Six Bad Poets, Christopher Reid, Faber and Faber, 2013, 88pp, £12.99 (hardback)

Oscar and I, Confessions of a Minor Poet, Peter Phillips, Ward Wood Publishing, 2013, 76pp, £8.99 (paperback)

Nothing’s Lost, Ian House, Two Rivers Press, 2014, 48pp, £8.95 (paperback)

In ‘The Friendship of Young Poets’, a poem from his second collection, The Happier Life, Douglas Dunn looks back wistfully to his days of obscurity as a fledgling poet:

There must have been more than just one of us,
But we never met. Each kept in his world of loss
The promise of literary days, the friendship
Of poets, mysterious, that sharing of books
And talking in whispers in crowded bars
Suspicious enough to be taken for love.

Dunn’s poem was written in the early seventies, since when the world of poetry has certainly moved on. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine now that a young poet would need to endure such isolation. In her ‘Introduction’ to The Salt Book of Younger Poets (2011) Eloise Stonborough, a poet in her early twenties, laments the fact that ‘it isn’t easy to ‘make it’ as a poet today’. It’s doubtful that it ever was, yet even Stonborough acknowledges the opportunities available to aspiring poets today and, in particular, the advantages of social media networks and online publication. Scanning the biographies of the poets who actually ‘made it’ into this anthology – all fifty of them – one sees that almost without exception they are undergraduate or postgraduate students of creative writing, some of whom are already engaged in teaching it. To judge from the number of its adherents, poetry has never had it so good. And yet, in the ‘Preface’ to his Carcanet anthology, New Poetries V, Michael Schmidt claims that there is little market for poetry books beyond the poets themselves, who schlep them from reading to reading. Moreover, since the publication of its selection of ‘younger poets’, Salt Publishing has decided to discontinue individual collections, preferring to concentrate instead on occasional anthologies.

A former adherent of the ‘Martian’ school and, subsequently, the poetry editor at Faber and Faber, Christopher Reid is well qualified to send up the poetry scene. In the opening section of Six Bad Poets he introduces us to his protagonists in a series of sharply focused vignettes in which we sense that ‘bad’ is used both qualitatively and morally to describe each poet’s work and character. First up, there is Charles Prime: ‘an old, forgotten poet / … back in town after ten years away. / Two country marriages, plus a spell in gaol.’ A poet whose reputation has barely been kept alive by a couple of occasionally anthologized pieces, he is relieved to discover that his favourite literary pub, The Agèd Eagle, is still on the go. Hoping to re-launch his career from this ‘light-shy’ hostelry, he learns that a foppish young man has been making enquiries about him. Prime’s repeated attempts to avoid the attention of Jonathan Wilderness is one of the main strands of Reid’s narrative. A young poet on the make, Wilderness seems, increasingly, to be a younger version of the washed-up septuagenarian whose biography he hopes to write. Feckless, libidinous, and only modestly talented, both men have a gift for getting their way with the ladies.

Before too long, Prime will insinuate his way into a free billet in the home of Antonia Candling, ‘the doyenne of London poetry’ who has just found herself unexpectedly widowed. Candling is a sure-footed operator in a world where many are called but few are chosen:

She often has cause to reflect on the animus
her obvious good fortune rouses in others. Well,
let that be their problem; it’s not her task
to redistribute the world’s uneven supply
of luck, success, or money.

Bryony Butters, ‘poet, novelist, and more besides’, is Antonia’s ‘friend’, rival, and one of Prime’s old flames. Judged by Prime to be ‘not bad in the niff / for a woman of your years’, the pair soon find themselves back in bed. The sextet of poets is completed by Derek Dufton and Jane Steep. The former is a ‘poet and academic’ to whom we are introduced in medias res as he ‘wakes with a start and a shudder from his sleep / in the middle of a lecture … / on ‘Tennyson and le néant’’; while Steep, ‘only just out of uni’ and drifting from one awful job to the next, is also ‘a poet still in search of her voice.’

