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:

Three Poems

Peter Redgrove, 17 June 1982

In Lincoln Museum

The rock-tree underground Moving its boughs slowly, The sky-blue flintfruits Rising in the soil Gradually like sealed firmaments;

Knapped open they show Blue and cloudy white; Or like bubbles of the oozy bedrock, Like sky-blue apples falling upwards

Very slowly. The hollow blue-black Underground tree of the mine, The thick orchards of the mines Berried with flints, and these...

Letter
SIR: John Layard gave me a version of the story of his ‘suicide’ at variance with the one recounted in Karl Miller’s review of Charles Osborne’s W.H. Auden: the Life of a Poet (LRB, 17 April). He told me that Auden had stolen a boy that he (Layard) was in love with; in despair he shot himself in the mouth to end it all. Greatly surprised to find himself nevertheless still alive, he decided...

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.

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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