Book Review - The Romantic Imagination by Maurice Bowra

 The Romantic Imagination by C.M. Bowra

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961 (first published 1950)     ISBN 0192810065

In a series of thoughtful and thought-provoking essays (originally lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1948-9), Maurice Bowra skilfully dissects the great Romantic poets, showing us how in their view "the creative imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things."

Bowra focusses on the major poets of the era - Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats - and also the "fellow travellers" who shared some of the thinking of the major poets, but either could not surrender fully to the imagination (Byron, Christina Rosetti), or surrendered to it too fully (Swinburne, Poe), or could only work with the thinking in a limited way (Dante Gabriel Rosetti).

Bowra shows how these poets succeeded, and where they failed, and links those successes and failures back to the driving ethos behind Romanticism. While the Romantics opened new vistas for poetry to explore, by turning their backs on the Augustan and Elizabethan tradition, Bowra explains that the Romantics had no tradition to fall back on when inspiration failed; "for tradition enables a poet to conserve his powers, to recruit his strength from other quarters when he is not able to do everything from his own resources. It even helps him to exert himself in fields for which he is not ideally suited, but in which none the less he may be able to win noteworthy successes. The Romantics relied on what was most unlike others in themselves, on their own peculiarly individual gifts. The result was that, by too much concentration on them, they exhausted these gifts and had nothing to put in their place."

In his essay on Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Bowra explains this process as it worked through this poem and Wordsworth's life, and how Wordsworth came to terms with the waning of his inspiration, in a way that Coleridge could not. In both men poetry waned, but only Coleridge stopped writing. I think Bowra sees these two as the peak of true Romanticism, most able to successfully commit their "philosophy" to poetry that could readily be understood.

Blake, and to some extent Swinburne and Poe, struggled on that front as they used their own personal idea of the "supernal" in their poetry, and thus made it harder for the reader to understand what they were trying to say. They also moved away from using ordinary everyday scenes and words which was key for Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, and their poetry suffers because of it. 

Poe and Swinburne in particular, in their strivings for tonality and musicality, could stray too far from meaning.. It's probable that Swinburne would have agreed with Walter Pater's maxim that "All art aspires constantly to the position of music", even though it was written well into the Victorian era. However, this idea is fundamentally flawed: poetry is an art (and a craft) that deals with words, and words convey meaning. No matter how "musically" words are grouped together, if they fail to convey meaning, a poem has failed. This was often a trap for Swinburne (and for God-knows how many poets that have come after him).

Bowra's essay on Christina Rosetti was for me the most powerful. It brings together his theories, showing how while Rosetti was a wonderful poet, she was not a Romantic because she cleaved to traditional religion rather than a self-created spirituality. She longed for God and fought her worldly desires for love. These strains are all worked out in her verse, and because she does have a focus for her "unseen order of things" her poetry doesn't fall into the trap of say, Poe's work, which too often falls into the "un-nameable" or "un-knowable" other.

I suppose the question for me is do I agree with Bowra's views as expressed in this book? I think, for the majority of them, the answer is yes, especially when he discusses Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. His essay on Blake is interesting, and requires more thought from me. The essay that opened my eyes the most was the one concerning Christina Rosetti - I will go back to her work with a new outlook and respect.

If you like the works of the Romantics, but feel that you need a bit of a scaffold on which to build a greater understanding of their achievement, I can highly recommend this book - well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Adam Lindsay Gordon: the Man and the Myth by Geoffrey Hutton

Adam Lindsay Gordon: the Man and the Myth by Geoffrey Hutton

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996 (first published 1978)  ISBN 0522847080

This is a good workmanlike biography of the only Australian Poet to be commemorated in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey, the man who was lauded in the early part of last century as Australia's first poet, and who today still ranks in the pantheon of Australian verse.

In this book Hutton clearly lays out the facts - Gordon's father was a retired officer of the Indian Army, while his mother was a very highly-strung heiress, who spent a lot of her life travelling to improve her health. Gordon's main interests throughout his life, apart from verse, were horses and horse racing, in his early days pugilism, and his latter drinking. Hutton well describes Gordon's inability to find his way in life: he was indifferent at school, could not handle the lifestyle at military college (his father had ideas of Gordon following his footsteps into the Army), and drifted into the milieu that surrounded horses of jockeys, bookies and owners. He was constantly in trouble and often in debt.

He fell in love but was rejected, and so when his father suggested going to the colonies to join the Mounted Police in South Australia, he felt that there was nothing else for him but to give it a try. He wrote to his friend before departing that he only expected to be in the colony for a couple of years before returning, but he never did.

Once in South Australia, he stuck at being a trooper for a couple of years before inheriting from his father an amount that, properly managed, would have seen him comfortably well-off for the rest of his life. Unfortunately Gordon did not manage his money well. He was too generous to friends, followed a failed dream to set up a pastoral run in Western Australia, and spent too much on horseflesh. He was for a time an MP in the South Australian Parliament, but the life didn't suit him and he resigned after eighteen months.

Although one of the reasons he left England was to leave the horse racing set behind, he fell into it again in Australia. When he left the Mounted Police he started the first of a series of stables and horse-breaking and training businesses, most of which went sour. He became quite a well-known steeple-chaser, and for a time did well. Gordon's curse was that he was an upper-class Englishman in the colonies, so he fell between two worlds. He raced much of the time as a gentleman, and so didn't make as much money as he could from his exploits, and didn't have a nose for business, which meant that by the end of his life he was heavily in debt.

Gordon was a man of moods, and was quite often taciturn and morose. Hutton posits that he inherited this trait from his mother, and it could be true: he seems, in this biography as least, to have a lot of the characteristics of someone with Bipolar Disorder. His suicide was a tragic culmination of his many failures and inability to cope. It seems to me that he could not see a way out of his financial predicament (interestingly Hutton tells us that Gordon tried to take out life insurance not long before his death) and shot himself on the very day that his third and last book of poetry was published, to mainly good reviews.

So, we get in this book a good recitation of the life, but what about the poetry? Hutton was a journalist and not a poet, so in terms of criticism of Gordon in this work it is mostly at second hand. Gordon, although a member of the bohemian Yorick Club in Melbourne during his last years, was not well-known as a poet until after his death, and not well-rated as one until well after. Despite being praised by luminaries such as Wilde and Conan Doyle and other Australian authors and poets such as Marcus Clarke and Henry Kendall, Gordon's work was not seen as particularly Australian or even particularly good in the decades after his death. It was in the Twentieth Century, when a core of Gordon admirers worked assiduously to bring him forward as "Australia's Poet" that his star rose. It was helped by several intersecting events. Australia was moving beyond it's pioneering years, and nostalgia for an easier time was growing, especially after the horrors of war; Gordon not only fitted the mould as a poet that expressed what our pioneering years were like, but unlike Kendall and Harpur he actually lived the life of a bushman, with his daring riding exploits and homes in the country. He had been chosen as an archetype, and was made to fit.

