New British Poetry 20: Contrasts and Surprises
Homegoing cyclists,/ bowlers cracking skulls before invasion/ stake unquestioning claims to earth and air.
Not everything in the book is fashioned in this manner. One of the more easily accessible pieces is an intelligent and suitably bookish elegy for Thomas Gray, entitled 'Gray at Little St. Mary's':
Forget the Stoke burial in a family vault,/ the fifteen years at Pembroke across the road./ This iron bar beneath his Peterhouse window/ is apt enough memorial for a man/ born under the shadow of a lifted boot,/ who could never accept survival as a given.
One senses that there are two styles at work in this book - perhaps an early and a late - yet in both it is the evident intention to distrust the simply-seen matter as necessarily the truest representation of their subjects' worth which gives the poems their attractiveness. There is something slightly atypical, unlooked for, indeed challenging, about each that makes them worth reading and re-considering.
My third selection is Charles Hobday's ELEGY FOR A SERGEANT: A POEM FOR VOICES, (Belfast: Lapwing, 2003). Now as much as I relish the avant-garde and the experimental in poetry, I approached this one with some trepidation, not least because the cast list includes among others the poet's uncle Henry Sheppard, William Shakespeare and the Three Fates - not a self-evident recipe for success. But then, Hobday is the author of numerous books, including four previous collections of poetry, so I put my faith in his good judgment. And I was not disappointed. Telling the story of Sheppard's death on the Western Front, the book is beautifully written throughout, in a manner that is authoritative without ever becoming sentimental or patronizing; its main issues are plausibly argued, and it somehow manages to maintain its steadiness and dignity in spite of the cracking pace of its narrative. It is impossible to convey either the full pathos of the story Hobday tells, or the ingenuity of its telling, but here is one short exchange that symbolizes something of the tragedy implicit in the theme of contrasted reality and ideals:
ARCHBISHOP: They willingly offer themselves for their country's service.
SOLDIERS (singing) Send for the boys of the Old Brigade/ To keep old England free,/ Send for my brother and my sister and my mother,/ But for Gawd's sake don't send me!
There is every variety of soliloquy, dialogue, description, recollection and bawdy song brought together here, to give testimony to the strange and haunting mixture of noble sacrifice and infernal reality of First
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