Modern Language Review

Antony Rowland’s monograph is a significant and high-profile study of contemporary British poetry, featuring metamodernism’s reflections—what Rowland calls the ‘enigmatical poetics’ of both mainstream and ‘innovative’ poetry. Beginning with Geoffrey Hill’s declaration in one of his 2011 lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry that ‘he was “marooned” in the 1950s with the work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot’ (p. 1), Rowland exemplifies how contemporary British poetry, influenced by Adorno’s account of the ‘remainder’, exists ‘“with” and “after” modernism’ by [End Page 268] assimilating ‘the formal legacies of modernist literature’ (p. 147) and embracing inextricable enigmas. As Rowland declares, enigmatical poetry, in contrast to the commodification of literature, bridges the gap within contemporary British poetry by navigating the realms of both mainstream and ‘innovative’ poetry. Overall, metamodernism is less explored by poets and scholars, primarily on account of the potential subversion of bourgeois-friendly arts, while discussion of contemporary British poetry within the framework of metamodernism receives considerably less attention than fiction.

This book does not shy away from the dichotomy between mainstream and ‘innovative’ writing, and describes metamodernist poetry, which conciliates and elongates the war between the two, as a bridge between them and a response to modernist writing. The understanding of ‘enigmas’ is broad: Rowland’s reexamination of contemporary British poems includes the topic of ubiquitous incomprehensibility; enigmas’ perpetuation of ‘poetry wars in a modulated fashion’ (p. 58); ‘committed and autonomous art’, which differentiates from both ‘the reality principle’ and ‘art for art’s sake’; enigmaticalness in the works of those who ‘draw on the formal predilections of both mainstream and “innovative” poets’ (p. 88); and double consciousness embedded ‘between myth and the everyday’ (p. 119). Drawing on Adorno’s conception of enigmaticalness and Andre Furlani’s notes on metamodernism (Andre Furlani, Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007)), Rowland ruminates over ‘the absence of an extended appraisal of contemporary poetry’ (p. 3). In this absence, poetry is simplified to ‘utilitarian texting’ or ‘something other than the “in-itself” of the poems themselves’. Rowland concludes that enigmatical poetics has ‘transform[ed] [modernist antecedents] into “exasperating” poetics’ (p. 148) by close reading of the poems of poets such as Geoffrey Hill, J. H. Prynne, Don Paterson, Geraldine Monk, and Sandeep Parmar. From this perspective, Rowland rectifies critical viewpoints which contend that contemporary British poetry leads towards conservatism instead of producing a deliberately exasperating poetics.

Generally, the book explores the prevailing state of British poetry in terms of revealing enigmatical poetics in mainstream and ‘innovative’ poetry, and demonstrates the blurred boundaries between them within the framework of meta-modernism, while Hill’s poems, which ‘[adhere] to exasperating poetics’ (p. 25), serve as the backdrop for Rowland’s exploration of contemporary British poetry. Adhering to the principle of moving from theories to examples, Rowland explores the enigmatical poetics of two generations: ranging from Hill and Harrison to Ahren Warner, Antonin Artaud, and others, he offers readers a useful set of perspectives from which to examine British poetry. In contrast to ‘Raymond Williams’ conception of modernism as a monument to the end of an era’ (p. 6) and Hill’s ‘critical pertinacity’ on ‘ignoring two generations of poets from the London and Cambridge Schools’ (p. 134), Rowland opines that enigmas should be the core of discussions surrounding contemporary British poetry. Dealing with questions of inextricability and inaccessibility, the book primarily spotlights the bifurcation between poets who advocate communication with the public and poets who stick [End Page 269] to poems’ aesthetic connotations. In general, Rowland provides readers with an explicit approach for reinspecting contemporary British poetry and suggests other potential paths for examining contemporary artistic production. Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry is indispensable for scholars studying British poetry, providing a comprehensive panorama of mainstream poetry and ‘innovative’ poetry.