Pamphlet Reviews: Faber New Poets (2009), by Gillian Grafton

Gillian Grafton reviews the four pamphlets that launched Faber's New Poets scheme in 2009, in which four winners of the Eric Gregory Award received a year of money and a mentor. She opens by asking what "new" can mean for poetry. Avant-gardes have often defined themselves against the old, she notes, yet novelty alone can excuse mediocre verse, and she insists that youth or a generational shift is not enough to earn the label. She is dry about the selection process, with its scouts nominated through the Arts Council and a panel that met and adjudicated, and she quotes Sean O'Brien's Guardian remark that none of the four contributes to a plague of anecdotes.

Fiona Benson is the first poet taken in turn, and Grafton disagrees with O'Brien: her poems, she says, are full of nostalgic anecdote, short meditations on a dead bird, a night in the dark or a Thailand resort. The pronouns work against the reader, and only a few phrases in First Wife earn praise. Heather Phillipson fares little better. Her humour and in-jokes, as in the poem about German phenomenology and a streak through north London, are clever, but Grafton finds the emotional weight missing and asks where the risk lies in poems about sex on a plane or breakfast alone. Jack Underwood is cheerier, with a talky, boyish voice in Hannah-loo, though his compressed, riddle-like poems are the most skilful and the poems that slide into prose the weakest.

Toby Martinez de las Rivas receives the warmest verdict. Grafton finds his writing broader than the self-absorbed lyricism of the others: it takes risks with language, sustains an argument and moves from image to image, with The White Road and Things I Have Loved singled out. She finds real depth and intensity in his poems and judges that he builds on Barry McSweeney and Gillian Allnut rather than imitating them.

The review ends by pointing to other emerging poets outside the scheme, among them Jonathan Morley, Sophie Robinson and Kate Potts, all in Bloodaxe's anthology Voice Recognition, and by saying that only time will show who is truly new.

Work

Faber New Poets

Author

Fiona Benson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Heather Phillipson, Jack Underwood

Publisher

Faber

'New' should not become a byword for 'young'

Gillian Grafton, The Wolf, issue 22

Toby Martinez de las Rivas' poems have real depth and intensity

Gillian Grafton, The Wolf, issue 22