Points of View - Poetry Review - Volume 98:2 Summer 2008

Poetry is a thoroughly different beast to prose, and consequently deserves to be read in a thoroughly different way.

My preferred method, and most poetry readers have their own method of choice, is to read it through first without stopping to annotate or consider thoroughly, just concentrating on getting a feel for the poem and it’s narrative thread and general message. Others prefer to read aloud to get a feel for poetry in the mouth, the full sounds, but as I often read on the train this may strike some of my fellow-travellers as a little odd. Furthermore, I feel I can gauge a poem’s sound pretty well without having to read it aloud, as I can enounce it in my head.

After this, I comb through it with a pencil, making annotations on rhyme, meter, syntax, imagery, or whatever strikes me particularly relevant for that poem.

This is where poetry differs from prose for me, for while I do make some annotations when reading prose, they are nowhere near as thorough as those I make when reading poetry.

Poetry is wordsmithery at its highest form, delicate threads of sentences and punctuation interwoven to make a blanket of sound, rich in terms of layered meanings, imagery and simple flow of language. To put it simply, everything matters in poetry. When you’re working with perhaps as little as four lines, there is no room for superfluity, and this is where the beauty of poetry lies for me.
After reading poetry, prose can often seem like the work of children, simple and bare to the point of inanity.

This is the first issue of Poetry Review I have read. It begins with about 50 pages of poetry, selected from various new volumes. While I enjoyed some of the poems, I’d much rather read a whole volume of poetry by one poet, as this allows themes to circulate, it allows feelings and a sense of something to brew into something fit for imbibing. The kind of poetry reading where we jump between authors is almost like snacking – it satisfies a quick need but leaves us essentially unsatisfied, needing more.

Next comes about 15 pages about ‘Poets into Prose’, and this was far and away my favourite section of the magazine. Poets cannot help but be poets even when writing prose, and it is consequently a rich, slower prose than that of pure prose stylists. Alan Brownjohn’s ‘There and Back’, a story of a trip to Bucharest, stood out.

Tim Liardet sums up individual poets very succinctly, but we can apply his comments to poetry as a whole, as an art form distinct from prose:

‘All good poets…have created [their] own dialect and very rarely abandon it.’

(p. 103)

Next come some 30 pages of reviews, followed by a few pages of endnotes, comprising an editorial and bits of prose and poetry.

All in all this is an engaging magazine that is aware of poetry’s marginal place in the literary world, but also seems to sense a second-coming. As Fiona Sampson states in her editorial:

‘Poetry Review is proud to celebrate and learn from multiple points of view in today’s remarkably fertile poetic climate: whose intelligent fluidity, we believe, will allow the Next Big Thing to emerge.’ (p. 118)

It could just be that poetry’s inherent opposition to the pace of modern life ensures its survival as a future art form, despite many viewing it as an already long-dead art form.