Poetic Redress. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: I write to comment on the quality of the poetry published recently in Quadrant. As far as I am aware, while there have been numerous articles published on the poetry of individuals, there has been no criticism or evaluation over the past decade of that published in the journal itself--except or a passing comment by Peter Ryan lamenting the absence of rhyme, with which I concur.

In The Redress of Poetry Seamus Heaney says that what Vaclav Havel has to say about hope can also be said about poetry: "It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons"; and Heaney goes on to say that

 
   Poetry cannot afford to lose its 
   fundamentally self-delighting 
   inventiveness, its joy in being a 
   process of language as well as 
   a representation of things in the 
   world. To put it in W.B. Yeats's 
   terms, the will must not usurp 
   the work of the imagination. 

Nevertheless, he writes, in a

 
   context of politically approved 
   themes, post-colonial backlash 
   and "silence-breaking" writing 
   of all kinds ... poetry is understandably 
   pressed to give voice 
   to much that has hitherto been 
   denied expression in the ethnic, 
   social, sexual and political life. 

And he concludes:

 
   But in discharging this function, 
   poets are in danger of slighting 
   ...