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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
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Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease Swipe Right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill Life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal Wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix Prose Poems
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A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
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· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
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2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
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2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
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· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
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A dilemma for educators:
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
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Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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The significance and frailty of Raymond Crump.
A Fortnightly Review.
Chords. New and selected poems.
by Raymond Crump
Afterword by Peter Riley.
SSEA Press and Face Press (London & Cambridge) 2020 | 68 pp| £12:50 (paper) £22:00 (hardcover)
By NIGEL WHEALE.
RAYMOND CRUMP’S POEMS all have this frail strength; simply brief, they also just evade you at every reading, me at least, and so they should.
Part l is thirty-one poems, written before 1970, fifteen of which were included in Green Barrel Poems, the poet’s only other collection.1 Other poems were included in the 1960’s ‘worksheet’, The English Intelligencer, and Peter Riley’s Collection; three are from manuscript.
Part II comprises twenty poems written after 2010. These are less evanescent, more declarative, in that sense, perhaps more conventional. These differences apart, there’s no apparent narrative development in the collection, one lyric succeeds another, then they stop.
I must have puzzled over Crump’s poems when I first saw copies of The English Intelligencer in 1968. My teacher, Roger Langley, was intensively coaching me, post-A level, for the Cambridge Entry exams. I was sent a few gratis numbers, having tried to join that tightly corresponding, mimeographed circle, but had been politely declined membership, by Andrew Crozier — I was just a callow sixth-former, after all. But Rog was an inspiring genius; he had written only one poem at that time, ‘Matthew Glover’, closely focused on the history of the landscape near his home in Shenstone, but following Charles Olson’s ‘open field’ practice:
Roger talked me through his poem, half-embarrassed, but maybe half-convinced that he had as much right to be a poet as, well, all those others. He would go off to mythic Cambridge for three or four days each holiday, and return with his poet-friend and mentor’s latest work. He told me how J.H. Prynne would keep him up through the night till dawn, interrogating him line-by-line about his own latest poem, which he seemingly understood no better than Roger — ‘“Mallet path!” What the hell’s a “mallet path”? He doesn’t know either!’ Again, that half-quizzical, half-inspired sense for him that this was utterly new writing, and not understanding it was precisely its virtue and point.
Roger never dared to mention his own poem to Prynne, who never asked about the progress of Roger’s work when he became more prolific, and finally published by Carcanet in 2000. When I arrived at Cambridge, the first collection of Prynne’s that I bought, partly from my scholarship winnings, was the then-utterly mystifying Kitchen Poems (1968). I’d already seen some of the texts in copies of The English Intelligencer that Rog had shown me, at school. Another reading revelation at Cambridge was George Oppen’s Discrete Series (1934), thirty-one poems somehow linked together, but on a much larger scale than anything suggested by Raymond Crump’s Chords.2
‘Intelligencer’: earliest meaning in UK English, 1540, as ‘spy’, and then later, ‘reporter’; a broadsheet to convey intelligence, as information and as, well, intelligence. English Intelligencer, perhaps following on from The Freeman’s Journal, Or the North-American Intelligencer, which circulated in Philadelphia, 1781 to 1792; in Washington, the National Intelligencer was the local journal. By the mid-nineteenth century, the earliest issues of the Scientific American were subtitled the ‘English and American Intelligencer’. But there had also been the Cambridge Intelligencer:
‘Dispersed gratuitously in the most unfrequented parts of the Country’ could apply as well to The English Intelligencer as to its Cambridge forerunner.
