Shearsman Books

Paperback, 316pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $27
ISBN 9781848610071

Andrew Duncan's latest study of contemporary British poetry offers studies of some thirteen modern poets, together with a number of general essays giving an overview of events and trends in British poetry over the past thirty to forty years. Some of the names will surprise, others will be expected. The juxtapositions of ideas, and of names, will disturb those who are more comfortable with trench warfare than with dialogue, and Duncan's startling aperçus will leave even the most well-read student of poetry wondering.

From the pages of this book:
"The present work is part of a series which have generally focussed on the 'British Poetry Revival' and on the failure of conservative critics to enjoy modernity. My interest has shifted to depolarisation. If we imagine a spectrum, formally speaking, from left to right of a graph, I am aware of wild-eyed radicals to the left of me, repetitive conservatives off to the right, and a zone of Normality centring on me. [. . .] I feel in a good position to explain one faction to another. My preference would be for hostility to decrease, and for certain inherited feuds to end in a truth and reconciliation process."

"A Canadian psychologist in the 1940s showed chimpanzees a clay head and elicited responses of horror and alarm. Further experimentation showed that in fact they were very disturbed by any element isolated from its normal whole. In fact, the presentation of any figure with an element missing was extremely disturbing.

This is clearly related to the device of omission in modern poetry: the missing element is foreground, and is the source of disturbance. [. . .]
The mainstream critics respond to poems of unusual design with the same horror and alarm as the chimpanzees in [the] laboratory."

"Can we really separate the scorn, irritation, tribal pride, officiousness, and self-congratulation with which the devotees of the avant-garde treat anything which is not avant-garde enough from social hostility in general? Is this not the glacial sense of authorisation with which a sixth-former brushes off the attempts of a fifth-former to speak to them?"

"It may even be that we can divide British poetry into two groups: art poetry, and bovine realism. It is, I would guess, because the vast majority belong to the latter group that the discourse of propaganda against the former is so prevalent, so well understood by everybody, and so much more common than an attempt to explain what they are doing. [And] when poetry is imported from abroad, it is almost inevitably the art poetry which is felt to be worth the costs of transport; [. . .] British readers are much more likely to encounter art poetry from other countries than from Britain."

Read a long review of this book by Todd Swift on his Eyewear blog here.

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