Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 50

Daniel Bourne

Perhaps not everyone remembers the old adage (at times attributed to George Bernard Shaw from the eastern side of the Atlantic, and at others to H. L. Mencken from the western) that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” It is an observation that lingers, however, not just in the minds of those bemused by differences in American and British idioms, but also those who consider the existence of some sort of Mid‐Atlantic trench between the poetry written on the American shore as opposed to the British.

In his essay, “Poetic Modernism and the Oceanic Divide,”¹ a review of the 2004 anthology New British Poetry edited by British poet Don Paterson and Serbian‐born American poet Charles Simic, American poet Kevin Clark again raises the question of the existence of such a divide, though noticing the distortions involved in using such a broad categorical brush stroke: “Like cartoons masquerading as reality, the stereotypes are obvious: Contemporary British poets remain rhyming automatons and Americans are still bellowing their free verse yawps” (Clark 2004, 1). He reports that there has been a tendency for American practitioners as well as critics of poetry to claim “that British verse was long ago marked by its staid traditions of form and voice and that American verse has been characterized by its compulsions toward a roughhewn originality” (2). More convincing to Clark appears to be the differing historical dynamics of the two traditions—that is, the way that the two poetries might have different thematic concerns and different ways of wrestling with these concerns. In this regard, Clark finds himself for the most part in agreement “with those who think that British writers have been molded in good part by considerations of class and American writers by ideals that favor the Emersonian individual” (2).

Of course, the perception of this supposed divide dovetails with the chronic spat within American poetry circles themselves, involving what Robert Lowell during his acceptance speech for the 1960 National Book Award for his collection Life Studies famously characterized as the divide between “a cooked and a raw” (Lowell 1960), crystallizing the sometimes sharp and sometimes blurred boundaries between poets (and readers of poetry) who expected new American verse to be wrought in the fixed forms of the past and those who proclaimed this new poetry should be “free” to do whatever it wanted. In this schema, the bards and blokes writing in fixed verse in England are very much the cooked, while the poets of America have thrown off the yoke of imperial form and are now the proud pioneers of a wild and wide‐open poetry befitting a wild, wide‐open land.

Again, the supposed spat is imbued with stereotype; yet, it would also be amiss not to recognize the presence of this sometimes unsettled sea of mistrust and misreading, of controversies over differing conventions and intentions. Above all, there continues to exist a discussion about this barrier, and one that has broken down only rarely (and notably) in the examples of just a few poets. At the same time, however, the main observation has to be that despite possible differences of ear and thematic concern, individual British and Irish poets have still continued to land in America with great impact. In fact, to a large degree the genuinely significant influence of British and Irish poetry in America since 1960 is not connected to any similarity of school or movement. There has been no “invasion” akin to Beatlemania c. 1964. Instead, this story has been one of individuals. And, within this story, no character looms larger than Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Also of particular note are British poets Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes as well as Irish poets Paul Muldoon and Eavan Boland. Moreover, both Muldoon and Boland exhibit an instant complication to the supposed Atlantic divide in that both poets came to make their homes at least part of the year within the United States.

Earlier, there was also the interesting case of Denise Levertov, born in Essex in 1923, who moved to the United States at the age of 24, and who by the 1960s had emerged as one of the central figures in American poetry. Connected with the Black Mountain School—Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, etc.—she ended up fashioning one of the key conceptual components of late twentieth‐century American free verse: the notion of organic form. Almost the entirety of Levertov's poetry after her arrival in America was issued by New Directions, a publisher as central to the American literary landscape as the Mississippi River is to the country itself. How can we even conceive of poetry in America toward the end of the twentieth century without thinking of her? And what about W. H. Auden, who was still writing poems after 1960, though his most significant work was behind him? Here, there is even some temporal fuzziness, in that even if we grant Auden's most influential poems were written in an earlier era, a wider reception in America awaited him because of the inclusion of his landmark poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” in the 1976 David Bowie star vehicle film The Man Who Fell to Earth, which exposed this poem to an audience beyond the usual poetry crowd.

When Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) died in the summer of 2013, his obituary in The New York Times referred to a 1995 review in Publishers Weekly stating that Heaney “has an aura, if not a star power, shared by few contemporary poets” (Fox 2013). Here, the reviewer was not singling Heaney out against a backdrop of other UK poetic imports, but was comparing him to all living poets, American or otherwise. In 2008, the year before Heaney celebrated his seventieth birthday, two‐thirds of the poetry collections sold in the United Kingdom were written by him (“Heaney,” Poetry Foundation 2015e), and, in the United States, his literary presence has been almost equally remarkable.

