Andrew Duncan - Böcker

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The strange brigadier who hardly speaks... Leo, his feisty pilot daughter... Labrador, the vengeful Pole... Henry Dunning-Green, Leo's boring suitor... Adrian Russell, the treacherous master spy...All linked by SOE Somerville, the top secret Second World War finishing school for spies on England's south coast, and its local community: A melting pot of intrigue and counter-intrigue.A fast-unfolding, untold tale of deception, betrayal and romance leading to a tense life-or-death climax in occupied France. Many of the events actually took place. This is the first fictional treatment of life at the famous Special Operations Executive 'finishing school' for spies, SOE Beaulieu in the New Forest (renamed SOE Somerville). It's also the first fully realised fictional portrait of master spy and traitor Kim Philby (renamed Adrian Russell) who lectured at SOE Beaulieu."A novel for anyone who loves the New Forest. Andrew Duncan captures its beauty, history and sense of magic."

The background to Origins of the Underground is really the story of how British poets became intellectuals. As they retreated from inherited and fixed value systems, they had to think for themselves, and this was a race which intellectuals generally won. You can't just buy in ideas like a small tropical country buying jet fighter planes. What the success of poets seems to turn on is their willingness to use ideas which excite the ideas part of their brains because they are genuinely unfamiliar. Poets who prefer to stick to well-worn and inherited arguments, where they can predict every move, fail for this reason. The area of nearby uncertainty has an odd shape. Obviously, most of the ideas which were new and risky thirty years ago are now forgotten – the risk fell to earth, so to speak. A certain archaeology is needed to retrieve these "casualty" ideas. I admit that I enjoy this sort of digging, and the practice of psychoceramics (the scientific study of crackpots), but perhaps this pleasure pursuit is useful as well. The terrain is made impassable by deep mutual disagreements between different groups of poetry readers (and writers). Going in at the level of ideas offers a possible way of easing these disagreements. Admittedly, it's very difficult to find out exactly what they are.

Andrew Duncan's latest study of contemporary British poetry offers studies of some thirteen modern poets, together with a number of general essays giving an overview of events and trends in British poetry over the past thirty to forty years. Some of the names will surprise, others will be expected. The juxtapositions of ideas, and of names, will disturb those who are more comfortable with trench warfare than with dialogue, and Duncan's startling apercus will leave even the most well-read student of poetry wondering.

Where poetry is dominated by amateurs, its key ideas are the ones that nobody owns. Underneath the glittering cavalcade of conscious and innovative art is another world of poetry without technique, protected from change. Can we find a history of what seems to be most inaccessible to time? Can we write a history of the unheard voices, articulate the unconscious and write a stylistics of the conventional? Most people who write poetry are untouched by theory and have no expectations of winning prizes. Is there a much deeper, inarticulate, pulse of style history, almost detached from reflexivity and concealed from view by an elite who write directly from theory? The 1950s now seem like a mystery, only remembered as the factory which produced all the rebels of the succeeding two decades. But its rejection of rhetoric opened the gates to the amateur poet, its existential preoccupation with authenticity gave the unknown poet a chit to justify writing for and about themselves alone. It seems as if the 1950s have never stopped.The return to them is an attempt to crystallise the unchanged, the underlying stock of linguistic practices which was damaged by all the changes that washed over it but was finally intact, indifferent, unlearning. A kind of safe world where dissidents didn't rush in to subvert the text at every minute and where there was a comforting shared feeling among literary people. An era of naivety, virtue-and Close Reading. Did Pop and protest poetry come out of the Church's inner crisis on discovering that urban youth had given up church-going and that its noble oratory seemed irrelevant to social issues? Existentialism looks at the concrete and close at hand and turns out to be looking at white goods, pass marks for the bourgeoisie. Inhibitions seemed to be part of the kitchen equipment. How would we recover such a history? Surely, by discarding names and isolating styles, entities recovered by emphasis from a vast amorphous mass of data. So we address the domestic anecdote, the Pop poem, the academic poem, the communalist poem, the Oxford Line, the late Christian poem. These foci allow us to define and reflect on what seemed to be transparent and anti-technical.They reach highlights, where we look at supremely gifted exponents of the styles. The mass of material is far greater than any classification can round up and frame. Looking for tensions within the material, we recover a break within the gatekeepers' rules. A trail through a static landscape leads to a legend about a crisis and the fall of a wall: an unmarked point during the 1980s where the restrictions failed to turn up for work and so the 1950s ended, giving way to a new regime of the 'post-modern' or 'deregulated'.

