Chris Wallace Crabbe

Chris Wallace-Crabbe has always had a good ear for a title, but Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw is surely his best. Half a century older than Shakespeare’s ghost-ridden poet–hero, he rings the changes on Hamlet’s high-fantastical play with language, by turns delighting and disconcerting an audience which might sometimes struggle to keep up with his leaps and ellipses. Ghosts and shadows abound in this distillation of his finest work from the last five years or so, but the intimations of mortality don’t mean that this book inhabits a Yeatsian ‘country for old men’. There are some curtains of Celtic darkness, but the soul of this poet–singer rejects tattered coats and sticks, swaggering, as the introductory poem has it, ‘On the Side of Life, / suntanned here in the lost antipodes / of childhood’s yellow beach and glaucous water’.

Who is, or rather who was, André Gide? I ask this because a distinguished editor warned me, on hearing that I was about to review Robert Dessaix’s enticing new book, that nowadays nobody would remember who Gide was. Ah, the years, the years! It was another story in the time of my youth ...

Laura Riding, sometime poet and citrus-grower has risen from the grave to deliver this series of attacks on poetry and its untruthfulness. She comes back to us now in a posthumous gathering of essays and shorter notes, The Failure of Poetry: The Promise of Language. It will certainly get people’s backs up.

The English critic Terry Eagleton is nothing if not a dasher. Once suspected by many as the kind of postmodern theorist who undermined the category of ‘literature’, he has increasingly hiked into its territory. In The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), he turned against the kinds of scepticism and virtuality which he saw as demeaning all literary or cultural study. The book certainly made some of his former allies quite cross, not least because it was penned with such rhetorical high spirits. His Marxist foundations, sturdily nourished in a Salford boyhood, remained, however, and were built upon. Yet they are sometimes twinned with residues of Catholic belief, as his recent attack on the atheism of Richard Dawkins has shown, full as it is of residual theology. He can certainly be an odd kettle of fish. In How to Read a Poem, Eagleton takes a broad brush. He remains at home with the traditional texts, the kinds of poems we have long deemed important.

Fancy an editor in this post-whatnot era using the word ‘great’ to describe the poems he publishes. Lord save us! It is almost as though recent decades hadn’t been, and we still wore the mild woolly clothing of the postwar years. But here is the Canberra poet and longtime schoolteacher Geoff Page offering us a high road through poetry in English: a series of touchstones, as our serious uncle Matthew Arnold might have said.