Melanie Challenger
Galatea
Salt Publishing £8.99

Annie Freud
The Best Man That Ever Was
Picador £8.99

Sharon Morris
False Spring
Enitharmon £8.95

As it happens, these three books demonstrate rather different ways towards the quality we call ‘poetic’. Since they are all first collections, I am bound to ask what the promises and risks of these ways or strategies are, and how well the writers have got on in them. Of course, there are many more ways than three of making a shape of words poetic, and a writer might follow more than one of them, even within one poem; but the ideas and practices of Melanie Challenger, Annie Freud and Sharon Morris are distinct enough to want particular discussion.

By the very title of her collection Melanie Challenger signals her aspiration and strategy. She attaches her poems to myth. There are two or three Galateas in Greek mythology but the one she has chiefly in mind is the statue who came to life as a woman under Pygmalion’s hands. But from Greek, Judaic and Christian myth she peoples her book with a whole cast of characters, among them Medusa, Zeus, Danaë, Mary Magdalene, Lot, Moses, Lamech and Zillah. Also from fairy tale: Rapunzel, and Kay and Gerda from the Snow Queen. As well as fetching in myths (or hitching her poems to them), she quotes from and alludes to a great many authors and texts of ancient and modern world literature, a small selection of them being Akhmatova, Ovid, Nikos Kazantzakis (whose wife was called Galatea), Novalis, Leibnitz (spelled wrong), Hesiod, Nietzsche, Genesis, Ecclesiastes, Numbers, Isaiah, the Rollright ballad and Beowulf.

At the heart of this strategy is the commendable wish to extend the poem beyond the merely personal; and also, I guess, the belief that every successful poem does in fact enter that dimension. The aspiration is good; a poem wants the extended, more various, more lasting life beyond the biographical self; and in myth and world literature that life is certainly still being lived. But the risks in the strategy are appalling.

Galatea is in two sections: ‘The Service of the Heart’ and ‘The Spark of Transgression’ (the Contents page makes you think it is in three); but really the book hurries on from poem to poem and over the gap of the sections in one long breath. The lay-out, I suppose deliberately, makes it difficult to tell where one poem or part of a poem ends and the next begins. In this inchoate rush the occasional prose epigraphs are very welcome: ‘The hair, reddish-gold from the effects of the bog acids in Schleswig-Holstein, was of exceptional fineness.’ Why so welcome? Because readily intelligible, because the language does what it is meant to do. And suddenly to come across, ‘His hand on her hard bosom lay’ (Dryden) or ‘ Oh Kay, we have been in the earth where the dead are’ (Snow Queen), or ‘Only a little Fountain lent/ Some use for Eares’ (Henry Vaughan), gives a shock of grateful pleasure. Panning for gold in a very turbid river, suddenly you light on some. One risk in continually quoting from world literature is that you set up comparisons you are very unlikely to win.

Also, consorting with the heroes, gods and prophets of myth, you may lose your linguistic whereabouts, and begin to speak archaically. Thus: ‘Pacific are my hands tonight …’; ‘that I wist not such shame …’; ‘None shall hinder the sullen flies’ obedience’; ‘Behold!’; ‘And her body cherishes not the disco-purple of those lips …’ Archaically, and often also very strangely, as though ‘the real language of men’ will not serve you well enough among the immortals. Thus:

Her gargantuan heart is the holy ark, a fleshy jeroboam
Whose brew is the Weltliebe wherein the infinite
Possibilities of human love find glittering passage;
Or a subsidiary brain in whose glistening sanctum
Man’s Sturm und Drang silts like tealeaves in porcelain.

Harold Bloom’s endorsement on the back cover is very silly. With friends like that, Melanie Challenger needs no enemies. How can it help, in 2007, to be told that you are ‘the Pindar of Eros’ or the best in English since DH Lawrence for ‘vision fused by Eros into authentic splendor’? It can’t help. Better friendship would be to say that Challenger is well read, highly imaginative and has an admirable belief in the seriousness and effective power of poetry. She has a feeling for montage and for form and does put some order on her ebullience. But she is high on myth, literature, quotation and adjectives, and risks losing all her gifts in polysyllabic welter and portentousness. ‘Sir’, said Dr Johnson of Macpherson’s Ossian, ‘a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.’ He was a tad unfair, and it would be more unfair to say that of Galatea. Still, in my view, the tone needs to drop a few levels, the rush wants steadying, the clutter of resonances wants thinning out.

