In Memoriam Poetarum

 RIP - may they rest in poetry.....

Someone once said to me that, 'Poets are at the forefront of language.....'  And that does make sense, in a way, though who is to define a poet?  Or who can really define poetry?  From Homer to Chaucer to Byron to John Cooper Clarke, via William McGonagall, and via every child who has made up a rhyme, there are poets everywhere, in every language.....

But then there are those whose poetry resonates, whose words remain, and whose words make a difference to others.  For me, the greats include W B Yeats, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, but then the list goes on and on, and I want to remember Keats, and Causley, Hughes and Heaney, Montale and Mayakovsky, Brecht and Blake.....

There is an extraordinary richness out there, some stored in people's memories, some stored in libraries and bookshops, on private shelves and in dusty attics. 

And the lives of poets come and go, passing time as time passes us all.  And just this week, we have lost two more voices of our age.  On September 29th, Brian Patten (1946-2025), and three days earlier Tony Harrison (1937-2025).  

And as the great survivor, Roger McGough, says:

Let me die an oldman's death

a clean and in between the sheets holy water death

famous last words?  You must be joking death

been there, done it, seen it all before, death

Corruption, greed, can't take any more, death

It will be our turn soon.....

All those years ago Brian wrote to me (I was proposing a book) about his friend, Roger:  He has priests hands, don't you think?  (Adrian has childs hands.  I'm looking at mine now. But we can never see ourselves.  That's one reason to distrust primary sources.) Another reason is that the primary sources might not like the sauce.....

In memoriam Brian Patten, a man of love, a man of playful, deeply felt words.  As he wrote, in One another's light,

But it's hard to guess

How one thing on another

Works an influence.

We pass - 

And lit briefly by one another's light

Think the way we go is right.

I met R S Thomas (1913-2000) in Cambridge, when he had just driven himself from the wilds of Wales to read at a conference.  He was a craggy, austere man, but his observations were clear and gentle:

A poem that always went down well with my students was Poetry for Supper, which has two old poets, Hunched at their beer in the low haze/Of an inn parlour, discussing poetry, while the talk ran/Noisily by them, glib with prose.....

                                     'You speak as though

No sunlight ever surprised the mind

Groping on its cloudy path.'

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window

Before it enters a dark room

Windows don't happen.'

Adrian Henri (1932-2000), and his girlfriend Catherine, stayed with us in Italy when I persuaded him to visit in the wake of his pal, Roger McGough.  Adrian was a larger than life character, an artist, playwright and poet, and he thoroughly enjoyed performing for my school, enlisting the support of a bluegrass group of friends to perform a talking blues, among other highlights. 

As a painter, his poetry is more visual than his Liverpudlian mates, but this one, Poet in School, appropriate in the context of his visit to my school, tells a painful story:

'Write about

something that's happened to you

or someone you know.'  Half an hour

to go, and still nothing written.

Just sitting, face blank as the empty sheet,

shuffling his feet.  'Come on, son,

you must know something that's happened

to someone.'  'No, Sir.'

'Your family, your friends?'

'Sir, my brother's best mate died.'

'How?'  'Sir, electrocuted.  A train...'

'Was he on the track?'  'Sir...'

The empty eyes fill with tears.

Somehow the years between us

aren't enough to take the words back.

Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008) first came into my life when he performed, with, among others, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Christopher Logue, in Wholly Communion at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965.  His poem, To Whom It May Concern, with the refrain Stick my legs in plaster/Tell me lies about Vietnam, made him famous, perhaps, as it combined incisive rhythm with arresting images spoken in his gentle but insistent voice.

Later I encountered him at Lancaster University, where he was friends with my mentor David Craig.  And then I met him again in 1992 at Lerici, with others including Dannie Abse (1923-2014) and the Italian poet Paolo Bertolani (1931-2007), to celebrate the bicentenary of Shelley's birth, and I took the opportunity to invite him and his wife, Celia, to Rome.  

Adrian read at my school (St George's - at the time it was St George's English School, Rome.....  now it is changed - utterly changed.....) In the morning he read a poem (I am not sure, but I think it might have been Victor Jara of Chile - look it up - ) and my then Headmaster said he thought that Adrian should not read it that evening.  I mentioned this, dutifully, to Adrian, who read it very clearly that evening.....

