Reviews in full
More reviews
Someone might be interested to see the history of reviewing, and like the rest of this website this is offered for somebody with that curiosity. In 1978 I published a book of poems about life as a gastarbeiter, in a magazine called Ochre. One of the editors forwarded me an extract from a letter (30/3/79) from Lee Harwood: "I was immensely moved by the work, more moved by a poem than I have been for ages. It's all quite stunning - to read work which comes out of such a real necessity (Olson's old insistence, and more), and in which it's as though the writer's whole life is laid out there, but laid out not as mere autobiography, personal catharsis, but as a force that also affects others. A work of art in the best sense of that phrase. And such a great and deep pleasure and excitement to read a text that's talking about something that really matters, something that has this firm human base." Yes, well, it was all downhill from there. Thanks, Lee! Later in the beginning there was Prynne's Letter about Threads of Iron, written in 1981 but published in Grosseteste Review in 1984. Its purpose was to persuade Cambridge-type publishers to publish Threads, but that didn’t happen. (No good being connected if the work isn't good enough.) So we skate over ten years during which my career was under the ice, and get to the publication of ‘Cut memories’ in 1991.
John Cornall, Marxism Today, October 1991.
"Mutated muse
Andrew Lawson's Human Capital and Andrew Duncan's Cut Memories and False Commands are uncompromising books by two leading young poets from the avant garde of British poetry.
Human Capital illustrates the way, as culture progresses, that materialist-based values are eroded and counterfeit ones set in their place. These false values, like the multifarious consumables of late-capitalist culture, titillate and exhaust human resource. The first poem begins: “The dusk-linked trees are etched/ filled with noise and shadowed bodies.” The etched and filled trees, ambiguously neither natural or artificial, can be connected to late references to enervated sensory experience: images of eyes emptied and filled or veins charged with the acid torpor of lethargy.
These lines do not refer to things-as-seen, but to a conceptual image, not unlike the intellectual metaphor of 17th C, ‘metaphysical’ poetry. He forces the reader to make connections and to find precise contexts or conceptual frameworks for each line or phrase: ‘from cool seclusion you emerge/ flushed with meaning like/ the trained and arching ash.’
Human Capital's intransigent, artful address can be seen as refusal to titillate, or otherwise cheaply excite its reader. Lawson seeks instead to engage the reader in the process of constructing meaning. The obtuseness and difficulty of Andrew Duncan's open-ended sequence of poems is found in its wide range of reference though there is also thematic complexity and discontinuity of expression. His poetry is furious and bardic but it nevertheless does not rest secure, as the book’s title hints, with the imperatives of sentiment as a valid ground for truth-saying. “Days, worked out in city walls,/light, shining out of other people,/ How can I say anything to you/” (‘A Flock of Deer by Moonlight’). Like Allen Ginsberg, Duncan acknowledges the body as the final reference and creative motor of the poetry, but, like Wyndham Lewis, he also regards the body as machina carnis, a debased organism hooked to a diet of cheap sensation.
One of the hopes of poetry has been that it could deliver a renewed sense of commonality and human order in the face of nature, but in the visions of these two books there seems little chances. The human condition appears mutated rather than merely estranged. What affirmative stance both poets do offer is a kind of freedom gained by means of a vigorous, critical, intellectually lively detachment from the common life."
John sent me the unedited version of this review but I couldn't find it just now! Still, I found other interesting stuff. It is interesting to recall a review of Andrew’s book, since after all he withdrew from the scene quite soon after this point. Joint reviews generally piss me off and I am happy to cut out the bits that didn’t relate to me, but this didn’t affect me that way. The terminology of the review is standard Leftism of the time, but this works out rather well, Andrew and I were both part of a wider current of opinion. That current may have changed since 1991, but both of us addressed collective ideas. You could say, everyone was asking the questions that we were answering. Another review: “Andrew Duncan takes the mythology of London and the Thatcher years in a different direction, seeing it in a broader historical and unphilosophical direction. This means Cut memories lacks the immediacy of [some other book] but leads to some interestingly difficult poems, the seriousness and ambition is to be welcomed, though some of the poems do seem over-long and overblown in their rhetorical devices. Duncan is concerned with dissecting 'that seed of thought... I call England… a nation like an uncovered machine', with an ironic although sometimes angry overview. This is a hard book to find quotable chunks in : Duncan's imagination works on a different scale to most poets – like most poets that's true of. What he seems to need now is a good strict editor to restrain his excesses. Cut memories… is a challenging book, stimulating for the reasons individual poems sometimes fail, but with much to admire." (Mark Robinson, Scratch #6, circa 1991)
John reviewed the same book again for City Limits, May 1991:
"Cut Memories and False Commands
One of the problems for late-modern poetry of such rare seriousness and ambition as this has been how to present imaginations of society which are prospective as well as critical. How to do this without the particular values of the poetry becoming subject to fixed, externally located systems of ideas? The prospective condition Duncan maps out is hard won, and necessarily hard to define. It is, if it is any fixed condition at all, a new state without commonalty: a liberated, sometimes anarchic, sometimes pacific, sometimes even mystical, existential order to which poetry’s process of critical rage can bring the self by breaking the false divisions of the private and social day."
