Skip to main content
Read page text
page 62
 REVIEWS Poetic Power For James Murray-White, David Gascoyne remains an essential, inspiring poetic force Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne Rober t Fraser Oxford University Press, 2012 ISBN: 9780199558148 Ifirst heard about David Gascoyne from a radio programme that told how, in 1973, while he was institutionalised, a volunteer called Judy Lewis read out a poem by, she said, a poet who was long dead. After the session, Gascoyne thanked her for reading his poem September Sun: 1947 so beautifully. Initially disbelieving, she checked and discovered that he was indeed still alive. They became friends, later married, and she became a restorative influence in Gascoyne’s life, helping him produce new work and rehabilitating his reputation, now further enhanced by this wonderful biography by Robert Fraser. Fraser rightly shreds the chauvinistic legend that David alone benefited from this union: Judy Gascoyne found great love and companionship from this spiritual and caring individual who was one of the leading cultural figures of the age. My first reaction upon reading Night Thoughts was: what a life! Gascoyne met everyone of any cultural importance; major names spring off every page, winding their way around his journey through creativity, depression, despair and madness to joyful poetic power and reflection. Steeped in music since being a chorister at Salisbury Cathedral, he rebelled against a miserable London schooling by seeking refuge in Charing Cross bookshops and meeting the poets and publishers of the literary milieu of 1930s London. Using the proceeds from his first publication, in 1933 Gascoyne visited Paris, where he connected with the surrealist movement, becoming one of Europe’s leading surrealist poets and bringing the work of Eluard and Dali to London, as well as navigating the personality clashes of this influential, fiery bunch. During the war, he spent time acting in a touring theatre company. These years seem to have been unhappy, despite several publications, most notably a collection illustrated by Graham Sutherland (Poems 1937–42), and a growing appreciation amongst writers and publishers. His addiction to painkillers contributed to a steady decline, and the first of several periods of institutionalisation began. Perhaps Gascoyne’s greatest single piece is Night Thoughts (1956), written for radio, which travels from a Megalometropolis through to a true Encounter with Silence. A soaring work, it reminds me of Samuel Beckett and John Donne, amongst others: “Night music of mysterious hazard. Dream fugues: variations on fortuitous themes; intricate tracery unwinding like designs drawn in a trance across the taut sky of the universal ear.” One of Gascoyne’s greatest champions was Enitharmon Press, founded in 1967 by Alan Clodd, then run by Stephen Stuart-Smith. Clodd met Gascoyne through his longtime friend Kathleen Raine, an outstanding poet of the divine. This relationship provided an outlet for his poetry, translations, articles, collected writings and reprints up until his death in November 2011. Raine also introduced Gascoyne to Satish Kumar in 1985, and Resurgence played a valuable part in Gascoyne’s exposition of his inner world, publishing him many times. Delving so deeply into this poet’s life, I finished the book knowing that Gascoyne lived richly, through sublime connection and agonising isolation, and gives much inspiration to artists of any genre. His spiritual questing was pure and grittily honest. Fraser’s portrait is often so painfully intimate that sometimes I longed to have Gascoyne’s poetry to explore instead of his daily minutiae. Despite being tricky to track down (Bristol library had a Collected Poems in its reserve), and second-hand copies being expensive, there is an online presence, and some audio recordings are available. I certainly recommend having a volume of Gascoyne’s writings side by side with Fraser’s epic (469 pages) biography. Night Thoughts, then, is an enriching biography of an inspirational poet whose work continues to infuse light and knowledge into the world. David Gascoyne © George Douglas/Picture Post/Getty Images James Murray-White is a writer, reviewer and filmmaker. www.sky-larking.com 60 Resurgence & Ecologist November/December 2012
page 63
Accumulated Depth Jay Ramsay discovers a true eco-poet Helen Moore gives the humble fish a complex voice Seared Tuna by Emily Sutton www.emillustrates.com Hedge Fund:And Other Living Margins Helen Moore Shearsman, 2012 ISBN: 9781848612013 If there is a cerebral England we have been suffering, there is also an England of the heart, which has its most memorable voices – an England rooted in Nature of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and John Clare – and this is the tradition Helen Moore’s work is in. She draws on America too, with its poetic directness, and her ‘shouting nouns’, her capitalisations of things, recalling Emily Dickinson, perfectly emphasise the importance of things in the natural world seen not as objects, but as subjects. This is fundamental to an ecological and an eco-spiritual poetry. Things have voices, as they do in the roots of our own Anglo-Saxon poetry: The Dream of the Rood, where the Cross speaks, lies behind Helen’s poem The Unsung Pilchard, where the fish speak on their journey to the sea: in fact every thing in this collection speaks, and her savouring of complex words also suggests an ecology of language where words, like species, can become extinct unless they are remembered. Helen also has an impressive formal range, from tightknit verse variations of free and formal structure (like the pantoum) to the prose poem, which she also uses to great effect as ‘mini essay’: Marine creatures processed into food for humans, pets, poultry. Fish factories, floating towns, construct economies of scale, while trawlers scratch away insatiably to feed the industrial maw. Maw, maw, maw! It’s the opposite of dumbing down, and of the Dulux prose of New Age self-help guides that barely use the English language in all its range and accumulated depth. It’s interesting that ecology (Joanna Macy, Thomas Berry, Thom Hartmann or David Abram, for example) tends to be so much better written. How much love or compassion for human beings is there here? How easy is it for us to love humanity in its present state? Ironically, the tractor driver in the title poem becomes an object in his self-preoccupation. And yet without love we are doomed to another kind of collapse. But Helen is very much aware of this, and in the more personal poems that accompany her incisive diagnoses – An American Rose, Sacre Coeur (Frome) and the superb Climbing Out Of A Dog Eat Dog World – she asks the question, “What can a poet do?” Her answer is vital as well as congruent: Now I notice when my heart has closed. Only the heart breaks patterns of fear. Together we can make a Being Love Being World. Her own inner work and practice balance her knifelike incisions into our sleep state (Capitalism: a sonnet), freeing her from the trap of erstwhile 1980s left-wing self-righteousness and opening up a new poetic depth and maturity as well as a sustained richness and humility of utterance. Like a beautiful at-last summer day freed of endless and albeit necessary rain, I didn’t want to get to the last page. Jay Ramsay is a poet and psychotherapist. www.jayramsay.co.uk Issue 275 Resurgence & Ecologist 61

