Vol. 12 No. 11 · 14 June 1990
page 18 | 2472 words
Hugging the cats
John Bayley
- Poems by Gay Clifford
188 pp, £14.99, May 1990, ISBN 0 241 12976 1
- Selected Poems 1940 – 1989 by Allen Curnow
Viking, 209 pp, £15.99, May 1990, ISBN 0 670 83007 0
- Collected Poems and Selected Translations by Norman Cameron, edited by Warren Hope and Jonathan Barker
Anvil, 160 pp, £14.95, May 1990, ISBN 0 85646 202 0
- Collected Poems by Enoch Powell
Bellew, 198 pp, £9.95, April 1990, ISBN 0 947792 36 8
Good writing, in prose or verse, can seem a sort of visible distillation, brandy-like, of the anima vagula blandula, the tenuous and transparent daily self that produced it. Another kind of good writing does not establish itself as involuntary personality, but as something the writer is just very, very good at doing. Such a dispossessed fluency seems available to everyone with a flair for catching a fashion. I suspect that a lot of people spellbound today in the intergalactic gameyness of an Ian McEwan novel feel that, yes, this is the thing – I could do this if I had the idea or the time, or, well, the talent. Good writing in this academic sense is, or seems to be, held in common.
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Letters
Vol. 12 No. 13 · 12 July 1990
From Harry Kemp
John Bayley does scant justice to Norman Cameron’s poetry in his review (LRB, 14 June) of the very welcome Anvil Press reprint. First: Cameron’s work has been grossly neglected over the years, but at last becomes once more available to English readers. Second: Cameron, like his lifelong friend and fellow poet James Reeves – still also grossly neglected – was a quiet poet. During his lifetime public attention was continuously distracted by noisier others – first MacSpaunday, then Dylan Thomas and latterly, since Norman’s death in 1953, by Modernism-in-decline. Professor Bayley devotes more than three-quarters of his review-page to two vers-librettists whose work, even he admits, is ‘irritatingly with-it’. It is also intellectually and emotionally without-it – literally chaotic – and so not poetry at all.
Cameron was a scholar of poetry; his translations of Villon and Rimbaud are in the Arthur Waley class. His poems, though small in number, are all of the first water – and totally incomparable with Enoch Powell’s imitations of Housman. ‘Academic’, Professor Bayley remarks, is a hard word: but his review, while in effect hard on Cameron, has the air of tired, and uncaring, inconsequence, rather than of conscientious critical academism. As a lifelong friend of Cameron and deep admirer of his writing I protest at this new injustice done to him.
Harry Kemp
Crediton, Devon
