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COLLECTED POEMS by Ronald Bottrall. (Sidgwick and Jackson.)

THE RE-ORDERING OF THE STONES by Jon Silkin. (Chatto and Windus with the Hogarth Press.)

HOWRAH BRIDGE by James K. Baxter. (O.U.P.)

THE EARLY DROWNED by Hilary Corke. (Secker and Warburg.)

The collected poems of Ronald Bottrall represent thirty years’ work, from The Loosening of 1931 to poems of the last year or two. Few of them are not worth reading and reading again. The writing, if occasionally awkward, is never slack or glib.

     The earliest pieces make a determined attempt to see the rootless life of industrial England clearly, not in the sharply lit perspective of the Marxist but in a wider, more humane context:

Not for nothing was I born
Within earshot of that iron sea, where
Across the hedge the calf milked
Its mother astride the webbed dew and the share
Yearly uptore fresh paths beckoning the seed
To a resurrection.

There is no nostalgia. For opposed to the disorder of power-house stacks and girder-ribs is not the rhythm of an older, agricultural way of life, but the alertness and balance of a mind living in the present. The senses are alive, under the scrutiny of a mistrustful intelligence. Hence images are used not to realize personal experience (experience itself is mistrusted) but to illustrate an argument. The point made, the image is discarded.

     It is partly this logical play of images, partly the formality of the diction, that gives the poems their cerebral cast. The writing is difficult because it is grappling with emotions of some complexity. The parallel, in fact, is not with Auden but with Eliot and Pound, from whom Bottrall has learned a good deal. And the limitations of his early work are a reminder of how recalcitrant, to any but the most powerful imagination, is the material they engaged. The innovations of Mauberley and The Waste Land — the disruption of syntax, the intensification of metaphor, the recourse to allusion — were not just ways of invigorating a moribund poetic tradition but a strategy for dealing with the collapse of a civilization; and perhaps only men whose consciousness was formed before the crack-up could find the strength to master it.

     To say that Bottrall learned from Pound and Eliot is not to say that his verse is parasitic. His debt is not for images nor, except in a few professed imitations, for rhythms. What he owes to Pound and Eliot is an artistic stance, at once detached from the emotional banality of our society and committed to an inspection of its confusions. The astringent phrasing, the flat, controlled rhythms are his own. They combine to form a poetry that rewards the attention it exacts: though a poetry that convinces the intellect and moral judgement rather than the imagination.

     This description would have to be qualified for one or two poems in Bottrall’s second and third volumes. But it is in his fourth, Farewell and Welcome, that his writing is most assured. If the themes are less ambitious here, there is still an awareness of difficulties that are more than personal. Three or four lyrics (‘Assignments’, ‘Icarus’, ‘One Cornishman to Another’) have a remarkable intensity of feeling, and something of this intensity is carried over into the analyses of love (‘Evidence Evalued’, ‘Orders of Love’, ‘The Middle Kingdom’). The sustained energy of syntax in these poems and the discretion with which images are used point to a study of the Four Quartets; but the Quartets have been studied intelligently, their rhetorical and linguistic strength understood. The result is impressive.

     Bottrall’s work rarely has the rhythmic inevitability that commands immediate assent. It is rather, as here, the trained, ironic intelligence of the writing that makes the best of his poetry durable. It comes through, to take another example, in the sestet of a recent sonnet, ‘Attic Shepherd’:

Now the sweet sour smell of sweated leather
And clothes hanging heavy as a wet fleece
On the patched cob walls in the scrawny heather

Shape me a shepherd ragged at the knees
Bones crying out from the frost-bitten weather
With a dried-up past, no present, and no peace.

     Jon Silkin’s new collection, though a good deal more limited, has something of the same intellectual and moral grip. The notation is exact, the verse closely knit. Sometimes the writing is so curt, the rhythm so faint, that the result is a miniature moral essay rather than a poem (‘Respectabilities’, ‘The Measure’, ‘The Wall’). Yet the half dozen best pieces in the book have a precision and a discriminating charity that are valuable. The principal themes — weakness, solitude, pain — are defined through the recurrent imagery of stones and the terse, impermeable phrasing. That this laconic style can deal effectively with other themes is evident in a poem on Geneva:

The river drifts through
The town, falling massively
Under a low bridge.

Nor is the precision simply, or even primarily, sensuous. The poem proceeds to an analysis of this city, where

The life of a great
Intelligent continent
Falls through the space
It has made in itself
With too much intellect.

In two poems at the end of the book a love relationship is analysed with comparable force. The rhythmic impulse is still meagre rather than disciplined, but the accuracy of the phrasing holds the reality of the experience clear.

     Mr Baxter is content with a softer focus. As in his previous volume (In Fires of No Return) he feels most at home with a predictable iambic beat; and the emotion, though genuine, is often too slight to hold the stanzas taut. The diction is vivid rather than incisive, the imagery picturesque. A first, and even a second, reading is agreeable.

‘Remember, Odysseus,
How day climbed from the cave
Of the summer nymph. Exhaustion
Following the deep spondaic thrust,
Honeysuckle, arbutus,
Trailing down the rock of lust,

A belly like a brown gourd,
Broad nostrils, mouth of broken clay
Beside the talkative island wave . . .’

But the rhythmic interest of this is unusual, the ineffectiveness of the sixth line characteristic. Mr Baxter is most successful in the wry appraisal of ‘Election 1960’ and in one or two ballads where a vigorous regular metre is appropriate. But after the bone and muscle of Mr Bottrall’s work, or Mr Silkin’s at its best, this is an easy-going poetry.

     Hilary Corke’s first volume, too, is decidedly relaxed. The writing is fluent, colourful:

Sleep, calm winter sleep, the rides are woollen
Over the dreaming roots, thick snow in sunlight
Is sugar under the trees, wool or sugar,
Immaculate, crystalline, soft. All night this has fallen.

Too often a sensuous and emotional facility seems to release these poems at a good deal less than half pressure. But Mr Corke’s style is evidently still unformed, and there are signs towards the end of the book that this facility has been recognized.