Scrupulous Wit
The earliest of [Enright's] Collected Poems go back more than 30 years, to the end of the 1940s; but already in them you find that absolutely characteristic move away from a feeling of his own to a thought about somebody else—and then another thought….
Enright has lived abroad, teaching English literature, for much of his life, and he has written poems about Egyptians, Japanese, Germans, Thais, and the Malays and Chinese of Singapore. He has seen a lot of suffering and oppression; but he has always tried to picture it in individual terms, turning a situation from facet to facet to catch it in as many lights as possible.
He can write as well about an Asian prime minister, listing the names of students who are to be arrested that night and for a moment seeing his own past reflected in their lives, as he can about a 13-year-old Japanese bootblack who killed himself with rat poison because he had a headache. ('Kazuo—who found rat poison cheaper than aspirin," Enright says in the last line of that poem—again remembering exactly what poverty means.)
It might seem that this is a very impersonal poetry, and indeed Enright has been admonished for that…. But of course the truth is that you feel his personal presence in all of his poems. It takes a very special art to put across such uncomfortable observations as Enright does without seeming priggish; and he does it precisely by his disarming personality, so funny, and so conscious of his own weaknesses, without ever losing sight of the point he wants to make. I spoke of his wit and his scrupulousness as though they were different things; but often they are one and the same, the humour lying in the very way in which he sees and reports some fresh implication….
There is one [poem] I have always especially liked: the very Proustian 'Words', where in a new country, where even the moon looks strange, this perpetual traveller begs: 'Words, tell me where I am!' I don't know if he feels his plea has ever been answered. But I don't think there is any English poet writing today whose words have done more to tell us where we are.
Derwent May, "Scrupulous Wit," in The Listener, Vol. 106, No. 2728, September 24, 1981, p. 347.
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