Presumably it’s not unreasonable to struggle with phonetically-written English if that’s the tactic adopted to try and conjure a particular accent. Doing so doesn’t make the work concerned ‘bad’ (nor automatically ‘good’); neither does it make me a ‘bad person’. (I assure you I try not to be!)
But I did struggle with such poems in Daljit Nagra’s Look We Have Coming to Dover. I suspect the poems concerned work far better as performance pieces than they do on the page; that would be only natural. Having said that, there are examples in this collection – like the short and splendid “Journey” – which are fine and all the more accessible because they have no need to resort to phonetic gymnastics.
My volume comes from a Faber reprint of “Faber’s most iconic collections of poetry, one from each decade” which, I have to say, wouldn’t appear to say much for Faber’s list from 2000 to 2009… In the prior decades they have been able to choose Eliot, Auden, Hughes, Plath, Larkin, Heaney… Maybe Faber lost its way toward the end of the last century…Or maybe poetry did too…
Ian Gouge - Writer 