He didn't fit of course - it seems clear from Hutton's life that Gordon very much saw himself as English, and indeed much of his poetry was not specifically Australian (although it is the specifically Australian that is probably the best of his work). However the truth has never got in the way of a well-constructed hero story, and so not only did Gordon get a bust in Westminster, his various homes were treated as shrines, he got a statue near Victoria's parliament house, and famously a plinth at Mt. Gambier celebrating his famous "leap". The first time I became aware of the poet and his works was by visiting his cottage in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens (although it's the Ballarat racecourse at Dowling Forest that really has more of a connection to the man in that city).

As a poet then, what can we say of Adam Lindsay Gordon? Hutton points out that Gordon often composed while riding, several companions describing him muttering away as he rode along. It seems his drafts were often written on scraps of paper and so little survives of his method of revising, although Hutton suggests with some evidence that revising was something that was an anathema to Gordon (which I think shows in much of his work). His reading was, by his peripatetic nature if nothing else, scattered, although it's clear he committed much verse to memory, and was partial to Swinburne and Browning among his contemporaries. Gordon's vanity led him to publish much that perhaps would have been better to keep back, and so the good can sit side-by-side with the bad when reading him. Certainly "The Sick Stockrider" is a very good piece of its time and place, and probably an inspiration to those that came after him.

So in summary, Hutton's book is a good well-researched life, but as a work of criticism one would need to look elsewhere (and there is a short but useful bibliography in this book).

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Christopher Brennan: a Critical Biography by Axel Clark

 Christopher Brennan: a Critical Biography by Axel Clark

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980                    ISBN 0522844413

In my youth, like many other young Australians studying literature in the 1980s, I came across Christopher Brennan. To be more accurate, I came across the legend of Christopher Brennan - a looming shadow over late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian literature - lauded as the most cosmopolitan of Australian poets, a friend of Mallarme, and someone who was cruelly treated by the establishment, before declining to a sad death.

His poetry was to me in turn obscure or cringe-worthy,  and yet there is definitely something lurking in the words he wrote. I have been aware of Clark's biography for a long time, and been meaning to read it for almost as long. Now that I have, I feel I not only have a better understanding of Brennan the man, but also of his body of work.

Clark's book is an expansion of his University of Sydney thesis, which examined Brennan's life up to 1914. As a consequence, it is written in a fairly dry style, which means a little dedication is required from the reader to continue through the book. However such dedication is rewarded as this book is the most complete biography of Brennan, and a useful criticism of his poetry, as Clark is not afraid to excoriate that which needs excoriation.

Brennan was truly an extraordinary character. A product of a devout Roman Catholic family. Brennan was helped by the Church to attend St. Ignatius at Riverview, which had recently been established and was already on its way to becoming the prestigious school that it is today. Brennan excelled there, and went on to become one of the great characters at Sydney University, where he gained a reputation as a greatly learned scholar, and a bit of a reprobate - he had a lot of boisterous fun that was essentially harmless, but not looked on kindly by the University establishment.

It was while he was at University that Brennan broke with the Catholic Church (some of his problems with the University sprang from the things he was heard saying about the Church, and religion generally). Clark convincingly argues that Brennan was by nature looking for a Godhead, and when the Church failed to provide, he tried to construct his own, initially by a study of philosophy.

After University he spent some time in the regions teaching (which was a failure) and conducting love affairs (which were also unsuccessful). He then won a scholarship to Berlin, which would seem to be the making of him. When he got there he fell for his landlady's daughter, and neglected many of his studies, and in his reading of European poetry -, especially French symbolist poetry - began to formulate his theory of "the Absolute" in contradiction to formal religion.

When he came back to Australia he was engaged, and really without prospects. It was then that he decided that poetry could be the way to the Absolute, and with his love of the Symbolists, he began to construct his livre compose. He worked at this project until approximately 1902, but it was a failure. Clark, through close reading of the poems, shows us that Brennan had decided that nuptial love was the path to the Godhead, but when his fiancee finally arrived in Australia and they were married, he was sorely disappointed: Clark shows us that Brennan was in love with ideals rather than the actual person of Elisabeth. Many of his poems from this period are formless, obscure and opaque. His poem "The Wanderer" describes his disillusionment with trying to find a path to paradise through verse, and he lost his way, both in verse, and in life.

He finally got a position as lecturer at the University after several travails, but his life was heading off-track. The First World War finally destroyed his marriage: his wife was a patriotic German, but Brennan had a visceral hatred for what that country had become, and wrote some truly appalling patriotic verse during the conflict, which ironically made him popular as a poet, after receiving almost no notice for his "major" works.

There is not much more to write about his personal life - he met and fell in love with a woman younger than him, and left his wife and children for her. His drinking, which had been problematic for a long time, became worse after his lover was killed in an accident, and he was let go from the University for his waywardness, His final years were in turns poverty stricken and squalid. He found his way back to Mother Church before he died, and has been memorialized over the years as a wonderful raconteur, lecturer, and friend.

Clark's biography is, given it is of someone who was renowned as a talker and bon-vivant, very serious. There are some tales (for example the time Brennan quoted from memory the first four books of Paradise Lost), but this is mostly a formal recitation of an interesting but in many ways failed life. The criticism of the poetry is, I think, harsh, but fair. Brennan never climbed the heights that many people seemed to think him capable of reaching, but he did leave a strong legacy in Australian letters, and remains an enigmatic figure today.

This book, if you are interested in the subject, is well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Voice of Victorian Sex: Arthur H Clough 1819-1861 by Rupert Christiansen

 The Voice of Victorian Sex: Arthur H Clough 1819-1861 by Rupert Christiansen

London: Short Books, 2001                                                       ISBN 0571208150

An interesting little essay on an interesting Victorian character. I'm not sure Clough lives up to the title that Christiansen has given his work, but his life and poetry are a fascinating insight into a time of great intellectual upheaval in England, and Christiansen has given us a deeply thought out account of how Clough's experiences shaped his all-to-short life.

