Blake Morrison

Now that poetry has been brought into the marketplace, and publishers have discovered how to make a modest profit from it, and now that publication outlets can be found in any good-sized store, so productivity levels in British poetry have increased dramatically. Most poets these days publish a new collection of thirty or forty poems every three or four years; some are more industrious than even that. Paul Durcan’s Going home to Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The justification for such work-rates, beyond the economics of scraping a living and the PR requirement of keeping a high profile, is that you have to write the bad poems in order to write the good. But do you have to put the mediocre ones in hard covers? The example of Larkin and Eliot, severe critics of their own work, seems alien to our Thatcherite enterprise culture, where Creative Writing Fellowships have created a new breed of eager-beaver writing fellows and where everyone must be seen to be hustling their product up and down (but mainly down) the country.

Old people will tell you that after death the soul passes over Whinny-moore, a place full of whins and brambles, and … would be met by an old man carrying a huge bundle of boots; and if among these could be found a pair which the bare-footed soul had given away during life, the old man gave them to the soul to protect its feet whilst crossing the thorny moor.

Richard Blakeborough,

There are four beach huts, numbered 13 to 16, Each with net curtains and a lock. Who owns them, what happened to the first twelve, Whether there are plans for further building: There’s no one here today to help with such enquiries, The café closed up for the winter, No cars or buses in the PAY AND DISPLAY. The offshore rig is like a titan’s diving-board. I’ve heard the...

The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth from childhood to manhood, and the father’s from early to late middle age: each poem denotes some new phase, and usually low point, in the relationship. The father’s absences and absent-mindedness, his tempers, adulteries and workaholism, his patronising of his wife and children – these sins and omissions are meticulously totted up. No physical detail is spared: with the peeled senses of adolescence, we smell the father’s ‘salami breath’, observe the ‘bleak anal pleats’ under his eyes and the ‘red band of eczema’ across his chest, hear him chewing and snorting his way through meals. The son, with his ‘thin, witty, inaudible voice’, seems a pale shadow beside him, the usual fate of sons in filial accounts of this kind: it is almost incidentally that we learn of his education in an English public school (his parents return to Germany) and of assorted part-time jobs in his teens. His mother appears small and shrewish, Gertrude to a Morel not a Claudius, in awe of her husband’s animal cunning; the son takes her side and does the necessary (‘It’s up to me to be the man of the house’), but she is allowed only two poems to voice her own complaints. It is left to her son to do most of the accusing:’

Was it thrup or thrip, your word for the thunderflies that came off the cornfield with the paddlesteaming combine, like wafted ashes

sticking to our bodies and warning us of this: the yellowing page set alight at one corner, the burning of straw.

We can see the flames rushing towards us like a lynch-mob, blood in their eye, tarring and furring,

until the churn and swirl of the ploughed...