Born on April 13, 1939, in County Derry, Northern Ireland, Heaney published his first major book of poetry Death of a Naturalist (Faber & Faber) in 1966. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, his other collections include Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), Stations (1975), North (1975), Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), The Cure at Troy (1990, a play in verse), Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), and District and Circle (2006). Two earlier collected works, both published by Faber & Faber, were Selected Poems 1965–1975 (1980) and New Selected Poems 1966–1987 (1990). Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996, published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998, was even on the list of The New York Times' “Notable Books of the Year.” In 2010, his last collection of poetry, Human Chain, was also published in an American edition by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Not only his poetry, but Heaney himself was also present in America throughout much of his later writing life. Among other contacts, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University from 1985 to 1997 and Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence at Harvard from 1998 to 2006. Earlier, he had been a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

In America, however, Heaney is no less “Irish.” The Poetry Foundation's webpage on Heaney even mentions that in large part the poet's impressive “popularity stems from his subject matter—modern Northern Ireland, its farms and cities beset with civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule” (“Heaney,” Poetry Foundation 2015e). Yet, Heaney's reach cannot be reduced only to a convenient cause célèbre, a function of Northern Ireland and “the Troubles” being perpetually in the news in the decades toward the end of the twentieth century. Heaney's work goes beyond the documentary and the topical. Instead, Heaney's treatment of this painful period of Protestant/Catholic conflict in his native land is perhaps as complex as the background issues and events themselves. Moreover, his complicated positioning of himself and his poetry vis‐à‐vis such subject matter has perhaps become a source of admiration among American poets and poetry readers, in that his bearing witness to these troubles is expressed in narrative and metaphor rather than doctrinaire statement. The very approach to poetry that might make him seem detached and esthetically anesthetized by some readers directly connected to the conflict might in fact make him seem more honest and genuine by poets and readers who mistrust yoking poetry to politics.

Within Heaney's prolific and influential oeuvre, it is his “bog poems,” especially, that have captured attention; for example, “The Tollund Man” from Wintering Out or “Bog Queen” and “The Grauballe Man” from North. Rather than being an escape into archeological romanticism, however, these poems engage in an intense dialogue with the troubled Irish present. Referring in an interview with The Paris Review to an essay by American poet Robert Pinsky about the responsibility of the poet involving a response or answer to the surrounding world, Heaney asserts:

I see the Bog Poems in Pinsky's terms as an answer. […] Not quite an equivalent for what was happening, more an attempt to rhyme the contemporary with the archaic. “The Tollund Man,” for example, is the first of the Bog Poems I wrote. Essentially, it is a prayer that the bodies of people killed in various actions and atrocities in modern Ireland, in the teens and twenties of the century as well as in the more recent past, a prayer that something would come of them, some kind of new peace or resolution. In the understanding of his Iron Age contemporaries, the sacrificed body of Tollund Man germinated into spring, so the poem wants a similar flowering to come from the violence in the present. Of course it recognizes that this probably won't happen, but the middle section of the poem is still a prayer that it should. The Bog Poems were defenses against the encroachment of the times, I suppose.

(Heaney and Cole 1997)

In this “attempt to rhyme the contemporary with the archaic,” there is an endeavor to find historical resonance, to avoid the shrill or anemic rhetorical frequencies of overt littérature engagée. But there is also a recognition of the anxiety Heaney feels at his own passivity as well as his desire to bear witness, as we can see from his comments about another bog poem, “Punishment:”

But there was always a real personal involvement […]. “Punishment,” for example [is] a poem about standing by as the IRA tar and feather these young women in Ulster. But it's also about standing by as the British torture people in barracks and interrogation centers in Belfast. About standing between those two forms of affront. So there's that element of self‐accusation, which makes the poem personal in a fairly acute way. Its concerns are immediate and contemporary, but for some reason I couldn't bring army barracks or police barracks or Bogside street life into the language and topography of the poem. I found it more convincing to write about the bodies in the bog and the vision of Iron Age punishment. Pressure seemed to drain away from the writing if I shifted my focus from those images.

(Heaney and Cole 1997)

This displacement, of course, might have an analog in American literature in the way that Arthur Miller situated his play The Crucible in the literal witch hunt of 1690s Salem in order to attack the metaphorical Communist witch hunt taking place in 1950s McCarthyite America. Through this displacement, there comes an anchoring of the present conflict in a longer tradition, a way of recognizing its tangled and complex longevity in human conduct. But there is also a type of pressure put upon the contemporary thinker to use knowledge of this history as a tool of illumination to avoid the ongoing trap of inaction in the face of atrocity.