Unusually for one of his class, Clough spent his early years in America, and when he returned to England was sent to Rugby under the tutelage of Thomas Arnold, where he was a much-loved and successful student, before heading up to Oxford with a scholarship to Balliol. His years at Oxford were not successful, as Clough struggled with having to submit to the religious test to stay at the University. This eventually became intolerable and affected his final degree, and led to him abandoning his position as a don.

He led a life of dithering over what he should do with his life. He variously entertained plans of moving to New Zealand, Australia, and actually did for a time spend some time in the USA (he was firm friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, after meeting him in England. He was also close to Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle). Eventually he got a job in the civil service, and married. However, it seems he was never truly happy, not being able to conform with societal expectations. Christiansen makes much of Clough's sexual travails - his Arnoldian education meant he was wracked with guilt over any sexual thoughts that weren't pure, exacerbated by what seems to be a predilection to prostitutes over the course of his life.

His poetry is where Christiansen finds evidence that Clough was "the voice of Victorian sex". Certainly his poetry did move on from Romantic tropes that were popular during his youth, toward a poetry of  ordinary life and feelings, and to relations between men and women. Clough often gives women in his poems agency in love and romance, which is unusual for his times.

I suppose where I have reservations about Christiansen's claim is that Clough, although popular in literary circles, and seen for some time as an up-and-coming man (before he was seen as a what-might-have-been), was only a minor figure in poetry. His first published poem as an adult, The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich was well received, but at no stage was he truly influential in the world of poesy in England.

His poetry has never been really popular - he usually appears in anthologies of Victorian poetry, but not as often in broader collections. His style was individual, preferring lesser-used metrical systems such as hexameter, and subjects that were very individual. It is hard to gather from his life whether he saw himself as a poet in any meaningful way.

His later life was spent as general factotum to Florence Nightingale, who was a cousin to his wife. He worked extremely hard in her name, until he had some sort of mental and physical breakdown in 1859. The origins of his decline are such that Christiansen can't pinpoint exactly what was wrong with him, but he went to Europe for a cure, and died in Italy with his wife by his side.

I suppose it's fitting that a minor poet gets a short book - I like the idea behind this series of "short lives" books - this was a pleasant and edifying way to spend some time waiting for my child to finish their music lesson, and like all books worth reading, has lead me on to have a look at more of Clough's work.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Ulysses Voyage by Tim Severin

 The Ulysses Voyage : Sea Search for the Odyssey by Tim Severin, drawings by Will Stoney, Photographs by Kevin Fleming

London: Arrow, 1988 (first published 1987)                            ISBN 0099544202

We tend to forget in these days of computers, drones and 3D imaging, that it was not long ago that archaeology was a field of study that occurred just as much through reading as through digging, and almost never through what is now known as "experimental archaeology". In fact that phrase is not even mentioned in The Ulysses Voyage - Severin I think would have balked at the idea that he was an archaeologist - but certainly his voyage in the Argo shows us  how much of Homer's poem can be tied to real places in Greece.

With his re-enactment of Odysseus' voyage home from Troy, Severin laid to rest some of the theories that had abounded that much of the action of the poem occurred in Italy or points west. As he explains in the final chapter of the book, many of these flawed ideas can be laid at the feet of Strabo, who knew Italy (and Georgia, where he correctly deduced the voyage of the original Argo), but didn't know Greece at all and so moved much of the action of the Odyssey to places that  he knew. The fact that some of his theories were taken seriously at all shows how the field of archaeology quite often can allow itself to be led in circles.

Severin starts out with a simple theorem - if I was Odysseus, how would I travel home from Troy? With that in mind, he proceeds along the coast of Greece, using the poem as a guide. Severin explains that in Ancient Greece, galleys proceeded at  slow pace, and only when weather conditions were favourable. Severin also shows us that while the course of the Odyssey takes ten years to return to Ithaca, the actual sailing part of the story could be completed in one season. He then posits that the Odyssey is a conglomeration of many sailors stories turned into a narrative. Severin constantly discovers as he sails that much of the Odyssey that refers to the techniques and realities of sailing a Bronze Age galley is surprisingly accurate.

Some of the descriptions of localities are very accurate as well, and Severin discovers plausible sites for the lair of Scylla and the Cyclops, the island of Circe and of the Laestrygonians. He backs his theories with descriptions from Homer, and explaining how the sailing times would match from previous waypoints, and also on many occasions explaining how local legends have been used by Homer (the Cyclops a case in point), which also help to pinpoint locations.

The Ulysses Voyage reminds the reader to be wary of both complicated explanations for myths, and of putting current thinking onto the past. Greek galleys did not sail as far or as fast as later ships, for example - sailing stages of hundreds of miles simply weren't plausible for these vessels, and so some of the wilder theories could be fairly easily discounted. Likewise, deciding that a place must be part of the story, and then trying to bend reality to fit is not a way forward - Severin is very careful to try and not do this, which means that the island of Ogygia remains elusive. After all, the Odyssey is a poem, and not strict geography.

I found this book very enjoyable - it's easy to read, and neatly blends Severin's voyage with the ancient poem, and brings new light to the voyage of the wily Odysseus, and reaffirms his good sense (most of the time). If you are a fan of Homer (and if you aren't, you should be!), this is well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Charles Harpur by Judith Wright

 Charles Harpur by Judith Wright (Australian Writers and their Work)

Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1963

I love this little series of pamphlets - Australian Writers and their Work. Edited by Geoffrey Dutton, each title is a short 30-ish pages about an early Australian writer, written by another writer. Not only are they interesting in their own right, they are an illustration of a time when Australia was beginning to discover itself, and indeed study itself.

This series was a first step into the study of Australian literature as a literature separate to itself, rather than a stunted offshoot of English literature. Of course we have now (unfortunately) passed through that period, and we seem to no longer value the study of Australian literature as a separate subject: globalization doesn't only happen in the business world.

What I particularly like about these titles is that Dutton chose writers, rather than academics, to write each title (I suppose there may not have been academics qualified to write them at the time). The potential advantage of doing so is that no-one has a better insight into the art and craft of writing than a fellow writer. And so we have this small pamphlet about Charles Harpur, perhaps our first (white) poet, written by Judith Wright, one of Australia's great twentieth century poets.

The state of Australian literature in the early 1960s is evidenced by the fact that Wright had to journey to the Mitchell Library to consult the manuscript copies of Harpur's poems, as many of them were not extant in print. The major book of his poems, published in 1883 was heavily bowdlerised before publication and so Australian readers had little exposure to his work (thankfully this has since been rectified).

