Verbal (Pre)Occupations

Abstract

In his 1992 survey, ‘Poetry for the ’90s’, for British Book News, Peter Forbes reports that ‘some see as a superleague’ in British poetry since the 1960s the four Hs — Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Toni Harrison and Geoffrey Hill — joined by Caribbean Derek Walcott and Australian Les Murray (1992:671). To name any selection of names a ‘superleague’ is, as evidenced by Forbes’s cautious wording, hardly unproblematic after decades of canon debate. Even if we disregard this aspect, there is in any case a problem concerning the use of ‘British’ to designate the four Hs, since Heaney has deliberately chosen the Irish Republic rather than his native Northern Ireland as his place of residence.

There’s always that point where

the language flips

into an unfamiliar taste;

where words tumble over

a cunning tripwire on the tongue;

where the frame slips,

the reception of an image

not quite tuned, ghost-outlined,

that signals, in their midst,

an alien.

(Imtiaz Dharker, ‘Minority’, in Astley, 1994:47)