This review is taken from PN Review 241, Volume 44 Number 5, May - June 2018.
on Bryce and Keung
John Ennis, Heinrich Heine, Salvador Espriu, Charles Tomlinson, Peter Bland, Carole Satyamurti, Andrew Motion, Michael Longley, David Scott, Michael Longley, John Riley, Mark Strand, Denise Riley, John Montague, Clive Wilmer, Matthew Sweeney, Peter Abbs, George MacBeth, W.S. Graham, Francis Ponge, Douglas Clark, David Gascoyne, Christine Evans, Derek Mahon, Frederick Seidel, Geoff Page, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Hofmann, Ruth Bidgood, Kirkpatrick Dobie, Vicki Raymond, David Malouf, E.J. Scovell, Jean Garrigue, Fleur Adcock, Kenneth Koch, Bernard O'Donoghue, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, James Schuyler, Lee Harwood, David Wright, Vivian Smith, Kathleen Raine, Hugo Williams, David Harsent, Michael Hamburger, Mark O'Connor, Les A. Murray, Charles Johnston, Fleur Adcock, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, Michael Riviere, Lawrence Lerner, Thomas Blackburn, D.M. Thomas, Fleur Adcock, John Montague, P.J. Kavanagh, David Holbrook, John Silkin, Günter Grass, Elizabeth Jennings, Patricia Beer, Peter Sansom, Jaan Kaplinski, Vladimir Khodasevich, Jack Clemo, Frank Koenegracht, Jamie McKendrick, Michael Symmons Roberts, Jean Bleakney, William Plomer, Colette Bryce, Kathleen Jamie, Selected Poems (Picador) £14.99
Sean Wai Keung, you are mistaken (The Rialto) £6.99
There are some poets whose control is overwhelmingly obvious. Opening her Selected Poems, Collette Bryce takes on the role of field captain barking commands at her ‘line’:
If anyone has such authority over their ‘Line’, it is Bryce. This book selects from her four published collections since the start of the millennium, and it stands as a testament to the possibility of sheer poetic skill. Even when playful and wry, there is a magnificent patterning and precision at work in ‘Plot Summary, Scene 4’:
The ‘a’ sound in ‘embrace’ and ‘face’ lurks around the lines and yet is absent from the eye-rhyme of ‘delegate’/’state’ where it is most needed. As if to rub in this failure, ‘state’ is near-rhymed with ‘waits’ and alliterated with ‘staked’ in the next line. Her chamber music is so precise as to be able to harmonise its dissonances as well as consonances.
The tightness of sounds in her poems means that when an inspired phrase comes it has an electric zip to it. Postcards land on her floor ‘like meteorites’ and the ‘refuse ...
maze through the slating,
dive from sight and down into history, Line,
take flight in the chase of the fences,
leap the streets
If anyone has such authority over their ‘Line’, it is Bryce. This book selects from her four published collections since the start of the millennium, and it stands as a testament to the possibility of sheer poetic skill. Even when playful and wry, there is a magnificent patterning and precision at work in ‘Plot Summary, Scene 4’:
[I would] approach you in a cool embrace and kiss
alternate zones of your face, solemnly, like a delegate
from some forgotten independent state
whose population waits, has staked on this
all hope.
The ‘a’ sound in ‘embrace’ and ‘face’ lurks around the lines and yet is absent from the eye-rhyme of ‘delegate’/’state’ where it is most needed. As if to rub in this failure, ‘state’ is near-rhymed with ‘waits’ and alliterated with ‘staked’ in the next line. Her chamber music is so precise as to be able to harmonise its dissonances as well as consonances.
The tightness of sounds in her poems means that when an inspired phrase comes it has an electric zip to it. Postcards land on her floor ‘like meteorites’ and the ‘refuse ...
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