Lloyd Evans

Same rubbish, new wrapper. This is the criticism usually levelled at those big bad soccer clubs who put out a new kit every season with minor alterations. Where the clubs lead, the publishers follow. David Winner, the author of this rambling and incoherent discussion of the national game, is a theoriser so prolific that he can prove his case on one page and refute it a few paragraphs later. To show that English football is bloodier than the continental game he quotes the Frenchman Robert Pires: ‘Some of the tackles are like rugby. People will run you over.’ A little further on we hear that Ravanelli and Zola came from Italy and ‘enjoyed English sportsmanship, the relaxed atmosphere, and the huge amount of space they had to play in’.

Is there a more charming literary companion than Al Alvarez? In this extended series of lectures he examines the writer’s creative method, or ‘voice’, as he metaphorically terms it. His own voice comes through loud and clear, a seasoned, colloquial, authoritative and highly polished channel for his telling insights and throwaway erudition. He flits with ease across the centuries. On one page he is in the 1920s, breathing new life into antique disputes about free verse and quoting Pound’s advice to Modernist poets ‘to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome’.

It is 50 years since Peter Porter arrived in ‘rain-veiled Tilbury’ from his native Australia. ‘I came, I saw, I conjured,’ is how he summarises his career. Death haunts this collection from first to last. The opening poem uses the sea as a metaphor for existence. Its initial line, ‘The engine dies,’ is both a reference to a stalling boat and a symbol of mortality. He approaches the inevitable head-on. ‘Within this calm,’ he muses quietly, ‘something is now to be.’ Directness is only one of Porter’s virtues. ‘Sex and the Over-Seventies’ is a straightforward comic elegy for the wasted energies of youth.

Sad to report, but this book is a gem. Why sad? Because Michael Winner, a sensitive, witty and extremely gifted artist, has made such a cock-up of his personal PR that to praise him in public is like applauding the Holocaust. There are nasty silences. Faces go white. Plates drop. The man is not well liked. But he deserves to be. This is one of the books of the year. It’s easy to forget that in the late Sixties Winner was the most enterprising young director in Britain, popular with audiences, loved by stars and saluted by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. This book is the story of his 30-year career as a producer and director. His style is lucid, chatty, aphoristic and acutely observant.

He is most like a poet when writing least like one. Skim the titles of P. J. Kavanagh’s new collection and you’ll find the clues. ‘November’, ‘London Bridge’ and ‘Christmas walk’ are admirable instances of a skilled craftsman plying his trade, but they lack the yeasty suddenness of the real thing. Head instead for ‘What I didn’t say to Thomas’, a slice of wry humour about Kavanagh’s evasiveness over his belief in God, or ‘Vox Pop’, which uses a Larkinesque transition to turn a momentary rant into a celebration of civilised values. Kavanagh has all the technical gifts a poet could wish for, but at times his brain has to work overtime because his heart and soul have phoned in sick.

Ted Hughes was the first living poet I loved. The same is probably true for countless kids who went to school in the 1960s and 70s. The general rule that classroom study engenders a lifelong dislike of poetry must make an exception of Hughes. Only a teacher of chart-topping ineptitude could prevent a child from enjoying those magical early portraits of animals. I still remember the sensational shudder that ran through me at the opening of ‘The Jaguar’: ‘The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.’ It was ‘adore’ that got me. Pluck or pick or squash or sift, yes, I was ready for those, but ‘adore’. It didn’t belong but it belonged. For me it was like the moment when the lozenge cracks and honey floods your tongue.

How's this for a good opening? 'I took out a gun and painted the bullets gold.' If that were a novel the author would win prizes; but he isn't a novelist, he's a nutcase. Let's call him 'J'. J was convinced that his wheelchair-bound grandmother was a vampire. He visited her one morning, did her laundry and asked if there was anything else he could help her with. She said 'No'. So I put on my suit and shot her in the heart. She was wiggling and screaming at me. Then I shot her three more times real fast. After this he laid her body on the bed, drank some of her blood, uttered a prayer and torched the house. What makes this testimony so vivid and compelling is the detail: the laundry, the suit, the prayer.