Page Text

View plaintext

 REVIEWS

Poetic Power For James Murray-White, David Gascoyne remains an essential, inspiring poetic force

Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne Rober t Fraser Oxford University Press, 2012 ISBN: 9780199558148

Ifirst heard about David Gascoyne from a radio programme that told how, in 1973, while he was institutionalised, a volunteer called Judy Lewis read out a poem by, she said, a poet who was long dead. After the session, Gascoyne thanked her for reading his poem September Sun: 1947 so beautifully. Initially disbelieving, she checked and discovered that he was indeed still alive. They became friends, later married, and she became a restorative influence in Gascoyne’s life, helping him produce new work and rehabilitating his reputation, now further enhanced by this wonderful biography by Robert Fraser.

Fraser rightly shreds the chauvinistic legend that David alone benefited from this union: Judy Gascoyne found great love and companionship from this spiritual and caring individual who was one of the leading cultural figures of the age. My first reaction upon reading Night Thoughts was: what a life! Gascoyne met everyone of any cultural importance; major names spring off every page, winding their way around his journey through creativity, depression, despair and madness to joyful poetic power and reflection. Steeped in music since being a chorister at Salisbury Cathedral, he rebelled against a miserable London schooling by seeking refuge in Charing Cross bookshops and meeting the poets and publishers of the literary milieu of 1930s London.

Using the proceeds from his first publication, in 1933 Gascoyne visited Paris, where he connected with the surrealist movement, becoming one of Europe’s leading surrealist poets and bringing the work of Eluard and Dali to London, as well as navigating the personality clashes of this influential, fiery bunch.

During the war, he spent time acting in a touring theatre company. These years seem to have been unhappy, despite several publications, most notably a collection illustrated by Graham Sutherland (Poems 1937–42), and a growing appreciation amongst writers and publishers. His addiction to painkillers contributed to a steady decline, and the first of several periods of institutionalisation began.

Perhaps Gascoyne’s greatest single piece is Night Thoughts (1956), written for radio, which travels from a Megalometropolis through to a true Encounter with Silence. A soaring work, it reminds me of Samuel Beckett and John Donne, amongst others:

“Night music of mysterious hazard. Dream fugues: variations on fortuitous themes; intricate tracery unwinding like designs drawn in a trance across the taut sky of the universal ear.”

One of Gascoyne’s greatest champions was Enitharmon Press, founded in 1967 by Alan Clodd, then run by Stephen Stuart-Smith. Clodd met Gascoyne through his longtime friend Kathleen Raine, an outstanding poet of the divine. This relationship provided an outlet for his poetry, translations, articles, collected writings and reprints up until his death in November 2011. Raine also introduced Gascoyne to Satish Kumar in 1985, and Resurgence played a valuable part in Gascoyne’s exposition of his inner world, publishing him many times.

Delving so deeply into this poet’s life, I finished the book knowing that Gascoyne lived richly, through sublime connection and agonising isolation, and gives much inspiration to artists of any genre. His spiritual questing was pure and grittily honest.

Fraser’s portrait is often so painfully intimate that sometimes I longed to have Gascoyne’s poetry to explore instead of his daily minutiae. Despite being tricky to track down (Bristol library had a Collected Poems in its reserve), and second-hand copies being expensive, there is an online presence, and some audio recordings are available. I certainly recommend having a volume of Gascoyne’s writings side by side with Fraser’s epic (469 pages) biography.

Night Thoughts, then, is an enriching biography of an inspirational poet whose work continues to infuse light and knowledge into the world.

David Gascoyne © George Douglas/Picture Post/Getty Images

James Murray-White is a writer, reviewer and filmmaker. www.sky-larking.com

60 Resurgence & Ecologist

November/December 2012

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content