Transfigurations
Roger Garfitt, 20 March 1980
The Weddings at Nether Powers
by Peter Redgrove.
Routledge, 166 pp., £2.95, July 1979,0 7100 0255 6 Show More
by Peter Redgrove.
Routledge, 166 pp., £2.95, July 1979,
“... 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 in his clay to the bung in a wine barrel. It is a trope that recurs repeatedly in Peter Redgrove’s recent work, You take turns to be food, Before you can grind wheat you have to be wheat, Before you can eat bread you are a nice new crust Eaten by Mary, who chooses a crust-you here, A mouthful of Shakespeare’s breath there, a glass Of transparent Genghis Khan there, but in a very different spirit from the Classical original ... ”