Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Peter Redgrove’s Selected Poems comprises a reprinting of some, though by no means all, of the titles in Poems 1954-1987, plus thirty or so poems selected from four volumes published since The Hall of the Saurians in 1987. It is a nicely produced book, modestly priced, and it offers the reader a good and varied selection of this poet’s work over the last four decades, and perhaps an opportunity to evaluate his achievement and standing among his peers as he approaches his seventies.

     It is noticeable that there is not a great difference, either in method or subject-matter, between the early and the late poems except that the rather Whitmanesque, dithyrambic line tends, after Every Chink of the Ark (1977), to become shorter, often with a sharpening of imagic focus. In fact, the most striking thing about this Selected Poems is the high level of accomplishment, the originality of vocal tone, and sheer confidence of the earliest poems.

     Reviewing The First Earthquake and Poems 1954-1987 in Ambit more than a decade ago I recommended that the poems should be taken in fairly small doses since the richness of language and imagery might be difficult to digest in large quantities, and the same caveat applies to the Selected Poems.

     The reading of any poem of real quality is, for the reader, an act of collaboration with its author and we should expect a strong, original poem to make fairly heavy demands on attention, intelligence and empathic imagination. On the whole the rewards are, with Redgrove, commensurate with the willingness of the reader to give full attention to the text though, especially in the earliest poems, linguistic and imagic over-egging can obscure rather than illumine the quiddity of the thing being presented.

     Redgrove’s tendency to flex and display verbal musculature can trap him into bathos and simple absurdities. In ‘On the Patio’, for instance, his account of a wineglass being filled with rain during a thunderstorm is beautifully achieved until the end when:

Suddenly I dart out into the patio,
Snatch the bright glass up and drain it,

Bang it back down on the thundery steel
                                            table for a refill.

     Immediately one protests that a wineglass that has been ‘banged’ down on a steel table is most unlikely to survive to be refilled.

     Still, the Charles Atlas part of Redgrove is less in evidence in most of the later work and there are lovely elegiac poems for his parents and a new delicacy and leanness in, for instance, the delightful ‘Esher’.

     Selected Poems is excellent value, good to look at, to handle and, of course, to read.