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Raining

Donald Davie, 5 May 1983

Later Poems 
by R.S. Thomas.
Macmillan, 224 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 333 34560 6
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Thomas Hardy Annual, No 1 
edited by Norman Page.
Macmillan, 205 pp., £20, March 1983, 0 333 32022 0
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Tess of the d’Urbervilles 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell.
Oxford, 636 pp., £50, March 1983, 0 19 812495 3
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Hardy’s Love Poems 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Carl Weber.
Macmillan, 253 pp., £3.95, February 1983, 0 333 34798 6
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The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy. Vol. I: Wessex Poems, Poems of the Past and the Present, Time’s Laughingstocks 
edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford, 403 pp., £19.50, February 1983, 0 19 812708 1
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... has been on the defensive. The first move was to prefer to Gittings’s biography a later one by Michael Millgate, which is said to be (I haven’t read it) more temperate and more boring, at all events more compassionate. A second rearguard action is mounted by Peter J. Casagrande (he’s American, and thanks the General Research Fund of the University of ...

Poetry and Christianity

Barbara Everett, 4 February 1982

Three for Water-Music 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 69 pp., £2.95, July 1981, 0 85635 363 9
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The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse 
edited by Donald Davie.
Oxford, 319 pp., £7.95, September 1981, 0 19 213426 4
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... in consciousness who have got to know the hard way where the limits of their theories lie. Donald Davie’s new sequence of poems, ‘Three for Water-Music’ (which fills the first third of his Carcanet paperback), refers not only to pleasant 18th-century entertainments by water, but to something like Yeats’s ‘words for music, perhaps’: or like ...
The Trick of It 
by Michael Frayn.
Viking, 172 pp., £11.95, September 1989, 0 670 82985 4
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The Long Lost Journey 
by Jennifer Potter.
Bloomsbury, 179 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 7475 0463 6
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Falling 
by Colin Thubron.
Heinemann, 152 pp., £10.95, September 1989, 0 434 77978 4
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Coming to Light 
by Elspeth Davie.
Hamish Hamilton, 191 pp., £12.95, August 1989, 0 241 12861 7
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A Careless Widow 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Chatto, 176 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 7011 3438 0
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... Michael Frayn hasn’t published a novel for 16 years, but it’s immediately clear from his new one that he hasn’t lost the trick of it. After so long a lay-off some self-consciousness might have been expected, but Frayn has turned this potential liability to advantage by making it an essential part of his subject ...

Self-Positioning

Stefan Collini: The Movement, 25 June 2009

The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries 
edited by Zachary Leader.
Oxford, 336 pp., £18.99, May 2009, 978 0 19 955825 4
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... volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They ...

What became of Modernism?

C.K. Stead, 1 May 1980

Five American Poets 
by John Matthias, introduced by Michael Schmidt.
Carcanet, 160 pp., £3.25, November 1979, 0 85635 259 4
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The New Australian Poetry 
edited by John Tranter.
Makar Press, 330 pp., £6.50, November 1979
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Carpenters of Light 
by Neil Powell.
Carcanet, 154 pp., £6.95, November 1979, 0 85635 305 1
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Mirabell: Books of Number 
by James Merrill.
Oxford, 182 pp., £3.25, June 1979, 0 19 211892 7
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The Book of the Body 
by Frank Bidart.
Faber, 44 pp., £4.50, October 1979, 0 374 11549 4
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Skull of Adam 
by Stanley Moss.
Anvil, 67 pp., £2.50, May 1979, 0 85646 041 9
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Poems 1928-1978 
by Stanley Kunitz.
Secker, 249 pp., £6.50, September 1979, 0 436 23932 9
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... is because there is in the British literary climate something of that ‘philistinism’ Donald Davie says was characteristic of the Movement: ‘We would not entertain for a moment the idea that poetry could be, in some degree, or from some points of view, a self-justifying activity.’ Why should it be that, insofar as it’s possible to abstract ‘the ...

Certainties

Donald Davie, 20 May 1982

In Defence of the Imagination 
by Helen Gardner.
Oxford, 197 pp., £12.50, February 1982, 0 19 812639 5
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... is the 20th-century sensibility; hers is, charmingly but irrelevantly, stalled with, perhaps, Michael Drayton. In that once again, I dare say, the consensus is with ...

Pound and the Perfect Lady

Donald Davie, 19 September 1985

Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy 
by Richard Humphreys.
Tate Gallery, 176 pp., £12.95, June 1985, 0 946590 28 1
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Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909-1914 
edited by Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz.
Faber, 399 pp., £25, January 1985, 0 571 13480 7
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... art is quite another matter: altogether more ambitious and probing. Out of D.S. Chambers and Michael Baxandall and some Italian scholars Robinson measures up Pound’s ideas about the right relation between artist and patron against what we know of how patronage in fact worked in the ducal fiefs of Renaissance Italy; and when he deals with the closeness ...