Wright, in the short space given her, expounds on Harpur's life: son of freed convicts, he worked mostly in labouring jobs and while he did have some contact with literary people, he was mostly resigned to living and writing by himself. She then goes on to give the reader a flavour of Harpur's verse: as a self-educated man with limited access to books in his youth (and quite possibly in his adulthood as well), he studied the verse he could access, writing essays about, and composing verses in the style, of several of the poets he'd studied such as Dryden, Chaucer, and others.

Absorbing what he'd read, Harpur became the first poet to write about the Australian countryside in a way that was Australian, rather than a transposed English pastoral. He also tried his hand at everything from hard satire, to an (unpublished) attempt at an epic poem about a kangaroo hunt, as well as writing political journalism in support of land reform and other liberal causes.

As Wright notes, Harpur as a poet was varied in his success. Much of his poetry is archaic now, but still important, because his work is the first by a native Australian of working class, and amongst the first to celebrate Australia itself. Anyone interested in Australian poetry and literature in general should get to know him - I guess these days checking out his Wikipedia entry is enough to discover him (it's quite good actually, with links to many of his poems), but, crusty old man that I am, I'd rather read Judith Wright's little tome.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Eight Victorian Poets by F. L. Lucas

 Eight Victorian Poets by F. L. Lucas

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930

If you are a book accumulator like myself, you no doubt have many books such as this lying around your house: picked up for a song, on a subject you like (or would like to know more about), and put in the pile to read "one day". Well, for Eight Victorian Poets, that day has come, and on balance it was worth the time to read.

Frank Lucas was a well-known critic and commentator in his day, and was famous for his scathing review of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, although his real expertise was in poetry of earlier eras: it's important to keep in mind that, having been published in 1930, Eight Victorian Poets was discussing near contemporaries, not an era ancient to the author. In fact Lucas points out that several of the poets discussed died not many years previous to the publication date of this book (which, from the introduction, I take to have originally been radio broadcasts).

Lucas has written short, quite personal essays on what he saw as major poets of the Victorian era: Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Clough, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Swinburne, and Thomas Hardy. Whether by design or chance his chosen subjects range across most of Victoria's reign, and so we see the "development" of poesy through that time (if indeed development is the correct term).

In dealing with Tennyson and Browning, Lucas compares and contrasts their styles - Tennyson the great evoker of scenery, where Browning was much more concerned with people rather than places. Both are to be enjoyed, in Lucas's opinion, in fragments rather than by trying to read their longer poems in one sitting: Browning in particular he exposes as hard to understand at times. Both he considers failed themselves when they turned too much toward preaching rather than the music of poetry, with both becoming lost in their fame and the adulation they received from a sometimes too credulous public.

Lucas moves to discussing Arnold, whom he considers had a great art, but repressed it because he felt that it was too frivolous a thing to be writing poetry when there was so much more to do in the world. He compares this to Clough, who's art was destroyed by his engagement with big questions (faith, love), which left him little time to be much more than a dilettante, but one with much talent.

Rossetti in some ways Lucas sees as a pivotal figure of the period, the one who brings the "passionate South", into the cooler "Northern" air of Victorian poetry. While he became a bruised personality, he worked hard on the art of poetry, rather than concentrating on moralism or preaching like Tennyson and Browing.

In Morris, Lucas sees a poet somewhere between the extremes he has previously delineated, one who did use his talent wisely in his verse. He likes Morris's fecundity in all things, and while not suggesting all his work was successful, the following quote sums up his feelings for the work - "Between the fireside glitter of societies like Pope's and the sun-blinded vapours of souls like Shelley's, lies a middle sphere. In it are found reason without insensitiveness and imagination without unreality, sense without hardness and deep feeling without sentiment; in it the greatest name is Shakespeare, and far from the least is William Morris."

His final two studies, Swinburne and Hardy, are again contrasts for Lucas: whereas Rossetti was "driven mad" by Victorianism, Swinburne was "eaten up" by it, barely surviving his first foray into poetry, and, as a poet, never really moving beyond his initial youthful exuberance, Lucas portrays him as "childish and cruel", his poetry showing a want of proportion and experience, judgement and restraint. While his music as a poet was sublime, he mostly had nothing to say - he failed to ripen.

Hardy on the other hand, he portrays as never being "young" - ruthlessly truthful all the time, he had no need for sentiment or flowing adjectives. His sincerity and intellectual honesty shine out in his poetry - "There are poets like Tennyson who think of Beauty before Truth; they tend to produce poetry that is perfect rather than great: and there are poets like Hardy who have a feeling for Truth even before Beauty; these tend to produce poetry that is great rather than perfect."

This book is a pithy introduction to these poets, with Lucas providing a pithy introduction about the value of reading verse over succumbing to science - Lucas enjoins us to read and enjoy, and enjoy just for enjoyment's sake. Which is what I'm heading off to do right now.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hey Days by Alister Kershaw

HeyDays by Alister Kershaw

Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991             ISBN 0207166757

Alister Kershaw is little-known now: truth be told he was little-known before his death, and little-known even when he was active in the world of letters. A quick scan through most of the better anthologies of Australian Poetry will reveal none of his work to a reader, and he doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, and only a scant entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, which states that he was a "member of the city's artistic counter-culture of the 1930s and 1940s, contributing to such magazines as Comment and Angry Penguins." HeyDays is a vignette of his life in Melbourne during the war years, and a first impression of Paris, where he moved after the war.

Kershaw self-consciously chose a literary life and a bohemian existence. His world was one of artists, writers, and the Melbourne scene as it was, which centred around the Leonardo bookshop, the Petrushka cafe, and the Mitre Tavern. It is mostly around these places that Kershaw weaves his tale of feuds, fun and art, through describing his fellow travellers.

I use that phrase ironically, as one thing Kershaw certainly wasn't was Communist in any way shape or form. He had a clear-headed view of what Communism was, and as a true non-conformist, could not be trammeled by the rigidity required to be part of any such group or ideology. He lampoons several such followers in HeyDays, Noel Counihan and John Reed in particular.

Kershaw was a free spirit, and found a boon companion in Adrian Lawlor and to a lesser extent Denison Deasey, but people who get more than a passing mention in this book are Max Harris, whom Kershaw admired while forgiving him his shameful self-promotion, Geoff Dutton, who was a close friend, James Gleeson whom he met on the boat to Paris, Sidney Nolan whom Kershaw thought was second-rate, and Albert Tucker whom Kershaw grew to admire greatly after a rocky start to their acquaintanceship. He writes about the publishing scene in wartime Melbourne, Comment and Angry Penguins particularly, as well as the difficulty in publishing a book of poetry in Australia at that time.

