Mark Ford

The final section of Paul Bowles’s most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky, is prefaced by a quotation from Kafka that encapsulates the narrative trajectory of just about everything Bowles has ever written: ‘From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’ With obsessive frequency Bowles’s short stories and novels feature characters propelled beyond the boundaries of their own cultural milieux towards realms they can neither control nor comprehend, and in which even their sufferings become meaningless. In one of his earliest stories, ‘A Distant Episode’, a professor of linguistics investigating Arabic dialects is captured by a band of Reguibat nomads, who beat him, cut out his tongue, and drape him with strings of empty tin cans. He is forced to perform a ridiculous dance for their amusement, and in time grows accustomed to his role as the tribe’s jester. When he finally escapes, rather than attempting to return to Western civilisation, he immediately flees back into the wilderness.

‘What are we going to write about now?’ one of Ulster’s more engagé poets half-jokingly inquired soon after the IRA’s ceasefire was announced. One would imagine that Paul Muldoon will be among the Northern Irish poets least directly affected by whatever happens – or doesn’t – in the Province. His poetry has always reflected political events in the most delicate of styles, avoiding overt judgments, sentimental ideals, commitments or solutions, instead teasing out angles of irony and embodying states of impasse – ‘that eternal interim’, as he calls it in ‘Lull’ – with a sophistication that must be its own reward.’’

George Bush’s proud declaration that by bombing fleeing Iraqi soldiers America had ‘kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all’, was one of the more startling instances from recent years of the Vietnam War’s continuing hold on the American imagination. One could just about suspend disbelief when Sylvester Stallone set about rewriting history, but it was disconcerting to find the President of the United States so clearly in the grip of the same fantasy of revenge.

The poetic legacy of Ezra Pound has been divided up, sifted, plundered by an extraordinary variety of claimants. A list of poets who have profited from his achievement would include Allen Ginsberg and Louis Zukofsky (both Jewish), the Lowell of Notebook, the Orientally-minded Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder on whom Cathay made such an impact, British poets as different from each other as Donald Davie and Jeremy Prynne, Objectivists like Oppen and Reznikoff, and of course the whole group of poets associated with Black Mountain College – Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson.

Australia’s most celebrated Modernist poet was born on 14 March 1918, in Liverpool. His father, wounded in the war, died in 1920, and soon after that the family moved to Australia, settling in Sydney where his mother had relations. He left school at 14, and worked over the ensuing years at a random series of jobs, as a garage mechanic, an insurance salesman, a watch repairer. Most of his brief adult life was spent in Melbourne, where he was, in the words of his elder sister Ethel, ‘fond of a girl’ but ‘had some sort of difference with her’, a difference movingly reflected in such lyrics as ‘Perspective Lovesong’.