Abstract
Through careful analysis of the poetry and lives of six poets, Neal Alexander traces how modernist aesthetics continued to find expression in the second half of the 20th century in Anglophone literature. Alexander outlines three key aspects of late modernism: ‘the prevalence of longer forms’ (p. 10); ‘a concern with the poetics of place’ (p. 10); and ‘its tendency to foreground the cultural significance of peripheral and non-metropolitan places’ (p. 12). The book devotes chapters to interpretations of six poets’ work (David Jones, Basil Bunting, and W.S. Graham from the UK; Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, and Gwendolyn Brooks from the US).
Alexander pays close attention to how specific places are represented and experienced in the poets’ works; that said, his analysis is helpfully more nuanced than making simple arguments about the ‘rootedness’ of the poems and poets. For instance, in his reading of Basil Bunting’s long poem Briggflatts, Alexander writes: ‘To speak of the poem’s “rootedness” in place is therefore to neglect its grasp of the dynamism of place itself, its manifestation of change in the here-and-now, and to underestimate the entanglement of local, regional, national, and international affiliations to which it attests’ (p. 79). A cultural geographic understanding of place as lively process undergirds his reading of all the poets in the book, whether he’s examining David Jones’ Wales, Lorine Niedecker’s Wisconsin, or Gwendolyn Brooks’ Chicago.
One of the key points that Alexander returns to in his monograph is that the important places in these poets’ works and lives are ‘peripheral’ to large metropolitan centers. What is peripheral, of course, is different depending upon from where one stands. In the chapter on Niedecker, the peripheral is also aligned with edges. Alexander argues that her ‘critical regionalism finds its fullest expression in her attention to the edges of places where land and water, human and natural habitats meet’ (p. 120). I appreciate how Alexander extends the analytic of the peripheral to encompass more than a relationship to metropolitan ‘centers’. A consideration of such edges – and related hybridity and in between-ness – is an impulse that moves through late modernism into much contemporary poetry engaged with place.
Another thread that weaves through Alexander’s readings of these poets is the relation between memory and place, and how that finds expression in their specific projects. For instance, on Bunting, Alexander writes that ‘richly sensuous memories of past experience are situated exactly and deliberately in their proper places, which thereby become loci of memory’ (p. 78). Relatedly, Alexander writes that a ‘strong undertow of nostalgia can be felt in Graham’s Greenock poems’ (p. 93), and referring to Brooks, writes that ‘it is the dismembered past of a Bronzeville that has all but ceased to exist that Brooks’s poem seeks to recover imaginatively’ (p. 187). In other words, memories of place – expressed through poems – are also a kind of personal and/or social poetic historiography, which perhaps is also an aspect of late modernism that carries through to contemporary poets. In his final chapter, Alexander briefly traces some of the after lives of late modernism, through for instance, Olson’s influence through Black Mountain School poets up through Tarlo’s ‘radical landscape poetry’ (p. 203) or through the work of postcolonial poets such as M. NourbeSe Philip. Although this was not the book’s project, it would have been useful to see these further tracings or complications of late modernism’s impulses expanded, if even slightly.
In the book’s introduction, Alexander writes, ‘many late modernist poems can usefully be considered “geographers” in their own right’ (p. 18). I love this turn of phrase: instead of the poet as a geographer, the poem itself is a geographer. Poems go out into the world themselves. They engage with places and they make sense of the world. They reflect and complicate representations of specific places and relationships between and among places.
Alexander has produced a nuanced and insightful book; through reading it, a reader becomes a better reader of these poets and a better reader of place.
