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Maura Dooley (ed.): Making for Planet Alice. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, £8.95.
Poetry Review 86, 4 (Beyond the Bell Jar), Winter 1996/7, £5.95.

     In her introduction, Maura Dooley admits that her first thought was: did we need another such anthology, four years after Bloodaxe’s Sixty Women Poets? Human nature being what it is, she immediately set about convincing herself that we did. Carol Rumens in Poetry Review feels that this is not the route to achieve what Dooley wants. I’m very much with her there, and for once feel it is the whole principle of such a book that needs reviewing, as much as the quality of the individuals in it.

     In 1993, Neil Astley wrote to me that he thought Sixty was needed to counter a lack of women in Bloodaxe’s The New Poetry. This, he felt, was inevitable with three male editors, because it was a known fact that male editors could not appreciate certain kinds of women’s poetry. I don’t think, myself, that it is a simple question of gender; it has as much to do with class, educational background and moving in a rather small, incestuous world. But it did raise a rather obvious question: if he thought that, why choose three male editors? If that was a problem, the answer was to appoint more female editors, not of ghetto anthologies but of mainstream ones.

     Dooley says the problem is that women’s poems are too infrequently discussed, written about, made the subject of essays or critical appraisals. If that is not done, “their poetry will not have a future as part of the main canon of English Literature. Enough will not have been said about the poems to secure them a lasting readership.”

     Supposing it were true that poems live or die according to how many critics write essays about them, the answer, again, is surely for Dooley, or someone else, to start writing the essays. The poems exist already; why should critics who haven’t discussed them before do so because they’re anthologised?

     It is in any case a deeply depressing thought; it recalls the wine collector who, asked if he ever drank any of his legendary vintages, replied: “They’re not for drinking; they’re for buying and selling”. Since I never read Lit. Crit. unless paid to do so, I haven’t read a word about most of my favourite poets - Edwin Morgan, for instance, or Norman MacCaig. The fact that I don’t know what Fred Farnsbarn the critic thinks of them doesn’t seem to have made any odds: I can work out that I like them, and why, all by myself. Nor can I agree with Dooley’s quotation from Louise Bernikow: “which writers have survived their time and which have not depends upon who noticed them and chose to record the notice”. Of course editors and anthologisers make mistakes, and include the duff at the expense of their betters. Time sorts it out, though that may not console in the short term. Neil Astley gave me a list of male poets he felt had been unfairly anthologised in preference to women. They had one thing in common; they hadn’t lasted. Look back at Fifties and Sixties anthologies, and see if getting into them was a recipe for immortality. Who on earth was Hilary Corke? (I’d have got even the gender wrong, without the editor’s note).

     It is also a bit rich for the editor of a gendered anthology to complain that “collections of poetry by women continue to be reviewed together...as if their gender gave them something in common” (my italics). That’s exactly the problem with books like this - as Rumens points out, they blur poets-who-happen-to-be-female into a shapeless mass. Dooley remarks that before the Seventies, it was hard to get taken seriously if you wrote about “blood, babies, the moon and jam-making”. Well, fashions change but fashion stays, and nowadays if you’re a female poet whose work does not happen to be redolent of leaked breastmilk, floor polish or sexual congress, you can have trouble with certain editors (mainly male) who think they know what “women’s poetry” sounds like, and certain critics (mostly female) who think they know what it ought to sound like. Ghetto anthologies reinforce stereotypes, they don’t change them. They may also persuade the male editors of mainstream anthologies to exclude women in favour of men, since the girls can always have their own sister anthology...

     This anthology has another entry criterion; it’s for women who published their first book since 1990. Several were part of the ‘New Generation’ promotion. Very new writers, in short, which is presumably why some of them sound so amateurish. Is it heresy to suggest that writers are not at their most profound or polished in their twenties, and that some are going to grimace, in a few years, at these choices? The current ageism in poetry actually brasses me off more than any other ism; it was sheer cheek for editors of The New Poetry to decide that nobody born before 1940 could be writing anything “new”. Two of my favourites in this book - Anne Rouse and Janet Fisher - turn out to be among the oldest writers in it, and I don’t suppose it’s accidental; they have had longer to become skilled with words, and to realise that splurging ideas, facts or emotions on to a page for their own sake has remarkably little entertainment value. What Jane Holland says in ‘Pulse’ is true, but need a polemical poem be all polemic and no poetry? Should it have no greater linguistic ambition than a laddish (ladettish?) parade of the c-word: look, I can be as rude as the boys? Why do Moniza Alvi’s reminiscences (as in ‘Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan’) seldom sound like any more than that? What makes the following a poem, and where’s the incentive to read on?

I’m sewing on new buttons
to this washed silk shirt.
Mother of pearl,
I chose them carefully.
In the haberdashers on Chepstow Place...
                     (Sarah Maguire: ‘The Invisible Mender’)

And if Maggie Hannan is so fascinated by language, why is hers, at least in the poems here, so fearsomely uncommunicative?