Retrospective

Donald Davie, 2 February 1984

A World of Difference 
by Norman MacCaig.
Chatto, 64 pp., £3.95, June 1983, 0 7011 2693 0
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... trial. But his name comes in handily because it has been coupled with MacCaig’s. This was by Michael Schmidt, who pointed out that the sort of figurative writing associated with Raine, patented as ‘ludic’, had been practised by MacCaig from long ago. What Schmidt had in mind must have been something like ‘Running Bull’: All his weight’s ...

Jokes

Donald Davie, 11 June 1992

In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets 
by Peter Robinson.
Oxford, 260 pp., £35, May 1992, 0 19 811248 3
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... Basil Bunting, and who else? In a tight spot Wall-ace Stevens appealed to the famous line from ‘Michael’, ‘And never lifted up a single stone’ (drawing from it unwarrantable inferences, as Robinson points out): but Stevens’s admirers know they are on safer ground if they appeal to Coleridge or Keats, Blake Or Emerson. It takes some nerve, in ...

What a carry-on

Seamus Perry: W.S. Graham, 18 July 2019

W.S. Graham: New Selected Poems 
edited by Matthew Francis.
Faber, 144 pp., £12.99, September 2018, 978 0 571 34844 2
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W.S. Graham 
edited by Michael Hofmann.
NYRB, 152 pp., £9.99, October 2018, 978 1 68137 276 1
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... of those poets who make the writing of poetry into the subject of the poems they write,’ Donald Davie noted with some scepticism. ‘The commonsense view is that this drastically limits the importance and interest of what they write; and I think this is true.’ But Graham could conceive nothing more important or interesting:To be always alone is ...

Browning and Modernism

Donald Davie, 10 October 1991

The Poems of Browning. Vol. I: 1826-1840 
edited by John Woolford and Daniel Karlin.
Longman, 797 pp., £60, April 1991, 0 582 48100 7
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The Poems of Browning. Vol. II: 1841-1846 
edited by John Woolford and Daniel Karlin .
Longman, 581 pp., £50, April 1991, 9780582063990
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... than the paratactic. In a later phase of the Modernist endeavour this would be recognised, so that Michael Edwards (Of Making Many Books, 1990) can say of Charles Tomlinson – in my view, quite rightly: ‘Tomlinson’s syntax is what makes his poems, linguistically, what they are ... in the poetry of our century, Tomlinson enacts the revenge of ...

My Americas

Donald Davie, 3 September 1981

... versions were hawked in vain round the University Presses of North America: it was left to Michael Schmidt and Peter Jones of the relatively unfunded Carcanet Press to recognise the moral and cultural responsibility. In fact, I find my sympathy goes out to Drummond very easily indeed. I must declare an interest, for I was associated with Virginia de ...

Errata

Christopher Ricks, 2 December 1982

T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage 
edited by Michael Grant.
Routledge, 408 pp., £25, July 1982, 0 7100 9226 1
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... to wonder whether it is the original author (in the following case, Harriet Monroe) or the editor (Michael Grant) or you yourself who must be getting giddy: ‘While stating nothing, it suggests everything that is in his rapidly moving mind, in a series of shifting scenes which fade in and out of each other like the cinema. The form, with its play of ...

Homage to Ezra Pound

C.K. Stead, 19 March 1981

The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound 
by Michael Alexander.
Faber, 247 pp., £7.95, April 1979, 0 571 10560 2
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Ezra Pound and the Pisan Cantos 
by Anthony Woodward.
Routledge, 128 pp., £7.95, April 1980, 0 7100 0372 2
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Ezra Pound and the Cantos: A Record of Struggle 
by Wendy Stallard Flory.
Yale, 321 pp., £12.60, July 1980, 0 300 02392 8
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Ezra Pound and His World 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Thames and Hudson, 127 pp., £5.95, February 1981, 0 500 13069 8
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End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound with Poems from Ezra Pound’s H.D. Book 
edited by Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King.
Carcanet, 84 pp., £2.95, February 1980, 0 85635 318 3
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... strangely, considering his origins in the neo-Augustan ‘Movement’ of the Fifties) Donald Davie, who kept the subject respectable, the interest alive. Michael Alexander suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more common than hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work ...

What Kind of Guy?

Michael Wood: W.H. Auden, 10 June 1999

Later Auden 
by Edward Mendelson.
Faber, 570 pp., £25, May 1999, 0 571 19784 1
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... he was up to the job, did he think the job was up to much? His later work is full of what Donald Davie, thinking of Larkin, called ‘diminished expectations’. ‘No world/wears as well as it should,’ Auden writes. Love is ‘far too/Tattered a word’ to describe a casual but agreeable affair. Minor ailments warn against ‘the flashy errands’ of ...

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