Simon Armitage, The Shout: Selected Poems (Harcourt, 2005),
hbk, 107pp., $23.00.

Lavinia Greenlaw, Minsk (Harcourt, 2005), hbk, 71pp., $21.00.

     These titles introduce to US readers two of the best-selling English poets in their forties. In some sense they are both exemplary figures, from a generation of British poets born in the sixties who emerged fully-formed in the nineties with what already seemed like a period style. Some background to this might help: Armitage and Greenlaw were two of the poets chosen by the Poetry Book Society for their “New Generation” promotions push, which was, as Andrew Motion writes, “launched in 1994 with the kind of fanfare not usually associated with poetry. It was well received: it gave poetry a public profile that it had long been denied, and introduced all those represented to the wider audience that they deserved. Several of the poets have since become some of the best-known names in the country: Simon Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw, Don Paterson.”

     It’s certainly true that this was a success story in marketing terms—ten years on, the existence of these two books and of the recent Graywolf anthology New British Poetry, co-edited by Paterson, shows how the bandwagon is still rolling. But now the stakes are higher: will they crack America? In general, British cultural exports from the nineties failed at this point—Oasis and Robbie Williams always seemed unconvincing; even the latter pretending to hook up with Nicole Kidman couldn’t convince the US to tell him apart from the funny one in Mork & Mindy. Now Armitage and Paterson are publicly flirting with the celebrity Charles Simic, will the US buy their brand of Britpop?

     The worry is they might not see what all the fuss is about. Remind me again what’s so great about these guys? The strange thing is, no one seems too confident. Paul Farley, another nineties poet approaching middle-age (he missed out on the NewGen boat but made it into the diminishing returns re-run of last year, called—wait for it!—the Next Generation, many of whom were older than the previous bunch) has commented ruefully and honestly, “My generation haven’t had criticism; they’ve had marketing. Which all sounds bleak.” Somehow the marketing of these poets has always seemed a bit like special pleading—swaddling some rather fragile types in blurbish cotton wool to insulate them against the attacks of too-clever bullies and mean sceptics.

     And there have been attacks. Less generously than Andrew Motion, Iain Sinclair puts it like this:

A more recent (and sinister) phenomenon, the ‘New Generation’ poets, have arrived in our midst like pod people. They are eternally not-quite-young and they feed on images of blight […] They were invented by marketing men, hyped into existence with seemingly fictitious occupations and previous histories dreamt up by Poetry Society copywriters. The Guardian, that game old dowager, ran a works-outing photo of the whole bunch squatting in the windows of the Poetry Society, lapel badges in place, like a conference of sales reps ordered to have a good time.

This comes from the introduction to the 1996 anthology Conductors of Chaos which Sinclair edited and which gathered together thirty-six “elective outsiders,” as the blurb says, representing various “post-avant” or “neo-modernist” or “experimental” tendencies in British poetry. Some of Sinclair’s cattiness hits the mark and some doesn’t: he does well to point up the air of dowdiness and bathos and unenthusiasm which hangs over the whole enterprise; but sinister? The idea of a sinister poetry seems rather exciting (I think of Roy Fisher’s line, “All my life I’ve been left-handed”); but surely the worst thing the NewGens can be accused of is annexing a disproportionate chunk of the tiny oxygen of poetry-publicity for what were at worst dully condescending identikit poems? And if Sinclair’s “conductors” were really the hot shamans and punks and mad scientists and revolutionaries he claims, would there be any need for the hints of jealous resentment in his caricature?

     From this vantage and from across the Atlantic this sort of self-interest and squabbling should seem an inexplicably trivial curiosity. Boys will be boys! But the same kind of promotions language seems to linger in the books at hand. Simon Armitage’s The Shout has the subtitle Selected Poems, and the dust-jacket flap says that it “collects his work from the past three decades.” But this makes Armitage seem somewhat older than he really is—a curious move from the publicity people; his first book was published in 1989, which is more like a decade and a half ago. And the selection is an intriguing one. A UK-market Selected came out from Faber and Faber in 2001 with 200-odd pages of work drawn pretty evenly from Armitage’s (then) eight previous books; The Shout, in contrast, gives us only 107 pages drawn from ten titles, and eleven of its 51 poems—a fifth of the book—come from 1992’s Kid, which, as Simic says in his foreword, “has sold 60,000 copies, a figure any writer, poet, or novelist would envy.”

