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 5, Volume 5 Number 1, October - December 1978.

Matt SimpsonLICORICE AND BRANDY David Holbrook, Lost Bearings in English Poetry, Vision, £5.80.

It's now not far off half a century since F. R. Leavis championed the poetry of Hopkins, Pound and Eliot, poets who looked like showing the way forward from a romanticism gone dead but refusing to lie down. Now, in David Holbrook's twentieth book (and he tells us in the text that there are two others in preparation), we are informed that the way forward has merely projected us into the black hole of nihilism. A poem of Yeats, one of Hardy, and one of Rosenberg, constitute about all that the twentieth century can offer in terms of the 'restoration of creative man'. These, the Impressionist painters, and, of course, the music of Mahler.

The trouble is that we have now suffered some three hundred years of the Galilean-Newtonian-Cartesian dehumanizing process-the mechanistic view of the universe-and the result has been 'the failure of confidence in creativity'. According to Holbrook, this needn't and shouldn't be. The study of philosophical biology (which this work ably anthologizes) should show perfectly well that the fashionable nihilistic postures, the failures of creative nerve that are to be found in modern poetry, are absurdly out of place in their inability to find man 'at home in the universe'. Poetry urgently needs 'a greater awe'.

You won't find this in Lowell ('transfixed paralysis'), or Pound ('a solitary visit to the Jeu de Paume should have demonstrated a way in which man's vision can redeem the world, filling it with mystery, meaning and ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image