Likewise in poems such as “Bog Queen” we see Heaney articulating another mutual permeation of one thing with another that is more ontological than temporal, where the boundaries of sentience and death themselves become blurred:

through my fabrics and skins

the seeps of winter

digested me,

the illiterate roots

pondered and died

in the cavings

of stomach and socket.

I lay waiting

on the gravel bottom,

my brain darkening,

a jaw of spawn

fermenting underground

dreams of Baltic amber.

(Heaney 1998, 108, ll. 9‐21)

Here, the body in death constitutes another type of life, the queen's “fabrics and skins (l. 9)” becoming a permeable membrane to “the seeps of winter (l. 10)” absorbing her body into its own greater organism. But even while the brain is “darkening” (l. 18) there is still a bubbling of consciousness, a dream of light: the glint of the Baltic amber that may be adorning her—or perhaps, rather, she herself is the beginning point for the formation of future jewels. And, in the same way, the imagery of this poem—so similar to the “deep imagery” of a James Wright or Galway Kinnell—exists both as finely focused description as well as part of a metaphorically constructed field of meaning; the language remains both concrete and metaphysical at the same time.

Besides Heaney's panoramic yet seamless vision—able to connect past and present, local and universal, sentient and inanimate—is his remarkable voice itself, as sophisticated as it is accessible. American poet Brad Leithauser, reviewing Heaney's 2006 volume District and Circle for The New York Times, describes how Heaney's voice still “carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspoken—even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say” (Leithauser 2006). In fact, in the opening to the title poem of Seamus Heaney's 1979 collection Field Work, we can see the poet's mouth as well as eye at work, the scene's clarity perhaps whetted rather than merely adorned by the steady play of alliterative [w] sounds:

Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze,

where the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched,

where one fern was always green

I was standing watching you

take the pad from the gatehouse at the crossing

and reach to lift a white wash off the whins.

(Heaney 1998, 170, I. ll. 1‐6)

Anchored in place (another element that makes him almost automatically tap into an American audience, despite the fact that he might write about Northern Ireland rather than a James Wright Ohio or a Richard Hugo Montana), as well as attuned to local speech (in the same way that William Carlos Williams aimed to emulate the “brown bricks of American speech”), Heaney's work can indeed be appreciated in America on an anthropological level, a description of the “works and days” of the people populating his world from childhood onward. But there is much more here at work: a scaffolding built so squarely in the ground can hope to climb the higher. The title Field Work itself bespeaks the upper reaches of Heaney's poetic sweep. Not only does the phrase refer to the quotidian notion of agricultural work conducted in the field—planting and spading and herding and so on—but also the idea of field work in the sense of scientific investigation, in the sense of Heaney being a full‐fledged practitioner of his art immersed in the past and influential in the future of poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps it is worth noting that in a short essay published by the online news magazine The Daily Beast, former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey even claims that Heaney's collection North inspired her own poetic investigation into her “South” in her 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning collection Native Guard:

I'd been reading North while working on a book of my own, turning again and again to that title poem. In it I found one of the things to which I am most drawn in Heaney's great body of work: that Heraclitus's axiom is as true now as ever—“Geography is fate”—and that answering the call of our particular geographies and their attendant histories is a noble undertaking: a necessary one. […] In grappling with the difficult history and hardships of his homeland, Heaney's work […] showed me, too, a way into my own work, the calling to make sense of my South with its terrible beauty, its violent and troubled past.

(Trethewey 2013)

Besides Heaney from Northern Ireland, two poets from England who have garnered widespread attention are Philip Larkin (1922–1985), born in the city of Coventry, and Ted Hughes (1930–1998), born in the town of Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire. In fact, these two British poets have perhaps made the leap into American poetry to the point that their work would be equally well known as just about any American‐born practitioner of poetry in the latter half of the twentieth century. Kevin Clark, too, notes (wryly) these two British poets' exceptionality for American readers in a remark about their absence: “Now that Larkin and Hughes are dead, most of us may have assumed that British poets have returned to laboring in neat little fields circumscribed by fourteen rhyming lines and 140 syllables. Of course, we're wrong.” (Clark, Georgia 2005, 403)

