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“... politically but far more broadly, in the Sixties. And I am not the first to notice that, in the light of such goings on, Pound’s testimony from half a century back shows up rather better than when Murray could confidently dismiss it in 1974. Pound was wrong – yes, we can all think so. But just where was he wrong? That’s a question that none of us ...”

“... The first poem by Donald Justice I ever read was the much anthologised sestina, ‘Here in Katmandu’: We have climbed the mountain, There’s nothing more to do ... It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, a beautiful and mysterious object, resonant and yet resistant to paraphrase. It might be said that it is a poem of regret for the death of idealism, a poem about coming to terms with quotidian reality, and, therefore, in some sense about ‘the way we live now ...”

“... bed, she told the journalist, there were strange happenings. A tumbler spontaneously shattered, a light bulb from the bedside lamp migrated, still hot and intact, to the other side of the room; a pot of face cream, flying through the air, narrowly missed Don, their son, who was coming to their aid, and their lodger, George, was hit by coins (a shilling and a ...”

“... he thought it was)... should this paradox unsettle us? Hardly: for such dark shadows in such amber light should be familiar to us from as far back as Golden lads and girls all must Like chimney-sweepers come to dust. Still, I’m not sure that other of the England poems earn their golden light of Eden as surely as do the ...”

“... of beasts was impossible.’ After McCrindle’s fence has been tightened, the company boss Donald sends the men on a job to a featureless area of Hereford and Worcester. Their days follow a pattern: they put up fences with numbing slowness, stop for cigarette breaks, eat, go to the pub and then retire to their dingy caravan. This procedure is ...”

“... much more about Hardy’s relations with his first wife, and have reconsidered his poems in that light – this, I’m afraid, is unscholarly. The most scholarly essay in The Occasions of Poetry is also the longest and the best, on Fulke Greville. Here not only is the learning impressive and well marshalled, but the critical intelligence is at full stretch ...”

“... turns on how he reacts to this condition, once it is brought home to him. Graham’s attitude is light years away from those who, having discovered duplicities in language, are determined to root them out; or those others who, having discovered the duplicitousness, delightedly aggravate it. The better alternative, Graham profoundly says, is to reconstruct ...”

“... Donald Justice, who died in August 2004 at the age of 78, was one of the most subtle and enchanting American poets of his generation. In ‘Variations on a text by Vallejo’, a poem anticipating his own demise, but written some three decades before it, he pictured gravediggers burying him in Miami (his home town): And one of them put his blade into the earth To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami, And scattered the dirt, and spat, Turning away abruptly, out of respect ...”

“... confidence: he is forever shuttling between received opinion (received, mostly, from his hero, Donald Davie), and ill-balanced subjectivity. Admittedly, Johnson himself was unreliable, but with him we are usually more interested in the judge than we are in those he’s judging. Johnson is a companion we want to see more of; he’s crusty and he makes us ...”

“... the way poetic form and poetic inspiration work to search each other out. One of these poets was Donald Davie, the other Timothy Steele. Let me talk about Donald first. In the middle of my studies in Economics at Stanford University, I was given the chance to spend a year in the Creative Writing Program in the English ...”

“... covered here And took delight of dayspring as a mirror; Hundreds of tiny spikes and threads of light. But now the spikes are hawthorn, and the hedges Are foamed like ocean’s crests, and peace waits here Deeper than middle South Sea, or the Fortunate Or Fabled Islands. And blue wood-smoke rising Foretells smooth weather and the airs of peace. Even the ...”

“... delivered scenes of the American berserk. Either way it put me in mind of a passage early in Donald Antrim’s first novel, Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World: I keep seeing Jim’s face, lit red by tail lights, in the long moments before the lines snapped taut, while Bill Nixon tried and retried to start his fume-spewing, out-of-tune Celica. It was ...”

“... timber that stokes the fire is beside the point: what matters is the fire, the heat of it and the light it throws. (Which is not to deny that in the case of poets better than either MacDiarmid or Graves we respect the soundness of the timber that is consumed to fire them.) A name that crops up in both sets of letters is that of John Wain. Wain in 1962 wrote ...”

“... and was now clucking around the opening show wondering if perhaps the galvanised iron relief by Donald Judd wouldn’t have looked better over there, where the green lacquered one was. The two things that struck me most forcefully about him were his innocence – he had, after all, agreed to speak to me ‘off the record’ despite all the horrible ...”

“... One of the finest things in Donald Davie’s Under Briggflatts is a sustained, learned and densely implicative comparison of two poems about horses: Edwin Muir’s well-known, post-Apocalypse poem ‘The Horses’ and Austin Clarke’s much less familiar ‘Forget me not’, a poem written out of Clarke’s angry response to the Irish trade in horse meat in the 1950s ...”