The Anti-Jacobin, in which this notice appeared, was founded by George Canning, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and edited by the ‘cold and saturnine’ satirist, William Gifford; Pitt the Younger wrote for The Anti-Jacobin, James Gillray contributed cartoons; it ran from 1797 to 1798. Gifford was wrongly thought to have written the ‘Cockney poetry’ notice attacking Keats’ Endymion, which, in the view of Shelley and Byron, destroyed the poet. (The notice was in fact written by ‘the talking potato’, John Wilson Crocker, denounced by William Hazlitt.)4‘Dispersed gratuitously in the most unfrequented parts of the Country’ could apply as well to The English Intelligencer as to its Cambridge forerunner. The poetical Intelligencer was compiled and produced under the pressure of collaborative composition, and in a relatively unsystematic way, so its numbers now present tricky problems for cataloguers and librarians.5
Raymond Crump’s Chords is beautifully made, the size of a large notebook, white cover with vibrant yellow card flyleaves. On the cover, an abstract, blue pen-and-graphite drawing, ‘Suspended Chord’ [shown above], by the author. The fifty-two poems are risograph-printed in the same pale, mimeo-blue; wide margins place them perfectly for a slow, sustained read, and re-read. The poems call for this. I have always loved Matsuo Basho’s haiku in his Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, and Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel — spare, naturalistic, yet endlessly meditative. I can read Raymond Crump’s poems with the same kind of attention, and pleasure. They are freighted ephemera.
The frailest elements — light, flower, petals — are charged with significance; the poem is the place where words are concentrated.
The three sentences appear unrelated, but take the reader on, to a different percept, line by line. The frailest elements — light, flower, petals — are charged with significance; the poem is the place where words are concentrated. Crump’s poem is utterly original, but calls up every other poem ever written about time passing and our ephemerality:
A white flower.
The spring is old days
And the dream is cold. (Ozaki Hosai)
The poems of Part l are mostly pastoral, there is work in fields — ‘The baler broke, shaft / sheared through’ — a relationship haunts some of the lines; perhaps there is a child, too. There are also moments of the larger world — a trip to the cinema, a hitch-hiker, time in the dole office where ‘We are all waiting / for money’. But the world and the orchard are just pretexts for the lyric intangibility of these poems. They are so nearly almost nothing, that the ways in which they resolve – conclude is too final a word – has to be through an extreme tact.
Peter Riley notes, in his Afterword, ‘The eye is alert to beauty, in the singular instances by which it manifests itself. The language gathers round it until a completion is formed, an ending, a summation, frequently dominated by nouns, a final stasis.’
The longest poem in Part l, ‘Of the Black Garter’, is in five numbered sections — another occulted narrative of which we see only dislocated shards. There seem to be three involved — a lover, a she, and another male, ‘he, leader’. As in the shorter poems, you read but what you follow is ever elusive, meaning side-steps you, the poem refracts to somewhere else, that could never be totalised.
The final poem in Part l is a perfect miniature, that could have been written by Basho during his dangerous journey to Mount Fuji:
The twenty poems of Part ll, written since 2010, are, in Peter Riley’s words, more ‘substantial … moving more slowly towards a wider and more resonant conclusion’. They are in that sense, to me, more conventional, and in most of them I miss the slightness and evanescence of the poems in Part I. The first poem, ‘Woodpecker’, serves as a kind of thesis, a sustained metaphor for the nature of language, meaning, and their convergence in the written word.
Raymond Crump is a great musician of words, and his lines can sing: ‘Wee / twittering tit sticks the twigs with stitch / and stutter.’
The second poem, ‘Hooded Raptor’, might be haunted by Hughes’ crows, but then escapes anything so obvious by characteristic indirections and swiftness: ‘Grey rooftop heron. / Flown smile horizon.’
‘Flight of the Deer’ describes a particularly poignant roadkill incident, the kind we all drive in fear of, and seems orchestrated to deliver its final line, ‘Crash landed in a sudden grace of death.’
‘Charnel Ground’, ‘Skiff’, ‘Meridian Walker’ and ‘Castaway’ are meditations on an estuary, hulks abandoned, skiffs stranded, pathos of seascape and shore as emblem for some ‘hapless crusoe’.
‘Shower on the Garden’, ‘Wet in Wet’ and, superbly, ‘At Churt’, have that lovely attention to almost nothing that makes Raymond Crump’s poetry utterly singular, and rewarding:
♦
Nigel Wheale is the author of Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005) and The Six Strides of Freyfaxi (Oystercatcher 2010). His academic texts include The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995) and Writing & Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590-1660 (Routledge 1999). An archive of his work for the Fortnightly may be found here.
NOTES.
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Publication: Tuesday, 9 June 2020, at 13:46.
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