Winter’s Ragged Hand
by and published in Edition Two of Pomegranate
I was recently asked to review Les Murray’s latest collection, The Biplane Houses. I’ve always enjoyed Murray’s work although sometimes wary; he has a tendency to write the unexpected, some of which I find difficult to engage with. But I’d also seen him reading a few months before the book came out and I honestly thought he was excellent. I’ve always loved Translations from the Natural World and I’d just finished Fredy Neptune.
So I was primed and excited; but the book disappointed. My expectations were high and everything I liked in Biplane Houses I’d seen in his previous poetry. To boot, the magazine’s editor didn’t like what I wrote – the review was like a young upstart trying to kick against the established order for the sake of it, or such was implied.
So I slunk off to do a bit of Jon Ronson-esque soul-searching (particularly after the magazine editor asked me to rewrite the article in a more positive light). I knew that I would never have reacted that badly had this been a first collection. Quite the opposite – this would have been one of the best first collections I had ever read.
But at the same time, is it inconsiderate to demand our older writers get better and better? I suppose what I wanted from the book was that it would do more than Murray, a stalwart of mainstream experimentalism, had already made poetry capable of. And I couldn’t get away from the feeling that he was treading water in his latest book.
The counter-argument to this, well-put by the magazine editor, is to look at a poet’s achievement and decide whether or not they should be trashed for their lifetime’s contribution to the ‘Poetic Tradition’ (my emphasis – hopefully not too bitter-sounding). “Look at Murray’s essays; read all his work, not just his poetry,” I was told.
I came at Murray’s collection from the slightly botched standpoint of someone who wanted to acknowledge his oeuvre without being blindsided by the planetary status afforded him by past critical perspectives. Or so I thought. But I was being told something quite different, something I only just managed to put my finger on. A review in The Guardian by M Wynn Thomas, of Anne Stevenson’s latest collection, Stone Milk, (“Age, the equaliser” 13th October, Saturday Review) put it in perspective for me: “If the anxiety of influence drives some young writers to parricidal or matricidal assault on giant predecessors, in ageing one may feel companionably close to the mighty dead – more so than to youthful contemporaries: “I-pod is a hideous word.”
Thomas kindly acknowledges the grumbles of young writers, the need to kick against the establishment in order to force a little space on the dais for themselves. But this (no doubt old) reviewer fails to acknowledge the closed circle clique that develops with age. As one mid-career playwright said to a workshop I was at: “I should be putting you all down, you’re my competition.”
Sometimes it does take a child to point out the hairy naked man prancing about publicly in a crown and a birthday suit. That said, I’m also not saying that there’s a critical checklist by which you can measure a poem’s, or collection’s, quality. But it’s worth taking FR Leavis, or Gyorgy Lukacs as starting points to counter declarations of ‘greatness’; critics who first proposed the idea that if we’re going to call something great, then we should have a yardstick by which we define greatness. Otherwise, there’s a lot of backslapping going on amongst the silver-bearded heights of Parnassus.
And also a lot of writers who make it to a grand old age and are called great just for getting into the octogenarian club. The Nobel Prize for Literature is a classic case of this: the average age of recipients has been about 63 throughout the prize’s history, with Rudyard Kipling as the youngest winner, at 42. More recently, Orhan Pamuk, who won the prize relatively young at 54, produced criticisms for his selection – grumblers complained that he was awarded the prize more for his work against censorship than for being any good. As if ‘good’ isn’t a subjective measure, categorised on the whole by egos and longevity.
Just as the Nobel panel decided to offer the Literature Prize to Doris Lessing this year, instead of Les Murray, sometimes taste counts. This isn’t a slur on his oeuvre, his qualities as a poet and definitely not an indication that just because someone doesn’t like a particular book, or even poem, by a poet, that the rest of their work is bad, or that you, given your different tastes as a reader, might not feel differently.
And in any case, I’m not trying to say Les Murray is a bad poet. But that’s how a single negative review seems to come across in many (old?) people’s books. Friends of writers under scrutiny sometimes rear up against their pals’ negative reviews, as happened when Sean O’Brien’s ‘Dante’ was panned by the Saturday Review – although the ensuing discussion at ‘The Poem’ forums interestingly also exposed the reviewer’s bias. I really wish more reviewers were explicit about their biases. Part of a reviews editor’s job is to be careful about selecting who reads what, in order to prevent the kind of lambasting that O’Brien underwent. But at the same time, knowing that O’Brien’s reviewer was an expert on translating Dante can also lead to a balance of trust and mistrust in reading their opinion.
One more example: Stride Magazine’s review of The Allotment, edited by Andy Brown. The reviewer took Brown’s introduction as the yardstick by which they measured the poems within. The result was fairly damning, not a review that would make someone want to buy the anthology. Oh, and I should mention that the book was published by Stride Books, which also runs the magazine. A case of crossed wires? Bad editorial? Or simply honesty? I’m in favour of an editorial that is willing to accept the mistakes made in selecting titles for publication. (Like that major publishing house that paid a six-figure advance for a book about a shopping trolley and a mattress that fall in love and have many adventures. Which promptly flopped.) And an editorial that is willing to accept reviewers’ opinions where they are well considered.
I saw Lionel “We Need to Talk about Kevin Not Being My Only Good Book” Shriver (that there being my shortest review) while she was promoting her new book recently. In the discussion she mentioned that she never writes a bad review, because the only person to whom the review matters is the author of the book. No one else is actually swayed by a review, in her opinion.
This is utter rubbish to me. It’s too common that reviewers renege on their responsibilities as guides to cultural quality (or lack of). The art of reviewing needs to be reclaimed from the publicity departments of publishing houses. As Peter Forbes argued back in the nineties, poetry needs good reviewing. And that means poetry needs to have a few standards raised that indicate a scale of preference, from good to bad. That, in turn, means displaying the relationships between reviewers and their subject authors. How else is reviewing going to be valued as a useful way to enjoy books? And, thereby, keep people reading, instead of turning to film, or other art forms, where even the reviews in the tabloids still carry a bit of weight.
George Ttoouli
George Ttoouli is 28 years old. He works in London as the Education Projects Co-ordinator at the Poetry Society and in Coventry as an Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme. As a freelancer he edits British Pensioner and co-edits Gists and Piths and The Oubliette. He received a Jerwood-Arvon Young Writing Apprenticeship in 2004 and was commended for creative non-fiction in 2007 by New Writing Ventures. He is fairly convinced that he shouldn’t be writing poetry, but he just can’t stop.