PoetryPoetry rarely makes the news in Britain, and when it does the focus is squarely on poets rather than poems.
The market remains buoyant for stories about Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. Andrew Motion, too, is copyworthy and so, at a pinch, is Carol Ann Duffy. The Cambridge poet, J.H. Prynne, recently found himself at the centre of a mini media flap, for the offence of an academic having declared him to be a better writer than Larkin. But Prynne is the exception that proves the rule: no longer merely obscure, he now occupies the category of "famously obscure".
It is the merely obscure poets who should be worried. The Scottish-born W.S. Graham (1918-1986) is a classic example. By rights, he should be at least as famous as Larkin and Hughes; in reality, he has been a "poets' poet", his reputation kept alive by a small but devoted band of admirers. In the hiatus between his The Nightfishing (1955) and Malcolm Mooney's Land (1970), Faber lost track of Graham to such an extent that they thought he was dead. Readers of the recent special issue of Aquarius devoted to Graham will have gained some insights into the reasons why. His life in Cornwall was often semi-destitute. Undistracted by success, he became "the Chair of Professor of Silence".
Graham's work divides into at least three phases. The line "My toe displays its blizzard to curious accordions" captures well enough the hectic spirit of his first two books. If they leave the reader at sea, Graham himself sets out to sea in the obsessively maritime images that come to dominate from The White Threshold onwards. 'The Nightfishing' is one of the great modern journey poems, overlaying memories of Graham's childhood Clydeside with the philosophical investigations that come to dominate his final two books, Malcolm Mooney's Land and Implements in Their Places. The poem as letter or private communication is a favoured theme. Another is the poem as sceptical meditation on language, as in the sequence 'What is the language using us for?'
If these poems are drawn to the sea, they are also haunted by images of drowning. Graham is the Phlebas the sailor of modern Scottish poetry, immersing himself in the deepest, most secretive currents of language but resurfacing to tell the tale. In an age of the prize poem and the pre-publication blurb, it is intensely pleasing to see this important book published in such a handsome but unadorned format. This is the book to do Graham justice at last. His reputation can only continue to grow.
R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), too, knew a lot about obscurity over his long life. Thomas was ordained a priest in 1937, and put Christ's injunction to "get thee behind me, Satan" sternly into practice in his art as well as his life. For a writer so vocally devoted to Wales, he never seems to have cared very much for the Welsh. His early poems on its grim hill-farmers have a certain windswept majesty, but not a little grand guignol too. Then again, for a poet-priest, he doesn't seem to have thought very much of God either. His attitude to the creator closely resembles that of Seán Ó Riordáin's (apocryphal?) statement that "Má tá sé ann is bastard ceart é" ("If he does exist, he's a right bastard"). But God provided him with his great theme, so God it had to be.
Thomas has been accused of writing bitty little poems, each one much like the last. In his defence, there is a discernible pattern of development in Thomas's work, from the social realism of The Minister, through his state of Wales poems, painting poems, science poems (anti-science poems, much of the time), and the sparser, broken psalms of his final phase. It would be tempting to say of Thomas what T.S. Eliot said of Tennyson, that his doubt is intense but his belief a poor thing. But Thomas is no soft-soap poet of a comfortable agnosticism. The truly valuable thing about him is just how awkward and implacable he is in pursuit of hard religious truth. Thomas leaves his readers no middle ground: take me or leave me, these poems cry out. Yet even in so cold a landscape, small comforts offer themselves, as in 'Carol':
What is Christmas without
snow? We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to rim
our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity's
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.
The Penguin Selected strongly emphasises later over earlier work, but for completists (who will already have the old Collected Poems 1945-1990) the Bloodaxe is the book to buy. After a long period of populist conservatism, British poetry is currently in a transitional state. If it does fancy going somewhere interesting, it could do worse than take its bearings from Graham's and Thomas's awkward, dissenting, fertile example.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic
New Collected Poems By W.S. Graham Faber and Faber, 387pp. £20 Selected Poems By R.S. Thomas Penguin, 353pp. £9.99 Collected Later Poems By R.S. Thomas Bloodaxe, 368pp. £9.95