But if you're prepared to commit your time and money to reading full-length collections, there are two brand-new books that offer contrasting perspectives on the conflict of an individual's alienation from a society which nevertheless remains as fascinating as it is insurmountably difficult to abandon. My own favourite this month is Anne Beresford's HEARING THINGS, published by the London-based Katabasis. Katabasis describes its ethos as 'Down to Earth and Utopia Poetry and Prose from Home and Abroad', and this mix of outward-looking-ness and introspection is also prevalent in HEARING THINGS. This is Beresford's twelfth title, and her previous books have been praised by some of the best. The 'hearing things' of the title reflects a sharpening of the senses the poet experienced following her move from London to rural Suffolk, and this newly awakened sensitivity permeates the poems in the collection. This is true even of poems like 'Atalanta', which at one level, are mythical in time, and without obvious geography. In Beresford's poem, Atalanta may be a twenty-first-century Everywoman, her race a race against what is simultaneously her prescribed social role (wife) as well as her larger destiny. Her conqueror, Hippomenes, is in a sense, successful because of Atalanta's inquisitiveness (or possibly acquisitiveness), but not for nothing is his success possible because fear of failure has driven out his senses: 'The pounding of his heart blocked out all sound'. Everywhere in this handsomely produced book there is a feeling of intensity and concentration, a need to make the words faithful to the sensations initiating them, and a pure pleasure to the ear.
A wholly different approach is taken by John Whitworth in his latest book, THE WHITWORTH GUN. Whitworth has a secure reputation in the UK, with reviews in POETRY REVIEW and THE SPECTATOR, and his poems have been widely published, in print, on radio and even on film. THE WHITWORTH GUN, is his eighth collection, and it is published by the very highly regarded Peterloo Poets. I've certainly been a fan of Peterloo's list for many years, and I'm inclined temperamentally to favour anyone that merits their endorsement. This particular collection by Whitworth, however, is one that is bound to inspire love or loathing in its readers. Witty, urbane, personal and yet detached, it is a book of poems that plays tricks on the eyes and the ears. There is a scattering of footnotes round about some poems, identifying the origins of ideas, or quotations, or sometimes addressing the reader directly-'a bweezo is a bush in French, more or less. OK?' But all of the poems are powerfully engaged with WORDS: where they come from, how they look, how removing them from their contexts distorts them without entirely disengaging them from their prior associations. Likewise, Whitworth is a formalist in his work, leveling his 'gun' at what he regards as the chaos of authors like Whitman and Ginsberg, yet he, himself, remains far from traditional in most senses. For instance, in a poem I enjoyed called 'Red-eye' he begins with what sounds like old-fashioned "poetic" posturing, 'My red-eyed laughing barber cared but little' ('cared but little'?), moves through colloquialism ('It's a man thing, see.') and offers an imagery that is both surprising and apt for the mood he creates, ('You carry your small guts round in a pail.') Elsewhere, in a poem called 'Sad', he repeats the title word, its variations, and its rhymes sixteen times in twenty-four lines without ever loosening the tension of the complex ironic mood he establishes. If you like your poetry plain and simple, with thoughts and expressions set out as neatly as the first and second courses, then Whitworth may not be for you. But if you want an introduction to a distinctly British way of experiencing words as living things, with a past, with relationships, with an unpredictable contribution to the future, then The Whitworth Gun is a good initiation.