     Although this makes The Shout pleasingly readable in a single sitting, it seems like an unnecessarily and uncharacteristically parsimonious way to select from a poet whose key-notes are garrulousness and range, a sort of improvisatory bagginess. Again in that description of Kid we see the blurring of criticism and marketing: Simic presents Armitage’s work to US readers with the authority of its previous commercial success; you will like it, it’s popular. Apart from quoting the poems to good effect, Simic’s foreword otherwise seems surprisingly asinine; much of it reads as if he’s paid one of his students to cut-and-paste it together from the gleanings of a Google-search: “It is no wonder that he is one of the most popular poets in England… All together he has published eleven collections of poetry.” One more complaint: whoever wrote Simic’s introduction and whoever set up the poems was a terrible proof-reader: “all together” above should surely be “altogether,” there’s a “be” for a “he” on page 2, and “hired private nurse” on page 6 should read “hired a private nurse”; I could go on.

     One of the things that makes this mid-career Selected an interesting volume is the fact that the more recent work in it represents both some of the most and the least successful poems in the book. “Birthday” comes from Armitage’s last full-length collection, 2003’s The Universal Home-Doctor. Its opening moves recall the flashy metaphor-driven style of so-called “Martian” poetry of the early 80s, the hyper-banal defamiliarized by being seen through outer-space wide eyes, as in this aubade: “The first bus, empty, carries its cargo of light / from the depot, like a block of ice… One day older the planet weeps…” But as it continues the poem surpasses any such forebears with the bleak accuracy of its hurt: 

This is the room
where I found you one night, 

bent double, poring over
the Universal Home Doctor, 

that bible of death, atlas of ill-health:
hand-drawn, colour-coded diagrams of pain, 

chromosomal abnormalities explained,
progesterone secretion, 

cervical incompetence…
Susan, for God’s sake. 

I had to edge towards it,
close the cover with my bare foot. 

The bravery in writing this barely, approaching what can’t be said, is genuine, and there aren’t many contemporary poems which do it as well as this (although one which does it better would be Kate Clanchy’s “Miscarriage, Midwinter,” from Newborn).

     It may be that Armitage’s experience as a writer of fiction has informed this new deftness with the painfully domestic. But elsewhere in the newer poems here, “lad-lit” can only be a baleful influence, as in “You’re Beautiful.”  If I ask what exactly the reader is supposed to do with this poem, I’m not (or not only) asking a rhetorical question; I’d really like to know how anybody could find much pleasure in this dire, charmlessly enunciated catalogue of poisonous clichés about gender difference: 

You’re beautiful because you can’t work the remote control.
I’m ugly because of satellite television and twenty-four-hour rolling news.
[…]
You’re beautiful because you look great in any colour including red.
[…]
I’m ugly for saying ‘love at first sight’ is another form of mistaken identity,
and that the most human of all responses is to gloat.

I’m not sure what’s worse: the fact that this goes on for four whole pages, or that it has this refrain: “Ugly like he is, / Beautiful like hers, / Beautiful like Venus, / Ugly like his, / Beautiful like she is, / Ugly like Mars.” Yes, men are from Mars and women are from you-know-where; now we have a poem adding its vatic imprimatur to the offensive certitudes of such self-help talk—talk that doesn’t so much help, I suspect, as coarsen and reduce the detail of the world, the texture of people’s actual lives. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the poem—its import must be comic, although it isn’t very funny; but the main thing I don’t understand is why it exists.

     Another poem from The Universal Home-Doctor opens the book and gives it its title. “The Shout” tells the story of the speaker and a “boy / whose name and face / I don’t remember” conducting a school experiment: 

      …We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth, 

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

The boy gets progressively further away, but the speaker addresses him in the last line: “you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.” This sort of thing is rapidly becomingly a disastrous sub-genre, the poem which recalls some school-days experience and tacks on a baggage of clunkingly “found” significance. Seamus Heaney is probably to blame: “every spring / I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied / Specks to range on window-sills at home, / On shelves at school…”; “I sat all morning in the college sick-bay…,” and so on. But in the hands of Englishmen born in the sixties all of Heaney’s blarneying charm is lost: we end up with a crew of misty-eyed deluders nursing their playground non-stories over a pint of Nostalgia Ale; the NewGens rechristianed the We Love 1972 Club. “Remember how we used to play Dead Fish? / If it rained, the dinner-ladies kept us in / and we cleared the canteen…” “A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain & Europe / was the first book I owned, not counting annuals…” These are beginnings of two poems from The Ice Age by Paul Farley, raising the unhappy possibility that poetry is what results from that point in the evening when middle-aged men realise they don’t actually have anything to say to each other.