Along with the American poetry scene's supposed re‐infatuation with form in the 1980s, a movement often referred to as New Formalism, came an acute appreciation of the librarian poet Philip Larkin, who himself earlier had been associated with The Movement, a poetic trend arising in England in the 1950s that was roughly akin to later New Formalism in America. Known for its emotional reserve, its tendency to find its subject matter in a very unromantic present day, and its interest in writing in fixed, traditional form, its practitioners included Larkin, Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), Donald Davie (1922–1995), and Thom Gunn (1929–2004), all of whom continued to write into the last decades of the twentieth century and to be read beyond. Larkin's High Windows (1974), his last book of poetry issued before his death in 1985 and readily available on both sides of the Atlantic after its issue in paperback in 1979, has become especially emblematic of the power of Larkin's poetry to combine austerity and form with a strong, hard‐chiseled voice. Albeit that his poems were written in form, they also partook of the American ear's need for an authentic voice, a “tweaked” vernacular capable of being both plainspoken and pointed. It was a poetry poised on the tight rope between formal surety and thematic surprise, between the compression of language and an open classicism of tone embodied in the image of “high windows” themselves. The result was a quiet ferocity conveyed to the reader despite the proverbial stiff upper lip of form and tone. Here are the first two stanzas as well as the last in the collection's title poem:

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he's fucking her and she's

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

………………………………………………………

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun‐comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

(Larkin 1974, 17, ll. 1‐8, 17‐20)

Though he may be thought cynical and anti‐emotional, through his precise craft he is still able to trace the twisting pathways of the human mind, its sudden shifts in focus and awareness. For example, note in how at the end of the first stanza of the poem the way in which a seemingly personal voyeuristic exaltation on the part of the poet in the sexual lives of others modulates in the first line of the ensuing stanza to a broader statement about the persona's awareness of everyone's progression toward death, even the “young going down the long slide” (l. 8) toward a mechanized grim reaper that is itself “outdated” (l. 7). Then, at the very end of the poem, “[r]ather than words comes the thought of high windows” (l. 17), the infinite nothingness beyond. (Also, dare I say, the combine image itself might be more accessible to American than to British readers.)

As in the case of Seamus Heaney, American poets writing in praise of Larkin have been wont to praise his accessibility. For example, in New Criterion, X. J. Kennedy praises Larkin's work by calling it “a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people, can take comfort and delight” (Kennedy 1986, 16). Similarly, another American poet, Alan Shapiro, remarks on Larkin as being “a poet of great and complex feeling” endowing “the most commonplace objects and occasions with a chilling poignancy, [measuring] daily life with all its tedium and narrowness against the possibilities of feeling” (Shapiro 1989). But the cross‐Atlantic admiration was not reciprocal. As reported in the Poetry Foundation's online biography, Larkin “distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature, including most modern American poetry” (“Larkin,” Poetry Foundation 2015d). Even more impressive is a possible disconnect between Larkin and the American poetry world in his attempt “to avoid the clichés of his own culture, such as the tendency to read portent into an artist's childhood” (“Larkin,” Poetry Foundation 2015d), thus avoiding a source of personal mythology widely popular among American as well as British poets.

By contrast, the attraction of Ted Hughes seems to hinge on a poetry afroth with violence and metaphor. Moreover, not only did Hughes write poetry for children, but his work often seemed to pulsate with a child‐like attention to and acceptance of the world in a manner devoid of the easy answers of society or religion, a world where when Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten, she stays eaten. His animal poems both evoked the frissons of a Darwinistic survival of the fittest and a wonder at the ways that beauty went hand in hand with violence, which evidenced itself in the vibrant imagery and torqued rhythms of the poetry itself. Of especial interest have been his “Crow” poems. This is the beginning of “Two Legends”:

Black was the without eye

Black the within tongue

Black was the heart

Black the liver, black the lungs

Unable to suck in light

(Hughes 1971, 1, ll. 1‐5)

In the beginning was crow and the crow was with crow…. Both creation and anticreation myths, the texts have an almost black hole density to their poetic language. In general, Hughes's work seems anchored in the world of field and pasture, of beast and bird, in a way that made his poems readable within a literary tradition profoundly impacted by Henry David Thoreau and other American nature writers. Of course, Hughes's many years spent in America as well as his complicated marriage with American poet Sylvia Plath have contributed over the years to his high‐profile presence on this side of the Atlantic, though not necessarily to the benefit of his reputation as a poet. Indeed, the succès de scandale that affected Hughes because of his widely suggested blame for Plath's death and early silencing of her work might have put brackets around his poetic reputation in unfair ways.

Nonetheless, in terms of both praise and criticism of his work, American readers have seemed overall to treat him as one of their own, or, at the very least, to point out the differences between him and other English poets. For example, writing in Salmagundi, M. L. Rosenthal asserted not just Hughes's value to American readers, but that he might even be more appreciated here than in his homeland:

Hughes's work … is of the same order as some of the most interesting American work of the age. It represents a formal ordering of a kind that the best American poetry has been after for a long time but that British critical hostility has made it difficult for English poets to pursue. Such a triumph is always internationally significant, and the explosive violence in Hughes's poetry seems especially expressive to Americans at this moment.