But, in memoriam, after all, this is the poem to remember Adrian by:

Beattie Is Three

At the top of the stairs

I ask for her hand. O.K.

She give it to me.

how her fist fits my palm,

A bunch of consolation.

We take our time

Dow the steep carpet way

As I wish silently

That the stairs were endless.

At a tangent, perhaps, Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) was a very different poet. He was a professor (prior to early retirement in 1980) at Glasgow University. He also had connections with David Craig, and I met him when I lived in Lancaster. His poetry was tense, acerbic, and inventive in an ultimately modern way. Some of his writings belonged to the school of concrete poetry, where shape was the prime issue; but he also translated poetry from Russian, Hungarian, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and other languages.  A poem that affected my students particularly was In the Snack-Bar, which tells of an old man with disability seeking help to go to the toilet in a cafe and then taking a bus.  Another that inspired young listeners was, The First Men on Mercury, where invasive beings exchange greetings with indigenes, and then leave changed.

Glasgow 5 March 1971, one of his "Instamatic" poems, clicks like a photograph, an instant in the life of a city, a moment in life's timeline that shocks and makes us pause, and think, and wonder about outcomes:

With a ragged diamond 

of shattered plate-glass

a young man and his girl

are falling backwards into a shop window.

The young man's face

is bristling with fragments of glass

and the girl's leg has caught

on the broken window

and spurts arterial blood

over her wet-look white coat.

Their arms are starfished out

braced for impact,

their faces show surprise, shock,

and the beginning of pain.

the two youths who have pushed them

are about to complete the operation

reaching into the window

to loot what they can smartly.

Their faces show no expression.

It is a sharp clear night

in Sauchiehall Street.

In the background two drivers

keep their eyes on the road.

Jonty Driver (1939-2023) was a friend of my parents, and we got to know each other towards the end of his life. He was a South African, and was active in the anti-apartheid movement, became a political prisoner, and latterly a school master and a poet.  Not everyone loved Jonty, and in Private Eye, on February 11th 1978, Auberon Waugh wrote in his diary, GOOD NEWS that C J Driver, whoever he may be, is going away to teach in Hong Kong and will not be reviewing any more novels for the Guardian.....  Although, Waugh goes on, Lorna Sage is undisputed as Lord Gnome Trophyholder for Most Boring Reviewer of All Time, Driver comes second with his record-breaking three-year run of picking dud novels.....

Not for me to make war with a Waugh, but, certainly in my experience and later in his life,. Jonty was an engaging and entertaining observer of life, and, when I last saw him read, at the Sea Fever Festival in Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, he carried off the persona of poet with grace and clarity.

In his last book, Still Further, there is a poem entitled Sunset & After which, I think, expresses common humanity in a way that all can relate to:

The tide is out, the sand is firm beneath

my feet, the sun about to set.  I'm here

again on Noordhoek Beach.  Another day

is sauntering to its casual end.

I've journeyed back from where I don't belong

to where I also don't belong......

The point of being here is not revealed;

perhaps you'd find it out from time to time

and wander on, pretending that you had

a plan.  Not true, as far as I'm concerned.

If God has worked His purpose out, He's not told me.... 

Of all these gifted and imaginative men, the one I was most in awe of was Tony Harrison (1937-2025) who died just a week ago, aged 88.  Initially approachable, and affable, Tony concealed a cauldron of thoughts and ideas, and attempts at light-heartedness seemed brittle. He read his poems as if they were wrought from hard material - carved, as it were, from blocks of words.  Marked with D. (where D stood both for Dad and Death) a poem about the cremation of his father, who had been a baker, begins:

When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven

Not unlike those he fuelled all his life,

I thought of his cataracts ablaze with heaven

and radiant with the sight of his dead wife.....

I listened, and tried to note his intonation, and any changes between my text and his recital, and was swirled in a sea of words and images.  Poetry has potential, a power that perhaps no longer works against the competition of electronic wizardry.

