Walking Poets

Mr Scannell’s verse has obvious human attractions. He writes about what happens to himself and other people – probably the best poems in his book are a series of bar room sketches – but two factors limit and blur what could have been wholly real and successful work. The first is a formal matter, the clumsy jog-trot of modernised and truncated blank verse from which he rarely departs; and the second is harder to identify, being a subtle defect in his vision of reality. He writes always from inside his culture, never from outside it.

It is the same limitation that kept J.B. Priestley, and five hundred other fairly good English writers, from ever speaking truly from the human condition – a peculiarly English defect, a whiff of suet pudding, an unconscious assumption that sentimentality and a bluff hebetude admit one to the language of the page 12 angels. Short of ten years penal servitude, I can see no cure for it.

The case of Mr Middleton, however, is wholly different. His nonsequences are in fact non-poems. They record the progress of a mad microscope over the surface of anything near at hand. This has not prevented them from receiving a Book Society Recommendation and some vague praise from A. Alvarez. Following American cooking instructions, Mr Middleton’s suet pudding is chopped up in cubes and scattered on the plate. He can hardly be blamed since he has simply tried to follow the most recent semantic fashions. But I cannot find it in my heart to be glad about it.

The formal accomplishments of John Pepper Clark, a young Nigerian poet writing in English, are modest enough. He is at his best when he follows speech rhythms and avoids the awkward pressures of rhyme. His vision, however, is real and exact, though narrow – a keyhole view of Nigerian landscape, life and politics, with some asides on the non-African horrors of Princeton and New York. It could well happen that he will find more to say about both arenas.

The best book, Mr Rowland’s, I have chosen to mention last. His broad tapestries of urban or suburban life in Canberra evoke from a reader the same tingly, dry tiredness from which the poems originate – an Australian quality of spiritual exhaustion as I remember it. His verse has the merits of precision and formal control. The themes are on the whole cosmopolitan, ranging from Australia to South-East Asia to Moscow and back again. But I find the strength and inevitability of the best poetry only in the South-East Asian sequence, dated 1952-1955. It could perhaps seem much the same at the present day –

. . . Under the lamps the drivers squat
Naked in quiet colloquy
By cabaret and gambling-den,

Echoes of mortars from the plains
Disturb the city, and the blood
Moves strangely in its moving wood;
Who walks the streets tonight discovers
Obscure conjectures in his veins . . .

These obscure conjectures now belong to us all – at the political level, the sense that Western militarism has bitten off more than it can chew, and at a personal level, the sense that the Eastern world could supply, though painfully, what is lacking in our padded knowledge of human choice and suffering. Some such intuitions stir behind the poems, and Mr Rowland is to be praised for having laid himself open to them.

1966 (380)