Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36012 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Jo Shapcott
`I haven't seen any description of where and who we are that's as clear, balanced and inspiring.'

An Independent on Sunday reader
`Many of us... have learned to read unfamiliar poetry with greater understanding as a result of this weekly analysis.'

Times
"She chooses her poems with impeccable taste, an anthologist of the very best contemporary poetry"

Customer Reviews

A well-meaning Eng Lit lesson that doesn't really succeed
I must confess that I'm a little baffled by all the praise that has been heaped on this book. I have found it deeply annoying - in fact it's one of the most irritating books I have encountered for quite some time.

The ineptly written introduction falls among several stools. As an explanation of the techniques employed in poetry, it cuts too many corners and for a beginner contains too many unexplained specialist terms. As a potted history of poetry it omits many key developments, and as an introduction to contemporary verse, it misleadingly and rather simplistically equates progress in poetry with anti-Thatcherite and feminist thinking.

Some of the 52 poems are indisputably fine pieces, and it's good to see excellent examples of the work of U.A. Fanthorpe, Elaine Feinstein, Liz Lochhead, and Fleur Adcock. Seamus Heaney's well-known poem The Skunk is here, as is Thom Gunn's Still Life. But really good poems such as these speak for themselves, and don't require the hugely laborious dissection job that seems to be Ruth Padel's preferred line of approach. Very many of the poems in the collection are relatively unknown over-intricate pieces that would have been best left in obscurity. Indeed one is tempted to conclude that if a poem needs taking apart word by word and sound by sound before it makes sense, it shouldn't really have been written in the first place.

Each of the 52 poems is immediately followed by Ruth Padel's commentary-cum-analysis, and as one reads each poem, one is uncomfortably conscious of the earnest teacher impatiently lurking in the wings, piece of chalk in hand. The analyses, frequently impaired by rather unclear English, are not always very convincing and one often winces as Padel forces the poem into her own conception of the poet's intention. The essentially didactic nature of the exercise is given emphasis by many underlinings, by the use of CAPITAL LETTERS (wake up at the back, there!) and by an air of confident certainty that seems to allow for no ambiguity in interpretation.

Sometimes, the would-be exegesis succeeds not in providing enlightenment but in making matters very much worse, with entertaining results. See, for example, Padel's commentary on Gillian Allnutt's poem Barclays Bank and Lake Baikal, which manages to render an already difficult piece completely and utterly incomprehensible. Indeed this commentary, along with several others, must surely be a prime contender for inclusion in Private Eye's Pseud's Corner. Try reading it aloud, and try to keep a straight face while doing so, and you will see what I mean.

If you encounter a contemporary poem that you can't for the life of you understand, the likelihood is that it's the poet's fault, and not yours. Good poets write work that needs no detailed analysis, but asks only for the employment of intelligence and concentration. In that sense, Padel's primer is of rather limited usefulness. Even so, this book has its value. It's certainly a source of innocent amusement, if nothing else.

Not what it says on the cover!
This book is not 52 ways of looking at a poem, it is 52 ways of looking at 52 poems. The difference may sound slight, but it's not. There is no progression of learning from one poem to the next, as each is treated individually.

If like me you are a 'poetry virgin who wonders what all the excitement is about' (back cover blurb), and someone who is sceptical of the whole 'poetry thing', you will find that this book simply reinforces the unattainable essence of poetry.

In the introduction, Ruth Padel makes a big effort to try and convince the reader of how 'exciting' modern poetry is, how 'accessible' it is: "It's Not that Difficult, Not Elitist, Obscure or Irrelevant: and It's Written for You" (pg.55). Unfortunately, she fails miserably by having to interpret each of the 52 poems - but doesn't have 'insider' knowledge from the poets of what the poems are about. This leaves us really with one poets interpretation (review) of another poets work. For example, the 'line by line' exploration mentioned by other reviews (for a different version) is inaccurate, as there is no line-by-line exploration (except where elements of technical technique are mentioned), and sometimes nothing other than guesses, as in the explanation of the third poem: "Are we in a monastery? And what brass fenders? Are they gleaming in the monastery kitchen, is he planning to retire to a villa with log fires, or are we talking vintage cars? The point is, we cannot know."

On the positive side, if you are studying poetry or are intending to do so, this is a good book, and I did learn something from the introduction about various techniques to help dedicated poetry enthusiasts to interpret poems. What the book thoroughly failed to do was convince me that I should put the necessary effort into researching poetry enough to understand it. Quite the opposite in fact. For example, I would have to know (or research) that "After months of jaw jaw, ..." echoes Winston Churchill's words "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war" in order to understand what the poet is inferring. Maybe this comes naturally to the author's Independent on Sunday readers.

Possibly what irritates me the most about this book is that Ruth Padel recognises why poetry is struggling but does nothing about it other than to reinforce the effort required to 'get into' poetry: "You have to have time, and something like solitude, to go into and out of a poem, turn it over, think about it. ... At work, most people now have an exhausting reading load. Even doctors have to spend longer reading patients' notes on screen than attending to the lesion those notes are about. I asked a fifty-year-old barrister ... why he never read poetry now. 'Because of all the other stuff I have to read,' he said. 'Piles of papers ... The last thing I want to do after that is open a book, especially something you have to concentrate on.'"

If, like me, you were looking for a book to inspire you to read (or write) poetry, this is not the book for you.

fascinating and helpful to the common reader
Although I do buy some modern poetry much of the stuff that gets published seems to be written for a tiny clique, and few (other than Wendy Cope and Carol Anne Duffy) are as immediately accesible as Philip Larkin. The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, never gets a poem printed without a ton of derision from hacks, which doesn't help those who'd like to find out if anyone new is as good as the poets we read at school and university.

Ruth Padel's collection, taken from a weekly newspaper column in the Independent on Sunday is therefore a real thrill, whether you're a student trying to find out how to approach modern poetry or an interested but bewildered reader. She puts modern poetry into a literary and historical context, with a light, witty touch, and explores 52 poems line by line, with a bit about each poet as introduction. Her own metaphors in doing so are sometimes as good as anything in the poem - I loved her description of Peter Redgrove's "playful love poem" to The Visible Baby "offering its own bright images and spell-like repetitions like a coloured mobile."

Though not, I imagine, includsive of all good modern poets this is a terrific way in.