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Book Review
FROM RUEFUL TO RAUCOUS
1986
Overview
Most obviously, we are in the presence of a clever, lively, often extremely funny writer with wide literary and cultural reference and extraordinary technical facility. Like Auden, whom Mr. [Gavin Ewart] credits as one of his masters (''The Gavin Ewart Show'' begins with a poem called ''Audenesque for an Initiation''), he is a virtuoso of forms; his work is a display case of inventiveness and adaptation, which includes numerous ''homages'' in the Poundian sense - Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, Kipling, Philip Larkin and Ogden Nash are merely some of those whose manners he slyly or affectionately slips into. Also like Auden, Mr. Ewart is a master of the conversational mixed tone, an urbane blend of knowingness, satirical edge, wisdom and tolerance, which is an aspect of what he refers to as ''Auden's wonderful hybrid rose that crossed the comic with the tragic.'' ''Hurried Love'' is characteristic: Those who make hurried love don't do so from any lack of affection or because they despise their partner as a human being - what they're doing is just as sincere as a more formal wooing. She may have a train to catch; perhaps the room is theirs for one hour only or a mother is expected back or some interruption known, awaited - so the spur of the moment must be celebrated. Making love against time is really the occupation of all lovers and the clock-hands moving point a moral: not crude, but clever are those who grab what soon is gone for ever. Mr. Ewart's dexterity of form and tone enables him to encompass the shocking and violent (''The Gentle Sex'' chronicles a brutal Northern Ireland murder in the stanzas of Gerard Manley Hopkins's ''Wreck of the Deutschland'') as effortlessly as the farcical and frothy (''The Importance of Being Earnest'' retells Wilde's plot in limericks). His ear for dialect of all sorts, sharpened by a distaste for jargon, is exquisitely tuned, as in his update of Sir Thomas Wyatt's ''They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek,'' which begins: At this moment in time the chicks that went for me in a big way are opting out; as of now, it's an all-change situation.
Publisher
New York Times Company
Subject
