Peter Redgrove most recent volume of poems was The Apple Broadcast. He teaches at Falmouth School of Art and has brought out an anthology: Cornwall in Verse (Secker, 68 pp., £5.50, 17 May, 0 436 40987 9). He speaks of himself there as having ‘sired several children on this soil, which may make me, as an immigrant father of citizens, some kind of honorary Cornishman’. He explains that ‘poems are tuning-devices, and Cornwall is sending out many interesting broadcasts.’ The selection bears out this claim. It is short, but has a wide span of work: Hardy, Betjeman, D.M. Thomas, the unsung John Harris (1820-1884), who plumbs the Duchy’s mines:
I
Each fly a little Isis, A transformer, buzzing; The trees worried by their wolf, The wind. The spring of water, An almost silent work, continuing Under the threshold of sleep. The little rivers of gnats.
II
The boy showed us a pleasant trick, Taking his penny-whistle to the gnatswarm, Which widened to the low notes like the outline Of a Russian doll that can never be...
(for Peter Porter)
I
The maroon-hued slugs swallow the garden down. Out at sea the ships on fire with light Like burning soldiers drawn up on parade.
I switch on the electric light; It is a furnace in a vase. Then the maroon that slaps the night:
The lifeboat is out, One of those lighted ships is toiling With some current like a great maroon dragon;
Let its stacked lights not be quenched. I...
Who was cast out of heaven But is alive in me. A certain Ghost dangles foaming in his jaw.
My tongue licks my palate And the big shed of my jaws Distils. The head of beer
Pocked like the Moon in craters Alive in me. In this city of boys A million open collars of beer
The fizz hanging in the throat Like a gossamer in a well, The moon going down
In black tides, the spirit Distilling in the dark...
I
The rich seaside stones turn to cloth at a word, To magnificent garments, the tweeds of the granite, Felspar woven with mica and buttons of quartz. The whole earth at a word is a magnificent garment Which the Lord wears, A magnificence sewn for him by his Mother,
The smooth sleeves of wet slate, the sewn pearls of barnacles, A dressing-gown of sliding sand, a...
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