D.J. Enright

D.J. Enright taught English for thirty years in universities across Asia. Collected Poems 1948-98 appeared four years before his death in 2002. He also published fiction, two volumes of memoir and edited several anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Death.

Lost Empire

D.J. Enright, 16 October 1980

By the time I had reached the end of this novel I had accumulated enough notes to make a modest book: a fact that bears witness to the sheer density of the writing, as well as the seriousness of its concern. It is unwise to skim. Only in retrospect can you identify what could safely have been skipped as supererogatory or duplicate. Since complaints will follow – grave matters incur grave complaint – let me say at the outset that Earthly Powers carries greater intellectual substance, more power and grim humour, more knowledge, than ten average novels put together.

Poem: ‘Burden’

D.J. Enright, 6 November 1980

The grasshopper was a burden to me. It knew of something hurtful to me. In a dream I squashed the grasshopper.

Why was the grasshopper such a burden? Its singing hindered me from sleeping, All flesh is grass was still its burden.

Unlike the owl, the bat, the loris, The grasshopper is no power of darkness. It sings at ease in the light of the sun.

Did I lie at ease in the light of the sun? The...

Poem: ‘Explanation’

D.J. Enright, 5 March 1981

It develops like this, you see. The things called hands Which terminate in fingers, which terminate in nails, The whole depending from arms. And likewise the legs, Which merge into feet, from which emerge what are known As toes. There you see a head. These parts grow together Quite slowly, or grow one from another. As though, It might seem, a loving care is somehow involved.

A bomb, as they...

Tribal Lays

D.J. Enright, 7 May 1981

This is seemingly the first draft of roughly half of a novel which, had he lived to finish it, the author might possibly have entitled ‘The Doctor of Confusion’. It is right that it should be published, for it is good work, certainly in no obvious need of revision.

Chinese Whispers

D.J. Enright, 18 June 1981

The subtitle of Maxine Hong Kingston’s first book, The Woman Warrior (now published in paperback), embodies a pun: ‘Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts’ – that is to say, among Chinese story-ghosts and also among non-Chinese, who by definition are ghosts, if not demons. ‘Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.’ In her books Mrs Kingston comes near to suggesting that it is America which is invisible – populated by ghosts, the Mail Ghost, the Newsboy Ghost, the Garbage Ghost – while China, the China of her parents, or the China her parents told her about, is the solid world.

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Omdamniverous: D.J. Enright

Ian Sansom, 25 September 2003

This is the end of something – although of what exactly it’s not quite clear. The death of D.J. Enright, in December 2002, makes one ask some serious questions about poets and about...

D.J. Enright

D.J. Enright, 16 October 1980

D.J. Enright, 6 November 1980

D.J. Enright, 5 March 1981

D.J. Enright, 7 May 1981

D.J. Enright, 18 June 1981

Pieces about D.J. Enright in the LRB

Ian Sansom, 25 September 2003

James Wood, 24 March 1994

Christopher Prendergast, 8 July 1993

C.K. Stead, 10 October 1991

John Bayley, 23 May 1991

Mark Ford, 14 June 1990

Iain McGilchrist, 25 January 1990

Christopher Ricks, 4 December 1986

Denis Donoghue, 7 November 1985

Christopher Ricks, 6 June 1985

Malcolm Bowie, 5 July 1984

John McManners, 16 June 1983

Donald Davie, 3 December 1981

Frank Kermode, 5 June 1980

James Fenton, 6 December 1979

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