A very English domesticity

Anthony Thwaite is among the last surviving links to the Movement of the mid-1950s. That group (which was named by J. D. Scott, a former literary editor of this magazine) was ideologically diffuse — largely because it wasn’t a movement in the formal sense — and short-lived, but its members’ early work marked the transitional stage in literature between patrician romanticism and demotic, illusion-free modernism. In the last few years Thwaite has perhaps been mentioned chiefly for his role as literary executor to another poet briefly associated with the Movement, Philip Larkin — he edited the posthumous Collected Poems (1988) and Selected Letters (1992) — but this new book, which collects most of the verse from Thwaite’s 50-plus years as a practitioner, serves as an excellent reminder of his own great qualities as a poet.

Certain topics are fairly constant in Thwaite’s work through the decades: archaeology, history, childhood, death and isolation in particular have been regular features. These preoccupations are similar in that they are all means by which a poet can examine the transience and delicacy of one’s life; they are all connected to what could soon be, or has already been, lost. This might seem to place Thwaite in Larkin territory, therefore, but Thwaite’s poems roam more widely than Larkin’s did; his work spans millennia, several continents and dozens of people’s perspectives. Larkin’s poetic vision was sharpened by self-imposed constraints of subject-matter, whereas the opposite is true with Thwaite: he needs movement, temporal and spatial, to reach the edges of his talent.

In his first full volume, Home Truths (1957), published when he was 27, he is already contemplating the fragility of life. In ‘The Rat’ he revives a memory from school of a lengthy attempt to catch the eponymous rodent, which ended ‘… at the moment when/I broke his back, and smashed again, again’.