Four Englands

Division Street, by Helen Mort.
Chatto & Windus. £12.00.

Dear Boy, by Emily Berry.
Faber and Faber. £9.99.

Sins of the Leopard, by James Brookes.
Salt Publishing. £9.99.

Terror, by Toby Martinez de las Rivas.
Faber and Faber. £9.99.

This omnibus review is very much about English poetry, and Englishness in contemporary poetry from England, and, perhaps even better, young English poets. By something like a happy coincidence, these four collections are each by a poet who has won an Eric Gregory Award (more on this in a moment) — and, even more pleasingly, they won their awards more or less consecutively, in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 (Martinez de las Rivas, Mort, Berry, Brookes). So, here are four poets who have been noticed, and even encouraged, as some of the main rising stars of new poetry in “these isles.” Well, these isles are crowded with poets, many Welsh, Irish, or Scottish, but any list of the most appreciated of the YBPs (Young British Poets) would include these poets — along with, say, Ahren Warner, Sam Riviere, Luke Kennard, Heather Phillipson, Sandeep Parmar, Caleb Klaces, Jen Hadfield, Jack Underwood, Liz Berry, James Byrne, Jon Stone, and Clare Pollard.

There is something like a broad consensus that has been forming, based on appearances in the larger British magazines, acquisition of prizes and university degrees, and publication in pamphlet form with publishers like Faber and Faber, or, in a smaller way, tall-lighthouse, when Roddy Lumsden was its editor. The Eric Gregory goes every year to a handful of the best poets thirty years or under, for an unpublished manuscript. To win one is to get a nice chunk of money, and a very good shot at a publishing deal within the next few years.

In the case of the poets here whose books from late 2012 to 2014 are under review, this wait has been between three and nine years. One of the collections is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which is the sort of stamp of approval most poets would gnaw a finger off for; Berry has won a Forward Prize, and Mort been asked to judge the Forwards already (a great honor for a debut poet); Brookes was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Martinez de las Rivas is being spoken of as a major new Christian poet. Each is from a recognized publisher — Faber and Chatto & Windus, relatively major players; and Salt, the feisty newer kid on the block (despite having published hundreds of poetry books). In short, here are four poets American poets and poetry readers would do well to acquaint themselves with — and yet, none of these debuts are likely to be widely sold, reviewed, or read beyond Britain’s borders, at least for the time being.

These poets come out of a certain tradition, or at an angle from The Tradition, as one might expect of poets in their twenties or early thirties. Each has a few notable precursors, so-called presiding spirits, who have very much shaped their work’s temperament, goals, and style. Helen Mort, a poet from Sheffield in the relatively impoverished North of England (home to the major indie band Arctic Monkeys), writes under the influence of Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage, yet her major themes and music come even more from Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson — each, in their way, very male poets. In a sense, Mort is the strong female Northern Poet, come at last (she does not very much resemble the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who nevertheless has publicly praised her work).

Emily Berry is only one of the “Berrywomen” now active in London poetry circles — the other is Liz Berry, whose own debut was published this year. Ms. Emily’s is a berry-red book from Faber, with the very pop title of Dear Boy. Berry is from London, where she has lived her whole life and it is something of a rude shock to actually read a Faber collection by a British poet from the publishing capital itself, who is, for instance, not Irish or Scottish. She is resolutely English in tone and manner, in much the same way as her hero, Morrissey of The Smiths is; indeed, Berry’s key precursors may be said to be the great pop and indie lyricists since the eighties, during which time she grew up. But this is half the story. In other ways, her ironic, edgy, and peculiarly strangled emotionalism seems to reach out and grab Plath from the grave and demand she return, this time as a pastiche ghoul. Berry, then, has a skewed relationship to how contemporary British poetry has heretofore tended to sound — unless one had been reading Luke Kennard, the strongest poet of this new generation, who seems to have invented several of the key tropes, forms, and concepts that Berry herself assays.

