Peter
Redgrove : Sheen
(Stride, Exeter, 2003. 163pp, pb, 170mm x 145mm, £10.
ISBN 1-900152-87-8).
One
of four new Stride titles in a new house style and size. The odd-sounding
shape is about the same as the Foil anthology, same
width as a CD case but about 25% taller. It's a nice handy
format and serves the contents here quite well. The book also comes
with a fine cover derived from a painting by editor Rupert Loydell.
Redgrove
was a sad loss to us earlier this year but Stride has managed to
ensure that his final manuscript appeared quickly,
for which I'm
grateful. The poems are all structured in Redgrove's preferred
late style, employing the 3-step or triadic line – which
is akin to the form espoused by W C Williams in the 1950s, or by
Charles
Tomlinson on many occasions since. In Redgrove's case, the language
moves differently than in the Williams exemplar, being less compressed.
His themes here are as they have been for many years: nature, sex,
myth, mysticism, a touch of the shaman. All a bit unfashionable
in terms of the UK mainstream, and probably beyond the pale for
the alternative poetry scene here. So had time passed him by? Was
he
still relevant?
Most
emphatically so. Redgrove was quite simply one of England's best
poets from the post-war era. Yes, he was over-productive — I'd
guess his published output runs to more than 2,000 pages of verse,
some of it repetitive, but a sizeable Selected (400
pages, say), drawing on his entire career, would be a fine book.
It's not even
as
if Redgrove had ever really been fashionable, though I guess
he had his moment(s) in the 60s and early 70s when the zeitgeist
and
he
were probably most in tune with each other, the era of Crow and
of ethnopoetics.
I've always warmed to his work for his baroque, luxuriant mode
of expression, for its touch of the bardic, the shamanic, the
excessive, for his use of language as a tool of magical power
when for most
contemporary poets it is simply a blunt instrument. If there
is a problem with Redgrove's work it's a kind of imprecision,
a vagueness, but – in the end – I have to say I'm
happy to be carried along by the surge of this particular tide, as
in Eve Naming:
Trees
of light
thistle-tower
searchlights made of silver hair
They stare back
with silk that is seed,
combed beard of silk-seed
Sitting on all its thrones at once;
green sepals grip the jewel
which has turned
Into a rosette of semen;
we blow some seed of it
into a sunshaft
It skims in argosies:
actual presences
called out
From susceptible species –
named or pointed out,
they step forward
Spruced up by their name;
she savoured the word thistle,
and as she pronounced it
I saw it in a moment of silk.
My vocation was alchemist, not chemist it says on the final page
here. Alchemist indeed and, as with the alchemists of times past,
we shall not see his like again. Let's not forget him, please,
now that he's gone.
