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     This is a book which no one with even a passing interest in poetry can afford to be without. The breadth of Charles Causley’s range and his mastery of the art bring home to the reader a wealth of experience set in a sublimity of form to cause nothing less than aesthetic delight. This is not only because his favourite form is the ballad but also because he uses it with a depth of interpretation unique in the modern era. He is, of course, steeped and saturated in the lyric tradition of English poetry, but he is a consummate practitioner of non-rhyming and free verse as well. For poems about childhood, ordinary people, and one’s own family, he is the best of guides. In fact, his solidarity with the generality of persons is exemplary: he can show up Auden in this respect. If his main influences are the English lyric tradition, Blake, Clare, the Romantics, Whitman, Housman, Auden, Betjeman, and W.S. Graham, say, they nevertheless operate in a manner all his own, and in a matter which, unfashionably, brings honour to Christianity, the bedrock of his poetry.

     These collected poems begin and end with the sea. The sea is everywhere: “the flashing bay”, “the leaping fishboats”. This Celtic Cornishman speaks of “The splendid sea”, “the pilfering sea”, “The grave and open sea’, “seas deeper than death”, and “The holy sea, unmerciful and mighty”, which “Strides with the tide its penance all the day”. The sky performs a similar symbolic function. We see “Blue on heaven’s bar the acrobat star”; we watch as “The archer sun unships his candid quiver/ And tips with azure all his blazing arrows”; we feel “a cinder star/ Sizzling in the sky”; we notice “Across the beach of the sky the sun/ Crawled like a crab”; while by contrast “The moon’s ray” is “A searchlight crawling on the bay”. His Liza Tremlett “Casts a laser eye/ Into the God-filled sky”; for the Causley persona itself: “Out of the million-angeled sky / As gold as the hairs of my head and thigh/ I heard a new-born baby cry”. If “Lightning razors/ The heavy air”, that cry, the sea, and the sky are the media of Christ.

     This is a poetry haunted by pathos, especially death at sea in battle:

Draw the blanket of ocean
Over the frozen face.
He lies, his eyes quarried by glittering fish,
Staring through the green freezing sea-glass
At the Northern Lights
                          (‘Convoy’).

Yet it early became axiomatic for Causley that death is redeemed by faith. It seems that, childhood and adolescent faith aside, war forced this conclusion on him, rather as it did on David Jones. So when in a typical sea ballad he asks the sea, “Are you hard as a diamond, sea,/ As iron, as oak?/ Are you stronger than flint or steel?”, the sea is being more than ironic when it replies, “And  the  lightning  stroke”. We sense that Causley’s vision was won at a high price. Because he is not a poet who can be ignored with impunity, his Christianity is therefore all the more interesting. Like Jones before and Hill after him, both the poetry and the religion are employed to raise standards, not the reverse. In ‘Death Of A Pupil’, Causley observes a dying pupil being stolen by Christ. This reminds him of his experience of war:

For we had met, this thief and I, before
On terrible seas, at the spoiled city’s heart.

     From beginning to end, the pulsation of the lyrical heart of English poetry can be felt. This is good news for all those wondering where it had gone. This is poetry “Where the icicle fires her freezing ray”, where “the crystal lark floats on the Cornish air”. It is “poetry bursting like a diamond bomb”, where we hear “The iron music of the London train”, and meet the mundane and the popular song in a rhapsodic image:

O the pineapple salads of Colombo 
               The wine-bar at Trincomali
My bonnie lies over the ocean:
               The brilliant Arabian Sea.

               (‘Able Seaman Hodge Remembers Ceylon’)

*

     Never for a moment does his conscience desert him. We are in the company of a man who sees straight through himself: “In the stirring pool I fail/ To see the drowned of Passchendaele”. He is a witness to the “jigsaws of impossible bone” in the war cemetery. He could serve as a witness to the Unknown Soldier:

He lies locked in a wood of winter snow.
The snow is blue, the shadows indigo.
If he could speak, I would not understand.
Ice seals the rifle to his silent hand.
                            (‘On The Eastern Front’)

     Charles Causley’s father died when he was seven. This results in several moving poems about his father, but it also leaves the impression of a young mind somewhat unprotected from the dangerous world. This is perhaps Causley’s greatest strength, as though his father’s death afforded him the poetic legacy of childhood’s visionary intensity. His poetry constantly recreates the immediacy of childhood: “I feared that as I looked towards my bedroom door/ I should see the handle break slowly into flames, then turn”. But its most memorable gift to us is the Causley ballad. Characteristically, this leaves no room for distinction between childhood and adulthood, war and peace, love and loss, death and life. Always the poignancy is in the pathos of their unity. The truth of this is everywhere apparent in his best work.

I saw the crystal poet
               Leaning on the old sea-rail;
In his breast lay death, the lover,
               In his head the nightingale.

                             (‘Keats at Teignmouth’)

*

O war is a casual mistress
And the world is her double bed.
She has a few charms in her mechanised arms
But you wake up and find yourself dead.

                             (‘A Ballad For Katharine Of Aragon’)

*

Brittle O brittle hangs the steeple:
             A finger of white,
The insidious snow furling, whirling
             In the glass ball of night.

                             (‘Legend’)

*

But the terrible toy of my lily-white boy
Is the gun in his innocent hand.

                             (‘Recruiting Drive’)

*

False O false was my lover
Dead on the diamond shore
White as a fleece, for her name was Peace
And the soldier’s name was War.

                             (‘Ballad Of The Faithless Wife’)

     This is not a poetry suffused with sentimentality or the blush of innocence. It comes from a primeval taproot in our tradition. And when Causley writes, “I heard the heart’s drum in the scratched cell beating”, we know his Christ, “naked as Eden”, is in there as well. His empathy with the derelict and the forgotten is equal and opposite to his outflanking of pomposity and cant. This comes about through a literary sophistication of the highest order, a point which Causley proves several times, notably in ‘The Visit’, concerning a haughty Greek poet. As well as in his wonderful poem to Auden, ‘Letter From Jericho’, which with the lightest of touches upbraids the old master for looking down on “unknowable nomads” beyond the point where “Carolingian/ Bavaria stopped” (as in Auden’s poem ‘The Cave Of Making’). Never has Auden’s literary and historical snobbery been so deftly exposed.

     There is much more to extol in this book, such as ‘I Am The Great Sun’, his perfect sonnet on Christ; ‘Ten Types Of Hospital Visitor’; and the Canadian and Australian sequences. There are the incursions into recent history, like the Tudor poem ‘King’s College Chapel’; and more ancient history, like ‘Fable’, in which Aesop is described “as if a toad had spat/ Diamonds.” There is the notable poem ‘Letter To W.S. Graham’ in which Causley says of Graham’s poetry: “I/ Turn to it as to/ A spring that has/ Not failed me in/ Forty years”. He also says, “I thank you;/ Think of you as/ The Genuine Miracle.” There is ‘Birthday Photograph’ in which Causley describes himself as “A talismanic Celt”. There are quotable poems galore.

     The joy of the poems is that they are as fresh now as when they were first written. This ageless quality stems from his dizzying trust in his poetic vocation, despite thirty years as a schoolmaster in “chalk Siberias”. For this reason, he was and remains the best of role-models. In a poetry world crowded with poets falling from grace, this book gives us back our wings. However, it has no editorial content whatsoever. No introduction, no dates of first publication, no notes, nothing – merely an index of first lines – an absurd and cheapskate oversight. Fortunately, Charles Causley’s poems fend for themselves; but it would have been nice.