"Nothing is more mysterious than the real," wrote the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. In Found Wanting Hugh Underhill pursues the mystery of the real, the poetry of the material world and what the writer Robert Bloomfield called its "thousand, thousand dies".
For Underhill, poetry is a constant struggle against distortion, a "moving or breaking to sight" of the suppressed or denied, and a sharing of delight in "bright things" and in the goodness of the world. It's also an act of commitment, political and personal, against the world's disarray. His heroes are Bunyan, Blake, Bloomfield, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney. These poems are rooted in England but qualified by complicated feelings about place and belonging. They are shaped by the belief that a poem should be a made thing, an act of craftsmanship. And they are based upon the Nonconformist belief that living acquires meaning through commitment and choice.
Found Wanting is concerned with the way other lives act upon our consciousnesses, with the sometimes fragile, tenacious, fabric of our personal relationships and their histories. It attends to the voices of the past and to the effects of memory, bringing past experience into conversation with the experience of the present. And it considers the way in which all artists, in their struggle with language or paint, are "found wanting".
"Hugh Underhill's meticulously-crafted poems are distinguished from the mass of contemporary verse by the quality of their attentiveness, and by their exact understanding of how, through rhythm and phrase, experience is saved and made palpable."
John Lucas
"Underhill's big subject is memory and how it meshes with our present experience... There are plenty of fine poems here... Don't think it comes easy, this throwaway ease of poetic manner. It takes more work, more honesty, more confidence than the aureate boom-booming that is more readily recognisable as poetry."
Tony Grist
Hugh Underhill was born in Kent, grew up in Sussex and did National Service in Germany. He spent twenty years teaching English at the University of Hong Kong and at La Trobe University, Melbourne. His books include The Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry, The War is Over and three books of poetry, The World We Make, Passing Through Glass and The Actual Hour. He currently edits The Robert Bloomfield Society Newsletter. He lives in Bedford.
Found Wanting, by Hugh Underhill
ISBN 978-0-9954028-5-2
Price: £7.95
Publication date: 1st October 2008
Order Found Wanting from Inpress.