(Rosenthal 1973, 61)

Over the decades, Hughes's work has indeed appeared from major publishing houses as well as in literary journals in the United States. For example, several of his Crow poems (appearing in Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, Harper and Row 1971) were originally published in The New Yorker (in fact, earlier, Hughes had published poetry in such well‐known American journals as The Atlantic, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, and Poetry). As a publicity blurb on the back of the first American edition of the book, no less a poet than Anne Sexton proclaimed: “let all the poets of the world bow down their heads in admiration and awe” (Hughes 1971, back cover). The second blurb, from critic Jack Kroll, is in fact a quotation from his review of the slim volume in Newsweek (indeed, the very fact that a collection of poetry would be reviewed in Newsweek was no mean event) that once again strikes the chord of accessibility and outreach: “One of those rare books of poetry that have the public impact of a major novel or a piece of super‐journalism.” Then the reviewer goes on to evoke its elemental, virtually primeval force: “If our own organs—our brains, blood hearts—could speak, this would be their language” (Kroll 1971, 114). But these prehistoric cave paintings in Hughes's own mind were not the subject of universal praise by American poem‐makers. Robert Pinsky wrote in The New York Times Book Review of Hughes's collection: “…for some readers the violence may be justified by deeper rewards; but as for me, I can't find anything under all that ketchup except baloney” (Pinsky 1977, 4–5).

From the generation of Irish poets, after Heaney at least two writers stand out: Paul Muldoon (born 1951) and Eavan Boland (1944–2020). Muldoon, of course, is not only a well‐known poet in America, but, as current poetry editor of The New Yorker, wields additional influence as a gatekeeper within the American poetic scene. A Roman Catholic born in Northern Ireland, Muldoon's work is anchored in place as is Heaney's, but is nonetheless substantially compact in its referential and associational density. As such, Muldoon's work is perhaps not as accessible to a wider audience as was Heaney's, but is still extremely valued within the poetry world itself. Writing of Muldoon's collection Moy Sand and Gravel, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Peter Davison (a prominent American poet who was, moreover, poetry editor for The Atlantic over a span of 30 years) noted how the book “shimmers with play, the play of mind, the play of recondite information over ordinary experience, the play of observation and sensuous detail, of motion upon custom, of Irish and English languages and landscapes, of meter and rhyme. Sure enough, everything Muldoon thinks of makes him think of something else, and poem after poem takes the form of linked association.” (Davison 2002)

Eavan Boland's relationship to her native Ireland is not only complicated, but might in fact be at least partially responsible for “bringing” her to America. Born in Dublin in 1944 and the daughter of a diplomat, Boland spent much of her childhood living in London, though returning to Ireland for college, where her earliest collections appeared. Starting with the collection Introducing Eavan Boland, published by Ontario Review Press in 1981, her work also came to be published on this side of the Atlantic. Until her death, Boland split her time between her native city of Dublin and California, where since 1996 she has been a professor and director of the creative writing program at Stanford University. But it is both Boland's presence as a woman Irish poet as well as her insistence on a more complete and authentic portraiture of women's experience and cultural significance in her poetry that has most markedly defined not just her presence in contemporary Irish poetry but her expanding role among American readers. Although hardly to be reduced to the status of a poetic refugee because of her residency and poetic activity in the United States, in the following interview with the readers of the American literary journal Smartish Pace, Boland herself notes the cultural claustrophobia she felt in her homeland:

I began to write in an Ireland where the word “woman” and the word “poet” seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other. Ireland was a country with a compelling past, and the word “woman” invoked all kinds of images of communality which were thought to be contrary to the life of anarchic individualism invoked by the word “poet.” I found that a difficult and resistant atmosphere in which to write. I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman's life. And I couldn't accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.

(Smartish Pace 2015)

Her endeavor to put the life she lived into her poems resulted in a poetry that was indeed too large to be contained by one country. The Poetry Foundation webpage on Boland notes that her fifth collection, In Her Own Image (1980), though published in Dublin, “brought Boland international recognition and acclaim. Exploring topics such as domestic violence, anorexia, infanticide and cancer, the book also announced Boland's on‐going concern with inaccurate and muffled portrayals of women in Irish literature and society.” (“Boland,” Poetry Foundation 2015b)

Within the United States, many of Boland's collections were published by Norton, and, in general, Boland emerged as an iconic presence not just in terms of her subject matter but also her intense and well‐gathered style. Writing in The Southern Review, Kate Daniels starts off her essay “Ireland's Best” by declaring:

If one were to compose a scale of oppositions upon which to consider contemporary poetry by Irish women […] Boland […] would appear at one end, and Medbh McGuckian […] at the other. Although their work is fundamentally different—Boland the mistress of a highly cadenced, formalistic verse that favors “a lyric speech, a civil tone” (to use her own words), and McGuckian the wielder of nonlinear, surrealistic pieces—both women share a preoccupation with the liberation of Irish poetry from the historical grip of male readers and writers.

