This review is taken from PN Review 90, Volume 19 Number 4, March - April 1993.

on E.J. Scovell

Jem Poster
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 (Carcanet) £
Cover of Selected Poems

This selection is drawn mainly from the Collected Poems of 1988, which I reviewed at length in P·N·R 61. I spoke there of a gift undiminished - indeed, enhanced - by the passage of time; and reading the previously uncollected poems which conclude this selection, I'm struck again by a technical assurance and an emotional energy which seem strangely at odds with the poet's explicit references to the circumscribed powers and perspectives of old age. Look, for example, at 'Old People':

They dwell in sorrow. If a time may come
When they recall as happiness this time
Yet now they know that Sorrow is its name,

Their country of domicile; and that it is,
Like other countries, not without its flowers
(Although as insect-small as arabis,
Minutest crucifer in stones and grass) -

As when in nights strange and unselved
   with sleep
And waking, she goes down to bring him up
Chocolate in a cup or sweetened tea,
Emblem of better comfort than can be;
And thinks of midnight feasts that children
   scheme:
Closeness, adventure, waking dream.


That second sentence, fluid yet controlled, unfolding through clause after clause to the poem's conclusion, is characteristic, as is the chronological range which it encompasses. The tentative glance forward to a time at which present sorrows may retrospectively assume the appearance of joys (a possibility so quietly understated that we might easily ...
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