HeyDays is a short book, full of anecdote and half-remembered adventures, but none the worse for that. As an evocation of a unique and short-lived period of Melbourne's cultural life (when the War finished most of the people mentioned in this book either went "respectable" or, like Kershaw himself, decamped to Europe), HeyDays is a wonderful way to spend an hour or three.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A primer of English Versification by James McAuley

A primer of English versification by James McAuley

Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967

James McAuley's reputation has suffered many slings and arrows over the years, some of which are undeserved. Most famously remembered as being one half of the Ern Malley hoax, and perhaps less so for being editor of the right-wing magazine Quadrant, which received money from the Congress for Cultural Freedom (which had links to the CIA). Cassandra Pybus wrote a vitriolic book about him, which hasn't helped his reputation.

It is a shame, because he was a fine poet, and thoughtful critic. His bent was to formality in verse - which explains his participation in the Malley fiasco - and over the years he wrote several useful books about poetry.

A primer of English versification has many good points, the first being its short length. At 60 pages, it is a book that can be read often, and repays re-reading. As the title suggests, the book is a first-stop for those trying to understand English verse, particularly metre and rhythm. McAuley gives us brief descriptions of basic metre, stress and sound, and how they add up along with meaning to create poetry. Poetry is a tension between all these things, and McAuley shows that by careful use of all these factors, the poet can create something new and beautiful.

What I particularly like about this book, after spending years in University unproductively scanning lines, is how McAuley puts all these factors into perspective. If the verse is in iambic pentameter, don't stress too much about feet that don't seem to fit - look at the whole verse, not just a single line, and the metre should be obvious: don't worry too much about small changes. In fact it's often the small changes to a metre that give the verse its energy.

If you are someone who wants to understand verse better, or just needs reminding of stuff you might already know, this little book is worth hunting out and keeping on your desk.

Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The death of Lorca by Ian Gibson

The death of Lorca by Ian Gibson

London: W.H. Allen, 1973          ISBN: 0491010400

In days when even the spokesman for the US President forgets the history of World War II in claiming that Hitler didn't kill his own countrymen with chemical weapons, what chance that anyone walking the street will cast a thought back to the Spanish Civil War, that terrible precursor to the worldwide conflagration that began six months after the final Republican surrender?

And yet the history of that war keeps coming back to haunt us. Recently Spain has been grappling with the horrors that occurred during the war, and the cover-ups and mendacities that happened after it, under the long tight grip of the Franco regime.

This book, by English academic Ian Gibson, was written in the final years of Franco, and was the first disinterested attempt to find out what happened in the final days of Federico Garcia Lorca, certainly the most famous Spanish poet of the Twentieth Century. His murder was one of the early outrages to occur in the Civil War, and became a stain that the Nationalists were desperate to eradicate from their history for many years.

Gibson was in the fortunate position to be in Granada in the late 1960s, and could speak to people who were in the town at the time when the initial uprising occurred, and who were eye-witnesses to many of the horrible events of that time. He begins the book with some short chapters on Lorca, and his relationship with the Republic, and on the twists and turns of Spanish electoral history in the 20s and 30s that led up to the attempted coup.

He describes in some detail the fall of Granada, and the brutal repression that followed, in which thousands of people were summarily executed (Gibson puts the figure somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 people). Many old enmities were expunged in the name of the country, and countless innocents were caught in the horrible terror that ran from July 1936 well into the next year.

Lorca's heart was with the Republic and the peasants, and he was widely seen as left-wing, but was hardly a great presence on the political stage. At the outbreak of the rebellion he felt he had to leave Madrid for his hometown of Granada, not from a feeling that he would necessarily be safer there, but because he wanted to be near his family.

It was not long after the Nationalists took Granada that Lorca realised that he was going to become a target for the new regime, and so he turned to one of his good friends, Luis Rosales, who was in fact a member of the Nationalist hierarchy in Granada - a member of the Falange. Rosales sheltered him in his house for several days.

However, as Gibson's detective work shows, there were other forces at work. One of those forces took shape in the figure of Ramon Ruiz Alonso, a failed right-wing politico with a grudge against Rosales. He organised a raid on the house while Rosales was at the front, and took Lorca to the Civil Government Building and handed the poet over to Valdes, the governor. It seems clear that Lorca was kept in this building for several days: Valdes was unsure what to do with his famous "prisoner", until his superior, the infamous Quiepo de Llano, instructed that Lorca was to be shot. Gibson was probably the first to find out the exact chronology and location surrounding his murder - he was taken a short distance out of Granada, shot in the back of the neck and buried.

The Nationalist forces soon realised that the murder was a great mistake, and if the truth got out it would be a propaganda coup for the Republicans. And so a campaign of obscufation began, which surrounded the facts with a farrago of half-truths, outright lies and conspiracy theories. Gibson devotes some time to each of theses, shooting them down when he can, and pointing out holes in others. It doesn't help when people with an intimate role in Lorca's final days swear to conflicting stories about what happened.

As can be the case, this book about a single life throws the appalling massacre that occurred in Spain in sharp relief - as Gibson writes in the final paragraph of this book "Had Federico not died that morning in Viznar, the thousands of other innocent, but less well known, granadinos liquidated by the rebels might have been forgotten. As it is they will be remembered long after those responsible for the repression have passed into oblivion."

An interesting and educative read.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The poet by Yi Mun-yol

The Poet by Yi Mun-yol, translated from the Korean and with notes by Chong-wha Chung and Brother Anthony of Taize

London: The Harvill Press, 1995           ISBN 1860460100

How often it is in life that something looked forward to and hoped for turns out to be disappointing, and those things sprung upon us, or that we stumble across despite ourselves, are great experiences. So it is with The Poet. My wife, who has an artistic temperament, bought this book second-hand because she liked the cover art (Tiger by Song'am) and, through a mis-communication I thought she had purchased it for me owing to its subject matter. I never would have purchased or read the book if left to my own devices, and that would have been my loss.

The Poet is a fictional re-telling of the life of Kim Sakkat, a wandering poet of the early nineteenth century in Korea. Written in a dry, almost academic style, Yi Mun-yol describes how Kim's grandfather aligns himself with a rebel force, and when he is captured and executed by the King, the rest of the family fall into exile and disgrace. Kim Sakkat is unable to enter the civil service and, burdened by shame and bitterness at his fate, becomes a wandering poet. Yi uses the bare bones of this story to write about betrayal, loyalty, fame, honour, wealth, truth and of course, poetry. He does this by describing the development of Kim's poetry during his journey through life.