So, 115 words. This qualifies my reaction… while I think John had really got the book, the reviews editor squashed the review to the point where it wasn’t saying very much. This is a contrast to other reviewers who got more space but didn’t get the book or didn’t really try to review it. Andrew Lawson also reviewed ‘Cut Memories’ (I think it was that one), I can’t find that review. Interesting to see that adjective “bardic”, when I read in Edenkoben in 2011 the same word came up (in German). This is an abiding word. Because I did Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic as a degree subject, I am very attached to the idea of bard. Actually it just means “poet”, although it implies a geographical site, in Scotland and adjacent countries, which I find highly sympathetic. But it is a dog-whistle for some people, suggesting “what they hate about poetry”.
The next item isn’t actually a review, but a letter (to Simon Jenner). However, it is about ‘Skeleton’, my book with Waterloo. (Dare I admit that the original painting was “Skeleton looking at Chinese statuettes” (by James Ensor, 1885), I saw this in Cologne in 1973 and forgot the exact title.) Eratica is Simon’s magazine, for the Brighton scene. Porter said:
"We talked on the phone about Eratica a little, especially about the interview with Seymour-Smith, and your articles concerned with music. .... But this letter is really about one thing, namely Andrew Duncan's Skeleton looking at Chinese Pictures, which I have been reading at intervals now for some time. I think that certainly it is a remarkable book and I also recognize that I must inhabit a shamefully restricted part of the literary world for me not to have encountered his poetry before this - specially as he is not that young and my having about twenty years or so ago known his father, the Historian of Science at Loughborough. But, at the risk of seeming complacent, I must add to this confession that I have never really been aware of the particular segment of poets and poetry which you and your friends have fostered among the contending groups and sorties of contemporary verse. The poetry Scene (sic) is as bewilderingly various as any order of theologians in Byzantium. Of course your colleagues (and the poets you champion) have contacts with well-known claques, such as the prynnites and their Cambridge halations, and with several groupings of the Salon des refuses especially the oxford chapters. Using such a term which will appear derogatory isn't truly so. What passes for orthodoxy in its own time can later be merely fustian. After all, it was Larkin himself who said that 'the present is always over-valued'.
What I admire most in Duncan's work is his willingness (indeed enthusiasm) for not confining things to any sort of ghetto. he likes as much history and mediaevalism as Pound but he also aspires to a contemporary concern for life in our modern mercantile mess. His chief fault, it seems to me, is a sort of verbal vertigo: too many words spin round and round, and though he has a good sense of rhythm it's difficult to prevent the poems seeming over-stuffed. It's excellent the way he refuses to be cowed by any sort of notion of appropriateness or decorum, so that runic and traditional poetics mix with the city of London and sexual turpitude in modern life. He can be plain enough when he wants to be, as in 'Master of Arts’. To end in so quotidian and disillusioned a way, and slightly before to score the poem much more richly - 'The softness of the buds/ tempts the mouth of ruin' is good writing, I believe. There are many properly 'big' poems - something which doesn't get attempted sufficiently these days, presumably because it gives hostages to fortune. I'm thinking of 'Nomad carpets' 'Rasengang in the forest' 'In the ethnographical musuem' and 'Night Train'.
His two styles are happily mixed in 'The Phone ringing in an empty flat' where the common-enough miseries of rejection are fanned into a sort of holograph of Apocalypse. if I say that I am reminded at times of Peter Redgrove, Lawrence Durrell, and even David Jones, with a touch of a more unbuttoned Geoffrey Hill, I am not implying any kind of influence but only the bewildered commentator's need to resort to more familiar writers in order to comprehend someone new. It is certainly a rich book and now that I have marinaded my mind in it, I expect to return to individual poems with greater pleasure and understanding.
