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Collected Poems

Page 41

by Peter Redgrove


  25. ‘The House of Taps’: dedicated to Penelope Shuttle.

  26. ‘The Haunted Armchair’: ‘Redgrove solus, as invincible virgin.’ [PR to Dilly Creffield]

  27. The Hermaphrodite Album: a collection of poems by Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle, in which the authors of individual poems were not identified.

  28. Sons of My Skin: this was Redgrove’s first Selected Poems, drawing on his collections up to 1973. It also contains a number of otherwise uncollected poems, from which these have been chosen.

  29. ‘The Oracle’: ‘He’ in this poem is John Layard.

  30. ‘Sam’s Call’: based on a family anecdote from Redgrove’s Art School colleague Derek Toyne.

  31. ‘Dog Prospectus’: Redgrove wrote this poem after an unhappy experience at Colgate University, New York State.

  32. ‘Tapestry Moths’: Hardwick Hall is a great Elizabethan house in Derbyshire, famous for its extensive windows and its tapestries, which Redgrove visited in 1973. He probably had in mind a tapestry representing a fruit seller (actually female) in the Entrance Hall.

  33. ‘Dance the Putrefact’: broadcast on Radio 3 in 1975.

  34. ‘God Says “Death”’: mire-drummer: bittern.

  35. ‘Living in Falmouth’: Trelissick is a garden, now owned by the National Trust, near Truro, Cornwall. The Carrick Roads is a large natural harbour navigable from Falmouth to Truro.

  36. ‘Excrementitious Husk’: St Cuby is a church at Cuby, near St Austell in Cornwall, restored in the nineteenth century.

  37. ‘Rev. Uncle’: ‘’Obby ’Oss’ alludes to the ancient festival held on Mayday in Padstow, Cornwall, which Redgrove describes in The Colour of Radio and The Sleep of the Great Hypnotist.

  38. ‘Tall Hairdo’: goffered: fluted. St Materiana’s is an eleventh-century church at Tintagel, Cornwall.

  39. ‘At the Street-Party’: ‘The biblical echo to the smelling of the son is Genesis 27:27; Isaac blessing Jacob disguised as Esau.’ [PR]

  40. ‘Gwennap Cross’: near Redruth in Cornwall.

  41. ‘The Cave’: codling is both a species of apple and a species of moth that feeds on apples.

  42. ‘From the Life of a Dowser’: a dowser is a water-diviner. ‘Fenten ow Clyttra’ is Cornish for sparkling well.

  43. ‘Renfield before his Master’: Lola Montez (1820–61) was an Irish-born dancer and mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Redgrove pasted into his journal a newspaper clipping with a photo of her and the caption: ‘Lola Montez shook up San Francisco with her spider dance and set the citizens gawking by walking two greyhounds on a leash while a parrot perched on her shoulder. She smoked cigars, gambled in forbidden saloons and claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron.’ ‘The karast is literally the god or person who has been mummified, embalmed, and anointed or christified’, Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt the Light of the World, p. 218. This is one of many details that Redgrove derived from the works of the Victorian Egyptologist Gerald Massey, to whom he dedicated both The Apple-Broadcast and The Man Named East.

  44. ‘Silence Fiction’: loosely based on C.G. Jung’s account of a dream which, he said, led to the discovery of the collective unconscious: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, London, Fontana, 1967, p.184.

  45. ‘Call’: dedicated to the poet Frances Horovitz, a close friend of Redgrove, who died of cancer in 1983.

  46. ‘In the Pharmacy’: dedicated to a student of Redgrove’s at Falmouth School of Art.

  47. ‘The Green Tower’: the church is St Euny’s in Redruth, Cornwall, which is near the hill of Carn Brae, site of Neolithic and Iron Age settlements, and a medieval castle.

  48. ‘The Quiet Woman of Chancery Lane’: there are a number of pubs with this name and sign, immortalised by Hardy in The Return of the Native, but not in Chancery Lane, the main thoroughfare of London’s legal quarter.

  49. ‘The Funeral’, ‘Warm Stone for N’: Redgrove’s mother Nancy (or Nan) died in 1980.

  50. ‘Cloudmother’: dedicated to Derek Power, the first Chair of the Falmouth Poetry Group.

  51. ‘Local’: dedicated to Gerald Massey (see note to ‘Renfield before his Master’). ‘The Quiet Woman’: see note to ‘The Quiet Woman of Chancery Lane’.

  52. ‘Pneumonia Blouses’: nenuphar: water lily.

