NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This anthology differs from others in that it lets Barry Tebb paint vivid pictures of the twelve poets appointed as Gregory Fellows by the University of Leeds in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. In his introduction to the writers Tebb gives remembered details that let us into the world of these poets, so that at times we feel we're in the smoky rooms with wet raincoated groups listening to poets of the calibre of Peter Redgrove.

The university gave fellowships to talented young or new — poets, sculptors and musicians. They could live in or near the university and Debjani Chatterjee explains that this gave them the financial security to be innovative and experimental. Chatterjee describes Tebb as a working-class poet who emerged in the 1960s and he named the Sixties Press after this time which he saw as a dream decade. Chatterjee describes the Fellows as mainly sharing this working-class background and as being among the leading poets of their generation although some are now out of print. The anthology is a chance for these poets to be presented to a new generation of readers writes Chatterjee.

The Gregory Fellows included here are Martin Bell, Thomas Blackburn, Wayne Brown, Kevin Crossley-Holland, John Heath-Stubbs, Pearse Hutchinson, James Kirkup, Paul Mills, Peter Redgrove, Jon Silkin, Bill Turner and David Wright. Redgrove was particularly admired by Tebb for his talks, creative writing classes and poetry. I'll leave it up to the reader to discover who Tebb hated on sight ... and the feelings were mutual and about which poet he says his ideas about poetry seemed very dull.

Tebb names Kirkup as his own mentor due to their shared sense of isolation:

that special alienation all true poets feel when they realise that their vocation, instead of drawing them closer to their fellow-men as they might wish, makes them stand alone.

	And he must go 
	The lonelier for his unwanted miracle, 
	His singular way, a gentle lunatic at large 
	In the societies of cross and reasonable men.

With so many excellent poets it is impossible to do them all justice in a short review but I recommend reading each of them afresh. For me the revelation was Paul Mills, one of the youngest in the group and a poet I had not read before. His writing is on the theme of single fatherhood and he shows how poetry of the ordinary and everyday can strike us and remain long afterwards in our memory. Mills was admired by Ted Hughes who said of him:

What I especially like is the rather apprehensive feeling that absolutely anything can happen ... A big kit of metaphysical templates.

 
	No clay pot in the garden without fag-end. 
	Never any corner without its sock. 
	Telling time by what's gone off in the fridge. 
	Walking the timeless aisles of supermarkets. 
	Writing sick-notes, seeing washing done.

	Petals focus them: 
	The eye-lashes grow wide. 
	Why should one not bring these to a funeral? 
	And at night, like children, 
	Without anxiety, their consciousness 
	Shut with white petals

	Something has ceased to come along with me. 
	Something like a person; something very like one. 
	And there was no nobility in it 
	Or anything like that. 
	Something was there like a one year 
	Old house, dumb as stone. While the near buildings 
	Sang like birds and laughed 
	Understanding the pact 
	They were to have with silence. But he 
	Neither sang nor laughed. He did not bless silence 
	Like bread, with words. 
	He did not forsake silence.