CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Peter Redgrove
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
I: Early Uncollected Poems (1953–54)
Phlebas the Phoenician
Dr Immanuel Rath
Guardian
II: The Collector (1960)
Against Death
The Pregnant Father
Lazarus and the Sea
Old House
The Bird
Flies
The Collector
Shearing Grass
Bedtime Story for my Son
Memorial
The Archaeologist
The Play
Without Eyes
Picking Mushrooms
III: The Nature of Cold Weather (1961)
For No Good Reason
Ghosts
The Stronghold
Mists
Two Poems
I Stroll
Disguise
Corposant
More Leaves from my Bestiary
Malagueño
Variation on Lorca
The Secretary
Expectant Father
Being Beauteous
Mr Waterman
IV: At the White Monument (1963)
A Silent Man
Fantasia
A Scarecrow
In Company Time
V: The Force (1966)
The Force
I See
The House in the Acorn
The Ferns
The Contentment of an Old White Man
The Heir
Directive
The Room in the Trees
Sunday Afternoons
Noise
Required of you this Night
The Artist to his Blind Love
Sweat
On the Screaming of Gulls
The Absolute Ghost
The Widower
Decreator
The Sermon
The Case
VI: Work in Progress (1969)
The Old White Man
Hush! The Sun
Quasimodo’s Many Beds
VII: Dr Faust’s Sea-Spiral Spirit (1972)
Christiana
Minerals of Cornwall, Stones of Cornwall
Shadow-Silk
The Moon Disposes
Intimate Supper
Young Women with the Hair of Witches and No Modesty
A Small Death
The Youthful Scientist Remembers
The Idea of Entropy at Maenporth Beach
The House of Taps
The Haunted Armchair
Frankenstein in the Forest
The Half-Scissors
Dr Faust’s Sea-Spiral Spirit
VIII: The Hermaphrodite Album (1973)
The Snow-Shirt
Six Odes
Erosion
Brainwall Cornghost Horsestorm
Some Books, Some Authors, Some Readers
For David
IX: Sons of My Skin (1975)
The Agnostic Visitor
From the Questions to Mary
The Oracle
A Philosophy in Welshese
This Cornish Passage
Sam’s Call
X: From Every Chink of the Ark (1977)
Dog Prospectus
Tapestry Moths
The Stains
The Half-House
Serious Readers
The Doctrine of the Window
A Twelvemonth
Trashabet
Doll-Wedding
All the Skulls
Three Aquarium Portraits
Pictures from a Japanese Printmaker
Winter Oat-Flies
On Losing One’s Black Dog
The Terrible Jesus
The Skin
Somebody
Tree of Swords
In the Vermilion Cathedral
Moonbeast in Sunshine
Dance the Putrefact
XI: The Weddings at Nether Powers (1979)
The Visible Baby
Rich Jabez Dog
The Wood
Or was that when I was Grass
My Father’s Kingdoms
Born
One Time
The Shrinking Clock
Frog-Leap Plops
Autobiosteography
Shaving
After the Crash
God Says ‘Death’
Vicarage Mooncakes
The Grand Lunacy
Sean’s Description
The Looms of the Ancestors
Place
Guarded by Bees
Thrust and Glory
The Whole Music at Pod’s Kitchen
A Move to Cornwall
from Living in Falmouth
Excrementitious Husk
Rough and Lecherous
The Ninety-Two Demons
Silicon Stars
Peachware
Among the Whips and the Mud Baths
The Weddings at Nether Powers
Rev. Uncle
Light Hotel
Tall Hairdo
XII: The Apple-Broadcast (1981)
On the Patio
Spring
The British Museum Smile
My Father’s Spider
Delivery-Hymn
At the Street Party
Gwennap Cross
Saluting Willa
The Sire of Branches and Air
Earth Shakes Away its Dead Like Crumbs from a Cloth
Rock, Egg, Church, Trumpet
The Cave
Full Measures
From the Life of a Dowser
Grimmanderson on Tresco
Renfield Before His Master
Orchard With Wasps
The Laundromat as Prayer-Wheel
Lecture Overheard
Guns and Wells
The White, Night-Flying Moths Called ‘Souls’
Song
Pheromones
Dream-Kit
The Journey
The Secret Breakfast
The Housekeeper
Silence Fiction
The Apple-Broadcast
XIII: The Working of Water (1984)
Seconds, Drops, Pence
XIV: The Man Named East (1985)
Call
In the Pharmacy
The Heart
The Green Tower
The Quiet Woman of Chancery Lane
Under the Duvet
Shells
To the Water-Psychiatrist
The Proper Halo
The Funeral
Warm Stone for N
Transactions
Lights in the Mist
Cloudmother
Mothers
The Will of November
She Believes She Has Died
The Man Named East
In Autumn Equinox
Whitsunwind
The Brothel in Fairyland
Mothers and Child
Like a Rock
Wooden Wheat
The Young and Pregnant Spiritualist
XV: The Mudlark Poems & Grand Buveur (1986)
