The Craft of Poetry by Lucy Newlyn

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Craft of Poetry by Lucy Newlyn John Batchelor The Craft of Poetry. By Lucy Newlyn. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2021. x+ 181 pp. $25; £14.99. ISBN 978-0-300-25191-3. To write about the technical aspects of poetry writing in verse is quite a party trick, and to do it in a sequence of over 180 original poems is remarkable. Some rhetorical figures lend themselves to this treatment more comfortably than others. 'Simile', a helpful how-to-do-it item set out in verse, imagines a humble figure crossing a stream in Yorkshire: 'You imagine, for a moment, what it might be like | to be that figure, carrying her small burden.' The figure pauses 'then turns back'. The poet asks, 'Why turn back? Was the far bank so very scary? | What did she glimpse on the other side?' And the image is explained: As the figure pauses on the bridge,so simile hesitates to make a crossing.The two sides of the beck remain distincteven as they are compared.Simile is cautious; but can maintain balance. (p. 19) I admire the clarity and confidence with which this concise and helpful definition is expressed. In 'Allegory', we compare 'the parallel worlds that are unfolding, | to spell out a coherent story' (p. 24), while in a remarkably effective poem called 'Allusion' two figures are seen, one in a grey cotton smock, the other in jeans and anorak. They clearly live in different centuries. The shepherd on the far side 'glides rather than walks' while the man on this side 'strides with a firm substantial gait, but falters' (as one would when meeting a ghost) 'as they come face to face'. The mood becomes that of Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting'. Man and avatar 'join | like long-lost friends, clasped in an embrace | which lasts for a split second of shared time' (p. 25). [End Page 118] Lucy Newlyn creates her own remarkable instances of some of the major forms of celebration poem. Her 'Epithalamion' creates a traditional scene in which a young couple on their wedding night in a remote cottage 'lie peaceful, satisfied, their lives complete' and the natural world with its owls and foxes amplifies and echoes their happiness (p. 113). She runs through a long, exhaustive list of poetic forms, illustrating each with her own ingenious example of the possibilities that the form yields: her 'found poem' for example is an actual Wensleydale cheese recipe (pp. 158–59). At the opposite end of the scale is a difficult and triumphal form, the 'Ottava Rima' (Byron's grand option for his great and cynical narrative poem Don Juan). Her first stanza praises the form's versatility: This form is not reserved for those who ponderthe bleak demise of empires and of kings,nor for Romantic bards who brood and wander,moody among all solitary things. (pp. 129–31) In Byron's case, the form served the riotous debunking of everything in a spirit of celebratory rudeness, but Newlyn's exercise here opts instead for gentle melancholy in the northern landscape which is the imagined setting for most of the poems ('soon you must return and find your way | back to the disappointing light of day' (p. 129)). She creates her own fine and illuminating instances of 'Villanelle', 'Sestina', and especially 'Canzone', which is 'Intractable, repetitive and tangled' (p. 137), and I particularly liked her 'Ballade' (p. 140), which uses the playfully exasperated voice of a teacher dealing with a pupil who is slow on the uptake. She also gives her own pleasing exercises in the varieties of sonnet form that a reader is likely to encounter—Petrarchan, Spenserian, and Shakespearian—and then the form as used by later masters, including Pushkin and Meredith. In a book which offers to illustrate so many of poetry's rhetorical devices I wondered whether one of Shakespeare's favourite figures, namely 'hendyadis' (as in 'the dark backward and abysm of time'), might have been given a newly minted verse example of its own. But maybe all readers of this book will have favourite figures they might have wished to add. As it stands, this...