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Peter Huchel,. SELECTED POEMS, 73pp, cloth £2.50, paper £1.25; Alexander Tvardovsky, TYORKIN & THE STOVEMAKERS, 71pp, cloth £2.50; George Kendrick, BICYCLE TYRE IN A TALL TREE, 62pp, cloth £2.00, paper £1.25 - all from Carcanet Press, 266 Councillor Lane, Cheadle Hulme, Cheadle, Cheshire SK8 5PN, UK.

Ever since the publication of Michael Hamburger’s EAST GERMAN POETRY (also from Carcanet), I’ve regarded this book as a classic of translation, It is an absolute necessity for anyone truly interested in the past, present and future of poetry. On a smaller scale, a branch if you like of the same tree, Carcanet’s new Huchel book is just as valuable. For Huchel can now be clearly seen as one of the creators of modern poetry in East Germany, from whoa the younger poets in the earlier anthology have obviously learned much, and from whom we can all learn the lessons of understatement, compression, lucidity and allusiveness, If that sounds contradictory, read the book. As is usual with Carcanet translations, we have the German text ‘en face’ so that anyone with access to German can see what a brilliant job Mr Hamburger has done for these poems.

     These poems are often deceptively simple in language and operate on several different levels this quality seems to be characteristic of so much East German poetry from later Brecht onwards and is no doubt occasioned by the difficult political situation which prevents openness (look what happened to Wolf Biermann, for instance). What motivates Huchel’s poems in particular and makes them such powerfully affecting statements is their underlying tension between commitment and freedom of thought and feeling, It is this that makes Huchel difficult to classify (if one wants to do that), just as it does in the case of, say, Reiner Kunze and Gunther Kunert as well. Often apparently topical, Huchel’s poems, by referring to myth, to nature, to history, have a reverberative scope, sometimes within a very few lines, that is denied, unhappily, to most English poets.

     The Tvardovsky volume is another proposition, It contains two selections from the Russian ‘Vasili Tyorkin’ volume and from its sequel ‘Tyorkin in the Other World’, together with a long prose piece, ‘The Stovemakers’, Tvardovsky was a very popular poet in the USSR and his creature Tyorkin a modern, my.thic figure. The Tyorkin poems were written in simple, ballad-like, colloquial verse. Anthony Rudolph’s translation has tried to imitate in English this simple, ballad quality of the original. The effort of doing this and at the same time trying to convey the meaning of the original has often proved too much for him. The English limps and halts along too often for comfort, and many times without too much consistency ; it has none of the gusto, freedom and scope of the original. This is a noble attempt on Mr Rudolph’s part but one which has proved to be just a little too much for him, just too difficult a job to do. Since it is in prose, ‘The Stovemmkers’ is a very successful piece exhuberant and expansive, often rambling and full of diverting asides in a very Russian way, it is vastly entertaining. The success of this piece more than makes up for the comparative failure of the verse translation.

     George Kendrick’s book, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation earlier this year, shows that his poems have appeared in all the right places STAND, ANTAEUS, LONDON MAGAZINE, CRITICAL QUARTERLY, the BBC’s ‘Poetry Now’ series, etc, etc. By saying this, I hope I have immediately ‘placed’ these poems for some people. They are competent, conservative and do not attempt too much, but they have none of the reverberative associativeness of the Huchel, for instance. They are, in fact, rather ‘safe’ and verbally unadventurous and represent what Eric Mottram, the editor of POETRY REVIEW, recently called the ‘Horatian Combine’ (POETRY STUDENT, No 1, February 1975)as opposed to those few writers who are really widening our consciousness and knowledge of ouselves and reality. On their own terms, Mr Kendrick’s poems work well enough. But lines like : “Time crashes along the highway...” and “Hurricanes hi jack the elms:/You remain rooted/At the still centre.” (LADY LUCK) really tell us nothing new and are, even, rather cliché-ridden. These poems make few demands on the reader and, when looked at very closely, can be seen to reiterate some pretty tired old sentiments.

     Nevertheless, I still say thank God for presses like Carcanet. Our knowledge of European poetry would be so much less were it not for their series of translations. When it comes to English poetry, a daunting enough proposition for anyone, their choice-making apparatus does sometimes appear to be a little blinkered. But It is easy to carp. I hope they prove me wrong in future.

Ronald Bottrall, POEMS 1955-1973, 158pp, cloth £2.95, paper £1.50; Peter Russell, THE ELEGIES OF QUINTILIUS, 62pp. cloth £1.95; Tony Harrison, PALLADAS: POEMS, 45pp, cloth £1.95, paper 80p; John Digby, THE STRUCTURE OF BIFOCAL DISTANCE, 56pp, paper only £1.25 Stefan Aug. Doinas, ALIBI & OTHER POEMS, 31pp, paper only 90p - all from Anvil Press Poetry, 69 King George Street, London SE10 8PX.

     After a quiescent period Anvil Press Poetry have produced a flood of new titles. There is always a quirkiness about Anvil’s choice of poetry that adds interest to their publications. The biggest of the current crop is Ronald Bottrall’s book. Although subtitled ‘poems 1955-1973’ most of the poems in this volume were written in 1972. Bottrall was first singled out for notice in the 1930s and consolidated his reputation in the 1940s. Since then little has been heard from him. But it is now obvious that he has developed his poetry considerably since then. He is now a very versatile poet in his use of verse form this is never merely meretricious gloss, concealing an emptiness below the surface, but is always skilfully chosen to enhance the content of the poems. The first section of the book, ‘Talking to the Ceiling’, is a long, autobiographical poems, very movingly and beautifully written. But throughout this book, Bottrall, with his very sensitive ear, balances both intellectual and emotional content in such a way that the reader is never overconscious of either and both work to give each poem its maximum impact. This is a book to keep referring to; It should be read by anyone who cares about poetry and should do much to establish Bottrall’s position as a very fine poet.

