2000

Neil Powell (b. 1948), poet, critic and biographer, has been associated with Carcanet Press and PN Review for many years as writer, editor and proofreader. He taught at Kimbolton School and St Christopher School, Letchworth, where he became Head of English; he was the founder-owner of The Baldock Bookshop in Hertfordshire; and since 1990 he has been a fulltime author and editor. Among his publications are biographies of Roy Fuller, George Crabbe, Amis father and son, and Benjamin Britten; he has edited Fulke Greville’s Selected Poems (1990) Donald Davie’s Collected Poems (2002) and Adam Johnson’s Collected Poems (2003) for Carcanet; his latest book is his own collected poems, Was and Is (Carcanet, 2017). In ‘Forgetting How to Read’, Powell wrote at the end of the twentieth century: ‘there are times when a perception of cultural decay might actually be accurate, and perhaps this is one of them. […] [T]his collapse is different in kind and scale from previous shifts in our culture, because it involves a devastating and potentially irreversible disconnection from the past.’¹

FROM NEIL POWELL

Bungay, Suffolk

3 October 2000

Dear Michael,

I’ve been looking again at the mass of material from which I hope to produce a book (or two) of essays; and it occurs to me that there is a coherent collection there, absolutely at the heart of it – one which seems somehow completed by the Winters piece I’ve just done for PNR.² It’s still called Virtues and Necessities, a title which sums up the twin purposes of my essaying and reviewing, and it could be subtitled ‘Essays on Twentieth-Century Poets’. (That would leave me with the option of assembling a more wide-ranging companion book – after V&N has proved an astonishing and resounding success – to be called Airs and Variations.)

      The pieces, which I propose to arrange in thematic clusters rather than in order of writing or publication, fall into four substantial groups: (1) Graves, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, pieces on First World War poets in general; (2) writers of the mid and later century, including Winters, R.S. Thomas, W.S. Graham, Roy Fuller, Heath-Stubbs, Davie, Larkin, Gunn; (3) shorter essays, mostly deriving from TLS reviews – on a range of late twentieth-century poets (Fanthorpe, Scupham, Dobyns, Doty, Kantaris, Wells and others), ending with my PNR piece about Adam;³ (4) general pieces and polemics – a couple of reviews of major anthologies (the 1993 New Poetry piece and ‘The Bonfire of the Anthologies’)⁴ and articles from ‘The Poet, the Public and the Pub’ (PNR, 1978) to ‘Forgetting How to Read’ (PNR, 1999). Looks like a terrific book to me! 320pp at a guess. What do you think? I feel lost without a Carcanet project in the pipeline.

      I am also thinking, but slowly, about the memoirish thing: it has to be right, and it’s the sort of book which needs to be approached very sanely (or else in a spirit of reckless lunacy). I hope there will also be, eventually, a new book of poems.

      Crabbe, meanwhile, may have found a good home, about which I’ll say nothing more until it’s settled (or not).⁵

Best wishes,
Neil

FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

5 October 2000

Dear Neil,

Thank you for your letter of 3rd October about ‘Virtues and Necessities’. It is an attractive title.

      There is a serious absence in the work you outline of essays on what one might call the Rickword, Empson, Auden line as well as the Modernists. ‘Essays on Twentieth-century Poets’ has a kind of comprehensive air.

      You are clearly not making exclusions on national grounds in view of the fact that you include Welsh, Scottish and American writers (I see no Irish there!).

      If the book is to be anything more than a miscellany of

      good reviews, we must make it cohere a bit more intensively.

      Let us discuss this matter soon. I certainly would like to do another book of you, prose or verse. My feeling is that a prose book based on, for example, your anthology reviews, could be made a lot of fun whereas the larger collections you envisage are for the most part too miscellaneous to make sense. I wonder indeed whether a book on the modern anthology, cannibalising your reviews in various ways, might not be in itself quite original and quite wonderful? It could, for example, reproduce and collate contents lists or take ‘sections’ and see what poets are anthologised in which ways and how many anthologists cannibalise each other’s work rather than going to the fountainhead. I have often contemplated writing such a book myself but have not had sufficient incentive. It could start briefly with Tottel⁶ and the Elizabethan books which made the fortunes of their publishers and proceed, possibly with brief character sketches of the publishers where they were important and of the editors where they were self-important, to the present day.

      Much of the work seems to me to have been done already in your excellent reviews!

      You may think this is a non-starting idea from your point of view but I love it! I would almost go to contract immediately!

With warm regards,
Yours ever,
Michael

P.S. I had a long letter from Anthony Thwaite this morning.⁷ What a shock.

*

Neil Powell was a very close and central figure in Carcanet and PN Review for decades. He writes with clarity and confidence, as a poet is a fine formalist, a kind of cousin of the poets in Il movimento inglese (Wells, Davis and Wilmer) without the Wintersite colouring. For me, a foreigner in love with England, he is the epitome of certain values I relished. He was also a schoolmaster rather than a university lecturer, which was very much in his favour in my book: he was in touch with people coming to, and coming to terms with, poems, not yet strung out on the racks of theory. But as Carcanet changed, finding new poets, different kinds of poetry and new directions, and as the times changed, Neil was an unwobbling pivot.