I can't recall ever having read this volume reviewed anywhere. Not that journals and newspapers do much reviewing of poetry anywhere, but perhaps also my own width of reading is too small. Duncan may be well-known in the pages of some of the 'Little magazines' but in general you don't see his name conjured by the leading figures in Contemporary Poetry."
* It is almost depressing to see how good a reviewer Porter was, even when not writing for publication.
About 2000. Andy Jordan wrote:
"The thematic structure of Duncan’s writing is energised by fleeting or ‘concrete’ dialectical currents. They come in gusts. You can’t easily quote from a poem. It’s not that you can’t show how effective the writing is, but that you can’t do justice to the architectural grandeur of the ‘whole’ process. He has no fear of embracing the multifarious ‘tradition’.”
– Andrew Jordan on poems that were in shearsman #35, writing in 10th Muse, 1999. Jordan again:
"This issue of Fire concludes with the opening five sections of Andrew Duncan's Anglophilia - a Romance of the Docks. Duncan constructs an unofficial history of the making of the myth of England in pre second world war Britain, outing a sense of what existed behind Stephen Tallents' documentary evocations of "the good life". The introduction refers to these in terms of nonist false landscapes. In reference to Q-ships - antisubmarine ships disguised as "helpless merchantmen" - Duncan presents England as a Q-landscape.
He marshals a yard from the streets of Bolton
picks the ones who look most
workerly, takes their names
to form a child's view of authenticity
from part three, Putting England on film The poem has been serialised in Fire 22-24. It would be worth collecting those issues for the Andrew Duncan representations of representations alone."
(Fire was Jeremy Hilton’s magazine. Nonism is Jordan's poetic movement claiming that place does not exist, the past does not exist, etc.) That was from 10th Muse #13, on-line. Pretty good. Jordan again:
Switching and Main Exchange.
“These poems were written in 1980-81 as part of a book called Threads of Iron, of which the other half has been published as Cut Memories and False Commands. related material came out as Sound Surface. Seventeen years later, I am someone else;” so says the author in his afterword; the afterword is a defining text in this set, the publication of which marks a high point in the author's historicisation of himself. He is informed of his own past inadequacies, noting how his attempted The “seizure of a world, not as it is, but as a set of moving patterns generating a future world, thus failed...” All this emotion recollected in tranquillity is, ironically as much an attempt to re-recuperate the words of an earlier Prynne (now someone else) as to capitalise on them; his authorisation – quoted on the back cover- is ‘compelling’. This is a backward glance at a lost youth. Not a youth wasted in pubs and drugs, but in study and the works canteen. It can be read as ‘a kind of nerd lament’ or as a “major landmark of Duncan's development...” This landscape is the flipside to Nicholas Johnson's (anthology) Foil, it is the big view in which detail founders. These are bold lyrics by turns gentle and robust: “The soft unspoken lyric is our keepsake and we are the air/ the silent song...” (from Oreads). The intro prose, endless highway, does read like something written in a state of youthful narcissistic withdrawal – “I watch the city spread out like the dead forms of my depression” but the rest of it is much less adolescent. It races along too with that amphetamine velocity readers of Duncan will be familiar with, the symphonic aspects redolent of Shelley. His poems work best in the contention of a collection, where the grandeur of his vision- a kind of personal Thule effect – can be seen as overarching, defiantly modern."
[Thule is Iceland, not really sure how that fits in]
"Pauper Estate Andrew Duncan.
‘Train rush of big emotions shivering words with/ turbulence like wings, wilder and more shaking than/ articulate sound.’ These lines, quoted from 'The Speaking Head', go some way to defining the techniques used in Pauper Estate. It rushes along, as if aligned on some arbitrary (and modernist) fixed point on the horizon, in a hurry to proceed but providing a commentary on something else, a failed chemical wedding,an economic context in which each relational aspect remains unknown to itself. It’s as if our socio-economic lives have been recreated or represented as the performance of a state of mind. ”We see the withdrawal from politics, and from exploring emotional experience.” So says Duncan in his Foil review. Pauper Estate is the manifesto that backs up and interdicts the statement. In relation to Switching and Main Exchange, the same romantic persona is present but the alienation has been refined. The book contains some neat literary criticism too:
“I wouldn't mind taking out Neil Astley with a Heckler & Koch, catching
Peter Forbes in the open with a Glock nine mill,
freezing Seamus Heaney with a long-barrelled Ruger
The anus is a key innovation and not everything has one.”
There are times when Andrew Duncan is nothing but a crowd-pleaser. His self-mutilating symbols of power, when collected and laid out in the right order, are a discrete Kabbalah of affective revolutionary praxis. None of these cards have pictures on, but they do appear to work."
