|
|
 |
| |
 Harold Pinter |
Camden books | 'I am Twenty People' poetry review | Mimi Khilvati and Stephen Knight |
Harold Pinter
Three new poetry books reviewed by John Horder
I AM Twenty People! edited by Mimi Khilvati and Stephen Knight (Enitharmon £8.95) is the latest Poetry School anthology.
Only four poets stood out for me in I Am Twenty People! and all of them from women. They were: Alice Allen for the one poem Stuff; self-effacing Shazea Quraishi for Skyros; mischief-making Lorraine Mariner for Mac; and Saradha Soobrayen, the one openly gay woman poet, for Like Cold Air Passing Through Lips and On The Water Meadows.
The last two poems by Soobrayen are also published in the much more memorable New Poetries IV (Carcanet Press £9.95), edited by Eleanor Crawforth, Stephen Procter and Michael Schmidt, the experienced managing director of Carcanet Press.
They have cast their net much more widely. Also the 11 poets on offer are more substantially represented. There is not a dud poet among them.
They are still learning their trade of making their poems have the maximum impact.
I would point them all in the direction of two very different poems in Hugo Williams’s beautifully realised anthology Curtain Call 101 Portraits in Verse (Faber £7.99), Bernard O’Donoghue’s intensely visual but self-effacing A Nun Takes The Veil and Harold Pinter’s more sensational Message.
Pinter is an anthologist’s dream. I will let him have the last word:
Jill. Fred phoned. He can’t make tonight.
He said he’d call again, as soon as poss.
I said (on your behalf) OK, no sweat.
He said to tell you he was fine.
Only the crap, he said, you know, it sticks,
The crap you have to fight.
You’re sometimes nothing but a walking shithouse.
I was well acquainted with the pong myself,
I told him, and I counselled calm.
Don’t let the fuckers get you down,
Take the lid off the kettle a couple of minutes,
Go to the town, burn someone to death,
Find another tart, give her some hammer,
Live while you’re young, until it palls,
Kick the first blind man you meet in the balls.
Anyway he’ll call again.
I’ll be back in time for tea. Your loving mother.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
