"Fingerprint" by Fiona Sampson (Genome Research, 2012)

These poems were commissioned by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. The main theme is supposed to be personal genomics. However, the theme isn't well followed, and I'm far from convinced by the poetry.

The project was eye-opening for some of the scientists she discussed ideas with - "instead of seeing the candlestick I suddenly saw the two faces looking at each other" wrote Dr Jeffrey Barrett in the introduction. In her preface she points out that "the nature-nurture debate long predates genetic research ... the question of how much we can change the kind of person we are ... is a question about free will", which is fair enough.

I like "When we met, myself and I,/ each cast the other into a kind/ of shining shadow -// my younger self ascending through me/ like a shiver, as I turned/ toward the house below." (p.15). I'm less happy about "A curtain brims -/ its white lip appears -/ dashing and slovenly/ like the girl on the Tube/ with her bedroom hair" (p.22), or "Sometimes what's opening/ is really closing, don't you see? Like a square,/ arcaded, cobbled,/ in Poznan, for example,/ where they speak German to tourists/ because of what happened /               in the squeezebox of history" (p.27)

"Coleshill" by Fiona Sampson (Chatto and Windus, 2013)

Dreams, ghosts, dusty rooms, light, fields (and paths through them), but most of all, a preoccupation with questions of existence. The poems may well be excellent, but I can't relate to them intensely. I have particular problems with short poems like "An Oxfordshire Annunciation" - a heavy title for a poem that depends on its punch-line which nevertheless doesn't deliver. Ditto "Little Songs ...". "Dave and his holy mountain" puzzles me too.

Poems about existence can initially sound self-indulgent.

Fields, pale sky, ragwort crowding a summer verge: these have no value, so what are they for? (p.41)

and

Sometimes at dusk I have this sense of really existing (p.57)

but the latter at least develops, the narrator identifying with a brown deer running across brown fields, ending with

To watch myself is to slide across myself, like pushing past a stranger. (p.57)

which I like. The next poem's ending continues the mood - "all you need's this play of surface -/ all that you need. All you have". The poem on p.63 (the final poem) ends "If you're not dead you're doing alright". The village of Coleshill's multi-sensory, multi-era stimuli combined with the odd individual provide solace, mostly.

Some nights, my body wakes to itself a forest of cries and small deaths as bruised tissues punish each other in the intimate dark (p.45)

But at least it's a good time for bees - 5 bee poems are here, adding to those in books by Sean Borrowdale, Carol Ann Duffy, etc.

Other reviews

• Kittie Belltree (New Welsh Review) (While Sampson’s technical virtuosity is unquestionable, the very power and intensity of her voice through the collection can feel oppressive and absolute)
• Sean O'Brien (Guardian) (the central mode of Coleshill is lyric ... Sampson's fourth collection reads the place not only for the welcome seclusion of its fields and hedgerows but for its menace, and for a larger environmental unravelling ... Along with lyric goes intimacy, a solitary intimacy with the self, in the body and in the dreamscapes between sleep and waking ... It is bracing, at a time when sentimentality is often allowed to infect serious matters, to read such a determined affirmation of possibility, and such a refusal to shrivel under the weight of malevolence and spite, or to be confined by them.)
• Gareth Prior (These are profoundly liminal poems, obsessed by the boundaries between spaces and states of being. Over half the poems in the book are either explicitly set at night / twilight or else feature dreams or ghosts. Many of the remainder emphasize haze, blurring, shifting and floating. Reality often seems at risk of dissolving or being subsumed by internal forces. ... a rare and beautiful book)

"Beyond the Lyric" by Fiona Sampson (Chatto and Windus, 2012)

I like books like this, where the author expresses opinions. She writes that "We're enjoying a period of tremendous richness and variety" (p.2). "Enjoying so many different kinds of poetry frees me from feeling I should be obedient, even to the tastes and types of the poets I most admire. ... The fine poet and editor Hugo Williams once said to me, 'You seem to like everything.' Which, as far as ways of writing go, is pretty much true" (p.7). To give a very rough idea of the selection, here's an ordered list of the poets whose index entries exceed 9 lines - Paterson 30, O'Brien 24, Oswald 21, Burnside 17, Padel 17, Porter 17, Shapcott 17, Stainer 16, Geoffrey Hill 16, Harsent 15, Harrison 14, Selima Hill 14, Robertson 13, Farley 13, Greenlaw 13, Armitage 13, Lomas 12, Petit 12, Craig Raine 11, MacSweeney 11, Jamie 11, Kay 11, Alvi 10, Duffy 10, Jenkins 10, Khalvati 10, Rollinson 10, Thwaite 10.