Steve Spence in ‘Terrible Work” #10:
"Pauper Estate by Andrew Duncan; Shearsman, Lark Rise, Fore Street, Kentisbeare, Cullompton Devon EX15 2AD (£6) - This is a brilliant little book. Duncan's work should be much better known than it is. For someone unfamiliar with his poetry this is as good a place to start as any, and my advice to a new reader would be to immerse yourself in the poems, go with the flow, enjoy the changes in register, the wide references, the vast amounts of sheer information, the sudden occasional 'intrusion' of the self, before reflecting on the whole. Duncan is certainly a writer whose work takes time to get to grips with but there are plenty of points of entry into the poems selected here. There's a political aspect to his work, for example, but it's a very self-questioning sort of politics and is as likely to change gear and slip into more playful mode before the end of the poem. How about this piece of daydream polemic: "I wouldn't mind taking out Neil Astley with a Heckler & Koch, catching/Peter Forbes in the open with a Glock nine mill/Freezing Seamus Heaney with a long-barrelled Ruger/The anus is a key innovation and not everything has one". Not much chance of Duncan being published by Bloodaxe or Poetry Review, eh!? Excellent work."
*
What I noticed when I was sifting through cuttings to get quotes for the Selected, in 2017, was that the reviews stopped around 2003. Nothing for ‘Geometry’, two reviews for ‘Savage Survivals’, nothing for the official publication of ‘In Five Eyes’ (with the two samizdat books), nothing for my first Selected poems. Mysterious. I guess the industry changed.
"This book forms the second half of Andrew Duncan's long-discussed and elusive manuscript Threads of Iron, which was the subject of an extended analysis by J.H. Prynne ... invariably subject to caricature -- James Keery, PN Review. Andrew ."
- can’t locate the rest of this piece but it must have concerned ‘Main Exchange’.
There are a number of other reviews – I am not insolent enough to grab a whole lot of things which are available on-line and which I obviously don’t own. The most detailed and insightful reviews are by Tim Allen (in Eratica) and Peter Hughes (in Intercapillary Space). There is a review by Simon Jenner within a book which is unfinished, so I had better leave that alone. Pretty interesting, though. I left out reviews by Simon Smith and Peter Manson as not being very focused. There is a vast piece by J.E. Keery on 'Threads' (both parts) which I am not picking up, because it would drown everything else. He re-lineates one of the poems to make it sound like Geoffrey Hill, interesting but maybe not the most direct way to describe the book. I am doubtful how much a reviewer can say in 150 words (I admit that Cornall, Robinson, and Spence seem to have the skill to do that), but it is also striking that some people are still happy to sign reviews where they have not taken the poetry in at all, the monologue in their heads did not allow them to listen to the poet whatsoever. As if art demanded passivity and they despise passivity. Moving on 15 years, there was a very long review by Erec Schumacher of my German selected (from Bruterich), but also a short note by Marion Poschmann, here:
"Radio Vortex. Herausgegeben von Norbert Lange. Aus dem Englischen von Konstantin Ames, Thomas Kling, Jan Kuhlbrodt, Norbert Lange, Ulf Stolterfoht, Barbara F. Tax und Hans Thill.
Die Pathosformel von Andrew Duncan ist ein weiter poetischer Bogen, der globale und historische Tableaus der Verlorenheit umspannt. Vom Kurgan der Skythen geht die Bewegung zum Sarkophag in Tschernobyl, vom Raketenkonstrukteur Sergej Koroljow zu den Insassen der Staatlichen Besserungsanstalt in Perm. Andrew Duncan folgt den Spuren der Macht, die sich durch die Geschichte ziehen, folgt den ideologisch geprägten Sehnsüchten durch die großen Räume und Träume der Menschheit, und er zeigt deren Opfer in ihrer einsamen Körperlichkeit. Ausgehend von einigen Gedichten, die seinerzeit noch Thomas Kling übersetzte, konnte Norbert Lange eine Reihe renommierter Mitstreiter gewinnen, um eine zweisprachige Auswahl aus 30 Jahren zu präsentieren. Mit Kling teilt Duncan das Interesse an visuellen Medien, an Ethnographie und Relikten schamanischer Kulturen, die Geste des Aufbegehrens und die durchaus feinfühligen Selbstbeobachtungen, letztere immer verdeckt von lässigem Trotz."
Explaining a poem to a translator is really difficult, and this is where you realise that the poems have to speak for themselves.
