A Worldly Country

Carcanet, £9.95

Talking to the Dead

Carcanet, £9.95

Little Gods

Picador, £8.99

JOHN ASHBERY’S NEW collection A Worldly Country at once opens itself to the reader and holds us at arm’s length.

To Be Affronted, as the title of one poem recognises, is a typical reaction to poetic obscurity, but Ashbery, although undoubtedly obscure, gives us grounds not to be. He does his best to make us welcome – “Come in. We were expecting you”; “Thank you for calling” – and while the alienated are “free to leave” at any time, they are invited, via an epigraph from William Empson, to “Come back, in a few days”.

His is not the difficulty of a poet such as, say, Geoffrey Hill, who tends to view the reader as an enemy, making burdensome demands of us, unforgiving of our weak-mind-edness. With Ashbery there is no guilt trip, only gentle encouragement not to give up: “Still at it, friend?”

There is a place for the reader who has not slavishly mastered the poet’s entire works, who might be coming to Ashbery for the first time, overawed by his reputation as a colossus of American poetry; and, indeed, for the nonpoetry reader.

This is not the kind of writing that allows too much poring over, and the best way to approach the poems, at least at first, is to take them at a run, without worrying too much about what they mean. Our “eyes growing accustomed to the darkness” are thus averted from the “false dawn” of “Oversubtlety”.

But “though simple enough when gazed at directly” and when heard to speak directly to and for the reader, the oblique nature of Ashbery’s poetry resists any interpretative foothold, often pulling the rug from beneath our feet, preventing us from growing too accustomed. As it goes on the book begins to turn, the easy manner dissipating, the tone becoming slightly admonitory, sometimes outright slighting: I hope you’re not listening (but you are, somewhere) Anything to sift the discerning from the mob-capped mob The freedom seemingly on offer can make us feel “Hectored by possibility”, and accordingly one may discern a formal preciousness about the way he brings the line up against silence, sealing: the borders with light and the endless diffidence light begets. That diffidence doesn’t always extend as far as it might, since Ashbery’s aspirations to a narrative that will endure for many years, even if no one reads it suggest that the latter doesn’t really matter, perhaps because he knows that people will.

In Talking to the Dead Elaine Feinstein does address the endurance of poetry diffidently, as in Old Poets: We were so sure the words of their poems would last, and that the next generation would be equally in love with the past.

That she is no longer so sure is suggested by the less-than-laureate pitch in which many of the poems memorial-ise her dead husband, delicately sidestepping the elegiac note. She writes of buying coloured stockings to honour Katherine Mansfield “in the character of Gudrun”, while “For you, I’ve bought a wool-len dressing gown” – not as honorific, yet poignantly homely, the more so since it could be his or hers.

But Feinstein is by no means blindly in love with the past, equally alive to moments of marital strife: “You think I don’t love you. I won’t argue.” Knowing there is no one to argue back, her speech-acts of love rekindle memories of old flames, as if meaning to arouse a pang or two of jealousy: One I loved well gave me a diamond – I often wondered what happened to him – Then you became the skin of all I am.

For all we know, though, “he” is “you”.

Chief among the Little Gods to whom Jacob Polley alludes is Proteus, the poet himself (occasionally a herself) a kind of shape-shifter: like a mirror, “whatever’s before me, I become”.

There is water, water everywhere in this collection, and many a drop to drink. In Brew the speaker makes his honey a cup of honey-sweetened tea, pleading with her to: Say you like something in it but you’re not sure what – which might be true of Polley’s enchanting poetry. But there is an also an undercurrent of menace and foreboding, as if there is something in the water: Poisoned by mercury, fluoride, or the television’s oracular flames.

This is a dark world of little devils, owls, ravens, animal skulls, voodoo dolls, votive candles, witches and weird little sisters. Yet the horror lies most of all in the writer’s sunburned brain, where “you lie with no ideas in the dark”.

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