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

Ian Brinton reviews Allotments by Laurie Duggan In an 1851 lecture on ‘Walking’ Thoreau suggested that he had met with ‘but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking…who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering’. Thoreau considers two derivations of the verb to saunter: there are those who ask for charity under the pretence of going to ‘la Sainte Terre’, the Holy Landers, and there are those without land or a home, sans terre , ‘no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea’. Laurie Duggan’s latest collection of 29 ‘Allotment’ poems possesses that marvellous quality of sauntering which allows the poet and the reader to recognise the small details which accumulate to provide a whole picture. In the opening poem, sitting in his local pub, Duggan’s range of meditative reflection moves him from Ken Bol ton to Paul Blackburn , Australia to New American Poetry, whilst ...

Ian Brinton reviews Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction by Edward Ragg In this highly persuasive and readable account of the later poetry of Wallace Stevens Edward Ragg examines the world of abstraction and the practice of ‘the aesthetics of abstraction’ in the poet’s work. The introduction, itself a model of clarity, looks at ‘how abstract reflections conjure commonality, ordinariness and “the normal” without promulgating hollow generalizations.’ One point of reference here is the attitude adopted by Charles Tomlinson to Stevens’ early work. Looking at a 1964 interview with Ian Hamilton it is easy to see why the young English poet and artist should feel some disquiet about the American whose work he had first come across via his mentor Donald Davie whilst studying at Cambridge: It was a case of being haunted by Stevens rather than of cold imitation. I was also a painter and this meant that I had far more interest in the particulars of a landscape or an ob...

Ian Brinton reviews The Ground Aslant, an anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry edited by Harriet Tarlo This is an absolutely splendid book! Very attractively produced, beautifully laid out, intelligently edited, it is a book to return to time and again. Harriet Tarlo makes her intentions absolutely clear in the introduction when she writes ‘Language is a form in which landscape can come alive’ and the multiplicity of forms presented to the reader within the one hundred and eighty pages of this book is testimony to that world of changing landscape: I have focused here on poets whose formal techniques are exploratory and experimental enough to be called radical, poets whose ideological pushing of the boundaries is to be found integrated into the forms their poems inhabit. The editor also makes the essential point about juxtaposition, ‘often through parataxis’, being a fundamental linguistic principle and suggests that some of the anthologised pieces by Wendy Mulford, Peter Larkin, ...

Ian Brinton reviews London Brakes by John Muckle In the blurb on the back of this extraordinary novel Will Self suggests that one of John Muckle’s achievements as a writer lies in his ability to conjure up ‘this peculiar inter-zone between the behemoth of the city and the hinterland of the country’. That said, rest assured that this world is not that of the simple description however atmospheric and photographically accurate; we are more in a world that combines the moving sense of ‘thereness’ you might expect in the poetry of Charles Reznikoff when mixed with the phantasmagoric creations of Paul Auster and Iain Sinclair . Much of the novel seems to answer that well-worn Larkinesque quandary posed by Mr. Bleaney as he looks out of his window contemplating the extent to which the way we live ‘measures our own nature.’ The mundane repetition of expectations, the patterning of ourselves upon our surroundings, is there from the second paragraph: Gladys and myself never spoke beyond th...

Ian Brinton reviews Martial Arts: The Epigrams of Martia l Translated by Laurie Duggan When D.R. Shakleton Bailey’s three-volume prose translation of Martial’s Epigrams appeared as an addition to the series of Loeb Classics in 1994 Charles Tomlinson reviewed it for The New Criterion under the title ‘Martial in English’ noting that this edition ‘offers an occasion for thinking about the way Martial’s presence shows itself in English poetry’. He praised the unpretentiously accurate approach of the translator by suggesting that it ‘helps the reader to the mental possession of the original’ as well as making one conscious ‘anew of how splendidly some of our English poets responded to Martial.’ A matter of weeks ago Pressed Wafer’s reprint of the Australian poet Laurie Duggan’s translations brings back into the market-place the variety of tones to be found in the Latin poet, the mixture of biting wit and scarifying disdain, a concern for humane values and a compassionate understanding...

Ian Brinton reviews The Watchful Heart, A New Generation of Irish Poets edited and presented by Joan McBreen If you are trying to encourage diners to try a newly-opened restaurant which you rate very highly then there is little point in commenting on each dish on the menu since you will end up with one, or at the most two sentences, serving a descriptive purpose that could have been put there by the restaurateur. With this in mind I have decided to give an account of this remarkably fine new anthology by concentrating upon two very different poets whose poetry and prose appears in that ‘box where sweets compacted lie’. Geoff Ward , the Vice-Principal of Royal Holloway, London has an article in PN Review192 (March/April 2010) in which he suggests that ‘Words can describe, evoke, suggest, delineate, propose, haunt—do all manner of things—except be the thing or feeling or concept to which they refer.’ These words are themselves ghosts of another article written by the same critic in 1...

Ian Brinton writes on Prynne in the latest Salt Magazine .

If it weren't for the fact it is almost my birthday - or that mirrors and doubles and water-gazing figure prominently in my new collection (which speaks to, almost as an ironic retort, my New and Selected from the previous year) - I might not have succumbed to this narcissistic temptation - really an honour. Ian Brinton , Prynne expert, scholar and critic - has sent in a delightful gift - an unasked-for piece of writing on my new book. I post it to share the gift with you. Ian Brinton on Mainstream Love Hotel The heraldic statement concerning objects which William Carlos Williams included in Book I of Paterson, published in 1946, came from an early piece of his written in 1927: Before the grass is out the people are out and bare twigs still whip the wind— when there is nothing, in the pause between snow and grass in the parks and at the street ends —Say it, no ideas but in things— In these lines there is, of course, more than just ‘things’. There is a sense of time as winter en...