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 74, Volume 16 Number 6, July - August 1990.

John CrickSPITTING IMAGE Alan Robinson: Instabilities in Contemporary British Poetry (Macmillan) £29.50 & £9.95

Of the two books on contemporary poetry I read shortly before this one, one followed the Sheeran-principle (he is the Oxford don who classifies poets on Football League table lines); the other mixed strains and breeds to produce a good romp round the field. Robinson takes neither the 'pedigree' nor the 'mongrel' tack. Under the least raunchy of titles imaginable, his book looks like another cobbled-together collection of occasional essays. But there is much more substance than this. It is, so to speak, by deconstruction-structuralism out of Post-modernism with a back kick at 'purely stylistic analysis'. (Incidentally, do we have to go all the way from Second Post- to Last Post-Modernism?) In spite of Robinson's disclaimer, it has a Thesis, or rather several: that poets who started to make their reputations in the 70s and 80s exhibit fragmentation and a turning from engagement in the old sense as a reaction to the 'High Modernism' of Eliot and early Pound, and the 'Late Modernism' of Williams and late Pound; that contemporary poetry taps energies from non-metropolitan sources; and that it shows, in its ludic and parodic veins and poets' style-consciousness, a filtering down into poetry from that Laputa of critical theories that hangs over contemporary literary studies. That is the map of twentieth-century poetry Robinson lays out in his muscle-flexing early chapters.

But the more you look at it, the more you realise landmarks are missing which would confound the picture: Hardy and Yeats, and since the war, ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image