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On Sun, 25 Jan 1998, Peter Riley wrote: > I think someone should reply to PoetMex about Hughes but most subscribers > to BP are probably enraged dissidents who think Hughes is "Mainstream" and > so never read him. - well, yes, Hughes fits pretty fairly into my definition of "mainstream", but I can't recall saying that I didn't read mainstream - I do, though probably not to the depth which I should, and certainly not to the exclusion of "non-mainstream". I've read Hughes fairly consistently, for instance, with different reactions over the years, from excitement (when I was sixteen) to boredom (when I was 30 and knew everything). Yet both Veronica Forrest-Thompson and Andrew Duncan > thought [tense?] that Hughes was/is a good and important poet. - Good for them, but I don't see... VF-T must've been responding to early Hughes, which I still think is good at what it does. Can't comment on Andrew's reasoning. Really, so many people say he's a good poet... I don't feel > so confident, but I do get the impression that Birthday Letters might be > the best he has ever written. - could you elaborate? So far as I know nothing has happened about > the book over here of a serious nature, I mean its impact is in the hands > of various journalists (literary hacks, professional feminists, etc) and > I've seen nothing said which recognises it as poetry. - well, quite: and that press flimflam has established a web of quasi-diana biographical enhancement around it so that it'll be darn difficult to get through to the poetry (one of the weaknesses of a mainstream response). On the strength of the one printed in the Guardian, and the bookshop copy flipped through at the weekend (neither to hand) it seemed to me that Hughes had put aside his more orotund public-utterance tone and gone for apparent simplicity: the bits I read were like prose with funny linebreaks. I can see how one might pick on such a method for such a book. Others who've read it more, deeper, might see it differently. > What's all this about "autumnal"? What's wrong with Autumn? It's my > favourite time of year. It gets cold, the trees turn red and brown, the > sunlight comes at more of an angle, it's wonderful. - definately. Sign me up to the "New Autumnalists" movement/anthology, we'll have a manifesto out by the end of the week. RC %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%