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:
The rock-tree underground Moving its boughs slowly, The sky-blue flintfruits Rising in the soil Gradually like sealed firmaments;
Knapped open they show Blue and cloudy white; Or like bubbles of the oozy bedrock, Like sky-blue apples falling upwards
Very slowly. The hollow blue-black Underground tree of the mine, The thick orchards of the mines Berried with flints, and these...
Peter Redgrove’s sexual ritual, ‘the Game’, ignited some of his most arresting poetry and was vital to his personal mythology.
Most books offered as poetry never leave the condition of prose – which is not to say they are good prose. But when a prose voice enters poetry, it can clear and freshen the air. Beside...
In 1894, the same year that the Children’s Charter extended new legal protection to the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by...
Recently I received a somewhat smug letter from one of the editors of PN Review asking me to contribute to yet another symposium on the state of critical chassis which still persists in Great...
The President’s Child works, effortlessly, on many levels. First, it is a political thriller. Isabel Rust, a television producer and former hack reporter, once had an affair with a man who...
A more sophisticated version of Larkin’s cry ‘Foreign poetry? No!’ is the belief that the poetry of certain parts of the world (Eastern Europe, for example) is intrinsically...
In the first chapter of Peter Redgrove’s novel we are introduced to a poet named Guy, who is about to read aloud some poems he has written about bees. He breaks off a meandering...
The Parisian Surrealists appear to have taken their games-playing very seriously. Ritual imitations of the creative act – involving the practice of automatic writing, a deep faith in the...
One of the tropes of Classical rhetoric, which surfaced again in the Jacobean fascination with death, was that of the relentless mutability of matter – Alexander the Great could be turned...
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