Sir,
As widow of the late Basil Creighton, translator and novelist, may I make a small amendment to David Arkell's generous obituary in PN Review 68?

D.A. states: "Creighton had to accept that multiple reprints do not necessarily mean multiple fees".

Both Der Steppenwolf and Grand Hotel were translated by Basil Creighton for a small set fee plus a royalty on sales. Later translations were done on different terms.
Frances Creighton

Sir,
Grevel Lindop must have meant his piece on 'The Empty Telephone Boys' to be provocative in the extreme, but I'll rise to the bait. I find its last paragraphs in particular dismaying and spectacularly unfair.

The collections of Peter Ackroyd and Ian McMillan prompt him to consider "some serious arguments" underlying (or "lurking behind") the writing of, among others, J.H. Prynne. He believes these arguments "need to be addressed", but chooses to challenge them as they surface in the poetry, not of Prynne, who has made "something genuinely interesting" out of them, but of McMillan and Ackroyd, who, in his opinion, haven't. I find this strategy disingenuous: why use poets you don't admire as a stalking-horse for poets you do? Or why pay lip-service to Prynne at all, if you despise his "baleful heritage"? Wouldn't it have been fairer to have reviewed Ackroyd and McMillan in the customary column or so, and at three pages' length to have challenged Prynne directly?

Grevel Lindop gives his coinage a wider application, via "Ackroyd's Cambridge background", to Prynne's "disciples" (infected with "pretentiousness of the most dreary kind") - among others, the poets represented in 'A Various Art'. So far, this anthology hasn't been reviewed, let alone assimilated, in the pages of PN Review, and since false modesty on the part of its publisher can be ruled out, in view of the (often stringent) reviews accorded to other Carcanet volumes, I can't think why not. It seems to me the most significant anthology of English poetry since 'New Lines'.

In his chapter on new writers in 'British Poetry Since 1970' (Carcanet, 1980), Blake Morrison devotes his last few pages to the Martians: "An important development in the decade has come at its very end". Three lines are given to "the work and teaching of J.H. Prynne, who in Cambridge at least has a considerable reputation", though "there is no clear sign of what his following amounts to". The Martians just sneak in, to be highly acclaimed; yet the brilliant 'Grosseteste Review', the best of several kindred magazines, had been in operation since the late sixties! There was "no clear sign" only for a fledgeling metropolitan pundit who couldn't be bothered to look - yet nearly ten years on Grevel Lindop has only a sneer for the Ferry Press, while collections as "various" - and as marvellous - as 'History Labour Night' by John Seed and 'Continual Song' by Michael Haslam are every bit as glibly dismissed (and incidentally neither was reviewed in PNR)

For that was a well-named anthology. Is Grevel Lindop really suggesting a dreary equivalence between the poetries of Roy Fisher, Douglas Oliver, Thomas A. Clark, John Riley, Peter Riley, Tim Longville and the half a dozen other excellent poets who were or ought to have been in 'A Various Art'? Between Prynne's 'Treatment in the Field' and Oliver's 'The Infant and the Pearl'? Between Fisher's 'After Working' and 'Chronographia Continuata' by John Riley? 'Lindisfarne: Dole' by Seed and 'North, North, I Said...' by Anthony Barnett?

"Free verse, according to Proust, was tennis without a net. This is tennis without a ball." An ace, perhaps, but critical shadow-boxing is as tedious a sport. When Grevel Lindop turns from "cataloguing... language-games" he offers some remarkable prescriptions, in rather unconvincingly purple prose: poets must "try with all their might to close... the gap between word and experience"; "force the language near to breaking point or sing it into trance in the effort to make us see the object or feel the emotion"; and accomplish "the formidable task of trying to hold words up adequately to sensed and known reality". This strikes me as an amalgam of T.S. Eliot and Dr Johnson, while F.R. Leavis is behind the contention that poetry "relieved of the constraints of mimesis" is cheap and irresponsible. Now, if Grevel Lindop is a Leavisite, when the chips are down, good luck to him! But I believe a present-day 'New Bearings in English Poetry' would focus on 'The Empty Telephone Boys'. May I challenge Grevel Lindop to take on the best of them? They deserve consideration in their own right.
James Keery

Sir,
I'm grateful to James Keery for reading, and responding to, my article. But I wish he'd tackled the central points, instead of reproaching me for failing to review ten (plus "half a dozen") other poets I wasn't asked, or offered the space, to discuss.

Does Keery agree, or disagree, with my judgment on the poems of Ackroyd and McMillan? Does he accept my diagnosis of the theoretical basis of their work? If not, what theoretical foundations does he see there? These are the things we ought to be arguing about.

For the rest: I gather someone else is reviewing A Various Art for PNR. I didn't discuss Prynne in more detail because I was considering writing a separate piece on his work, and had just written the (necessarily brief) article on him for the Cambridge Guide to English Literature. In an case, respect for a poet is quite compatible with the view that his influence has been "baleful": I have a high estimate of Hopkins, for example, but he has damaged many an imitator. I'm happy to be in the company of Eliot, Johnson and Leavis, but surely the view that poetry has a mimetic responsibility is at least as old as Aristotle? Finally, to say in this context that John Seed's and Michael Haslam's work is "glibly dismissed" seems a little disingenuous, as it suggests that I mentioned it. I didn't.

I have a respect for Prynne mainly because it seems to me that other poets can learn from him: he has developed techniques which can be applied elsewhere. My real response to Prynne is probably in my poems, particularly in the title poem of the Tourists volume (1987) and the sequence 'Monuments' in the same book.
Grevel Lindop