  53. ‘Horse Looking over Drystone Wall’: a response to one of a number of photographs of the Scilly Isles by the Falmouth-based photographer Simon Culliford, to whom the poem is dedicated.

  54. ‘Thunder-and-Lightning Polka’: dedication: J.H. Barclay was a retired biscuit-manufacturer from Bootle, who collected Redgrove’s work and was one of his most devoted readers.

  55. ‘Into the Rothko Installation’: Redgrove wrote this poem spontaneously as a response to the Rothko Room at the Tate, and was subsequently invited to contribute a poem to the gallery’s anthology With a Poet’s Eye (Tate Gallery, 1986).

  56. ‘Summer’: ‘Shivering Mountain’ is Mam Tor near Castleton in Derbyshire. This passage is based on notes Redgrove made during a visit there, sixteen years before the poem was published, an extreme example of his method of ‘incubation’.

  57. ‘Stench and Story’: ‘the Roads’: the Carrick Roads (see note to ‘Living in Falmouth).

  58. ‘Eight Parents’: Redgrove’s father died in 1989.

  59. ‘My Father’s Trapdoors’: Maskelyne: the name of a family of stage magicians. The one Redgrove saw as a boy must have been Jasper Maskelyne, 1902–74. ‘Soup-and-fish’: colloquial term for men’s evening dress.

  60. ‘Esher’: a town in Surrey, six miles from Redgrove’s childhood home in Kingston on Thames.

  61. ‘Davy Jones’ Lioness’: an unusual example of a poem that was directly inspired by a dream.

  62. ‘Enýpnion’: this Greek word, more usually transliterated ‘enupnion’, means dream.

  63. ‘Leather Goods’: there is a shop in Falmouth which sells leather retrieved from shipwrecks, but not to my knowledge human skin. ‘Manacles’: notoriously treacherous rocks off the Lizard peninsula, Cornwall.

  64. From ‘Assembling a Ghost: Ms Potter’: inspired by the death of Redgrove’s first wife, Barbara, in 1994.

  65. ‘Wheal Cupid’: the name of a disused mine at Lelant, near St Ives, Cornwall.

  66. ‘Orchard End’: the name of Redgrove’s childhood home in Kingston on Thames.

  67. ‘Collected’: ‘With such hair too… /Used to hang and brush their bosoms’: from Robert Browning’s ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, stanza 15.

  68. ‘Squelette’: see note to ‘Assembling a Ghost: Ms Potter’.

  69. ‘Limestone Cat’: dedicated to Neil Roberts, critic, biographer and editor, who showed Redgrove a petrified cat in a Derbyshire pub.

  70. ‘Spiritualism Garden’: when Redgrove was ten or twelve years old his mother confided in him about, and possibly made him complicit in, one or more abortions. He became preoccupied with the thought that the foetuses might be buried in the garden at Orchard End.

  71. ‘Afterglow Laboratories’: in 1941 Redgrove was evacuated with his mother and younger brother to Llandudno in North Wales. ‘Ora et labora’ (Pray and work) was the motto of Taunton School when Redgrove was a pupil. It has recently been changed to the corporate-sounding ‘Offering more’.

  72. ‘Nude Descending’: see Marcel Duchamp ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’.

  73. ‘Orchard End II’: see note to ‘Orchard End’.

  74. ‘Last Poem’: transcribed by Penelope Shuttle from Redgrove’s handwritten draft.

