JORIE GRAHAM
Never
Carcanet £9.95

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
Scandalize my Name
Picador £7.99

DENNIS O’DRISCOLL
Exemplary Damages
Anvil £7.95

CAROL RUMENS
Hex
Bloodaxe £7.95

In the closing passage of ‘Gulls’, from Never, Jorie Graham describes words:

... how they want to see behind themselves —
                               as if there is something
back there, always, behind these rows I
                    gnaw the open with —
feeling them rush a bit and crane to see beneath themselves —
and always with such pain, just after emerging —
twisting on their stems to see behind — as if there were a
                                                                sun
back there they need, as if it’s a betrayal,
this single forward-facing: reference: dream of: ad
                                               mission: re
semblance: turning away from the page as if turning to a tryst:
the gazing-straight up at the reader there filled with ultimate
                                                  fatigue:
devoted servants: road signs: footprints you are not alone:
slowly in the listener the prisoners emerge:
slowly in you reader they stand like madmen facing into the wind:
nowhere is there any trace of blood
spilled in the service of kings, or love, or for the sake of honor.
or for some other reason.

This extract contains a fair amount of the evidence both for and against Graham’s work. The verse achieves and sustains momentum into and across the potential obstruction of the series of verbless phrases divided by colons. It does so without monotony, managing to combine her characteristic nervy inclusiveness with an invitation to speak the lines aloud. The rhythm is not flatly ‘free’ but subtly various. That final cluster of nouns — ‘listener’, ‘prisoners’, ‘madmen’, ‘kings’ — recalls the suggestive authority of the late Zbigniew Herbert (see the similarly theatrical ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’) and unites what might seem rather academic speculations with the realm of history and politics. All this is to the good.

On the other hand, there is the patronizing undergraduate emphasis at certain line-breaks — ‘a / sun’ (please stop moving your lips when I’m about to say something, mother): ‘ad / mission: re / semblance’ (junior Geoffrey Hill, this one); ‘ultimate / fatigue’ (me too) which suggests a want of tact as well as the absence of any sense of the ridiculous. The religiosity of the poem appears standard in Graham’s work, like the virtual absence of the ordinary furnishings of the world.

In all, the combination of musical and rhetorical power and imaginative ambition with a taste for poetry at its most swooningly absolute and professorially finical may produce a correspondingly contradictory response in the reader — at any rate, in this reader. I wish Graham’s poems were written by someone else. Elizabeth Bishop would do. Or Rilke.

Never is described as an ‘exploration of time’, which also entails an exploration of the consciousness that apprehends its passage. The theme is hardly original but the approach is, as one would expect, ambitious. The book is a doomed but determined attempt to catch time as it flies by creating a sense of dramatic ‘real time’ within the poems. The task virtually denudes the poems of irony, instead placing in the foreground the combination of passion and perplexity which often produces irony in the work of other poets. To a greater extent than many, Graham describes phenomena for their own sake, in the hope of revelation. She is in a sense the opposite of Louis MacNeice:

Here melting off: the skin of the
momentary lull where forward and backward
motion are ever so briefly equal — feathers [too soft] but
mostly marbled [so hard]
yet sloughing snakeskin off with the very next
wave and laying that skin on to shore, at
our feet. In sand: on sand:
palmfronds, feather-layings, accumulations of differently
gapped nets at
angles nor exactly overlapping: drifts of
minuscule dune-structures building like sound-waves
then lowering in sun in fast-moving clouds: making
for the time being, the time being: tide coming back
in and the fishermen walking this way carrying off
an unusually large
catch.
                                                                     (‘The Time Being’)

That closing phrase recalls Bishop’s pelicans in ‘The Bight’, which crash into the water ‘unnecessarily hard, / it seems to me’. Graham attempts a similar transmutation of the prosaic by context, but in general the texture of the verse is much thinner than Bishop’s, and the reliance on line endings made from articles and prepositions — these lines are ‘notes’ of a highly artificial kind — creates a staged, self-conscious effect which in turn undermines the potential of ‘for the time being, the time being’. It’s as if the poet somehow needs to be seen doing this and duly approved of. Her scrutiny of the external world is, unavoidably, but in her case at times unhelpfully, a scrutiny of the reflected self beset with problems of meaning familiar in an age which has inherited a spiritual cast of mind but can find no sustenance for it other than its own anxiety.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s Scandalize my Name: Selected Poems is a first British publication for another eminent American poet. If Jorie Graham’s preoccupation is time, Komunyakaa’s is history — his own, his father’s, Black America’s. Whether real or imagined, the past is his first resort: ‘I’m here, as if I never left, / Stopped in this garden,’ he writes in ‘Work’, remembering a white employer’s wife sunbathing nude while he mowed the lawn (‘The engine / Pulls me like a dare’). It comes as a surprise to realize that this is not simply a generic ‘episode’ from a thousand films and novels but an account of surviving a crisis only to be haunted by it.