Eye-Bestowing
Drink to the Duke
Grand Buveur I
Grand Buveur II
Master Piss-on-Himself
Legible Hours
Grand Buveur X
Local
XVI: In the Hall of the Saurians (1987)
Pneumonia Blouses
Horse Looking Over Drystone Wall
In the Hall of the Saurians
Her Shirt Open
At the Cosh-Shop
Thunder-and-Lightni
ng Polka
Into the Rothko Installation
Playing Dead
A Dewy Garment
The Girl Reading My Poetry
Far Star
A Scarecrow
Dry Parrot
The Big Sleep
XVII: The First Earthquake (1989)
The First Earthquake
Summer
Harvest
To the Black Poet
Starlight
Carcass
Round Pylons
Wooden Pipes
Zoe’s Thomas
Quiet Time
Domestic Suite
The Dynamite Doctors
Menopausa
Entry Fee
At Home
Joy Gordon
XVIII: Dressed as for a Tarot Pack (1990)
Geodic Poet
Sixty Stags
Marmalade
Wave-Birth
XIX: Under the Reservoir (1992)
The Small Earthquake
The Secret Examination
Blackthorn Winter
Under the Reservoir
Falmouth Clouds
Sniffing Tom
In the Lab with the Lady Doctor
from Four Poems of Love and Transition
from Buveur’s Farewell
XX: The Laborators (1993)
Pigmy Thunder
Stench and Story
The Mountain
Orphelia
Popular Star
Annalee and Her Sister
Toad and Others
XXI: My Father’s Trapdoors (1994)
Eight Parents
Argus
Guarnerius
At Richmond Park
Fish
A Passing Cloud
Climax Forest
Black Bones
Staines Waterworks
My Father’s Trapdoors
XXII: Abyssophone (1995)
The Moths
A Shell
Cat and Tree
Pure Chance
Sea-Eye
Familiar
XXIII: Assembling a Ghost (1996)
Esher
Bibliophile
Davy Jones’ Lioness
Enýpnion
Leather Goods
from Assembling a Ghost: Ms Potter
Nude Studies VI: The Horse
Boy’s Porridge
Wheal Cupid
Abattoir Bride
They Come
XXIV: Orchard End (1997)
Orchard End
Collected
At the Window on the World
Nude Studies III: The Speleologists
Squelette
XXV: From the Virgil Caverns (2002)
Arrivals
At the Old Powerhouse
From the Virgil Caverns
Reservoirs of Perfected Ghost
Tsunami
Elderhouse
Lawn Sprinkler and Lighthouse
Huge Old
Buzz
Dentist-Conjurers
Body, Mind and Spirit
Apprentice
XXVI: Sheen (2003)
Tom as Supernatural Presence
Spiritualism Garden
Solid Prayers
In the Year of the Comet
Henrhyd Waterfall
Afterglow Laboratories
XXVII: A Speaker for the Silver Goddess (2006)
Luckbath
The Paradise of Storms
Moth-er
Nude Descending
My Prince
XXVIII: The Harper (2006)
Ball Lightning
Cornish Persephone
The Rainbow
Trial by Mallet
True Wasp
Core
Autumn Loveletter
The Harper
Pianism
Theme-Dream
Orchard End II
Last Poem
Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003, was one of the most prolific of post-war poets and, as this Collected Poems reveals, one of the finest. A friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in the early 1950s, Redgrove was regarded by many as their equal, and his work has been championed by a wide variety of writers – from Margaret Drabble to Colin Wilson, Douglas Dunn to Seamus Heaney. Ted Hughes once wrote warmly to Redgrove of ‘how important you’ve been to me. You’ve no idea how much – right from the first time we met.’
In this first Collected Poems, Neil Roberts has gathered together the best poems from twenty-six volumes of verse – from The Collector (1959) to the three books published posthumously. The result is an unearthed treasure trove – poems that find new and thrilling ways of celebrating the natural world and the human condition, poems that dazzle with their visual imagination, poems that show the huge range and depth of the poet’s art. In Redgrove’s poetry there is a unique melding of the erotic, the terrifying, the playful, the strange, and the strangely familiar; his originality and energy is unparalleled in our time and his work was the work of a true visionary.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Redgrove was born in 1932 and studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge. He was also a novelist, playwright and co-author (with Penelope Shuttle) of The Wise Wound, a revolutionary study of the human fertility cycle. Among his many awards were the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Prix Italia and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He died in 2003.
