Fiona Sampson reviews The Harper by Peter Redgrove

Peter Redgrove’s posthumous work is divided between two collections published this Spring.  Stride published A Speaker for the Silver Goddess in February; and now Cape have brought out The Harper.  It’s important to read both books to understand the point this extraordinary poet had reached by his death in 2003.  But each also stands alone.  The Harper is as important and characteristic as any of Redgrove’s collections; a glowing  addition to the contemporary canon. 

Redgrove’s work is characterised by a muscular flexibility which, shifting one thing into another with absolutely congruent metaphor – and in doing so rendering each shifted thing symbolic – makes it hard for us to avoid the idea of this poet as alchemist.  The Harper opens with a characteristic transformation, which by a trick of personification immediately takes us ‘upstairs’ into the register of the gods:

            The sonar of spring thunder,
                        hollow boxes shoved across a stage,
                                    the percussionist’s kit
            Moved across hills […] (‘Sonar’)

And this opening is also characteristic for the way in which Redgrove controls his material.  Within four lines we are back in the physical world from which his metaphor sprang: and that world has been further sketched in.  Now we have a landscape as well as a season; with the next couplet (‘facing north, so the weather/emerges from his left”) we also know we’re in Redgrove’s West Country, with its Atlantic weather.

Redgrove also has a reputation as an ‘alchemist’ because of his subject-matter.  He is fascinated by arcana, the mysteries of women and sexuality, and by the world of the unconscious: particularly, here, as it is unlocked by that primary of the senses, smell.  What makes Redgrove a profoundly necessary poet, rather than a mere dabbler in New Age special effects, is the combination of this radical, symbolic dimension with a grammar of clearly-structured thought.  In what seems to me (had it, perhaps, a more distinguished title) to be the “title poem” – the defining piece – of the collection, ‘Autumn Loveletter’, Redgrove addresses the triumph of transformation – in meaning, in love-making – directly:

            The skin-of-the-earth shining
                        as you walk towards the tree
                                    which has exuded
            A sheening envelope of sap;
                        it is like a door
                                    opened in the trunk
            And, inside the door,
                        something to drink.

Though written when Redgrove was gravely ill, this is a poem, and a collection, in which such explicitly joyous transformations recur: “[…] that apple-tree’s fruit/with stars in its mansion//Shall serve as meat for all.”  This is the mystical landscape of a Samuel Palmer, a Stanley Spencer’s “Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land”, as much as it is in the tradition of the inner, more purely-synthesised landscape of William Blake himself.  Like all Redgrove transformations, however, it is worked-up on a ladder of symbol – this poem goes from the image of refreshment to Bunyan and the proximity of heaven, a Grail reached by the waters of Lethe – and of love-making – as much as the beautifying rain of  “Unbottle, or Autumn,/when the pleasure//Of smells/is at its most/perilous.” 

In a poetics where the form of thought is so important, poetic form is also of fundamental significance.  All but the last two poems of this collection adopt William Carlos Williams’s toppling tercets with their stepped-in lines, which mime both the structure and fluency of the poet’s thought.  They also allow the reader to glide more easily through the often-rapid metamorphoses of an idea; while showing us the intrinsically-sequential nature of Redgrove’s poetics.  Their beauty and range often prevents us from noticing how stepwise is the accumulation of symbolic resonance.  Redgrove is both the absolute master of description (lifted, a sleeping cat is “like a sleeping-bag of black silk//In which a vagrant snores”(‘Benevolence’)) and an architect of structures which proceed by what he calls in ‘Sonar’ “consonance”.  The “fluid pianism” of this, poetics which finds consonance in associations of form and symbol,produces an apparent limitlessness, “over the piano’s terraced ledges” as the musical self-portrait of ‘Pianism’ has it.

The volume includes too many pleasures to list: from the exactitudes of ‘True Wasp’ and the Jack-in-the-Green of ‘Carabus Violaceus’ to a sexy ‘Hormone Harvest’.  As these knowing titles suggest, everything here is deployed, advertent; the brilliantly-coloured syntheses of a profound and sensual intellect.  Redgrove has no poetic heirs.  We should celebrate this extraordinarily sophisticated adventure of a book.  There will not be others. 

Fiona Sampson’s latest collection is The Distance Between Us (Seren 2005).  She is the Editor of Poetry Review.

The Harper, Jonathan Cape, 64pp.  ISBN 0224077937

 

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.