This review is taken from PN Review 125, Volume 25 Number 3, January - February 1999.
on Antony Dunn and Carol Satyamurti
Antony Dunn, Pilots and Navigators (Oxford University Press)
CAROLE SATYAMURTI, Selected Poems (Oxford University Press)
CAROLE SATYAMURTI, Selected Poems (Oxford University Press)
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 (Oxford University Press)
Carole Satyamurti ranges widely, drawing in her poems on events in the news, on history, on literature and personal experience. She is a witty and humane writer, several of her poems trying to enter into and empathise with the experience of other people's lives, especially the lives of other women. Her poems are playful and humorous, grave and wise.
She has a light, familiar touch with language - her poems are often conversational, and sometimes quite aware of forming one half of a communication, as in 'One', a poem addressing a lost lover as if it were itself a private exchange with the absent partner:
I assume you - then
the Oh, like an uppercut.
And look
I'm talking to you.
Because these poems seldom abstract, one is always aware of the individual as a nexus of experience. In her poetry one feels the presence of a person in the world, distinct and yet surrounded by an objectivity, a private reality pressing up against and inhabiting public reality. In 'Travelling through France', she writes of being struck that 'for some, the centre of the world / is this strip of houses called Rièstard',
whereas I know it is London
or, rather, Crouch End
or, currently,
this Ford Fiesta.
While the poems drawn from her most recent collection, Striking Distance (1994), are both technically and emotionally the most confident in ...
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