“... here's some Norman MacCaig...His poems are full of a genuinely observed strangeness, there's nothing "clever" about them, and he's not trying to show off...”
Steve, you’ve said this fellow is a better poet than Craig Raine? I also somewhat enjoy these poems, but I don’t find them artistically comparable with Raine’s “Kalahari Desert,” not even close.
In "Starling on a Green Lawn," I’m surprised that you don’t find the following an example of MacCaig trying to be clever:
“He makes such a business of going somewhere
he's like a hopping with a bird in it…”
And he’s pretty academically imagistic with,
“He angles himself to the sun and his blackness
becomes something fallen from a stained-glass window.”
For me, that’s too much “Oxford” for a starling on a lawn.
Fisherman
"Look at my hands -
pickled like vegetables."
I like this (if he’s just off his boat).
“Yet somewhere mermaids...”
Sorry, but fishing poems with mermaids live as dangerously as AMERICA, SOUTH poems with kudzu.
In the west of that notorious island west of Scotland lives a poet named Richard Murphy. Some of his work is excellent and he doesn’t sound like an Oxford prince. I think you might like him.
Bob
|