Selected works

Lecturing at UC Berkeley in 1976, Seamus Heaney lined up three English poets – Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin – who all “live[d] off the hump of the English poetic achievement” and “treat[ed] England as a region – or rather treat[ed] their region as England”. When he published his talk in 1980, Heaney called it “Englands of the Mind”.

In a world where academic books are given better titles, Modern and Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry: Cultural identities, political crises might well be called Yorkshires of the Mind. Its wide-ranging chapters, encompassing (but, alas, far from limited to) Larkin, Hughes, Simon Armitage and the “poet, educator and activist” Matt Abbott, use Yorkshire as a kind of emotional kaleidoscope, albeit one bunged with academic cant: turn it one way and you get Larkin’s “Places, People and Narrative Perspectives”; turn it another and Armitage is “(Re)Defining Place-Based Identities”.

Like most books written to this model – the one currently favoured by academic publishers, in which authors are held down and force-fitted with scholarly “lenses” – Kyra Piperides’s study is chock-full of ideas, and has the habit of taking potentially interesting ones (Larkin’s poems approach their scenes from on high) in rather confined, uninteresting directions (he is “the bird-narrator occupying the ground-level position”). Worse, at a structural level, its attempt at comprehensiveness blocks a wider argument from emerging.

When we do zoom in on selected poets, there is a problem of quality control. Larkin and Hughes are major figures, and their inclusion speaks for itself; Armitage, likewise, is difficult to ignore in the story of Yorkshire poetry. But the same is simply not true of the “spoken word artist” Abbott: he is the author of such stunningly obvious lines as “The establishment deafened by / a voice they never heard. / A bulldog in the ballot box; / the table overturned”. For reasons known only to the author, Abbott’s Twitter politics are given a full chapter, at the expense of genuine poets such as Tony Harrison, Helen Mort and Zaffar Kunial (who are crowded into surveys).

At one time a scholar of Piper­ides’s quality might have published a fine book of unlinked essays, each of which would have given its subject the breathing room it required. For as long as academia insists on misguided appeals to “relevance” – and especially on a scholar’s having a needlessly dilated monograph to their name as the price of entry – it will struggle to serve the “English poetic achievement” that Heaney found, still vital, in the poetry of his day.

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