The Theatre Poems of Bertolt Brecht, Edward Bond, and Howard Brenton
Howard Brenton's poems follow after ten years of plays, in performance and in print, and at first sight they seem like a new departure. The collection is a sequence of 74 sonnets, and has the kind of completeness and individual authority associated with the traditional sonnet sequence. Yet in two important respects Brenton's poems are at least as organic to his dramatic purpose as those of Brecht and Bond. First, as his title, Sonnets of Love and Opposition, suggests, the poems are an attempt to chart his everyday landscape, moral and physical, and the poems operate through actual description more than universal images, so that the sequence has something of the effect of a journal, a record of experience and development over a number of months.
That this experience covers a very wide range of subject matter is one reason for the collection's great interest. The other lies in his use of the sonnet sequence as a form. It is clearly (as Lowell and Berryman have found) an ideal vehicle for a journal; the individual poems are just the length of a manageable single process of argument (two ideas, for example, opposed and then drawn to a conclusion), but Brenton has also found in the sequence its potential as a most direct form of drama.
It reads as a sinuous monologue that amplifies and extends the central speaking voice by contact with various characters who almost meet him in dialogue—members of his family at the closest, a series of archetypes of opposition at the furthest remove—and throughout the sequence the placing is firm and effective, clearly a dramatist's work….
The poems are immediate and raw, but surprising in being scrupulously rhymed and patterned, often rhyming from the centre outwards. The combination of an almost reckless openness and careful craftsmanship is impressive. (p. 51)
Paul Merchant, "The Theatre Poems of Bertolt Brecht, Edward Bond, and Howard Brenton," in Theatre Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 34, Summer, 1979, pp. 49-51.∗
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