     Anyway, the twist in Armitage’s poem comes just before the end: the “boy,” it turns out, “left town, went on to be twenty years dead / with a gunshot hole / in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.” But not to worry: the speaker can still hear him.  And presumably the poem testifies to that persistence of memory; makes the voice enduring; establishes a connexion through time and distance, and a connexion that overcomes death. Which are all the things that a poem should do, of course. But the first problem is that the boy’s suicide doesn’t really work within the fiction of the poem: if the speaker can’t remember the boy’s name or what he looked like, how did he find out this information and match it up with the same boy? Or should we take it as a fanciful imagining of the boy’s fate? But it’s not really either fanciful or fitting enough.  Perhaps the poem then becomes a kind of nineteenth-century dramatic monologue with a drastically unselfknowing speaker conjuring up this pubescent version of the macabre to endorse the continuity of his own solipsistic identity, unchanging through time. But there isn’t enough character for that; the “I” is relatively undifferentiated; and the boys-own sensationalism of that faux-deadpan “gunshot hole / in the roof of his mouth” is of a piece with the tone of some of the earlier poems.

     One of the signatures of Armitage’s earlier work was content like the story in “Gooseberry Season,” about an unannounced and unexplained visitor arriving at a family’s home, and outstaying his welcome; they decide to murder him—“we ran him a bath / and held him under”—then dispose of the body: “we dragged him like a mattress / across the meadow.” A poem called “Hitcher” gives us a speaker who picks up a hitchhiker and decides to murder him: “I let him have it on the top road out of Harrogate—once / with the head, then six times with the krooklok / in the face.” Elsewhere we get cruelty to animals: dogs “hurled like bags of sand from rented cars” in one poem, and this in another: “the dog shat, / and for that the dog was taken out and shot.” Some of these poems are better than others, their moral blankness full of ambiguous menace; but sometimes the performance seems more than a little factitious in its stageyness: 

Anyone here had a go at themselves
for a laugh?  Anyone opened their wrists
with a blade in the bath? Those in the dark
at the back, listen hard. Those at the front
in the know, those of us who have, hands up,
let’s show that inch of lacerated skin
between the forearm and the fist.  Let’s tell it
like it is… 

Surely this isn’t really “telling it like it is” at all? But it’s not really entertaining enough as a fiction either. Presumably it’s this sort of thing which has led critics to speak, as a quote on the back-cover does, of Armitage’s “slangy, youthful, up-to-the-minute jargon.” But when that “minute” was ten years ago, the dramatic performance implied in this posturing is less convincing—the schlocky melodrama both of the verbal cliché (“let him have it”… “had a go at themselves / for a laugh… tell it / like it is”) and of the narrative content, add up to so many adolescent ripping yarns. This performance of the radically inauthentic seems irrelevant to what, it becomes clear, are Armitage’s actual and substantial gifts.

     Simic does well to quote some of what he calls Armitage’s “stunning metaphors,” as in the extended riffs of “Not the Furniture Game”: 

His elbows were boomerangs or pinking shears.
And his wrists were ankles
and his handshakes were puff adders in the bran tub
and his fingers were astronauts found dead in their spacesuits
and the palms of his hands were action paintings
[…]
And his dog was a sentry-box with no one in it
[…]
The whole system of his blood was Dutch elm disease. 

It’s that ‘whole system’ that pleases the most: the charm of its absolute conviction and the precision within its nuttiness. I rather wish that Armitage’s poems would move more in the direction of this anarchic image-based confounding of “system”; I want more “puff adders in the bran tub” and less “tell it / like it is,” I think.  “Not the Furniture Game” make an enlightening comparison with a poem which I suspect may have influenced it, John Ashbery’s “He,” from Some Trees: 

He indeed is the White Cliffs of Dover.
[…]
He snorts in the vale of dim wolves.
[…]
He is never near. What you need
He cancels with the air of one making a salad.
[…]
He used to be pretty for a rat.
He is now over-proud of his Etruscan appearance. 

It’s a strange thing that a moderately innovative poem from the 1950s can make a poem from the last decade—and I think it’s a good poem—look like it might be playing it safe. But the charm of Armitage’s lines survives the comparison, and there are a good number of equally successful poems in the book. Is it legitimate to describe a poet in his forties as “promising”? I want to suggest that it is. The Shout introduces to US readers a writer of genuine talents who seems to have been able to write badly and also rather well, sometimes in the course of a single poem.

     Lavinia Greenlaw’s Minsk is also the writer’s first US publication, but Greenlaw is a rather different fish from Armitage, even if the packaging of these two books makes English poetry look something like a team effort, an in-house affair. Ruth Padel is quoted on both of them (viz., Armitage has “brilliance,” Greenlaw is “brilliant”), and Greenlaw also gets blurbs from Andrew Motion and NewGen poet Glyn Maxwell.  And, like Armitage, she has a celebrity sponsor, like a Victorian debutante carrying a letter of introduction to the best houses across the Atlantic. Edward Hirsch writes a foreword somewhat more perspicacious than Simic’s, but he still seems to repeat the received ideas and stock marketing-lines about the poet that have been current since she first emerged.

