Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970

Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970. Edited by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain. Hanover and London: Wesleyan UP, 1999. 280pp. ISBN 0-8195-2258-9.

Other collects the work of 55 British and Irish poets who have figured little in conventional histories of contemporary British and Irish poetry, and who have thus received little recognition either within their own country or abroad. With most of these authors the principal reason for this neglect is their allegiance to a modernist sensibility which has often been looked on with suspicion by the British literary establishment. These poets have turned to an international (often American) modernism for inspiration; but they also draw on a less well-known tradition of UK and Irish modernism, some of whose authors – such as Basil Bunting, Mina Loy and W.S. Graham – have begun to receive more attention, while many others, such as Brian Coffey, Nicholas Moore and Lynette Roberts, still remain undeservedly little-read. A number of the poets in Other number among the most important practitioners writing in English in recent decades. Given the difficulty of obtaining many of their books – often out of print or with limited distribution – the North American reader has cause to feel grateful for the diverse array of work presented here by the editors, Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain.

The book kicks off with a combative introduction that concerns how the poets included have chosen to be or found themselves made “other” to mainstream British poetry, both aesthetically and in terms of their access and attitude to the institutions of cultural legitimation – major presses, curricula, canons, public funding, and so forth. There is considerable justice in the editors’ dislike of a UK poetic mainstream whose astonishing feebleness may be demonstrated by a trawl through such anthologies as Sean O’Brien’s The Firebox: Poetry from Britain and Ireland after 1945 or Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford’s The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945. Yet the editors resort to arrogant and sketchy caricature of the mainstream (or “the ‘mainstream’” as they prefer to put it), while rather bewilderingly refusing to acknowledge that this is what they are doing. “It is not the function of this introduction to describe in detail the development of this ‘mainstream,’ nor is it our intention to dismiss it as devoid of worth,” according to one paragraph, which goes on to say that “‘mainstream’ in this context may be said to include the narrow lineage of contemporary poets from Philip Larkin to Craig Raine and Simon Armitage, and encompassing their attendant ‘collectives’ (Movement, Martians, New Generation). Generalisation about such (often nebulous) groups is fraught with difficulties, but it nevertheless holds that in each case the typical poem is a closed, monolineal utterance, demanding little of the reader but passive consumption” (xv). There is no way to pretend that this is an unprejudicial characterization, or that undefined terms like “closed” and “monolineal” have a precise meaning rather than emotive impact. It is simply wrong to speak of Craig Raine’s poetry, its stock in trade the baroque metaphor and the opaque riddle, as demanding no more than “passive consumption”.

Other ’s editors use a now-familiar academic vocabulary of decentralization, marginality, dialogism, diversity and otherness, and also tick off a quick checklist of “class, race, gender, creed” as concerns of the writers they admire (xviii); but they are unwilling to recognize that such concerns are equally important to the UK mainstream and the critical and anthological apparatus surrounding it, as the preface to the Armitage/Crawford book demonstrates, or (going further back) that to the 1993 Bloodaxe The New Poetry. (Andrew Duncan, in a review of the latter in Angel Exhaust 11, compared its preface to that of the avantgarde anthology Floating Capital and asked, “Does the avant-garde have a separate discourse any more?”) Other’s editors claim that the mainstream and the larger power structure it is associated with value “transcendent identity and unity”, “universality of moral, ethical, and aesthetic values”, “centrist monologic utterance”, an “established centralised tradition”, and “Absolute Reality”, to quote merely a single paragraph (xx). But though their polemic might suit a dinosaur like Anthony Thwaite, it has little pertinence to the current generation of UK and Irish mainstream poets, which is very concerned with issues of representation, identity and language, though this does not always mean the poetry is much the better for it. I might cite, for instance, Jo Shapcott’s “Phrase Book”, a collage drawing from Gulf-War military jargon and a traveller’s phrasebook to suggest the dissolution of individual subjectivity in media-saturation; Carol Ann Duffy’s inversions of patriarchal myths in The World’s Wife; Peter Reading’s book-length satirical collages; Paul Muldoon’s slippery picaresque postmodernism; and W.N. Herbert’s spirited mixtures of surrealism, MacGonagallian doggerel and polyglot satire. The editors accuse the mainstream’s “established centralised tradition” of “dividing the world into such binaries as us and them, real and unreal, authentic and fake, original and imitation, true and false, poet and poetaster” (xxi); but it is precisely these binaries that underpin their polemic. Without precise definition, terms like “dialogic” and “monologic” are the flimsiest of covers for “good” and “bad”.

If I’ve dealt with the preface at length, this is because its flaws seem to me to unnecessarily detract from a strong case: UK and Irish nonmainstream poetries are some of the most interesting work being produced today. Conventional wisdom sorts the UK poetry scene into two camps, “Cambridge” and “London”, with J.H. Prynne the presiding genius of the former and Eric Mottram and Bob Cobbing sharing the honours for the latter. (Mottram and Cobbing are represented here; Prynne, as is his usual policy with anthologies aimed at the educational market, declined the editors’ invitation.) I suppose that Other can be loosely ranged on the London side, as its choice of authors overlaps extensively with the Mottram- and Edwards-edited parts of Paladin’s 1988 The New British Poetry, while containing only a sprinkling of the authors who appeared in Iain Sinclair’s Conductors of Chaos, which was heavily weighted towards post-Prynne poetries. Yet, reading Other, my impression is that such terms say virtually nothing of use about the poetry. The stylistic diversity of the book makes a nonsense of ideas of stylistic “schools”, and shows up the blandness and interchangeability of much of the UK mainstream. Even a book like In the American Tree looks positively unified compared to Other.

