Corb our enthusiasms

By MICHAEL CAINES

We couldn't help it: eventually, a dangerous enthusiasm for the work of certain poets had to show itself via TLS Voices, the TLS podcast, and here it is . . .

In case you missed it: Robert Potts spoke last week about J. H. Prynne's To Pollen and the images of suffering so acutely accounted for by Susan Sontag in On Regarding the Pain of Others: 

 

And here's a word from me about The Infant and the Pearl (1985), Douglas Oliver's highly personal, idiosyncratic pastiche of the fourteenth-century dream vision Pearl, in which a twentieth-century dreamer ��� a dreamer of the 1980s, more specifically ��� goes on a grimly satirical tour of Margaret Thatcher's Britain. Not only a tour: with a nightmarish ease, the "lyric subject", as Andrea Brady has put it, becomes "personally implicated" in "brutal Tory politics and City greed".

Despite the references to video screens and Cabinet ministers of that era, I couldn't help thinking that perhaps such a vision held some relevance for British politics today ��� a whole week on from the announcement that Jeremy Corbyn (a socialist of the same mould as Oliver's father, perhaps) has become leader of the Labour Party. But let's not get into all that now . . . .

Those eager to discuss literature, the current scene and that old one are directed to Mrs Thatcher and the Writers at King's Place, London, on October 4; a former Editor of the TLS, Ferdinand Mount, is one of the speakers, alongside Jonathan Coe and D. J. Taylor.