The Seawall Features 20 Poets Loving On Their Favorite New Collections

New on The Seawall: Twenty poets write briefly on some of their favorite new and recent collections...a lovely and extended version of a best-of list, to be sure. Writers writing include Brian Teare, Rusty Morrison, Nick Sturn, Aaron Belz, Daniel Bosch, Julie Sheehan, and many more. Here, to pique your interest, is David Rivard on Helsinki by Peter Richards (Action Books):

No form would seem more at odds with the ellipticism and fragmentations of our current period style than the epic poem. An aesthetic whose primary effect is that of simultaneity, and whose pleasures are those of chance and receptivity, makes an unlikely vehicle for story. The audacity of Peter Richards’ Helsinki is that it subverts the accepted wisdom that narrative is either unnecessary or impossible when composing with methods that are “indeterminate.”

The result is a book filled with duende, one of the very few written in the last twenty years that could be said about. Composed in densely lyrical, fairly brief sections, Helsinki begins with what initially sounds like a strange field report written during debriefing. “In time” is the phrase that kick starts the action, an idiomatic eternity that cannot be escaped:

In time I came to see death was the hay
binding one soldier to another and my own
death would appear partially lit as during
a nighttime operation the moon barely attends
whereas I with new density carry on as before

That wildness and richness of vision runs throughout, but the character of the narrator so established in these lines anchors it in a psychological complexity—vulnerability, rage, fear, tenderness, bafflement, melancholia, disdain, awe, and horny self-amusement are churned through with a rapidity driven by musical invention but somehow wholly consistent in how it is all the speech of single person.

Robert Duncan once complained that the LANGUAGE poets had failed because they had no stories to tell. Duncan might have been pleased by the obsessive-compulsive mythologizing of Helsinki’s character-filled underworld, with its tenderhearted berserker soldiers, its tentacled erotic starlets, metabolizing bees, and “loose cloud/of animal gadgetry eating air and chrome alike.” An air of perverse Ovidian transformations hangs over Richards’ landscape, transformations that are intended to uncloak rather than disguise....

Scrolling down a bit, you'll find a worthwhile introduction to one Bernard Spencer, from the poet Joshua Weiner, who writes:

Have you heard of Bernard Spencer? I hadn’t. He’s not even included in the Oxford Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry, Keith Tuma’s monumental recovery project, which ten years ago reestablished the presence of an avant-garde in the more conventional narrative about modern poetry in the UK. Like Lynette Roberts, whom Tuma included and helped bring back into focus, Spencer was born in 1909. And as with Roberts, there’s a strong flavor of European modernism running through his work, though less obviously by virtue of disjunctive techniques (as one finds in her poems), and more in terms of a personal visionary quality, one that you might associate with Montale, Seferis, and Elytis, all poets he translated.

Born in Madras, India, he grew up in England, bumped shoulders with MacNeice and Spender and Auden (and Betjeman too), but was never of their circle. After college he spent most of his life abroad as a member of the British Council (Athens, Cairo, Turin, Madrid, Ankara, Vienna). His involvement in international modernism was as an intrepid stranger in communities where little English was spoken; at the same time, there’s something durably, intractably English about his poetry, a kind of intimately voiced prose element that recalls Edward Thomas, or the open rhythmical swing and naturalist surrealism of Ted Hughes.

While in Egypt during World War II, he became part of a group in Cairo, associated with Lawrence Durrell and Keith Douglas, and edited an ex-pat magazine, Personal Landscape, issues of which have become collectors’ items. He’s seems quite clearly now to have been the best poet of the lot.

“Personal Landscape” is a phrase that captures some of the strongest qualities in Spencer’s poetry, which is often set in real locations, in particular situations, but from a solitary, idiosyncratic vantage conveyed in lines that unfold with a strong prose cadence and startling, mysterious images.

I first came across his poems about five years ago, when I was reading around in Edward Lucie-Smith’s Penguin paperback anthology, British Poetry since 1945 (1970), trying to fill in some mental mapping as I worked on a collection of essays about Thom Gunn. (I don’t much enjoy reading anthologies, but making these kinds of discoveries is one of the things they’re good for.) There were two poems tucked between W.S. Graham and Roy Fuller, “Night-time: Starting to Write” and “Properties of Snow.” The first begins:

Over the mountains a plane bumbles in;
down in the city a watchman’s iron-topped stick
bounces and rings on the pavement. Late returns
must be waiting now, by me unseen

To enter shadowed doorways. A dog’s pitched
barking flakes and flakes away at the sky.

Such writing immediately caught my ear (like that plane, buzzing into my personal space). The aural image of the doubled flakes is arresting, inventive, weird, and somehow natural to the sound of barking (the hard kays). There’s a formal shapeliness and ease, an attention to acoustic correspondences that is not insistent, or pedantic, but attentive though coolly engaged. A late-night suspension of floating-mind-in-preparation.

There's a ton of other natural espousing. Read on here.