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Something seems to be stirring out there. I’m too cautious and cynical to proclaim a renaissance in formalist poetry but the prognosis is promising. Clarence Caddell, an Australian, has published the second issue of The Borough: A Journal of Poetry. I wrote about the first issue in September. Just last week I wrote about the third issue of New Verse Review.   Especially gratifying is seeing five poems by R.L. Barth in The Borough. Bob is a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam who served as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. He is the finest American poet to have served in that war – not that there’s a lot of competition for the title. His work is composed in the plain style, practiced by writers from Ben Jonson to Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham. Here is Bob’s anti-sentimental “Letters from Home”:   “I never understood Why others couldn’t wait For letters when what good Came from news three-weeks late?   “Came from an alien world Of proms and family meals? Took mind from war, unfurled No memory that heals   “But carelessness that kills? The truth is that you’re here On mountains or foothills Where life, not home, is dear.”   And here is “Flying Home,” subtitled March 1969, also from The Borough:   “Weapons surrendered to the armory, My separation papers well in hand, I look at the dark porthole, where I see Myself in civvies, ill-prepared to land.”   Another good poet collected in The Borough is Vivian Smith, a retired teacher in Australia who turns eighty-two this year. As with Barth, note the emotional realism, the pared-down though conversational style, and the anti-sentimental tone. Here is Smith’s “Birthday”:   “Born in the year that Hitler came to power, I don’t do face book, blog or tweet, I’ve never owned a mobile phone, kind of old-school, dressed to disappear,   “and yet surprise, surprise, I’m still alive with poems waiting to be written down like sign writing scribbled on the sky, half-erased, already vanishing.   “I like my life, the humdrum tasks. I never hungered for the hippie trail. Indifferent to fashion, I survive. Poems can be true in different ways.   “I write them down, I do not hold my breath. I don’t just sit around, waiting for my death.”   On Friday, Bob sent me a new poem not published in The Borough. Of it he writes: “Here's a poem about a subject I've been thinking about for fifty-five years. Like [J.V. Cunningham], I am a renegade Catholic; but, as JVC certainly knew, being a renegade doesn't mean you leave the training behind.” Here is “A Soldier-Poet Courts Controversy”:   “‘Your unchecked rages and so forth are clearly Manifestations of PTSD.’ An all-encompassing excuse, for sure, To which I give a blunt response: bull shit. Agnostically, call them . . . character flaws; But Catholics know the Seven Deadly Sins Down in the depths of their iniquity, And strictly hold themselves accountable.”

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The year the young Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) boarded The Beagle, Mary Shelley contemplated the nature of the imagination in her preface to the most famous edition of Frankenstein, concluding that creativity “does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos” — the chaos, she meant, of ideas and impressions and memories seething in the cauldron of the mind, out of which we half-consciously select and combine fragments to have the thoughts and ideas we call our own. The chaos of ideas Darwin was about to absorb on the Galapagos would lead him to… read article

Robert Chandler has rescued, through translation, much of Russian literature for the Anglophone world – Pushkin, Andrey Plantonov, Teffi, Lev Ozerov and Vasily Grossman, among others. Most of Chandler’s own prose I've read has been in the form of brief introductions and notes. Several years ago he alerted me to a piece about Rudyard Kipling’s poetry he had published in Granta, and I wrote about it. Now I find two other essays published in the same journal – one on Grossman, the other one devoted to an English poet previously unknown to me: “Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger,” by Randall Swingler. Chandler assures us the book contains Swingler’s “best work,” much of it devoted to his experiences as a British soldier during World War II.  One of the most gratifying pleasures I know as a reader is learning of a writer new to me and finding him worthy of attention. The passages quoted by Robert look more than promising. My university library has only one book by Swingler in its collection: The God in the Cave. It’s a twenty-three-page poetry collection published in 1950 by Alan Swallow of Denver (publisher of Yvor Winters), and I’ve put a hold on it. Through interlibrary loan I will request a copy of The Years of Anger. My only hesitancy is that Swingler was a communist, an affiliation not associated with the writing of first-rate poetry. Robert quotes the central stanza of “The Day the War Ended”:   “There is a moment when contradictions cross, A split of a moment when history twirls on one toe Like a ballerina, and all men are really equal And happiness could be impartial for once.”