Richie McCaffery welcomes a chance to gain a more rounded view of the poetry of William Oxley and finds that it ranges from the didactic to the warm and approachable.
Collected and New Poems
William Oxley
Rockingham Press
ISBN 978 1 904851 554
£12.99
I have rather selfishly used this review as an excuse to get a more rounded understanding of William Oxley as a poet. Being a reader and collector of back issues of the magazine Agenda to which Oxley has been a regular contributor over the years, I have read a fair few of his poems and I have often thought of him as a younger protégé of that didactic school of poets which comprised Tom Scott and Peter Russell among others. Indeed, it is good to see a number of poems dedicated here to the outriders of 20th century poetry, such as Scott, Hugh MacDiarmid and Roy Campbell. One of the hallmarks of Oxley’s poetry is a contempt for fads or fashions in poetry, and a quiet and admirable devotion to getting on with the task and producing work in the present which may have the possibility of enduring. However, I find at times that this impatience with youth and with literary vogues manifests itself in outbursts of thrawnness and fogeyism. For instance ‘Made Not Born’ has a go at fly-by-night self-promoting poets who want an easy ride and are allergic to criticism:
Yes, it’s a nice road to Parnassus now
. Where criticism’s weeds don’t grow,
And sooner or later, there’s a book and award
. When you’ve learnt to know who to know.
This poem is followed by ‘So You Write Poetry?’ which seems very closely related to Basil Bunting’s ‘What the Chairman Told Tom’ where the poet reacts against the supposed philistinism of the public via the means of an imaginary dialogue, usually with that of a straw-man talking-head:
‘So you write poetry?’
he made it sound like something
the police could get you for
‘Well, what’s the use of that?
Let me tell you something –
most people can do it
and rhyme it as well,
which you don’t seem able to do.’
Other poems reveal the speaker to have little time for the imagination sapping power of television (‘Talk of Telly’), taught creative writing (‘The New Poetry’) and poetry book sales, although this poem is winningly undershot with a refusal to accept that poetry is some sort of irrelevant and dwindling academic hobby-horse, reflected by its poor sales in small sections in Waterstones:
Yet is there no truth will tell
poetry’s not ill, nor a dull patient indeed,
but in fact is healthy and well?
Though bookshops present an invalid –
a book almost impossible to sell –
poetry’s healthy mystery still remains.
. ‘Where the Poetry Books Are’
At the risk of upstaging the strictures in ‘To My Harshest Critic’ I feel it is necessary to get my criticisms of this collection out of the way first. Occasionally in these poems I detect a strand, perhaps acting as a defence mechanism, of self-parading intellectualism. For instance, in ‘A New Clarity’ Oxley writes of the breath of fresh air a trip to Paris has given his work ‘after all the well-read years’. ‘The White Table, 4 am’ talks of ‘we who shuffle the endless pack of words’, the book’s blurb states that Oxley considers himself in the company of Coleridge, and the mock-heroic, admittedly humorous tone, in ‘Poem Written at Dannie Abse’s Desk’ talks of ‘caretakers of cantos’ and the desk as an ‘altar of inspiration’. I found myself time and again being drawn towards the more serious and ruminative poems only to turn the page and find the effect deadened by some piece of deliberately tongue-in-cheek doggerel:
Auden took to Christianity
Pound to Mussolini
Yeats to Lady Gregory
Dylan to every brewery
Heaney to Nobel Prizery
Hughes to every animal
Frost to mending a wall
Lowell to every Lowell
And Larkin to bugger all.
. ‘Poets’ Beliefs’
Contrast this poem above with one of a number of sincere and poignant poems for the poet’s father, a boxer, and – that rare father in a book of poetry – a kind man:
So whenever I see two fighters toe-to-toe
their dum-dum fists feasting on flesh
whether mugs or not I don’t much care
for he for a second’s in a corner there
and the sweat is golden, the bruises flowers
and the ring once more a magic square.
. ‘The Magic Square’
And also in ‘Aspects of my Father’:
And it was only as an old man
when he ceased to be a god
and became human
that I began to worship him.
