Having just read the versions of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems in Robert Robertson’s The Deleted World I can understand why people love and admire them so much and perhaps in time I’ll come to do so myself.  Their language is supple and fluent, rich and delicate in sound and full of expressiveness, and behind it all there is the immense power and humanity of Tranströmer’s own vision. At least for now, though, they just don’t feel right to me.

Perhaps familiarity with Robin Fulton’s versions means that I’m not approaching Robertson’s with an open enough mind. And of course I have no … Continue Reading

A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley. Jonathan Cape. 64 pp; £10.00

Michael Longley’s poetic voice must be one of the most instantly recognizable in English poetry. And yet the tone of his writing, especially in this new volume, is extraordinarily modest. Sometimes, as in “Call”, he barely seems to impose his own will on poems which appear almost to assemble themselves as he notices things around him, people or animals cross his path and thoughts surface. The frequent use of questions is a part of this tentativeness. They are rhetorical in that they aren’t part of an ongoing process of enquiry, … Continue Reading

Jane Draycott’s Pearl is a remarkable poetic achievement and fills what has been a frustating gap in our translated literature. There is a translation by J. R. R. Tolkien, but it preserves the formal patterns of the original at the price of syntactical contortions that make it virtually unreadable as poetry, however useful as a crib. The original is a 2500 line long, fourteenth century dream poem, probably by the same author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It narrates a dream vision in which a grieving father speaks to the soul of his dead two-year-old daughter, receives consolation … Continue Reading

There’s something almost miraculous about the combination of quietness and penetrative power in A Hundred Doors, Michael Longley’s new book from Jonathan Cape. I’m looking forward to reviewing it but it will be a daunting task. Each poem is assembled with such extreme reticence and delicacy and at the same time packs such an enormous punch that the attempt to paraphrase and explain will seem even more out of keeping with the original than writing about poetry usually does. Meanwhile I’d just like to recommend all lovers of Longley’s work to buy it.

Of Mutability is a book about death and change. Some of its poems hauntingly evoke unease, fear and loss. What is astonishing is how often the same poems, looked at from another angle, twinkle with humour, playfulness and resilient vitality. “Procedure”, the penultimate piece, is one of the most poignantly life-affirming poems I know. Here, the guard of humour is dropped completely, but the final poem, “Piss Flower”, blends elements that are wonderfully funny with others that aren’t funny at all in an amazing fusion of rude wit with grace. This is an immediately accessible and enjoyable book. It’s also … Continue Reading

The quality of Gary Allen’s writing is impressively sustained. In the whole of Iscariot’s Dream I found hardly a page from which I couldn’t have drawn memorable quotations. From the first I was struck by the authority and resonance of his phrasing, as in the first three lines of the book: 

                        This cushion of darkness pins us to the earth
                        landbound, only our thoughts rise
                        above the sensed outline of these buildings:

Several characteristic notes are sounded here: the combination of emphatic utterance with fluidity of syntax and metre; the cutting of a line against the syntactical grain to tauten rhythms … Continue Reading

Cynthia Fuller’s writing is artistically polished but linguistically low-key, using simple syntax and vocabulary in a precise and evocative way. In the best poems the restraint of her style is a considerable strength. One such piece is “Encounter with Angels”, recounting a visit to Coventry Cathedral. It is composed in couplets formed not by rhyme but by being laid out in two-line stanzas. Here one sees very clearly how carefully achieved the restraint of Fuller’s writing is. It appears in the syntax, avoiding the drama of enjambement almost entirely, and using the coincidence of period with line or stanza to … Continue Reading

John Levett’s poems present themselves in armatures of assertive rhyme and metre. To my taste, this can become oppressive, but Levett rhymes with great skill and verbal resource, and often to powerful effect. For example, in “Tourniquets”, commended in the 2005 National Poetry Competition, the way he weaves long, complex sentences through a demanding rhyme pattern powerfully builds and controls the imaginative pressure. Still more impressive in this way was “Five Barred Gate”, with its virtuoso handling of a complex metrical and stanzaic form. In “Salix Contorta” what the poet calls his “trellised song” is paralleled to the willow’s twisting … Continue Reading

Steeped in learning, sophisticated in vocabulary, syntax and metre, highly wrought and sculpted to last, the poems in David Constantine’s latest volume offer the reader huge rewards. 

Not the least of these is the pleasure of seeing familiar writers and artists through the eyes of someone who reacts to them with such direct and passionate engagement. For example, “26 Piazza di Spagna” gives devastating focus to the pain of Keats’ death. In itself, it is one of the most poignant poems inspired by the life of a writer that I’ve read. In context, it is one of a densely interconnected cluster … Continue Reading