     Anyone who admires Ezra Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, Day Lewis’ translation of the Aeneid and has read with sympathy and attention Gilbert Highet’s ‘Poets in a Landscape’, will instantly recognize the flavour of Peter Russell’s translations of the elegies of Quintilius. These reflect the atmosphere and language of some of the best classic Latin poetry. Quintilius is not a Propertius, has not his range, but is the more ironic, more humourous and more sad of the two. His range is not as wide as Propertius’. This book is beautifully produced, adequately equipped with notes and even contains, pace Eliot, a second version of the Fourth Elegy, written according to the blue-pencilled emendations of the ‘old Vort’ himself, old uncle Ez. From a comparison, it would seem that the famous blue pencil was having an off-day. Mr Russell manages wonderfully enough on his own.

     Put next to Quintilius, the 4th Century Alexandian epigrammatist Palladas seems pretty slight. Tony Harrison has written some very clearly expressed, bitter little statements which I’m sure do justice to the original. There are some moving moments here and one can sometimes hear the saddened voice of this last Pagan facing the onrushing tide of a victorious Christianity. Historically, It is an interesting document, but it is not great poetry and lacks the humane irony that makes Quintilius a greater writer.

     If you read lines like these by John Digby ‘Everything was arranged perfectly/The morning released its thoughts/ Like 3 week old eggs/Fluttering from the windows of a castle’ - you should know instantly where you are that odd, haunted landscape of spontaneous, self-generating imagery known as Surrealism. If you like this particular world then you will like Mr Digby’s poems and find them every bit as rewarding as, say, Arc Publications’ volume of Benjamin Peret (see OASIS 12, pages 81 & 82). Digby has mastered his chosen medium and uses it with exuberance and sensitivity. But the trouble with Surrealism is that it is an hermetic world, impossible to enter for most people because (a) it is so personal and (b) because it has no limits, It can go anywhere, do anything, and you just have to accept it - or not.

     Stefan Aug. Doinas is yet another Rumanian (there seem to have been quite a lot surfacing recently); he was to have read at Poetry International last June. According to him, poetry expresses ‘the grandeur and misery of the human condition, in full awareness of our possibilities and our limitations...’ - well, yes, of course. But isn’t this awfully familiar and so easy to say? So is ‘...the spirit borders on those chasms which humanity has explored for aeons. Pain, joy; despair, ecstasy; resolution, impotence; solitude, companionship; language, silence...’ Surely we’ve all tried to do this with our poetry, to force it into an attitude of universal human Significance (cap. ‘S’). For instance, ‘Snapshot’ (1964):

...We swim - in their eyes: smiling
we still make large, luminous gestures
under the sky in bloom...
But underneath,
bloodied, the shadeless water
has already poured us into a dark whirlpool.

Here is an ordinary thought, competently dressed up, but forced, in the last three lines, to relate to a generalized human panorama - a technique which is adopted in very many of these poems.

     Two last thoughts on these Anvil books : their production, in these economically austere days, Is excellent throughout and they are all worth reading because they provoke thought, even if finally in a way that is negative as far as individual poems are concerned. But one cannot help admiring the catholicity of taste shown by Anvil in bringing out these volumes.

Robin Fulton, TREE LINES, New Rivers Press, P 0 Box 578, Cathedral Station, New York, N.Y.10025, USA; l27pp, cloth $5.00, paper $2.50.

This book contains work by a poet who is, to my mind, very undervalued. One does not, for example, see his work appearing very often, nor hear much discussion of his work. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that Mr Fulton writes such deceptively quiet poems (I’m not suggesting for a moment that he should change : this is a good and too rare quality). In fact, I say ‘deceptively’ because Fulton’s poems, though expressed in lean, spare words, have very complex themes: his subject is really the nature of reality in all its manifestations, a metaphisical probing beneath the surface of life. Fulton has refined end pared his language to a bareness that will not interrupt the mental movement of his poems, which are held together by a tension between the concreteness of his imagery, the things mentioned, and the intellectual examination of their content and the way they relate to each other. Take, for example, these opening lines from ‘September the First’

the house creaks with a fresh season, I think how old
the noises are and shiver as the lower depths of sleep
chill and expunge memory after memory –

This is clear, exact and yet causes the mind to take off on a journey of its own. One of the most interesting pieces in the book is Section 6: ‘In Memoriam Antonius Block’ (the knight in Bergman’s ‘Seventh Seal’). This is a wonderful tour de force, a set of moving variations on death and time and life, It is a great pity that this elegantly produced book should appear in the USA, which means that not many people in this country are going to discover how good a poet Robin Fulton is.

Kevin Borman, LOVEMAPPING; Jeremy Hilton, PATTERNS OF FRIENDSHIP; Ena Hollis, STRANGE LANDFALLS; David Tipton, PACHACAMAC; Jim Burns, EASTER IN STOCKPORT ; Allan Burgis, DEGREES OF EXILE; Clayton Eshleman, PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS BACON - 20p each, all from Rivelin Press, 157 Sharrow Vale Road, Sheffield S11 8ZA.

The Rivelin Press, run by David Tipton, is a new venture in small press publishing which deserves support. All its publications so far are the same size (quarto) and price, simply but neatly produced in mimeo, and all contain interesting material. For me, the best of this bunch were Kevin Borman, Jim Burns mud David Tipton’s own book. But all the booklets are worth reading, all the work in them is clear and straightforward, unfussy and unpretentious, though there are signs with the Eshleman book that the press is venturing into slightly more experimental territory.