Annie Freud’s poetry addresses the world she and many others live in, no doubt about that. So it has locations that you will find in an A to Z – the Caledonian Road, Copenhagen Street, Queensway – and sometimes employs a language that is close to common speech and that carries details people of particular social groups would recognize. Thus, from a poem called ‘Declan’:

                                                      It’s the legal aspect
that makes me quail. I wish to God I hadn’t
said I’d work today, but there’s a stack
of end-of-term papers to mark and it’s not
something you can just drop on someone else.

Or:

Hunnington Herbert was her name;
she lived off Kensington Gore
in a stuccoed mansion block
owned by the late Charles Clore.

Freud’s tone is, for the most part, satirical-facetious and it’s fair to say that much of what she views in the world she knows is fit for the satirist. But she is not a realist poet. Her strategy is that of willed oddity. Her perfectly tenable premise seems to be that if poetry deals with commonplace things it must do so by techniques of estrangement. Only by radical defamiliarization will we see the world we live in and have got used to.

The danger in this determined strangeness, in being so adept at devising oddity, is that the poem becomes detached from whatever reality it began in or had to do with. Oddity as an end in itself. Surrealists – Annie Freud is not quite one but risks ending up as one – soon move into a zone where the criteria for honesty, for truthfulness (however defined), are apparent only to themselves. Readers may be left at a loss to know what constitutes the truth of such a poem. Not seeing the criteria for honesty, they may begin to suspect that there are none. The poem sheers off and away into a world of its own. Self-delighting, perhaps, but not – for more than a minute – delighting anyone else. Facility in this mode is an affliction. Think of three whimsical details; you can surely think of another ten. The heaping up of characteristic details is Freud’s forte, and her undoing:

He could not forego the acquisition of a tiny cannonball,
nor the Pop-Up Book of Great Women in History,
nor a set of ocarinas painted with blue polka-dots.
These things would find their place inside the flat
beside the family of Confucian china rabbits,
a bedspread stitched by soldiers wounded in the Boer War
and, carved in balsa, a bas-relief of trysting lovers on a stile.

Or:

I listen to the crunch of Hula Hoops,
I notice that I’ve put on weight,
I take another gulp of echinacea tea
from a cabbage-leaf shaped cup.

Surely she might go on for ever. The examples begin to seem arbitrary. Soon the whole exercise feels not binding. But there is something very binding indeed about a poem when it works. In ‘A Retreat in an Edwardian Manor House’, satirising – are they still worth satirising? – residential courses of one sort or another, Freud writes ‘We have paid in advance and must change our lives’. Which alludes, I suppose knowingly, to the last line of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’. The work of art in that poem, though very battered, still issues the injunction : ‘You must change your life.’ That is what I mean by binding.

Irony is not redemptive. I mean ‘redemptive’ in an entirely secular and existential sense: liberating, effecting a change for the better. Knowing that things will not do may be a step towards redemption in that sense; biding ironically in that knowledge certainly isn’t. Rather like the Viennese, whose answer, at various points in their history, to the question ‘How are things?’ has been, ‘Oh, desperate, but not serious.’ So: carry on waltzing. A dance of death it may be, but very smiling and adept.

The Best Man That Ever Was does have moments of real poignancy, as if a truth were trying to get through and become really, unavoidably visible:

                                                      There’s a girl
who arrived last weekend in a pink tracksuit
and has been lying face down on her bed ever since
in exactly the same position, still clutching her handbag

Or (continuing the quotation from ‘Declan’):

Well, whatever, it’ll all get done somehow by someone.
Don’t get up just yet. Hold me.

There’s another such moment in ‘To a Window on the Caledonian Road’; and then this, a glimpse, suddenly, in the midst of another surplus of whimsy: ‘one gets/ tired of the surreal and being alone’. But really the jokiness, the wacky strangeness, is pretty unremitting, in title after title … ‘I Was the Manager of the Nipple Erectors’, ‘A Voids Officer Achieves the Tree Pose’, ‘The Inventor of the Individual Fruit Pie’, ‘Like What You Get When You Play It Backwards’, ‘The Green Vibrator’. And the poems then unroll one after another like exercises in conceit. Cumulatively their effect is dispiriting. A usual function of the technique of estrangement is to bring sharply into focus something we might have missed or grown indifferent to. Helped by the poem to see it clearly, we might indeed think we ‘must change our lives’. But a whole volume of Annie Freud’s poems greatly attenuates poetry’s most humane power, which is the widening of sympathy. It leaves you feeling that these people in their circumstances may be briefly intriguing, shocking or amusing, but do not in the end matter very much. You can’t care whether they are living well or badly. And that drags poetry down with it. Can poetry itself, deployed like this, really be said to matter? It’s a waste and a shame, such expense of inventiveness, keen sight, intelligence, grasp of shapes and forms – and on what? ‘Le Twelve o’ Clock de Hugo Williams.’ But, as I said, there are holes in the whimsy, gaps, uneasiness, and that is where the promise lies.

