D.J. Enright: 1920-2002
by James Norton

Those seeking evidence of poetry's downfall need only contemplate this: Most poetry is consumed, argued about, shared among and treasured by other poets. Poems are circulated through English departments, passed around at writing conferences and discussed in the pages of specialized magazines. Sometimes, like a stray walnut turning up in a tossed salad, a particularly competent or arrogantly confident bit of poetry will show up in a magazine like Harper's, wedged between a long article on the Iraqi Kurds and a transcript of Rush Limbaugh swearing at an errant caterer.

Most poetry isn't good for much. It billows around emotionally. It obsessively drops references. It makes wry remarks designed to conceal a great inner sadness only truly known to the poet, but perceptible by a sensitive reader willing to go the extra mile. Much of it is self-contained, self-referencing, insular and self-cannibalizing, like a snake eating its own tail. It speaks to few people outside of the family, and it wears its impenetrability like a badge.

The writing of Dennis Joseph Enright is different.

A British poet with a cutting sense of wit and timing, Enright's poems capture tight, poignant bits of life, politics and culture using language as precise and spartan as most poets' words are bilious and precious.

Down on the page, Enright's ideas are sharp — tiny hooks of specificity that rip into their topic with stinging impact of a thumbtack.

A teacher in Japan, Thailand and Singapore successively, Enright came to the East as a visitor, and took vivid, tinted photographs with his verse:

A Polished Performance

Citizens of the polished capital
 Sigh for the towns up country,
And their innocent simplicity.

People in the towns up country
 Applaud the unpolished innocence
Of the distant villages.

Dwellers in the distant villages
 Speak of a simple unspoilt girl,
Living alone, deep in the bush.

Deep in the bush we found her,
 Large and innocent of eye,
Among gentle gibbons and mountain ferns.

Perfect for the part, perfect,
 Except for the dropsy
Which comes from polished rice.

In the capital our film is much admired,
 Its gentle gibbons and mountain ferns,
Unspoilt, unpolished, large and innocent of eye.

Whether capturing the sound of political rhetoric being barked unintelligibly through a loudspeaker on a hot summer night or interpreting the story of Doctor Faustus, Enright's language is clear and bracing. Viewing Asia through British eyes, he may be one of the world's most significant post-colonial poets; tracing the slipping reins of empire and the riotous circumstances of new nations struggling to emerge, Enright captured political and cultural upheaval with the jaundiced eye of a veteran journalist.

Prime Minister

Slowly he ticks off their names
On the long list:
All the young political men

As he was once himself.
He thinks of how he despised the others
   — the apolitical,
   the English-educated
   the students he called 'white ants
In their ivory tower'.

Not so long ago, in fact,
He coined that happy phrase 'white ants'.
How he despised them, all they cared for
Was lectures, essays and a good degree!

A small thing these days
   — he tells himself —
To be arrested.
Incredulously he remembers
Not once was he arrested, somehow.

Slowly he ticks off the names
On the list to be arrested.
Tonight, isn't it? Yes.
Between 2 and 4 when the blood runs slow.
The young political men,
Full of fire, hot-blooded.
   — For a moment,
He thinks he sees his own name there.
'Red ants,' he hisses,
Thrusting the list at a waiting policeman.

Vividly aware of poverty and politics, engaged but not obsessed with current events and intellectual movements, Enright wrote with a clarity rare to any medium. As a new empire swells into the full glare of the global limelight, its novelists and balladeers could very well take a good lesson from Enright: Look long and hard. Write clearly. And keep it sharp.