  INDEX OF TITLES

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  Abattoir Bride, 411

  Absolute Ghost, The, 65

  After the Crash, 186

  Afterglow Laboratories, 454

  Against Death, 9

  Agnostic Visitor, The, 131

  All the Skulls, 1
51

  Among the Whips and the Mud Baths, 205

  Annalee and Her Sister, 375

  Apple-Broadcast, The, 252

  Apprentice, 444

  Archaeologist, The, 17

  Argus, 380

  Arrivals, 427

  Artist to his Blind Love, The, 82

  Assembling a Ghost, 407

  At Home, 340

  At Richmond Park, 382

  At the Cosh-Shop, 312

  At the Old Powerhouse, 428

  At the Street Party, 219

  At the Window on the World, 418

  Autobiosteography, 185

  Autumn Loveletter, 473

  Ball Lightning, 467

  Bedtime Story for my Son, 15

  Being Beauteous, 38

  Bibliophile, 403

  Big Sleep, The, 322

  Bird, The, 12

  Black Bones, 385

  Blackthorn Winter, 354

  Body, Mind and Spirit, 443

  Born, 183

  Boy’s Porridge, 410

  Brainwall Cornghost Horsestorm, 125

  British Museum Smile, The, 216

  Brothel in Fairyland, The, 288

  Buveur’s Farewell, 360

  Buzz, 440

  Call, 263

  Carcass, 333

  Case, The, 74

  Cat and Tree, 396

  Cave, The, 227

  Christiana, 95

  Climax Forest, 384

  Cloudmother, 280

  Collected, 417

  Collector, The, 14

  Contentment of an Old White Man, The, 56

  Core, 472

  Cornish Persephone, 468

  Corposant, 31

  Dance the Putrefact, 168

  Davy Jones’ Lioness, 404

  Decreator, 68

  Delivery-Hymn, 218

  Dentist-Conjurers, 442

  Dewy Garment, A, 317

  Directive, 58

  Disguise, 30

  Doctrine of the Window, The, 145

  Dog Prospectus, 141

  Doll-Wedding, 151

  Domestic Suite, 337

  Dr Faust’s Sea-Spiral Spirit, 109

  Dr Immanuel Rath, 3

  Dream-Kit, 245

  Drink to the Duke, 300

  Dry Parrot, 321

  Dynamite Doctors, The, 337

  Earth Shakes Away its Dead Like Crumbs from a Cloth, 224

  Eight Parents, 379

  Elderhouse, 435

  Entry Fee, 339

  Enýpnion, 406

  Erosion, 124

  Esher, 403

  Excrementitious Husk, 201

  Expectant Father, 37

  Eye-Bestowing, 299

  Falmouth Clouds, 355

  Familiar, 399

  Fantasia, 46

  Far Star, 319

  Ferns, The, 56

  Flies, 13

  First Earthquake, The, 327

  Fish, 382

  For David, 127

  For No Good Reason, 27

  Force, The, 53

  Four Poems of Love and Transition, 359

  Frankenstein in the Forest, 107

  Frog-Leap Plops, 184

  From the Life of a Dowser, 229

  From the Questions to Mary, 132

  From the Virgil Caverns, 429

  Full Measures, 228

  Funeral, The, 275

  Geodic Poet, 347

  Ghosts, 27

  Girl Reading My Poetry, The, 318

  God Says ‘Death’, 187

  Grand Buveur I, 300

  Grand Buveur II, 301

  Grand Buveur X, 304

  Grand Lunacy, The, 188

  Green Tower, The, 265

  Grimmanderson on Tresco, 231

  Guarded by Bees, 192

  Guardian, 4

  Guarnerius, 380

  Guns and Wells, 238

  Gwennap Cross, 220

  Half-House, The, 144

  Half-Scissors, The, 109

  Harper, The, 475

  Harvest, 329

  Haunted Armchair, The, 106

  Heart, The, 264

  Heir, The, 57

  Henrhyd Waterfall, 452

  Her Shirt Open, 311

  Horse Looking Over Drystone Wall, 309

  House in the Acorn, The, 55

  House of Taps, The, 105

  Housekeeper, The, 249

  Huge Old, 440

  Hush! The Sun, 90

  I See, 53

  I Stroll, 30

  Idea of Entropy at Maenporth Beach, The, 103

  In Autumn Equinox, 285

  In Company Time, 47

  In the Hall of the Saurians, 310

  In the Lab with the Lady Doctor, 358

  In the Pharmacy, 264

  In the Vermilion Cathedral, 166

  In the Year of the Comet, 452

  Intimate Supper, 100

  Into the Rothko Installation, 315

  Journey, The, 246

  Joy Gordon, 343

  Last Poem, 478

  Laundromat as Prayer-Wheel, The, 235

  Lawn Sprinkler and Lighthouse, 437

  Lazarus and the Sea, 10

  Leather Goods, 406

  Lecture Overheard, 237

  Legible Hours, 303

  Light Hotel, 208

  Lights in the Mist, 279