James Brookes is even more English than Berry, if such is possible. That is because, in a daring or foolhardy swerve back to confront the major living poet of his place and time, Brookes seeks to take on Geoffrey Hill at his own game. Surely Hill, like Milton or Yeats, has mastered a baroque and learned rhetoric so steeped in history and language as to be inescapably his own? Well, yes, and no. The general way of putting it is that Brookes “reminds” us of Hill. I would say he out-Hills Hill, in being, in this debut, even more concerned with the history of kings and parliament, the violence and graphic details of world wars, and the demands of place, in this instance, Sussex, where he was fortunately born a stone’s throw from Shelley’s “boyhood home.” It is perhaps unimaginable for an American poet born in 1986 (even if it was a few yards from Hailey, Idaho) to unironically compose and publish poems with titles like “Amen to Artillery,” “Silent Enim Leges Inter Arma,” “Surveying the Queen’s Pictures,” or “Lucifer at Camlann.” This is high poetry, full stop.

However, in terms of an attempt to turn lyric modernism’s highest Hill into a mountain, or unaging intellectual monuments, we must end with the Somerset-raised Martinez de las Rivas, whose Christian poetry seems almost impossibly erudite (by contemporary standards), with blatant echoes of Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, David Jones, and Lowell, and several poems that (seemingly without irony) break off into Anglo-Saxon, Greek, or Latin. It is apparently the most learned debut by a twenty-first-century British poet; we in England last saw work with this Poundian high modernist ethos in Bunting. Depending on your relationship to words like “elitism” and “accessibility,” Terror either appalls or thrills, or both — as it is no doubt (given its title) meant to.

What we have here are excellent emerging poets, each to a certain degree acclaimed, each imbued with a seriousness of purpose that varies between the almost-sentimental to the almost-portentous, with way-stops any fellow traveler will recognize as arch irony, wit, reserve, and tonally restrained elegance. These are the stations of the English poetic cross, and yet these pilgrims make something new of them while revisiting the old blood-dimmed haunts.
 

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Helen Mort’s Division Street opens with a quote from Stevenson about Jekyll and Hyde, followed by a poem playing on the fact that her name means “death” in French; and various poems across the book relate to divided loyalties, identities, and the dangers (and promise) of names. Anyone who has followed British poetry since 1990 will know this is territory that deceased British-American poet Michael Donaghy staked out as his own in the poem “Smith,” often cited as a modern British classic. However, this idea of doubles, and doubling, and double identities, central to Scottish literature from James Hogg to Robert Louis Stevenson, indeed, J.K. Rowling, is perhaps most famously explored, even obsessively so, in most of Don Paterson’s collections; Paterson is the best-known advocate of Donaghy’s work (as well as his publisher at Picador). Mort’s collection is almost a direct reply to these influences — and is especially Patersonian in its sensorial enjoyment of alcohol, pubs, and drink in general — few other poetry collections have such a fug of lock-ins as this one. In her most Patersonian moment, in the poem “The Complete Works of Anonymous,” she even says, “I’ll raise a glass to dear Anonymous: the old / familiar anti-signature, the simple courage / of that mark.” In Mort’s Northern English world, raising a glass is no bad thing. Indeed, as she tells us in “Oldham’s Burning Sands,” “people sing the sweetest when they’re drunk.” As a credo for a poet it promises lots of hangovers after the carped diem. “Stainless Stephen,” a local, provincial comedian down on his luck, even when shut out of most establishments, “knows a pub across the river / where the doors will never shut.” Even the elements want to possess the local pub — snow, in the poem “Fur,” wants “to claim The Blacksmith’s Arms.” In the poem “Fagan’s” there is a pub quiz host “part-drunkard, part-Messiah.” The Division seems to be between those sober, and less so. In fact, it is more than that. Mort’s poems can sometimes be a bit sentimental, or force a bonhomie or epiphany past the point of no return, but her music is almost never wrong — indeed, in terms of her skill at expertly deploying fairly conservative rhythm and rhyme, she seems the equal of Paterson or Duffy.

