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is Believing. A sense for passionate intelligence and clear-eyed perception informs the book, qualities he had assimilated from his European and American reading, and which were crucial to his unfurling, fastidious style of writing. The manuscript had been rejected by British publishers but, thanks to advocacy of the critic Hugh Kenner, the book appeared in New York in 1958. The event led to correspondence between Tomlinson and William Carlos Williams. In 1959 Tomlinson won an International Travelling Fellowship to visit the United States. Charles, Brenda, and their baby daughter Justine, embarked on a six month expedition, travelling by greyhound bus, writing, exploring, and befriending William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, and Marianne Moore. Their welcome eased the literary isolation he had felt among the English poets of The Movement, whose tapered engagement with the world frustrated him. Tomlinson’s reputation in Britain grew more secure with the publication by Oxford University Press of Seeing is Believing in 1960. His next collection A Peopled Landscape (1963) is inhabited, placed, and peopled with remembered and real characters – farmers, stone-masons, factory workers. Tomlinson and his family travelled again to America in 1962-3 where he was a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico, meeting Georgia O’Keefe, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and also the ‘Objectivists’ Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (whose fine-chamfered verse Tomlinson likened to carpentry). Road trips in Mexico and Arizona, as well the sense of Ozleworth as omphalos, inform American Scenes and Other Poems (1966). In 1967, Charles met Ezra Pound in Italy at the Spoleto Festival and began his long friendship with Octavio Paz. This dynamic period was recounted, often with a delightful lightness of touch, in American Scenes and Other Poems (1966). Appearing in 1969, The Way of a World was a daring collection, containing an array of forms including prose poetry. It opens, as does this selection, with a tour-de-force: ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’, one of Tomlinson’s most scintillating poems. No less energised are the political poems ‘Prometheus’, about the Russian revolution, and ‘Assassin’, about the death of Trotsky. Tomlinson injected a muscular diction, even duende, into his lucid, supple, syncopated lines and rhymes that punctuated ‘the forward progress of an energetic syntax’. The jump-cut, filmic progression of ‘Assassin’ owed a debt to Tomlinson’s early attempts at film-making. The Way of a World also carried pieces of lucent ars poetica: on the 177 afterword
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psychical and physical reality of place in ‘Eden’; of the graces of moderation in ‘Against Extremity’; and of the choices and happy accidents of ‘The Chances of Rhyme’. Chance and choice played a role in the rediscovery of his talents as a graphic artist in 1970 as he began working in decalcomania, a technique which involves pressing paint between sheets of paper to make fortuitous imagery, and then deciding how to splice, meld, and present a final image. Written on Water (1972) and The Way In and Other Poems (1974) introduced powerful autobiographical elements to Tomlinson’s writing concerning the universality of place, and an unflinching exploration in ‘The Marl Pits’ on the origins of his poetry: It was a language of water, light and air I sought – to speak myself free of a world Whose stoic lethargy seemed the one reply To horizons and to streets that blocked them back… While The Way In had its roots in Stoke, and the memory of childhood, the personal epiphanies in The Shaft (1978) explored Tomlinson’s experiences of Venice, the Euganean Hills, Tintern Abbey, New York, and an imagined and actual Arden: ‘…not Eden, but Eden’s rhyme…’. This Eden/Arden, as a twinned ideal and place, bedded itself in his imagination over his later collections. Tomlinson also returned with renewed power to politics and personalities in the French revolution, in the dramatic poems ‘Charlotte Corday’, ‘Marat Dead’, and ‘For Danton’. Confident, playful and unalienated collections marked his publications in the 1980s.The Flood (1981) recounts the dramatic, but perceptually beguiling, flooding of Brook Cottage. Notes from New York (1984) is a book of travel, place and playfulness, and of homely exile in poems influenced in part by his admiration for Elizabeth Bishop. The Return (1987) flows back to the place where his earliest poetry was written, with an elegy for his friend Paolo Bertolani. Tomlinson’s subsequent collections take in continents, companionship, and the sometimes bittersweet associations that arise when memory meets reality (he mourned the changes to place wrought by tourism and environmental destruction). The Mediterranean and Gloucestershire provide subject, light, and story, for Annunciations (1989) and The Door in the Wall (1992). Retirement from academic duties made for genial, celebratory, witty poetry in Jubilation (1995). 178 afterword

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is Believing. A sense for passionate intelligence and clear-eyed perception informs the book, qualities he had assimilated from his European and American reading, and which were crucial to his unfurling, fastidious style of writing. The manuscript had been rejected by British publishers but, thanks to advocacy of the critic Hugh Kenner, the book appeared in New York in 1958. The event led to correspondence between Tomlinson and William Carlos Williams. In 1959 Tomlinson won an International Travelling Fellowship to visit the United States. Charles, Brenda, and their baby daughter Justine, embarked on a six month expedition, travelling by greyhound bus, writing, exploring, and befriending William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, and Marianne Moore. Their welcome eased the literary isolation he had felt among the English poets of The Movement, whose tapered engagement with the world frustrated him.

Tomlinson’s reputation in Britain grew more secure with the publication by Oxford University Press of Seeing is Believing in 1960. His next collection A Peopled Landscape (1963) is inhabited, placed, and peopled with remembered and real characters – farmers, stone-masons, factory workers. Tomlinson and his family travelled again to America in 1962-3 where he was a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico, meeting Georgia O’Keefe, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and also the ‘Objectivists’ Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (whose fine-chamfered verse Tomlinson likened to carpentry). Road trips in Mexico and Arizona, as well the sense of Ozleworth as omphalos, inform American Scenes and Other Poems (1966). In 1967, Charles met Ezra Pound in Italy at the Spoleto Festival and began his long friendship with Octavio Paz. This dynamic period was recounted, often with a delightful lightness of touch, in American Scenes and Other Poems (1966).

Appearing in 1969, The Way of a World was a daring collection, containing an array of forms including prose poetry. It opens, as does this selection, with a tour-de-force: ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’, one of Tomlinson’s most scintillating poems. No less energised are the political poems ‘Prometheus’, about the Russian revolution, and ‘Assassin’, about the death of Trotsky. Tomlinson injected a muscular diction, even duende, into his lucid, supple, syncopated lines and rhymes that punctuated ‘the forward progress of an energetic syntax’. The jump-cut, filmic progression of ‘Assassin’ owed a debt to Tomlinson’s early attempts at film-making. The Way of a World also carried pieces of lucent ars poetica: on the

177 afterword

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