Christopher Reid

firs born X mas day Yer 1885 in the same burer Waping

pa a way Ma not being by Trade merchent Sea man in forn parts: all so a precher on Land

i sow him Latter

4 of 9 not all Livig

a hard Thing Ma sad: mirs Pale a mid Wife in the back room bed rom Nor wod she got Thurgh when a ANGEL apperd over the JESUS pichire

which i got after it Savd my Life.

*

so i name Gabriel which you did not no why...

Amy Clampitt is a most spirited and exhilarating performer. An enormous appetite for observation and zeal to describe precisely what she has observed are transmitted through both the best and the least successful of her poems. ‘Gusto’ is the word that springs to mind – and not only because it was a term of the highest commendation with the senior American poet whom, in many superficial respects, she most closely resembles: Marianne Moore. One registers this quality, bracingly, through the singular rhythms which permeate her new collection, What the light was like, and which, in her verse, have come largely to take the place of orthodox prosody.’

The most successful pieces in Norman MacCaig’s Collected Poems tend to be lists of one kind or another. He is best, too, when he has found something to celebrate. A poem such as ‘Praise of a Collie’, which enumerates the virtues of an admired sheep-dog, now dead, works well enough as a primitive catalogue. The fourth of its five three-line stanzas gives something of its flavour:

‘I dislike the cult of dreams,’ Sarah Ferguson declares. ‘They should be secret things, and people who are always telling you of what they have dreamt irritate me. Nor do I like hearing psychological discussions between those who do not really know what they are talking about. There is something soft and messy about such people.’ Sarah Ferguson was previously quite unknown to me, but this passage from a book called A Guard Within (1973) is one of the 450 or so literary specimens to be found in this curious anthology.

When John Berryman’s first full-length collection of poems, The Dispossessed, was published in 1948, Yvor Winters wrote a notice of it for the Hudson Review. Here Winters drew attention to Berryman’s ‘disinclination to understand and discipline his emotions’, and went on to suggest: ‘Most of his poems appear to deal with a single all-inclusive topic: the desperate chaos, social, religious, philosophical and psychological, of modern life, and the corresponding chaos and desperation of John Berryman.’