More vitally, her origins appear authentic — her Northern “voice” underwritten by a sense of generational blight and hardscrabble self-empowerment that few poets from the South of England could ever reference. Not since Tony Harrison, it seems, has a poet wanted to make so much of what divides “uz” from them. The two most noteworthy poems in the collection, which as a whole is as openly readable as any mainstream British poetry is likely to ever be this decade, and hence, as likely to be prized for such, both emphasize the rather striking (pun intended) contrast between Mort’s non-elite past (growing up Northern, and less privileged) and her elite present, or more recent past (Cambridge student/graduate). This becomes the tension of her own life and work, but, more broadly, the perceived tension of the English current today.

The great poem in the book, a sequence in five parts, is called “Scab.” A scab, which we know is a wound’s barely healed covering often picked at, to no good effect, is also the ugly name for someone who crosses a picket line during a strike to find work — often, poignantly, betraying family and friends in the process of making ends meet. This resonates with the violent history of the suppression of the miners’ strikes under Thatcherism. Mort considers how her own crossing, from Sheffield to Cambridge, is an equivalent selling out of more tribal loyalties. In the bravura last few lines, she achieves a tonal force simple yet worthy of her concerns, likely to make the poem essential reading for anyone concerned with such issues:

One day, it crashes through
your windowpane; the stone,
the word, the fallen star. You’re left
to guess which picket line
you crossed — a gilded College gate,
a better supermarket, the entrance
to your flat where, even now, someone
has scrawled the worst insult they can — 
a name. Look close. It’s yours.

That is the big poem in the book, but to this reader, the more elegantly affecting is “Miss Heath,” a poem in nine more-or-less tercets, whose narrative is easily summarized. Mort writes the kind of popular English poem whose subject and theme can be summed up easily, and is thus ideal for exams; this is what the experimental poets loathe about so-called mainstream British poetry, that it doesn’t resist the heresy of paraphrase, but actually embraces it. Mort — or the poetic speaker, as they tend to be the same — now a shy young woman about to enter a bar “far from home” where “everyone’s a stranger,” finds the figure of her long-lost but never forgotten “dance mistress” whose “French was wasted / in the north” appearing as an apparition and clicking her fingers, “Elegant, / she counts me in.” It is a sentimental but effective poem of small-town aspiration.

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Emily Berry is a strange poet to appear with Faber. Her poetry is not in the general Faber line of mainstream lyric or narrative poems written, usually, in a cadenced near-iambic pentameter, with much recourse to clever rhyme schemes, as we find in Paul Muldoon or Simon Armitage, for instance; nor is she a poet of roots or the natural world, like Seamus Heaney or Alice Oswald. Hers is a poetry of modest, studied eccentricity, written mainly in cadenced free verse, that harks back more to Eliot and later Plath, and, as I have said earlier, Kennard. We don’t have to look long or hard for the Plath here — half the poems feature characters displaying a great deal of fraught emotionality via intense and unusual metaphoric language. In “Devil Music,” the lyric I “bit on the absolute nerve”; in “Shriek,” “my mouth tastes of phone calls.” In another poem, “The Doctor” “slapped my face with his penis.” In “Sweet Arlene,” we “live above the mutilated floor.” In one of Berry’s best poems, and surely the most formally witty, “A Short Guide to Corseting,” it is said that “pain is the spine of life. It holds you up.”