Books like this need some organising principle. "By observing poems and grouping them according to type, it identifies thirteen tendencies (or species) in contemporary British poetry" (p.8), though some people are missing, for reasons she provides

• "This is a book of enthusiasms" (p.1)
• "A few anomalous figures ... play a smaller part in this book than they rightly do in British poetry ... These significant, unusual figures include Anne Stevenson ... Most significantly of all, technically quieter poets ... have had to be omitted altogether" (p.9)
• "Missing, too, are some of today's young poets ... Emerging poets, however brilliant, grow into their own poetics only gradually" (p.10)

Consequently, Gross, Lumsden, and Michael Hofmann aren't mentioned, and Moira Dooley only gets a sentence or two (though Vikram Seth's name appears a few times, and Anne Carson gets two mentions). She ends up being rather poet-centred. Of course, putting poets (rather than poems) into categories is asking for trouble, especially if some poets write poems that belong in various chapters. I think Andrew Duncan has attempted a classification too. I wouldn't be surprised if his classification conflates 10 of her classes and expands her "Post-Surrealism and Deep Play" and "The Exploded Lyric" sections into several categories.

She mentions class, feminism and immigrant issues but not gay issues at all. Technology and Performance barely gets a look-in - when they do, they're related to derogatory tendencies. She writes "When I started editing Poetry Review ... the poor quality of the critical writing appearing on my desk was a revelation ... The wider field of contemporary poetry also suffers from this failure to articulate what makes a poem good at what it does" (p.4). She attempts at times to articulate (I'm not always convinced), and there are paragraphs of close reading. The introductions to Oswald, Prynne, Ciaron Carson, and Burnside are useful, and she does mention some younger poets - Polley, Katherine Towers, Dunthorpe, Martinez de las Rivas, Ahren Warner, etc. Below are some samples of her views

Individuals

• "The Movement - led by Philip Larkin and including Kingsley Amis ... " (p.15) (did Larkin ever lead anything?). "Duffy has a strong claim to be the Movement's true heir" (p.122)
• "Adcock is not alone in being courageous" (p.20)
• "Today's influential dandies include Hugo Williams, Craig Raine, Glyn Maxwell and Jo Shapcott" (p.38). Is Hugo Williams influential?
• "Shapcott's consistency makes her a steely exemplar of the virtues of stylish writing, but she is far from being the most recently emerged dandy in British poetry ... Picador ... issues a steady series of stylishly dandified collections" (p.56)
• "it would be impossible to ignore [Les] Murray's influence, in particular on British poetry of the Eighties and Nineties" (p.170). Really?
• "Carol Rumens is an unusual, important figure: a lyric thinker who happens to be a woman" (p.182)
• "Unlike Selima Hill and Medbh McGuckian, J.H. Prynne is not, in effect, an abstract expressionist" (p.273)

