Most Read... John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Joshua WeinerAn Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259)
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 Kirsty Gunn re-arranges the world John McAuliffe reads Seamus Heaney's letters and translations Chris Price's 'Songs of Allegiance' David Herman on Aharon Appelfeld Victoria Moul on Christopher Childers compendious Greek and Latin Lyric Book Philip Terry again answers the question, 'What is Poetry'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This review is taken from PN Review 55, Volume 13 Number 5, May - June 1987.

Paul McLoughlinSOMETHING CRASSLY NATURAL Brian Jones, The Children of Separation (Carcanet) £4.95 pb.
Jon Glover, Our Photographs (Carcanet) £4.95 pb.

The Barbizon school lends its name to one of the poem-sequences in Brian Jones's eighth collection and, whether or not Jones is an admirer of its art, one is tempted to discover parallels between painters and poet. What attracted mid-nineteenth century artists to the area was a reaction against picturesque and allegorical expressions of Romanticism: artists were to concentrate on the simple and ordinary, insisting, for example, that landscape be allowed to remain landscape merely; they were, as one critic has it, to 'listen for the "voice" of each site'.

In Jones's poem, the protagonist muses on 'Marguerites in a green glass' and wonders how we came 'not to trust these mundane plenitudes'. In the gallery's 'monastic room on stilts', a turn of the head reveals:


a landscape of distances that shocks a window
and you breathe freely to recognise

the plenitude of the commonplace,
the breadlike availability of the strange.


In a poetry of contemplative realism, as in the world it describes, it is 'the ordinary that shocks' ('Earth Landing') and there can be little more ordinary than marguerites (flowers that also inspire the beautifully realized miniature 'Merely an impulse to beautify'). Even tragedy and whole-scale disaster are seen as the result of 'something crassly natural' ('Four Poems, 2 Aftermath'). As to form, well, of the volume's thirty-four poems, twenty-four are (unrhymed) sonnets or sonnet-sequences, while others adopt three-, four- or, in one instance, ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image