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 47, Volume 12 Number 3, January - February 1986.

Avril HornerAN UNEVENTFUL JOURNEY Frank Delaney, Betjeman Country (Granada) £4.95 pb.

If Frank Delaney is the thinking person's Russell Harty, then his book Betjeman Country must be the Michelin Guide to that poet's world. Its format (rectangular enough to fit into the glove compartment) and its unremarkable line-drawings and photographs (too many of which sport the obligatory framing branches), smack more of the traveller's guide than of a book about a poet. Even Delaney himself appears to be faintly surprised by the bizarre nature of the project and his suggestion in the Introduction that the reader might 'leave his armchair and wander off in the same spirit of enthusiastic enquiry to a fair in Pinner, or a crescent in Bath or a golf club in Surrey' seems to lack any real conviction that such a journey is worthwhile. For, of course, as he admits in the Postcript - 'I finally found that the reality was not so important' - 'Betjeman country' is a state of mind rather than a conglomerate of places on a map. Unlike most recent British poets, landscape for Betjeman carries no sense of revelation or epiphany; instead, it comes increasingly, in its mild and predictable beauty, to act as a gentle anodyne against what the poet perceives to be the casual cruelty and brute insensitivity of its inhabitants. This function of nature cannot be adequately caught in photographs; it comes out instead as visual cliché and sadly much of the book borders on that. Where there are interesting photographs, or photographs of interesting things, the reader ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image