ALSO BY PETER REDGROVE
POETRY
The Collector
The Nature of Cold Weather
At the White Monument
The Force
Work in Progress
Dr Faust’s Sea-Spiral Spirit
Three Pieces for Voices
The Hermaphrodite Album (with Penelope Shuttle)
Sons of My Skin: Selected Poems 1954–74
From Every Chink of the Ark
The Weddings at Nether Powers
The Apple-Broadcast
The Working of Water
The Man Named East
The Mudlark Poems & Grand Buveur
The Moon Disposes: Poems 1954–1987
In the Hall of the Saurians
The First Earthquake
Dressed as for a Tarot Pack
Under the Reservoir
The Laborators
My Father’s Trapdoors
Abyssophone
Assembling a Ghost
Orchard End
Selected Poems
From the Virgil Caverns
Sheen
A Speaker for the Silver Goddess
The Harper
FICTION
In the Country of the Skin
The Terrors of Dr Treviles (with Penelope Shuttle)
The Glass Cottage
The God of Glass
The Sleep of the Great Hypnotist
The Beekeepers
The Facilitators, or, Madam Hole-in-the-Day
The One Who Set Out to Study Fear
The Cyclopean Mistress
What the Black Mirror Saw
PLAY BOOKS
Miss Carstairs Dressed for Blooding and Other Plays
In the Country of the Skin
PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY
The Wise Wound (with Penelope Shuttle)
The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense
Alchemy for Women (with Penelope Shuttle)
ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS
The Colour of Radio
to Penelope Shuttle
INTRODUCTION
Peter Redgrove’s work is exceptionally of a piece. He had one great theme, a transformed vision of the world which is at the same time an affirmation of neglected human powers. He explored this theme with extraordinary dedication and intensity, and at the same time his writing is an unusually complete revelation of the man. His voi
ce is educated, even scholarly, well-mannered but with a note of what Philip Fried called ‘disciplined wildness’.fn1 Both in person and in writing he had a genial, at times wicked, and at times bizarre sense of humour. His career was a sustained and heroic commitment to the creative imagination and his poetic style, matching the vision of which it was the expression, was at once exuberant and precise, fantastic and scientific. Unorthodox and challenging ideas are matched by minute and exact observation. So in one poem, characteristically titled ‘In the Pharmacy’, he asks his reader to entertain the idea that a ‘pupa cogitates’, but at the same time reveals the ‘floury wings’ and ‘fernleaf tongue’ of the moth. He once said that anyone who described him as a surrealist could never have looked through a microscope.
As a young boy he wanted to be a scientist. He had his own laboratory in the family home and when he left school, just short of his eighteenth birthday, he had won a State Scholarship and an Open College Scholarship to read Natural Sciences at Cambridge. But this image of conventional success and promise was delusive. The young man was already troubled by obsessions that would, within months of leaving school, shatter the youthful scientist and, over the next few years, remake him as a poet.
Before going to university he had to subject himself to military service and, under the stress of the harsh regime of basic training, he had a nervous breakdown. Sexual obsessions, originating in his superficially conventional but deeply conflicted family life, and phobias about his health and sanity, overwhelmed him. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and, at that time, there was only one treatment for schizophrenia: Deep Insulin Coma Therapy. He escaped the army, but at the cost of a more extreme ordeal: daily injections of insulin, inducing a coma from which he was brought back by injections of glucose. He was subjected to this – later discredited – treatment fifty times.
The following year he went up to Cambridge but it became apparent that he no longer had any enthusiasm for pursuing a degree in science. During his years at Cambridge what absorbed him was not science but poetry. By his own, perhaps self-mythologising, account it was his first sexual experience that made him a poet. After making love a peace and silence came into his head, and into this silence his first poem, ‘The Collector’, which became the title-poem of his first collection.fn2 An even more important poem of his Cambridge years was ‘Lazarus and the Sea’, which encodes the transformative effect of his insulin coma treatment. During those comas he had vivid dreams, in one of which he was ‘dead, and dissolved into the soil’.fn3 When, setting out as a poet, he asked himself what authority he had, he remembered this experience:
I could say nothing of where I had been,
But I knew the soil in my limbs and the rain-water
In my mouth, knew the ground as a slow sea unstable
Like clouds and tolerating no organisation such as mine
In its throat of my grave.
Written at the age of twenty-one, ‘Lazarus and the Sea’ is an astonishingly authoritative and resonant poem, which may well have inspired Sylvia Plath to follow the example of using the figure of Lazarus in her poem inspired by aggressive psychiatric treatment, ‘Lady Lazarus’.