What??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
From: Chris Emery <[log in to unmask]>
To: UK and Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 19 May 1999 22:12
Subject: A mild and boring reading
|I'm still fascinated by the wonderful, impeccable Eavan Boland
well I read that poem again and again and I couldn't see what you see. I
thought she was getting somewhere with her last line.
|
| Let me die.
|Whilst we're in Ireland, Mebh McGuckian continues to thrill aswell. This
| Music is my heroine,
oh dear
|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
yes, there was nothing I could relate to experientially there for me as well
Ruth Padel still informs us with that emotional accuity and little depth
|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 don't know this poem; but on the face of it this is dressed up
|There's a lot of reflective
|moods here which can be a little exhausting from one so young,
Why?
|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
barbed wit? kept you reading and returning? that?
|I was bowled over however by Anne Carson when I found her
why?
|TV Men is a
|modern classic in my view,
why?
and should be compulsory reading for anyone who
|wants to understand modern western culture:
gawd
|I thought that Alice Oswald's "The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile" was a
|terrific tour-de-force.
that's a pretty powerful tour-de-force
The natural world pervades almost every piece and
|her life as a professional gardener adds a colourful dimension to the
|collection:
I am sure that all these titles will add a colourful dimension to all sorts
of things; but you haven't persuaded me at all; but I prefer argument to
assertion - though please don't feel you have to oblige
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.
Excuse me? More like a call for alms.
|some classic Sharon Olds:
surely some mistake
* * * * *
sorry to have missed Erin Moure at cambridge
Maggie O Sullivan at the voice box next week
Lisa Robertson at svp in june
Patricia Farrell and elizabeth james at svp in july
& still hoping to see Cydney Chadwick over in November at svp
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