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

Michael Schmidt (ed.), Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland: An Anthology, Carcanet Press, £9.95

Let me declare an interest. Some fifteen months ago Andrew Motion and I published an anthology called The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. Though this hardly put him in a select minority, Michael Schmidt had some fierce criticisms to make of the book. Having attacked it once on the radio programme Critics' Forum, he then devoted an editorial of his magazine Poetry Nation Review to a (bigger) second bite of the cherry, dismissing the anthology as merely 'fashionable' (but if it was fashionable why did nine out of ten reviewers dislike it?), making out that it was a largely 'Martian' selection, and complaining in particular of the introduction, with its 'committee English' and 'crumbs fallen from stale SDP speeches'. Since I am now reviewing Schmidt's own anthology covering roughly the same ground and period, anything I have to say against it will look like sour grapes (the bitter harvest of revenge) and anything I have to say for it will look like spinelessness (a bending over backwards to be fair). Either I roast Michael Schmidt or I heap coals of fire upon his head. I shouldn't perhaps be reviewing him at all. There.

Or almost there. I make a special point of declaring my interest since Schmidt has omitted to declare his. There is no mention of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry in the five-page preface to his anthology, yet it is the subtext without which his own text would have little meaning. Against our too comprehensive-sounding title Schmidt offers the almost laughably tentative Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland: An Anthology. (But does not that distinction between Britain and Ireland suggest that poets from the Republic of Ireland will be represented? They are not.) Elsewhere our introduction is the ghostly presence behind his preface, which opens, for example, with the sentence: 'Anthologies of poetry often flatter their readers with promises of radical novelty, new beginnings, even "decisive shifts of sensibility" '. The phrase 'decisive shifts of sensibility' comes from our first sentence, so we must be these flatterers. Later Schmidt berates poets and critics ('vendors of novelties') who over-employ the terms 'metaphor' and 'narrative', or who with 'academic foolishness' talk of poets being 'mainstream' and 'post-modernist'. These are terms which Andrew Motion and I have frequently used and which we use in our introduction. Again, describing the 'large market' for verse, Schmidt notes that 'journalists are interested in the poet and poetry business, if not in the poem.' Since I once wrote an essay called 'Poetry and the Poetry Business', I take this to be a snide reference to me (Or am I being paranoid?). Here and at other points Schmidt seeks to attack us without admitting to his readers that this is what he is doing. It is an odd manoeuvre: having bemoaned, in PN Review, our self-effacing introduction, Schmidt now effaces us still further.

Schmidt's anthology, it is true, did not begin as a counter-anthology (he had the idea for it at much the same time as we did for ours) but appearing as it does over a year later it inevitably has the look of one. How does it differ? We included twenty poets; he has eighteen; only seven appear in both anthologies: Derek Mahon, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Peter Scupham (who is closely identified with PN Review and, it must be admitted, looks more at home in Schmidt's anthology than in ours), Jeffrey Wainwright, Tony Harrison and Tom Paulin. Among the poets we included but Schmidt doesn't are Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Craig Raine (who he would have liked to put in but evidently offended through some editorial inconsistency: see PN Review 35, letters page), Douglas Dunn and Christopher Reid. All five of the women poets in our anthology have gone; so has any poet who might be thought in the least 'Martian'. This leaves Schmidt with eleven poets whom we failed to include and who are evidence to him of the 'variety in excellence of recent poetry' (an unfortunately ambiguous phrase). Clearly we and he have reached very different conclusions about who are the most interesting poets to have emerged in the last fifteen years.

We also reach rather different conclusions about the poetic spirit of the age. Andrew Motion and I were excited by the feeling that in the late-1970s a number of bold new talents were emerging. Schmidt is impelled by no such conviction; he pooh-poohs the idea of novelty and emphasises continuity; it is only in his penultimate paragraph that he allows himself to admit (reluctantly, as the italics suggest) that 'Of course, we have not been exactly here before.' He senses a 'distantly Victorian spirit' hovering over his poets, with Arnold, Ruskin, Clough, Browning, Hardy, Housman and Edward Thomas as presiding spirits, though 'the roots of these younger poets go much deeper than the nineteenth century, of course.' ('Of course'!) The word Victorian is invoked again: 'many of these younger poets are from the great Victorian cities.' This is a characteristically Schmidt-like way to speak of Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester — as if they were only the 'ruins' of another age, not cities with a continuing life of their own. It is typical of his preface's emphasis on the stable, the time-honoured and the conservative as against the fragmented, the incoherent and the shoddy-democratic. It is like listening to speeches at a Tory Party conference: 'vital areas of tradition still accessible to the tactful ... 'resolutely traditional in their approach ... 'classical training ... 'notes of civility that have not been struck for a long time ... '. Any phrase that might smack of post-1900 trendiness he handles with mild distaste, in inverted commas ('subjective', 'important', 'from the life', 'effect'), as if with a pair of tongs. From an editor working freely on his own, not forced into the 'compromise' which he saw bedevilling our introduction and choices, it is an oddly drab and impersonal preface: only in one parenthesis — ' (how secular my generation is compared with the one that stretches from R.S. Thomas to Geoffrey Hill ... )' — does Schmidt allow himself a frank personal utterance and with it the sort of acute observation that a 'polemical' book, such as his claims to be, deserves and needs.

