I just found a rather harsh review of Dick Davis's new poetry collection on the New Criterion website. The review is part of an omnibus review by William Logan, who's regarded by many as a kind of literary assassin.
Here's the review. What do readers who've read the book think?
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Dick Davis was part of a group of proper English formal poets, ardent admirers of Yvor Winters, that made almost no impact on British poetry in the seventies and eighties. Like many New Formalists in America, their verse was a little too careful, a little too ordinary, and a little too dull. Sometimes as formal poets age they unbend (all too often they become fossilized instead) and use their trained ears to write in classical simplicity.
The sun comes up, and soon
The night’s thin fall of snow
Fades from the grass as if
It could not wait to go.
But look, a lank line lingers
Beyond the lawn’s one tree,
Safe in its shadow still,
Held momentarily.
The first stanza might have been written by Frost, it’s so cleanly expressive; but the second must have been by Frost’s deaf yardman, with its clogged alliteration and the awkward rhyme on a secondary accent. It’s amusing to find an exponent of the classical virtues guilty, elsewhere, of a dangling participle as bad as some freshman’s (“Lifting her arms to soap her hair/ Her pretty breasts respond”).
The poems in Belonging[4] have the soulless and manufactured air of kitchen appliances (they’re like a refrigerator talking to a microwave). They don’t have room for the personality of craft and their meter comes from a handbook, the righteous handbook of Winters. (In a good poet the meter is rarely confining—it seems liberating instead.) The poems are so professional and suburban, they don’t allow anything to ruffle their complacencies—if they were married they’d be monogamous, and dues-paying members of the Kiwanis Club. You long for a little rowdiness to trouble their surfaces, but all you get is a watered-down cocktail of Frost and Richard Wilbur.
Wilbur is a hero to young formal poets and has been generous praising them, but he was a more baroque and metaphysical and intellectual poet than poets now dare to be—too many laws (the kind poets unconsciously observe, the laws of taste) have been passed against such elaboration and decoration. Wilbur was a Bernini once, who could say things in meter that free verse would never allow (Davis is stuck saying the things free verse rejects). It would be stimulating to have a few Berninis again.
At times you suspect Davis is a closet skeptic, but you’d have to threaten his family to get him to admit it. He pursues his craft in a dogged way, writing monotonous monorhymes, or lines regular as a metronome and twice as determined (“A child let loose on Nelson’s Victory/ I fantasized his last quixotic quest,/ Trafalgar’s carnage—where he coolly dressed/ As gaudily as if he wished to be … ”), or passages like Kipling in a malarial fit:
And the sudden breeze of sunrise, like a nervous lover’s hands
Hardly touching, but still touching, as my body understands,
Like a whisper that insists on life’s importunate demands
Tugging me to love and pleasure, to what passes as we sleep,
To the roses’ quick unfolding, to the moments that won’t keep,
To the ruin of a childhood, and the tears that parents weep.
Such sentiments are best left to the experts, the greeting-card writers.
Amid the humdrum and predictable verse, however, are a few epigrams as astringent as anything by J. V. Cunningham.
The pretty young bring to the coarsely old
Réchauffé dishes, but the sauce is cold.
That has a pleasantly bitter taste; but the next, on teaching poetry workshops, is even better:
A house was rented for the visitor
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTWho came to lecture here for one spring quarter:
In house and class his only duties were
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTTo feed the hummingbirds with sugared water.
Those lines have a delayed sting and you have to be patient enough to wait for it. A poet who can write epigrams shimmering with such wit, ragged with such despair, has no business writing anything else. Cunningham, a Wintersian himself, gave most of his last forty years to epigrams and wrote half a dozen that are among the delights of the last century. Davis could do worse with his next few decades.
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