T
here are so many ways of writing a poem. The American John Ashbery, who has been publishing poetry for more than half a century, and whose first instalment of a two-volume collection, Collected Poems 1956-1987 (Carcanet Press, 1042pp, £19.95; Tablet price £18) is already gargantuan, delights, teases and bemuses us in equal measure. He carries us along on a tidal wave of teeming words. We never know quite where we will land or what landfall will look like when we get there. The poems, often
quasi-philosophical musings upon the perplexities of negotiating one’s way through an ever-shifting world, possess a kind of extravagant, freewheeling gaiety, shifting from the casual to the elevated within the space of a single line. How different they feel temperamentally from the great sequence Canti (or Songs) written by the soul-stricken, bodily disabled nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, newly translated into English by Jonathan Galassi (Penguin Classics, 498pp, £14.99; Tablet price £13.50). Although Ashbery’s manner of address often seems intimately confiding, his poems also feel rather impersonal. Leopardi, in every one of this great sequence of poems, fully impregnates each word with a kind of exquisite, honed anguish. Seldom has a poet written so beautifully, so eloquently and so pessimistically about the predicament of the loveless, estranged
On the make
The Fortune Hunter: a German prince in Regency England Peter James Bowman
SIGNAL BOOKS, 232PP, £14.99 ■Tablet Bookshop price £13.50
H 01420 592974
ermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau – later known to
many as Prince Pickle and Mustard – was born in 1785, to a 15-year-old mother, on Muskau, which now straddles the Polish-German border, the estate he was later to inherit and to suffer much for. Had he loved Muskau less, or been a less talented landscape gardener, he might not have found himself the subject of a biographical work such as this. On the evidence of Peter James Bowman, he should be remembered as a matchless anthropological guide to Regency society. Pückler was a young dandy who ran through his riches almost before he had inherited them. He was married in 1817 to a monied and understanding heiress named Lucie, but quickly spent her cash too, mostly on spectacular improvements to the grounds of his beloved park. At this point, the pair concocted an unusual plan: Pückler would divorce Lucie and marry a richer bride plucked from the dinner tables
22 | THE TABLET | 11 December 2010
POETRY ROUND-UP
writer in a hopelessly withered and ever withering world. Has the world then changed for the
worse? Not at all, is the message of the finest of poetry anthologies of the year, Patrick Crotty’s Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (Penguin Classics, 1042pp, £40; Tablet price £36). Never before has there been an anthology of the 1,500-year history of Irish poetry with such a mighty historical sweep. Predictably enough, much of it is given over to translations, often newly made, by the likes of Seamus Heaney, Maurice Riordan, Michael Longley and Crotty himself. The book is not to be valued for its poetry alone. The tremendously informative introduction, that runs to 90 pages, is the best and fullest account I have ever read of the complicated history of poetry in Ireland: of its languages, the battle between Gaelic and English, the flight of the Bards – all this is summarised masterfully and engrossingly. But, finally, it is the poems we value, and almost every page contains moments of sheer delight. And, most of all, we recognise that the ferocious, contrary, wilful nature of the human beast has changed little throughout that millennia and a half. Yes, the world has not changed for the worst. It has never been less than pretty bad. Bad or not, we must fight our way
through as best we can. Robert Saxton’s new translation of Hesiod’s Calendar (Carcanet, 92pp, £9.95; Tablet price £9) gives versions in sonnet form of two books by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, called Theogony and Works and Days. The latter is a book of practical advice, in verse form, on such issues as how to till the land, and the first an account of the creation of the universe, of the battle that was waged between the Titan and the Olympian gods, and who won out in the end. The sonnets, which positively skip along, moving easefully from one to another, delighting quite as much as they instruct, bring out the best in the originals. The season’s most companionable new
collection is written by an undertaker from Michigan who has not only felt and negotiated his way through many heartaching situations throughout his professional career, but also lives to write about them tenderly, soulfully and with a deft humour. Thomas Lynch’s Walking Papers (Cape, 62pp, £10; Tablet price £9) feels written at walking pace, in step with everything that is heartbreakingly human – the loss of loved ones, mortality, the sputtering candle flame of religious faith. These are poems that delightfully memorialise what it is to be the undependable, Janus-faced creatures that we are. In all, it’s a hands-warmingly delightful book for a nippy season such as this. Michael Glover
Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau in a contemporary satirical print
of England. He would bring her home to Muskau where all three would live together, happily ever after, renovating the grounds as they went. The prince arrived in England in 1826, a
little lacking in dash and far from fluent in English. The unerring eye for detail which served him so well in matters horticultural, however, quickly went to work on London’s
table manners. In one of the first of many letters home to Lucie, he dissects the courses and customs of his hosts: “It is not customary to take wine during dinner without draining your glass with someone else: two people raise their glasses, stare at each other, nod slightly, and then gravely drink off their wine. Even some of the more seemingly bizarre customs of the
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36