Books, Bards and Bunnies
Books, Bards and Bunnies
Selima Hill won the latest Whitbread poetry prize for her book Bunny, to the surprise of many and the indifference of many more. And thus it came to pass that enough copies were printed for some of them to find their way to a local bookshop that specialises in remaindered stock, piled moderately high and sold cheap-ish.
I had read and liked some of her stuff before but never a whole book. In fact the last single-author whole book of poetry I read was Eliot's Prufrock and that came out in 1917, so you can imagine.
It's a suite of short - mostly very short - poems about an adolescent girl. The lodger who shares the house is taking an unwholesome interest in her, and many details of her emotional response are precisely rendered. It isn't all sweetness and light, basically. But nobody reads lyric poetry for the plot, and occasionally Hill can produce some strange and enchanting images. In the first poem the girl is alone in the house, a bit excited and a bit frightened
like someone in a hanger after midnight,
entrusted with the mothering of jets.
That's poetry, that is.
Meanwhile, the 20th century poetic canon-in-prospect gets all shook up by Ian Hamilton . He excludes Eliot, Yeats, Auden and Hardy from consideration on the grounds that posterity is going to have to like them or lump them and goes on to consider the claims of almost fifty other poets, each of whom gets a miniature critical biography and a couple of short poems or extracts to make their case. Even better, the Guardian has both the whole introduction as an extract, and another bit where you can watch H.D. and Hugh MacDiarmid get theirs.
Unfortunately the book itself is only out in hardback at the moment, and hardback books are against my religion. This is the biggest problem I have with newspaper book reviews - there's a delay of a year or more before I can act on them. This is also probably a blessing in disguise, though, since it means that there is still just about enough room in my flat for me as well as the books.
In other news, the University shuts for Easter after today, and I
shall be visiting my Mother in London, so I probably won't be posting
again until Tuesday. Right now I'm so tired I feel as though with a
good run-up and a following wind I could sleep until then, anyway.
This break has come at a good time.