Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 35

In this section, we wish to set out certain regularities and shared features of the texts discussed earlier. As always with such a proceeding, the question must arise as to whether these regularities have been generated only by the corpus of texts chosen, or whether they are of general application. Finally, we believe that the reader must decide. It is for her or him to disprove or endorse the account given here. It should also be stressed that these categories are not exclusive, and that poems not mentioned as part of one category could in some cases readily be included in another.

Very general categories can be observed. First, there are texts in which an interplay of order and disorder is constitutive of the poem's meaning. In general and beyond this corpus, a balance between order and disorder is apparent in many poems (although by no means all), but in some poems the concatenation of ordering and disordering devices is particularly prominent. From our corpus, we would include: Larkin's “An Arundel Tomb,” Harwood's “The Sinking Colony,” Heaney's “Requiem for the Croppies,” Stevenson's “A Love Letter,” Harrison's “Turns,” Adcock's “The Ex‐Queen Among the Astronomers,” Sheppard's “Fucking Time,” Muldoon's “Moy Sand and Gravel,” Khalvati's “Ghazal: The Servant,” and Marriott's “The Wreck of the Mendi.” Second, there are texts that (although this is a matter of interpretative balance) directly and relatively unambiguously present and enact their meanings.² Here, we would include the analyzed poems by Harwood, Heaney, Montague, Joseph, Johnson, Davies, Warner, Kay, and Duffy. Marginal cases might be the poems by Stevenson and Duffy. Joseph's “Warning” is a difficult case. On one level, it is what it says it is—a warning to respectable society—but that social order will scarcely be shaken by the threatened behavior. Third, we observe a group of poems that are marked by self‐undermining and irony. This includes the pieces by Larkin, Hughes, Joseph (probably), and Adcock.

A secondary level of categorization can be observed in several poems. First, a varying engagement with varying traditions is apparent. The tradition is social in poems by Larkin, Heaney, Harrison, Johnson, and Marriott. There is clearly an antiestablishment and antimetropolitan tenor to all these texts, apart from Larkin's, although an aristocratic and established order is slyly undermined in that text. The engagement with tradition is literary (although that is not without social implications) in texts by Heaney, Harrison, Johnson, Muldoon, Sheppard, Khalvati, and Marriott. It is more exclusively social in Larkin's “An Arundel Tomb.” Second, fragments and ellipses organize texts by Harwood, Hill, Constantine, Muldoon, and Khalvati. Third, the demotic voice is apparent in several texts: in those by Hill, Harrison, Johnson, Warner, Kay, Duffy, and Marriott. These demotic voices have different implications and resonances (English varieties, Scots, Black English), but they do have a commonality that jars metropolitan linguistic norms. Fourth, mythological transformation of the everyday is present in a small number of poems: Davies's “The Ophthalmologist,” Constantine's “Visiting,” and Adcock's “The Ex‐Queen Among the Astronomers.” The degree to which Hughes's “Crow Tyrannosaurus” is a mythologization of the commonplace is open to discussion. It is our impression that the mythologizing category is underrepresented in our corpus (as is demonstrated by several essays in this volume). Fifth, women's voices (although far from unambiguous ones) are present in texts by women poets: Joseph, Stevenson, Adcock, Davies, Kay, and Duffy. It is interesting to note that Val Warner's poem does not focus on women's experience, although other poems in Tooting Idyll do.

Finally, two thematic focuses of poems in the corpus deserve to be stressed. First, the motif of impotence is rife among these texts: the figures on Larkin's tomb; Crow who is not a tyrannosaurus rex, but only a crow; Joseph's prefigured old lady, whose misdemeanors are limited in impact; Johnson's put‐upon immigrant; Davies's entranced and entrapped visitor to the eye doctor; Constantine's wretched revenant; Adcock's bitter ex‐queen; Warner's musing gay speaker; and Khalvati's concerned voice. This motif can be contrasted with the more active figures in Kay's text (though the speaker is still dependent on the inspector's goodwill), in Heaney's rebels (though they are defeated), in Montague's socially mobile farmer (though it all comes to naught in the end), and in Hughes's murderous Crow (though he is still just a megalomaniac crow). Second, history permeates many of the poems discussed. This is, above all, the matter of England and of Ireland, but our hypothesis is that a concern with history (both broadly and restrictively conceived) runs through much British and Irish poetry of the last 60 years. Such a concern is apparent in Larkin's, Harwood's, Heaney's, Harrison's, Hill's, Montague's, Johnson's, Warner's, Kay's, and Marriott's verses, in which grand events are interwoven with local and personal histories. If we interpret the term history even more broadly, other texts (for example, all the texts by women writers) could be included in this grouping.

So let this be our story about British and Irish poetry since 1960: technically complex in its working of order and disorder; engaged, often in a disruptive and ironic fashion, with literary and social traditions; offering demotic and marginalized voices and focuses; permeated by motifs of impotence; and fascinated with history.

But these are generalities. The engagement with the individual text and collection, and their attentive reading (on several levels), is the thing.