Swimming Chenango Lake: Selected Poems
192
Swimming Chenango Lake: Selected Poems
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Overview
William Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson's poetry: 'He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.' Of all the poets of his generation, Charles Tomlinson was most alert to English and translated poetry from other worlds. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz admired how he saw 'the world as event... He is fascinated – with his eyes open: a lucid fascination – by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things.' Tomlinson's take on the world is sensuous; it is also deeply thoughtful, even metaphysical. He spoke of 'sensuous cerebration' as a way of being in the world. His poems are always experimenting with impression and expression. This dynamic selection, edited by the poet and Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley, presents Tomlinson to a new generation of readers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781784106805 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 500 KB |
About the Author
Charles Tomlinson was born in Stoke on Trent in 1927. He studied at Cambridge with Donald Davie and taught at the University of Bristol from 1956 until his retirement. He published many collections of poetry as well as volumes of criticism and translation, and edited the Oxford Book of Verse in Translation (1980). His poetry won international recognition and received many prizes in Europe and the United States, including the 1993 Bennett Award from the Hudson Review; the New Criterion Poetry Prize, 2002; the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Ennio Flaiano, 2001; and the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Attilio Bertolucci, 2004. He was an Honorary Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, and of the Modern Language Association. Charles Tomlinson was made a CBE in 2001 for his contribution to literature. He died in 2015.
The poet David Morley, editor of this volume, is an ecologist and naturalist by background. He won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems and a Cholmondeley Award for his contribution to poetry. His Carcanet collections include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, Enchantment, The Invisible Kings and Scientific Papers. He wrote The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing and is co-editor with the Australian poet Philip Neilsen of The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing. David Morley studied with Charles Tomlinson at Bristol and currently teaches at the University of Warwick. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Relations and Contraries (1951)
Poem
Wakening with the window over fields To the coin-clear harness-jingle as a float Clips by, and each succeeding hoof fall, now remote,
Breaks clean and frost-sharp on the unstopped ear.
The hooves describe an arabesque on space,
A dotted line in sound that falls and rises As the cart goes by, recedes, turns to retrace Its way back through the unawakened village.
And space vibrates, enlarges with the sound;
Though space is soundless, yet creates From very soundlessness a ground To counterstress the lilting hoof fall as it breaks.
The Necklace (1955, 1966)
Aesthetic
Reality is to be sought, not in concrete,
But in space made articulate:
The shore, for instance,
Spreading between wall and wall;
The sea-voice Tearing the silence from the silence.
Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting
I Warm flute on the cold snow Lays amber in sound.
II Against brushed cymbal Grounds yellow on green,
Amber on tinkling ice.
III The sage beneath the waterfall Numbers the blessing of a flute;
Water lets down Exploding silk.
IV The hiss of raffia,
The thin string scraped with the back of the bow Are not more bat-like Than the gusty bamboos Against a flute.
V Pine-scent In snow-clearness Is not more exactly counterpointed Than the creak of trodden snow Against a flute.
VI The outline of the water-dragon Is not embroidered with so intricate a thread As that with which the flute Defines the tangible borders of a mood.
VII The flute in summer makes streams of ice:
In winter it grows hospitable.
VIII In mist, also, a flute is cold Beside a flute in snow.
IX Degrees of comparison Go with differing conditions:
Sunlight mellows lichens,
Whereas snow mellows the flute.
Sea Change
To define the sea –
We change our opinions With the changing light.
Light struggles with colour:
A quincunx Of five stones, a white Opal threatened by emeralds.
The sea is uneasy marble.
The sea is green silk.
The sea is blue mud, churned By the insistence of wind.
Beneath dawn a sardonyx may be cut from it In white layers laced with a carnelian orange,
A leek- or apple-green chalcedony Hewn in the cold light.
Illustration is white wine Floating in a saucer of ground glass On a pedestal of cut glass:
A static instance, therefore untrue.
The Art of Poetry
At first, the mind feels bruised.
The light makes white holes through the black foliage Or mist hides everything that is not itself.
But how shall one say so? –
The fact being, that when the truth is not good enough We exaggerate. Proportions
Matter. It is difficult to get them right.
There must be nothing Superfluous, nothing which is not elegant And nothing which is if it is merely that.
This green twilight has violet borders.