These elegies and tributes, alongside a truncated sequence of poems about all of the rooms Oxley has been in over the years, strike me as some of the most lasting achievements in this book. While Oxley writes widely about nature, his is a kind of deeply anthropomorphic nature as shown in poems such as ‘Reading Nature’ where ‘autumn creeps in like a political statement’. Oxley clearly admires painters and the painterly approach, as evidenced in the poem ‘Sky Over Bond Street’ which pays tribute to Constable and Turner; but when he is writing about the coast and of great seascapes I am reminded most often of the poetic equivalent of William McTaggart – of broad and thick strokes that may occasionally lose a sense of detail and nuance, but impress themselves vigorously and boldly upon you:
O why does all my sea stream after you? –
an outgoing tide-of-space carrying to other worlds,
carrying every day some of me nearer to you,
or to the cruel desolation all despairers sometimes feel?
[…]
And though everything seems only what it appears,
and we feel hope and despair by turns –
yet this is what is permanent (despite the images’
everywhere-beckoning), for in the end only the light remains:
and in this world’s long night of hiding
only what is felt is what’s abiding.
. ‘Postscript’
I began this review by saying that I wanted to get a more rounded sense of Oxley as a poet, and while I found poems here that correlated well with my limited notion of him as a didactic poet, such as in poems very reminiscent of the later Tom Scott (The Tree, The Dirty Business) such as ‘The Dispossessed’, I also have found a much warmer and approachable voice in a number of these poems, often in tribute or elegy to others from the poet’s father to John Heath Stubbs. I have had a similar experience reading The Collected Shorter Poems of Tom Scott (Chapman, 1993) which presented me with an appreciably different, almost lyrical voice. And it will be these deeply human and moving poems I found in the cramped pages of Oxley’s Collected and New Poems which I will remember most readily. I am pleased to have been able to add another dimension to my opinion of his work.
.
Richie McCaffery is the author of two pamphlets (Spinning Plates from HappenStance Press and the 2014 Callum Macdonald Memorial prize runner up, Ballast Flint) and the recently published collection Cairn from Nine Arches Press. He is a PhD candidate at The University of Glasgow’s Scottish Literature Department and has written reviews for a number of publications, such as The Warwick Review, Northwords Now, Elsewhere, Sabotage, Sphinx and The Edinburgh Review.
Richie McCaffery welcomes a chance to gain a more rounded view of the poetry of William Oxley and finds that it ranges from the didactic to the warm and approachable.
Collected and New Poems
William Oxley
Rockingham Press
ISBN 978 1 904851 554
£12.99
I have rather selfishly used this review as an excuse to get a more rounded understanding of William Oxley as a poet. Being a reader and collector of back issues of the magazine Agenda to which Oxley has been a regular contributor over the years, I have read a fair few of his poems and I have often thought of him as a younger protégé of that didactic school of poets which comprised Tom Scott and Peter Russell among others. Indeed, it is good to see a number of poems dedicated here to the outriders of 20th century poetry, such as Scott, Hugh MacDiarmid and Roy Campbell. One of the hallmarks of Oxley’s poetry is a contempt for fads or fashions in poetry, and a quiet and admirable devotion to getting on with the task and producing work in the present which may have the possibility of enduring. However, I find at times that this impatience with youth and with literary vogues manifests itself in outbursts of thrawnness and fogeyism. For instance ‘Made Not Born’ has a go at fly-by-night self-promoting poets who want an easy ride and are allergic to criticism:
Yes, it’s a nice road to Parnassus now
. Where criticism’s weeds don’t grow,
And sooner or later, there’s a book and award
. When you’ve learnt to know who to know.
This poem is followed by ‘So You Write Poetry?’ which seems very closely related to Basil Bunting’s ‘What the Chairman Told Tom’ where the poet reacts against the supposed philistinism of the public via the means of an imaginary dialogue, usually with that of a straw-man talking-head:
‘So you write poetry?’
he made it sound like something
the police could get you for
‘Well, what’s the use of that?
Let me tell you something –
most people can do it
and rhyme it as well,
which you don’t seem able to do.’
Other poems reveal the speaker to have little time for the imagination sapping power of television (‘Talk of Telly’), taught creative writing (‘The New Poetry’) and poetry book sales, although this poem is winningly undershot with a refusal to accept that poetry is some sort of irrelevant and dwindling academic hobby-horse, reflected by its poor sales in small sections in Waterstones:
Yet is there no truth will tell
poetry’s not ill, nor a dull patient indeed,
but in fact is healthy and well?