In Five Eyes recovers two almost-lost collections of poems-Sound Surface & Surveillance and Compliance-published some 20 and 10 years ago, respectively, but which were written in the 1980s and early 1990s. Published originally in fugitive editions, these two collections fill out the picture of Duncan's earlier work. Sound Surface was part of the original Threads of Iron manuscript, the remainder of which is published simultaneously with this volume

"The first interview here with Allen Fisher dates from 1973. I took the decision to collect old interviews rather than make an all-new book. I am fascinated by the idea of a very long base line, records of one person's views over 30 years, change as part of the object recorded. Drawing on the creative input of Eric Mottram, Adrian Clarke, and Victoria Sheppard (among others) made the book more robust and embracing." (Andrew Duncan)

Threads of Iron is Duncan's lost debut volume: not because it was never published, but because it never appeared as intended. Instead, the original was split into two and was published in two parts by Reality Street (in 1991) and by Shearsman Books (in 2000). A further part of the manuscript was cut and became Sound Surface (see In Five Eyes, published simultaneously with this volume).

The figures we have tell that the number of new books of poetry published each year nearly doubled between 1976 and 1993 and then nearly doubled again by 2000, then staying at this level. In the years 1999-2001 roughly as many books of poetry were published as in the whole of the 1970s. This is a poetry boom. We seem to have a situation where there are 100,000 Eng Lit graduates and 10,000 write a book of poems and succeed in getting it published. This is the outcome of large-scale benign processes. You aren't going to take to the streets and chant Less choice. Less access. Now! A knock-on is that I can't survey the period; all I can do is make notes on the regions I've been to. We're on the beach and the marks in the sand get wiped away everynight. Maybe 12,000 people have published at least one book of poetry. (Maybe it's only 10,000 - oh, that's so much easier. Am I an expert on all ten thousand? What do you think? "'I love you all' he lied and left the room.") People like what poetry has to offer. It is more plausible to describe the things people like than to describe some other cultural system which would be more free of flaws.Not all poems work.However much you dislike theory, the sound of an emotional-symbolic structure slipping, snapping its pegs, teetering, and collapsing into cultural rubble is all-pervasive: the sound of Now. We have to listen very closely to that sound. I have included a number of chapters on critique, the thing poets dislike most. Some poets think that equity means that whatever I say is true. It seems to support the statement, whatever other people say about me is true, but in fact the rule changes at that point. The idea of softening the boundary between the self and the world does not abolish the outside world. It may be that the gift of the poet is to internalise parts of the outside world, to soften the boundary between the self and the world. The critic is trying to bring the processes of the self outside, into the light where they can be objectively examined. That is the reverse process, pretty much. At present the statement, 'justice means Me getting exactly what I want' seems to be socially acceptable. I want to reform this to say that 'people who actually wrote and finished numerous poems of high quality and who didn't get good reviews, circulation, etc. are examples of Injustice'.Prose has to be founded on equity.

This volume starts from the key misrepresentation of orthodox poetry criticism, that the conservative is also the new, and sets out to define the whole British complex of refusing to innovate. In the attempt to set up publicly accountable criteria for what counts as new, the book goes through the whole period from the 1950s to the mid-1990s, identifying what the stylistic innovations were at each point. Naturally, in such a culturally rich era, not every significant poet or work can be mentioned. We present the 1950s as an era of conservative reaction and occupation of the institutions by a new stratum, whose self-regard is locked up with verbal gestures as "status objects". We go on to the 1960s as a moment where a certain fear of the past brought immediacy, hedonism, simultaneity, immersion, spontaneity, montage, direct address. Then, in the late 60s, Utopian project: When the faint star does take/ us into the deeper parts of the night. The imaginary space engulfing all poetic space, between divination and navigation. In the 1970s, there is the classic era of modern poetry, as the innovations are made to work.Then in the 1980s we see how a restorative taste sealed off the penetration of the new. The next chapter attempts to define the whole phenomenon of poetic conservatism, the feeling that only old and familiar things offer wholeness, and that ideas utterly prevent pleasure. A final chapter stumbles into the field of what isn't clear yet, and what hasn't even happened yet, in order to flourish the names of poets to whom the future may belong.

