This review is taken from PN Review 109, Volume 22 Number 5, May - June 1996.
on W.S. Graham
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 (Faber &
W.S. GRAHAM's late poems, written a long way from Paris (in a cottage in the far west of Cornwall) and no doubt independently of critical developments there, are preoccupied with a theme that was receiving attention in French literary theory at about the same time, that of the author's absence from the text he or she creates. For Roland Barthes, 'the Death of the Author' is the dissolution of an oppressive myth and the empowerment of the reader. Graham, on the other hand, might be said to take the phrase personally, and to consider himself bereaved of himself. As he wrote in the important late poem 'Implements in Their Places':
… what is the good
Of me isolating my few words
In a certain order to send them
Out in a suicide torpedo to hit?
I ride it. I will never know.
(Collected Poems, p. 244)
The author must die for the text to live. But Graham is unwilling to let go - or so the poems tell us. At the same time, they remind us that he has already let go, that what appears to be his voice is only the impersonal subject of the text.
Whatever the philosophical implications of this theme may be, it is a practical problem that every professional writer has to face. The author hands over the text to its unknown readers by way of the uncertain ...
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