C. J. Allen, Violets (Templar Poetry) £4.50
Adrian Buckner, Bed Time Reading (Five Leaves) £3.00
There is a breed of Englishman writing today whose work is very easily reviled; much like the ‘cowpat’ school of English composers of the 40s and 50s. In fact, the sound track to their poems is indubitably the andante second movement of Gerald Finzi’s Cello Concerto. Their writing has little of Finzi’s sometimes overwhelming lushness, but there is his almost obsessive attention to lyrical detail. And, like Finzi, the tunes these writers pursue to create are warm and tender, and wince at any suggestion that they have any confidence in what they finally have to offer. Like the ‘Cowpat’ composers (Finzi, Ireland, Peter Warlock), there is a slightly coterie feel to this cohort. They know each other and edit provincial poetry magazines, in which they review for each other. They live in the English Midlands in unfashionable counties. They view their gender in the domestic situation with a sometimes debilitating wryness, love their children almost too much, and look out through steamy kitchen windows at gardens about which they also feel guilty.
Two of those writers are under review here, a third, Ed Reiss, was reviewed here a month or so ago and, to be fair to him, Reiss isn’t part of this Midlands’ ‘conspiracy’. In addition, Reiss’s Englishness is founded more on his wry take on English history and the English narrative, than either Allen or Buckner, whose view is often more domestic.
Allen’s and Buckner’s poetry often works by accreting details into lists with telling narrative arcs: ‘I remember their mothers// who gave me tea and under the strip-lights of their kitchens/ judged me a negligible risk. In numberless/cinema queues to see films no-one really wanted to see,/I have made conversation the way others might/make a dog-kennel.’ In these few lines from his lovely ‘The Girls’, C. J. Allen brings a small world to pulsing life. And, yes, this kind of poetry is a kind of solipsism; the prism we view these lives through is only Allen’s. But there is such tenderness towards the girl-friends’ mothers and towards that part of the girlfriends’ lives, too. And the devastating precision of that final metaphor! So Allen’s gatherings have a narrative drive that shows what technical control he really has.
In ‘The Neighbours’, Allen looks sardonically at another English target: ‘If, by accident,/ we meet them in the supermarket,/will they look on the contents of our basket/with horror? Will they have hobbies/and might these hobbies involve sand,/wire, ropes or specialist literature?’ This is the poet’s take on curtain twitching. And again, Allen creates a world that is both beguiling and complex; in which he reflects as sardonically on his own prejudices and expectations as he does on the new neighbours and what they might bring.
An irony is that these poets are not afraid to go ‘whoring after strange gods’: Ed Reiss with his love of Geoffrey Hill; Clive Allen’s devotion to Ashbery; Adrian Buckner’s openness and generosity to a whole raft of international writers. That generosity is capitalised on in his lovely, new pamphlet, Bed Time Reading. Buckner riffs on the way the bed-time reading of authors, ranging from Turgenev to Primo Levi, causes the reader to reflect on their domestic situation. Thus, Buckner responds to these great writers in the way that such writers would ideally like; a response that links the reading to the life of the reader: ‘So I turn on my side, wondering about/the books that couples keep of themselves//the bold of early markings, the fading/pages, the confiding quiet of years.’ (Anna Karenina). As with Allen, Buckner not only shows an exemplary tenderness to those couples, he, too, is quietly masterful in his use of phrase structure, and vocabulary, to create small poetic tensions and eddies in the syntax.
Buckner responds to Tolstoy’s comment that Chekhov was all middles with no beginnings and no endings by creating loving and detailed paraphrases of epiphanies from Chekhov’s stories: ‘A shaven head in a sharp suit/stared with no compromising softness/at the waitress mistaking his table./That seemed an end, so I looked away.’ And when again the narrator reaches his home, ‘[I] found you asleep;/my own eyes scorched tired, seeing/back to the beginning, the beginning,/the beginning, this middle.’(The Fiancée and Other Stories)
Provincial though they might be, these poets do not write for readers whose interest is Little England. They are about as far from the English Defence League as you could get and they would be strident in their condemnation of the EDL’s hijackings of nationality. What these English poets nail are the ambivalences of contemporary Englishness, and they do this with a piercing, yet devoted gaze.
Ian Pople