The predecessor of Shouting at Crows in this respect was Colin Simms's Goshawk Poems, which I bought at the Post Office in Garrigill while I was on holiday last Autumn: it was one of a set of volumes in the window wrapped in cellophane to protect them from the damp. I boggled at the sheer amount Mr Simms has apparently managed to write over his career as a biologist and an observer of birds: this book alone runs to about 140 pages, and his oeuvre includes dozens of similar volumes. And I did find it quite hard to batter my way through: it strikes me, dreadful though it might be to someone who spends a lot of time watching them, that there's only so much you can say about goshawks, and I would really rather read about people. Lately, in fact, leaving PJ Harvey's baleful Orlam to one side, my poetic excursions have been a bit unsatisfying. The Collected Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, which Lady Arlen herself bought me years and years ago, was shocking old tripe and it was no surprise so little of it was ever published. Mary Barnard's lucid, Sappho-like lyrics were enjoyable but not quite as sparkling as I expected. I found Bedouin of the London Evening by the mythical Rosemary Tonks almost impenetrable. Revisiting Thomas Hardy increased my respect for his industry and inventiveness but I felt little warmer towards his work. My favourites remain Geoffrey Hill, who you may well have heard of, and Elisabeth Bletsoe, who you almost certainly haven't.
In this company, I rather liked Shouting at Crows, with its meditations on pain and loss in the small, domestic, hidden, and unstated. I wonder whether the next adventure, Jeremy Reed's Patron Saint of Eyeliner, will be as worthwhile?
Of course you must encourage your friends, and if you find yourself open to the Muse then do write it down. I have to say that I have not read or even heard of any of the works of poetry that you mention. Arguably you must read what enlarges your spirit and you may have exposed a deficit in mine.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I know of no better advice than I came across long ago in The Art of Thinking (published 1928), by the French priest and author Ernest Dimnet (1866 to 1954). Let me quote:
'The principle which has never failed to confer superiority on a man's thinking activity is the well-worn precept: DO NOT READ GOOD BOOKS—life is too short for that—ONLY READ THE BEST. This simple recipe is as infallible as good air and good food are in physical hygiene. Yet, it is a fact that nineteen out of twenty modern people quake away from it. "Masterpieces again," they groan, "The Aeneid, the Divina Commedia, Paradise Lost, we have heard that before: much rather be ordinary than bored."'
So this is going to sound snooty, but the poet I most often read is TS Eliot, though I have also been moved by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath among others. Distinction, and nobility of mind and spirit, are open to us; should we not align ourselves with them, as the needle of the compass trains to the north?
I met Geoffrey Hill a few weeks before he died. We were drinking coffee in his wife's church after a service, and I wondered if the great man would give me something to tell my grand-children about by speaking to me.
ReplyDeleteAnd indeed he did.
"Can I squeeze past you, please?"
Wisdom to treasure indeed (Geoffrey Hill's)!
ReplyDeleteYes, if you are going to confine yourself to greatness, you can do little better than Eliot. But Eliot never wrote a meditation on the flight of a woman balloonist over the Haworth Gala in 1906 as Charlotte Eichler has.