New Poets
Both these poets are unfamiliar to us as names in modern English poetry. Miss Scovell, one learns from the dust-jacket, has already had published two books of verse; Mr Press, on the other hand, is making a first appearance. The Oxford University Press is to be congratulated for unusual generosity in taking the risk of publishing the work of a new poet – a risk which most publishers now avoid like leprosy. Mr Press justifies their parental trust. His poems are highly readable, intellectually acute, and essential normal ’prentice work. But a tendency to abstract language makes his verse too thin at times –
. . . I was exempt from discontent
And aching disillusionment.
I was immune from pain and grief,
Guarded by steady irony;
Why did you come, when I was free,
To trouble my calm unbelief?
This is an example of the good half-poem (good as exact statement, but only half a poem) which Mr Press writes rather too often. Africa, however, renews in him the fibres of poetry: it horrifies him with violence, in female circumcision rites; it moves him also to grief and a trace of envy. One feels that he leaves Africa too soon behind.
Miss Scannell brings to her poetry a most rare innocence and maturity of heart and mind. Her themes are not unusual – chrysanthemums in a garden, the habits of children asleep and awake, isolation, distance, the mystery of human identity – but her strong delicate poems, like scrollwork done in steel, reveal the truth of her unique experience.
The days fail: night broods over afternoon;
And at my child’s first drink beyond the night
Her skin is silver in the early light,
Sweet the grey morning and the raiders gone.
These four lines come from a sequence quite unparalleled, I imagine, in English poetry – ‘The First Year’, love poems of a mother to a child, in which no trace of stereotyped feeling or language appears. She understands so much and pretends so little. Her descriptive and metaphorical powers match her insight.
1957 (161)