Jeremy Hooker's 'The Release'. Part one. The problem of writing about poetry

 

This began as an attempt to write a review of Jeremy Hooker’s The Release. The first part is preamble. How to write about poetry? The second part is a discussion of the book itself. 

 

Part one. How to write about poetry? 

Jeremy Hooker’s ‘The Release’ (Shearsman 2022) is a combination of prose journal recording time Hooker spent in hospital between June 2019 and August 2020 and the poems  that grew out of the experience.

 

I read it in one sitting. The remains of ex-tropical cyclone Tiffany were still rummaging round the coast, occasionally crashing rain against the house. When the floor to ceiling curtains were blown horizontal I remembered to stop and close the windows. Otherwise, I went on reading. 

 

A positive, enthusiastic response. I wondered if I could review it. Then it occurred to me that what might be important was my reaction to the book, and my ability to explain that was secondary. How to do justice to the experience, and yet write about it in a way that might be of interest or use to a third party. 

A review, which masquerades as an objective evaluation might be essentially dishonest. A book comes alive as it inserts itself into and resonates within a complex of memories, interests, and concerns that are specifically personal, or it doesn’t. 

 

It’s impossible for me to read Hooker’s comments about Barry Lopez without remembering the first time I heard that name, or remember sitting on a sand dune watching the sun rise over the Pacific, rereading Crossing Open Ground. 

It’s impossible not to be interested in what Hooker has to say about David Jones. His book on Jones is still one of the most sane and lucid discussions of that baffling writer, and over the years he’s qualified and revised his opinions and hasn’t been afraid of doing that in print. I am currently reading a book on Jones, published last year, and wishing the writer had Hooker's clarity, enthusiasm and generosity.  

And the poems! The Selected Poems, published in 2020, were impressive, but these new poems seem to have picked up and gone further, giving the lie to the myth that poets do their best work in their twenties.  

 

I am increasingly convinced that an enthusiastic response is initially more important than the cerebral one that comes in its wake. Without it, or at least an acknowledgement of its absence, criticism starts in the wrong place and is never more than a performance with a text as a starting point. How many critics have you read, where you were left with the strange feeling that the critic doesn't enjoy or admire the writer or book they are discussing? 

 

However, to enter into dialogue with a third party about poetry it’s necessary to go beyond the subjective. Who else cares about my memories of Barry Lopez? And then there’s an immediate problem. How do you talk about poems and resist the gravitational pull of an off the shelf vocabulary? 

There are ready made tool kits available from which you could cobble a passible review if you were lazy. 

 

There’s The Reviewer Tool Kit. It contains phrases and words like ‘brilliantly original’ ‘innovative’, ‘genre breaking/bending’, ‘searing’, ‘coruscating’ ‘raw’, ‘honest’. The poet is ‘reinvigorating the language’, ‘redefining poetry’, ‘pushing the boundaries of the possible.’ Most of the time, if you’re honest and not ignorant or suffering from Historical Amnesia, you know they don’t apply. You can count the truly original, ground breaking genre breaking poets in the 1500 years of English poetry on one hand. 

 

There’s also an Academic Poetry Tool Kit which has changed so greatly in my life time. The formalist reading gave way to ‘theory’. That seems to have faded. Today, you don’t even need to read the poems. If the poet is dead, you can rifle through the biography and the letters, commenting on statements which suggest political affiliations no longer in fashion, or time bound attitudes that are no longer acceptable. Or the poems can be discussed in terms of ideologies, praised when flying the flag for whatever group is currently fashionable, or whichever particular ideology the critics are currently marching behind, damned when they don’t. 

 

Either tool kit allows the reviewer to sound like a wine connoisseur flaunting the appropriate vocabulary; the equivalent of a knowing wink or secret handshake for a limited circle of cognoscenti. Most of the time, it sounds like a wine connoisseur trying to flog the nastiest chateau de plonk. Or for those of us old enough to remember, baffled elderly Music  Journalists trying to intellectualise The Stones. 

 

To strip away this sludge and get to the experience of reading a book requires an effort and the results are neither succinct nor pretty and will still teeter preciously on the border lines of an informed and hopefully intelligent subjectivity. After all, the book that redefines your world can bore your best friends. Your highly erudite, well-read acquaintances may think there’s something very wrong with you because you fail to see any value in the famous poet they are currently spruiking. 

 

And discussing poetry becomes even more difficult, when dealing with a poet like Hooker who avoids the tricks and twitches of the fashionable. 

 

One of the earliest surviving comments on a poet in English is Laȝamon's succinct praise of Wace, whose work he must have lived with and known inside out and backwards as he translated the 15,000 lines of his work.

 

Boc he nom þe þridde; leide þer amidden.   

þa makede a Frenchis clerc; 

Wace wes ihoten; þe wel couþe writen.

 

‘He could write well.’ There may be few poets in history who are original ground breaking language reinvigorating or boundary pushing but there’s a host of great poets who wrote well and are worth rereading. Tongue in cheek, what else need to be said about Yeats? 

However, (again) If I move from the subjective to the public, is my knowledge of poetry broad enough and deep enough, and have I proved it enough, to validate the statement: ‘This is well written’?

That’s still not enough. There are any number of modern writers who can ‘write well’ whose work is instantly forgettable. Their books are on my shelves and once read rarely get taken down again. Who would pay to hear a guitar player run scales? The poem has to be well written, and at the same time offer something to the reader beyond the spectacle of a self-applauding performance.  

 

I don’t know the answers. I do know that The Release is excellent. And in the next post, a discussion of that book rather than my tangled reaction to it.