Yellow butterflies Nervously transferring themselves From scarlet to bronze flowers Disappear as the evening appears.
Fiascherino
Over an ash-fawn beach fronting a sea which keeps
Rolling and unrolling, lifting The green fringes from submerged rocks
On its way in, and, on its way out Dropping them again, the light
Squanders itself, a saffron morning
Advances among foam and stones, sticks Clotted with black naphtha
And frayed to the newly carved Fresh white of chicken flesh.
One leans from the cliff-top. Height
Distances like an inverted glass; the shore Is diminished but concentrated, jewelled
With the clarity of warm colours That, seen more nearly, would dissipate
Into masses. The map-like interplay
Of sea-light against shadow And the mottled close-up of wet rocks
Drying themselves in the hot air Are lost to us. Content with our portion,
Where, we ask ourselves, is the end of all this
Variety that follows us? Glare Pierces muslin; its broken rays
Hovering in trembling filaments Glance on the ceiling with no more substance
Than a bee's wing. Thickening, these
Hang down over the pink walls In green bars, and, flickering between them,
A moving fan of two colours,
The sea unrolls and rolls itself into the low room.
Seeing is Believing (1958, 1960)
The Atlantic
Launched into an opposing wind, hangs
Grappled beneath the onrush,
And there, lifts, curling in spume,
Unlocks, drops from that hold Over and shoreward. The beach receives it,
A whitening line, collapsing Powdering-off down its broken length;
Then, curded, shallow, heavy With clustering bubbles, it nears
In a slow sheet that must climb Relinquishing its power, upward
Across tilted sand. Unravelled now And the shore, under its lucid pane,
Clear to the sight, it is spent:
The sun rocks there, as the netted ripple
Into whose skeins the motion threads it Glances athwart a bed, honeycombed
By heaving stones. Neither survives the instant But is caught back, and leaves, like the after-image
Released from the floor of a now different mind,
A quick gold, dyeing the uncovering beach
With sunglaze. That which we were,
Confronted by all that we are not,
Grasps in subservience its replenishment.
Oxen: Ploughing at Fiesole
The heads, impenetrable And the slow bulk Soundless and stooping,
A white darkness – burdened Only by sun, and not By the matchwood yoke –
They groove in ease The meadow through which they pace Tractable. It is as if Fresh from the escape,
They consent to submission,
The debris of captivity Still clinging there Unnoticed behind those backs:
'But we submit' – the tenor Unambiguous in that stride Of even confidence –
'Giving and not conceding Your premises. Work Is necessary, therefore –'
(With an unsevered motion Holding the pauses Between stride and stride)
'We will be useful But we will not be swift: now Follow us for your improvement And at our pace.' This calm Bred from this strength, and the reality Broaching no such discussion,
The man will follow, each As the other's servant Content to remain content.
How Still the Hawk
How still the hawk Hangs innocent above Its native wood:
Distance, that purifies the act Of all intent, has graced Intent with beauty.
Beauty must lie As innocence must harm Whose end (sited,
Held) is naked Like the map it cowers on.
And the doom drops:
Plummet of peace To him who does not share The nearness and the need,
The shrivelled circle Of magnetic fear.
Glass Grain
The glare goes down. The metal of a molten pane Cast on the wall with red light burning through,
Holds in its firm, disordered square, the shifting strands The glass conceals, till (splitting sun) it dances Lanterns in lanes of light its own streaked image.
Like combed-down hair. Like weathered wood, where Line, running with, crowds on line and swaying Rounding each knot, yet still keeps keen The perfect parallel. Like ... in likes, what do we look for?
Distinctions? That, but not that in sum. Think of the fugue's theme:
After inversions and divisions, doors That no keys can open, cornered conceits Apprehensions, all ways of knowledge past,
Eden comes round again, the motive dips Back to its shapely self, its naked nature Clothed by comparison alone – related. We ask No less, watching suggestions that a beam selects From wood, from water, from a muslin-weave,
Swerving across our window, on our wall
(Transparency teased out) the grain of glass.
Tramontana at Lerici
Today, should you let fall a glass it would
Disintegrate, played off with such keenness Against the cold's resonance (the sounds
Hard, separate and distinct, dropping away In a diminishing cadence) that you might swear
This was the imitation of glass falling.