(Daniels 1999, 387)

Later in her essay, Daniels argues that both of these women poets might find a receptive audience in the United States because of the similarity of their struggles with that of Adrienne Rich, that their “plaints are recognizable versions of [Rich's] dilemma […] as a young American poet struggling to emerge from the grip of New Criticism.” (387). But thematic similarities can beget boredom as well as receptivity, not to mention gender‐connected blind spots, and Daniels, interestingly, also reports of some of her own male colleagues' resistance to Boland. According to them, she is “flat.” Nonetheless, writes Daniels, Boland “is one of the most celebrated poets writing today […]. If her voice is flat, it is the flatness of authority—no nonsense, take‐no‐prisoners. It is a voice that must be reckoned with” (390).

Of course, there are many other poets worthy of mention. Three books of the aforementioned Irish poet Medbh McGuckian (born 1950) have even been published in America by Wake Forest University Press: Captain Lavender (1995), Shemailer (1998), and The Currach Requires No Harbours (2010). Her work, involving a multilayered exploration of women's consciousness, has been said to be “reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke in its emotional scope and John Ashbery in its creation of rich interior landscapes” (“McGuckian,” Poetry Foundation 2015c).

Among poets on the other side of the Irish Sea, Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955) has certainly garnered attention in America. Britain's current Poet Laureate, Duffy is not just the first woman, but also the first open member of the LGBTQ community to achieve this recognition. Her poetry is so powerful because it conveys emotional immediacy with historical resonance in a way that constantly blends the personal with the political, and it is no surprise that it has gained an appreciation in America. Kevin Clark admires her offering “a feminist consciousness willing to reexamine itself while ultimately reaffirming itself.” (Clark 2005, 405) Writing in The Antioch Review of Duffy's The World's Wife (1999), Jane Satterfield (born in England but raised in America) has noted Duffy's “masterful subversions of myth and history” in these poems written from the perspective of women connected with various fictional as well as historical male figures of cultural note (Satterfield 2001, 124).

Anne Stevenson (born 1933) too is a “bi‐Atlantic” poet in that she was born in England, but raised in the United States from the time she was 6 months old until she graduated—in 1954—with a BA in Music and Literature from the University of Michigan, where she studied with the poet Donald Hall (“Stevenson,” Poetry Foundation 2015a). She then moved to England where she has lived for most of her adult life, though returning to Ann Arbor in 1960–1961 to complete an MA in English Literature. Over the years, however, her poetic presence on this side of the Atlantic has certainly remained. Living in America, her first collection, was published in Michigan by Generation Press in 1965. Several of her collections have also been published in both London and New York by Oxford University Press, including Travelling Behind Glass: Selected Poems, 1963–1973 (1974), Enough of Green (1977), Minute by Glass Minute (1982), and Four and a Half Dancing Men (1993). A Selected Poems, edited and introduced by the former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, appeared from the Library of America in 2008. Besides such wide publication, Stevenson has also garnered such awards as the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation of America, and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry from the University of the South—all in 2007—and, in 2008, an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Michigan.

Suffering from a hereditary condition that robbed much of her hearing by the age of 30, Stevenson has nonetheless become known as a poet attentive to sound—of language as well as of music. According to Emily Grosholz in The Hudson Review, “Many of Anne Stevenson's best poems reflect on the action of poetry and music on time” (Grosholz 2009, 406–407). There is, though, evidence of some dissonance between her work and at least a few American readers, not so much in subject matter, but in “poetic ear.” Writing in a review of Stevenson's Poems 1955–2005 (Dufour Editions) in Poetry, D. H. Tracy, despite a considerable amount of admiration, nonetheless finds her at times awkward:

She has something of Bishop's patrician sequencing of observation and, less reliably, Plath's way of pogo‐sticking from word to word. More socially constituted than either of these poets, she possesses a charity that neither of them had, and suffers from an excess of consciousness that neither of them had either. I say “suffers” because the excess often manifests itself as literary mannerism or a chattiness of tone that does not entrain itself to the formal or dramatic requirements of the poem. Her challenge, generally speaking, is disciplining this excess.