Reid’s exposition is exemplary and throughout his six intricately plotted cantos his characters scheme or bumble their way. Stereotypes, perhaps – since this is not a full blown novel – or, more accurately, ‘caractères’ in the tradition of La Bruyère, his protagonists have more than enough individuality to engage us as they make their way on self-serving quests. Enjoyable too are Reid’s brilliant set pieces: Janet Steep’s night out at a poetry reading, where a motley crew of ‘mumblers and shouters, shamblers and strutters / … bring their variable / party tricks to the mic’; or the conversation between Jonathan Wilderness and Bill Gubney, his hard-boiled literary agent, who exclaims ‘Poetry? I’d rather try to flog / Bottled piss from a stall outside a gents!’

When Clive James wrote his literary satires in the 1970s he appropriated the Augustans’ heroic couplets. Before him, W. H. Auden composed his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ in the stanzas similar to those employed by his master for ‘Don Juan’. For Six Bad Poets Reid has preferred to invent his own form, so that his six cantos each consist of six poems written in a modified form of the sestina. Rather than repeating the same six words, Reid uses rhyme, assonance, or visual similarity. This opens up a notoriously claustrophobic form, and offers considerable scope for comic wordplay, as in these examples from ‘One/1’: ‘gaol, goal, Agèd Eagle, / guile, gargoyle, girl’. Six Bad Poets is a bravura performance which is both entertaining and, in its modest way, a wise anatomy of the vanities and foibles of poets and, by extension, perhaps the rest of us too.

Oscar and I, Confessions of a Minor Poet, is the latest collection from Peter Phillips, a London-based poet whose previous work has been distinguished by its lyricism and warmth. Understated, yet frequently moving, Phillips’s poems are also on occasion very funny. In this, his fifth book of poems, he focuses his attention upon George Meadows whose precarious existence as a full-time poet is explored in a series of brief scenes and dialogues that highlight Phillips’s timing and deadpan humour. In ‘Frank Introduces George’ we get an indication of George’s place in the current pecking order:

George is often placed or shortlisted – the National,
T. S. Eliot, Costa – but hasn’t won a big one, always

simmers, just below brewing point. He feels poetry
shouldn’t be elevated too high. It’s the only thing

he never worries about, is still a self-confessed
half empty-man, can down a pint in one flourish

but prefers to be polite and do it in two.…

This assessment of George by his ‘poetry pal’ Frank as a self-effacing poet and bon viveur is one which George seems happy to accept. In ‘With his Grandson’, he is asked by the latter: ‘Are you a good poet?’ Using a sporting analogy, he replies: ‘What a question! I’m not in the Premier League’ and then goes on to admit that he is barely clinging on to his place in The Championship, explaining, moreover, that poets instinctively know their own level: ‘It’s something we sense. / Like knowing you’re not strong at maths.’

Disingenuous and disarming, Meadows is nonetheless quietly determined when it comes to advancing his career, especially if there is a free pint or a curry involved; and, for all his protestations to the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that he isn’t doing that badly: appearances at festivals, a poem on a shortlist that has led to an enquiry from an American publisher and, of course, regular stints as a creative writing tutor. Unashamedly old school, George Meadows ‘doesn’t know the difference between / a gigabyte or a love bite’, has a horror of exposing himself on Facebook, and doesn’t even have an email address. Phillips’s depiction of his bibulous and rather workshy bard is in marked contrast to the earnestness of the tyros he half-heartedly tutors. They, of course, are the future, a fact which is brought home to Meadows as he finds it increasingly difficult to get paid reviewing jobs. Little wonder, then, that in the course of his occasional bouts of anxiety he seeks reassurance from Frank, his ‘pal’, and the companionship of Oscar, a rescue dog who, like his doomed namesake, ‘was in the gutter looking at the stars.’

Where Reid’s Six Bad Poets has the symmetry of a Molière play, Phillips’s narrative, focused on a single character, is more picaresque. In the course of its sixty-six episodes there is scarcely any aspect of the poetry scene that is not viewed through the lens of Phillips’s bemused gaze. Wisely, too, Phillips breaks out from the closed shop of poetry to emphasise its irrelevance to the lives of those who are not involved in writing or promoting it, such as his wife, his dentist, or the guest at a dinner party who remarks: ‘I’ve heard you write poetry. What’s your real job?’ On becoming the chairman for this year’s Forward Prize, Jeremy Paxman suggested, somewhat mischievously, that poets have connived at their own irrelevance. Whether or not one agrees, there is little doubt as to how seriously the majority of poets take themselves. Here is George’s final comment as he hovers above the congregation at his own funeral:

Well, it’s nearly over.