Though bookshops present an invalid –
a book almost impossible to sell –
poetry’s healthy mystery still remains.
. ‘Where the Poetry Books Are’
At the risk of upstaging the strictures in ‘To My Harshest Critic’ I feel it is necessary to get my criticisms of this collection out of the way first. Occasionally in these poems I detect a strand, perhaps acting as a defence mechanism, of self-parading intellectualism. For instance, in ‘A New Clarity’ Oxley writes of the breath of fresh air a trip to Paris has given his work ‘after all the well-read years’. ‘The White Table, 4 am’ talks of ‘we who shuffle the endless pack of words’, the book’s blurb states that Oxley considers himself in the company of Coleridge, and the mock-heroic, admittedly humorous tone, in ‘Poem Written at Dannie Abse’s Desk’ talks of ‘caretakers of cantos’ and the desk as an ‘altar of inspiration’. I found myself time and again being drawn towards the more serious and ruminative poems only to turn the page and find the effect deadened by some piece of deliberately tongue-in-cheek doggerel:
Auden took to Christianity
Pound to Mussolini
Yeats to Lady Gregory
Dylan to every brewery
Heaney to Nobel Prizery
Hughes to every animal
Frost to mending a wall
Lowell to every Lowell
And Larkin to bugger all.
. ‘Poets’ Beliefs’
Contrast this poem above with one of a number of sincere and poignant poems for the poet’s father, a boxer, and – that rare father in a book of poetry – a kind man:
So whenever I see two fighters toe-to-toe
their dum-dum fists feasting on flesh
whether mugs or not I don’t much care
for he for a second’s in a corner there
and the sweat is golden, the bruises flowers
and the ring once more a magic square.
. ‘The Magic Square’
And also in ‘Aspects of my Father’:
And it was only as an old man
when he ceased to be a god
and became human
that I began to worship him.
These elegies and tributes, alongside a truncated sequence of poems about all of the rooms Oxley has been in over the years, strike me as some of the most lasting achievements in this book. While Oxley writes widely about nature, his is a kind of deeply anthropomorphic nature as shown in poems such as ‘Reading Nature’ where ‘autumn creeps in like a political statement’. Oxley clearly admires painters and the painterly approach, as evidenced in the poem ‘Sky Over Bond Street’ which pays tribute to Constable and Turner; but when he is writing about the coast and of great seascapes I am reminded most often of the poetic equivalent of William McTaggart – of broad and thick strokes that may occasionally lose a sense of detail and nuance, but impress themselves vigorously and boldly upon you:
O why does all my sea stream after you? –
an outgoing tide-of-space carrying to other worlds,
carrying every day some of me nearer to you,
or to the cruel desolation all despairers sometimes feel?
[…]
And though everything seems only what it appears,
and we feel hope and despair by turns –
yet this is what is permanent (despite the images’
everywhere-beckoning), for in the end only the light remains:
and in this world’s long night of hiding
only what is felt is what’s abiding.
. ‘Postscript’
I began this review by saying that I wanted to get a more rounded sense of Oxley as a poet, and while I found poems here that correlated well with my limited notion of him as a didactic poet, such as in poems very reminiscent of the later Tom Scott (The Tree, The Dirty Business) such as ‘The Dispossessed’, I also have found a much warmer and approachable voice in a number of these poems, often in tribute or elegy to others from the poet’s father to John Heath Stubbs. I have had a similar experience reading The Collected Shorter Poems of Tom Scott (Chapman, 1993) which presented me with an appreciably different, almost lyrical voice. And it will be these deeply human and moving poems I found in the cramped pages of Oxley’s Collected and New Poems which I will remember most readily. I am pleased to have been able to add another dimension to my opinion of his work.
.
Richie McCaffery is the author of two pamphlets (Spinning Plates from HappenStance Press and the 2014 Callum Macdonald Memorial prize runner up, Ballast Flint) and the recently published collection Cairn from Nine Arches Press. He is a PhD candidate at The University of Glasgow’s Scottish Literature Department and has written reviews for a number of publications, such as The Warwick Review, Northwords Now, Elsewhere, Sabotage, Sphinx and The Edinburgh Review.
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, Year 2014