A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
Between.Pomiędzy Festival, and the founder of the Beckett Research Group in Gdan&c.acute;sk. He has published Complicite, Theatre and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and a monograph on Samuel Beckett (Universitas, 2006). He is a member of the editorial board of the global portal The Theatre Times and the literary quarterly Tekstualia.
Bartosz Wójcik is a translator, literary critic, and cultural manager. He has published scholarly papers on the works of, among others, Patience Agbabi, Jean Binta Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kei Miller, Mutabaruka, Michael Smith, and Derek Walcott. He is the author of Afro‐Caribbean Poetry in English: Cultural Traditions (Peter Lang, 2015) and works at the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures in Lublin, Poland (spotkaniakultur.com).
Preface
With such a long, multi‐authored book on such a complex and provocative subject, editors of necessity feel that the reader deserves a few words of explanation before he/she starts to read it.
In our choice of topics and poets, we have been guided by what we felt to be important and useful. We are well aware that another two editors would have approached the field quite differently. We have aimed to open up contemporary British and Irish poetry to a variety of readers in order to give them some sense of the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that make up these two distinct but interrelated poetries.
We have encouraged the authors of the essays in this volume to shape their contributions as they thought best. As readers of poetry, we have a fondness, inter alia, for technical analysis of rhythm, meter, and sound. Not all the authors share this interest to the same degree, although all their analyses and interpretations are well‐grounded in the textual material of the poetry they discuss. Such diversity is as it should be. Further, we have allowed authors a latitude in the length of their essays. Some contributions are more concise than others. However, we insisted that the extent of the longer essays be justified in terms of the complexity and interest of the subjects that they address. Further, several essays are provocative and do not bow to established pieties. Again, surely, this is as it should be.
The volume has been several years in preparation. As a result, while we have tried to make sure it is as up‐to‐date as possible, some poets in the meantime may have published additional poems, and commentators published new studies. But this is an inevitable part of discourse in modern and contemporary literary studies.
Readers will be struck by the absence of separate essays on some well‐known and outstanding poets. Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, and Geoffrey Hill are obvious examples, as is Carol Ann Duffy. We felt that the world did not need another separate essay on Larkin or Heaney, for instance. But a glance at the list of contents and the index to this volume will show that such celebrated poets (eximious within an extravagance of writers) appear continually throughout the volume in discussions of wider issues. In the essays on individual writers, we have chosen poets who deserve greater individual prominence than they have achieved hitherto, or writers who are emerging as major poetic voices.
From a personal perspective, we note with sadness the death of one of our contributors, the gifted poet and critic David Kennedy. In addition, we thank D. M. de Silva for his advice. We also thank the editorial team at Wiley‐Blackwell for their patience and support.
Wolfgang Görtschacher
David Malcolm
1.1 Introduction—1960–2015: A Brief Overview of the Verse
Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm
Introduction
The story is a well‐known one, and this volume presents it in individual essays. The Movement. Alvarez's The New Poetry. The Liverpool poets. The Northern Irish. The British Poetry Revival. The Martians. Linguistically innovative poetry. Black British poetry. Women's poetry. Gay and lesbian voices. The abiding forces of regional poetry. American models. The stars: Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Paul Muldoon, and Carol Ann Duffy.
It occurred to us that we could retell that story here. But it had been told so often, and is told, we believe—with much else besides (thematic and genre‐ and technique‐centered essays, essays on writers within and without any obviously stellar grouping)—in the span of pieces contained in this volume. We felt we should do something different.
Our premises are twofold. First, the best and fullest engagement with poetry is an engagement, above all, with individual poems. Second—and this is, to a degree, a corollary of the first premise—this engagement involves an analysis and interpretation of what we would call technique, that is, the formal properties of a piece of verse. These properties include line length, stress placement, meter, and a panoply of phonological features (rhyme and other sound effects). These we conceive to be integral to the meaning of a poem, as much as—and in conjunction with—thematic reference and imbrication in the historical and social contexts. These premises have guided the organization of the introduction.
It consists of three parts. In the first, we suggest that a great deal of modern criticism of poetry does everything in its power to avoid speaking about technical aspects of any piece or body of verse. We are not sure why, except that it is probably easier to maunder on impressionistically about the topics of a piece of verse as Fiona Sampson does than to sit down and actually analyze a poem. We contend, however, that if you do not analyze and interpret technique, you are at best only doing half your job. Thus, the second part of this opening chapter contains brief analyses of 20 poems of substance from the period embraced by this collection. Restrictions of available space limit how much we can do in any analysis. We have adopted a minimum technique of analysis, which has the merit of being accessible. We hope readers can see the general principles underlying our approach. We contend that this set of analyses offers some interesting insights into how British and Irish poetries are configured in the second half of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. Our discussions perhaps allow a slightly different—and complementary—story to the traditional one. It certainly brings with it some unexpected juxtapositions. Thus, third, we offer some general remarks on British and Irish poetry in the period.
1.
It is, of course, very difficult to prove an absence.1 However, let us suggest that although the contemporary discussion of contemporary poetry is complex and valuable, there is a tendency to avoid the technical. There is a disposition among commentators to talk of the contextual and the thematic, but not what one might call the formal or the technical aspects of poetry. Let us present some examples.
Here Martin Booth writes about Thom Gunn's poetry in British Poetry 1964 to 1984 (1985).
Gunn wrote with an urgency that was appropriate to the times. This gained him few readers. What got him far more and was to extend his reputation were his poems that were about matters close to the common heart. Lorry drivers, “rockers” in leather jackets, Elvis Presley, death and, in more recent books, homosexuality and drugs.
(226–227)
The topical focus (a correct one, surely, let it be noted) is evident here, as it is in Michael Schmidt's earlier A Reader's Guide to Fifty Modern British Poets (1979), in a comment on Roy Fuller's poetry.
His landscape is finally not Africa but suburbia where, as in the war poems, and sometimes with equal power, he celebrates arrivals, departures, the long ennui.
(250)
Here, however, justice compels