At the end of his reading, Harrison turned to A Kumquat for John Keats, a relatively long poem about what happens if you don't die young, about what it feels like to live in a world that has the possibility of total extinction.  That febrile state where we know not what will become of us while we still should be alive:

I find I can't, as if one couldn't say

exactly where the night became the day,

which makes for me the kumquat taken whole

best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul

of one in Florida at 42 with Keats

crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats

the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel,

that this is how a full life ought to feel,

its perishable relish prick the tongue,

when the man who savours life's no longer young,

the fruits that were his futures far behind.

Then it's the kumquat fruit expresses best

how days have darkness round them like a rind,

life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.

It is sad that those we love pass away before us.  We mourn the silence that fills our lives where conversations and laughters once shone like silver and gold.  But we know that this is life, and we know we have our memories.  With poetry we are blessed by the remaining words, on paper or in our minds.  And, for those who remain it is good to rehearse the life of others as it is good to love the life that we still hold.

Some thirty years ago I was attempting to write a book about Roger McGough, and I sent a draft of the first part to Brian Patten.  I asked him to be honest, and he was.  I found it interesting but now and then it sounds a bit chummy, he typed....  Perhaps there could be a bit more background colour....  I suppose in any biog the background against which a life is lived is hugely important and maybe more of that is needed.

Brian then hand-wrote a footnote:  I really hope you don't find my comments dispiriting at all,

Very Best

Brian

And the very best to you, Brian, and all in the afterlife.  

Where would we be without you?

The Gulf of Lerici - 1992

....and the scent to winged flowers,

and the coolness of the hours

of dew, and sweet warmth left by day,

were scattered o'er the twinkling bay...

P B Shelley

Lines written in the bay of Lerici

[for 02/11]

E lucevan le stelle

Space and Time, part two.....

Light and Shade

Flying late into Pisa the weather didn't look good, boiling rain clouds below an uncertain sunset,

But the moon broke through those clouds later and helped to glorify the leaning tower,

And the following day the rain held off. September weather in Italy can be unsettled, but we struck it lucky and the sky began to clear above Il Campo dei Miracoli:

A gentle breeze billowed the awning at the entrance to the Duomo,

The light was good enough for selfies in the acoustically perfect Battistero:

And the ancient cemetery contained within the seven-hundred-year-old arcaded Camposanto was serene in geometric  light and shade.

We walk atop the city walls and then descend the Torre Piezometrica, the 1930s water tower for the former Marzotto textile factory which is now part of the University of Pisa, a reminder that Italy is not just ancient wonders, but that it is an ever-surprising continuum, lights and shades of unstoppable time:

From Pisa we head to Monte Amiata, passing severe Volterra and sweet Montalcino on the way, the clouds dispersing, though still shadowing the flowing landscape:

And on the way we pause at the beautiful Abbey of Sant'Antimo, which dates from the time of Charlemagne, and which was for many years unoccupied and home to nesting Rollers in the campanile, until 1992, but now looked after by a community of Mexican nuns:

On Monte Amiata we visit the eighth century crypt of the Abbazia di San Salvatore, which was once the richest abbey in Tuscany, 

And then drive to the vetta (the summit), at 1738 metres the highest mountain in Tuscany south of the Arno, topped with a twenty-two metre tall iron cross, originally installed at the end of the nineteenth century, but severely damaged in the last war, and subsequently rebuilt by the local people.  

The views from here can be spectacular.  This is looking south-east to the Lago di Bolsena and the distant Monti Cimini, some seventy kilometres away, not very far from where I used to live:

We cross the Val d'Orcia by Montepulciano, where thick morning cloud blankets the hills; 

We bathe in hot (33-36 degrees) mineral waters that come from the 120 metre deep Sillene springs at the Terme di Chianciano:

Then, in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, light filters through whorls of coloured glass,

And in the Museo dell'Opera Metropolitana statues by Giovanni Pisano that once adorned the facade of the cathedral, and which include Plato and Aristotle, rest in the shade.  

We move on, to Lucca, where Ilaria del Carretto rests in marble from the Apuan Alps, sculpted in the early fifteenth century by Jacopo della Quercia. She lies in the sacristy of the Cathedral, seemingly peacefully asleep, though she died giving birth to a daughter at the age of twenty-six.  Her repose is calming, a dignified hymn to the difficulties of love....

