Callaloo

Robert Crawford

• Northlight by Douglas Dunn
  Faber, 81 pp, £8.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 571 15229 5
• A Field of Vision by Charles Causley
  Macmillan, 68 pp, £10.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 333 48229 8
• Seeker, Reaper by George Campbell Hay and Archie MacAlister
  Saltire Society, 30 pp, £15.00, September 1988, ISBN 0 85411 041 0
• In Through the Head by William McIlvanney
  Mainstream, 192 pp, £9.95, September 1988, ISBN 1 85158 169 3
• The New British Poetry edited by Gillian Allnutt, Fred D’Aguiar, Ken Edwards and Eric Mottram
  Paladin, 361 pp, £6.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 586 08765 6
• Complete Poems by Martin Bell, edited by Peter Porter
  Bloodaxe, 240 pp, £12.95, August 1988, ISBN 1 85224 043 1
• First and Always: Poems for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital edited by Lawrence Sail
  Faber, 69 pp, £5.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 571 55374 5
• Birthmarks by Mick Imlah
  Chatto, 61 pp, £4.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 7011 3358 9

‘Where do you come from?’ asks one of the most important questions in contemporary poetry – where’s home? Answering the pulls and torsions of that question produces much of the verse of Heaney, Harrison and Dunn, but it also produces very different kinds of poetry. Martianism had nothing to do with Mars, everything to do with home, the place where Craig Raine (like Murray or Dunn) feels richest. Surely Martianism comes from the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, the quintessence of home seen from abroad. Home can be a bit smug, though; and sometimes constricting. The poetic celebrants of home at the moment tend not to be women. But if it was once fashionable to see home as a ‘provincial’ bore, there have been poets around for some time, such as Edwin Morgan and Roy Fisher, who give the lie to that. Home is no longer ‘so sad’.