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chief among the sonneteers, declares. There is a finding and forging of connections. There are a lot of birds here. And magic, the transforming kind that works now by charm, now by science. But before we become too formally fixated, consider the unaffected eroticism of Eric Langley’s suspending repetitions, his syntax resisting closure, the tender, firm fingertips active on language as if trying to prove it skin, flesh and bone: and not a sonnet in sight. New Poetries VI is friendly to free verse when it is genuinely free of metre, or working powerfully within it, and doing the new things that modernism does so well, with hearing and with irony. The orthodontic meddling of language with the world, its snaggling malocclusions between a group of objects and their name That’s Joey Connolly: we can only imagine the pain he endured in the dentist’s chair to reach that cacophony of images. André Naffis-Sahely calls his poems ‘episodes rescued, as Robert Lowell once put it, from “amnesia, ignorance and education”’. But is this right? He is not content with the formulation. How many poems are in fact remembering, how many invent memories? Is the rhetorical juxtaposition of ignorance and education more than rhetorical? Lowell without education? The romanticism of ignorance, poverty, the so-called ‘natural man’ have sell-by dates. Nyla Matuk evokes, in another context of escape from what we are, a ‘bourgeois notion masquerading / as real life.’ Her sea-shells are occupied by monsters and molluscs: she has managed to use poetry as a way of unknowing herself. When Brandon Courtney writes ‘Reality, in plain language, is paramount in my work’, he has defined how difficult it is to arrive at that plainness, how much has to be discarded on the way. My father says the war changed me from a killer to a pacifist; I refuse to fillet the fish he pulls from the lake. I refuse to slip the blade between gills, fold back their pearlescent scales, cut away what little meat their bodies offer. xvi New Poetries VI

One might think that his unique selling point is his subject matter: he is a war poet and has been in the thick of action. But though the adjective comes first in ‘war poet’, the noun element is ‘poet’, and that is what went to war, and what came home, wrestling the experience into language and form. Subject matter is never enough, unless we want our poets to be journalists. As C. H. Sisson wrote of Wilfred Owen, the poetry is not in the pity, but in the poetry. Each of these poets seems to have an almost epithetic image: a seashell, say, or teeth, or fingertips, foreign cities, wind, alleys, gardens, a fascination with the spaces of others – other times, other genders. We as editors relish this variety and the variety of tones. There is a good deal of laughter in this book, including poems that might be described as light verse – which deserves its equal welcome at the high table, as it always has. There is also ambitious experiment, in the formal exigencies and nuancing of syntax in the vivid elaborations of Alex Wong’s poetry and in the unrestrained invention and discovery of Vahni Capildeo’s. In February 1955, anticipating the publication of his sequence The Nightfishing, the Scottish poet W. S. Graham wrote: ‘With all its mistakes and blemishes I think it is a knit object, an obstacle of communication, if you like, which has to be climbed over or gone round but not walked through. I think it just might make its wee disturbance in the language.’ If as editors we were to look for communal ground among the works here, Graham’s notion of a poem as an object made of words, that creates a ‘disturbance’ in the language, might provide a starting point. The poets in New Poetries VI share a consciousness of the English language – coloured by place, by other languages, but nonetheless a common tongue for the North American, British, Trinidadian, Antipodean – as their medium. They explore it with old and new-made tools, they push and prod, they bring other languages and times to bear upon it. It sings and also clashes with itself, against itself. And Graham’s phrase ‘an obstacle of communication’ resonates: there is a contrariety about the very act of writing poetry, fixing something in a language which often imitates the ephemeral intimacy of speech, imposing measure on it, containing and rhyming it. Graham develops the idea of ‘obstacle’: the poem has to be ‘climbed over’ or ‘gone round’. Basil Bunting spoke of the Cantos as the Alps that had to be crossed. On a smaller scale, our obstacles cannot be simply ‘walked through’. Poetry is not communication in the usual sense of the word, imparting information. Nor is it mere opacity, indirection, slant. There is little place in poetry Preface xvii

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chief among the sonneteers, declares. There is a finding and forging of connections. There are a lot of birds here. And magic, the transforming kind that works now by charm, now by science. But before we become too formally fixated, consider the unaffected eroticism of Eric Langley’s suspending repetitions, his syntax resisting closure, the tender, firm fingertips active on language as if trying to prove it skin, flesh and bone: and not a sonnet in sight. New Poetries VI is friendly to free verse when it is genuinely free of metre, or working powerfully within it, and doing the new things that modernism does so well, with hearing and with irony.

The orthodontic meddling of language with the world, its snaggling malocclusions between a group of objects and their name

That’s Joey Connolly: we can only imagine the pain he endured in the dentist’s chair to reach that cacophony of images. André Naffis-Sahely calls his poems ‘episodes rescued, as Robert Lowell once put it, from “amnesia, ignorance and education”’. But is this right? He is not content with the formulation. How many poems are in fact remembering, how many invent memories? Is the rhetorical juxtaposition of ignorance and education more than rhetorical? Lowell without education? The romanticism of ignorance, poverty, the so-called ‘natural man’ have sell-by dates. Nyla Matuk evokes, in another context of escape from what we are, a ‘bourgeois notion masquerading / as real life.’ Her sea-shells are occupied by monsters and molluscs: she has managed to use poetry as a way of unknowing herself. When Brandon Courtney writes ‘Reality, in plain language, is paramount in my work’, he has defined how difficult it is to arrive at that plainness, how much has to be discarded on the way.

My father says the war changed me from a killer to a pacifist; I refuse to fillet the fish he pulls from the lake. I refuse to slip the blade between gills,

fold back their pearlescent scales, cut away what little meat their bodies offer.

xvi New Poetries VI

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