Lucca is a beautiful town. The ancient nucleus is confined by 4.2 kilometres of tree-lined red walls, built between 1504 and 1645, the most significant military construction in all of Tuscany, now a peaceful route for the evening passeggiata.

Life is quiet here. Traffic is restricted and people sit outside their homes, content with their phones:

Or offering assistance to a lost soul:

Then in the midst of narrow streets there is the Casa dei Guinigi, with its tree-topped tower, giving views across the city to the hills beyond:

Down there, close by the twelfth century church of San Frediano, is the shape of the Roman Amphitheatre, converted two hundred years ago into an oval of residences around an open space, now filled with bars and trattorie as dusk falls:

The sun is going down, burning down over the hills above Camaiore, liquid gold that, like a sweet distillation of fruit, reaches its setting point just before it goes dark:

We dine da Giulio, where I remember the late Giulio to his daughter. Simple but excellent Tuscan food and wine.  What's not to like?

And then we wander back through the slumbering streets to our accommodation, sampling the cigar smoke that seems to surround the seated figure of Giacomo Puccini outside his birthplace:

And then in the morning we are back to Torre del Lago Puccini, where the last time I visited, Simonetta, Puccini's granddaughter, was my host. Though she died in 2017, the villa is almost as it was when Giacomo last returned from hunting in the surrounding marshes.

Chi son? Sono un poeta.

Che cosa faccio? Scrivo.

E come vivo? Vivo.

In povertà mia lieta

scialo da gran signore

rime ed inni d'amore.

Per sogni, per chimere

e per castelli in aria

l'anima ho milionaria.

Che gelida manina

La bohème

Giacomo Puccini

So we are back where we began, gazing across the Lago di Massaciuccoli, with shades of Puccini's music in our heads and the reflected light of Italy in our hearts....

****

Someone once asked me why I love Italy.  Although I could have spoken at length, and rambled about the variety of scenery, the kindness of the people, the wonderful food, the glorious wine, art, literature, and history, I simply said, with barely a moment's hesitation, It's the light.... whether it is day or night, sun or stars, you can drink the intoxicating light and it fills you with love.....

E lucevan le stelle.....

****

For my friends and relatives in Italy and for my travelling companion.....

****

Ave Maria

Space and Time, part one.....

Shadows and Reflections

We are in Tuscany, gazing across the Lago di Massaciuccoli from the villa which was Giacomo Puccini's summer retreat between 1891 and 1921, where he composed Tosca, La Boheme and Madame Butterfly among other works. The shadows and reflections of the stakes in the water are at angular odds with the gentle sweep of the hills toward Lucca and the more distant Monte Pisano. Actuality and memory join here in the late summer light, past, present and future all sparkling in the placid lake.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, 

Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, 

et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. 

But this journey to Tuscany began with The Angelus, a painting that Jean-François Millet completed in 1859, which is currently on view in London's National Gallery..... 

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Pray for us sinners,

Now and at the hour of our death. 

Amen

Which led to an exhibition entitled Kiefer / Van Gogh in The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries at the Royal Academy.....

Here we see how Van Gogh took inspiration from Millet, and his understanding of the relationship between the harshness of life and the culture of faith, and then how German neo-expressionist painter Anselm Kiefer developed his visual and thematic ideas from Van Gogh's landscapes....

And how Kiefer uses materials such as sand, wood and straw to create unusual textures on the surface of vast painted canvases which may, or may not, work, or last, as statements of love....

On  16 August, 1963 at  6 pm, Kiefer recorded in his diary:  Then I wandered through the fields a little.  When you walk on a country road you can feel the primitive, natural quality that I've been looking for everywhere; these roads and fields are still how they were a hundred years ago.  The landscape here is melancholy.  It's easy to imagine Van Gogh painting the wheat field here that would be his last important work.

Yes, we are (I am) filled with wonder, and, not for the first time, think about the effect -  the importance - the value - of art.  Does it represent something we need to be represented?  Does it fill a gap we might otherwise not have recognised?  

In Tuscany I find art of a more didactic nature, but one that seems to reach out, across the centuries, to touch us even now.  Even now, when we don't necessarily believe that this was that nor that that was how the evangelists said it was...

