The publication of Sean O’Brien’s first collection of poetry criticism is an exciting event, given his growing stature in the field. As befits a writer whose poetry continually employs negatives to sketch out its shifting territory, the preface starts by explaining what the book is not. It is not “a history or a comprehensive account of contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland”; of the thirty-six poets described in its twenty-five chapters, it is not “an overall view of their bodies of work”, and, apparently, it is not “a random aggregation of essays disguised as a coherent book, or a selection of reprinted reviews”. O’Brien is more hesitant about what the book actually is: “I give an account of the experience of reading and thinking about contemporary poetry over thirty years, from the viewpoint of a poet and critic for whom curiosity tends to outweigh certainty, and for whom many questions about meaning and value remain (fruitfully I hope) open.” This endearingly cautious rubric, then, allows pretty well anything in, though a reading of the volume leaves even some of these limited propositions open to dispute.
The justification for both the exercise and title is the apparently unusual variety of the poetic scene at what O’Brien describes as “a particularly interesting poetic moment”, when “it is not clear where authority in poetic matters resides”. The length, or particularity, of this moment, like so many other assertions in this book, goes unexplained. Yet even accepting that, say, the past twenty years, or the past ten, have had something especially unregulated about them, the connection between this pluralism and the economic deregulation to which O’Brien refers, both metaphorically and directly, is far from clear. It appears more like a handy device that clears the way for O’Brien’s political concerns, which form the background to his judgments.
For instance, in an otherwise sympathetic reading of the work of Douglas Dunn, O’Brien discerns an unsatisfying lack of radical zeal. “[His] work has never found a political future to match his dramatic grip of the past – a point which might be less pressingly apparent if his rendering of consciousness paid a smaller subscription to realist modes.” It is hard to read this line without understanding O’Brien to be suggesting that a realist poet who offers an attentive rendering of the past has an obligation to propose political futures; a facet that is also lacking, for instance, in O’Brien’s more surrealistic but equally detailed poetry. Paul Durcan, on the other hand, is criticized initially for “absenting himself from politics”, as a writer who has “limitations as a poet resistant to politics”; whose utopian or transcendent moments risk “lapsing into… a cult of human relationships, of paired-off passions and intimacies in which an individual fulfilment validates a flight from the political”. Durcan, unlike some other writers in the book, gets let off at the very last minute in the unconvincing exeat of “it would do him a disservice to expect the vivid, powerful and generous feelings of a fundamentally lyric poet… to offer a sustainable (as distinct from passionate) critique of his society”.
In a grotesquely partial essay on Peter Reading, subtitled “The poet as Thatcherite”, we are in no doubt that Thatcherite is a pejorative term; but later, dissecting a comment by the critic David Kennedy, O’Brien remarks that, “peculiar though it may seem, there have been worse things than Thatcherism, and England was as ready for Thatcherism as it was fearful of it”. He goes on to call Bloodaxe Books, the publisher of these essays, “a ‘Thatcherite’ enterprise [in] its early rejection of the poetic establishment… and its subsequent incorporation into the establishment”. This line, apart from reinforcing a suspicion that no one at Bloodaxe actually reads the books they publish, is questionable. In what way has Bloodaxe been “incorporated into the establishment”? By the critical success of a minority of its many and diverse authors; the most successful of whom – like Simon Armitage, Glyn Maxwell, and O’Brien himself – then move to “establishment” houses like Faber and Oxford University Press?
But O’Brien’s vacillations over the power or constitution of the “establishment” throughout these essays is unsurprising. The references to a “proprietary Oxbridge culture” and “the Oxbridge-London mafia” are written by a Cambridge graduate who reviews for the London-based Sunday Times as well as the TLS. In an essay which significantly praises the (not dissimilar) critical work of the Oxford fellow and media pundit Tom Paulin, he writes of “the excesses of the academy” and “the corrupt, homogenizing tendency of the public prints”. Few people these days have penetrated further inside the poetry Establishment than O’Brien and Paulin. Yet in these pages Ted Hughes is described as a teddy-boy turned soldier and a poacher turned gamekeeper; Tony Harrison apparently fails to satisfy O’Brien that he has resisted the incorporation of class struggle into an easy humanism; and Armitage writes a poetry that “demands access, not transformation” – “a state of Blairite ideological denial”. Only Ken Smith, it seems, offers “a bracing class enmity”.
O’Brien’s criticism can be far more sophisticated than these examples suggest, but there are far too many moments when a vulgar Marxism takes over, the sort of “algebraic” reading he discerns in the work of others. It has its own contradictions too. In an essay on Paul Muldoon that reads more like a review of Tim Kendall’s book on that poet, O’Brien takes exception to an unfavourable comparison by Kendall between Heaney and Muldoon, and says, “This seems vulgar, more like name-calling than criticism – not least since Heaney did a good deal to create the possibility of Muldoon’s work.” This is an accusation which could as easily (and equally fatuously) be aimed at O’Brien’s style in the rest of the book, and sounds an oddly patrilineal note; besides, a similar “debt” has prevented neither Paulin nor O’Brien putting the tired old boot into Larkin and Hughes, even while acknowledging it.
O’Brien is a lively stylist, though, and an engaging enthusiast; many of his close readings are stimulating, and his citations of other critics make the book an exceptionally useful first stop for anyone wishing to look more deeply into the work of the poets he describes. The limitations of his remit make the essays necessarily brief, and they get briefer as the book races on; many essays end abruptly with a rush to ex cathedra judgments that sound like someone happy to have reached the end of another chapter. O’Brien’s concession to women’s writing ends, “Be that as it may, it seems clear that the female line(s) in poetry currently embody a good deal of its most interesting energy. The male reader may at least hope to find himself not hopelessly strange to the new conditions.” Apart from the inadvertent essentialism implied here, the preceding chapter (on Jo Shapcott, Selima Hill and Helen Dunmore) fails badly in its attempt to establish grounds for this conclusion, which smacks of knee-jerk “affirmative action” – naively viewing (say) women’s or Irish or Scottish or black writing as “good”, simply because of who and where it comes from.
O’Brien seems to have his cake and eat it in The Deregulated Muse, playing at being regulator but nodding at the anarchic uncategorizability of poetry; expressing dissatisfaction with the politics (or eschewal of politics) he discerns in the work of others, but confessing that “there may be little the poet can do about his material and his imaginative resource: the margins for change lie elsewhere”. Finally, O’Brien claims that he wishes his criticism to be widely accessible, not written “in the interior code of a class or professional cadre”. It fails on this account; many sections of the book are hard going without a background in the language and concepts of recent academic study of literature, and as O’Brien acknowledges, he has no idea whether these tools have found their way into the hands of a larger audience than the academy.
As an account of Sean O’Brien’s ambivalences, politics, prejudices and frustrations, The Deregulated Muse gives an admirable insight into the argument with himself that informs his poetry, and is also worth while for the flashing brilliance with which he picks out the interesting or attractive in his chosen texts. Like Tom Paulin’s early collection of criticism for Bloodaxe, Minotaur (1992), its deliberately ungoverned enthusiasms and passions send one back to old poets and on to new; but it still tells us more about the author than his subjects.