     I think this anthology is uneven and could have been pared, but at least the selection doesn’t seem to be trying to make everyone sound alike. What ruined Sixty Women Poets for me was turning to one of my faves, Deborah Randall, and finding her trademark feisty male persona poems excluded in favour of a rather wet piece about a hare which was plainly there not for its own worth but because the hare/moon/woman thing fitted the agenda. Indeed I seem to recall that book had hares coming out of its ears, so to speak. This is far more varied in content and style. The power of Gillian Ferguson’s images; the swimming-pool ghost who “died in the wrong metaphor/ like a baby dropped in a font”. The vigour of Anne Rouse’s language, one moment chatting to Auden, the next in a Hamburg bar in the persona of a football hooligan (‘England Nil’), who manages to sound genuinely scary while voicing a sonnet. Eleanor Brown’s polished and delightfully unsisterly cattiness: “There isn’t a law that a face should have features,/ It’s just that they generally do” (‘Bitcherel’).

     A pity, then, about the twee title, from a rather fey poem, and the cover picture, a sort of brunette Monroe: neurotic, tarty and with far too much lipstick on. She looks the sort of woman who’d tell you all about her therapist if you didn’t make a quick getaway, and it makes you expect a bunch of self-obsessed moaners inside - which is unfortunate, for most of the voices aren’t like that. This anthology is no different from most non-gendered ones: i.e. about a quarter of the poems are really interesting and the rest are fairly forgettable. So can we, please, stop producing anthologies that suggest there were two species, rather than two genders, writing in the late twentieth century?

     Poetry Review is at it too, with an issue on ‘New Women Poets’. Peter Forbes is an editor open to Dooley’s charge of considering female poets en bloc. Sean O’Brien has asked why he nearly always has women’s collections reviewed, “usually emolliently”, by women, and while I won’t plead guilty to being emollient, it’s a fact that I have reviewed about 25 poets for Mr. Forbes, and only four were male. It’s a habit he doesn’t seem able to break, though he’s trying to in this issue. We’ll see if it continues.

     In his favour, though, he doesn’t try to stop reviewers treading on revered toes if they feel they should. I’ve warned him when I wasn’t keen on some big name, so that he could choose another reviewer if he wanted, and he didn’t. This contrasts with what another editor did lately, when I warned him that if I reviewed the PBS choice he’d just sent me, I would say I couldn’t fathom what the poems were trying to say or achieve. He took it back, saying: “I can’t understand him either, but I find I don’t mind” - a strange thing to say about a would-be communicator, I thought. But the point is that Forbes lets reviewers go against current taste. I think many reviewers in PR, men and women, are too easily pleased, but that’s them, not him.

     His unprescriptive attitude lets controversy develop within the pages, which gives PR a lot of its interest, and features like ‘The Classic Poem’ also allow other tastes besides the editor’s to be represented - in this issue Elaine Feinstein talks about a poem from Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, which I’ve just had the luck to review; it’s great, go out and buy it.

     What I don’t turn to PR for is Forbes’s own choice of poems. I think they’re predictable, partly due to heavy reliance on the usual suspects. In this issue there is a Fleur Adcock poem, ‘Stockings’, which is pure waste of space; a trivial anecdote told in unambitious language. We all have off-days. If Forbes had received this from Joanna Soap, I am certain he’d have rejected it.

     Then there are the editorials... I haven’t got over the one, years ago, which announced: “Poetry must find an objective correlative for the thinginess of things, instead of relying on simple denotation”. A friend, working in Germany, stuck this on his office wall to annoy Germans who thought they could speak English. They’d pore over it for ages before asking what it meant - whereupon he’d have to admit that it didn’t mean much to a native speaker either. I’ve only ever met one person who claimed to understand it. He said it meant what Lewis Carroll did when he said poets “look at all things/ With a sort of mental squint”. Only Carroll put it in English. This editorial is one of his “unexceptionable but dull” ones; I prefer the weird brand.

     Two other things I must note. On the back cover is a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Adam Czerniawski. Maybe Mr. C. isn’t a native English-speaker either, and didn’t know that you cannot write “he lay down his suit”, or maybe he wrote “laid” and things went wrong later. But someone should have picked up this embarrassing illiteracy before it went into print.

     And a review of Penguin Modern Poets: 8 by Linda France, editor of Sixty Women Poets. She points out one poet in the volume is far weaker than the other two, and questions the selection criteria: “This one’s definitely ‘Black Women’, which seemed a touch demeaning...surely it’s the poetry that counts rather than the poets?”

     Well, well! I’d love to think this was a road-to-Damascus conversion, but a poet I met last year told me France still didn’t have a good word for me, for saying the same thing about Sixty Women Poets. So presumably herding “women poets” together is only demeaning if you also add “black”. Can’t see the logic myself.