Someone might be interested to see the history of reviewing, and like the rest of this website this is offered for somebody with that curiosity. In 1978 I published a book of poems about life as a gastarbeiter, in a magazine called Ochre. One of the editors forwarded me an extract from a letter (30/3/79) from Lee Harwood: "I was immensely moved by the work, more moved by a poem than I have been for ages. It's all quite stunning - to read work which comes out of such a real necessity (Olson's old insistence, and more), and in which it's as though the writer's whole life is laid out there, but laid out not as mere autobiography, personal catharsis, but as a force that also affects others. A work of art in the best sense of that phrase. And such a great and deep pleasure and excitement to read a text that's talking about something that really matters, something that has this firm human base." Yes, well, it was all downhill from there. Thanks, Lee! Later in the beginning there was Prynne's Letter about Threads of Iron, written in 1981 but published in Grosseteste Review in 1984. Its purpose was to persuade Cambridge-type publishers to publish Threads, but that didn’t happen. (No good being connected if the work isn't good enough.) So we skate over ten years during which my career was under the ice, and get to the publication of ‘Cut memories’ in 1991.
John Cornall, Marxism Today, October 1991.
"Mutated muse
Andrew Lawson's Human Capital and Andrew Duncan's Cut Memories and False Commands are uncompromising books by two leading young poets from the avant garde of British poetry.
Human Capital illustrates the way, as culture progresses, that materialist-based values are eroded and counterfeit ones set in their place. These false values, like the multifarious consumables of late-capitalist culture, titillate and exhaust human resource. The first poem begins: “The dusk-linked trees are etched/ filled with noise and shadowed bodies.” The etched and filled trees, ambiguously neither natural or artificial, can be connected to late references to enervated sensory experience: images of eyes emptied and filled or veins charged with the acid torpor of lethargy.
These lines do not refer to things-as-seen, but to a conceptual image, not unlike the intellectual metaphor of 17th C, ‘metaphysical’ poetry. He forces the reader to make connections and to find precise contexts or conceptual frameworks for each line or phrase: ‘from cool seclusion you emerge/ flushed with meaning like/ the trained and arching ash.’
Human Capital's intransigent, artful address can be seen as refusal to titillate, or otherwise cheaply excite its reader. Lawson seeks instead to engage the reader in the process of constructing meaning. The obtuseness and difficulty of Andrew Duncan's open-ended sequence of poems is found in its wide range of reference though there is also thematic complexity and discontinuity of expression. His poetry is furious and bardic but it nevertheless does not rest secure, as the book’s title hints, with the imperatives of sentiment as a valid ground for truth-saying. “Days, worked out in city walls,/light, shining out of other people,/ How can I say anything to you/” (‘A Flock of Deer by Moonlight’). Like Allen Ginsberg, Duncan acknowledges the body as the final reference and creative motor of the poetry, but, like Wyndham Lewis, he also regards the body as machina carnis, a debased organism hooked to a diet of cheap sensation.
One of the hopes of poetry has been that it could deliver a renewed sense of commonality and human order in the face of nature, but in the visions of these two books there seems little chances. The human condition appears mutated rather than merely estranged. What affirmative stance both poets do offer is a kind of freedom gained by means of a vigorous, critical, intellectually lively detachment from the common life."
John sent me the unedited version of this review but I couldn't find it just now! Still, I found other interesting stuff. It is interesting to recall a review of Andrew’s book, since after all he withdrew from the scene quite soon after this point. Joint reviews generally piss me off and I am happy to cut out the bits that didn’t relate to me, but this didn’t affect me that way. The terminology of the review is standard Leftism of the time, but this works out rather well, Andrew and I were both part of a wider current of opinion. That current may have changed since 1991, but both of us addressed collective ideas. You could say, everyone was asking the questions that we were answering. Another review: “Andrew Duncan takes the mythology of London and the Thatcher years in a different direction, seeing it in a broader historical and unphilosophical direction. This means Cut memories lacks the immediacy of [some other book] but leads to some interestingly difficult poems, the seriousness and ambition is to be welcomed, though some of the poems do seem over-long and overblown in their rhetorical devices. Duncan is concerned with dissecting 'that seed of thought... I call England… a nation like an uncovered machine', with an ironic although sometimes angry overview. This is a hard book to find quotable chunks in : Duncan's imagination works on a different scale to most poets – like most poets that's true of. What he seems to need now is a good strict editor to restrain his excesses. Cut memories… is a challenging book, stimulating for the reasons individual poems sometimes fail, but with much to admire." (Mark Robinson, Scratch #6, circa 1991)
John reviewed the same book again for City Limits, May 1991:
"Cut Memories and False Commands
One of the problems for late-modern poetry of such rare seriousness and ambition as this has been how to present imaginations of society which are prospective as well as critical. How to do this without the particular values of the poetry becoming subject to fixed, externally located systems of ideas? The prospective condition Duncan maps out is hard won, and necessarily hard to define. It is, if it is any fixed condition at all, a new state without commonalty: a liberated, sometimes anarchic, sometimes pacific, sometimes even mystical, existential order to which poetry’s process of critical rage can bring the self by breaking the false divisions of the private and social day."
