David--thanks for the poitner to your article--just signing off here late at
night but I thought I'd comment on one passage--you mention Eagleton on
various contemporary poets including Medbh McGuckian & then say:

For example, Allen Fisher, Roy Fisher, Trevor Joyce and Denise Riley are all
poets who would fit Eagleton’s categories equally well but whose work has
little interest in what might be termed an easily consumable and assimilable
prosody.  (I should point out that I am well aware that many find
McGuckian's work 'obscure' or 'difficult'. My point is not that it is easy
to understand but that it is, like the other poetries in Eagleton's list,
easy to consume prosodically.)

This seems to me rather in need of sharpening.  I'd suggest that what makes
McGuckian more "canonical" than the other figures you mention is a complex
of factors--being Northern Irish, associated with poets like Muldoon &
Carson, writing a poetry explicitly about gender & issues of identity,
writing a poetry that seems almost _eager_ to be sucked into current
academic concerns about gender & identity & postmodernism.  I'm not sure
people pay that much attention to prosody unless it's noticeably different
from the norm (either way--probably Allen Fisher's use of projective &
conceptual prosodies & Peter Riley & Michael Haslam's innovatively
traditionalist verse are both too perceptibly at variance with the
attenuated free verse & mild formalism that are the hallmarks of the
mainstream in UK poetry to be easily assimilable to it): surely in fact the
overwhelming reason why McGuckian's work has been read as part of the
"mainstream" is because of its use of the simile, which the mainstream tends
to consider _inherently_ poetical (see Ted Hughes on the topic, or of course
Craig Raine) & which has been treated with hostility by most poets writing
in the wake of Pound & Williams.  I find McGuckian's use of simile a very
irritating tic, often lazy.  Try these lines, for instance (from "The
Unplayed Rosalind"):

....Her dress reminded me of curtains torn
Like a page from a bedroom window.

There was a rustle in the lock of the door,
A noise like grasshoppers as though a great
Moth were caught in it.  Then the door
Simply waved, and a long white sheet
Of paper came gliding from under it,
Like a coaster shoved beneath everyone's
Wineglass, or glass being cut under water.

-- all best --N

Nate & Jane Dorward
[log in to unmask]
THE GIG magazine: http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/
109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
ph: (416) 221 6865