The Company of Poets

Mr Updike’s poems are light and sometimes witty. He has a liking for conundrums, and one can pass a pleasant half-hour trying to solve them. It is a misfortune for him that Ogden Nash has already written so much better in the same vein. The new Penguin book of comic verse has the merit of cheapness; but the editor, after several stronger collections, has begun to scrape the bottom of the barrel. In undistinguished company, there are a few good epigrams, such as this epitaph on a party girl –

Lovely Pamela who found
One sure way to get around,
Goes to bed beneath this stone
Early, sober and alone.

There is nothing in the anthology of Welsh poetry to rival this, if one excepts three poems by Henry Vaughan and two by Dylan Thomas. Like Maori chants, Welsh poems in translation are all but incomprehensible unless the reader has sufficient anthropological knowledge to recognise the allusions to vanished customs and forgotten tribal chiefs; and the poems in English by Welshmen are notable chiefly for their unenterprising piety.

Mr Kirkup is quite a different kettle of fish. His poetry, nervy, erratic, formless, belongs unmistakeably to the hydrogen age. For inward unity he substitutes exact reportage. He celebrates a world of wandering boys who never come home –

Wandering alone at midnight
Along the streets we walked together,
I was a stranger once again,
For everything was unfamiliar,
Changed by the loneliness as much
As by your presence at my side . . .

This imprecise but very real sensation of self-alienation sustains his better poems, though his many failures resemble cut flowers standing in dry vases. Perhaps reportage is his true medium. The poems written in Japan, like Zen Buddhist arrangements of stones, assemble detail to accentuate absence of being. The casual style hardens into an oblique but penetrating language.

1960 (218)