In the Quicksands of Poetry

A gentleman wrote to this newspaper the other day to express his irritation at a reference in Seamus Heaney's review of Ted Hughes's acclaimed Birthday Letters, the new collection of 88 poems which documents the tempestuous marriage between Hughes and the late Sylvia Plath.

Heaney celebrated what he called the "undertruths of sadness and endurance" in the poems, and this man asked "what in the name of blazes is an undertruth"?

I wish I could help, but cannot. I can only suppose the word is poetic shorthand for an underlying truth. But that suggests the truth is. . .lying. See what I mean? That is why I leave these things to poets. It is their territory. The language of poetry is a shifting quicksand, and communication by means of it is a minefield.

Similarly, this is why poetry is always reviewed by other poets, as the letter-writer complains, though he is incorrect in alleging that it is always "poets puffing each other's works". Hatchet jobs are regularly carried out with gusto in this paper by fellow-poets. Reputations are destroyed by means of so-called reviews, character is assassinated with dreary regularity. At times it is all the literary editor or the Garda can do to prevent a resulting physical assault on one wordsmith by another. It has to be understood that poets live out there on those remote shifting shores of language, occasionally making a vague effort to relate to the rest of us, mired as we are in rational discourse, when not drunk in Mulligans or the like. There is no way most of us can establish close contact with these far-off word-voyagers. A poet is the only envoy we can send to meet, review, or write about other poets. Naturally the envoys sometimes forget they are meant to be writing their reviews for the understanding of ordinary human beings, as opposed to poets. The whole thing is devilishly complicated and fraught with misunderstanding. But as soon as Birthday Letters was published it was clear we were in for a deluge of rot about doomed love (there being no other). Much has already been written, most of it writ wrotten, and there is undoubtedly more to come.

Overcome by the nature of the collection and its "resonances" (God help us), many reviewers have predictably chosen to enlighten us with their own insights on life, love and the whole damn thing.

In a Daily Telegraph review for example, Grey Gowrie instructs us as follows: "We fall in love. We fall out of love. As time goes by, we recognise that emotions follow Einsteinian rather than Newtonian concepts of time." This is patronising rot. Who are "we"? Did you or I ask to be included? What about the sensible among us (not many, admittedly) who are not so careless as to be constantly falling in and out of love? What does Lord Gowrie know of "our" emotional life? And if emotions fit any concepts at all and are not entirely anarchic, they surely follow the laws of thermodynamics, with energy being neither created nor destroyed, some of it converted into heat and dissipated uselessly into the environment, and entropic doom awaiting every last lover among us. Depressing, but there it is, and thank God for alcohol.

The real items of interest thrown up by these poems are: the dangers for creative types in moving to the country, and the impossibility of successful co-habitation between poets - particularly between American and British poets. It was all very well for countryman Hughes, but there was never much hope that an urban American like Plath, who was happiest in London and New England, would settle happily in the wilds of North Devon, to where she and Hughes moved (from London) in 1961. From there on her poetic imagery darkened until her suicide two years later. Yet the Dartmoor influence is rarely taken into account. Regarding the impossibility of workable co-habitation between male and female versifiers, the American poet Eva Salzman wrote a devastating essay in the Times recently about her experiences of living (not simultaneously) with two male poets, a Scot and an American: "Ours was a household of double poetic vision, double hypochondria and double egos, alternately big as houses or small as worms and so liable to be squashed."

As for the British/American poetic axis in such situations - forget it. Ms Salzman says that she and her Scottish live-in poet ended up accusing each other of "destructive negativity". Apparently, she says, "what is Calvinist guilt and angst in a Scot is pure self-indulgent nonsense in an American, who is somehow not automatically entitled to membership of the same Profundity Club."