PN Review - November - December 2011

Page IFC

PORTRAIT

abraham lincoln by John Henry Brown Watercolour on ivory, 1860 Sight: 11.7 × 8.9cm (45⁄8 × 31⁄2 ") Frame: 14.3 × 11.4 × 1.1cm

(55⁄8 × 41⁄2 × 7⁄16 ") National Portrait Gallery,

Smithsonian Institution NPG.75.11

Abraham Lincoln The story goes that Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, bibliophile and poetry lover, bought a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) and would read it aloud during quiet moments in their Springfield, Illinois offices, Lincoln listening sympathetically and asking for phrases to be repeated. Such a story would be an early link between the poet and his most famous subject and muse. But Lincoln had his own aspirations as a poet. Famously, Lincoln was unschooled but not unlettered: he was a ferociously concentrated autodidact. He knew the Bible and Shakespeare cold (his favourite play was Macbeth) as well as Watt’s hymns and English literature from Bunyan to Thomas Gray. As a young man, he wrote poetry as a way of assimilating and making sense of his own sense of distance from the world around him. Some of that writing expressed the physical hardship of growing up on the frontier where farm families heard ‘the panther scream’. But Lincoln’s own sense of emotional displacement ran through his longest poem, ‘My Childhood Home I See Again’, written in 1846 and modelled on Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’. A retrospective view of the childhood home that Lincoln never really had, it concludes:

I range the fields with pensive tread,

And pace the hollow rooms, And feel (companion of the dead)

I’m living in the tombs.

Lincoln’s melancholy was leavened by his appreciation of a good joke or story. During the Civil War, he wrote some goodhumoured, vernacular doggerel about the campaigning. But the 1846 poem offers extraordinary insight into the mind of one of America’s great writers. david c. ward

Page 1

CONTENTS

REPORTS

POEMS

ARTICLES

REVIEWS

Inside cover Portrait: David C. Ward on Abraham Lincoln

2 Editorial 3 News & Notes 5 Letter from Silas Gunn

Neil Powell 6 Rewards of Failure Sam Adams 7 Letter from Wales Simon Eckett 9 Kitaj in the Lake District John Greening 9 Nicholson, Suddenly Frank Kuppner 11 Random Souvenirs of a Fleeting Return to the Continent

Jane Yeh 12 Seven Poems Jean-Paul de Dadelsen 17 Three Poems (translated by Marilyn Hacker)

Raymond Queneau 22 from Hitting the Streets (translated by Rachel Galvin)

Hester Knibbe 27 Five Poems (translated by Jacquelyn Pope) Anne Stevenson 39 Two Poems

Don Coles 40 Two-Hander Janet Kofi-Tsekpo 43 Six Poems Maurice Rutherford 45 Heinz Gropsmeyer

Neil Powell 46 Four Poems Pier Paolo Pasolini 51 Poems Around Town (translated by N.S. Thompson)

Peter Bland 58 Wilderness Moments and Mr Maui

Thomas Day 15 Variant Editions of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns Roger Caldwell 19 ‘The Present King of France is Bald’: On Possible Worlds Robert Griffiths 25 Shelley and the Old and New Atheism Marius Kociejowski 28 Once Upon a Time in County Cork

Adrian May 41 The Hang of Song: Arctic Monkeys and Clare Pollard Carol Rumens 44 in conversation with Maurice Rutherford

John Muckle 47 Out of Town: Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, and

The Ground Aslant

Ian Brinton 54 Jack Spicer’s Words: ‘God Must Have a Big Eye’ Mark Ryan Smith 60 Two Explorers: Charles Doughty and Hugh MacDiarmid

Bernard O’Donoghue 64 on The Word Exchange

Judith Chernaik 65 on Adam Zagajewski

Will Eaves 66 on Dan Burt Chris Preddle 67 on Ed Reiss Joey Connolly 68 on Ian Pople Gerry McGrath 69 on The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry Alison Brackenbury 69 on Siân Hughes, Ellen Phethean and Hilary Menos

71 Some Contributors

Cover image: John Ashbery, Napoleon, 2009, collage, 12⅜ × 9⅛ inches. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

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central books ltd, 99 Wallis Road, London e9 5ln email magazines@centralbooks.com Copyright © 2011 poetry nation review

All rights reserved issn 0144-7076 isbn 978 1 84777 041 7

General Editor michael schmidt Co-ordinating Editor helen tookey News & Notes Editor eleanor crawforth editorial address: Michael Schmidt Department of English University of Glasgow 5 University Gardens

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