Amis Versus The Great English Divide

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday January 7, 1989

Reviewed by HEATHER CAM. Dr Heather Cam will be chairing thePoetry Session -New Directions in Australian Poetry - at the Festival ofSydney's Writer'sWeek on January 30.

DO NOT judge a book by its cover. However the covers of these two anthologies are revealing. The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse comes in hardcover with a rich creamy dust-jacket featuring, dead-centre, a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, presumably the muse of those poets collected within. Above her, dominating the cover in a type-size more than twice that of the rest of the print, is the anthologist's name. The pre-eminence of Amis's name stresses the personal nature of this selection.

This anthology brings between two covers not the poems that Amis judges to be the best, but those he counts his favourites. He explains that:

A favourite poem, like a favourite human being, is attractive partly for reasons that are the stronger for being unfathomable. There has to be a personal element about such a poem, something producing the illusion that it was written specially for me...

Shakespeare, Shelley and Ezra Pound are particularly mentioned as failing to meet his criteria for inclusion. They and others are missing from this anthology because, Amis states bluntly, either "I dislike them or consider them overrated; nothing is here because I think it ought to be here".

The 109 poets are arranged chronologically, opening with John Lydgate(c1370-c1450), who was a generation younger than Chaucer, and closing with George Szirtes, born in Hungary in 1948, but living in England since 1956.

This raises the issue of how "English" is being used by Amis. By admitting Robert Burns, W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas and H.W. Longfellow, Amis indicates that for his purposes the term has more than a narrow national application. Yet overwhelmingly he has chosen British male poets or, rather, versifiers; for Amis's preference clearly is for verse, that is for compositions that observe a fairly regular metrical and rhyming pattern.

It is the "notes" that I enjoy most about this collection. They are cheerfully opinionated, often quirky, and surprising. Designed to be read after the poem they accompany, the notes are where Amis really makes his presence felt.

Whenas the rye reach to the chin,

And chopcherry, chopcherry ripe within,

Strawberries swimming in the cream,

And schoolboys playing in the stream;

Then O, then O, then O my true love said,

Till that time come again,

She could not live a maid.

The note to this song by George Peele reads: "This ...surprised the young Amis by showing that proper poetry could be about that too."

There is a bleak and moving, yet perfectly controlled, strictly rhymed and metrically regular "Elegy" by Chidiock Tichborne. This, the notes reveal, was written "three days before the poet's execution by the hangman in 1586 as a Catholic conspirator against Queen Elizabeth I".

The marvellously vivid battle of Agincourt described in enthusiastic detail by Michael Drayton, we discover, "commemorates an event that took place a century-and-a-half before Drayton was born". These little shocks and insights assist the reader's progress through the anthology.

At times, as Amis appreciates, the going gets tough. He begs our indulgence, for instance, as he takes us through the favourites of his adolescence: A.E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling and Walter de la Mare.

His choice includes what he considers to be "the first and greatest of all Leftie poems", "A Satire against Mankind" by John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, and"a great Rightie poem", Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", which argues so "persuasively that the poor and ignorant are better off as they are".

Not English verse through the ages, but new British poetry is the focus of The New British Poetry: 1968-88. No pale-skinned, dreamy muse adorns the cover of this sturdy paperback, rather a predominantly red, white and blue ceramic artwork, "54 Conjectured Flags". The nine by six tiles present variations on a theme. The British flag is played with, distorted, coloured, polka-dotted, and transformed. Above this appears the title in lower case letters, followed by the names of the editors in alphabetical order.

The anthology is, in part, a response to Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry and its narrow definition of poetry, as well as a reaction to "the new conservatism that ... did not fail to leave its mark on literature". It surveys and reveals the "range of poetries in these islands, largely ignored by or unknown to those who would hold the centre ground".

There are four sections: "Black British Poetry", "Quote Feminist Unquote Poetry", "A Treacherous Assault on British Poetry", and "Some Younger Poets". Particularly hard-hitting are black poets, like John Agard, whose artistic struggle complements a larger struggle in the British context:

I ent have no gun

I ent have no knife

but mugging de Queen's English

is the story of my life

I dont need no axe

to split/up yu syntax

I dont need no hammer

to mash/up yu grammar

I warning you Mr Oxford don

I'm a wanted man

and a wanted man

is a dangerous one

There are dialect poems, dub poems, a womb-shaped poem, computer-generated poems, concrete poems, prose poems, revolutionary poems. The object finally is: "In yr own words to/Make music, building Jerusalem in/England's (Inglan's)green & gorgeous/Wastes".