| |
Anthony Thwaite |
Poet on the side of life
Anthony Thwaite: Collected Poems. Enitharmon Press £25. order this book
AN old woman is telling the story of the accidental death of her brother when he was nine. She’s told the story many times but still holds her audience spellbound:
She pauses suddenly. The unwilled tears come,
She drops her face, and with a little cough
Stops the recital. Round the shadowy room
Children and grandchildren are silent too,
Life standing like a weight we cannot move,
Unmuscled by the thin, sharp shaft of love
That still must wound, and still the wound must show
And all that happened sixty years ago.
Precise, compassionate, rhythmic; touching head and heart equally.
That’s the essence of Anthony Thwaite’s poetry.
He’s been writing it for more than 50 years and the best has been collected into this excellent 450- page book.
There are poems written in, and about, Japan, Libya, Yorkshire, India, Cornwall, The Channel Islands, the former Yugoslavia, New England, and the Norfolk where he now lives. There are reflections on Victorian history, classical myth, National Service, the Bible, animals and grandchildren:
Alex is almost four, and knows ways to behave.
‘Being silly’ is not one of them.
He knows his Grandpa shouldn’t be like this.
Kicking my feet up, pulling a face,
Putting on funny voices – this is ‘being silly’,
And Alex hates it, wants to tell me so.
So he takes his Grann off, and says to her:
‘Please let me talk to Grandpa by myself’.
He tells me what he has to say. I promise.
And so I am not silly. I know how to behave,
At least in front of Alex. How to behave
Elsewhere is something I have still to learn.
The book is full of such delights – serious, playful, ironic, and on the side of life.
Thwaite has edited Philip Larkin’s ‘Collected Poems’ and ‘Selected Letters’ and there are traces of the Master here in the bringing together of the sharp contemporary image with eternal longing, but, he’s very much his own man. I keep this book by my bed. It cheers me up.
|
| |
|
 |
|
| |
|