Does what is true depend on where you are? or, can we speak of a British culture which varies gradually over the 600 miles from one end of the island to the other, with currents gradually mutating and turning into their opposites as they cross such a distance? Any account of the matter must rapidly disclose the fact that where group A proclaims idea X, group B swiftly proclaims X to be untrue. Assimilation and dissimilation are the exuberant flows which make the mill of culture turn. The unbalanced local energies which gave birth to the central horror of possessive individualism, the Empire, and the State as war-machine, do not sound their triumphalist self-praises without conjuring up a reaction in favour of collective values, pacifism, equity, and the languages of the periphery. Poetry has to offer more than the illusion of being in the few rooms where a metropolitan elite solemnly engages in the circularity of authentication. A polemic tour of Scotland, Wales, and the North of England exposes the possibility that the finest poets of the last 50 years have lived in the outlands, not networking and neglecting to acquire linguistic signs of status.We contemplate the sublime through the works of Sorley Maclean, Glyn Jones, Colin Simms, and Michael Haslam. But a second look at poetry in the South jettisons the shallow tricks favoured by High Street cultural managers to reveal a hidden stratum of intellectually sophisticated poets, even in Babylon.

At this point in time Andrew Duncan is better known as a critic of contemporary poetry - and an entertaining, waspish, and unusual critic at that. His own poetic work has been under-recognised and several previous collections - barring those from Shearsman - are out of print. This Selected edition gives the poetry-reading pubic a valuable chance to re-engage with a very original voice. Certainly no experimentalist, but also not a mainstream writer by any stretch of the imagination, he engages with narrative and history in a way that has become unusual in contemporary British poetry.

Why "silent rules"? Poetry is made of sound, in the form of speech, but is governed by rules which are not stated explicitly. As a help to readers, we try to tease out and make plain these silent rules. You have to perceive the structure of a work in order to read it. The subtitle is "inside and out" and becoming an insider involves knowing what the silent rules are.So much of the staging of modern poetry has operated a kind of "stereo blindness", in which whatever is visible to observer A is invisible to observer B, and vice versa. Annulling territoriality and blocks on visibility, we try to disengage a "cultural field", a low-resolution set of gradients which on mapping displays the cultural space inside which every literary move takes place. If you populate all the squares, eventually you have the map. By setting things in their true relations, much that had been suppressed or denied emerges in the light of day. The "hero of the piece" is the entire landscape, the awe-inspiring span from one end of the poetry world to the other.This completes the "heptagonal vortex", a set of seven volumes about British poetry in the period 1960 to 1997. The message is that poetic merit is scattered over the landscape and that loyalty to a faction is not compatible with full aesthetic principles and a thorough approach to collecting primary evidence.

"There are several reasons for writing about the Seventies at this point. One is a reading of a recent collection of memories of the decade by participants. My impression was that they couldn't remember the period - too much time had gone by. They had lost all sense of differentiation and were writing about 1975 as if it was 2015. It is also possible that any attitudes of the previous time which didn't chime with current positions were being written out, consciously or unconsciously. The extent of the mismatch is of great importance, I think. This suggested that there was a real problem with memory, justifying an account based on contemporary documents. The other problem with memory is that we are living in a splinter dictatorship, a cultural phase where the forces of convergence have stacked arms and opinions are split up into small groups. How can there be a collective memory when there is no single point on which all factions agree? so how can I record collective memory? in what sense is any statement about poetry true? But this argues even more for putting facts down and increasing the area free from malicious invention. We need to think about the divergence as a phenomenon in itself, a kind of cultural gravity that guides all the watercourses. The splintering allows local freedom at most locations - what it does not allow is unifying literary opinion." -Andrew Duncan

This new poetry is saturated in folklore and myth. The glass paintings are a distribution of cultured art motifs to rural households, patterns copied onto glass with feathers or brushes made of marten-hair. They are an expression of humility towards the illiterate. The idea of cultural difference being the effect of distribution technology was illustrated by the pedlars who carried the glass panes around the villages of central Europe. The interest in shopping follows a previous and prolonged interest in manufacturing and production, completing the sequence. Reminiscences of childhood and the wreck of the great High Street department stores around 2020 combine in a personal mythology of grand motifs and elaborate ruins.This volume is a new start after a long period of silence and begins with an inventory of concrete facts around the poet, in his home in Nottingham, close to where he grew up. One theme is defeaturing, the recreation of court and metropolitan art forms in a simpler manner. Radiant messages broken up by distance.Comments on 'On the Margins of Great Empires' (2018):"For the last 30 years, Andrew Duncan has patiently traced alternative wavelengths, to and from the unevocable, irreconcilable and the impossible." (Kevin Nolan)"Andrew Duncan [is] a writer whose poetry, criticism and magazine editing must make him one of the most vital and questing of today's authors." (David Hackbridge Johnson, The High Window)"Andrew Duncan's selected poems from 1978 to 2003 [is] an excited, hugely wide-ranging poetry soaring from the star and jewel riches of the Asian margins down to the brick offices in which are fates are problematized. Quite cryptic but never shirking the open and articulate cry." (Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review)