In Black and Gold: Contiguous Traditions in Post-war British and Irish PoetryC. C. Barfoot In Black and Goldindicates that opposed styles of poetry reveal subterranean correspondences that occasionally meet and run together. Austerity or tomfoolery are two of the many valid responses to the human condition that create the contiguous traditions that cannot help touching and reacting to each other. The poetry discussed in this book deals with the relation of individuals to strange or to familiar landscapes, and what this means to their own sense of displacement or rootedness; with the use of history as an escape from or as a challenge to an apparently failing present; and with the role of nationalism either as a refuge for angry frustration, or as a weapon against the affronting world, or as an ambivalent loyalty that needs to be scoured, or as all three. Here we find poetry as a means of discovering true or false allegiances and valid or invalid public and private identities; poetry as a medium for exploring the uses of the demotic in confronting the breakdowns and injustices of modern democracy; poetry as play in the midst of private and public woe; poetry as a spiritual quest, as a spiritual scourging, as a wrestling with spiritual absences; and poetry as an intermittent and sporadic commemoration of the triumphs and delights of epiphanic encounters with the physical world. |
Contents
| 7 | |
| 22 | |
| 45 | |
| 67 | |
Paul Moeyes | 95 |
David Punter | 119 |
John Goodby | 137 |
Julian Cowley | 179 |
Dennis ODriscoll | 199 |
Ingrid HotzDavies | 219 |
David Wilkinson | 235 |
E M Knottenbelt | 255 |
Some Few Things I Have Known Truly Up to Now | 277 |
The Poets Voice and Poetic Craft | 303 |
Notes on Contributors | 329 |
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&GOLD &GOLD &GOLD &GOLD BLACK &GOLD artist BLACK &GOLD BLACK BLACK&GOLD BLACK&GOLD BLACK&GOLD Bob Cobbing C.H. Sisson Collected Poems contemporary British poetry context critical cultural David Jones death Eliot England English poetry essay example experience feeling garden Geoffrey Grigson Geoffrey Hill Georgian Harrison Heaney's hen hen hen Hill's human Ian Hamilton Finlay Immram Ireland Irish poetry Jeremy Hooker Jones's Kantaris kind landscape language Leeds linguistic literary Little Sparta living London lyric meaning Mercian Hymns metaphor metrical modern modernist Muldoon's narrative nature Northern Irish past Paul Muldoon Péguy Peter Reading Philip Larkin poet poet's poetic political prose published reader Reading's reference Review rhythm Seamus Heaney seems sense sequence skinhead social sonnet speak speaker stanza Stevie Smith structure T.S. Eliot Tenebrae things Tollund tradition Ukulele Music verse voice volume Welsh words writing Yeats
Popular passages
Page 61 - O joy ! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive...
Page 14 - If one had briefly to distinguish this poetry of the fifties from its predecessors, I believe the most important general point would be that it submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomerations of unconscious commands. It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and — like modern philosophy — is empirical in its attitude to all that comes.
Page 295 - Nebelgard, Watching the pointing hands Of country people, Not knowing their tongue. Out there in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home.
Page 293 - Some day I will go to Aarhus To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap. In the flat country nearby Where they dug him out, His last gruel of winter seeds Caked in his stomach, Naked except for The cap, noose and girdle, I will stand a long time.
Page 326 - Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.
Page 32 - To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar; With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman; this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talents.
Page 311 - Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, " I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the...
Page 293 - I could risk blasphemy, Consecrate the cauldron bog Our holy ground and pray Him to make germinate The scattered, ambushed Flesh of labourers, Stockinged corpses Laid out in the farmyards, Tell-tale skin and teeth Flecking the sleepers Of four young brothers, trailed For miles along the lines.
Page 116 - And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.