As America and Canada became more diverse and adventurous, as their poets engaged with intimate, risky subject matter and searching re-explorations of language, myth and the poetic process, many British poets and critics were moving in the opposite direction, with a growing emphasis on received forms and safe ideas laced with a little self-deprecating irony that led publishers to believe that there was "no market" in the UK for North American verse. Allison Funk, Linda Gregerson, Rodney Jones, Charles Wright, Robert Wrigley, spring to mind to name just a few - and it has been hard to shake off the notion that this situation is a result, not so much of chance or economics, as conservatism.There is, however, some evidence to suggest that this is changing. In June this year, Carcanet published Soul Keeping Company, a long overdue selection of Lucie Brock-Broido's astonishing and extraordinarily powerful work. Brock-Broido has been described as an 'elliptical' poet, which may or may not be helpful; in reviews, the word that crops up most frequently is 'gorgeous', but what matters most is that this poet, more than any other I can think of, constantly renews our sense of the possibilities of the language we use, not just in our conversations with others, but in the inner dialogues that accompany love, loss, betrayal, self-revelation and grief. Brock-Broido's marriages of the abstract and the concrete, and of the wild and the familiar, not only make things strange (to borrow Seamus Heaney's famous dictum) but also create a sense that this strangeness is more like home than the sorry approximations that convention allows:In the space between seasonsWhich is one night in a life,The corn beats inside its stalks, waiting for bloom.The wheat flowers, falls easily.The clouds become enormous & have names.There is no other poet, working anywhere, who does what Brock-Broido does and Carcanet performs what is, quite simply, a public service in making her work available to us....
