Skip to main content

Making Hay

Back from Hay with my modest purchases:

A copy of David Gascoyne's 'Selected Poems' signed (as a gift) by his wife, Judy. When T.S. Eliot was asked which English language poets he had 'missed' failed to identify as important voices (and, therefore, not published by Faber of which he was the editor). He named David Gascoyne (and Kathleen Raine). Gascoyne left school at sixteen and went to Paris where he befriended the Surrealists and became one. (His 'Short Survey of Surrealism', written when he was only eighteen, remains one of the best, insightful introductions to the movement). His early poems are full of arresting images, piled up but in ways that hinted at future patterns as he journeyed from the 'unconscious' to an explicit, if tentative, Christian existentialism. I remember sitting in the bar of Dartington Hall, talking Buber and Berdaeyev with him: his quiet, probing voice, always questioning, exploring. He was mentally frail, always sensitive to breakdown, and had a painful struggle to overcome an amphetamine addiction (used as a treatment, become a curse). Security came in late marriage to a wonderful, nurturing woman and a Royal Literature Society pension!

Snow in Europe

Out of their slumber Europeans spun
Dense dreams: appeasements, miracle, glimpsed flash
Of a new golden era; but could not restrain
The vertical white weight that fell last night
And made their continent a blank.

Hush, says the sameness of the snow
The Ural and Jura now rejoin
The furthest Arctic's desolation. All is one;
Sheer monotone: plain, mountain; country, town:
Contours and boundaries no longer show.

The warring flags hang colourless a while;
Now midnight's icy zero feigns a truce
Between the signs and seasons, and fades out
All shots and cries. But when the great thaw comes,
How red shall be the melting snow, how loud the drums!

Christmas, 1938

A copy of 'Stanley Spencer by his brother Gilbert': a good artist on a great one - an illustrated memoir of a shared childhood, of similar influences taking different paths.

A copy of the fifteenth anniversary edition of Agenda. The best poetry magazine (in English) of the second half of the last century. This edition came after the death of the painter-poet David Jones and has the autobiographical fragments on which he was working at his death (and two essays of appreciation - on the art and the writing). Not since Blake had there been an artist who combined both vocations so completely.


A copy of 'The Way Things Are: conversations with Huston Smith'. Smith wrote the best introduction to world religions (that still sells and sells and sells). He is a lucid defender of the 'sophia perrenis' with a great turn of phrase (that has made him a periodic performer on PBS in the US)

A copy of 'Searching for the Emperor' by the Italian novelist by Roberto Pazzi. I bought this because it is a re-imagination of a failure to save the Tsar in Ekaterinburg (a period of history that has always arrested my imagination, even before I knew I would have anything to do with Russia) AND because I continue to search for a modern Italian writer to like! (With the exception of Eco's 'Name of the Rose', including Eco's subsequent novels, this has been, to date, a litany of failure)!

A copy of 'The Deer Cry Pavilion: A Sory of Westerners in Japan 1868-1905' because how the 'West' encountered, understood and failed to understand the 'East' is a continuing interest (though usually I focus on India).

And, finally, (apart from a present) something completely different a (new) CD of Poulenc.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more