Early on, before Kim realises that his attempts to re-integrate into the upper classes are fruitless, he composes a prize-winning poem condemning his grandfather's treachery. Disgusted with himself for betraying his family, he begins his life as a wanderer. It is at this stage that he has what turns out to be a pivotal meeting, with an old poet in the mountains. Although Kim doesn't realise it at the time, the old poet explains to him the true meaning of poetry - to be at one with the World, not to try and change it. Kim thinks the old man a dreamer, and goes on his way.

Yi describes the stages of Kim's poetry as stages in his life: his earlier works written to try and impress the upper class milieu into which he would have liked to be accepted were technically perfect and traditional in structure and theme - supporting the status-quo. Once he realises the pathway up the social classes is barred to him, Kim consciously sides with the lower classes, and begins to write works that are revolutionary in form - incorporating Korean language with traditional Chinese characters for the first time - and proletarian in content; writing of work, drink and sex, with much more humour than in his previous works.

The final stage in his poetic journey begins after he meets the old poet again and realises that the old man was right after all. Kim's final years and poems almost call nature into being as he recites: they are poems of what is, rather than what could be, or what he'd like to be. It seems, after a life of bitterness, anger and regret that Kim will die happy.

Like all good fiction, The Poet consists of many layers. As the reader discovers in the prefatory material, Yi's father, a communist, defected from South Korea to the DPRK during the Korean War. The Poet shows Yi not only working with themes that impact on him personally, but also looking at how society as a whole deals with betrayal and "traitors". As the book develops, Kim's knowledge of his grandfather's actions grows. As a child, all he knew was that his grandfather was a traitor to the King, siding with a rebel force. Later, during his travels, he meets an ex-rebel, who describes how Kim's grandfather was trying to bring about change and a better world for those under rebel control. Later still he meets someone else who questions that version of events. Yi shows us that one needs to be careful in what one believes, as nothing is black-and-white, and no one person's motives are entirely pure.

There is a strange section towards the end of the book where Kim becomes the poet for a band of revolutionary vagabonds, writing to instil bravery into the men, and revolutionary spirit into the locals. His work becomes widely popular, but fails utterly to help the revolution - words don't replace deeds in this case. This seems to be the final step in the progression for Kim in realising that poetry and words do not get you things in the "real" world - except maybe a meal or a drink here and there - and it is best to write the poetry that resonates within oneself.

The language in the book is spare, bald and matter-of-fact. Yi, in dealing with a real life, has twisted the story to make it his own by writing in a pseudo-academic style, correcting "mistakes" in the generally accepted life of Kim. The short chapters each deal with a specific event, yet while we know some of Kim's deepest thoughts, he is still an elusive character when he finally walks out of the frame of the story in the last pages. Yi's style, at least in this translation, reminds me of David Malouf's Ransom.

Highly Recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Contested Will by James Shapiro

Contested Will : who wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

London: Faber & Faber, 2010                  ISBN 9780571235766

For those interested in the Shakespeare conspiracy, and for an accessible guide to its history and why those who believe in an alternative writer of the plays are irretrievably wrong, this is as good a place as any to start reading. Focusing on the claims of Bacon and Oxford in the main, with a passing reference to other claimants, Shapiro not only gives a good run-through of the evidence that convinces sane people that Shakespeare wrote the plays, but also brings out some of the absurdities in the claims for Bacon and Oxford.

What I found most interesting in this book is that both Delia Bacon (no relation to Francis), who proposed Francis as Shakespeare, and John Looney, who first proposed Oxford, did so after spiritual and personal crises which - as Shapiro points out - had a lot to do with them becoming iconoclast. It almost goes without saying that their initial doubts about Shakespeare arose from a complete misunderstanding of theatre and playwrighting in the 16th and early 17th centuries, and by them thinking of authorship during that time as reflective of how authors worked and thought in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Shapiro demonstrates that it is all too easy to fall into the trap of using Shakespeare's writings to try and discover something of his life, and also explains that in the 1500s and 1600s the idea of writing - especially for the stage - that was in any way autobiographical was almost unheard of.

As historical work on Bacon, Oxford, and Shakespeare has moved on in the later 20th and 21st centuries, it has become clear that both Bacon and Oxford could not have written the plays, and that Shakespeare - despite what Baconians and Oxfordians might have you believe - was acknowledged at the time by various sources as the writer of the plays we know, and of others now lost. It has also become clear that Shakespeare collaborated on several of his plays as well.

For every character or situation in the plays or poems that the conspiratists use to further their theories, there are two or three that offer a counter view, and Shapiro uses those characters in his final summing up, which is a withering attack on the small imaginations of those who would doubt Shakespeare. For it seems that those who refuse to believe that Shakespeare could write the plays also refuse to believe that it is possible to make up stories and plays from one's imagination, using things one has read or heard. It's actually quite sad to read the bleatings of these people.

So, well worth reading, and with an excellent bibliographical essay with which the reader can take their own journey through the major literature of the authorship question if they wish. Or, just stop at Shapiro.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Oscar Wilde: a summing up by Lord Alfred Douglas

Oscar Wilde: a summing up by Lord Alfred Douglas, with an introduction by Derek Hudson

London: Icon Books Limited, 1962

There's little doubt that the line of the Marquesses of Queensberry was a troubled one - suicides, depression, violence and alcohol running through the family during the Nineteenth Century. Most famously Alfred Douglas' father, John, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, was a violent abusive man, who took Oscar Wilde to court which led to Wilde's imprisonment for homosexuality and following destitution, all in an attempt to belittle his own ex-wife and son, Alfred.

The book under review was written by Alfred a few years before he died, and is an interesting snippet of Wildeiana. Alfred in many ways was like his father: passionate, disagreeable and wilful. Oscar Wilde: a summing up is Douglas scoring some final points against his enemies, and re-assessing and justifying his own actions, while also muddying the waters as to his own culpability when it comes to Wilde's downfall.

While Douglas famously repudiated Wilde after the latter's death, in this book he softens his attack on him. Having converted to the Roman Catholic faith, he naturally deprecates Wilde's sexuality, while at the same time excoriating his imprisonment for it. As Douglas reckons it, while homosexuality is a sin, it is not a crime and to treat it as such is wrong. He also claims that he himself never engaged in a homosexual relationship with Wilde, and had no idea of Wilde's "perversion" until it came out in the trials, which is very hard to believe.