False Spring embodies another way towards the poetic; one along which Sharon Morris has not gone far enough, I’d say. That way is the conversion of things that happen to have happened to you – the personal, the accidental – into the figurative. It seems to me an indispensable strategy or process in the composition of any poem whose material is at all autobiographical. Poems written on such a basis lose touch with reality less easily than those courting the mythical or running to the surreal; but they risk captivity in their material, never lifting off from it, and they forfeit, in that bondage, all poetic purchase on life. I don’t mean we should veto the use of the first person singular or plural in a poem; but there should always be in its usage at least a sense of its extension into the figurative. The biographical self has to be exceeded.

False Spring is structured by travels in California, Rome and southern Spain. Most of its poems contain – indeed, they often open with – lines such as these:

You show me your pictures

We watch a container ship from China

We stand inside the split trunk
of a coastal redwood

You pick up the poems of Rilke

That is, the writer reminds herself and her travelling companion of a thing they saw or did together on their travels. Almost every poem has its origin in some such moment; that is to say, in the accidental and the personal. Then the poem, being composed, makes something of it. At times the procedure resembles that of a book of emblems: picture plus moral. Thus, in ‘Desert Wind’, opening lines, literal:

I have to close the door
on this blast of wind

– final lines, into the figurative:

we’re not prepared
for the desert, our buildings
aren’t sealed, doors and
windows don’t fit tight.

That is the formula, whether it operates as simply as that or in a more subtle and integrated fashion, in just about every poem. Most final lines, usually separated off, have the resonance of an enlarging significance:

What can we say to each other
when we only half-know ourselves?

I am forever asking

yet, it’s so hard to accept
the stillness of the unborn.

Then the whole book is shaped, in three parts, along its three locations, in America, Italy and Spain, the journeys thus being taken up into a poetic purpose.

This procedure – personal experience plus making something of it plus overall shaping – is the sort of conversion I had in mind and do think necessary if autobiographical material is ever to become a poem and a book of poems. But there are, in my view, two quite serious faults in the way Sharon Morris does it. I say two, but they are really one and the same. First, it is transparently formulaic. Second, she hasn’t gone far enough. The procedure is so obvious and does appear formulaic precisely because Morris has by no means liberated herself from what actually happened; she is still stuck in the accidental. In too many of the poems the necessary working towards the figurative is still under way; too many here published are only in the process of becoming poetic. It is still far too personal. And isn’t it slightly odd and unnecessary to be continually telling the person you were with what you did on your travels together?

But in many of the poems there are beautiful and effective passages. In fact, the book opens wonderfully with ‘Horses’:

When we can’t look at each other, eye-to-eye,
I think of horses sidling up to each other,
shying away from each other,
how horses stand like strangers,
eyes on the side of their long heads.

In ‘Presage’ (next poem but one) the horses appear again:

and as if an omen I dreamed of four horses,
round and glossy as chestnuts,
their heads resting on a white-picket fence,
in fall of evening, suffused in light,
shadows lengthening.

Poetic images, founded in the real, they are luminous and speak for themselves. Then, for me at least, at the very next line, falling back into ‘what happened’, the poem goes wrong:

The following week we saw them:
four horses in the valley of Olema …

Morris can do it; she can see the images. False Spring is scattered with promises, which will be more consistently kept when she begins to trust the developing truth of the poem, which may root in and be fed by biographical fact, but cannot be in thrall to it.

David Constantine has published half a dozen volumes of poetry (most recently – 2004 – a Collected Poems); also a novel and two collections of short stories (the second in 2005, Under the Dam). He is a translator of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. With his wife Helen he edits Modern Poetry in Translation.

Please send books for review in Poetry London to:

Scott Verner
9 Hume Court
Hawes Street
London N1 2EQ

You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk