POETRY: THE BEES (Picador, £14.99) is Carol Ann Duffy's first full collection since her appointment as Britain's poet laureate, and also her first since the remarkable Rapture, which won the TS Eliot prize. If Rapturewas an imposing display of Duffy's virtuosity and versatility, those same qualities are repeated here with fresh abundance and a sense, too, that Duffy is again remaking herself as a poet.
Rapturewas Shakespearean in the copiousness of its language and the skill with which she handled it; its poems were of an intensely intimate utterance. The Beeshas its share of equally private themes, and again there is much sensuous detail. However, if the mysteries of love were central to Rapture, the mysteries of war are a presence here. Much of this new work has been determined by responses to other public issues – ecology, politics – suggesting that this laureate is one with a cause and remains as crusading as ever.
Big Asksets a chilling tone with its incantatory sequence of questions:
When did the president give you the date?
Nothing to do with Barack!
Were 1200 targets marked on a chart?
Nothing was circled in black.
On what was the prisoner stripped and stretched?
Nothing resembling a rack.
Current and past wars cast their shadows: the striking imagery of Falling Soldier(after a photo by Robert Capa) is profoundly effective, and her memorable first World War poem Last Post, in which those "lines and lines of British boys rewind / back to their trenches", speaks volumes about the futile nature of such conflicts, and with them she has added, and quite powerfully too, to the kitbag of war (anti-war) poetry.
In Politicsshe perhaps takes a far more animated and assertive view of the subject than Yeats when treating the subject in his poem of the same title.
In this new collection there is a celebratory portraiture of an England that might be in the process of vanishing – an England of the Essex girl and Shropshire lad.
In the imaginatively playful John Barleycorn, with its sonorous and jaunty litany of names familiar to those who have darkened the doors of the archetypal British alehouse, she wanders like a pilgrim on a quest for the last vestiges of John Bull's island. Equally "English" in its mood is The English Elms, a compelling elegy for that lost treasure of the landscape:
In the hedgerows in old film
elegiacally, they loom,
the English elms;
or find posthumous fame
in the lines of poems –
the music-making elms,
for ours is a world without them . . .
This is a magnificent collection of shimmering lyric poetry by a poet who can move from spare to opulent language without any attendant discord. Every word matters in a Duffy poem, and every poem is “a spell of kinds, / that keeps things living in a written line”.
SASHA DUGDALE might appear to be a more understated, more reserved kind of poet, but she shares with Duffy a vigorously transforming imagination. Two previous collections established her as a poet with her own distinctive and authentic voice, and this third volume confirms that originality: her poems have an instantly recognisable quality, an inventive and adventurous syntax that often gives the poems their uncompromising firmness of voice.
In the title sequence of Red House(Carcanet Oxford Poets, £9.95) she tells us that "The red house lies within the parish of the soul". It is a magnificent sequence, held together by Dugdale's sustained focus on detail: "the tender annoyance of a wash trapped on a landing . . ." It is an example too of how different shades of meaning can appear in a Dugdale poem, but also how those shades coalesce. The physical world and the poet's emotional response to it run through much of Red House.
A preoccupation with the domestic world provides some of her finest work ("There was a woman who left the red house with her baby"), but Dugdale also shares Duffy's attachment to and affinity with aspects of British landscape, though her response to it as an imaginative terrain strikes some anxious notes. This emerges most powerfully in Out of Town, a kind of no-man's-land where "ghosts are beyond all human weakness / They throng to service stations as to holy wells".
Her brilliant praise poem Wolstonburyis a rhapsody that affirms the value of such places, in this instance ancient ground on the Surrey Downs that appears also to have become a playground for her children.
I leave to my children Wolstonbury Hill.
An island in the morning with the mist at its heel . . .
. . . In summer we climb the steps of thin root
And hear the grass squeal and wrench underfoot
And the blood in our ears and the scratch from the briar:
Are all the proof we need we’re alive.
Elsewhere there is at times a hermetic tendency that can halt a poem, but she is sufficiently compelling to keep her readers on track.
Dugdale’s open sensibility, combined with resourcefulness – and consistency – of voice, is her great strength. As a very fine translator from Russian, she is a poet who certainly knows that Akhmatova was indeed right
When she wrote who knows what shit
What tip, what pile of waste
Brings forth the tender verse.
Gerard Smyth is a poet