These quotes nearly paint the wrong picture, which may be half the point, for there is another tone at work here which is less anguished, and far more childlike and playful. The (female) poetic speaker of these poems, almost always an I, veers between being painfully involved in submission and domination games, and doing fun, cute things like walking around New York or having a tea party. There seems little in-between space for the rest of life, where, for instance, one has to mourn one’s deceased parent, or deal with a traveling lover. The poems that deal with dead loved ones and missing lovers seem to be psychic bridges, texts over troubled wadder (the word she uses for when Americans say water). First, though, let us turn to these immature, fun poems, that reintroduce a new note, as it were, into English poetry — a surrealist vein also mined by Kennard, whose doctoral thesis was on the surrealist prose poem, and whose poems have arguably influenced every poet under the age of forty in England, so beloved is his zany, off-kilter work now. This turn to naïveté is also more than a pastiche of Eliot’s cat poems, though it is almost that, or almost any number of Philip Larkin poems drained of their sexual mania. In “The Tea-party Cats”:

We stood in corners, if you want to know,
nibbling biscuits though our mouths were dry.
Some of us slipped away before the end.
I stayed until the speeches, when the cats
thanked each other proudly, proposing
endless toasts; and then one of them exposed
a weakness, but quickly covered it up.

This is dry, coy, and ironic. It is also very English — for what is more English than being embarrassed by weakness at a tea party? For cats, read poets, and for tea, read wine. For Plath, then, read Eliot, he of the exposed nerves.

Indeed, in “London Love Song” the unreal city gets the love it really deserves:

Prince of long dark nights and teenage hopes,
we spent our youth on you, on the adrenalin burn
of cheap drink necked in queues, glances back
and the journey home.

This might as well be The Smiths. Stephen Burt has reminded us that poets have an investment in youth and adolescence, but I can’t recall many previous Faber poets so openly referencing “teenage hopes.” One thinks of John Peel’s favorite song, “Teenage Kicks” by The Undertones.

Even the book’s title, Dear Boy, has that sort of pop song connotation, that teen yearning, very nicely confounded by its other meaning, the pompous English phrase “Dear Boy” — this having once been conflated in the person and name of pop figure Boy George, or perhaps in the song of that name on Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles album Ram. Berry, as much as Berryman, dreams in song, and songs.

In “Love Bird,” we get a series of fragmented phrases that offer a broken sense of lovelorn pop song lyrics: “My bird since you left I have loved strangely” and “Love was no bird” being the beginning and end of them. However, the main weakness Berry fears to expose, for now, appears to be that relating to her mother, who died when she was young. This from the text itself, from the poem “Her Inheritance” — which is Berry’s ticket to ride out of her Beatles-Betjeman London of cocky whimsy, into the darker and more serious work it seems her poems half-write already, before leaving the party, speech unfinished. The poem starts with the speaker “sponging twenty years of dust” to “avoid” the memory of a dead parent, a dead mother — “was calling you ‘some dead woman’” — until the last three lines, which are deeply moving:

                                    And I was grown up, with your face on,
heating spice after spice to smoke out the smell of books, to burn
the taste buds off this bitten tongue, avoid ever speaking of you.

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Previously, I asked the rhetorical question, “what is more English than    ...    ” — and the ambiguous, even cheeky subtext of that question is that the answer, like Louis MacNeice’s famous poem, is “various” (Berry plays with this word too). Well, if any young poet seems driven by Bloom’s family drama to overcome the strong poet, it is James Brookes. Brookes won his Eric Gregory Award in his early twenties. His first book, Sins of the Leopard, has no room for tea-party cats, though — it is more interested in devouring the mojo of other literary lions, like a big game hunter who eats the hearts of the beasts he stalks to know them better, to gain their powers. There are in fact cats here, as in “Fealty.” We get a sense of his compacted, Empsonian style with this stanza:

a sleeping tabby swaddles one faithless forepaw
over its partner. As if these two came
listed on the title deed, A. Cat et uxor.

Don’t worry, I didn’t get it either, aside from the Auden riff. Brookes is a poet in sound with the love of  himself, which can be a good thing. His finest poem, one as compact or fierce as any Fulke Greville, is “Shrike,” which ends:

No carrion charmer, no falcon or red kite
I, peregrine, I pious in thought and act
am shriven in my little blood, my butcher’s reek.
In the wrack of my nest, in its bonescree of voles and shrews
I am called to the questing retch of my home choir.
Their eyrie cry my kyrie eleison.