Trends in UK poetry

• On p.120 she identifies 2 stages of free verse's influence - first a release from inauthenticity; second (typified by Robin Robertson and Don Paterson) where the poetry "starts to develop techniques and conventions of its own"
• "An unintended consequence of the recent interest in formalism - and perhaps, too, of the patronage system that can arise all too easily in a writing workshop culture - is the caution audible in some contemporary verse ... there are some striking echoes, in some of today's writing, of the Georgian moment in early twentieth-century verse. ... A century later, recalibration in the similarly overwhelming era of globalization has given us Don Paterson, and those of his peers who favour thrilling clarity over a loose and rather risky grandiosity. But it also seems to have left us with the oxymoronic concept of a cool poetry, limited in affect and range" (p.246)
• "In this century a third moment in post-war radical poetics has arrived, and is characterized by a kind of 'automatic writing' that seems to mimic the generative capacity and quasi-autonomy of the digital realm. Poets, some of whom founded Reality Street and Equipage, and others who are associated with another independent press, Shearsman, are interested in 'gesture, 'trace' or 'text': in what we might call the outside of the poem, as it runs through a series of grammatical tasks or takes up space on the page, rather than in the possibility that it might in itself create readerly experience, evoke insight, give pleasure or even argue a case" (p.260) (maybe she doesn't like them? She's careful to display an appreciation of Prynne though - he's different)
• "Showing the reader that some things ... really are inexpressible, this approach takes the evocation of mental processes as the basis of its poetics.// The British mainstream has not yet admitted women with similar ideas. The bully boys of the blogosphere, who call this kind of writing 'Burnside lite', simply assume a male poet is being imitated" (p.266)
• "'Common sense', which confines thought and imagination to what is already familiar, has often demanded that British verse stick to a lyric, realist brief, and decried experiment as pretentious or obfuscatory", (p.76)
• "Today, exploring and reviving strict form, Ciaran Carson, Mimi Khalvati and Don Paterson are leading the new formalism", p.228
• "Modernism is undergoing a revival. Some of the most exciting, and very newest, poets emerging today seem to be searching for a poetic resource capable of responding to the limp-on-the-page work of many of today's performance poets … With some of our youngest fine poets prepared to risk originality and flair in the face of dull conformity, the outlook for British verse in the next couple of decades is newly, and markedly, improved" (p.206-7)

Poetry in general

• "The exhausted workshop forms of pantoum, villanelle and the palindrome verse, heavily reliant on repetition, add no formal 'charge' but simply prolong the text" (p.228)
• "While poetry avoids what's too casually generic in favour of the resonant specific, it nevertheless aims to echo as universally as possible. The paradox is that a poet must rely on his or her own sensibility to test that resonance" (p.173)
• "The formal poem ... has to exist entire in the mind's eye for the complete form to be experienced ... It means that, in formal verse, ideas can be directly expressed" (p.241)

Analysis

• In Shapcott's "'cut through/ her shyness like a crusader'. These sounds are economically organized. Vowels sink, between the alliterative snip of the c's, into a matching ou/y/e, before rising to the high a that is the crux of 'crusader'" (p.54)
• "After all, ramparts always 'crumble', and all believers are 'true'; the Straits of Gibraltar have long been known at 'pitiless'. This is a poet who has settled into her own skin and no longer has anything to prove" (p.86) (of Sarah Maguire. Faint praise?)

Connections

She ends the book with a section in praise of networking, though she doesn't go into details - no sociology of influence. In particular she doesn't point out how some younger poets are grouping together - online and via Mentoring, Anthologies, and Creative Writing opportunities. The book mentions some connections that are not always obvious.

• "Farley['s poetry is] ... related to Rollinson's, Kay's and Duffy's" (p.135)
• "Porter's primary heir is indeed Sean O'Brien" (p.170). Other protégés of Peter Porter include Gwyneth Lewis (p.176) and Duhig (p.199). Porter was "an early mentor" of Szirtes.
• "Robertson's preference for symbolic consistency is also apparent in the poets he edits" (p.149)
• "Perhaps, it has taken so long for a group of poets directly influenced by Burnside's work to appear because the project of joining multiple impulses to each other, rather than focusing on a single principle as lyric has largely done, is profoundly thorough-going ... Whatever the reason, it is very new poets like Maitreyabandhu and Kim Moore, poets of light touch like Janet Sutherland, and the secular visionaries A.A. Marcoff, Alan Stubbs and David Briggs, whose work most distinctively exhibits the kind of scope - in theme, flexibility of image and movement of thought - Burnside permits" (p.254)
• "Recognizable by its unusually rangy scale and wide, synthesizing intelligence, the expanded lyric often enters contemporary verse speaking with an Australian accent; although I suspect that British practitioners, certainly of the established middle generation, may see themselves as more influenced by a varied North American pantheon that include Robert Hass, Anne Carson, Kay Ryan and Jorie Graham", p.247

Other Reviews

• Joe Kennedy (Oxonian Review) - the best outcome of this overview’s publication would not be the reader’s sharing in a "story of pleasures taken", but a metacritical inquiry of Levesonian dimensions into why such a moribund poetics has come to enjoy a virtually absolute hegemony in contemporary Britain.
• Tom Payne (Telegraph)
• David Wheatley (Tower Poetry) - Seldom can a critical book have got off to quite as bad a start as Beyond the Lyric does
• Bill Greenwell (Independent)
• David Kennedy (Stride)
• William Wootten (TLS)

