Most Read... John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Joshua WeinerAn Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Christopher MiddletonNotes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Next Issue Sinead Morrissey 'The Lightbox' Philip Terry 'What is Poetry' Ned Denny 'Nine Poems after Verlaine' Sasha Dugdale 'On learning that Russian mothers buy their soldier sons lucky belts inscribed with Psalm 90 to wear into battle' Rod Mengham 'Cold War Hot Air'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This review is taken from PN Review 259, Volume 47 Number 5, May - June 2021.

Cover of Apocalypse
Imogen DurantLoop the Loop
Apocalypse, James Keery, editor (Carcanet) £17.99
Don Paterson and David Williams’s characterisation of the British poetry of the 1940s as marking a ‘nadir in the century’ is shown to be categorically untrue in James Keery’s new anthology. The apocalyptic style is usually associated with the 1940s, but Keery resists a decade-based approach, pointing out that Dylan Thomas, George Barker and David Gascoyne are as much poets of the 1930s as Auden, despite being more commonly associated with a subsequent generation, and ranging editorially up as far as the 1960s in his selection.

Keery proposes a tradition of visionary modernism, influenced by Surrealism and distinct from the ‘ironic modernism’ epitomised by Auden. The visionary and anti-ironic stance which characterises this work can, at times, be unrelentingly earnest, but it is the rejection of irony which produces its fervent intensity. (Keery’s claim that ‘Humour is not the keynote’ of this book is absolutely true, and poems which do attempt humour or frivolity can be somewhat jarring.)

Paterson and Williams suggested that the poetry is weakened by the influence of Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens, who are ‘poor models’, insofar as they are ‘poets of genius who nonetheless often succeed despite their stylistic excesses’. To imitate such excesses results, they write, in a ‘rather hysterical and affected “Apocalyptic verse”’. Thomas’s influence is undeniable (Keery states that the whole collection can be read as ‘a seismograph of his influence’), but Apocalypse also demonstrates that there is room for invention within imitation.

The best work in this anthology brings incisive clarity ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image