Undoubtedly, there have been many books which it has been a real pleasure to recommend to a wider audience. I'm quite sure that W.N. Herbert and Landeg White, for example, are two of the authors that readers outside the UK will find interesting for years to come. Likewise, the quirks and turns of lloyd robson's verse will continue to inspire, amuse and frustrate readers who want to get inside the minds of a UK population not at all like the one broadcast by the BBC or Merchant-Ivory films. It has also been very satisfying to make the stalwart efforts of publishers like Lapwing, who unflaggingly seek out the strong and individual voices of several generations of writers from Ulster, accessible to an international audience.
But what of the first collections, and the young talent on show here? Well, judging from the feedback I receive, I'm pleased to say, that it seems to count for something among both readers and writers to find that there is a venue willing to offer even the relatively inexperienced - and often chronically under-funded - the opportunity to become visible to a wide and often critical audience. Few print magazines these days have either the space or resources to offer any considered analysis to writers whose work is not already well-known to its readership. After all, why would a small magazine, or quarterly journal, be prepared to give up valuable space to the description and analysis of works not connected to its own editorial staff, or upon which its audience is not primarily focussed? Understandably, haiku magazines review haiku, and radical-political-vers-libre ones, march to the beat of their own peculiarly different drummers. Neither can afford to risk the other's clientele.
And so, in my own way, I fail both. For other venues, I review other material, and I'm often astonished at how variable it is - in quality, in professionalism and in originality. Each publication makes up its own biased mind, and for me, in this space, the right thing to do seems to be to offer books for which I feel some respect, and which I believe will give readers an insight into works (or authors) who are under-represented in the mainstream of poetry-advertising and review, but which (or who) deserve a mainstream appeal. Yet I am supremely conscious of how ineffectual this column has been with regard to being truly representative of what the 'poetry-scene' in the UK is like today. Where, for instance, is the voice of political or social dissent? Additionally, where is there any clear sign, that Britain is a truly multi-cultural nation with writers as diverse as can be imagined? Conversely, without wanting to seem snobbish, where is the evidence of the really huge quantity of self-consciously low-brow media, produced virtually as a consumable? What parameters are acceptable, without turning this into a clearing-house for simply modish trends?
Go To Page: 1 2