So, 115 words. This qualifies my reaction… while I think John had really got the book, the reviews editor squashed the review to the point where it wasn’t saying very much. This is a contrast to other reviewers who got more space but didn’t get the book or didn’t really try to review it. Andrew Lawson also reviewed ‘Cut Memories’ (I think it was that one), I can’t find that review. Interesting to see that adjective “bardic”, when I read in Edenkoben in 2011 the same word came up (in German). This is an abiding word. Because I did Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic as a degree subject, I am very attached to the idea of bard. Actually it just means “poet”, although it implies a geographical site, in Scotland and adjacent countries, which I find highly sympathetic. But it is a dog-whistle for some people, suggesting “what they hate about poetry”.
The next item isn’t actually a review, but a letter (to Simon Jenner). However, it is about ‘Skeleton’, my book with Waterloo. (Dare I admit that the original painting was “Skeleton looking at Chinese statuettes” (by James Ensor, 1885), I saw this in Cologne in 1973 and forgot the exact title.) Eratica is Simon’s magazine, for the Brighton scene. Porter said:
"We talked on the phone about Eratica a little, especially about the interview with Seymour-Smith, and your articles concerned with music. .... But this letter is really about one thing, namely Andrew Duncan's Skeleton looking at Chinese Pictures, which I have been reading at intervals now for some time. I think that certainly it is a remarkable book and I also recognize that I must inhabit a shamefully restricted part of the literary world for me not to have encountered his poetry before this - specially as he is not that young and my having about twenty years or so ago known his father, the Historian of Science at Loughborough. But, at the risk of seeming complacent, I must add to this confession that I have never really been aware of the particular segment of poets and poetry which you and your friends have fostered among the contending groups and sorties of contemporary verse. The poetry Scene (sic) is as bewilderingly various as any order of theologians in Byzantium. Of course your colleagues (and the poets you champion) have contacts with well-known claques, such as the prynnites and their Cambridge halations, and with several groupings of the Salon des refuses especially the oxford chapters. Using such a term which will appear derogatory isn't truly so. What passes for orthodoxy in its own time can later be merely fustian. After all, it was Larkin himself who said that 'the present is always over-valued'.
What I admire most in Duncan's work is his willingness (indeed enthusiasm) for not confining things to any sort of ghetto. he likes as much history and mediaevalism as Pound but he also aspires to a contemporary concern for life in our modern mercantile mess. His chief fault, it seems to me, is a sort of verbal vertigo: too many words spin round and round, and though he has a good sense of rhythm it's difficult to prevent the poems seeming over-stuffed. It's excellent the way he refuses to be cowed by any sort of notion of appropriateness or decorum, so that runic and traditional poetics mix with the city of London and sexual turpitude in modern life. He can be plain enough when he wants to be, as in 'Master of Arts’. To end in so quotidian and disillusioned a way, and slightly before to score the poem much more richly - 'The softness of the buds/ tempts the mouth of ruin' is good writing, I believe. There are many properly 'big' poems - something which doesn't get attempted sufficiently these days, presumably because it gives hostages to fortune. I'm thinking of 'Nomad carpets' 'Rasengang in the forest' 'In the ethnographical musuem' and 'Night Train'.
His two styles are happily mixed in 'The Phone ringing in an empty flat' where the common-enough miseries of rejection are fanned into a sort of holograph of Apocalypse. if I say that I am reminded at times of Peter Redgrove, Lawrence Durrell, and even David Jones, with a touch of a more unbuttoned Geoffrey Hill, I am not implying any kind of influence but only the bewildered commentator's need to resort to more familiar writers in order to comprehend someone new. It is certainly a rich book and now that I have marinaded my mind in it, I expect to return to individual poems with greater pleasure and understanding.
