In a recent column for the Guardian, the Booker-shortlisted writer Robin Robertson declared himself “vaguely appalled” by the poetry world, of which (though a newcomer to the novel) he has long been a feted member. It was, he wrote, small and polarised, and often either simplistic or incomprehensible. “I’m allergic to light verse because it seems a betrayal of the purpose of poetry. Equally, poetry that sets out to be deliberately opaque is betraying the purpose of language.”
One can only assume that a poem launched today by the Children’s Society will bring him out in hives, with its sentimental five-stanza invocation of starlight and candles, and its insistence that “No child should reach out their hand and find nothing/ No child should ever be left in the snow”. Light a Candle was commissioned from the poet Clare Shaw, and will be sung by choirs across the UK, in a setting by the Royal Academy of Music PhD student Louise Drewett, with an outing on BBC One’s Songs of Praise in early December. Shaw, the Yorkshire-based author of three collections, whose work has been hailed as “startling, searing, scorching”, says this secular, 21st-century descendant of Christina Rossetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter is one of the most taxing things she has ever tried to write.
Purists will doubtless argue that Light a Candle isn’t a poem, it’s a song lyric. Even Bob Dylan himself seemed a bit taken aback on learning that he had won the Nobel prize in literature in 2016, opening his will-he, won’t-he acceptance speech with the rather touching admission that, on first hearing the news, “I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature.” But times they are a-changing: few such misgivings greeted the recent announcement that Kate Bush is shortly to join Dylan on the library shelves when 40 years of her lyrics are published by TS Eliot’s old firm, Faber.
Eliot was once a leader of the grumpy old aesthetes’ brigade, arguing that “poets in our civilisation, as it exists at present, must be difficult”, to the dismay of that young whipper-snapper Philip Larkin, who believed in a poetry for the masses. But before anyone thinks that the author of The Waste Land and Four Quartets would be tossing and turning in his grave, remember this: it is his own Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats that – through the nifty reverse manoeuvre of the musical Cats – has helped to keep Faber afloat as an independent publishing house.
What does any of this have to do with the face-off between “light verse” and poetry that “sets out to be deliberately opaque”? One answer might be that it’s a false opposition. There is good and bad in both quarters, and one reader’s opaque is another’s moonlit field. Another response is that what passes for light verse covers a multitude of possibilities, including a poetry that is capable of building empathy and community in our snarling, fragmented times. “Having come through abuse and familial estrangement myself, I know that music and poetry can be a transformative experience for young people,” says Shaw.
Words that touch the hearts of those young people are important not only for them but for poetry itself, bringing in a new generation and buying time for them to orientate themselves and create their own spaces, which they can then fill in regenerative ways. There was an audible buzz when this year’s Forward poetry prize – which Robertson himself has won – was scooped by the black, queer American Danez Smith, whose propulsive debut collection made a thrilling case for the seriousness of popular forms. In the words of one commentator, this was “poetry as fierce fire”.
I’d go further and say that, because of its elasticity, poetry is stealing a march on the novel for inclusion and innovation, and that its vigour is backwashing into fiction. Max Porter’s brilliant Grief is the Thing with Feathers is one example: a hybrid work that co-opts Ted Hughes’s Crow motif for a heart-wrenching exploration of family bereavement.
And, significantly, the verse novel is having a bit of a moment. Sarah Crossan, the new Irish children’s laureate, has put it to powerful use, most recently in an exploration of the death penalty. (“This book really made me see things in a different way,” wrote a young reader of a previous Crossan novel, One, about conjoined twins.) Then there is Robertson’s own small masterpiece, The Long Take, which was a frontrunner for this year’s Booker prize, with its filmic evocation of postwar America as seen through the eyes of a demobbed soldier. So despair not – for, as Clare Shaw puts it in Light a Candle: “Beyond the horizon, a new sun is rising.”
• Claire Armitstead is associate editor, culture for the Guardian
