Peter Redgrove

Peter Redgrove most recent volume of poems was The Apple Broadcast. He teaches at Falmouth School of Art and has brought out an anthology: Cornwall in Verse (Secker, 68 pp., £5.50, 17 May, 0 436 40987 9). He speaks of himself there as having ‘sired several children on this soil, which may make me, as an immigrant father of citizens, some kind of honorary Cornishman’. He explains that ‘poems are tuning-devices, and Cornwall is sending out many interesting broadcasts.’ The selection bears out this claim. It is short, but has a wide span of work: Hardy, Betjeman, D.M. Thomas, the unsung John Harris (1820-1884), who plumbs the Duchy’s mines:

Two Poems

Peter Redgrove, 19 July 1984

The Party in the Woods

I

Each fly a little Isis, A transformer, buzzing; The trees worried by their wolf, The wind. The spring of water, An almost silent work, continuing Under the threshold of sleep. The little rivers of gnats.

II

The boy showed us a pleasant trick, Taking his penny-whistle to the gnatswarm, Which widened to the low notes like the outline Of a Russian doll that can never be...

Poem: ‘The Offices in the Old Baths’

Peter Redgrove, 17 November 1983

(for Peter Porter)

I

The maroon-hued slugs swallow the garden down. Out at sea the ships on fire with light Like burning soldiers drawn up on parade.

I switch on the electric light; It is a furnace in a vase. Then the maroon that slaps the night:

The lifeboat is out, One of those lighted ships is toiling With some current like a great maroon dragon;

Let its stacked lights not be quenched. I...

Poem: ‘City of Boys’

Peter Redgrove, 18 August 1983

Who was cast out of heaven But is alive in me. A certain Ghost dangles foaming in his jaw.

My tongue licks my palate And the big shed of my jaws Distils. The head of beer

Pocked like the Moon in craters Alive in me. In this city of boys A million open collars of beer

The fizz hanging in the throat Like a gossamer in a well, The moon going down

In black tides, the spirit Distilling in the dark...

Two Poems

Peter Redgrove, 3 February 1983

Hall of Clothes and Circuses

I

The rich seaside stones turn to cloth at a word, To magnificent garments, the tweeds of the granite, Felspar woven with mica and buttons of quartz. The whole earth at a word is a magnificent garment Which the Lord wears, A magnificence sewn for him by his Mother,

The smooth sleeves of wet slate, the sewn pearls of barnacles, A dressing-gown of sliding sand, a...

Letter

Magical Masturbation

7 October 1982

SIR: I do not know what personal nerve I could have touched in Anita Brookner for her so sourly to misrepresent my novel The Facilitators in your columns (LRB, 7 October). I would have hoped that your journal’s previous interest in my work would have guaranteed at the very least a fairly close reading of my text. The core or disclosurepoint of the book is on page 142, and includes a famous quotation:...

Escaped from the Lab: Peter Redgrove

Robert Crawford, 21 June 2012

Peter Redgrove’s sexual ritual, ‘the Game’, ignited some of his most arresting poetry and was vital to his personal mythology.

Read more reviews

What the doctor said

Edna Longley, 22 March 1990

Most books offered as poetry never leave the condition of prose – which is not to say they are good prose. But when a prose voice enters poetry, it can clear and freshen the air. Beside...

Read more reviews

Baby Power

Marina Warner, 6 July 1989

In 1894, the same year that the Children’s Charter extended new legal protection to the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by...

Read more reviews

Risks

Tom Paulin, 1 August 1985

Recently I received a somewhat smug letter from one of the editors of PN Review asking me to contribute to yet another symposium on the state of critical chassis which still persists in Great...

Read more reviews

Passion

Anita Brookner, 7 October 1982

The President’s Child works, effortlessly, on many levels. First, it is a political thriller. Isabel Rust, a television producer and former hack reporter, once had an affair with a man who...

Read more reviews

Beach Poets

Blake Morrison, 16 September 1982

A more sophisticated version of Larkin’s cry ‘Foreign poetry? No!’ is the belief that the poetry of certain parts of the world (Eastern Europe, for example) is intrinsically...

Read more reviews

Honey and Water

Michael Irwin, 7 August 1980

In the first chapter of Peter Redgrove’s novel we are introduced to a poet named Guy, who is about to read aloud some poems he has written about bees. He breaks off a meandering...

Read more reviews

Consequences

Christopher Reid, 15 May 1980

The Parisian Surrealists appear to have taken their games-playing very seriously. Ritual imitations of the creative act – involving the practice of automatic writing, a deep faith in the...

Read more reviews

Transfigurations

Roger Garfitt, 20 March 1980

One of the tropes of Classical rhetoric, which surfaced again in the Jacobean fascination with death, was that of the relentless mutability of matter – Alexander the Great could be turned...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences