Three short poems from the notebooks of
Peter Redgrove (1932-2003)
I
The sky looked up at me
from the sea,
my palm-skins became silky
The moon was carrying
all the world's water
in her bucket
The drops she spilt
were three wise men
and woven
in her haire
were Planets, Times and Signes
II
He time-travels to the end of his sentence.
The right-hand of his signature flies up.
It is like a crack in the paper.
He has to end-stop to prevent it flying away.
The whole book - he has to shake it a little,
please… ah now it arranges itself.
The sentence contains batteries and capacitators.
The sentence is a resonant circuit
round which the energy flows.
The book is beautifully gowned in energy,
sometimes it needs only one sentence
for the book to travel through the shady
halls of time.
III
Say the fifty words for daylight,
as you change trains
Sleep on your father's side of the bed
I saw a neat little chest of drawers
about three feet tall,
made of dark shining wood -
it was playing the violin to the Virgin Mary…
*
The three short poems published above were extracted from journals that the late Peter Redgrove kept in 1999. They were sent to us, at our request, by his widow, Penelope Shuttle. She did little to them before sending them on to us - just a touch of editorial tidying up. We had asked her whether there was any unpublished poetry by Peter. These three short poems were what she extracted for us, and we are grateful to see them. Meanwhile, the huge business of writing Peter Redgrove's biography is currently being undertaken by Neil Roberts up at Sheffield University, where most of Peter's papers are held. When that is published - the promised year of publication is 2012 - it will appear alongside a 500-page edition of his selected poems, which will be published by Cape.
What you must ask yourself is: can 500 pages really be enough? The fact is that few poets published quite as many volumes of poetry during their lifetimes as Peter Redgrove. They came gushing out of his pen like water from the tap. The edition of his Selected Poems that was published by Cape in 1999 was his 26th collection, spanning forty years of publishing. Its modest length, of just 136 pages may - one can only idly speculate - have been something of a disappointment to him. After all, taming the wind can be hurtful. In his later years, his regular publisher was Cape, but between those volumes he generally published another, with a small press from the West Country called Stride. After his death, three more collections were published. Yes, even after death he was unstoppable.
Prolixity of this kind can be very interesting. It can tell us as much about the writer as about the books themselves. What then does it tell us about Peter Redgrove? First of all, a little background. He began to publish at the end of the 1950s, two years after Ted Hughes' extraordinarily mature and explosive debut with Hawk in the Rain. The two poets had much in common. They had been near contemporaries at Cambridge University (Redgrove read Natural Sciences, and later worked for many years as a scientific journalist). They were both passionately interested in elemental forces - the buffeting of the wind; the power of water both to nourish and to overwhelm us. Formally, they were similar too - both seemed to regard the writing of poems as a kind of channeling of force fields. The old, prissy formalisms meant little to either of them. Poems surged, sprouted, burst forth. They did not necessarily get shaped into conventional stanzas with particular metrical schemes. Poems were too fluid - too unpredictably alive perhaps - to pay heed to such niceties.
But there were major points of divergence too. Redgrove's scientific and magical interests led him into more abstruse waters than Hughes would ever have swum in - psychologising; animism; the irrational. Anyone who wishes to understand some of the thinking that informed Redgrove's habits as a poet should read The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense (1987), an extraordinary pot pourri of reflections upon the interconnectedness of poetry, magic, mythology, science, legend and analytical psychology. Redgrove's poetry also had a humorous bent that Hughes' never shared, and a leaning towards surrealism that was quite alien to Hughes' more dour nature.
Redgrove's collections of poetry often felt not so much like one poem after another as variants upon the single poem that he had been writing all his life. That lifelong poem-in-progress was not so much a celebration of the natural world as a verbal expression of its essentially untameable - and often invisible - energies. The poem was not a social act - human beings figured only occasionally in Redgrove's work. It was the non-human which took centre stage - spiders (and a maze of other insects) were seldom absent for long, and he described them with a minute attention to detail that also managed to comprehend elements of the burlesque. Insects came tricked out like cabaret turns. That poem forever-in-progress-and-process was, to snatch a line from a relatively early poem called 'On the Patio', a 'wineglass overflowing with thunderwater', which meant that it was a restless, profuse, perpetually brimming thing whose atmosphere was usually somewhat akin to troubled water - that tremulous moment when the sky has darkened ominously all of a sudden, and a storm is about to break. No wonder then that Redgrove should have lived for so many years in Cornwall, a place which often seems so magically akin to his own temperament.
The poems, to recapitulate, are surging and rhapsodic, exclamatory and explosive, as much canticles as poems. They could also be repetitive - from time to time we wish that he had heeded Ben Jonson's wise words to his contemporary, William Shakespeare, about the need to indulge in a little more self-editing. Lines fall flat, and we cannot understand why they were not worked over - or excised altogether. And then, just as suddenly, the poem comes roaring back to life again. There is often something that seems quite disturbingly unpredictable about Peter Redgrove's writing habits - as though the poem is writing him, at breakneck speed, and he ought not to interfere too much. The greater problem, for the mere scribe, is keeping up with it. His task is merely to listen, and to faithfully record.
The burdens, in short, of a glorious excess.