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SONG FOR A BIRTH OR A DEATH by Elizabeth Jennings. (Deutsch.)

TARES by R. S. Thomas. (Hart-Davis.)

A SMELL OF BURNING by Thomas Blackburn. (Putnam.)

TIME FOR SALE by Edward Lowbury. (Chatto and Windus with the Hogarth Press.)

PANTALOON OR THE VALEDICTION by Philip Toynbee. (Chatto and Windus.)

When will the poets again dash forward like hussars? Nowadays they peddle wares as pious and predictable as indulgences, and there is no Luther for miles. If their poems are wrapped up in the right way, no one will complain. Look: Miss Jennings is neat and clear but she is not pedantic; the Rev. Thomas is traditional but he is very honest; Mr Blackburn is in pursuit of the Unknown but he is not difficult; Mr Lowbury is not original but he is not silly. The inclusive anthologies and British Council pamphlets can comfortably deal with them all. The critic can praise without feeling generous. The reader is very happy.

     But with none of these four poets do I feel that the poem is the thing itself (except for some early ones of Mr Blackburn’s). It may be a versified display of the sensibility. It may be an interesting and original diary jotting. It may even conceal the grit of a real trope among its fleshy folds. But it hardly ever appears inevitable on that linguistic level at which the best poems first attract and convince. Mr Toynbee, in the latest of his periodical evacuations, is nearer the mark, but still the parts are better than the whole. As is the case with minor poets, one finds oneself discussing the writer and not the work. To avoid both this and boring the reader, one must exaggerate praise and blame. Thus, unless one already belongs to the Poetry Book Society and has therefore received the Jennings and the Thomas as Choices, in which case one need hardly look at reviews anyway, it might be pointed out that these are the two volumes which are worth buying, if one buys at all.

     Of the two, Miss Jennings perhaps takes the lead in skill and depth. She is an industrious poet, still, as it were, to come to the boil. One might once have said she was too cool, thoughtful without being full of ideas. Now there is more directness, more imagination in her self-enquiry, as in this opening to ‘Stargazers and Others’:

          One, staring out stars,
Lost himself in looking and almost
Forgot glass, eye, air, space;
Simply, he thought, the world is improved
By my staring, how the still glass leaps
When the sky thuds in like tides.

A remark of Edwin Muir’s about her last book puzzled me when I read it on the dust-jacket (‘one knows things after reading it at which one had not guessed before’) because I could not very often apply it here. Rather, there is a pleasure to be got out of her innocent attack upon what is not necessarily an original situation or idea at all (for instance, the symbolical and religious suggestions of clowns). Indeed, I find Miss Jennings at her best where she charts some common human feeling, and less interesting in poems about art, religion or the mind. A religious poem is more acceptable if it is less like a prayer or meditation than an oratorio, being most obviously a work of art and therefore positive and not self-conscious.

     Self-consciousness does pay dividends in the case of R. S. Thomas, because, though a parson, he has come to find that matters of religion and art are of very little open use to his verse. He is a poet of the simple life, of the eternal verities as revealed to those who live and work on the land. His attempts to understand the Welsh farmers of his parish and their self-reliance which leaves little room for acceptance of their sensitive minister: this is the stage on which his poetry is set. His best poems move away from this theme towards the idea of enlightenment, or oblivion, and so on:

History goes on;
On the rock the lichen
Records it: no mention
Of them, of us.

I do not think Tares is better than the previous books. There are fewer, for instance, of those interesting and rather strange objective and symbolical elements that could be found in Poetry for Supper (as in ‘The Cat and the Sea’). It is, in fact, very much a sequel to his earlier work. The Rev. Thomas is writing in his maturity, and does not seem likely to change. The tone, easy and almost conversational, but always ready to break into a more measured cadence, is excellently chosen; it lends conviction even where the imagery stoops to the conventional. His search for truth is done with remarkable poise; the fifties, one feels, was a good time for him to flower, and when he writes (in ‘Poet’s Address to the Businessman’) ‘Forgive me/The tongue’s failure,/In all this leanness/Of time, to arrive/Nearer the bone’, we can only feel that he is no further from the bone than many of his smarter fellow-poets, and that his voice is all the more attractive for his not being a littérateur.

