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Dear Tim,

     Re Letters (Thumbscrew 15), I entirely agree with Peter McDonald that Edna Longley's critical authority is superior to mine. Happily, we do not inhabit a literary police-state in which the lesser are forbidden to challenge the greater. At least, I do not. In her review of the post-1945 poetry anthologies (Thumbscrew 13) Professor Longley suggests that “very little genuine English poetry has emerged in the last fifteen years”. She does not give her evidence, or say what she means by “genuine”. I can judge only by her response to the younger Scottish poets in the Armitage/Crawford anthology, Kay, Jamie, Paterson, of whom she seems, tentatively, to approve. If these are interesting writers (I agree they are), what is the quality in their work which is absent from that of the younger English writers? I cannot accept the implication that, for example, Lavinia Greenlaw is somehow less “genuine” an English poet than Kathleen Jamie is a genuine Scottish one, or that Jackie Kay has a greater command of her craft than Carol Ann Duffy (I think, though, there is evidence to show that Kay has learned from Duffy's work). I hope my judgement here is not merely patriotic, as I hope Longley’s was not. We cannot avoid, perhaps, being more sharply receptive to the writers in our mother culture: what we can and must avoid is slamming casual doors on whole bodies of work.

     I doubt if I would be allowed the space in which to set out my criticisms of ‘Genesis’. (To make a beginning, how can air be “burly”, how can one stride “against” it, don’t all miracles come from God? Etc.) Hill is a major poet but not infallible. I would frankly be worried if young English poets were working in that bombastic and rigid mode, a mode which Hill himself has since revised. The logic which escapes Professor McDonald in my shift from England to Northern Ireland is this: the presence of two generations of major poets there has not noticably empowered the younger. This is one reason for doubting the orderly process Longley's review desires – i.e. the handing on of the torch from one generation to the next. I suspect that confidence (unavoidable word, unavoidable pre-condition of creative work) may be sapped by the sensed proximity and constant critical elevation of paradigmatic figures. In a healthy literary culture the young “makers” feel free to argue with the
established figures before whom the critics kneel. I do not enlist McDonald among these timid beginners and slavish admirers, as he should have realised. But, of course, since he has such a low regard for my critical abilities, he no doubt derives only discouragement from the fact that I once sought out and published his poems in Brangle.

Yours ever,
Carol Rumens