PORTRAIT

ADRIENNE RICH by Joan Biren No date Digital print, 2010, after a gelatin silver print Private collection

Adrienne Rich 1929– Adrienne Rich was part of the great generation of postWorld War II American poets and she remains (along with John Ashbery) as one of that generation’s vital survivors. Her poetic beginnings were extraordinarily precocious (she graduated from Radcliffe in 1951, the same year that Auden chose her for the Yale Younger Poets series) but conventional enough in terms of style, positioning herself in the lineage of modernist Anglo-American poets. Lineage was soon experienced as restriction. A conventional poetic career, as well as a conventional career as a middle-class woman in 1950s America, increasingly troubled Rich. Her thoughts and feelings as woman and poet did not mesh with the expectations of the external world. As the gap between inner and outer grew larger, Rich turned into herself (she described herself at one point as having been ‘paralysed’), emerging as a defining poetic voice of American feminism. Stylistically, her engagement with her essential nature, and its implications for her relations with the world, meant a liberation of language from its patrimony. This process of reclaiming and reinvention has been discussed by other women poets (for instance, Eavan Boland); it was Rich who broke the ice with her self-conscious projection of her inner world onto an indifferent, unhearing world. Her gestures at a radical separatism of the woman’s world – her banning of men from her readings at one point – may occasionally have been over-drawn. But one cannot gainsay the power of ‘Diving into the Wreck’, in which she appropriates and transforms the supposedly male task of exploration for her own purposes:

the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.

david c. ward CONTENTS

Inside cover Portrait: Adrienne Rich (David C. Ward)

2 Editorial 3 News & Notes 5 Letters: from John McAuliffe, J.G. Nichols

REPORTS

POEMS

Neil Powell 6 Our Own Mags Sam Adams 7 Letter from Wales Adnan al-Sayegh 9 The Man Who Stayed Awake In His Delirium James Sutherland-Smith 10 Letter from Slovakia

Margo Berdeshevsky 11 on George Whitman’s Ninety-Seventh

Frank Kuppner 12 Concurrent Sentences Michael Glover 13 From the Bow-Wow Shop 4 Matías Serra Bradford 15 interviews Roger Langley

Charles Mundye 17 on Roger Langley as a teacher

Arthur Rimbaud 18 from Illuminations (translated by John Ashbery) Gwyneth Lewis 22 Four Poems

Lucy Tunstall 23 Six Poems James Womack 27 Three Poems

Yang Zi 31 Four Poems (translated by Ye Chun, Melissa Tuckey and Fiona Sze-Lorrain)

Edward Baugh 38 Seven Poems Michael McKimm 44 Dr Saad Eskander Alison Brackenbury 44 Five Poems

Julith Jedamus 49 Four Poems Michael Symmons Roberts 50 Eight Poems

Christoph Meckel 56 Four Poems (translated by Christopher Middleton)

Robert Saxton 57 Animal Passions Christopher Middleton 60 Two Poems

John Mallet 61 Two Poems Edward Ragg 62 Two Poems Marina Tsvetaeva 66 Poems of 1915–1920 (translated by Christopher Whyte)

ARTICLES

R.W. Maslen 24 Mervyn Peake’s Illustrations for Rhymes Without Reason Iain Bamforth 28 Catchwords 12 Jeffrey C. Robinson 35 A Burst of Romantic Poetry

Ian Brinton 40 England in the Sixties Tony Roberts 46 Sunlight on the Poet: Louis MacNeice Thomas Day 52 in conversation with Michael Symmons Roberts André Naffis-Sahely 58 A Single-Minded Homer: Logue’s War Music

Roger Caldwell 63 Roger Scruton on Art, Religion, and Philosophy

REVIEWS

John McAuliffe 69 on The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry

Will Eaves 72 on Anthony Astbury’s A Field of Large Desires Henry King 73 on Geoffrey Hill’s Oraclau/Oracles André Naffis-Sahely 75 on Valerio Magrelli

Gerry McGrath 76 on Toon Tellegen

James Keery 77 on Kevin Nolan Alex Wylie 79 on Jeremy Over and Matthew Welton

80 Some Contributors

Cover image: ‘The Giraffe’, originally included in Rhymes without Reason (1944) © the Mervyn Peake Estate.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Mervyn Peake Estate.

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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 038 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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