Review styles

When I write up a poetry book I try to avoid being impressionistic, and try to support my views with quotes or statistics. I don't often write an essay showing how the book in question relates to poetry at large. This makes the write-up less entertaining to read, and less quotable.

Here's the end of a review that I recently read.

In a postmodern world, there is an unapologetic desire to create a rich, mellifluous language within the spareness and anti-Romanticism of a post-modern world, one which can recalibrate the atavistic, almost Pantheistic presence of nature in a secular, degraded world. Again and again, these poems articulate what it is to work through pain and hardship, towards hard-won acceptance and the possibility of forgiveness: "as the morning slips through               my fingers like sand, like love, and the tireless waves push on                 into their own futures, as I reach       for a pen, struggling to transcribe                    word by word, sentence by sentence,                this fragile                                              … yes"

The review (by Linda Rose Parkes from ink, sweat and tears) is of a book by Sue Hubbard. It's almost the opposite of the style I use, though it's a perfectly valid style. In themselves, the quoted phrases "slips through my fingers like sand", "tireless waves push on" and "struggling to transcribe ... this fragile ... yes" strike me as being un-ironized clichés. The indentation increases my feeling that the poet's twisting the poeticising dial to 11. So I was hoping that the review might explain the melodramatic layout and choice of imagery. However, the grandiose preceding paragraph makes the quoted poetry seem rather bathetic - the prose and poetry undermine each other. If the prose is all that can be said in defence of that poetry, then that poetry's not for me. And I'd be wary of reading more of the reviewer's prose.

Contrast that with the following by Jennifer K. Dick from "Tears in the fence" No.58, Winter 2013/14 (of Marilyn Hacker's translation of Habib Tengour)

Here, Hacker's masterful translation abilities and ear for the music of poetic excel, bringing across from the French into English such lyric gems as the quatrain that begins the poem on page 54 Go into exile far from my back dark defense     to trace curve    locate an embrace beneath this high dry tree Here, the central embracing rhymes (trace/embrace) marry the delicate finger tracing a line over the skin or a trail to the other or of return and the more ferocious clinging connection of the embrace as a body locates and grasps another under a tree. The poem continues to manoeuver between connection and loss, the language mirroring this struggle, distancing itself from and connecting with the reader as the poem continues: marble spring like losing your time confusing and gnawing at yourself ephemeral fusion fluctuating in allegory excessively lost Wavering and weaving through unpunctuated space, the enjambment of these elliptic lines invite the reader to read and combine these words into various interchanging sentence fragments, fusing and separating them, 'excessively lost' and thus 'fluctuating' until, pages later, the poem will draw to a close with far more grounded 'he' and 'she'.

I can't see how the quoted quatrain is a "lyric gem", and "locate an embrace/ beneath this high dry tree" doesn't sound like a "more ferocious clinging connection" (it's the opposite of ferocious - I hear allusions to "left high and dry" or even a crucifiction scene) but at least the prose is trying to explain and justify the poet's choices, aware that readers like me might need help. I may not agree with the review, but it's useful. It made me go back and read Dick's poetry in a new light.

Mixed Reviews

Of course, one wouldn't expect all the reviews of a work to agree. What's interesting is in what ways they differ. For example, sometimes critics may disagree over whether a work is good while agreeing what criteria are appropriate. I've already written an article about Mixed Reviews in general, and I sometimes (e.g. with Landing Light) try to compare reviews of a particular book, but now that 3 reviews of my Moving Parts pamphlet have appeared (and I've unearthed a review I wrote), it's time to re-visit the topic. What I noticed was that

• No-one mentioned the blurb or acknowledgements
• No phrase was multiply-quoted, though "Windmills" (perhaps the weakest poem) was quoted from twice.
• "abstract[ion]" appears 6 times. The main issue seems to be whether the "abstract" is sufficiently balanced by the concrete or emotional, and whether the juxtaposed or paradoxical parts are resolved.

HappenStance have a multiple-reviewer scheme - the online description gives you the idea. I suspect that knowing they're not the only reviewer makes the reviewers more likely to say what they think.

More generally,

• A.L.Kennedy on her Books & Reviews page assesses some reviews of her books.
• Some general review comparison sites exist - e.g. metacritic and reviewcentre
• Both Everydayfiction and Fictionaut have peer-review assessment for unpublished stories

Litref Reviews - a rationale

The style of the reviews on Litrefs Reviews doesn't appeal to everyone, not even to all of those who read theory, so I thought I'd better offer this rationale

On his blog Rob MacKenzie asked "What the best approach for a reviewer? Is it best to be tentative and say you're not certain about various things?". Sheenaugh Pugh replied "If I don't get what is going on, I will say so. Folk can think me incompetent if they like --- What people think of the reviewer is not in the end the point". I tend to follow the Pugh approach. I know that some people feel that poetry's under threat and that poets should stick together. I also know people who think that the world of reviews is ridden with mutual back-slapping, with inhibition, and that only 20 or so poetry books per year are worth publishing. I think I'm somewhere in between.