Douglas gives a quick overview of Wilde's life, correcting some misinterpretations and falsehoods that had crept into the publications extant at that time, and provides some critical insight into Wilde's work. His criticisms on the whole accurately sum up the worth of Wilde's output but adds nothing new.

This is a quirky book, it reads like an old man talking over an afternoon cigar - wanting to make a point but constantly being side-tracked into explaining other things that crop up in the conversation, crusty and set in his views, and unrepentant over his role in the affair.

What Douglas does convey is the beauty of Wilde's wit and conversation, a facility that won over many of his enemies and was his ticket to fame. He was loved by no-one more than Douglas, and this book shows us that, as well as being an insight into Douglas himself.

The blurb on the back of this paperback edition states that "this book is a last word about Oscar Wilde.." and while that may be when it comes to Douglas, it is certainly not the last word on what was an amazing life and titillating scandal.

One for complete-ists only.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Poetry notebook by Clive James

Poetry notebook 2006-2014 by Clive James

London: Picador, 2014                            ISBN 9781447269106

The long mourning of Clive James has begun, before he has even shuffled off this mortal coil. I feel sure he relishes the irony of being feted in magazine and newspaper, especially in those that would never countenance publishing any of his verse.

His long decline into the grave has engendered an extraordinary outpouring of writing, both of verse and criticism. Even before his final illness was diagnosed he produced Cultural Amnesia, a work that almost defies description, and one I think will be an essential guide to the glorious mess that was the 20th century as time wears on. His translation of Dante is wonderful, and the work just keeps coming.

Poetry notebook pretty much does what it says on the cover - it is a collection of pieces written by James about poetry over the last ten years for various outlets, with his pieces for the magazine Poetry being at the heart.

There is no doubt that behind the bonhomie and wit of his television persona, James is a deep thinker, and committed to poetry as the highest of arts. He has a lot to say, in his own inimitable way, about exactly what it is that makes a poem, and how they affect us, the gentle reader.  James leads us through just what it is that makes a poem, from the memorable phrase, a master touch of rhythm and the wonderfully argued stanza. By referring back to his own discovery of verse, he reminds us of the great thrill of that first time you read a line, a stanza, or even a whole poem that grabs you by the guts and makes you feel lightheaded.

In the first section of the book, "Notes on poetry", James brings together his articles from Poetry magazine, interspersed with little "interludes"; and, while each essay is a whole within itself, they link together to provide a critical framework for what James considers important. And that is genius in language tied together with structure, which allows the poet to transcend both language and structure to create greatness.

James refers in one essay to Michael Donaghy's concept of “negotiation”, “obtained from a contest between what the poet aimed to say and the form in which he had chosen to say it.”, and it’s fair to say that James also believes in this concept. This belief makes him very wary of free verse. While he points out that much rubbish has been written both in formal and informal modes, James suggests that informal verse has a much higher bar to jump over to be considered good poetry, and in fact used poorly can take away the effect from some wonderful lines. James doesn’t dismiss informal verse entirely though, as there are success stories, and freedom and form need to both exist to bounce off each other.

All good poems must have something to say, and James is merciless to poems that don’t. There is a wonderful essay on Pound in this book, where James revisits his (and let’s face it, lots of our) early devotion to his work with a more mature eye, and calls out the Cantos for the cant that they mostly are, pointing out the irony that Pound the critic was all about meaning and being to the point, yet his poetry was often the exact opposite: “The arrow has not two points.”….

The second section of the book consists of articles and essays regarding particular poets, including Peter Porter, Les Murray, John Updike, Robert Frost and others. These writings reflect James’ conviction that poetry must be meaningful in a basic sense to really become poetry – he doesn’t like woolly language that attempts profundity, but holds to Frost’s concept of the “Sound of sense”.

James has always been at his best in the mode of critic, and it is in the essay that he finds his ideal outlet. This book (and it is true also of Cultural Amnesia), while constructed of disparate pieces, can be read as a single entity – a theory with examples scattered throughout the text. It is a book well worth reading for those engaged in writing poetry: even if you may not agree with his ideas about what poetry is, his advice to “young” poets is helpful – read as much as you can, work out why something grabs you, and practice, practice, practice.

There are other little gems of advice as well: James is a firm believer in the value of anthologies, as they not only bring together the “best” poetry, but they give you insights into the times they were produced, or what particular poetic movements considered seminal.

The final piece “Trumpets at Sunset” is a poignant collection of paragraphs in which James laments his imminent passing and how he now lacks the time to revisit some poets that he feels he may need to read again. He also lets us know in this section that he’s not a huge fan of Milton or Swinburne, but enjoys a bit of Dryden.

It will be interesting to see how posterity treats Clive James. I think Poetry Notebook is well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Street to street by Brian Castro

Street to street by Brian Castro

Artarmon, NSW : Giramondo, 2012                         ISBN  9781920882952


Where to start with this little novella?  The main protagonist, Brendan Costa, past middle-age, part-Asian, middle-level lecturer, failed husband, cigar smoker, is obviously partially a representation of Brian Castro. Whether Brendan's two failed marriages and ambivalent view on Male - Female relations mirror Castro is another question which I'm not qualified to answer.

Brendan is, in the course of Street to street, facing the breakdown of his second marriage, and is becoming more consumed by the book he is writing, which is (more than) a biography of Christopher Brennan, an Australian poet heavily influenced by the French Symbolist movement and arguably that country's first modern poet. His life was one of early success eventually overtaken by tragedy, mostly due to alcohol.

The story of Brendan and Brennan are intertwined through the brief 140 page work (published in a nifty square format by Giramondo - something different to your average paperback), with Brendan's depressingly post-faith, post-modern and post-belief life gradually gathering meaning for him, while Brennan's life gradually loses momentum.

Brendan is a worry to the part-time narrator of this story (the authorial voice moves around quite a bit for a small book) as he seems to be taking on some characteristics of Brennan, especially the drinking characteristics. He is falling out with management at the University, and is gradually giving up. However, a big event in his life gives him hope, and his view of Brennan's two-finger salute to society during his time also gives him strength.

Towards the end of the book, Brendan makes some discoveries about Brennan that destroy his faith in him, and the book then takes a tragic turn.