Hail Mary!  Guess what?  You are going to have a baby.....

And here, in Siena, in Tuscany, a young Duccio told us some stories.....

Amazing grace, How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now I am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

It is extraordinary how time, and geography, seem to affect our understanding.  We are two thousand years from the story of Christ (and much less from that of Mohammed) but we treat these fables as gospel (forgive me, Lord!) as if their age gives them glory, and some kind of sacrosanct credibility. These days there would be CCTV and body cameras, reliable (?) witnesses, corroborated alibis and satellite pictures....  

La Maestà - Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1308 - 1311

We are in Siena, a beautiful city (if that isn't an impossibility) where space seems to be simultaneously constrained and free. The Duomo crowns the hill, crowded around by houses that cling to the slopes:

The cathedral stretches up to the heavens despite its unfinished state, a vast building project that faltered and failed in 1348 due largely to the Black Death, which severely diminished the work force.

The interior dazzles with its black and white striped marble columns, the extraordinary flooring - fifty-six panels  of marble intarsia and mosaic, created by over forty artists, including Domenico Beccafumi, who created this scene  of the false prophets of Baal in the sixteenth century:

Another marvel is the pulpit, carved from Carrara marble by Nicola Pisano and others between 1265 and 1268:

The Piccolomini Library, commissioned by the future pope Pius III in 1492 to house his uncle, Pius II's, collection of books, was decorated by Pinturicchio and has a statue of the Three Graces as a centrepiece:

The dome, decorated with golden stars against blue sky, is topped by a lantern designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 

While the colonnade in the drum is adorned with images of patriarchs and prophets:

The oculus in the apse above the choir was originally made by Duccio in 1287, but his glass was removed in 1943 to avoid war damage: 

The six metre diameter (thirty square metres of surface) window shows three stories from the life of Maria and it is now in the cathedral museum, where it is possible to see the brushwork of the master over the coloured glass:

By day the cathedral is thronged with visitors, but at night it sleeps quietly under the stars, a glorious sight in the silence of space:

And in Tuscany I feel a great sense of space.  Our apartment in Siena takes up the whole top floor of a villa overlooking the city:

A city which, even after fifty years of familiarity still inspires and awakes emotions I may have temporarily buried:

It is a labyrinth which never fails to surprise as narrow alleyways give way to soaring towers:

Or which allows us to climb and look down on the same Torre del Mangia and the Campo, one of the finest city spaces anywhere:

Or to stare into the distance beyond San Clemente in Santa Maria dei Servi: 

A dream-like scene of rolling hills and fertile land which hasn't changed much since Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted it in his Allegoria del buono e cattivo Governo (1338-40) in the Sala della Pace (or Delle Nove) in the Palazzo Pubblico:

Or when Simone Martini (possibly) painted the majestic fresco of the Assedio del Castello di Montemassi da parte di Guidoriccio da Foligno (in 1328) on the wall of the Sala del Mappamondo.

On the walls of the Fortezza Santa Barbara (or Medicea) young visitors pose for their picture:

While in the Contrada of the Giraffe older men play scopa (with a defibrillator on hand....)

Space and time merge into one another.  The Annunciation (here painted by Matteo di Giovanni in the mid fifteenth century),

Shows a truly angelic angel breathing life into a reserved but saintly Maria, as if proposing an impossible marriage, their clothes and head gear hardly modern, but their faces untouched by the centuries between us and them:

Then, more remotely in Tuscany, on the slopes of Monte Amiata, I can feel the primitive, natural quality that [Anselm Kiefer was] looking for everywhere; these roads and fields are still how they were a hundred [and more] years ago..... 

And as the sun begins to slip away, the hills begin to stand out, backlit as if some master, some Duccio, or some van Gogh, was highlighting the scenery, to tell a tale of space and time:

And then, the sky erupts with burnished gold and the colours of Maria's vestments, the heavens assuming life in all its glory, a fresco across our vision:

Shining through the autumn crocuses,

And leaving shadows of dried grasses on the bedroom wall:

Time, and space, for peace (pace) and dreams....

Sancta Maria mater Dei,

ora pro nobis peccatoribus,

nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.

*****

Salute!

[To be continued]

*****