This review is taken from PN Review 175, Volume 33 Number 5, May - June 2007.

on C.K.Williams, Frederick Seidel and John Tranter

Roger Caldwell
John Fuller, Amy Clampitt, Gillian Clarke, Vasko Popa, R.F. Langley, Kathleen Raine, Séan Rafferty, Pearse Hutchinson, Michael Hartnett, Richard Kell, R.F. Langley, John Montague, Sally Purcell, Robert Nye, Freda Downie, Drummond Allison, Lee Harwood, David Constantine, Edward Lowbury, Anthony Cronin, Edith Sitwell, C.K. Williams, Thom Gunn, Weldon Kees, P.J. Kavanagh, Norman MacCaig, Paul Auster, John Welch, Christopher Middleton, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Donald Davie, Miriam Waddington, Ciaran Carson, Elizabeth Jennings, A.S.J. Tessimond, Norman MacCaig, Charles Tomlinson, Michael Hamburger, Michael Donaghy, Sheila Wingfield, Alan Brownjohn, Peter Porter, Edith Sitwell, Ronald Duncan, W.S. Graham, Michael Murphy, Kathleen Raine, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Anne Stevenson, Montagu Slater, Ian Patterson, Collected Poems (Bloodaxe) £
John Ennis, Heinrich Heine, Salvador Espriu, Charles Tomlinson, Peter Bland, Carole Satyamurti, Andrew Motion, Michael Longley, David Scott, Michael Longley, John Riley, Mark Strand, Denise Riley, John Montague, Clive Wilmer, Matthew Sweeney, Peter Abbs, George MacBeth, W.S. Graham, Francis Ponge, Douglas Clark, David Gascoyne, Christine Evans, Derek Mahon, Frederick Seidel, Geoff Page, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Hofmann, Ruth Bidgood, Kirkpatrick Dobie, Vicki Raymond, David Malouf, E.J. Scovell, Jean Garrigue, Fleur Adcock, Kenneth Koch, Bernard O'Donoghue, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, James Schuyler, Lee Harwood, David Wright, Vivian Smith, Kathleen Raine, Hugo Williams, David Harsent, Michael Hamburger, Mark O'Connor, Les A. Murray, Charles Johnston, Fleur Adcock, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, Michael Riviere, Lawrence Lerner, Thomas Blackburn, D.M. Thomas, Fleur Adcock, John Montague, P.J. Kavanagh, David Holbrook, John Silkin, Günter Grass, Elizabeth Jennings, Patricia Beer, Peter Sansom, Jaan Kaplinski, Vladimir Khodasevich, Jack Clemo, Frank Koenegracht, Jamie McKendrick, Michael Symmons Roberts, Jean Bleakney, William Plomer, Colette Bryce, Kathleen Jamie, Selected Poems (Faber and Faber) £
John Tranter, Urban Myths: 210 Poems (Salt) £
Cover of Selected Poems

Of this trio of veteran poets - Williams and Seidel are now both seventy and Tranter is in his sixties - it is Williams who emerges as the most traditional, returning us to a first-person voice we can more or less trust and an unambiguous narrative line. To a large extent is seems that for him modernism, not to say postmodernism, has never existed. The voice that we hear in most of these poems, far from being fractured or ironic, appears to be firmly anchored in Williams' own experience; the stories he tells us spring, we feel assured, from his own experiences, though the glosses he puts upon those experiences may, of course, be speculative. The straightforwardness of utterance and transparency of the language are akin to that of realist reportage:

     Up the street some surveyors with tripods are
waving each other left and right the way they do.
    A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids
passed, playing hooky, I imagine.

This realism can be stunningly mundane. We are offered such domestic scenes as:

     A summer cold. No rash. No fever. Nothing. But a
dozen times during the night I wake
     to listen to my son whimpering in his sleep, trying
to snort the sticky phlegm out of his nostrils.

Williams, famously, is the master of the (very) long line, and this can make him seem too ...
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