Chris Mithcell's review is fun, & in the pieces, not necessarily the poets,
he chooses to attack, he makes points with which some will wholly agree.
Yet, he fails to give any sense of the range of the anthology, especially
the way it asked certain of its contributors to choose older poets they
admired & include some of their work. So Tony Lopez on WS Graham, Drew
Milne on David Jones, eg, & I note that neither of these two fine poets are
mentioned in the review. I recall how excited y young poetry students were
when they hear Tony L read here, presenting possibilities for getting away
from the person 'lyric cry' in poetry. But then he & Milne, as examples, do
have a sense of line, & so do many others not mentioned in the review. I'm
not saying there aren't valid arguments to be made against some of the
writing in the anthology; but I do think this review fails to take account
of all that it presents (& represents)...
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Although they are
Only breath, words
which I command
are immortal
Sappho (Mary Barnard trans)
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