"The vision of culture and other poems" by Mark Howard Davis (Minerva Press, 1998)

It begins with a 10-page preface. Here are some extracts -

• "In an age where individualism is haloed with spotlights, where relativism runs amok, there are many clever and sophisticated people but few with real, intense, aesthetic depth of wisdom"
• "Everything is based on good contacts in the right places at the right time, rather than on serious evaluative criticism"
• "when I read any of the current poetry on offer (whether written by supposed first league or lesser poets) I am aware of a lack of structure, lack of form, content and style"
• "Once you slide into cultural relativism and it is deemed fine for everyone to pursue 'their own thing', all the critical apparatus and accumulated wisdom of tested craft and innovation become as nothing"
• "Relativism has enslaved our culture and nowhere more so do we experience this bitter truth than in the meagre, half-cooked microwave poetry of postmodernism"
• "today's postmodern conformism is due to the absense of any sort of intelligible poetics"
• "The world of the true poet is, in the last result, a unique world of personal joy and suffering. The sheer intensity of such inwardness seals this world off from any mere facile cleverness"
• "Poetry must regain its basis of meaningful patterning"

On the back cover it says "Explaining where recent poets have gone wrong, he harks back to a time when poetry actually meant something."

I think he's tarring a lot of people with the same broad brush. It's a pity he didn't name names. Geoffrey Hill? Armitage? Prynne?

I wasn't keen on "Letter to Milton" which ends "In conclusion, until you get a page/ in Poetry Review, forget your rage,/ for until then you have failed the grade,/ and misunderstood how money is made". "The Vision of Culture" also attacks some soft targets, this time from Modern Art - "There cheered editors and reviewers mooned,/ praising cryptic conformists to art's shame"

"To a Satellite Dish" has padding to fill the form but has a decent plot. The dishes that transmit "polished teeth in celluloid miles" makes him wonder if we are "doomed to drink your dry bowl ... fed from your spoon mouth's huge spawning yawn? ... lovelier shape is a bird's nest"?"

"Words to One Gone" is a dud. "My tree" mostly works for me. "The end of nature" is another poetical blast against the modern world, cars and roads this time - "Then came the termites' patented plague;/ a billion thirsting metallic hearts that/ droned in perpetual puffs of malignance,/ hurrying along the beast's great gashed pathways, they choked that geriatric creature". "Easter Saturday" might be good - I don't get it all. In "Hedgerows" the rhyme (not for the first time) gets in the way - "Scant the hedges for a pew/ where they might build a nest;/ for farmers deem them a pest/ and so birds have no rest". Its message isn't new either. Nor is that of "Words to a bluetit" that ends with "bright bird, it is not problematical/ to fly or die, but is to wonder why.". I like "The Journey of the Verb".

"Alive at Thirty-Five", in terza rima, is standard soul searching. "November Light" captures a moment when the sun pops out. I like "A word with death", though it's a little too long. I like some lines from "Thoughts in a Suffolk Church" - "Swallowed in this whale bellied hulk,/ my thoughts are magnified to dust". I can never understand why people bother writing (let alone publishing) pieces like "The Seeking", "My father's father", "Choice" and "The Dream of the Elms".

I like the idea of "The Golden Calf", that the idol is the self, but the development's disappointing. At the end it looks as if the idea is that the more metaphors that are piled in, the more poetic it is - "And the corn of greed crops bountiful from/ Lilliput's fields,/ where it's business as usual/ for regressed babes,/ enthroned in the counting house/ of en suite hell"

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