The nearby ‘Salome’ — ‘This white girl / Who moved with ease / On her side of the world / As if she were the only / living thing’ — goes further. A brief tale of an incestuous brother and sister swimming together suggests what Southern Gothic grows out of, a sense of the world founded in myth for black and white alike — ‘Swimmers trapped under / A tyranny of roots, born / With one heart.’

In Komunyakaa’s poems the waking mind and the unconscious can seem to have changed places. The secretive, forested landscape of Vietnam seems continuous with the American South, a place both of terror and refuge. In ‘Jungle Surrender’ suggested by a painting but flushed with memory,

Moving towards what waits behind the trees,
the prisoner goes deeper into himself, away

from how a man’s heart divides him, deeper
into the jungle’s indigo mystery & beauty,

with both hands raised into the air, only
surrendering halfway: the small man inside

waits like a photo in a shirt pocket, refusing
to raise his hands...

Leaving the racial and political context unstated here, Komunyakaa reveals the Viet Cong soldier’s position as a kind of accident of necessity, something experienced by an ‘enemy’ who is as basically uncompromised as the poet himself.

The book contains many other successful attempts to reclaim experience from the dead realm of ‘the obvious’, maintaining the same discipline, the same sense that sympathy driven by accuracy, rather than loud declaration, is what makes a poem three dimensional. In ‘My Father’s Love Letters’ the poet remembers having to write down his father’s dictated letters , pleading for his mother to come home to her violent husband:

We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters and pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences...
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he’d look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses and hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Labouring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

As in Graham there is a residual metaphysics: the world of male physical work, full of tools and equipment, seems imprinted with its users’ efforts. But this is not a subject Komunyakaa worries about. He accepts, indeed his work originates in, the authority of the imagination which makes the world a metaphor of itself. In ‘Elegy for Thelonius’ (though jazz seems an inherently elegiac subject) not only does the imagination return the dead musician to the world, its suggests that death was always with him, a condition of his music’s eccentric joy:

Damn the snow.
Its senseless beauty
pours a hard light
through the hemlock.
Thelonius is dead. Winter
drifts in the hourglass;
notes pour from the brain cup.

Here and there we can see some faint kinship with the Beats in Komunyakaa’s work, but he’s rarely rhapsodic, never sleeps on the job and seems to have disposed of the temptation to attitudinize early on in what has proved to be a distinguished career.

Compared with either Graham’s or Komunyakaa’s, Dennis O’Driscoll’s poems can seem reasonable and understated to the point of insanity. My God, there are even some jokes in here. Yet Exemplary Damages, his sixth book, is in large part concerned with mortality. One of the best-known poetic deaths of recent years is dealt with in ‘Last Words’, which is in part a defence of Philip Larkin against those minus his humour and compassion who queued up to shit on him:

...he croaked
as best the
throat cancer

(which he’d brought
on himself
with smokes and booze)

allowed: I am going
to the inevitable.
So negative always.

But O’Driscoll won’t allow things to be overstated or overrated either, pulling a further belly-laugh from signs of change and decay closer to home:

                My contributor’s copy
of The New Younger Irish Poets
             already liver-spotted with age.

If memory serves, the anthology in question was a rather glum experience. Now even the title sounds absurd. When Peter Reading comes up with stuff like that he’s awarded titles of his own — The Emperor of Arse Cream, that type of thing.

Perhaps the most ambitious piece here is ‘England’, a terrifying catalogue-poem with an epigraph from Anne Stevenson: ‘Without nostalgia who could love England?’ Such is the way of the world that the question sounds like an advertisement rather than an irony.

