Reposted by Andrew Neilson
My take on 3 recent books about poetry - www.thetimes.com/article/2f64...
thetimes.com
What’s wrong with modern poetry — and how to fix it
Too difficult? Too attention-seeking? Too quiet? In three books, poets Lavinia Greenlanw, Alice Oswald and Denise Riley, wonder what ails the artform
![78. The Dark Horse - SUMMER/AUTUMN 2026
the linin o his trackie huid; he is a dim beast in a sea o empties,/lane disgulshit daverin star' (a lone dishevelled wandering star); the guid chiel and 'Sinéad' of the Neilson, unlike the young man and woman in Yeats's original, are exhorted to take up their Dyson and Magic Mop, a comic recommendation and contemporary update which also, more seri-ously, matches Neilson's pragmatism in the face of the failed romance of Ferg's monie mysteries. Neilson is particularly good on the realities of the world's weight in conflict with the frail optimism of art and artistic temperament. His poems are an interesting combination of both; he expounds very well those implacable moments/realisations Robert Frost would call 'too much world at once; one can imagine these as being like news of a major artistic disappointment, for example, arriving for a cash-strapped young poet on a sunlit spring morning, or the bleakness of a disordered artistic life—but also its potential marvellousness-vulner-able against the workaday world and its reassurances of routine and (one hopes) security. In the second of a five-part sequence 'Lines, an elegy for Lumsden (of which more later), weeping for the dead poet who 'schemed
I. the impossible dream, Neilson writes:
Howling depends on sounds and words reduced to sounds
and from this realisation certain life choices arise.
Roddy, no fan of those, preferred words arcane and thicketed |....])
The collections last five poems (bar a coda, the tetrameter sonnet "The Debuf, a wry account of a volume Remaindered in the Eighth Circle, - surely a too-severe punishment for a mediocre first book?) all connect with either Lumsden or Donaghy in significant ways. 'My Alphabet' is a remarkable, at points enigmatic, Abecedarian sestina, with the repeated end-words, necessary to the form](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:clwb3peld77eohiaabgy2otx/bafkreih7iy7rutjgkvugo2zqq2nevhvps453zn25fawdznou5btr3iay54)
