What a fun sweep through some great writing! Some I'm not very familiar
with, so I am going to go and read them. I'm not sure I'd agree with all you
said about Jane Holland: I thought a lot of that collection lacked real
heart, although no one can doubt its personality and cleverness. I loved
'Slattern' too, and also Sharon Olds is one of my favourites. I think she
broke truly new ground when she wrote 'The Father', managing to fuse the
artistic and the factual. I wonder what you'd have to say about the 'truth'
as represented in that collection Chris?

Best
Polly

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Emery [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 19 May 1999 22:14
> To: UK and Irish poets
> Subject: A wild and varied reading
>
> I thought I'd catch up with some of the recent posts on poets who happen
> to
> be women, whether they are emerging or not.
>
> I'm still fascinated by the wonderful, impeccable Eavan Boland whose poise
> and grandeur, and well, sheer elegance always amaze me. I tend to go back
> to
> her when I want to be cleansed. Though cleansed of what I don't know . . .
> there's often so much haunting Boland, as if you see her as a reflection
> on
> a pane of glass, but the glass shews farther off something gorgeously
> still
> and unattainable but crystal clear.
>
> I want to take
> this dried-out face,
> as you take a starling from behind iron,
> and return it to its element of air, of ending --
>
> so that Autumn
> which was once
> the hard look of stars,
> the frown on a gardener's face,
> a gradual bronzing of the distance,
>
> will be,
> from now on,
> a crisp underfoot. Cheekbones. Eyes. Will be
> a mouth crying out. Let me.
>
> Let me die.
>
> Whilst we're in Ireland, Mebh McGuckian continues to thrill aswell. This
> poetic landscape is a voluptuous and homely place where the familiar
> triumphs in accord with the sensuous world. But it is displaced and
> ruptured
> too in a way that mythologises the revealed domesticity and widens it to
> something else, "Comes clear-cut from another world / As if translating."
>
> Music is my heroine, the synthetic kisses
> Of a woman's body. Drop by drop
> She distilled them, I watched the non-togetherness
> Of her sweetish old-maid lips,
> Her trained and pocket-mouthed smile.
>
> Sarah Maguire's recent offering "The Invisible Mender" was a treat
> although
> I sometimes felt it was a little too level headed and sensible to really
> lift me out of my chair.
>
> Pauline Stainer still mesmerizes with that cold precision that takes me
> somewhere out beyond Neptune staring at the blank infinity or lost in a
> whiteout somewhere at the pole
>
> I stood
> with the headless beasts
> on the parapet
> of the palazzo
>
> a far plough
> creaking across the valley
> olives silvering
> before the storm
>
> Ruth Padel still informs us with that emotional accuity and little depth
> charges of moral tinkering. Somehow the early urgency and veiled threat
> has
> softened but the earlier work still pinches:
>
> He'd had a research project: the Indo-China rage.
> He knew the folk cure. A raw ruby,
> the bigger the better, slung round the throat
> in a pouch of salt. As near the heart as possible.
>
> I was a little let down by Eva Salzman's last title, it was still barbed
> and
> immaculately written, but, I guess it was too refined, but "The English
> Earthquake" shimmered with the remembered threat in ordinary things:
>
> You cannot look at narrow-brush moustaches.
> You cannot think about gas-cookers, their ovens
> flame-rimmed, the diadem of fire, or hear the bell
> when it's done. Or think of teeth, lamp-shades, soap,
> the refinery chimney-stacks, puffing cheerfully.
>
> There is something Spartan and pared down about Patricia Beer's work.
> She's
> long since given up on dressing things up, we're left with distillates and
> residues:
>
> Our lane is a museum
> Sheets of ice cover marvellous exhibits
>
> I keep going back to "Friend of Heraclitus" and finding little gems.
>
> There's so much young talent that dipping in like this does no one
> justice,
> but Jackie Wells "Powder Tower" from the wonderful Arc was a great first
> collection (even with the tipped-in erratum). There's a lot of reflective
> moods here which can be a little exhausting from one so young, but its
> reticences save the day:
>
> On the 18th floor, looking over miles of estates,
> I thought I could see hills with trees on.
> As if the edge of a city was that easy to define.
>
> Julie O'Callaghan's impish delight in idiom and conversation pieces left
> me
> breathless in "What's what". I found this sometimes strained, but the
> barbed
> wit kept things moving and somehow the couldn't-care-less-ness of things
> and
> the have-you-heard-the-one-about-ness kept me reading and returning:
>
> what I'm doing snoozing in a bed
> in a pitch black room
> in a house enveloped
> in misty fog on fields
> located in the middle of nowheresville
> somewhere on an island
> out floating in tons of H20
>
> Kate Clanchy's "Slattern" was a gorgeous book. There's a simplicity and
> directness about the pieces that's carefully effective and each piece
> seems
> weighed against the other. Here's a bit of the title poem:
>
> I leave myself about, slatternly,
> bits of me, and times I liked:
> I let them go on lying where
> they fall, crumple, if they will
>
> I was bowled over however by Anne Carson when I found her. TV Men is a
> modern classic in my view, and should be compulsory reading for anyone who
> wants to understand modern western culture:
>
> Artaud is mad
> He stayed close to the madness. Watching it breathe or nor
> breathe.
> There is a close-up of me driven to despair.
>
> I guess I'll have to start rounding up, but I love Selima Hill, Maura
> Dooley
> . . . the list goes on.
>
> I thought that Alice Oswald's "The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile" was a
> terrific tour-de-force. The natural world pervades almost every piece and
> her life as a professional gardener adds a colourful dimension to the
> collection:
>
> She concerned him
> but the connection had come loose.
> They made shift with tifffs and silence.
>
> He sowed a melon seed.
> He whistled in the greenhouse.
> She threw a slipper at him
>
> Jane Holland, not someone who is backwards in coming forwards, produced an
> electric first collection in "The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman".
> I
> love "Post-Sirenists", which seems like a call to arms and is certainly
> pertinent to our recent discussions:
>
> We're coming out like moles
> at the end of a dark tunnel
>
> edging, noses to the light,
> whiskers flaring.
>
> I imagine Jane could beat me downing a pint and would certainly take me to
> the cleaner's on a pool table, she's tough, uncompromising and lives up to
> the impression of someone who has lived a little, learnt a lot and wants
> to
> take us on.
>
> But I'll sign off with some classic Sharon Olds:
>
> An elegant hand on your beard. Your tapered
> eyes found me on the lawn. You looked
> as the lord looks down from a narrow window
> and you are descended from lords. Calmly, with no
> hint of shyness you examined me,
> the wife who runs out on the dock to write
> as soon as one child is in bed,
> leaving the other to you.
>
> There's scores I've missed and I've eulogised often enough about Alice
> Notley to repeat the performance. Still, there's more I've missed through
> being knackered and needing to get back to my kids and the nappies and
> baby-gros and porridge covered floors to clean.
>
> Best
>
> Chris
>
>
>
>


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