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

I remember reading in the TLS some years ago a long article-review by Tom Paulin dealing with Gerard Manley Hopkins in which he expressed a number of - to put it mildly - eccentric opinions of the work and personality of the great Jesuit poet. Paulin’s main thesis was that Hopkins’s strongest linguistic influence came from the vernacular of the different working-class areas to which his priestly duties had taken him. There may be something in this, though the muscularity and vigorous drive of the language in, say, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and ‘Felix Randall’, are less a matter of imitating the idiom of a region or a class than proof of Hopkins’s genius for ransacking the whole of the English language to find the diction that was right for his purpose. Be that as it may, Paulin in his new book, The Wind Dog, shows an almost obsessive need to introduce into the texture of his poems regional demotic words which do not always add vitality or give the reader sonic pleasure.

     Another of Paulin’s idiosyncrasies is his total avoidance of all punctuation-marks except for an occasional dash, and while I can see that he would claim that his prosody and syntax obviate the necessity for commas, full-stops etc., their omission is both irritating and ill-mannered though, come to think of it, he would probably think discourtesy a manly virtue.

     In spite of Paulin’s assertion that “The ear/ is the only true reader” his own ear would seem to be an unreliable instrument when, in ‘Sarum’s Prize’, he begins the poem with these lines;

Because the style called Romanesque
buckles under pressure...

     How on earth does he hear the ‘que’ in the second line? Perhaps a new sound - ‘Kerbuckles’ like ‘Kerfuffles’?

     Paulin’s poetry is in fact profoundly ‘literary’. In the title-poem within a few lines we encounter quotations from or references to Mark Twain, Virgil, Andrew Marvell, Robert Frost and Kipling, and - a little later - Masefield, Spenser, Yeats, Rosenberg, Shakespeare, Clare and others. Nothing wrong with this, though it sorts oddly with his hard-man stance.

     In spite of their shortcomings I enjoyed some of the poems in The Wind Dog, especially ‘Door Poem’, in which the quirky onomatopoeia suits the subject-matter, and ‘The Unholy One’ which deals with Bernard Shaw and his relations to Yeats, Wilde and Joyce. ‘Chagall in Ireland’, though, with the lines

and we all know how rust tastes
- tastes like sick
or dried shite...

made me wonder a little about the poet’s dietary habits.