Ludbrooke: An Introduction
The Poetry Trust, 2009 www.thepoetrytrust.org ISBN
978-0-9550910-2-0, Paperback £5.00 (24pp)
This attractively produced pamphlet
of 16 poems, published in a limited edition of 300 by The Poetry Trust, precedes Ludbrooke & Others, a collection of 60
poems forthcoming this year from Enitharmon
Press (www.enitharmon.co.uk) and currently
advertised on their website.
Brownjohn is a poet whose career
covers many decades. His early work
was published in such groundbreaking series as Penguin Modern Poets (Vol. 14)
and Studio Vista’s Pocket Poets Series
(Jazz Poems). A first Collected Poems 1952-1988 appeared in 1988. Hence, it isn’t surprising that the
literary editor of The Times Literary
Supplement should describe “Alan’s late flowering with Ludbrooke as one of the best things going on in poetry at the
moment”, or that Dennis O’Driscoll, a self-confessed fan, should regard Ludbrooke as “a brilliantly wry
creation, lovably roguish, yet deeply vulnerable, too.”
thirteen lines long and so rondels rather than sonnets, is less
enthusiastic. From the repetitive mock-formality
of the titles, all containing the pronoun “his”, His Classic Modesty, His View
Of Lower Life, His Suggestion, and reminiscent of minor eighteenth
century verse such as Alexander Pope’s Of
Her Sighing and Of Her Sickness, the
poems have little to say beyond demonstrating Brownjohn’s preoccupation with male
egotism and its obverse, vulnerability. They are less the witty, satirical observations of human social
interaction of which his writing is capable, than depressing self-mockery. Ludbrooke’s life, like his cash flow,
“varies between a pose of fastidious care / and a pretence of letting it all
hang out”. In His Visit, rather than blaming himself for a failed stay with
friends, he concludes that “He just attracts appalling hosts”. Ludbrooke, as he admits in His Aspiration, “suffers / From an
MTD: Vanity – a Media-Transmitted
Disease”.
resonate beyond the poem in which they appear. In His Autumn
Courtship, for example, “On this dry day the leaves are scratching / Over Ludbrooke’s balcony like small driven
bones”, has some of the power of the opening of Gerontion by T. S. Eliot:
“Here I am, an old man in a dry month, / Being read to by a boy, waiting
for rain.” Sadly, such quality is
too thinly spread to overcome a final sense of Ludbrooke as obsessively self-regarding,
embittered, friendless, a failure with women, a red-wine drinker sipping
“resented herbal tea”. It might be
argued that poetry today has more pressing subjects with which to engage.
…reviewed by Ken Head