Poetry has been fun, but as Frank said,
I never won a big one. Do I care? I bloody well do.

Nothing’s Lost is Ian House’s second collection. A late starter in poetry after years of teaching at home and abroad, it is doubtful that House is overly concerned about having a ‘career’ in poetry or is anxious about where he stands in the ‘pecking order’. As far as one can tell from his Acknowledgements page, he has made little attempt to seek publication in magazines. He is, however, fortunate that his poetry has been nurtured and sustained by The Poets’ Café in Reading and the town’s excellent small Press. ‘Peregrine’, his opening poem, is the first of several pieces inspired by the natural world and is an impressive showcase for his ability to capture surface detail and then probe beneath it:

She floats to hand, hooks to the leather fist
like that other self he sees in the mirror,
inches from his eyeballs and a world away.

His craft and will against her flint,
her slate feathers, notched beak,
coalpit eyes.

From this brief extract one sees that House is not only a poet whose eye is clearly focused, but one whose ear is finely attuned to the rhythms and sounds of language. In ‘Cows’ he demonstrates an enviable facility to come up with startling images in a poem which, initially, might seem little more than a clever inventory: ‘“They are / ruminants, ungulates and quadrupeds.” / Words thick and juicy as flesh.’ However, in his final tercet he takes things to a different level:

I trample the grass with my alien smells,
belong to a tribe that has marked them for death.
All I can see in their eyes is reproach.

Equally impressive are ‘Silver Bream’ where he wonders whether the ‘speechlessness’ of fish is ‘empty-headed or wise’ and ‘Aldeburgh: Samain’ where, in the poem’s stunning conclusion, he moves beyond the ‘Martian’ imagery of ‘the waffle-print of shoes on sand’ to: ‘Someone howls like a dog. It is the wind. It’s you.’

Equally at home in bringing to life artefacts or paintings, in ‘Incarnation’ the fish woven into an ancient textile have a stunning actuality: ‘each fish is the weft of its flash / through the water, the warp of its flesh.’ ‘The Boar’s Head’ is a memorable evocation of a sculpture that once guarded the entrance to a pub and is ‘no more than a hunk of limestone / sheathed in lead’ until the poet follows it into an afterlife: ‘He thunders into the land of the dead. / I follow. We rootle together.’ Elsewhere House’s approach becomes more obviously metaphysical as in ‘The Open Door’, where he explores aspects of memory and perception, and ‘the mind’s lurch / from blackberries to ink spots.’ In ‘Takeover’ he plays with Locke’s idea of the tabula rasa with a nod, perhaps, towards Russell’s Problems of Philosophy: ‘Mind, you’re a table, / knotted, oak-hard, right-angled.’

Nothing’s Lost is a beautifully structured and richly textured collection in which each poem has earned its place, but a volume in which related themes are re-visited and viewed from different angles as if in a poetic hall of mirrors. In a group of poems set in Moscow, House’s ostranenie, his ‘making strange’, again comes to the fore. In ‘At large’ he explores his own sense of identity. In ‘Bystander’ we find him slowly coming to terms with ‘Stalin, / Yeltsin, Trotsky, three Lenins / smoking in the Metro corridor.’ House is a poet who has a Joycean relish not only in haecceitas but in the sounds that shape our perceptions of it, so that ‘gaunt’ becomes the embodiment of ‘my dead, angular grandmother’. In a sudden epiphany he realises that ‘sparse is the word for her hair’. Like MacNeice in ‘Snow’, House revels in ‘the drunkenness of things being various’. Although Nothing’s Lost has not made it onto the shortlist for this year’s Forward Prize, it could hold its own with the best of them. It is certainly a memorable, accessible, and highly enjoyable collection that I will be returning to.