(Tracy 2006, 169)

Also important to mention is Jon Silkin (1930–1997), a poet noted for long lines as well as historical witness, especially that involving the literature of World War I. Not only was he well known in America as a poet, but so was his literary magazine Stand. A representative appreciation of Silkin's poetry can be glimpsed in the 1970 inaugural issue of The Iowa Review, where Merle E. Brown describes his poetry as “many tongued, speaking with more than one voice even when containing only one person […]. Each creature and each voice [reverberating] with a representativeness beyond itself; if the society of a poem seems small, intimate, and personal at first, upon repeated reading its range widens and implicates a community, a nation, a world […]” (Brown 1970, 115).

Evidence of yet other interesting poets in the past half‐century or so from Ireland or England receiving notice in America can be gleaned from such prominent sources as the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry Volume II. Here we can encounter the work of additional Irish poets such as Thomas Kinsella (born 1928), Michael Longley (born 1939), and Derek Mahon (1941–2020). Other English writers include Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), Donald Davie (1922–1995), Charles Tomlinson (1927–2015), Thom Gunn (1929–2004), Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016), Tony Harrison (born 1937), Craig Raine (born 1944), and Grace Nichols (born 1950). In the case of Nichols, who was born in Guyana in 1950 but eventually settled in England in 1977, we see not just an example of a Black British poet's work being presented in America, but also the addition of postcolonial complexity in that some Anglophone poets from the British Commonwealth may see themselves as being both part of and beyond British poetry.

Another interesting anthology, New Poets of England and America, edited by prominent American poets Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, was first published in 1957, but continued to be reprinted in America long after 1960. Beyond the familiar names of Amis, Davie, Gunn, and Hill were poets Charles Causley (1917–2003), Michael Hamburger (1924–2007)—whose work as a translator from German was much widely recognized in America than was his own poetry—John Heath‐Stubbs (1918–2006), John Holloway (1920–1999), Jon Manchip White (1924–2013), and a lone female representative, Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001). Meanwhile, an important conduit for Irish poets was The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (Faber & Faber 1986), edited by Paul Muldoon. Still available in both hard and paperback, this anthology starts with the death of Yeats in 1939 and offers such additional Irish voices as poet and prose writer Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967), Louis MacNeice (1907–1963), John Montague (1929–2016), Paul Durcan (born 1944), Tom Paulin (born 1949), and, again, a lone female representative within the group, Medbh McGuckian (born 1950).

In this same period, publishing houses such as Bloodaxe Books were also extremely important as transatlantic bridges, known for printing the work of American poets in Great Britain as well as bringing British poetry to American readers. One example is The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets: Eleven British Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 1985), which along with the more familiar work of Sylvia Plath and Denise Levertov also offered such women poets as Stevie Smith (1902–1971), Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001), Elaine Feinstein (1930–2019), Ruth Fainlight (born 1931), Jenny Joseph (1932–2018), Anne Stevenson, Fleur Adcock (born 1934), and Jeni Couzyn (born 1942), who also edited the anthology. Couzyn—as was the case with Stevenson and Nichols—is not just “English.” Born in South Africa, she moved to Great Britain in her twenties. Ruth Fainlight, too, was born in the United States, but has made England as well as Spain and France her home.

Certainly, British and Irish poets made their mark on the pages of American literary journals as well. Indeed, it is no surprise that given the centrality of literary magazines in creating the richness and diversity of twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century American literature—as William Carlos Williams attested, “Without it, I myself would have been early silenced” (Williams 1951, 266)—the field is so vast and multivaried that a separate essay would be needed for a discussion of the appearance of British and Irish poets in the many scores of literary journals being published throughout the United States from 1960 to 2010, with poets both widely known and relatively obscure showing up in particular literary journals. But there are at least two examples of special issues on British literature worth mentioning. One would be the Great Britain special issue of Atlanta Review 4.2 (Spring/Summer 1988), a 90‐page section guest‐edited by N. S. Thompson. Two years earlier, New Orleans Review also published a British issue (22.2, 1996). Moreover, starting publication in 1966 in England under the editorship of George Cairncross, the journal Bogg (whose esthetic seemed much more inclined to the “raw” than the “cooked” side of Lowell's poetic divide) continued to espouse a special interest in British writing even after it moved with its subsequent, American‐born editor John Elsberg to the United States in 1980, where it continued publishing until Elsberg's death in 2012 (Darlington 2014). It is also interesting to note that one year earlier, in 2011, an online literary journal, Antiphon, started publication, characterized itself as “providing a showcase for the best in contemporary British and international poetry.” Edited in England, it is nonetheless present to American readers, appearing in the Poets & Writers (pw.org) database of literary magazines, and showing evidence of a continued transatlantic conversation still being conducted within literary journals in online and in hard‐copy incarnations. It should be noted, though, that no American literary journal in terms of poetry has ever come close to matching the presence on both sides of the Pond of Granta, which, devoting itself to the genres of fiction and nonfiction, at the height of its popularity in the mid‐1990s could count its U.S. circulation at 47,000, though with a figure slumping to around 12,000 by 2007 (Garfield 2007).