No other poet under the age of forty in England is writing like this (except, perhaps, Martinez de las Rivas), enjoying the high rich latinate languagery of Milton via Tasso.

In poem after poem, kings are killed, Japanese prisoners thrown out of planes, and animals claw each other to bits. It is as if Ted Hughes invaded the BBC history channel — the world churns with linguistic fury, every death an excuse for verbal virtuosity. Some would no doubt suggest Kingsley Amis and Larkin were born to cure this monstrous fever, but I welcome the ambition, the turn to seriousness which dares to speak its name in Brookes’s work. “Near All Hallows,” though, has some lines that have been so packed with ore they seem ready to explode in gash gold-vermillion. One is apt: “The wind a language shorn of obstruents”; but the last three lines are an amazement of riches, seemingly written to be intoned by a drunk Richard Burton:

Thanks be to all things rotten before they’re ripe:
the bletted quince turned edible at last;
the medlars sweetened, open-arsed by hoarfrost.

I love the way this marries the sickly richness of Keats’s autumnal ode with something very crudely English, the “open-arsed.” It captures, too, Keats’s cockney heart. Aware of how the Romantic legacy has been squandered, Brookes plants his own colors in the Sussex soil. In one of Brookes’s best poems, “Running to Field Place,” this place is seen through a different historical lens, that of wartime, and then a deloused present:

Fatted with snow and lit with a bomber’s moon
a yew branch blazes graffitoes of itself
over the parked-up mobile Breast Screening van.

Which would be anticlimactic except the poem ends this way, directed to Shelley perhaps, or a father or a friend, or all three in some trinity of remembrance:

I promise you that nothing here is changing.
I waited for you at the lychgate. Nothing.
The cattle grid, the empty millrace. Nothing.
Broadbridge Heath, this whole white winter of nothing.

This echoes King Lear’s loss of wasted things. Brookes can be a frozen brook, too, and a bit dramatic. His finest poem must be “Planh,” which brings together all his concerns (history, violence, nature, pageantry) in one concerted, brief unity, as if he had aimed all his brief life to write the ideal New Critical poem, a second coming of Cleanth Brooks. Here’s the first half:

Sussex betters itself for the unborn:
the jackdaw striving for its cuckoo-child
takes berries as though suckling on the thorn;
the adder craves the warmth that’s not his own
and the slowworm burrows in, his crown
fragile as treachery; small lives. I know

that I will love — will love things yet unborn.

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Terror has arrived, ironically, at a time when the seemingly endless debate about whether English poetry is too mandarin or difficult for the “ordinary reader” and “common man and woman” (whoever these may really be, if they exist at all) has exploded in the British media yet again (recently, one of the BBC’s most famous presenters, Jeremy Paxman, a sort of grumpier Mike Wallace, known for interrogating politicos with gleeful arrogance, has called for English poets to face an “inquisition” to justify their ways to man). Ironically, given the echoes of Spanish Inquisition in Paxman’s concerns, the ecclesiastical, highly complex, and modernist poetry of Toby Martinez de las Rivas is almost a direct riposte to the school of ordinary, secularized language that many commentators seem to crave.

It all comes down to a certain kind of English xenophobic suspicion on the parts of some critics, readers, and writers, that English poetry was only ruined when it came into contact with European and American modernism in the twentieth century — that, before Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas, English poetry was in a pure golden age, entirely transparent, popular, and often light. It is an imaginary canon that leaves out Milton and Donne, but sees Byron and John Betjeman as among the shining lights. It wants poems to be comic, brief, and entertaining more than enlightening. It’s as if poetry was a last bastion of flamboyant Celtic Catholicism in what should be bare choirs — a puritanism that wants poems simple, plain, and as undemanding as take-it-or-leave-it Church of England fetes.

