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Edward Thomas

This brief study of key poems by Thomas includes analysis of well known poems such as 'Adlestrop', together with biographical information.

 

Elizabethan Love Poets

This new book (due out late 2009) examines some of the neglected poets of the late sixteenth century, alongside work by Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson and others.  Each chapter concentrates on one characteristic love poem.

 

Chronological list of collections:

To view more information please click on book cover.

A SELECTION OF ESSAYS, ARTICLES, LECTURES, REVIEWS

 

    
 

The Poetry of Ted Hughes (Greenwich Exchange, 2007)

To coincide with the publication of Hughes’ letters (which include one he sent John Greening in the 1970s), Greenwich Exchange have brought out Greening’s The Poetry of Ted Hughes in their new ‘Focus’ series.  From his early glances at nature’s savagery, through the shadow-years of Crow, into a middle way full of birds, flowers, insects, farm-life and fishing, to the sudden, unexpected panorama of Birthday letters, Hughes never ceased to astonish his readers.   This new study offers a straightforward guide through the labyrinth of his Collected Poems, while making an assessment of the poet’s reputation nearly a decade after his death.

 

    
         
 

Thomas Hardy: the Poems of 1912-13 (Greenwich Exchange, 2007)

This new ‘Focus’ study from Greenwich Exchange concentrates on the poems Hardy wrote in memory of his first wife – the ‘Emma’ poems.  Greening highlights the distinctive music of this twenty-one poem ‘suite’, while exploring the sexual and spiritual tensions concealed within Hardy’s Dorsetshire and North Cornish landscapes.

 

    
         
 

W.B. Yeats (2005, Greenwich Exchange Literary Series,www.greenex.co.uk)

This new study, written from a poet’s perspective, highlights what is so original and enduring in Yeats’ craftsmanship.  The distinguished Australian poet Alan Gould called it a ‘readable and useful introduction’ which ‘succeeds in renewing interest in this extraordinary poet’ (Quadrant,www.quadrant.org.au).

W.B.Yeats follows the success of John Greening’s Greenwich guide to the Poets of the First World War.

 

    
         
 

Poets of the First World War

(2004, Greenwich Exchange Literary Series)

 

    
   

 

      
 
A SELECTION OF ESSAYS, ARTICLES, LECTURES, REVIEWS

First published in the Times Literary Supplement www.tls.timesonline.co.uk Poetry Review www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review.htm, London Magazine www.londonmagazine.net, Quadrant www.quadrant.org.au, Acumen www.acumen-poetry.co.uk and elsewhere.

On the State of Poetry

The Lost Ear (Poetry Review)

The Quest for the Seven Virtues  (Poetry Review)

The Mystic Path of Modern English Poetry  (Swansea Review)

Varieties of Englishness: a collection of Collecteds

Fleur Adcock (Poetry Review)

Charles Causley (TLS)

Peter Didsbury  (TLS)

U.A.Fanthorpe (TLS)

Elaine Feinstein (London Magazine)

David Gascoyne (Poetry Review)

Philip Gross (TLS)

    Harry Guest  (London Magazine)

John Heath-Stubbs  (Poetry Review)

Richard Kell (TLS)

C. Day Lewis (Poetry Review)

    Peter Scupham  (TLS) 

Carol Rumens (TLS)

Anne Stevenson: essay on ‘Arioso Dolente’ (The Way You Say the World:

 a celebration for Anne Stevenson) www.shoestringpress.co.uk

Post-Alvarez:

Animal Liberation: 40th anniversary of ‘The New Poetry’  (Poetry Review)

Something Else: Jon Silkin (Silkin Memorial Lecture)

George MacBeth  (TLS)

Charles Tomlinson’s Vision of nature (Swansea Review)

Breathing the Political Air (Poetry Now)

 

Other Collections Reviewed:

Gillian Allnutt  (Thumbscrew and TLS)

    Simon Armitage  (TLS)

Kevin Crossley-Holland (Poetry Review)

Hilary Davies (PN Review)

Michael Donaghy (TLS)

Jane Draycott   (TLS)

Paul Farley  (TLS)

Paul Groves (Thumbscrew)

Jen Hadfield (TLS)

John Heath-Stubbs (TLS)

Judith Kazantzis (TLS)

Tim Kendall (TLS)

Sidney Keyes (Poetry Review)

Mimi Khalvati  (TLS)

Lotte Kramer (PN Review)

Glyn Maxwell  (Acumen)

Les Murray (Poetry Wales)

Robert Nye (TLS)

Jacob Polley  (TLS)

Neil Powell (Poetry Review & TLS)

Kathleen Raine (Poetry Review)

Pauline Stainer (TLS)

Michael Symmons Roberts  (TLS)

    Adam Thorpe (TLS)

Anthony Thwaite (TLS)

    George Szirtes (Poetry Review

 

Welsh Writers

Dannie Abse (Poetry Wales)

Gillian Clarke  (TLS)

John Davies (Poetry Wales)

R.S.Thomas: the Machine Stops  (Poetry Review)

Vernon Watkins: the Music in the Eyes (Dylan Thomas Centre Lecture/New 

Welsh Review) and articles in Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review.