But back to anthologies, the 976‐page edition of Anthology of Twentieth‐Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2001), edited by American literary critic Keith Tuma, offers several new poets to American readers. Even such an expansive treatment does not prevent esthetic blind spots, however. Kevin Clark notes that, in terms of current poets, Tuma's selections “highlighting contemporary practitioners of more experimental work” point in a completely different direction than the formalist choices made by Don Paterson and Charles Simic in Graywolf Press's New British Poetry (2004), and that “[e]ach anthologist could have borrowed happily from the other's esthetic” (Clark 2005, 407). At the same time, Clark not only identifies a number of newer voices in New British Poetry, but also discusses why their work might connect with American readers, regardless of the presence of fixed or more open form. The poets he discusses range from the more familiar—Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O'Brien, John Burnside, Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay, and former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion—to other less well‐known figures, such as Mark Ford, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jo Shapcott, W. N. Herbert, Alan Jenkins, John Wilkinson, Robert Sheppard, Glyn Maxwell, Robin Robertson, Ruth Padel, and Fred D'Aguiar.

In fact, the reader could do worse in embarking on a look at the issue of British poetry in America than by reading Clark's incisive review of New British Poetry. Although I am not so inclined as Clark to bemoan the influence of James Wright (408) on recent American poetry (which of course might be more of an in‐house American debate than an issue germane to a comparative regard of American as opposed to British or Irish poetry), Clark usefully offers some specific comparison points between practitioners of both sides of the “divide,” noting, for example, some degree of formal eclecticism: “While [co‐editor] Paterson's Brits are clearly much more concerned with form, some of his contributors arrange free verse in elaborate stanzas completely familiar to readers of contemporary American poetry. [Some poets even] alternate between formal poems and free verse: reminiscent of [Galway] Kinnell” (408–409). Clark also articulates several commonalities involving both poetic conventions as well as concerns, especially the challenge of navigating one's place between the old and the new:

Like American poets, our British counterparts seem at home with the first person singular. Some are as concerned with consciousness and conscience as we are. Like many of our poets, some of these Brits wish to reorder imagination so that they may apprehend the changing world. Still, too many seem trapped by the expectations of a critical heritage that is uncomfortable with the new.

(409)

The problem with this comment, though, is that it might also describe a number of other national poetries as well. Again, what is most fascinating here is that with British and American poetry it is the ongoing discussion of possible poetic divergence that seems more significant than any particular difference per se.

Ultimately, I imagine that this difference will be connected with the growing importance of a poetry of identity within American literature, something that involves sexual identity as much as ethnic or national identity. Many are the vectors that bring a poet to the page, and I imagine that not so much sorting out poets according to these avenues, but employing an increased awareness of the dynamics between poet, poem, and community (however defined) in illuminating our reading will continue to hold sway. Not so much taxonomy, but cultural terroir. Moreover, these categories will continue to be increasingly complicated. How to differentiate between American and British poetry when it is harder to homogenize one poetic tradition or the other into one current, one flavor? Within America, many poets and readers of poetry might be much more concerned with the dynamics between American poetry written in Spanish and Hispanic American poets writing in English. A striking example of such a confluence occurs with the poet Juan Felipe Herrera (born 1948), U.S. Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, who has published his work in both English and Spanish, often in bilingual editions. We indeed have not just bilingual poets, but poems, as in the work of Lorna Dee Cervantes (born 1954), whose linguistic hybridity involves a reclamation of her lingual‐cultural heritage, since speaking Spanish was forbidden to her during her childhood (Ramazani et al. 2003, 1010).

This is not to say that British or Irish poetry will be reduced in significance, but that the dynamics between poet, poem, and reader might be refracted by matters of place and cultural background in ways that are more case specific than patterned in any discernable way.

In the end, and to echo a decidedly American voice, Henry David Thoreau, it might not be where a poet comes from that matters as much as the way in which she makes an honest account of her life—or resonates with her various backgrounds—that will make this or that poet worth reading, whether the poet might derive from Kent, Ohio, or Kent, England, from Belfast, Northern Ireland or Belfast, Maine.