The Republic of Letters

The phone has been ringing off the hook here at The Lyre ever since our mid-week newsflash. It is philosophers / newspaper books editors, mostly, wanting to know -- in a cognitively positivist sense -- how they can get hold of the latest and greatest work by J.H. Prynne:

'What does this sentence mean?', they ask. 'What's behind it? Whodunnit? What's its level of accessibility? And whither literary fiction?'

We have tried to explain to them what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose. We have even directed them to the poetry list dedicated to this philosophical task.

We refer, of course, to Fibre & Fibre, publishers of *regular* poetry, and now being edited again -- we see over at the Guardian -- by former employee, Craig Raine. As is traditional, the Fibre list has done very well in the end-of-year round-ups. In this week's TLS, for example, Fiona Sampson votes for David Harsent's 'aptly titled' Night as the 'stand-out book' of the Forward Prize shortlist, while reminding readers that his previous volume, Legion, 'made war easier to read about by using short ballad and lyric forms'. That's the Fibre effect.

Also in the TLS feature is a contribution from our American poetry correspondent, Al Dante, who has been enjoying some literary fiction of a less accessible kind, as well as a poet whose admiration for the great poets of this country really deserves to be reciprocated (The Lyre hopes that one of Fibre & Fibre, at least, will take note). Al appears under his Anglophile pseudonym:

JEREMY NOEL-TOD

At the end of last year, an extraordinary work of detective criticism briefly appeared, despite legal threats. Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark Above the Sun (Punch Press) movingly speculates that Kenneth Koch forged one of Frank O’Hara’s greatest poems as a posthumous tribute to his friend. A noir-ish middle also recounts some very funny run-ins with the English avant-garde. Shame on the poets who forced its redaction and suppression.

Another American who reads and feels trans-Atlantically is Peter Gizzi. Threshold Songs (Wesleyan University Press), Gizzi’s fifth collection, is his most profoundly rueful and wildly humoured work to date. This is a wintry ‘un gathering’ of poems, sung in the name of ‘Tradition & the Indivisible Talent’ – a company whose ghosts include Basil Bunting, W.S. Graham and the late R.F. Langley: ‘nothing / but earth and peat and mold / and rich soft living manna / you can breathe. The must’.