Jeremy Hooker (UK)

Richard Berengarten — A Tribute

After writing a piece on Richard Berengarten’s great book, Changing, I remember saying to Kim Landers, Richard’s former wife, ‘Richard is the elephant in the room of contemporary British poetry’. Of course, I meant no disrespect. Quite the contrary. There is nothing elephantine about Richard, who is a gracious man, and a graceful poet. Richard, it seems, is a poet too big to be as widely recognised in Britain as he should be. There is his longevity as a poet. There is his ambition, and there is his range of poetic skills.

We have met, or communicated, on occasion over many years, and once shared a reading, and I have written several pieces on his work, beginning with Black Light. Formally, we are very different as poets; but perhaps not so different in spirit. His formal control is partly what awes about his poetry. We were closest perhaps in our two books Avebury and Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant, published in the early Seventies, which show the attraction of the elemental and the ‘primitive’. In those books, we were seeking some fundamental truth, beyond the overheated modern secular world.

I wish I could say it’s a mystery to me that Richard isn’t widely known as an outstanding poet of our time. The problem, perhaps, is that he isn’t British in a narrow sense. He is a European poet, even a world poet; he belongs with George Seferis and Octavio Paz. He is a poet of his Jewish inheritance, and of his Balkan and Chinese influences. He is British, though, in this sense: he brings these riches to us; he enlarges the scope of our parochial world. He reminds us, in his mastery of the English language, what our native poetry is capable of achieving. 

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