The Dark Horse,
Nº 20
(Edited by Gerry Cambridge. c/o 3-B
Blantyre Mill Road, Bothwell, South Lanarkshire G71 8DD, Scotland. ISSN
1357-6720. £5 / $9: 2 year
subscription (4 issues) £17 / $28). Further details
here.
I have noted before in these review pages that
— notwithstanding the aesthetic differences between Shearsman and
The Dark Horse — this is a magazine that I admire. In this "Scottish-American"
poetry magazine, I tend to prefer its Scots to its Americans, and
its prose to its poetry. Its real strength for me, as a reader, lies
in its reviewing and in its essays, even if the latter do not always
cover subjects that I would normally find myself reading about (such
as Donald Justice in this new issue — but I'm happy to have my prejudices
challenged). Here's what the editor says about his take on essays
and reviews:
As an editor, I don't want prose which is either infected with
the aridities of the academy or the over-simplifyings of popular
journalism; finding writers who can achieve an authoritative
balance and be—that rarest
thing!—still readable is difficult. For the record, I want,
ideally, lively authoritative prose which is unafraid to be bold,
passionate or personal in writing about poets or poetry. Prose,
in other words, which doesn't turn the live coal of poetry into
so much ash.
If, as Ezra Pound asserted, poetry is an art originally intended
to "gladden
the hearts of men [and, presumably, of women]" the last
thing prose about it should be is dutiful or tedious. At the
same time, one wants to avoid the rank anti-intellectualism prevalent
in British, if not in American, cultural life. The trick as an
editor is in differentiating intellectually demanding prose from
obscurantist and humdrum writing. Here's to those writers who
give the renewing impression of a whole person responding wholeheartedly
to whatever texts are their subject.
Amen to that, even if we will inevitably disagree
sometimes on what constitutes quality, or on what constitutes a book
worth attention. What's the result of this editorial ethic? In a
nutshell, intelligent writing that engages at a deep level with the
subject at hand and, more often than not, leaves the reader enlightened.
That is to say, good writing, plain and simple. Yes, good writing
in a literary essay — an astounding concept, is it not? This is
because it's so rare, although P N Review does carry a fair few
good examples, I should admit. Most reviews that I see, and most
essays, smack of too much obfuscation, point-scoring, tub-thumping,
breast-baring and bull-roaring. I don't need that. I need, and want,
concern for the text. The Dark Horse offers the real thing, and the
examples in this issue, above all G.S. Smith's review of the Polukhina/Weissbort
anthology of Russian women poets, Mary Veazey on Armitage's Gawain translation,
and Sean Haldane on Sorley Maclean are excellent examples of what
often appears to be a dying art.
The magazine offers poems also, of course. These
are less to my taste than the critical prose, but the poems offered
are all, at the very least, well-crafted, even when they do not do
much for me. The pick of the selection is probably Amit Majmudar,
from the US.
Text copyright © Tony Frazer, 2007.
Quotation copyright © Gerry Cambridge.
