Most literary journalism sinks on publication, never to rise again. Very few reviews deserve a second read, let alone to be collected in book form. One such is Sean O'Brien, whose prolific journalistic output forms the backbone of The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Bloodaxe, £10.95 in UK), his account of poetry in the two islands since the second World War. The book's first section, "The Ends of England", deals with Larkin, Hughes and Hill, but there is no doubting which of these is O'Brien considers the true begetter of contemporary British poetry: Larkin.
For O'Brien, Larkin's poetry at its best is unillusioned, socially aware, inclusive and even redemptive - he sees Larkin as a true successor to Hardy. O'Brien has no stake in defending Larkin the Powellite curmudgeon, as revealed in his letters and attacked by Tom Paulin. Much more fruitfully, he rescues the poet from his own worst side by aligning him with the sort of symbolist technique he is usually thought of as having made redundant. It is with the question of what comes after Larkin, however, that O'Brien has to start making some hard decisions. The most obvious losers here are residual Modernists in the Bunting-Pound tradition such as Donald Davie and Charles Tomlinson, poets not inclined to make their peace with the "suburban mental ratio" represented by the author of The Less Deceived. One can see how O'Brien might find these writers stuffy. What possible excuse, though, does he have for giving a chapter to a minor talent such as Ken Smith while passing over Thom Gunn, a writer who combines Modernist stringency with the energy and adventure of Sixties America? Of more recent experimentalists too, what might be called the Iain Sinclair tendency in British poetry, O'Brien has even less to say. But, as the insistence on Larkin's debt to Modernism shows, The Deregulated Muse is by no means a simplistic espousal of the populist line in English poetry currently in the ascendant in the work of Armitage and Maxwell. The chapter on Tony Harrison is a badly needed antidote to the humbug of critics such as Stephen Spender on Harrison's jaded language and class politics. There is much about Harrison that O'Brien admires, however, and some of the best essays in The Deregulated Muse are those in which he probes the limitations of writers to whom he remains basically well-disposed, such as Durcan and Armitage.
Other poets dealt with include Roy Fisher, John Fuller and Peter Porter, writers with little or no discernible readership in this country. Irish poets' difficulties with being labelled "British" are wellknown, but isn't there something hypocritical in expecting the British to read us Irish while most contemporary British poetry remains so neglected here? If it achieves nothing else, The Deregulated Muse should administer Irish provincialism a much-needed irritant. O'Brien is resolutely demotic throughout, and writes in a way that undergraduates everywhere will have reason to be grateful for. The scope of the book means that many of the essays are critical fast food rather than full meals, though even so there are numerous annoying omissions. For penetration and authority O'Brien falls short of critics such as John Kerrigan or Edna Longley, but as a book to be "read rather than endured", The De- regulated Muse makes a lively and enjoyable contribution.
For O'Brien the Irish and the Scots (though not the Welsh, I notice) represent subversive alternatives to the fustiness of English poetry, but even within England there are exotic specimens which go unnoticed by The Deregulated Muse. One such is George Szirtes, born in Budapest in 1948 but resident in England since the fateful events of 1956. Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape (OUP, £7.99 in UK) is his eighth collection, and by any standards an impressive piece of work. "The Idea of Order at the Jozsef Attila Estate", "Variations on Radnoti: Postcards, 1989" and "The First, Second and Third Circles" are all memorable evocations of the poet's homeland. Elsewhere he shows an expert handling of syntax, often constructing a poem out of a single intricate sentence. The book is also of note for no less than three sequences of fifteen sonnets each, "Hungarian Sonnets", as Szirtes calls them, with the fifteenth in each case assembled from the first line of the previous fourteen. A single example of the vividness and invention that make Szirtes a poet well worth reading, the four-line "Day of the Dead, Budapest":
Down the main arterials, on ring roads, in alley ways, The dead stand perpendicular with heads ablaze. And some of them blow out, while others burn right down And leave small patches of darkness like footsteps about town
David Wheatley is a poet and critic