Customer Reviews

The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry

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Kirsch's essays are crisp and clear, and he has a kind of fearlessness
which allows him to be very direct-- often usefully so-- in summing up the essential poetic
character of this poet or that. There are real insights here, and the length of the essays
often eight pages-makes them really easy to digest.
At the same time, though intelligent and insightful at times,
he suffers from premature certainty-- which, like premature ejaculation,
isn't really fair to his partner. Criticism requires generalizations and opinions,
but Kirsch will sum up and dismiss a carreer in a few words, which don't really
grant much amplitude to encompassing a whole, often valuable body of work. When he
discusses CD Wright, for instance, he divides poetry into "rude" and "reader-friendly" poetry,
and though I don't much like Wright's drift into scrambled fragmented forms, either,
she's a more interesting poet than these silly categories can accomodate. That
is an example of a young poet/critic's error-- too much swagger.
Hopefully Kirsch will continue to grow, to enlarge his categories, and to be
a little more nuanced in his assessments.

A critic who knows to criticise, Kirsch quietly skewers Simic ('The olives and goat cheese tasted delicious'), the 'fundamentally unchallenging' and apparently influential but alas unknown to me CD Wright, and other worthies. Few escape - not the imperturbable Ashbery (me worry?) nor the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford, the venerable Geoffrey Hill. But Kirsch likes stuff too: Derek Walcot, the Eliot of The Waste Land; he's even remarkably forbearing about that curio Howl. (Could you read it more than once without embarrassment? I was more of a Coney Island of the Mind person myself.) A surprise favourite is the possibly minor Dennis O'Driscoll ('at his best') and he probably overrates Donald Justice, but I must look out Anthony Hecht (I get him all mussed with Anthony Thwaite). Of course whipping boys Collins, B and Olds, S don't escape censure; trouble is their virtues are so readily apparent that they bring out the critics in all their majesty - but aren't we all basically narcissistic and, let's face it, a tad romantic too? The best chapter, though, consists of short notices on four carefully chosen 'individual talents' or new voices - not your usual 'young guns'; he makes you want to read them all

Kirsch asks that poetry have, not meaning exactly, but significance. He makes appeal to readers - and, by implication, writers - whose taste is built on writing of more than 'the last hundred years'. He wields his scalpel with - his own word - courtesy: words like orotundity, nugatory, perspicuous gleam from the unassuming page. (Though why would you say 'an autodidact'(5 syllables) rather than 'self-taught'(2 syllables) unless you were the teensiest bit prissy?) His unpacking of Eliot is masterly - only compare Cynthia Ozick's 1989 piece or Roger Kimball's riposte in Experiments against Reality

Of course too much verse is published - there's too much of everything. It's the distribution that needs tightening up and the world is now too bloated (too big and yet too small) for us ever to see the way clear to achieve it. As pressure insensibly mounts and we glimpse the End Game for humanity taking shape, the need for good poetry (as for goodness of all kinds), the need for discrimination and a steady hand, becomes ever more pressing. We should be grateful for Kirsch's clear-eyed presence