One way of showing this diversity is to examine just one strand of influence in the book – that of Bunting, whose influence is not surprisingly well-represented in a book edited by two Bunting scholars. What’s remarkable is the range of response to his example: on the one hand, for instance, there are the elegantly compressed elegaic stanzas of Richard Caddel himself, or Tom Pickard’s terse lyricism and political directness; on the other, there’s work that shares Bunting’s affection for the gruff and gnomic qualities of medieval verse, like that of Bill Griffiths (“To dwindle / : nought / to lack name/’nown / leave nothing.” [98]) or Maggie O’Sullivan: “Snow of Earth bladder waking to a new Ear / when the stir of all Breath would to a Seeing turn, / wondered upon; housed many, unhurt is” (176). I was mostly unfamiliar with the nature poems of Colin Simms, whose work is a pleasant discovery: though he is strongly indebted to Bunting, his poems’ effects are more akin to those of Hopkins’ late poetry, as in “Grey Wagtail on the Tyne”:

the dirtiest, downstream of Team

twinned-for-power flourmill turret

Flash lever-long tail lined by the Yellow of it flirt opening-flower or of

butterfly-forewings somewhere else

in sour-air shadow oilcracker tower

Flash of felsite arching shine of the Grey and White not at some torrent’s tumbling fellside

not at a milecastle of the Roman Wall’s marchings. (245)

If the “London” school has a central poet it’s perhaps Allen Fisher, a polymath poet-publisher-painter whose twelve-page selection here makes a persuasive case for his importance. The collage and cartoon surrealism that characterize the mainstream’s efforts at postmodernism look hopelessly crude when set beside Fisher’s skilled crossfades between science, aesthetic theory, political commentary, narrative and abstract wordplay. His work is about the transformational nature of consciousness and art; it both draws on those themes for its materials (as “content”) and exemplifies them formally: often poems are treated less like discrete entities and more like matrices that, subjected to transformative operations, unfold into new poems. The results of his procedures can be dauntingly massed arrays of words, or amusingly absurd collocations (“A bunch of ‘passionified’ carrots to make the eyes gleam” becomes “Crunch of fashioned scare crows to exercise spleen and buzz off” [73]). But narrative is also important to Fisher, as exemplified here in two fine longer poems from Brixton Fractals. Fisher’s multiplicity of practice, cutting across different artforms, finds one of its most important inspirations in William Blake, an influence he shares with the “Cambridge” poet Peter Riley. I can hardly think of two more stylistically diverse figures; compared to the radical procedures of Fisher, Riley’s work of recent decades bespeaks an innovative traditionalism that suggests a poet who in other cultural contexts might well be part of a more viable mainstream. Riley’s ear is attuned to the high rhetoric and music of poetries of other centuries and other languages, but via an absorption of modern masters of such high lyricism, such as Duncan, Pound, Spicer or the British poet Nicholas Moore. But despite their poetic differences, Fisher and Riley share an unexpected common ground in how they both manage to catch the visionary, politically trenchant note from Blake. I’ll quote Riley first (the context is “a Car Boot Sale” in Alstonefield):

Dull English weather,

the day stands inert, colour stops dead,

distance diffused, a green field and a shed

with the usual water tank at the back of a farm

in the mud. It would be specious to pretend

that any bit of British countryside is anything

but an agricultural factory marked Piss Off.

And people open their car boots to reveal

image destitution. But a true ring, a

soul lock, and shopping is a delight, what

traces left of tribal pain lessen in the rain

until every necessary transaction brandishes

the rose of time, triumphantly above

the stalls of love. Then the heart and the

mountain ring are one. (219–20)

And from Allen Fisher’s “Birdland”:

Endless destruction

makes Brixton

Call it the coexistence of prohibitions and

their transgression

Call it carnival and spell out jouissance and horror,

a nexus of life and description, the child’s

game and dream plus discourse and spectacle.

On the edge

of death High Road, the Busker

starts up a reel, it begins as dance interlaced

with anger. I guess at the ridiculous partners

that perform. The busker dances with

her saxophone

‘Ideas of Good and Evil’ are subsumed into this nexus,

production knots and

unknots paranoia

Blake stands his ground

on the Common asks, Are

Her knees and elbows only

glewed together. (69)

I could also cite Barry MacSweeney as another instance of such a combination of formal daring, political bite and visionary rhetoric; his “Far Cliff Babylon” (with its classic lines “I am 16. / I am a Tory. My // vision of the future represents / no people.” [142]) is one of the book’s most memorable selections, a fierce combination of Rimbaud, reggae and the Sex Pistols.

Space limitations preclude my saying more about other selections, such as John James’s fine “Sister Midnight”, which makes more of O’Hara’s poetics than many American followers, or Alan Halsey’s mordant reworkings of the Robin Hood legend, or Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s passionate formalism. I have also given short shrift to two aspects of the anthology, its selections from Irish poets such as Randolph Healy, Catherine Walsh and Brian Coffey, and from black British writers such as Fred D’Aguiar, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Grace Nichols. Though neither selection is large, they usefully diversify the collection’s scope. That scope is almost too large, as it has meant that selections are mostly brief (three to six pages) and weighted towards short, self-contained poems. This decision was likely unavoidable, given the size of the field this book attempts to represent; readers may in any case supplement the book with such collections as Conductors of Chaos or A Various Art, especially for such authors as Roy Fisher or Douglas Oliver whose major works are in the long form and who receive rather unrepresentative selections here. Other is not a perfect volume, but it is a useful and important collection of work from authors who deserve close attention from readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Nate Dorward

Published in Sagetrieb vol. 18 no. 1 (1999)
[actual publication date 2001]