The Thick and the Thin of It: Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

The poetry of Ireland and Great Britain is, at the top level, much as it was at the beginning of the seventies, when W S Graham’s Malcolm Mooney’s Land and Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns emerged as new loci of imaginative awe, and Ted Hughes’s Crow bumped along below awe like a skimming shadow, flat but startling. Stevie Smith died in 1971 after writing the last, and some of the best, of her wickedly “touched” poems. Otherwise the names are the same, with one older poet, C H Sisson, and the two youngest ones, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, assuming new importance.

In more recent years, Graham, a Scottish poet living in Cornwall, has published another piquantly original volume, Implements in Their Places (1977), and the English poet Sisson, given an assist by his collected poems, In the Trojan Ditch (1974), since followed by Anchises (1976), has with his brilliantly affected disabilities hobbled out to at least the beginning of the visibility he deserves. In these years too the Northern Irish poet Heaney, working with the patience of his rural background, has built to the strength of Field Work (1979). But for most other front-ranking poets these years have marked a slight falling off. Thomas Kinsella, the deepest of the Irish poets, has seemed almost too demoralized for strong creation, and the same is true of the Welsh poet R S Thomas. The poetry of Charles Tomlinson, who became so discouraged by his cool reception in England that he took up painting again, has lost some of its initial crispness. Ted Hughes has vacillated between desultory poems on the countryside and more of the stuff of Crow, only it comes out less. Philip Larkin has sought a détente with the common joys of life, which he nonetheless regards as pitiable, with somewhat unfortunate results for his poetry. Hill has retracted his magnificent claws. And Donald Davie no longer conveys any joy in existence.