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John Powell Ward, Selected & New, £9.99
Seren, Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3BN
Donald Atkinson, In Waterlight
Arc, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancs OL14 6DA
Christine Evans, Selected Poems, £8.99 Seren
Edward Lucie-Smith, Changing Shape, £12.95
Carcanet Press, Alliance House, Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ
Jack Mapanje, The Last of the Sweet Bananas, £9.95
Bloodaxe Books, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland NE48 IRP

I picked up a copy of Ron Padgett’s Selected Poems in a shop that
sold magazines by weight in Johannesburg, and opened it up to find
this little poem:

   December

   I will sleep
   in my little cup.

That’s it: the whole of it. What does it mean? I have no idea; but it
reminded me of the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland; and it’s such
a sweet, silly little couplet that I decided to use it as the epigram for
this review.
  
   It shows up, I think, something about these Selecteds that maybe
says something about British poetry generally. How serious it all is.
Here, for instance, is early John Powell Ward:
  
   Or any coast… Miles out a white
   Wave rolls up the distance like a whale’s
   Belly showing. a single tip
   Of white vanishes like a far ship
   Going down.
                             (Bristol Channel)

   Now, this is good accurate observation, and I like the
enjambment that echoes the move of the waves; but it’s all still very
logical and serious: one man’s vision of the world. In other poems
you can see something of the influence of that glum clergyman, RS
Thomas.
  
   Later on, he smashes up the neat, well‑made quality of
these early poems and goes for more linguistically‑innovative
techniques: lines all beginning with the same letter, open form, even
typographical experiments; and even wry, self‑deprecating humour
in ‘In the Box’:
  
   Father, I have sinned and I confess.
   For I am white and middle‑class and
   Was brought up in the South of England…

   At heart, despite the experiments, I think he’s basically a good
old‑fashioned English empiricist attempting to emulate the far more
naturally anarchic Peter Finch.

Donald Atkinson is more successfully ambitious, I feel; and a poet
who deals in sequences and longer poems rather than individual
lyrics. The earliest sequence, ‘A Sleep of Drowned Fathers’, deals
with his difficult upbringing in often quite scary detail, and the writing
here is never less than clear, sharp, often witty in rub‑salt‑in‑the-wounds kind of way. But ultimately, these poems are all dealing
with serious matters, like the life of Gandhi in ‘a Constant Level of
Illumination’, or the final sequence about a journey to Mozambique.
He does it so well; but every so often,

   I will sleep
   in my little cup,

I want something to wake me up.

Christine Evans is another eminently sensible poet, who knows
how to turn a good image from the natural world or the people
who work and live on the Lleyn Penninsula or Bardsey Island
where she lives. The blurb praises her ‘precise observation’, and it’s
right, it is precise, and rural, and hard‑bitten; just the kind of life us
sophisticated city types would run a mile from. Individually, I reckon I could admire these poems: but consider this from ‘From the Stone’:

   This old Abbey stone, in the sun
   is the colour of honey, highlighting
   what seems a face –
   eyebrows, puckered cheeks
   a gathering of wryness, or resistance
   bunching, like a ganglion
   waiting to be triggered.

   You just know that some significance is going to be wrung out of
this stone, and we are not going to get away without having learnt
something, though nothing we didn’t already know:

   and I – out of what I am not sure –
   am silent, knowing only
   time goes on
   scraping the dust
   from the stone, and from our faces.

Nowadays, Edward Lucie-Smith is more widely known as an art-critic, and until Changing Shape his career as a poet had long been
put behind him. But i still remember having enjoyed ‘A Tropical
Childhood’ when I first started reading poetry:

   In the hot noons I heard the fusillade
   As soldiers on the range learned how to kill,
   Used my toy microscope, whose lens arrayed
   The twenty rainbows in a parrot’s quill.

It sounds a little more lively than the Movement poets of the fifties, nowadays; but that and ‘Imperialists in Retirement’ still sound
fresher than most poets of the time, even in their precise use of
traditional forms. When he stopped publishing his poems, though,
his poems were becoming looser, free‑verse, often about or
interested in art, and a little more fun. I suspect the later Lucie‑Smith
would give a wry little smile at Padgett’s couplet. He’s still serious,
but anyone who can write in later life:

   All these women
   Worship the cock
   Of the great poet.
   He owes them an orgasm.
   Or several…
                            (‘The Great Poet’)

is not a poet who takes himself too seriously.

Finally, Jack Mapanje: probably the most serious poet of the lot.
But then an ex‑’guest’ of Malawi’s Life President Hastings Banda’s
notorious Mikuyu Prison has a lot to be serious about. These often
grim experiences are often related, nevertheless, with a sense of
humour, and sometimes of the ridiculous as he describes prison
life, meetings with his captors after release or scribes who claimed
it wasn’t their fault. He’s difficult to quote from, because a lot of his
poems have a kind of rambling quality that drag you along with him;
and there’s an awkwardness in the English, sometimes an overcorrectness, that is very African. There’s nothing silly in this book, and in that sense it’s almost the opposite of Ron Padgett’s:

   I will sleep
   in my little cup

but of all the Selected Poems I have read for this review, this is the
one I’m most likely to return to. He’s not giving lessons, he’s not
striving to wring singnificance out of stones in church walls, he’s
writing down his life.
 
   And that, folks, is what it’s all about.