dumbfoundry

From Britain's shore
(A Toronto Globe & Mail review of New British Poetry, edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic):

Edited by a young Scot and a well-known American poet, New British Poetry presents the work of 36 British poets born since 1945. Two caveats: "British" here excludes the immensely skilled and influential Northern Irish poets such as Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson. Second, because the book is arranged in alphabetical order with an egalitarian three to five poems (or five to eight pages) per poet, it is really a sampler of poets that omits some great poems by important poets (Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, James Fenton and Paterson himself) in order to give others their due allotment.

That said, it has plenty going in its favour. First off, there's Paterson's own introductory essay, a tour-de-force defence of "mainstream" poetry which deserves to be read by all poets, particularly in Canada, where postmodern schools have been more prevalent than elsewhere. Paterson argues, among other things, that since postmodern poets delegate the production of meaning wholly to the reader, their poems cannot fail; only their readers can fail them. Mainstream poems, in contrast, "make an honest attempt to generate the literal or argumentative context by which they are to be understood," and therefore actually engage a reader who can say true, false, good or bad.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Saturday, April 17, 2004 at 7:27 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.