Reviewed by: Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty Magdalena Kay WOMEN, POETRY AND THE VOICE OF A NATION, by Anne Varty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. 248 pp. $110 hardback; $105 ebook. Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty is a ground-breaking book that engages with the work of four laureate poets of the United Kingdom and Ireland: Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead, and Paula Meehan. The book’s discussion focuses largely on the poets’ prose comments and manifesto-style pronouncements, looking at the ways they have made themselves visible in public space. Varty explores how these authors gained access to a poetry establishment dominated by men, how they critique prevailing representations of the home nation, and how they have gone from liminal positions to central ones. It also contains moments of close reading of individual poems in chapters devoted to each poet, as well as a chapter on their negotiations with William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and William Butler Yeats. Although feeling the need to seek permission to use one’s voice is, of course, not unique to female poets— even after winning the Nobel Prize, Seamus Heaney speaks of feeling the need to ask permission to undertake his acclaimed translation of Beowulf (1999)—this book centers on a gendered sense of exclusion. Varty does a wonderful job of presenting the foundational energies animating female poets in the twentieth century. The desire to make space for women’s voices is perhaps a given, but the ways in which poets take energy from their re-conceptualizations of the poetic voice is a phenomenon well worth reading about. The notion of “vitality arising from resistance, subversion and opposition” is intriguing (p. 6). Indeed, the book is not unified around any orthodoxy. For example, the question of national identity has the potential to be vexing for women writers who may feel, like the Irish poet Eavan Boland, that their voices are “outside history.”1 Other authors may argue that this issue does not hinge on a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion but rather upon recognition of various modalities for expressing collective identity, which may not hew to heroic or even public models for expressing national belonging. While this book focuses on the United Kingdom and Ireland, it is alive to the fact that influence is transnational. Sylvia Plath is positioned as an enabling voice that allows British women to feel that someone is listening, while the influence of Gary Snyder upon Meehan is sensitively recounted (p. 7). Varty is also aware that some of the poets represented here have a complex relation to the United Kingdom as a multi-national entity (indeed, it is hard to think of Boland or Meehan seeing themselves as poets of the United Kingdom). The book’s interest in laureate positions focalizes these concerns but also runs the risk of attaching overmuch importance to a role that some writers view as near-anachronism. Potential readers, though, may be drawn to this book precisely for its attention to public recognition. [End Page 176] Varty views these poets in terms of their participation in the “creative culture” of their home places, simultaneously recognizing that such culture is not often unitary (p. 94). For a poet such as Lochhead, whose “alignment of Scotland with woman” is widely recognized and serves her purpose of self-assertion, this approach makes sense (p. 104). For Duffy, the approach foregrounds one aspect of her legacy yet runs the risk of scanting her own refusal to engage in identity politics—regarding the identity-driven conversation surrounding the New Generation Poets, Duffy laconically comments, “the whole thing ‘misses the point’” (p. 125). In her chapter on Duffy, Varty recognizes that “the ‘edge’ has been presented entirely in terms of content and identity politics,” yet for practicing poets, their verse-craft may well be the real point, and the poet’s consciousness may not readily ally itself with available labels (p. 126). Perhaps not all the poets Varty studies would agree with the book’s focus on community—a reading of its individual analyses tempts us with the question of whether and when they have ever...
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Sep 28, 2023
Andrea Rizzi 
Open Access