     Both Miss Jennings and the Rev. Thomas can rush too breathlessly to a close, and are betrayed by glibness, but they are consistent, sympathetic and lively in comparison with Mr Blackburn and Mr Lowbury, who do not in the same way achieve a really characteristic articulation. The Smell of Burning is not as good as Mr Blackburn’s earlier books. He now seems to lack a fine selectivity and self-criticism. Even some plainer, moving poems (of which ‘Felo Da Se’ and ‘An Invitation’ have appeared in this magazine) do not escape a certain muddiness in writing which can generally be observed here. Mr Blackburn has deserted myth, and with it has fled his passion and imagination. He can now write with a multiple and perverse awkwardness of which this is perhaps an extreme example:

Shuddered, I did, to think of men,
Not unlike me, with Hydrogen
Oblivion at their trigger finger
And scant lucidity in anger . . .

His ideas are sometimes not presented at all clearly. One gets the impression, for instance, that his particular treatment of the birth/death analogy which crops up in several of the poems is merely wrong-headed, and one would like to think that Mr Blackburn has a finer imagination than this, because one is reminded of his talents in many successful poems where he is least forced, most clear-headed.

     Mr Lowbury is perhaps too clearheaded: one waits for the poems to catch fire. His themes are common: the impact of time and growth. If both myth and science, he asks,

All through; which part would seem were a lie
The wilder fantasy —
The tempo of your dream?
Or the notion that a cell
Should multiply, then scream,

     Then think up heaven and hell? Mr Lowbury moves skilfully enough on the surface of these ideas, but lacks distinction.

     Philip Toynbee’s new novel is considered here because it is largely in verse. It is worth stressing, though, that there is a difference between a novel in verse and a long poem (the difference, I think, between Aurora Leigh and Maud). Mr Toynbee’s hero explains his use of verse on the last page: ‘Where I’m happiest is in the brief and almost impatient illumination, the partial, momentary vision.’ The verse, loose, Eliotelian, and surprisingly lively, doesn’t bear any formal weight of progression. It is a method, a suitable style for the fragmentary recollections of an old man’s boyhood. It does not create its own shape.

     Even Mr Toynbee’s last two novels could hardly have prepared one for the wordy oddness of this biographical fantasy. Dick Abberville rambles among his memories: a religious Norwegian mother, a remote father, a baby brother to be jealous of, resulting resentment and delinquency, six months on a farm, unpopularity and quasi-fascism at school, and so on. The old man’s companion, a young Americanized Norwegian, obviously becomes bored after four days of it, and so the book stops. The knowing prose asides cannot convince us that this warm bath of reminiscence is ironical; it is merely quite real, and its wholeheartedness loses effect by the whole thing continually appearing to be about more than it actually is. One wonders if the content justifies the style. Here is Mr Toynbee on Christmas:

Created monkeys jumped on the cardboard mountain;
Muffins the best of our daily bread,
Bought in the lamplight, under the soldier’s statue.
The round pattern of an angel’s face on the nursery ceiling,
Rose of soft light above the oil-stove.

or on foetuses:

Pink fishes with the domed heads of professors . . .

or on the London Underground:

The blown air reeked of rubber and sparks
And a mild municipal disinfectant;
Of fagged-out breath and hasty scent,
Warm bodies and clothes.

Perhaps Mr Toynbee mostly writes with an intensified novelist’s rather than a poet’s eye and mind, and in a way this kind of free verse seems dated, but I found Pantaloon readable for its perseverance and descriptive skill. Mr Toynbee indulges in a certain refinement and elevation, but he does not have the answer to the flatness of the ’fifties style; indeed, this is not without its qualities and advantages, but one feels that some larger gesture is needed than either Miss Jennings or the Rev. Thomas provides. Poetry must not be merely honest, nor merely lively; it must build constructively upon the imagination.