D. J. Enright is a poet preoccupied with responsibilities. He is an itinerant and committed, if lazy moralist, not positively seeking to squeeze out a moral from experience, but doggedly prepared to confront any moral that obtrudes itself on him—and thousands do. His sytle reflects this moral stance. The poems [in Daughters of Earth] spar about rather loosely to begin with, without especial finesse, before going in to deliver their upper-cut. This they deliver with great precision: the punches of this Forsterian 'connect' all right, sometimes with his own chin. Indeed he sticks his chin out on our behalf: in no egotistic spirit, but on the assumption that it might as well be his as another's—which is a good definition of humanism. 'Why are the faces here so lined?' he asks, in 'Public Bar', one of his most funny and telling poems. The faces' owners haven't, like critics and intellectuals, agonised over complex issues or tragic art…. Such single-moral poems, in forms so casual and in language so relaxed—as, relatively, it is even here—can only rise to a limited kind of beauty. You may wonder if they are poetry at all. But whatever the nature of their virtue, it is sterling and obvious. And, oddly, it is Enright's bringing the same trick off time and time again that, far from creating monotony, is his most convincing credential. (p. 375)
P. N. Furbank, "Knockabouts," in The Listener, Vol. 88, No. 2269, September 21, 1972, pp. 374-75.∗
This is a free excerpt of 245 words. There are 250 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Enright, D(ennis) J(oseph) 1920–: Critical Essay by P. N. Furbank Access Pass.
