Poetry

They were ‘soulmates’ according to people who knew both of them. They were ‘soulmates’ according to people who knew both of them. The word has a double-edged quality; it may suggest that they got on well together because they presented such a problem to everyone else. Both Philip Larkin and Monica Jones found it difficult to suffer fools gladly, and in this collection of letters (ranging from 1946-84) from Larkin to his long-term companion and lover, the mean-spirited and misanthropic are given full rein. Larkin met Jones in 1946, and they soon became lovers. (So much for sexual intercourse beginning in 1963). She was a flamboyant presence in the English Department of Leicester University, remaining a junior lecturer until her retirement in 1981.

Among the most famous of all living poets, Nobel Laureate, highly educated, revered for his lectures and ideas as well as for his poetry, Seamus Heaney has a daunting reputation. He remains, however, enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers, accessible, song-like, direct, concerned with everyday details and human relationships. Essentially, Heaney’s poetry strikes to the heart through its central metaphor — the very mechanics of being human. Human Chain, his latest collection, makes this familiar territory absolutely explicit, right from the title.

Just as the slaughter in the trenches of Flanders and northern France gave birth to the tragic verses of Wilfred Owen, so the experience of bombing and being bombed between 1940 and 1945 generated its own major poetry in Britain and the USA. The scale of the catastrophe was vast: 55,000 of British Bomber Command aircrew, with an average age of 22, lost their lives, as did 60,000 British civilians roasted, suffocated, buried alive or blown to bits. German civilian deaths far exceeded this and have been estimated at around 580,000 (of these victims, more were women than men, and many were children), not to mention the millions of homes, churches and national monuments that were destroyed.

Award-winning poet Ruth Padel established her prose credentials with her autobiographical travel book, Tigers in Red Weather. Journalist Aatish Taseer trawled his own past and background for his memoir, Stranger to History. Now they have produced first novels connected by both dislocation and location — India, though they deal with very different versions of the subcontinent, viewing it from opposite, culturally shaped perspectives. Padel’s Where the Serpent Lives moves between a tangle of human relationships and an environment under threat. Writing about nature, she brings a poet’s intensity to her prose: objects, plants, and the wildlife that stalk her pages, are all fiercely observed. Her narrative spirals like a tropical plant, luxuriant with metaphor and imagery.

In a sense, as this interesting collection of his writings makes clear, Rudyard Kipling was always abroad. His first vivid memories were of an early childhood in Bombay, ‘light and colour and golden and purple fruits’ in the market with his ayah, or visits with his bearer to little Hindu temples where ‘I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods.’ His descriptive writing is always full of sounds and smells; in fact there is a whole lecture in this collection on ‘the illimitable, the fascinating subject of smells in their relation to the traveller’. Kipling’s first impressions of England were of a grey, dreary place. It was not until he went to school in Devon that he began to appreciate the English countryside.

For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. Lives Like Loaded Guns — which combines biographical material, critical readings, and an assessment of the history of her reputation — tells a completely hair-raising story. The Dickinsons were one of the first families of respectable Amherst. Emily and her sister Lavinia — ‘Vinnie’ — lived in one house, Homestead, right next door to her brother Austin, the head of the family, and his wife Sue. Susan Dickinson was a highly intelligent and sensitive woman, bosom friend to Emily. The poet called her ‘Sister’.

Who reads Ralph Hodgson’s poetry today? Probably few people under the age of 40 have even heard of this strange Englishman who died in 1961 in a small town in the American mid-west. His most famous poems are those once learnt by schoolchildren like ‘Time you old Gypsy Man’ or ‘The Bells of Heaven’, both little more than pleasant rhymes. But in his day Hodgson was admired by (among others) Robert Lowell, Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Spender and T. S. Eliot, who wanted him to illustrate the book that he had partly inspired — Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; the lazy Hodgson could have made a fortune from the project but refused. In fact he mostly did exactly what he wanted, in his life and his work.