Terror is like throwing a large stained glass window at a stone — a grand gesture of defiance so overblown in the disenchanted context it seems to rattle the suburbs to their core. It is an openly religious, even Christian, book, with titles like “Penitential Psalm,” “Covenant,” and “Crede.” The endnotes reference lesser-known poets and artists Patricia Beer, Fay Pomerance, and Jack Clemo as touchstones of piety and aesthetic engagement with the spiritual world. That is surprising, but the layout and design — for a Faber book — is nothing short of astonishing. Poems appear on the oversized pages sideways, or annotated by tiny-lettered phrases, scored, some pages featuring prose poems, others black dots symbolizing a black solar disc. Words in italics like Renovatur, desolate, stoven, and Availeth jostle for primacy. A sense of teleological menace not felt in British poetry since a creature slouched to Bethlehem to be born rises from the pages, as images of childbirth (and apparent death) mingle with images of shattered windscreens and psoriasis. There are attacked and attacking bodies in these dark and illuminated poems. The natural world is subject to another. This is fearsome.

The poetry is not easy to comprehend, as one might expect, and is more monumental than it is yielding. This is High Church stuff, leavened with a few unsettling moments of ruder diction: “It is a wild fucking kingdom,” but the poet seems to far more enjoy writing lines like “Our Lady of Gateshead, watch over us.” At times, it seems unintentionally hilarious, as when a line begins “Sometimes, when we touch” and one cringes to mentally add “the honesty is too much” — is this a postmodern adding of Dan Hill’s lyrics to a Geoffrey Hill tune? More often, the connotations are controlled, the rhetoric picked when ripe — as if “Genesis” by Hill was an urtext.

At its best, of course, Terror blends the contemporary with the ancient and medieval, as in the liturgical “The Clean Versus the Psoriatic Body” with its single-line stanzas:

Torn open, suzerain.

My little sons are lain out side by side in winter, the light barely born, that it might not burn.

And my bride has lain with another.

Many of the poems seem haunted by “bairns” dead, bodies diseased. “The body as image of the state, violated and violating” as the poem above begins, indeed. The opening poem, a tour-de-force that uniquely name-checks Barry MacSweeney (a most un-Faber poet of the British Poetry Revival era) and Christopher Smart, “Twenty-One Prayers for Weak or Fabulous Things” (which includes the Dan Hill allusion as well) is both wonderful and wooden, in places, as long list poems can be. At its best, it is marvelous, with lines like “he is a king at siege in the twinkle of his paraphernalia” and when it ends on an image from Joyce’s short story “The Dead”: “& falling like snowflakes beyond all light & knowledge.”

The chiaroscuro of the poems is intentional, for the poems resist light and knowledge, instead gesturing towards depths, darkness, and subtler ways to access gnosis. The last section of the book is arguably the strongest, with magisterial lines that pay knowing homage to Eliot and other religious poets such as Herbert and Henry Vaughan: “There should be viciousness in seeing — a deep cold light that takes no account / of suffering or hope: that is neither itself / nor our relation to it”; or, for that matter, the complex:

The vitreous idiolect of an accipiter
veiled in snow
conjures its obsolete paradise
from
the wastes.
Don’t tell me what I mean, or,
in malice, comfort
me.
— From Stability in the Text

And then, the magnificent: “what else can I say from the jewelled hibernacle of my doubt,” which has the tiny italicized word bone poised just above hibernacle, and, note, no closing question mark. The major accomplishment of this ambitious and achieved debut is in how it gives aesthetic permission to a whole new generation of younger 
poets to take on the biggest themes and concerns — even in, and because of being in, a desolate, often atheistic realm.

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Each of these poets — Mort from her wounded North and its cheery pubs, Berry from her London of loss and found boys, Brookes with his Sussex as real as a dragon and just as fearsome to behold, and Martinez de las Rivas from his enigmatic cultural and religious border region, an imaginary Spain-in-England — juggles the diversities, and divisions of poetic Englands, past, present, and future, writing new poems out of things hard to say for being too beautiful, or painful, or sincere: the final irony.