I can't recall ever having read this volume reviewed anywhere. Not that journals and newspapers do much reviewing of poetry anywhere, but perhaps also my own width of reading is too small. Duncan may be well-known in the pages of some of the 'Little magazines' but in general you don't see his name conjured by the leading figures in Contemporary Poetry."
* It is almost depressing to see how good a reviewer Porter was, even when not writing for publication.
About 2000. Andy Jordan wrote:
"The thematic structure of Duncan’s writing is energised by fleeting or ‘concrete’ dialectical currents. They come in gusts. You can’t easily quote from a poem. It’s not that you can’t show how effective the writing is, but that you can’t do justice to the architectural grandeur of the ‘whole’ process. He has no fear of embracing the multifarious ‘tradition’.”
– Andrew Jordan on poems that were in shearsman #35, writing in 10th Muse, 1999. Jordan again:
"This issue of Fire concludes with the opening five sections of Andrew Duncan's Anglophilia - a Romance of the Docks. Duncan constructs an unofficial history of the making of the myth of England in pre second world war Britain, outing a sense of what existed behind Stephen Tallents' documentary evocations of "the good life". The introduction refers to these in terms of nonist false landscapes. In reference to Q-ships - antisubmarine ships disguised as "helpless merchantmen" - Duncan presents England as a Q-landscape.
He marshals a yard from the streets of Bolton
picks the ones who look most
workerly, takes their names
to form a child's view of authenticity
from part three, Putting England on film The poem has been serialised in Fire 22-24. It would be worth collecting those issues for the Andrew Duncan representations of representations alone."
(Fire was Jeremy Hilton’s magazine. Nonism is Jordan's poetic movement claiming that place does not exist, the past does not exist, etc.) That was from 10th Muse #13, on-line. Pretty good. Jordan again:
Switching and Main Exchange.
“These poems were written in 1980-81 as part of a book called Threads of Iron, of which the other half has been published as Cut Memories and False Commands. related material came out as Sound Surface. Seventeen years later, I am someone else;” so says the author in his afterword; the afterword is a defining text in this set, the publication of which marks a high point in the author's historicisation of himself. He is informed of his own past inadequacies, noting how his attempted The “seizure of a world, not as it is, but as a set of moving patterns generating a future world, thus failed...” All this emotion recollected in tranquillity is, ironically as much an attempt to re-recuperate the words of an earlier Prynne (now someone else) as to capitalise on them; his authorisation – quoted on the back cover- is ‘compelling’. This is a backward glance at a lost youth. Not a youth wasted in pubs and drugs, but in study and the works canteen. It can be read as ‘a kind of nerd lament’ or as a “major landmark of Duncan's development...” This landscape is the flipside to Nicholas Johnson's (anthology) Foil, it is the big view in which detail founders. These are bold lyrics by turns gentle and robust: “The soft unspoken lyric is our keepsake and we are the air/ the silent song...” (from Oreads). The intro prose, endless highway, does read like something written in a state of youthful narcissistic withdrawal – “I watch the city spread out like the dead forms of my depression” but the rest of it is much less adolescent. It races along too with that amphetamine velocity readers of Duncan will be familiar with, the symphonic aspects redolent of Shelley. His poems work best in the contention of a collection, where the grandeur of his vision- a kind of personal Thule effect – can be seen as overarching, defiantly modern."
[Thule is Iceland, not really sure how that fits in]
"Pauper Estate Andrew Duncan.
‘Train rush of big emotions shivering words with/ turbulence like wings, wilder and more shaking than/ articulate sound.’ These lines, quoted from 'The Speaking Head', go some way to defining the techniques used in Pauper Estate. It rushes along, as if aligned on some arbitrary (and modernist) fixed point on the horizon, in a hurry to proceed but providing a commentary on something else, a failed chemical wedding,an economic context in which each relational aspect remains unknown to itself. It’s as if our socio-economic lives have been recreated or represented as the performance of a state of mind. ”We see the withdrawal from politics, and from exploring emotional experience.” So says Duncan in his Foil review. Pauper Estate is the manifesto that backs up and interdicts the statement. In relation to Switching and Main Exchange, the same romantic persona is present but the alienation has been refined. The book contains some neat literary criticism too:
“I wouldn't mind taking out Neil Astley with a Heckler & Koch, catching
Peter Forbes in the open with a Glock nine mill,
freezing Seamus Heaney with a long-barrelled Ruger
The anus is a key innovation and not everything has one.”
There are times when Andrew Duncan is nothing but a crowd-pleaser. His self-mutilating symbols of power, when collected and laid out in the right order, are a discrete Kabbalah of affective revolutionary praxis. None of these cards have pictures on, but they do appear to work."