In "Tears in the fence" (No 57 Summer 2013) the ever-readable Andrew Duncan makes some worthwhile points

• Clearly a great deal of good poetry has been written by individuals within the 40 poets on NewGen and NextGen, and we are willing to spend time on a project which treats the centre of those poets as the centre of its view, even if evaluation or criticism are not part of the cargo (p.111)
• The idea of a map involves shared space. It places poets in relation to each other and must select technical features to be the dimensions of the map - its north and south. This must be very provocative to poets - who like to see themselves as autonomous and perfect, even if they habitually place everyone else in a shared space. Location at one, any, single point must irritate people who see themselves as present over whole areas where that spot is not. Poets like to think of the world as something that fits inside their poems, rather than vice versa (p.112)
• Her particular approach makes each poet, successively, the very centre of the prose text being written. Functions like comparison and perspective are largely not carried out. ... Sampson's faithfulness to individual texts is like travelling by candlelight, a terrain of handkerchief-sized plots, snug in low visibility. This is the opposite of a map that puts local patches together in one set of uniform relations. ... The greatest virtues of the book are liked to not making a map and not going beyond the lyric (p.114-5)

"Poetry Writing: The expert guide" by Fiona Sampson (Robert Hale, 2009)

There's no introduction. The first chapter's rather dispiriting, beginning with talk of writing sheds and touchstones. We're told that "a well-made poem is a completed object, a whole to which every part contributes. It's also a completely achieved insight, moment or thought ... When you take a close look at how it's constructed ... It shouldn't lose resonance, or such formal qualities as balance", p.10. I was surprised how Formalist-friendly (and pre-modernist) the book was - there are chapters on clarity, rhyme, villanelles and ghazals, sonnets, series and sequences. I can't help thinking that a US-based equivalent would have a rather different balance and wouldn't have so many quotes like these

• "not only the sonnet, but other Romance forms, such as the villanelle and sestina, which no serious emerging poet should exclude themselves from", p.38
• "Much contemporary 'free-verse' is in fact blank verse", p.41
• "Free verse must be exceptionally finely calibrated if it's to achieve musical coherence", p.58
• "Read through your most complex poems to date and ask yourself whether every sentence is a full grammatical entity", p.100
• "It's surprising how often emerging poets fail to examine their poems for logic", p.108

Chapter 2 deals with defeating self-censorship and self-sabotage. I liked the chapter about the senses. The chapter about creating one's "Ideal Reader" and using past poets is useful. The chapter on difficulty deals mostly with material that's difficult (for personal reasons) to write about, rather than obscurity.

The section on metaphor provides a useful checklist of features - "resemblance (the metaphor fits), appropriateness (the metaphor suits) and affect (the metaphor moves the reader in the way that the original means to)", p.84

She name-drops Prynne on p.168. Jorie Graham gets a few mentions. The exercises are merged into the text. Mostly they're very standard, but at least they're thoroughly explained. And I suppose the same could be said about the rest of the text too. The book's not really for experts, more for serious beginners. Except for a few chapters dealing with the psychology of writing, the advice is good old common sense. To end, here are some quotes that caught my eye -

• "All writing has a 'speaking voice'", p.28
• "All good poetry displays some tension, or sympathy, between the formal tropes it reworks and the individual 'voice' of the poet", p.60
• "The 'Anglican' line-breaks of R.S. Thomas's later verse, where a significant word doesn't end a line but starts the next, echo the conventions of The Book of Common Prayer", p.77
• "The use of poetry in times of stress has become fashionable in the UK", p.95
• "As with much formal verse, it's good to let your second line and the approach to the third grow naturally out of the first if you can", p.145
• "The best poets are always the bravest, though not necessarily the most experimental", p.176
• "Like the charisma that surrounds very shy people, difficulty gives poems an extra glow, an intensity and freshness", p.179
• "I'm with the former Director of the Poetry Society of Great Britain, Christina Patterson, who said, 'If you knew as many poets as me, you'd certainly hesitate to say that poetry improves communication skills: or indeed mental health!'", p.183
• "writing poetry is essentially exploratory. It's not about healing, but about opening up the wound", p.183.