Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Dear Tim Kendall

     In his review of my book Samarkand, Paul Groves has many grand things to say about the purposes of reviewing. He would agree, I think, with my own opinion that writers benefit greatly from intelligent criticism.

     It is a pity, then, that Groves does not have the skills to match his ambition. He lacks, for a start, the gift of accurate summary (he says that ‘War Poetry’ is about a school janitor’s destruction of a wasp’s nest: it is not). He cannot describe style or theme: whole pages of verse are dismissed as “blank”, “too dense”, “weirdly arbitrary”, or “enigmatic” – entirely impressionistic judgements which are supported by no examples.

     At the level of linguistic analysis, Groves is even more disappointing. His remarks on form are confined to counting: many of the poems’ titles “are two words long”, he announces; only “ten of the thirty-nine” poems “sneak beyond a page”; ‘When my grandmother said’ (and this is his triumph) has “thirty-seven lines” and “three sentences”. But he does not relate these enumerations to any critical argument: he might have considered, for instance, that those three expansive sentences are shaped so as to suggest the ripples of an earthquake, which in turn echo the shifting contours of memory. He complains that ‘My Grandfather’ includes “non sequiturs”: but the poem’s subject is precisely the non-sequential elements of a personality, elements linked only by an intentionally bombastic proliferation of off-rhymes.

     Impervious to sound-patterns, Groves is also deaf to tone: he does not hear that the couplet “There are no flies on Galahad/ Though plenty buzz around his dad” is intended to be funny. Neither does he understand that the poem from which that couplet comes – ‘Guenever’ – is a dramatic monologue: he makes what he thinks to be a damning comparison with some lines from Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’, not realising that that poem too has a dramatic speaker whose haunted mind is evoked by the jog-trot precision of “Tis three feet long and two feet wide”, the dimensions of a pond where he fears a child was drowned. This typically undergraduate error constitutes Groves’s sole attempt at finding a literary echo or influence.

     Some of his misreadings are frankly comic. He assumes that ‘To Travel’ – despite the conditional verbs and the reference to the Arabian Nights in the lines he quotes – is a description of a real journey, and abuses it for not giving him enough Rough Guide style information. ‘Amore, Amore’ quite clearly announces itself as being about idealised love; but it, too, is taken to be “travel verse” and is condemned for not having been “forged in the furnace of Sino-Soviet hardship”. It is hard to imagine a less relevant remark.

     Groves is not identified in your biographical notes – but I wonder if he is very young? There is something almost sweetly youthful in his eagerness to skip over the poems and get to the knocking part of the review, the bit where he can berate well-known names and pontificate about “the Devil” and “the truth”. And something very naïve, too, in his bilious listing of “British Council and Society of Authors disbursements” and his boyishly martial vision of the world of published poets, where, apparently, I have “set up camp”, and am “staking a claim”, surrounded by “cronies and flatterers”. I only wish that such attentions really did follow the publication of two collections of poetry to modest success. If Groves is indeed an undergraduate, then I must forgive him his abuse and hope that he learns to read better in time and with tuition. I remain puzzled, though, as to why Thumbscrew chose to publish a review, not so negative, but so bereft of literary content.

Yours sincerely,
Kate Clanchy