E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

PLATH IS THE MOTHER OF US ALL, IN SOME WAYS TODD SWIFT ON STRANGER, BABY BY EMILY BERRY (FABER, 2017) "ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE, THE CONFLUENCE OF POETIC RESPONSES TO BEREAVEMENT" I hesitate to call this a review - it isn't - it's an appreciation, and a comment. I should say that I think  Stranger, Baby by Emily Berry   is one of the best books of British poetry you are likely to read in 2017; and that it seems to me to be at once better, and slightly less good, than its predecessor, Berry's feted debut, Dear Boy , whose title similarly played on various meanings. I once was Berry's "poetry tutor" - for several key years in the now-famed MAIDA VALE GROUP I ran through the POETRY SCHOOL - other members included Liz Berry , Helen Mort and Phil Brown . I recall seeing almost all the poems in Dear Boy in early stages. I have seen none from this new manuscript, though I predicted, even urged it to appear, in my several reviews/essays on Dea...

  The poet as critic Andrew McMillan reviews Dear Boy by Emily Berry There’s an interview with the wonderful American poet Matthew Dickman for the Scottish Poetry Library in which he says (and I’m paraphrasing badly here, apologies Matthew) that irony “isn’t horrible” but that it can “only get you so far”. I found this a really interesting idea. Much modern poetry seems too hip, too ironic, too tricksy for its own good- accomplished poems rest on their own surface intrigue rather on their ability to say anything real.   Love is fine but only if we don’t really mean it, only if we’re making fun of it, only if we love ironically. When I was first starting out in poetry, my first pamphlet got reviewed by someone who we won’t name who said, amongst other things, that the tone of the poems seemed too angsty; he was right, but what I took this to mean at the time was that writing love poems to a departed lover wasn’t enough, there needed to be an angle, somet...

There is a furore in the air because the Faber 50th anniversary edition of Sylvia Plath 's classic novel The Bell Jar , about a young woman in the 1950s America of Eisenhower who suffers mental health issues (to put it mildly), features a cover designed for the Mad Men set: stylish, retro and also, quite light.  The sense is, the design betrays the content, and cheapens lit by making it chick lit instead.  Ill-lit, it should be, not bright and sassy.  The Faber people claim the design is designed to reach young readers who might not know who Plath is, or have read her poetry - which seems a little unlikely as a sales aim - a bit like marketing Orwell to people who don't know much about Nineteen Eighty-Four with a cover of some slim sexy women in latex catsuits. However, some argue, what does it matter if the book finds new readers?  I guess the book and its cover issue raises a question - is there ever a cover not apt for an author?  Would we ever see a...

Are his poems on the Richter Scale? The August 20-21 weekend issue of the FT had an article by Martin Amis , on the poems of Philip Larkin , excerpted from his forthcoming Selected for Faber.  I am not sure why Larkin needs a Selected.  All his work is now available, and all is worth reading; nor is there so much of it to wade through, and he is the most readable of modern poets.  That being said, Amis, because of his father's close association with Larkin, is an intriguing choice of editor for such a book.  Amis makes the argument that Larkin is not so much a poet's poet, as a novelist's poet, because of his pithy lines, and his impressive imagery - though in fact effective image and metaphor, and memorable lines, have always been poetic gifts to the reader, and were only later borrowed by novelists. Amis is I think correct to cite Larkin as the great English poet of the second half of the 20th century.  Indeed, after Hardy , and Auden , he seems undeni...

The Sunday Times Culture section has a cover story on Faber's new app, for The Waste Land .  Sounds great.  What next, iPound?

It isn't true that poets, neglected or little read in their own time, will be discovered later, or that poets find other poets, and are able to champion them and bring them to light, - at least as far as a wider general public is concerned.  My doctoral research into poets of the 1940s has shown me the reverse - that good poets tend to oblivion, unless they are thoroughly fortunate, in friends, in connections, and, mainly in media attention.  The new movie Howl confirms the trend - poets known to the public get recycled. In Britain, the poets who usually get mentioned in the media are those who were, even during their lifetime, the media darlings - Ted Hughes, Larkin, Betjeman .  The launch today o f a new book by Professor Greene on the life of Edith Sitwell also shows how tough it is to be remembered or respected - Sitwell was a modernist eccentric and genius, but now is marginal.  I think of Joan Murray (who I recently anthologised in a Carcanet book), selec...

Who is Oliver Reynolds ?  We might still be asking that - but a new review of his latest book, by David Wheatley , partly rescues Reynolds from something closely resembling benign neglect.  Odd, since he had four books with Faber, starting in the mid-80s, after winning an Eric Gregory Award, then the Arvon Prize - proof that nothing is sure in the house of poetry.  Now, Reynolds, perhaps eccentrically working, in middle-age, as an Opera House usher, has a new collection out, Hodge . He deserves readers.  Why does he not have them (much) anymore?  I suspect that the poetry world's indifference to many good and even excellent writers is partly connected to the social networks that, naturally, flow about publications - going to a launch one is reminded that most books receive the reception not of all their peers, but those known to the editors, publishers, and authors - if lucky.  And, as poetry circles widen and contract, with age and circumstance, some poe...

I've just received my copy of Faber's Philip Larkin "lost recordings", The Sunday Sessions . It was a necessary purchase - after all, Larkin, for better and worse - is the face of non-modernist British poetry post-1945 - and is also one of the English language's greatest coiner of phrases. He's not a poet you just ignore, even if (as I do) you disagree with some or all of what he thinks about poetry. Still, I disagree with Pound often - but enjoy some of his poetry. Larkin's also something of a closet modernist himself (if one notes how much he drew on Yeats , Auden , Eliot and others). Anyway, imagine my surprise when I played the CD, and found that it was less than 46 minutes long ( 45 minutes, 20 seconds to be exact). The back of the attractive CD promises "Running time approx. 1 hour". Maybe in a Bangkok massage parlour, - but for this listener, "approx. 1 hour" should be approximately 60 minutes, give or take one or three. The...

Stephen Page , publisher and chief Executive of Faber and Faber, has begun to see the digital light - or at least, some of its glow. While his brief article in The Guardian is hardly evangelical, it does seem to represent a conversion, for mainstream British publishing, away from a model that ignores social networking on the Internet, to one which seeks to grab hold of that platform, and haul bricks and mortar publishing, paper and all, into the 21st century. Eyewear has been arguing, in these unpapered but lettered pages, for just such a decision, for some time now, and welcomes Page's moves, to an extent. However, if one reads closely, one will see that what is being proposed is not precisely an e-celebration. Rather, Faber is proposing to basically do what Salt Publishing already does - the "build it and they will come" approach, where a site offers cool things, around the books for sale (podcasts, and so on). This is not new; nor is the print-on-demand idea - many o...