Steve Spence in ‘Terrible Work” #10:
"Pauper Estate by Andrew Duncan; Shearsman, Lark Rise, Fore Street, Kentisbeare, Cullompton Devon EX15 2AD (£6) - This is a brilliant little book. Duncan's work should be much better known than it is. For someone unfamiliar with his poetry this is as good a place to start as any, and my advice to a new reader would be to immerse yourself in the poems, go with the flow, enjoy the changes in register, the wide references, the vast amounts of sheer information, the sudden occasional 'intrusion' of the self, before reflecting on the whole. Duncan is certainly a writer whose work takes time to get to grips with but there are plenty of points of entry into the poems selected here. There's a political aspect to his work, for example, but it's a very self-questioning sort of politics and is as likely to change gear and slip into more playful mode before the end of the poem. How about this piece of daydream polemic: "I wouldn't mind taking out Neil Astley with a Heckler & Koch, catching/Peter Forbes in the open with a Glock nine mill/Freezing Seamus Heaney with a long-barrelled Ruger/The anus is a key innovation and not everything has one". Not much chance of Duncan being published by Bloodaxe or Poetry Review, eh!? Excellent work."
*
What I noticed when I was sifting through cuttings to get quotes for the Selected, in 2017, was that the reviews stopped around 2003. Nothing for ‘Geometry’, two reviews for ‘Savage Survivals’, nothing for the official publication of ‘In Five Eyes’ (with the two samizdat books), nothing for my first Selected poems. Mysterious. I guess the industry changed.
"This book forms the second half of Andrew Duncan's long-discussed and elusive manuscript Threads of Iron, which was the subject of an extended analysis by J.H. Prynne ... invariably subject to caricature -- James Keery, PN Review. Andrew ."
- can’t locate the rest of this piece but it must have concerned ‘Main Exchange’.
There are a number of other reviews – I am not insolent enough to grab a whole lot of things which are available on-line and which I obviously don’t own. The most detailed and insightful reviews are by Tim Allen (in Eratica) and Peter Hughes (in Intercapillary Space). There is a review by Simon Jenner within a book which is unfinished, so I had better leave that alone. Pretty interesting, though. I left out reviews by Simon Smith and Peter Manson as not being very focused. There is a vast piece by J.E. Keery on 'Threads' (both parts) which I am not picking up, because it would drown everything else. He re-lineates one of the poems to make it sound like Geoffrey Hill, interesting but maybe not the most direct way to describe the book. I am doubtful how much a reviewer can say in 150 words (I admit that Cornall, Robinson, and Spence seem to have the skill to do that), but it is also striking that some people are still happy to sign reviews where they have not taken the poetry in at all, the monologue in their heads did not allow them to listen to the poet whatsoever. As if art demanded passivity and they despise passivity. Moving on 15 years, there was a very long review by Erec Schumacher of my German selected (from Bruterich), but also a short note by Marion Poschmann, here:
"Radio Vortex. Herausgegeben von Norbert Lange. Aus dem Englischen von Konstantin Ames, Thomas Kling, Jan Kuhlbrodt, Norbert Lange, Ulf Stolterfoht, Barbara F. Tax und Hans Thill.
Die Pathosformel von Andrew Duncan ist ein weiter poetischer Bogen, der globale und historische Tableaus der Verlorenheit umspannt. Vom Kurgan der Skythen geht die Bewegung zum Sarkophag in Tschernobyl, vom Raketenkonstrukteur Sergej Koroljow zu den Insassen der Staatlichen Besserungsanstalt in Perm. Andrew Duncan folgt den Spuren der Macht, die sich durch die Geschichte ziehen, folgt den ideologisch geprägten Sehnsüchten durch die großen Räume und Träume der Menschheit, und er zeigt deren Opfer in ihrer einsamen Körperlichkeit. Ausgehend von einigen Gedichten, die seinerzeit noch Thomas Kling übersetzte, konnte Norbert Lange eine Reihe renommierter Mitstreiter gewinnen, um eine zweisprachige Auswahl aus 30 Jahren zu präsentieren. Mit Kling teilt Duncan das Interesse an visuellen Medien, an Ethnographie und Relikten schamanischer Kulturen, die Geste des Aufbegehrens und die durchaus feinfühligen Selbstbeobachtungen, letztere immer verdeckt von lässigem Trotz."
Explaining a poem to a translator is really difficult, and this is where you realise that the poems have to speak for themselves.
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