Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Borderline Poet, 4 Nov 2002
I'm alternately repelled and very much intrigued---at times even dazzled---by this poet's work: certainly interested enough to buy it and to recommend it, though not unreservedly, to others. Carlin is drunk on language and on literature. Poetry bubbles up inside her quite naturally, and, yes, it is her own voice we hear (one can be utterly confident that there's no one else writing today who in any way resembles her), though at the same time one keeps hearing worryingly familiar inflections in her verse. (Hopkins? Emily Dickinson? Rene Char? Geoffrey Hill? Ted Hughes? Peter Redgrove? Paul Celan?)
Some readers will feel that there's too much style and not enough content---she's all brackets and dashes like a Victorian governess high on amphetamines---though what content there is does often reveal itself after a closer reading. One has the sense of some kind of comprehensible meaning desperate to burst through the clotted and at times slightly hysterical syntax: though meaning of the paraphrasable variety is hardly what this kind of writing aspires to (if it were, she'd be writing in prose). 'Deeps of unquizzy browncurl' is a good example of the sort of phrasing one comes across. ('Unquizzy'?) Her strongly idiosyncratic manner can irritate when it's married to Jungian psychoanalysis (phrases like 'half-sense of soul-streams' do little or nothing for me), to what one can perhaps only call 'green theology', or to that ever-popular genre, 'literature about literature'. (For my taste, much of what she writes is just too transparently allusive.) I naturally fight shy of most modern 'religious' poets too, though that's just prejudice, I suppose. (The American Jane Kenyon gets away with it---just.) But what Carlin's quite brilliant at is conveying not simply the sense, but the pressure and spirit of place (what Hopkins called 'instress'; 'thisness' and 'instress' are two of Carlin's own most distinctive themes). Both Midas' Daughter and How We Dream of the Dead were strongly evocative of the English Welsh borderlands. History, mythology and topography twisted and melded into a richly textured if occasionally incoherent and even self-indulgent series of hymns and meditations on the flora and fauna and local history of Shropshire and Powys: but Carlin also has a more hermetic and occult agenda, which creates a lot of the excitement and not unpleasing bafflement encountered when one first becomes acquainted with her.
Marble Sky is both more approachable and 'reader-friendly' than either of her previous volumes. The first section, Bottles of Blood, is autobiographical. She returns to her South African and Polish roots. The writing is plainer and more disciplined than hitherto, though no less consciously crafted. She can write powerfully about natural forces. Fear of Wind is surely the finest poem on this subject since the late Poet Laureate's Wind (from The Hawk in the Rain). Some of her poems about birds and animals are also impressive and memorable: Birdsong, Good Friday Swans on the Water Meadow, Escape of Two Pigs, and the two extraordinary poems entitled By Mad Dog Farm, which try to get into the non-human minds of two dogs. In the same way that she's constantly struggling to push human language towards the non-verbal worlds of the bestial and the elemental so she seems to be striving at the same time to invest the non-human world with a spiritual life---but without falling into the traditional anthropomorphic trap. There are still gushy Shelleyan outpourings of self-pity---'I thaw with pain' and so on---but for the most part these are mercifully kept in abeyance.
In conclusion, then, hers may well be a lone and unfashionable voice in the glib, techno-glitzy world of contemporary British poetry, but it's undoubtedly one worth heeding.
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