     The main one is that Greenlaw is a poet with “subjects and metaphors drawn from science”—but one wishes people would have stopped saying this by now, for it seems more and more like a misnomer.  The title of Greenlaw’s poem “Science for Poets” is indicative—the implication in Hirsch’s claim re-enforces a hapless “two cultures” intellectual model defunct decades ago, like C.P. Snow and Leavis replaying the whole affair on tranquillizers. Martin Amis did well to send up the position of most writers: “I don’t know much about science, but I know what I like.” The idea that Greenlaw’s snippets of “science for poets” are a remarkable feature of her writing does an injustice to her poems, finally; “science” seems more like an occasional source of perceptual vocabulary and metaphors of process, usually mythologised, than a model for some exemplary and mysterious “precision.” And what writer doesn’t try to be precise? The chimera “science” doesn’t come into it.

     The other received idea about Greenlaw is this: she is “a winter writer and her landscapes are icy ones,” as Hirsch says. Well, this one seems true; but it’s born out almost to the point of self-parody: put simply, the words “air,” “glass,” and/or “ice” feature in almost every poem in Minsk. The locus classicus, as it were, is “The Falling City,” quoted here in full: 

I was eight, I was atmosphere,
more than willing to take to the air.
The world was locked and clear. 

For a moment the glass forgave me,
curved like a hand that absolutely
loved me, let me down so gently. 

It’s an odd poem: for a time the clumsiness of rhyming “me,” “-ly,” and “-ly” annoyed me, but now it seems winning in the poem’s combination of total self-consciousness and blank self-incomprehension, and effectively childish. The image does seem haunting; partly because it re-appears, slightly modulated, in so many of the other poems: 

I am up in the air again,
cumulo-cirrus, thin ice […] 

We fly over a river,
part frozen, part cracking up
at the end of a beautiful winter:
a three-month blinding heaven 

This repetition makes the book seem impressively through-composed rather than the standard rag-bag of the slimvol; but it can also approach mannerism and preciousness, as in the sequence-title, “A Drink of Glass.” There’s something sinkingly ubiquitous in the title, which perhaps comes from its echo of Philip Larkin’s too-often-recalled “glass of water / Where any-angled light / Would congregate endlessly” and his “High Windows” with their “sun-comprehending glass” and “deep blue air.” The problem is, water and glass and air only have so much mileage in them; it is intriguing to read a poet obsessed with looking at them rather than through them, but it’s not intriguing forever.

     Against this, the poems in that sequence are actually quite good, partly because they allow their language-surface to be disrupted and made strange by lots of “foreign” matter, be it names—“Kaamos”—untranslated phrases—“sinenen hetki”—or this catalogue of absent features within the diminished perceptual field: 

no gentian, aconite or anemone,
no slate, plum, oil-spill or gun,
no titanium or turquoise,
no mercury or magnesium,
no phosphorus, sapphire or silver foil,
no duck egg or milk jug… 

One the things that’s pleasing about this is the suggestion of some eccentric taxonomy considered linguistically—things paired alphabetically, or because they almost rhyme. Elsewhere in the book there’s a similar sense of information being re-ordered in new ways: the first section of the book is taken up with poems that build up a piecemeal narrative of childhood—the speaker plays games with her brother, takes piano lessons, grows into a “backwater teenager,” stays out late drinking, takes karate lessons, and so on. But at the same time there’s a level on which these stories fashion identity in a magical, superstitious, elliptical way, even at the risk of sounding ridiculous: “I was wire. / I drank the blue air.”

     The sequence “A Strange Barn” presents an amusingly flattened version of cultural history, as the expansion and building of London Zoo is set in “context” barely taken out of reference books: so this is from “Flit: The Aviary, 1962”: “The air hums with promise, / missiles for Cuba, a contract for Concorde, / The Birds and Blowin’ In The Wind,” and this from “Stomp: The Elephant Pavilion, 1965”: 

The idea is a herd in a scrum
trumpeting out of fear or just for fun.
The Americans bombed North Vietnam. 

Flower Power, mini skirts… 

It’s a fine line, but Greenlaw plies her critical withdrawal with enough wit that the poem stands up in the face of these worn-out properties.  Minsk contains a number of other poems which seem extremely accomplished—in particular “Against Rhetoric: A Letter to Lord Chandos, 1603,” which answers Hofmannsthal’s fictional description of losing faith in language with a triumphant and well-argued “wonder.” Like the best poems in Armitage’s The Shout, it suggests a way in which poets of the “New Generation” might arrive at an achievement more complicated and individual than the rubrics of that promotional effort allowed. Et toute la reste, as Joyce once wrote in a letter, … est publicité.

— Matthew Sperling