Search Results

“... and the night is long; Stick with me when the shooting starts. Richard Murphy is not a reckless poet. Those who rate him surely rate him much too highly. Ted Hughes compliments him with the anti-reckless word ‘classical’ and with ‘the gift of epic objectivity’, and Seamus Heaney praises his ‘poised and appeased ...”

“... résistance, which, for all its length, occupies just one line on the contents page, as though the poet were telling us it’s no big deal. Madoc is a bigger canvas rather than a bigger splash. Perhaps it is Muldoon’s fault, perhaps he has pre-empted himself. Already the most characterful and most imitated of contemporary poets, he offered more trademarks ...”

“... never heard of. It is probable that, if he had survived, he would have become a very important poet indeed ... but it is also likely that his unsureness and lack of an instinctive sense of poetic design would have plagued him for many more years’. The fierceness of ‘rather corrupt’ sounds a note that we hear too seldom from reviewers, and even less ...”

“... was born, and brings the fruit of many decades’ reading and rumination to Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot. Donoghue begins by invoking his own 1990 memoir, Warrenpoint, which he had hoped to follow by writing something on literary Dublin in the 1940s and 1950s. Contemplating the slender yield of bohemian anecdotes from his time as a student and young ...”

“... has it in ‘The Plain Sense of Things’. One must first be rich to be newly poor. Does any poet, really, have a healthy disrespect for language without also having a healthy respect? The introduction, which reads like a post-structuralist’s suicide-note, ends with a flourish. The ‘defining presences’ for many of these poets ...”

“... himself from Contemporary Irish Poetry, his 1986 Faber anthology, but he included a poem by Seamus Heaney that was dedicated to him. We don’t of course know why the poem was dedicated to him, or indeed whether it is in any sense about him. It is a suggestive poem about what the living can get from the dead: Widgeon For Paul Muldoon It had been ...”

“... all rapt and visionary, the Clarke sardonic and declamatory – both bear witness ‘that every poet’s task is ultimately and essentially religious; and that it is dangerous for any poet to think otherwise.’ Davie reaches this conclusion only ‘hesitantly’, as well he might when making such an ideologically-loaded ...”

“... unexpected death. About eighteen months later, Bowers was alerted by Carrie Etter, a Californian poet, to the fact that a poem almost identical to ‘Tenth-Year Elegy’ had just been published under the title ‘Someone Forgotten’ by one David Sumner in the very small magazine, Mankato Poetry Review (circulation approximately 200). As well as altering the ...”

“... never-too-clear racial identity.’ A postscript on the matter of ‘racial identity’: the Irish poet Seamus Heaney has been anguishing about his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry.† Heaney decently admits the problem is a sticky one, that to some extent his Irish authoritativeness requires him to be heavily visible in ...”

“... A not unmalicious fellow poet once said of Pasternak that he resembled a horse: ‘the same big awkward profile and large eyes that seem to look intently without seeing anything’. The horse-faced parsnip – Pasternak means parsnip in Russian. This is very endearing. What other great poet has the bigness and animal closeness of the equine, and words that plod like hooves with such delicate precision through twigs and grasses? The girls chanting the ‘candle’ poem at his funeral must also have longed to have given him a lump of sugar? One of the best little scenes in Dr Zhivago is the doctor riding home through the Urals forest, with his slow beast undulating under him, and ‘dry volleys of sound bursting from the horse’s guts ...”

“... has always appeared a construction of exile. Field Day’s leading directors – Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel and Tom Paulin – are literary kings over the water or over the border. Their locus is a visionary Derry awaiting Jacobite restoration.The novelist Colm Toibin said in his Sunday Independent review of the Field Day ...”

“... reflective of the diverse poetries of the last twenty or so years. His brief introductions to each poet are also bibliographically useful, critically independent and sometimes funny (he describes C.H. Sisson as ‘an acquired taste’ who seems ‘inclined to warn off many who might acquire it’). Neither book rewrites the history of postwar poetry, and each ...”

“... lover of poetry has his own solution, and his own diagnosis of Larkin’s virtues. Long ago, the Poet Laureate referred to him as ‘the John Clare of the building estates’, a decidedly quaint though no doubt a heartfelt compliment, in line with Eric Homberger’s later summing-up of Larkin as ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’, or the ...”

“... dense enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words that would capture the rude nature of the Scottish snowstorm, calling it the ‘yowdendrift’, when snow is blown across the fields at ...”

“... was ‘incredulous’. To Monteith, the idea that Larkin might have been influenced by a foreign poet was ‘ludicrous’. ‘He had fallen,’ Raine comments, ‘for the propaganda – Larkin’s bluff, insular, faux-xenophobic self-caricature.’ Compound terms using ‘self-’ often raise questions about agency and responsibility. When we speak of ...”