But anthologies should be judged on poems not prefaces. How good is the poetry in Schmidt's book? Some of it very. Several of Harrison's 'School of Eloquence' sonnets are here (though I think Schmidt unwise to have included the long 'A Kumquat for John Keats'); so are Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in Co Wexford' and 'Courtyards in Delft', Paulin's 'The Harbour in the Evening' and 'Black Bread', Fenton's 'A German Requiem' and 'Wind' (though it is not, overall, an intelligent Fenton selection: the weakish 'Cambodia', 'The Wild Ones' and 'The Song that Sounds Like This' are in, but no `Chosun' or `A Staffordshire Murderer'). Of the poets we failed to include the most impressive are Michael Hofmann, John Ash, Gillian Clarke and Robert Wells. Hofmann is a true original who would I suspect have been in our anthology had we had more of his work to go on; Schmidt chooses insensitively from him — the feeble 'Boys' Own' and 'C. & W.' but no 'Dependants', 'Touring Company', `Entropy (The Late Show)' or 'Hausfrauenchor' — but there is enough to demonstrate his laconic grace and semi-surrealist wit. Ash, as reviewers have pointed out, can seem formless and is still somewhat under the spell of his near-namesake John Ashbery; but the inventiveness of poems like 'A Beauty' and 'Ferns and the Night' is undeniable. Gillian Clarke's language is less precise than such a pared-down verse ought to be and her rhythms are at times irritatingly mannered; but there is a lyric integrity to poems like 'Plums' and 'Journey'. Robert Wells, who recently made an excellent job of translating Virgil's The Georgics, is a much improved poet, combining physical sensuousness with philosophical meditation. I'd be tempted to add the fluent and intelligent Andrew Waterman to this list were not his poems undermined at crucial moments by horrible contortions and clanging over-elaborations — 'never were trees/thwart like these in flight', 'gulls/weave lamentation's dissonant vocables', 'drums throb savage annunciation', `traffic lights signalling insane morse'.

For the rest, I would like to believe that Jeremy Hooker has more than a slight descriptive gift, Clive Wilmer a feeling for ancestry, David Constantine a rhythmical facility, Dick Davis a way with mythological emblems and Alison Brackenbury a monstrously muscle-bound syntax. But the selections from them here do not persuade me that they are important overlooked talents. As for Frank Kuppner (b. Glasgow 1952 and making his debut here), he may be an interesting, new voice but the 44 four-line stanzas that make up his 'Svenk Rapsodi' do not give much indication of his range or potential, only some Glen Baxter-ish jokey surrealism:
          
          Amid profound cheering, the important personage steps ashore;
          A man who has fallen out of an aeroplane
          Lands with a sickening thud on the parade beside him;
          He defuses the situation with a witty remark.

All in all Schmidt is no less open than we were to the charge of having omitted too much. He has included eleven poets we didn't but it is not hard to come up with another eleven of equal weight and greater vigour — for instance, James Simmons, George Szirtes, Peter Reading, Kit Wright, Frank Ormsby, Ian McMillan, David Harsent, John Mole, Sean O'Brien, Alan Hollinghurst and William Scammell.

I do not expect Michael Schmidt to believe this, but I began his anthology — respecting as I do his energy and intelligence, and chastened as I've been by the reviews of our anthology—ready to be convinced that Andrew Motion and I were seriously mistaken in our assessment of what is interesting in contemporary British poetry. I ended his book convinced instead of the inadequacy of his critical judgment. It is not only that there are so few well-made poems in his book but that of the ten poets who should be in any anthology of younger British poets —Heaney, Fenton, Harrison, Raine, Dunn, Muldoon, Mahon, Paulin, Reid and Motion—he has included only five. We have all ten. Enough said.