Leaf-dapples sharpen. Emboldened by this clarity
The minds of artificers would turn prismatic,
Running on lace perforated in crisp wafers
That could cut like steel. Constitutions,
Drafted under this fecund chill, would be annulled
For the strictness of their equity, the moderation of their pity.
At evening, one is alarmed by such definition
In as many lost greens as one will give glances to recover,
As many again which the landscape
Absorbing into the steady dusk, condenses From aquamarine to that slow indigo-pitch
Where the light and twilight abandon themselves.
And the chill grows. In this air
Unfit for politicians and romantics Dark hardens from blue, effacing the windows:
A tangible block, it will be no accessory To that which does not concern it. One is ignored
By so much cold suspended in so much night.
Paring the Apple
There are portraits and still-lifes.
And there is paring the apple.
And then? Paring it slowly,
From under cool-yellow Cold-white emerging. And ...?
The spring of concentric peel Unwinding off white,
The blade hidden, dividing.
There are portraits and still-lifes And the first, because 'human'
Does not excel the second, and Neither is less weighted With a human gesture, than paring the apple With a human stillness.
The cool blade Severs between coolness, apple-rind Compelling a recognition.
More Foreign Cities
Nobody wants any more poems about foreign cities ...
(From a recent disquisition on poetics)
Not forgetting Ko-jen, that Musical city (it has Few buildings and annexes Space by combating silence),
There is Fiordiligi, its sun-changes Against walls of transparent stone Unsettling all preconception – a city For architects (they are taught By casting their nets Into those moving shoals); and there is Kairouan, whose lit space So slides into and fits The stone masses, one would doubt Which was the more solid Unless, folding back Gold segments out of the white Pith globe of a quartered orange,
One may learn perhaps To read such perspectives. At Luna There is a city of bridges, where Even the inhabitants are mindful Of a shared privilege: a bridge Does not exist for its own sake.
It commands vacancy.
A Meditation on John Constable
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why,
then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?
John Constable, The History of Landscape Painting
He replied to his own question, and with the unmannered
Exactness of art; enriched his premises By confirming his practice: the labour of observation
In face of meteorological fact. Clouds Followed by others, temper the sun in passing
Over and off it. Massed darks Blotting it back, scattered and mellowed shafts
Break damply out of them, until the source Unmasks, floods its retreating bank
With raw fire. One perceives (though scarcely)
The remnant clouds trailing across it
In rags, and thinned to a gauze.
But the next will dam it. They loom past
And narrow its blaze. It shrinks to a crescent Crushed out, a still lengthening ooze
As the mass thickens, though cannot exclude Its silvered-yellow. The eclipse is sudden,
Seen first on the darkening grass, then complete In a covered sky.
Facts. And what are they?
He admired accidents, because governed by laws,
Representing them (since the illusion was not his end)
As governed by feeling. The end is our approval
Freely accorded, the illusion persuading us That it exists as a human image. Caught
By a wavering sun, or under a wind Which moistening among the outlines of banked foliage
Prepares to dissolve them, it must grow constant;
Though there, ruffling and parted, the disturbed
Trees let through the distance, like white fog Into their broken ranks. It must persuade
And with a constancy, not to be swept back To reveal what it half-conceals. Art is itself
Once we accept it. The day veers. He would have judged Exactly in such a light, that strides down
Over the quick stains of cloud-shadows Expunged now, by its conflagration of colour.
A descriptive painter? If delight Describes, which wrings from the brush
The errors of a mind, so tempered,
It can forgo all pathos; for what he saw
Discovered what he was, and the hand – unswayed By the dictation of a single sense –
Bodied the accurate and total knowledge In a calligraphy of present pleasure. Art
Is complete when it is human. It is human Once the looped pigments, the pin-heads of light
Securing space under their deft restrictions Convince, as the index of a possible passion,
As the adequate gauge, both of the passion And its object. The artist lies
For the improvement of truth. Believe him.
Farewell to Van Gogh
The quiet deepens. You will not persuade
One leaf of the accomplished, steady, darkening Chestnut-tower to displace itself
With more of violence than the air supplies When, gathering dusk, the pond brims evenly
And we must be content with stillness.
Unhastening, daylight withdraws from us its shapes
Into their central calm. Stone by stone Your rhetoric is dispersed until the earth
Becomes once more the earth, the leaves A sharp partition against cooling blue.
Farewell, and for your instructive frenzy
Gratitude. The world does not end tonight And the fruit that we shall pick tomorrow
Await us, weighing the unstripped bough.
Cézanne at Aix
And the mountain: each day Immobile like fruit. Unlike, also
– Because irreducible, because Neither a component of the delicious And therefore questionable,
Nor distracted (as the sitter)
By his own pose and, therefore,
Doubly to be questioned: it is not Posed. It is. Untaught Unalterable, a stone bridgehead To that which is tangible Because unfelt before. There In its weathered weight Its silence silences, a presence Which does not present itself.
At Holwell Farm
It is a quality of air, a temperate sharpness
Causes an autumn fire to burn compact,
To cast from a shapely and unrifted core
Its steady brightness. A kindred flame Gathers within the stone, and such a season
Fosters, then frees it in a single glow:
Pears by the wall and stone as ripe as pears
Under the shell-hood's cornice; the door's Bright oak, the windows' slim-cut frames
Are of an equal whiteness. Crude stone By a canopy of shell, each complements
In opposition, each is bound Into a pattern of utilities ? this farm
Also a house, this house a dwelling.
Rooted in more than earth, to dwell
Is to discern the Eden image, to grasp In a given place and guard it well
Shielded in stone. Whether piety Be natural, is neither the poet's
Nor the builder's story, but a quality of air,
Such as surrounds and shapes an autumn fire
Bringing these sharp disparities to bear.
Civilities of Lamplight
Without excess (no galaxies Gauds, illiterate exclamations)
It betokens haven,
An ordering, the darkness held But not dismissed. One man Alone with his single light Wading obscurity refines the instance,
Hollows the hedge-bound track, a sealed Furrow on dark, closing behind him.
Fire in a Dark Landscape
And where it falls, a quality Not of the night, but of the mind As when, on the moonlit roofs,
A counterfeit snow Whitely deceives us. And yet ...
It is the meeting, of light With dark, challenges the memory To reveal itself, in an unfamiliar form,
As here: red branches Into a transparency In liquid motion, the winds'
Chimera of silk, twisting Thickened with amber shadows,
A quality, not of the mind But of fire on darkness.
A Peopled Landscape (1963)
Winter-Piece
You wake, all windows blind – embattled sprays grained on the medieval glass.
Gates snap like gunshot as you handle them. Five-barred fragility sets flying fifteen rooks who go together silently ravenous above this winter-piece that will not feed them. They alight beyond, scavenging, missing everything but the bladed atmosphere, the white resistance.
Ruts with iron flanges track through a hard decay where you discern once more oak-leaf by hawthorn, for the frost rewhets their edges. In a perfect web blanched along each spoke and circle of its woven wheel,
the spider hangs, grasp unbroken and death-masked in cold. Returning you see the house glint-out behind its holed and ragged glaze,
frost-fronds all streaming.
The Farmer's Wife: At Fostons Ash
Scent
from the apple-loft!
I smelt it and I saw in thought
behind the oak
that cupboards all your wine the store in maturation
webbed
and waiting.
There
we paused in talk,
the labyrinth of lofts above us and the stair
beneath, bound
for a labyrinth of cellars.
Everywhere
as darkness
leaned and loomed the light was crossing it
or travelled through
the doors you opened into rooms that view
your hens and herds,
your cider-orchard.
Proud
you were
displaying these inheritances
to an eye
as pleased as yours and as familiar almost
with them. Mine
had known,
had grown into the ways
that regulate such riches
and had seen your husband's mother's day
and you had done
no violence to that recollection,
proving it
by present fact.
Distrust that poet who must symbolize
your stair into
an analogue of what was never there.
Fact
has its proper plenitude that only time and tact
will show, renew.
It is enough those steps should be
no more than what they were, that your
hospitable table overlook the cowshed.
A just geography
completes itself with such relations, where
beauty and stability can be
each other's equal.
But building is
a biding also
and I saw one lack
among your store of blessings.
You had come late into marriage
and your childlessness
was palpable as we surveyed
the kitchen, where four unheraldic
sheep-dogs kept the floor and seemed to want
their complement of children.
Not desolateness changed the scene I left,
the house
manning its hill,
the gabled bulk
still riding there
as though it could command the crops
upwards
out of willing land;
and yet
it was as if
a doubt within my mood
troubled the rock of its ancestral certitude.
Excerpted from "Swimming Chenango Lake: Selected Poems"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Brenda Tomlinson, for the Estate of Charles Tomlinson.
Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Dedication,
to Brenda Tomlinson,
Acknowledgements,
SELECTED POEMS,
Prologue,
Swimming Chenango Lake,
Relations and Contraries (1951),
Poem,
The Necklace (1955, 1966),
Aesthetic,
Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting,
Sea Change,
The Art of Poetry,
Fiascherino,
Seeing is Believing (1958, 1960),
The Atlantic,
Oxen: Ploughing at Fiesole,
How Still the Hawk,
Glass Grain,
Tramontana at Lerici,
Paring the Apple,
More Foreign Cities,
A Meditation on John Constable,
Farewell to Van Gogh,
Cézanne at Aix,
At Holwell Farm,
Civilities of Lamplight,
Fire in a Dark Landscape,
A Peopled Landscape (1963),
Winter-Piece,
The Farmer's Wife: At Fostons Ash,
The Hand at Callow Hill Farm,
The Picture of J.T. in a Prospect of Stone,
Up at La Serra,
Head Hewn with an Axe,
American Scenes and Other Poems (1966),
The Snow Fences,
A Given Grace,
Arizona Desert,
Arroyo Seco,
Ute Mountain,
Maine Winter,
The Well,
On a Mexican Straw Christ,
The Oaxaca Bus,
Weeper in Jalisco,
Small Action Poem,
The Way of a World (1969),
Prometheus,
Eden,
Assassin,
Against Extremity,
The Way of a World,
Descartes and the Stove,
On the Principle of Blowclocks,
Words for the Madrigalist,
Arroyo Hondo,
A Sense of Distance,
The Fox Gallery,
To be Engraved on the Skull of a Cormorant,
Oppositions,
Skullshapes,
The Chances of Rhyme,
Written on Water (1972),
On Water,
Stone Speech,
Variation on Paz,
The Compact: At Volterra,
Ariadne and the Minotaur,
Hawks,
Autumn Piece,
Event,
The Way In and Other Poems (1974),
The Way In,
At Stoke,
The Marl Pits,
Class,
The Rich,
After a Death,
Hyphens,
Hill Walk,
The Shaft (1978),
Charlotte Corday,
Marat Dead,
For Danton,
Casarola,
The Faring,
A Night at the Opera,
Mushrooms,
The Gap,
In Arden,
The Shaft,
Translating the Birds,
The Flood (1981),
Snow Signs,
Their Voices Rang,
For Miriam,
Hay,
Under the Bridge,
San Fruttuoso,
Above Carrara,
Fireflies,
Instead of an Essay,
The Littleton Whale,
The Flood,
Notes from New York and Other Poems (1984),
Above Manhattan,
All Afternoon,
At the Trade Center,
To Ivor Gurney,
Black Brook,
Poem for my Father,
The Beech,
Night Fishers,
The Sound of Time,
The Return (1987),
In the Borghese Gardens,
In San Clemente,
The Return,
Catacomb,
In Memory of George Oppen,
At Huexotla,
A Rose for Janet,
Ararat,
Annunciations (1989),
Annunciation,
The Plaza,
The House in the Quarry,
At the Autumn Equinox,
The Butterflies,
Chance,
The Door in the Wall (1992),
Paris in Sixty-Nine,
Blaubeuren,
The Door in the Wall,
Geese Going South,
Picking Mushrooms by Moonlight,
Jubilation (1995),
Down from Colonnata,
Jubilación,
The Shadow,
Walks,
The Vineyard above the Sea (1999),
The Vineyard Above the Sea,
Drawing Down the Moon,
The First Death,
In Memoriam Ángel Crespo (1926?1995),
By Night,
Skywriting (2003),
Skywriting,
Death of a Poet,
Cotswold Journey,
If Bach Had Been a Beekeeper,
Cracks in the Universe (2006),
Above the City,
Bread and Stone,
A Rose from Fronteira,
The Holy Man,
Eden,
Epilogue,
The Door,
Afterword by David Morley,
About the Author,
Carcanet Classics include,
Copyright,