  Like a Rock, 292

  Limestone Cat, 438

  Living in Falmouth, 195

  Local, 304

  Looms of the Ancestors, The, 190

  Luckbath, 459

  Malagueño, 34

  Man Named East, The, 284

  Marmalade, 348

  Master Piss-on-Himself, 302

  Memorial, 16

  Menopausa, 338

  Minerals of Cornwall, Stones of Cornwall, 96

  Mists, 28

  Moon Disposes, The, 99

  Moonbeast in Sunshine, 167

  More Leaves from my Bestiary, 32

  Moth-er, 460

  Mothers, 282

  Mothers and Child, 289

  Moths, The, 395

  Mountain, The, 372

  Move to Cornwall, A, 195

  Mr Waterman, 39

  My Father’s Kingdoms, 182

  My Father’s Spider, 217

  My Father’s Trapdoors, 388

  My Prince, 463

  Ninety-Two Demons, The, 203

  Noise, 60

  Nude Descending, 462

  Nude Studies III: The Speleologists, 420

  Nude Studies VI: The Horse, 409

  Old House, 11

  Old White Man, The, 83

  On Losing One’s Black Dog, 158

  On the Patio, 215

  On the Screaming of Gulls, 63

  One Time, 183

  Or was that when I was Grass, 181

  Oracle, The, 133

  Orchard End, 417

  Orchard End II, 477

  Orchard With Wasps, 234

  Orphelia, 373

  Paradise of Storms, The, 459

  Passing Cloud, A, 383

  Peachware, 204

  Pheromones, 243

  Philosophy in Welshese, A, 134

  Phlebas the Phoenician, 3

  Pianism, 476

  Picking Mushrooms, 21

  Pictures from a Japanese Printmaker, 154

  Pigmy Thunder, 371

  Place, 191

  Play, The, 17

  Playing Dead, 316

  Pneumonia Blouses, 309

  Popular Star, 373

  Pregnant Father, The, 10

  Proper Halo, The, 274

  Pure Chance, 397

  Quasimodo’s Many Beds, 91

  Quiet Time, 336

  Quiet Woman of Chancery Lane, The, 267

  Rainbow, The, 469

  Renfield Before His Master, 232

  Required of you this Night, 61

  Reservoirs of Perfected Ghost, 434

  Rev. Uncle, 207

  Rich Jabez Dog, 179

  Rock, Egg, Church, Trumpet, 225r />
  Room in the Trees, The, 59

  Rough and Lecherous, 202

  Round Pylons, 334

  Saluting Willa, 222

  Sam’s Call, 136

  Scarecrow, A (AWM), 46

  Scarecrow, A (IHS), 320

  Sea-Eye, 398

  Sean’s Description, 189

  Seconds, Drops, Pence, 259

  Secret Breakfast, The, 248

  Secret Examination, The, 353

  Secretary, The, 36

  Serious Readers, 145

  Sermon, The, 70

  Shadow-Silk, 97

  Shaving, 185

  She Believes She Has Died, 283

  Shearing Grass, 14

  Shell, A, 396

  Shells, 270

  Shrinking Clock, The, 184

  Silence Fiction, 251

  Silent Man, A, 45

  Silicon Stars, 204

  Sire of Branches and Air, The, 222

  Six Odes, 121

  Sixty Stags, 347

  Skin, The, 164

  Small Death, A, 101

  Small Earthquake, The, 353

  Sniffing Tom, 357

  Snow-Shirt, The, 121

  Solid Prayers, 451

  Some Books, Some Authors, Some Readers, 126

  Somebody, 165

  Song, 241

  Spiritualism Garden, 450

  Spring (AB), 215

  Squelette, 421

  Staines Waterworks, 386

  Stains, The, 143

  Starlight, 333

  Stench and Story, 371

  Stronghold, The, 28

  Summer, 328

  Sweat, 63

  Sunday Afternoons, 60

  Tall Hairdo, 209

  Tapestry Moths, 142

  Terrible Jesus, The, 163

  Theme-Dream, 476

  They Come, 412

  This Cornish Passage, 136

  Three Aquarium Portraits, 152

  Thrust and Glory, 193

  Thunder-and-Lightning Polka, 314

  To the Black Poet, 331

  To the Water-Psychiatrist, 272

  Toad and Others, 376

  Tom as Supernatural Presence, 449

  Transactions, 278

  Trashabet, 148

  Tree of Swords, 165

  Trial by Mallet, 470

  True Wasp, 471

  Tsunami, 434

  Twelvemonth, A, 146

  Under the Duvet, 268

  Under the Reservoir, 354

  Variation on Lorca, 35

  Vicarage Mooncakes, 188

  Visible Baby, The, 179

  Warm Stone for N, 277

  Wave-Birth, 349

  Weddings at Nether Powers, The, 206

  Wheal Cupid, 411

  White, Night-Flying Moths Called ‘Souls’, The, 239

  Whitsunwind, 287

  Whole Music at Pod’s Kitchen, The, 194

 

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