For a book about two poets (Brendan is slated as a sometime poet), there is very little poesy in the work - not a criticism necessarily, and in fact a reminder that poets have mundane, tragic or exciting lives as much as any other person - Castro's evocation of Brennan's chaotic life is masterful - the early promise, the Wildean antics, the inability to take his gift to the World's stage, his gradual pathetic decline, is evoked as well here as anywhere else.

The reader gradually warms to Brendan through the work - unlikeable at the beginning, insights into his own and Brennan's life work on the reader to garner sympathy - both Brendan and Brennan tried to be true to themselves and poetry, despite all the roadblocks, both external and internal, that are placed in their way. Both fail for different reasons, but in the end the attempt seems almost noble.

An interesting book, and worth a read.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

P.S. For a much more intelligent review, head here.

Book Review - Beautiful and Pointless (a guide to modern poetry) by David Orr

Beautiful & pointless : (a guide to modern poetry), by David Orr

Published by Harper, 2011                     ISBN 9780061673450

Go to most bookshops today, and you're hard pressed to find a poetry section- if you do, you might find that the books of modern poetry are outnumbered by anthologies, and how-to books such as How to Read Poetry, or The Poetry Toolkit. At first blush David Orr's book might seem to be another in this genre, but he has set himself a slightly different task, and it's one he pulls off with a considerable amount of verve.

It's important to point out at the beginning of this review that Orr is writing specifically of the milieu of modern poetry in the USA, where creative writing courses have carved out a sizable niche in academe for 'professional' poets, and all that means (both good and bad). This is quite different from the Australian situation, where there is much less scope for poets to turn their craft into a way to earn a living, so my "Down Under" viewpoint might be a little different to Orr's (presumed) intended audience.

Orr has divided his work into six sections - The Personal, The Political, Form, Ambition, The Fishbowl, and Why Bother? The first section, The Personal begins by describing the responses Orr gets at parties when he says what he does for a living (he is a poetry critic). This moves into a discussion of what the personal actually means in poetry, especially given the confessional nature of a lot of modern verse. The point I think Orr is trying to make is that a reader shouldn't let the feeling of 'overhearing' a poem take away from the experience of it's language or technical skill. He subtly points out that this criticism could be applied to some poets as well.

The short chapter entitled 'The Political', deals with what it means to be political in poetry, and raises the conundrum that many (American) poets today are highly politicised (usually on the Left of the spectrum), but their poetry shies away from direct political statement, or fails to reach it's presumed target audience - Orr raising the conjecture that poets today might be so enclosed in the ivory tower that they have actually lost the ability to speak to the masses (and also points out that there may never have been a time when they did).

If you have got this far into the review, you'll realise by now that this is not your typical guide to poetry, but you might think the next section,'Form' might brings us back to more familiar 'how to' territory. You'd be wrong of course. In fact this is the best part of the book, because Orr does not go down the usual path of technical explanation of form. He describes the battle that rages between formalism and it's opposites, and in so doing has given us some new methods and terms to use when discussing form. Metrical form is obvious, but then he gives us two other terms, 'Resemblance form', and 'Mechanical form'. These are quite handy and useful ways to look at and perhaps categorize modern poetry - the idea behind Orr's concept of resemblance form is that something that resembles a classic form should be treated as such, even if it has been pulled apart with (post)modern glee and reconstructed in a way that Shakespeare may not understand (Orr does point out that even the Great Man himself was able to stretch forms to suit his purposes on occasion). Mechanical form is a category that Orr uses to describe poetry that sets itself some sort of artificial limitation, such as only containing a certain number of syllables a line.

Of course, because this is the postmodern age, Orr then spends several pages disavowing the idea of categorizing form at all, and coming to rest in the argument on the side of 'is it interesting?', rather than giving too much weight to any particular form.

In the section titled 'Ambition', Orr looks at the state of American poetry today in terms of what makes a poet ambitious, and what that means for a poet writing today. He has a very interesting section on Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, connected in so many ways, and the relative change in the posthumous reception of the two, with Bishop on the ascendant and Lowell declining in reputation. He makes the point that Lowell was self-consciously a Great Poet and strived to be so, a position that Bishop eschewed, perhaps to concentrate on her craft. It's instructive to note that Lowell's collected works amount to 1200 pages, where Bishop's checks in at about 200. The change to the nature of what it means to be a poet in the modern age has done things, in Orr's opinion, that make it harder for a Lowell-type Greatness to be possible today, and perhaps give us a greater appreciation for Bishop's less 'shouty' form of achievement. There is no easy answer to the question of what it means to be an ambitious poet in the early twenty-first century, and Orr gives the answer that may in fact be closest to the truth - find your voice and develop it as much as you can.

'The Fishbowl' brings us back closer to earth, being a discussion of what the "academization" of poetry has done to it's practitioners, and whether that change is of detriment to the art. Orr gives space to both sides of the argument, explaining how academia provides a comfortable place for someone to find the time to write, and gives poetry an importance that it might otherwise lack. He also points out that the ivory tower can put some limitations on a poet as well, in that a potential poet needs to conform to the appropriate career milestones and make sure they keep in with the right people to get ahead, which of course can actually end up being antithetical to the best poetry.

What Orr doesn't really discuss in this section are the poets that are not part of the academic treadmill, who are Insurance Executives or Librarians or Labourers. This section of the book is fascinating, but it is very narrow, and it is unclear to me whether Orr sees academic poets as the only ones worth talking about. Certainly if you are a poet in academe you are taking your work very seriously, but surely so was Philip Larkin (the Librarian), Wallace Stevens (the Insurance Company Executive), or John Shaw Neilson (the Labourer).

In 'Why Bother?', Orr moves into a more personal mode, where he attempts to answer a question that possibly has never had a definitive answer. He certainly doesn't provide one, and is unashamed to state that. Why Not? is a perfectly valid response, and in the end is one that Orr gives us, after a quick ride through some of the arguments that have been put forward for poetry over the years.

In his Introduction to this book Orr gives the reader permission to disagree with him - he also gives the reader permission to read poetry without necessarily knowing too much about it at first - he uses the metaphor of visiting another country, in which at first things don't make much sense, but if you keep wandering around eventually you do start to get the hang of it all. To stretch that metaphor, Orr's book is like one of those short, hip guidebooks that eschews the "normal" sights and restaurants, and instead provides an interesting view of some parts of the country of modern poetry that will help the traveller get around the countryside. It's well written, pacy and humorous in parts, and certainly more fun than a Lonely Planet Guide.

Check your local library or bookshop for Beautiful and Pointless - they probably won't have it but you never know, they might - and they might have some decent poetry as well.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell