A poet, born in
Worcestershire in 1932. He has taught at
Leeds, Cambridge, and Boston. His verses are
sparse, but scattered with little flowers of colour. He often uses religious
imagery, and fragments of nature and history.
I am going to quote one entire poem from his 1996 volume Canaan, and one stanza of comparable length, and resist adding any more. These two between them will give as much flavour of his work as I could without enthusiastically violating fair use.
POSTLUDE
Rose-douched ammoniac
arch goddess
of intimate apparel,
brutal and bijou,
regarding the sensual
imperative despair,
see: there are worse times,
this blank platz,
the bronze humps
of Gaea and Kronos;
spates of fat snow-melt
swallow their parturitions.
Now for part of a longer one. Here is stanza V of
De Jure Belli ac Pacis, which refers to
martyrs of the German
resistance against Hitler.
Not harmonies -- harmonics, astral whisperings
light-years above the stave; groans, murmurs, cries,
tappings from cell to cell. It is a night-watch,
indeterminate and of vast concentration,
of those redeeming their pledged fear, who strike
faith from the hard rock of God's fallenness;
their pain draws recompense beyond our grasp
of recapitulation.
Slurred clangour,
cavernous and chained haltings, echo from time's
inchoate music, the theme standing proclaimed
only in the final measures --
Vexilla regis
uplifted by Rüdiger Schleicher's violin.
vexilla regis = the king's banner