BOOK REVIEW
ich Pickings
Lnf i nite iche :
ThomasWhittaker (Year 12)
I t is clear from Infinite Riches , Ian Brinton’s survey of Dulwich College’s most notable poets of the modern era, that Dulwich has had an impressive run. Many answer pivotal questions about the world around them and, in particular the nature and importance of memory. As a writer of poetry myself, it was perhaps inevitable that not everything in the selection of work from a 60-year period appealed; however, it was striking to me how many poets here strike the right balance between complexity of language and ideas and being able to impart something inventive and engaging to the reader. Firstly, Brinton does an excellent job of explaining the circumstances in which many Dulwich poets rose to prominence. In Jon Silkin’s case, this involved starting a magazine, Stand , in 1952, closing it five years later but then reinstituting it in 1961. This seems to have been a trend amongst Dulwich poets: in December 1966, students Richard Selby and Ian MacCormick set up Muse , a monthly magazine of students’ creative writing and a weekly meeting to discuss poetry more generally outside of that prescribed in the classroom. Whilst I disagree with its musical taste, which stem from its 1960s counter-cultural leanings (Pink Floyd are overrated), I entirely appreciate its spirit and the focus on different types of writing to those found in The Alleynian ; Muse focused more on articles originating entirely from students instead of write-ups of concerts and rugby matches. I feel that in this current, ever-changing political and social climate, such a publication should be resurrected in order to represent a wider range of ideas. MacCormick’s
musical taste later improved: he joined the staff of the NME in 1972 and wrote a famous early piece on The Clash under the headline ‘Sten Guns In Knightsbridge’, itself a lyric from 1977, the B-side of their debut single White Riot. But on to the poetry itself. It appears from this book that Dulwich poetry is perhaps guilty of being overly complex on occasion, a case in point being the first poem featured by Jon Silkin, entitled Astringencies and separated into two parts, ‘The Coldness’ and ‘Asleep?’. When explaining the subject matter of the poem, the massacre of the Jewish community in York on the 16th March 1190, Brinton quotes Theodor Adorno on the prospect of a cultural resurrection after the horrors of the Holocaust: ‘The authentic artists of the present are those in whose works the uttermost horror still quivers’. I find some of Silkin’s poem startlingly effective in creating atmosphere, in particular the opening six lines:
Where the printing-works buttress a church and the northern river like moss
robes herself slowly through the cold township of York, more slowly than usual, for a cold, northern river
However, the parts of the poem that deal explicitly with the massacre feel, to my mind, a little stilted; Silkin doesn’t give himself over to the emotion that such horror would inspire in someone learning of such an event, and in my view seeks to overcomplicate what he is trying to say – counter-intuitive for
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