Volume 34, Number 1 · January 29, 1987
Provocateur
By Lincoln Kirstein
The Gavin Ewart Show: Selected Poems 1939–1985
by Gavin Ewart
Bits Press, 140 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The Young Pobble's Guide to his Toes
by Gavin Ewart
Hutchinson/David & Charles, 142 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The very notion of poet laureate summons up a figure of fun. This in no way denigrates our present national incumbent, certainly a most appropriate choice. But if one admits the faint risibility of certain verses by past laurel-crowned Britons, the chief of current comedians in the observance of public occasions is Gavin Ewart, now finally well introduced to the American audience. Recently, he was runner-up for the butt of Canary wine traditionally awarded by the Sovereign to his or her most loyal bard. This time Ted Hughes won, but it was the victory of a poet of lyric sensibility over a virtuoso ironist, not of nature raw in tooth and claw, but of soldiering, board rooms, urban discontent, family joy and horror, and sex, sex, sex. Gavin Ewart, by virtue of profligate prolificity, as well as response to every noteworthy incident of immediate history except its official reaction, is England's most legitimate successor to John Betjeman. We recall that neither William Morris nor Swinburne was appointed poet laureate, nor was Auden, owing in part to his shift in citizenship. But it is doubtful whether he might have served or satisfied.
Review, 2437 words
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