive declaration, fluid and intelligent as the music to which parts of it have been set by Northern jazz luminary, Keith Morris.

How Can You Have the Same Again?

Frank Kuppner, What? Again? Selected Poems, Carcanet

Is Frank Kuppner a national treasure or a striking oddity, only to be found in Scotland? As a long-time fan of both his prose and verse, I looked to this selection for an overview of this most particular of authors. I was a bit distressed to find myself halfway through in a classic Kuppnerian state: dispassionate poignant boredom. Kuppner is a genius of the detached tone, the distended syntax, the discovery of ever smaller twists of irony, the appalled distance we all achieve from our most intense emotions. But what happens as you read these personally-chosen extracts from five books is the loss of control of a sensation he usually exploits within any single volume: the aesthetic exploration of tedium, usually hilarious, starts becoming tedious in itself.

 The blurb refers to the ‘at times bewildering variety’ of his work, but what I think would strike a new reader is the constant reiteration of the same devices. Each in itself is entertaining and inimitable, but over the length of the book they can appear diminished and sometimes even moribund. So we have the wonderfully detached dismantling of Chinese poetry (or what we think that might be) in the poised quatrains of A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (1984), and in Second Best Moments in Chinese History (1997). The main difference between the two volumes seems to be the recurrent appearance in the later volume of the word ‘penis’. Don’t get me wrong, the genitalia leitmotif is always amusing, as in the following:

This bizarre artist paints by dipping his penis in ink.
The effects are more successful than you might anticipate.
Even so, his landscapes are probably finer than his portraits.
But his religious pictures are quite extraordinarily convincing.

But is it really any kind of advance on the sly dismantling of male attitudes to sex we find in his first book?

Something breasts something something bosom;
Something bust something bosom something;
Breast something something caterpillar something;
A look of doubt crosses the old scholar’s face.

Of course some writers are so good they don’t really need to progress – for one thing it takes quite long enough for a readership to catch up with them. But when two separate lengthy poems open with the same basic idea, as ‘Last Eternal Moments’ and ‘The Kuppneriad’ do (they both play with the notion of alternative universes), you have to at least query the principle of selection. Especially as both relate strongly to Kuppner’s favourite trope: the placing of intimate human relations against an inhumanly long perspective. In the ‘Chinese’ poems, history and cultural distance provide the chill ironic gap; in The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women, it’s the enormity of the physical universe.

Notice in passing how fabulous his titles are – this perhaps brings us to the heart of the problem: Kuppner’s poetry is always masterful in its details, it’s in these larger shapes, his attempts to impersonate the entire universe, that it comes unstuck. It didn’t really take forty quatrains to set up a moment of anomie – he’s so good I got it after fourteen. And if the next book contains the same moment, what then?

Frank Kuppner is a kind of Glaswegian John Ashbery, endlessly revolving within the extraordinary texture of his eloquence. He is an undoubted master at exploiting the poetic resonances of a prose register: his long lines are simultaneously plangent and funny (‘It’s just that I never like to see so much blood/coming out of a cake’). But this selection feels a little redundant: any single volume would not only be sufficient, but far more distinct.

The Dublin Eye

(Brendan Kennelly, Glimpses, Bloodaxe, £8.95)

Brendan Kennelly is famous as the author of roomy, controversial bestsellers like The Book of Judas and the genially-titled Poetry My Arse. Glimpses is a large collection of tiny poems, powered by an epic momentum. It's based around a simple apercu: that the intensity of modern life denies us time for much meditation, but compensates with the glimpse, a momentary communion of the corner of the eye.

Kennelly's book is filled with eavesdroppings, it's noted on the run: the haikus of a Dublin sage. There is a direct parallel here with Bengal's greatest poet, Tagore, and his 'kabitika' - brief poem - invented for the volume Kanika (Particles). And Dublin, like Tagore's Calcutta, like all cities poised between suffering and celebration, proves a fertile source. The language is fiercely inventive ('unfullstopping her head'), and unquotably bawdy.

Some readers may find a quarter or so seems slight, but such is Kennelly's range, it's likely to be a different quarter for each reader. Too much is made of the virtue of poetic concision: some contemporary volumes are not merely slim, but anorexic. Kennelly gives us both brevity and largesse:

Did Helen of Troy ever give herself
a Herculean scratch on her back
like Polly Doolin in Bewleys
scratching
with what must be delight
as she confronts
a mug of hot, black coffee
and a thick, buttered slice of barmbrack?

(Versions of these reviews have appeared previously in Scotland on Sunday)

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