I used to keep these notes to myself, but a decade or so ago I decided that given it's just as easy to put the stuff online as on paper, I might as well do so. Of course I could play safe. In a few months even I might not agree with what I've written. I note that Rob's most recent blog entry begins "I've badly misjudged WS Merwin. I'd read only a few poems by him, mainly written in the last decade or so, and these hadn't done anything for me". Yep. I know the feeling. I sometimes go back and change write-ups.

For self-education and calibration I allot a proportion of my reading time to authors I've not heard of before, or whose work I haven't previously liked. There are famous, highly regarded writers whose work I just don't get. I have blindspots both known to me and unknown. I'm not the only one ("You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are even worse" - Tolstoy to Chekhov; "Larkin had no literary talent ... Larkin never managed to write a good poem" - Andrew Duncan). It's not unusual, finishing a write-up, for me to have wanted it to come out differently, but there we are. If I read that Prynne's the most important living British Poet it doesn't make me like his work any more (though I might be encouraged to read his work again, and expose my incomprehension again).

As I read, I jot notes on a bookmark. I'm not trying to follow standard templates for reviews, or guidelines like "mention 2 things you like for each thing you don't"; "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all"; "write it as if it were a Reference for someone who might be shown the Reference, encoding all adverse comment"; "end with a judgment and an incitement to buy". I'm not even trying to be balanced - I link to other reviews whenever I can. If I gain an impression that's falsifiable (say, that an anthology has more male poets than female ones) I tend to do a count rather than trust myself. Once I go to the bother of doing a count I feel I might as well add it to the write-up. I don't think authors should have anything to fear from stats.

It's not a style that I'd recommend everyone to follow (especially in paper publications - my suggestions for those who want to be published are on Writing Book Reviews). My stuff's a side-show, a marginal voice - or at least it should be. What I would like is for many more people to write up their impressions - not just of the books by friends or by their favourite authors, but all the poetry books they read.

I've made a list of the Longer poetry reviews I've written.

The worlds of Academia and Literature

There are several parallels between the milieu of literature and those of specialist academic subjects.

• Scale - poetry print-runs might be in the low hundreds. Some academic publications would be happy to reach even those figures.
• Isolation - they both have their cliques and conferences (or festivals). They're both misunderstood by the public.
• Journals - academic paper periodicals were becoming very expensive - several hundreds of pounds a year - and were failing to perform their broadcasting function. Nowadays they're available online, but still at a cost. The periodicals still have to fund publication, archiving, and peer-reviewing. One option is Pay to Publish - to have free access to the publication, but making authors (or submitters) pay. It means a change in grant applications, but dissemination of ideas will improve (poor readers not disadvantaged) without quality control being compromised.
  Some literature magazines work a little like this - they're not free, but submission is at least in part by competition, subsidising printing costs (see Glimmer Train, short Fiction, etc)
• Peer Review - For specialistic publications, reviewers are likely to be friends or rivals of authors. Objectivity is at risk. Poetry's not so different. Anonymity doesn't always help.
• Reception - Whereas in the past reaction was slow and localised, discussion can now be global in hours, thanks to Twitter and blogs.
  In academia, the importance of papers is measured by their citation impact - where (and how many times) they're cited. Funding is affected by the results. People are now trying to extend this to cope with online mentions. Poetry could have the same mechanism were there the funding to set it up. In the States I believe something like this exists, with creative writing tutors getting points for poetry or story publication in approved magazines.
  I'm surprised how few poetry reviews are online (outside of Amazon). When I did a write-up of Don Paterson's Landing Light I found several reviews. For Carol Rumens' Blind spots I had trouble finding any, which makes comparisons difficult.
• Money - The value of publication is that it gets you a job which can earn money (workshop tutor, lecturer).

The Dark Horse, issue 25

I look forward to the arrival of "The Dark Horse". The recent issue has some articles on poetry marketing that try to answer questions like: Why do people agree to write blurbs? Why are anthologies like "Identity Parade" published?

• "Blurbonic Plague" by Dennis O'Driscoll - As the pseudonymous Harvey Porlock noted, 'Reading reviews of modern poetry is like attending prize-giving in a small, caring primary school: everyone has done terribly well, it's all absolutely marvellous', p.11
• "The Anthology Business" by John Lucas - Lumsden appears to have no love for language or the possibilities of prose rhythms. Nor ... does he show much ability to get beyond cliche ... I don't want to damn Lumsden's enterprise by such means. For all I know, he undertook to write these head notes with the enthusiasm of a man condemned to the stocks. Who in his right mind would want to produce what amounts to 85 blurbs, where the adjectives are selected much as buttons are from the button box ... And, to repeat, there are good poems aplenty in the anthology, p.25

To provide some balance there's an 8 page review by Rory Waterman of William Logan's "Our Savage Art: poetry and the Civil Tongue" - too often he roots out the bad whilst neglecting the good ... Logan thinks that the majority of writers are praised too highly and expect too much, p.76

Reviews, poems and other articles complete this tasteful offering. I was glad to see that Craig Arnold's "Uncouplings" uses anagrams -

the I in relationship
is the heart I slip on
a lithe prison ...

our listening skills
are silent killings