Rowan Williams (TLS)

 

Irish Writers

Paul Durcan (TLS)

Eamon Grennan (TLS)

Brendan Kennelly (TLS)

Thomas Kinsella (TLS)

Michael Longley (TLS)

Place Wisdom: John Montague  (Agenda and Poetry Review, TLS)

Louis MacNeice (Quadrant)

Dennis O’Driscoll (TLS and Quadrant)

 

American Writers

    Poetry Chronicle: Hudson Review

The Wilderness and the Ouija Board  (Spokes)

The Lost Boys of American Poetry (Poetry Review)

James Merrill: in memoriam(Poetry Review)

Vendler’s List:

Helen Vendler, Rita Dove, August Kleinzahler, Chase Twichell, Robert Bly, 

William Stafford, James Wright, Dave Smith (PR)

Smiling Public Men:

Donald Hall, James Merrill, Howard Nemerov, Galway Kinnell, Richard Howard

Nature and Artifice Timothy Steele and Peter Kane Dufault  (PR)

Elizabeth Bishop (Quadrant)

Hayden Carruth (Quadrant): to see essay please click here

Billy Collins (TLS)

Elton Glaser (Poetry Review)

John Haines (TLS)

Jane Kenyon (TLS)

Ted Kooser (TLS)

J.D.McClatchy (TLS)

Jay Parini (TLS)

Adrienne Rich (TLS)

Walt Whitman (TLS)

Letter from the Old World (The Hudson Review)

 

The Long Poem

 

Dedication to the Monarch: the Long Poem (Long Poem Group Newsletter)

Sebastian Barker (Spokes)

Aidan Andrew Dun (TLS)

John Gurney (TLS)

Glyn Maxwell (TLS)

 

Other times, other places:

 

Rescuing the Castaway: William Cowper (Quadrant)

Prince of Morticians: Thomas Lovell Beddoes (TLS)

Peter Huchel  (Agenda)

Goethe  (PR)

W.G.Sebald (TLS)

Hans Enzensberger (Poetry Review)

Marko the Prince (Agenda)

St John of the Cross (TLS)

E.Powys Mathers (TLS)

Four Poets of the Great War (Friends of Dymock Poets)

FICTION

Pleasure Trips, short story included in PEN Anthology edited by Peter Ackroyd. Originally in New Edinburgh Review.

 

The Great Western and Missed, short stories in South-west Review, ed Lawrence Sail and subsequently the former in South-west Review Anthology

 

 

      WAR IN THE POETRY OF HAYDEN CARRUTH

 

Hayden Carruth wrote of his friend, the poet, peace campaigner and Christian Denise Levertov that she ‘keeps her mind on the reality of imaginative process.  She rarely veers into mystical utterance for its own sake’.  Carruth considers himself a very down-to-earth poet, suspicious of the vatic or prophetic.  He is sometimes pigeon-holed as a nature poet, which he does not like either, although he conveys the strongest sense of the real outdoors of any American poet since Frost, from whom his anecdotal pentameter monologues (‘Regarding Chainsaws’, ‘Marvin McCabe’, ‘John Dryden’ etc.) ultimately derive. Carruth detests the ‘lovelessness, arrogance, and egomania’, the ‘flight from reality’ Thoreau’s kind of nature writing has encouraged, and (in the opening pages of his recent autobiographical notes, Reluctantly), makes a tub-thumping case for honest clear-sightedness, for the avoidance of anthropomorphism and sentimentality.  Creation is sad, pointless, ‘without end or reason’. There is nothing ‘Transcendental’ in his view of it.  He sees only ‘the absence of intelligence’ and feels like ‘a duck blown out to sea and still squawking’. 