      He has not taken up the gauntlet of the short book on anthologies which I threw down, after his excellent and perceptive essays. It could still prove the kernel of a larger project.

NOTES

1. ‘Forgetting How to Read’, PN Review 125 (January–February 1999).
2. ‘Winters’ Talents’, PN Review 136 (November–December 2000).
3. Powell wrote a tribute to his friend and fellow poet Adam Johnson (1965–93) in PN Review 93 (September–October 1993); Johnson had delivered the typescript of The Playground Bell – published in 1994 – to Carcanet three weeks before his death of an AIDS-related illness.
4. ‘Sparklers and Bangers’, PN Review 133 (May–June 2000): ‘Domes and wheels and other such questionable edifices apart, the thrilling fact that all four of the year’s digits happened to change at the end of 1999 provided an excuse for various literary fireworks; I wrote about a couple of fat rockets – Peter Forbes’s Scanning the Century and Michael Schmidt’s Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English – in PNR 130. Here are some of the lesser explosives, sparklers and bangers as it were, and much the most sparkling of the bunch is Simon Rae’s News that Stays News.’
5. Powell’s George Crabbe: An English Life 1754–1832 was published by Pimlico in 2004.
6. The London publisher Richard Tottel published Songes and Sonnettes, the first printed anthology of poetry in English, in 1557.
7. Anthony Thwaite (b. 1930), poet and critic, editor notably of Philip Larkin’s poems and letters. He published poems in PN Review in 1987 and 1993. In Powell’s interview with Peter Scupham, the latter said: ‘Some remarks do have an impact on one: I remember Anthony Thwaite leaning across and regarding me balefully once and saying, “Lay off the churchyards for a bit.” And he was dead right’ (PN Review 37, March–April 1984). Thwaite recalled this in his affectionate tribute to Scupham at 85 in PN Review 240 (March–April 2018): ‘in 2016, Peter and I found ourselves more fully represented than any other poets in Kevin Gardner’s anthology Building Jerusalem: Elegies on Parish Churches.’

THE YEAR IN BOOKS

      John Ashbery, Your Name Here

      Sujata Bhatt, Augatora

      Aleksandr Blok, Selected Poems, translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France

      Alison Brackenbury, After Beethoven

      John Clare, A Champion for the Poor: political verse and prose, edited by P.M.S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and John Powell

      David Constantine, Hermione Lee and Bernard O’Donoghue

      (eds), Oxford Poets 2000: an anthology

      William Cowper, The Centenary Letters, edited by Simon Malpas

      Donald Davie, Two Ways Out of Whitman: American essays, edited by Doreen Davie

      John F. Deane, Toccata and Fugue: new and selected poems

      Keith Douglas, The Letters, edited by Desmond Graham

      Elaine Feinstein, Gold

      Jonathan Galassi, North Street

      Roger Garfitt, Selected Poems

      Lorna Goodison, Guinea Woman: new and selected poems

      Jorie Graham, Swarm

      Robert Graves, The Complete Poems in One Volume, edited by Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward

      Robert Graves, Some Speculations on Literature, History and Religion, edited by Patrick Quinn

      Ivor Gurney, Rewards of Wonder: poems of Cotswold, France, London, edited by George Walter

      Mimi Khalvati, Selected Poems

      Thomas Kinsella, Citizen of the World

      Thomas Kinsella, Littlebody

      Frank Kuppner, What? Again? selected poems

      Jean de la Fontaine, The Complete Tales in Verse, translated by Guido

      Waldman

      Maggie Lane and David Selwyn (eds), Jane Austen, A Celebration

      R.F. Langley, Collected Poems

      Hugh Latimer, The Sermons, edited by Arthur Pollard

      Grevel Lindop, Selected Poems

      Richard Mayne, The Language of Sailing

      Ian McMillan, Perfect Catch: poems, collaborations & scripts

      Andrew McNeillie, Nevermore

      Paula Meehan, Dharmakaya

      Christopher Middleton, Faint Harps and Silver Voices: selected translations

      Edwin Morgan, AD: a trilogy of plays on the life of Jesus

      Edwin Morgan, New Selected Poems

      Cyprian Norwid, Poems, Letters, Drawings, edited by Jerzy Peterkiewicz

      Petrarch, Canzoniere, translated by J.G. Nichols

      Karen Press, Home

      Eça de Queiros, Eça’s English Letters, translated by Alison Aiken and Anne Stevens

      Jean Racine, Phaedra, translated by Edwin Morgan

      Peter Riley, Passing Measures: selected poems

      Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets To Orpheus & Letters To a Young Poet, translated by Stephen Cohn

      Peter Sansom, Point of Sale

      Michael Schmidt (ed), Commonplace Book

      Alan Shapiro, Selected Poems 1974–1997

      Iain Crichton Smith, Country for Old Men & My Canadian Uncle

      Edward Thomas, Letters to Helen, edited by R. George Thomas

      Andrew Waterman, Collected Poems 1959–1998