MORRISON, (Philip) Blake

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Nationality: British. Born: Burnley, Lancashire, 8 October 1950. Education: Ermysteds Grammar School, Skipton, Yorkshire, 1962–69; University of Nottingham, 1969–72, B.A. (honors); McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, 1972–73, M.A.; University College, London, 1974–78, Ph.D. Family: Married Katherine Ann Drake in 1976; two sons and one daughter. Career: Fiction and poetry editor, Times Literary Supplement, London, 1978–81; deputy literary editor, 1981–86, and literary editor, 1987–89, Observer, London. Since 1990 literary editor, Independent on Sunday, London. Awards: Eric Gregory award, 1980; Somerset Maugham award, 1984; Dylan Thomas prize, 1985; E.M. Forster award, 1988. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1988. Agent: Pat Kavanagh, Peters Fraser and Dunlop Ltd., Fifth Floor, The Chambers, Chelsea Harbour, Lots Road, London SW10 OXF. Address: 54 Blackheath Park, London SE3 9SQ, England.

Publications

Poetry

Dark Glasses. London, Chatto and Windus, 1984; revised and enlarged edition, 1989.

The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper and Other Poems. London, Chatto and Windus, 1987.

Selected Poems. London, Granta, 1999.

Play

The Cracked Pot: A Play, adaptation and translation of a play by Heinrich von Kleist. New York, Samuel French, 1996.

Other

The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950's. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1980.

Seamus Heaney. London, Methuen, 1982.

The Yellow House (for children). London, Walker, and San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1987.

And When Did You Last See Your Father?: A Son's Memoir of Love and Loss. New York, Picador, 1993.

As If: A Crime, a Trial, a Question of Childhood. London, Granta, and New York, Picador, 1997.

Too True. London, Granta, 1998.

Editor, with Andrew Motion, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. London and New York, Penguin, 1982.

Editor, with Sara Dunn and Michele Roberts, Mind Readings: Writers' Journeys through Mental States. London, Minerva, 1996.

Editor, The Gospel According to John: Authorised King James Version. Edinburgh, Canongate, 1998.

Editor, A Way of Life: Portraits from the Funeral Trade. Manchester, Len Grant Photography, 1999.

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Critical Study: By Michael Dirda, in Grand Street (Denville, New Jersey), 6(3), spring 1987.

Blake Morrison comments:

I have always resented Auden's line (or rather those who quote Auden's line) "Poetry makes nothing happen," which is not to say that my poetry is polemical but that it is concerned to combat in some small way the untruths, injustices, and imperfections of the world we inhabit. In my first book, Dark Glasses, I was much preoccupied with secrecy, lies, privacy, the difficulty of openness in both private and public life. In my second, The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, the obsession was with masculinity, misogyny, the cult of the hard, which required a journey into childhood and dialect. All this sounds very grandiose. Probably my poetry is about what poetry has always been about—love, death, memory, and loss. But without some meliorist ambition, a wish that poetry could make something happen, I doubt that I would even write at all.

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Blake Morrison's activities as editor, anthologist, and competition adjudicator in London's literary whirlpool have tended to deflect attention from his two excellent collections of verse, Dark Glasses and The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper. The much publicized exchanges between Morrison and Michael Horovitz have similarly removed the spotlight of attention from the poems. Not that Morrison is without a readership; he has received a Somerset Maugham award, an E.M. Forster award, and a Dylan Thomas prize. Not bad going for two slim volumes.

Dark Glasses appeared in 1984 (a revised and expanded edition was published in 1989) and included poems previously noticed in Faber's Poetry Introduction 5. Dark Glasses was a debut notable for its clarity of expression (the poems are immensely readable), the carefully achieved polish and finish, and the emergence of a voice, albeit with Philip Larkin looming hugely in the background. Morrison's tone was quiet, absorbed, even reticent. He could play the Martian without having to strain for effect—"Brown pups, a cow opening its sad eye, / The shine of the dining-room table" (from "Grange Boy") refers to conkers. Or consider these lines from "Meningococcus":

That night of his high fever
I held a stream against me,
his heart panicky as a netted bird,
globes of solder on his brow.

Not unlike his coanthologist Andrew Motion, Morrison develops the theme of secrecy ("English, we hoard our secrets to the end"), and observed violence—human and natural—crops up repeatedly. Morrison deals with such contemporary matters as criminality and domesticity in an unassuming, quiet manner. He comes across as writer-as-humble-joe.

The long poem "The Inquisitor" deals almost breathlessly with political and financial crimes in an episodic, filmic structure. It resembles one of those TV thriller series in which confusion is everything. The pace of the poem is hectic, yet the end product is clouded with mystery. Perhaps that is the point, that there are no easy answers.

The collection The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper is dominated by the title poem, a fourteen-page monologue in four-line rhyming stanzas. The narrator is an unnamed Yorkshireman speaking in dialect. The poem examines the secret crimes, the deviousness, and the cold criminality of Peter Sutcliffe, yet it manages a compassionate and thoughtful tone. A bleak humor, not easily discovered in Dark Glasses, emerges from time to time through the fog of violence and death:

Everweer in Yorkshire
were a creepin fear an thrill.
At Elland Road fans chanted
"Ripper 12 Police Nil."

and

So cops they lobbed im questions
through breakfast, dinner, tea,
till e said: "All right, you've cracked it.
Ripper, aye, it's me."

The poem works well, and it gives Morrison the opportunity to include other poems dealing with his Yorkshire background and to enlarge on family scenes with an Anglican setting. He still retains his power to astonish with imagery ("a lorry backed up in its exhaust / like a polar bear fading into snow.") and generally widens his range of subject matter to include nature, love, aspects of work, and history.

Morrison writes with a restrained power in his two collections of memorable poetry. It remains unclear, however, if his energy and potential are fully realized on the page or if his involvement in the literary world has defused his ability to write as elegantly and meaningfully as his books indicate he might do.

—Wes Magee