Carruth was born in 1921 in Waterbury, Connecticut and grew up in the New England that he writes about so frequently. His Second World War years were chiefly in Italy.  He trained as a cryptographer, but much of his army work was paper-pushing.  Although he exposes his life and personality in much of his writing (his 1953 sequence The Bloomingdale Papers [published 1975] draws on the paralysing years of his mental breakdown, his ultimate ‘conquest of himself’) we learn little about his personal experience of the war: just a glimpse in the poem ‘The Mountain’ of the Hayden Carruth who was a first-class marksman but who hated guns. We learn much more about his experience as a smallholder in Vermont – ‘the land/hidden from violent times’.  The matter of war, the Holocaust, terrorism, Vietnam – these take their place in a world which includes good things, peaceful things too.  In particular it includes rural New England and loving women. He clearly sympathises with the peace movement, yet asks wryly ‘Will revolution bring the farms back?’ And whatever his subject matter,  the question always seems to hang in the air: how can it be that we must die? Even in a poem about an age-old farm activity, ‘Emergency Haying’, the energy and urgency of the task is put in perspective halfway through: ‘I think of those who have done slave labour,/less able and less well prepared than I./Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony,/her father in the camps of Moldavia...’ The long ‘Essay on Death’ from the final section of Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991 (Copper Canyon) tries to make sense of the ceaseless barrage of bad news while trying ‘to send my loving father-message to a woman/far away’ (presumably the daughter whom he commemorates so heartbreakingly in the 1996 poem, ‘Pittsburgh’).  He looks at events in a broader perspective than Levertov or the Beat poets, so escapes the trap of instant outrage, the rush to revenge. Without any hysterical roll-calls, Carruth takes us from the atrocities of Emir and Sultan, to airport terrorist, to Polish farmers, who stood in their fields ‘watching/the trainloads of Jews go by, and they/shook their fists//and made the throat-slitting gesture and laughed’.  He is asking questions all the time, keeping his rational, sentence-making brain alert, knowing ‘the terrorized are all/who wait, everywhere.’

Like Yeats (though he counts cows rather than swans!), Carruth has submerged his ego in ‘camouflage, fronts, deceptions of all kinds.’ He also shares with Yeats a somewhat pretentious taste in titles: Brothers, I Loved You All (1978), If You Call This Cry a Song (1983) and  – can he be serious? – Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands (1989).  In the second of these books, we find ‘On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam’, a title which again echoes Yeats, but which unmasks the plain-speaking Carruth and the quiet sharp-shooter:  ‘Well I have and in fact/more than one...’ it begins, harmlessly, then lists them all, pointing out in the most unhysterical tone imaginable: ‘and not one/breath was restored/to one//shattered throat/mans womans childs/not one not//one...’ 

Form is a kind of camouflage. It is the stanza and the lineation that dominate Carruth’s poetry (some poems could almost be called concrete) but he is always listening to the ‘sentence sound’, to the speech of the people around him, to the Blues in the air (‘November Jeans Song’). Each new book finds new registers, new formal challenges: tercets, syllabics, song, sonnet, the very long lines in his latest work... Even his throwaway anecdotal manner is as artificial and hard-won as Frost’s, and can be as long-winded (and indeed just as sentimental as anything by ‘that idiot Thoreau’). His most effective forms are those that allow for a variety of perspectives, jottings from a journal, perhaps – relaxed, genial, colloquial, in the face of violence:

 

 

One day lightning struck our weathervane,

Busted the cupola, scattered slates every

Whichway, split a rafter, blew out the radio,

Entered the plumbing, and knocked hell out of

The curb box, making a pretty fair geyser.

Scared? Not me, I’d just had too many strawberries.

(‘Spring Notes from Robin Hill’) 

 

Nothing of the war here, it seems, but Carruth does not let us forget during this sequence that his wife, Rose Marie, is German and he ends with ‘It’s those bombs/They keep exploding out there on the ocean’. It could be said that Carruth writes best about war by avoiding it.  So in ‘The Birds of Vietnam’ he finds a way of describing the human casualties by  considering the deaths of birds, listing them. Similarly, a series of haiku or epigrams (‘The Clay Hill Anthology’) allows war to be mentioned ‘in passing’, perhaps ironically, or wittily:

 

The Sanskrit root word

for “war” means literally

”desire for more cows”.

 

There is a 1989 cycle of  (mainly) love sonnets, where an atrocity in Lebanon  suddenly appears (sonnet 57). The very fine Asphalt Georgics (1985), too, allows war to become an issue quite late on, when we least expect it (‘Phone’). These Georgics are a brilliant exercise in register, a series of unstoppable, all-inclusive abcb quatrains, ‘Cantos’ that stay on the road and respect other drivers. Carruth’s interest in jazz surely pays off in some of this later work. Apart from such catch-all forms, the discursive ‘essay’ perhaps suits him best: on marriage, on the deaths of animals, on stone... Everything must be studied and considered, even if ‘the green world shrivels like a napalm scab’. As his friend Galway Kinnell writes in the foreword to his 1985 Selected, Carruth ‘violates the first principle of contemporary poetry...’Don’t think’’.  He might have added ‘about your audience’, because Carruth always does consider us: we feel we are sharing a conversation with him.  In later poems it may be about walking, gardening, reading, making love, eating scrambled eggs, listening to music, getting drunk or being (and why not!) plain grumpy.