Reading the poem is a punishing and enlightening experience, since it gathers what appears to be every halftruth, almost-fact and demented allegation ever produced on the subject and leaves them in a steaming pile on the reader’s desk. For example,

It is somewhere at the back of the mind,
like the back of a newsagent’s where plug
tobacco is sold; shining like the polished
skin of a Ribston Pippin or Worcester Pearmain.
It preys on imagination, like pleated ladies
sporting on bowling lawns, like jowelled [sic] men
of substance nursing claret in oak-panelled
smoking rooms in jovial private clubs.
See it all for yourself — the quadrangled choir school,
the parterred garden with the honesty box,
the fox-hunting colonel on his high horse,
the Gothic Revival haunt leading through
a topiary arch to gazebo, yew, maze,
pet cemetery — on your jaunts through
cobbled market towns, treks down lanes
rutted with what surely must be haywain wheels...

Bring me the confession and I’ll sign it now. O’Driscoll strikes the wrong note perfectly. This is England as the Daily Mail imagines it to be, still, somewhere, a paradise of kitsch and sentiment, pastness entirely separated from history. It is what the English are told to imagine about themselves by their own worst enemies, people like themselves. O’Driscoll also smears together the various visionary bucolic allegations attributed to Stanley Baldwin, John Major and John Betjeman. He acknowledges a debt for these to Jeremy Paxman, whose glib aggression seems suspiciously like another part of the same problem — a further act of cunning on O’Driscoll’s part, perhaps.

George Orwell, a notable absentee from this poem of cheerful revenge, was an unacknowledged source of Major’s speech — those ‘old maids biking to Mass through the mists of the autumn morning’ are his, from ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. Orwell went on to say that ‘Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization...It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red letter-boxes’ — phenomena which would have fitted perfectly with O’Driscoll’s compendious charge-sheet, had Orwell not employed the insider’s Janus-faced irony which O’Driscoll naturally declines to entertain.

This England, according to O’Driscoll, is not intended to go anywhere, to change or develop — it is another version of the Orwell’s ‘deep, deep sleep of England’, the sleep, the poem suggests, of the immutably fraudulent. O’Driscoll is a keeneyed poet, but he rarely puts the boot in like this. You wish he’d do it more often.

Carol Rumens’s work has long been concerned with the condition of England. South London born, working class, socialist, feminist, internationalist, by virtue of the breadth of her interests and experience she brings a highly individual authority to bear. As she remarks in ‘Against Posterity’, ‘Poetry’s for grownups’, which may be why so few people read it.

Exemplifying what she has in mind, ‘A Rarer Blue’ brings Edward Thomas to mind, by the eloquent reticence of its attention to what it wants to recall and cherish. A wood full of bluebells sounds like a recipe for the Loamshire Poetry Rosebowl, except that there’s no sweetness attached to the vanishing of the species here. Instead, Rumens writes,

Now I would like to see the matter dropped
in a sadly unenlightened childhood
and give my gaze to the heath-dwelling solitary
who lets the island shine through all her panes.
She likes a northern coast, but she isn’t snobbish;
she gleams on Sussex, too, my wakeful lantern,
eye of the grass, mouth of the dawn, stone’s sea — glimpse —
the little shaken harebell that won’t be pulled.

It’s the kind of detail that carries no weight where the money lives and therefore — Rumens might suggest — it’s also the kind of detail that remains meaningful. ‘Just as in 1914’ shows the pitiable results of the re-marriage of revolt and money in our period, when so much prized ‘individuality’ exists only as the shadow of imperious commerce:

You can sell the young
A spell, a pill, a look, a grudge, a land,
Life insurance, God, a band,
A pup, the truth, their youth.

You can sell the young
Girl her own white unicorn.
You can sell the young
Man his own shite uniform.

Name it ‘gallantry’ or ‘martyrdom’,
You can sell it. You can sell the young.

This is as strident as ‘A Rarer Blue’ is subtle, and it suggests that in Rumens there is always likely to be a tension between poetry for its own sake and for the world’s sake. The division is not of poets’ making, but it will go on being their job to try to mend it.

Finally, Rumens raises a point about the use or non-use of capital letters at the beginning of lines: ‘Capitals denote a slightly stronger pause between the lines. I tend to use them in the more metrical poems. Where lines begin in lower-case they run on more swiftly.’ Surely the weight given to the line-break must be established by what happens in terms of sound, texture, punctuation, tone, rhythm and so on within the lines? Although layout and typography have their parts to play in the reading of a poem, can they be more than a formal notification of an intention whose fulfilment the reader’s ear must test?

Sean O’Brien’s Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001 appeared last year from Picador, and Methuen published his new verse version of Aristophanes’ The Birds.