Name: Occasional Poets
ISBN: 9780670802098

Richard Adams

An Anthology

Occasional Poets

Gavin

Poems from people not known as poets, yielding a equal mix of dedicatories, doggerel, and diamond. Their styles are mostly preserved, epitomised: the big grim novelists (Lessing, Coetzee, Fowles, Murdoch, Golding) write enormous grit-tooth verse; 
 Heads bowed down or thrown
 Backward open-eyed
 Here and there are dark 
 With terrible deaf pictures.
 Sounds rise up and vanish 
 Into a pitted dome.
 It continues to rain.
 The acoustics being imperfect some people fidget.
 
 Something which is pure is come 
 To a high magnetic field.
 Cry out as it passes on When shall we be healed?

Raymond Briggs, a quiet, brutal elegy; David Lodge, some good meta jokes; animal bits from Jan Morris and Stella Gibbons; Wodehouse, two wonderful gossipy hyperboles. Adams manages to pick out the only Naomi Mitchison poems I don’t like. A lot of unbridled sentiment, e.g. Arnold Wesker depressing his children, Francis King's lies spiralling down, Enoch Powell lying awake listening to his wife's asthma; the writers aren't expecting the irony-making pressures of publication, or the obsessive polishing of any work that will be identified with them. So it's free indeed. Until Adams.

Occasional Poets An Anthology

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