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Collected Poems
Published to mark the 40th anniversary of his death, this comprehensive edition of the poetry of Mervyn Peake includes pieces that touch on some of the most significant historical moments of the 20th century. His celebrated works range from the unemployment epidemic in pre-war Britain to the horrors of the blitz and the concentration camp at Bergen–Belsen, with each serving to anchor the fantasy world of his celebrated Gormenghast books. Black and white illustrations, drafted by the author, accompany the verse, along with previously unpublished illustrations and photographs.
259 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2008
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About the author
Mervyn Peake
110 books1,141 followersMervyn Laurence Peake was an English modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books, though the Titus books would be more accurate: the three works that exist were the beginning of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, following his protagonist Titus Groan from cradle to grave, but Peake's untimely death prevented completion of the cycle, which is now commonly but erroneously referred to as a trilogy. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien, but his surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.
Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children ("Letters from a Lost Uncle"), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye, a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.
Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived in London, and he was commissioned to produce portraits of well-known people. A collection of these drawings is still in the possession of his family. Although he gained little popular success in his lifetime, his work was highly respected by his peers, and his friends included Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene. His works are now included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Imperial War Museum.
Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children ("Letters from a Lost Uncle"), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye, a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.
Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived in London, and he was commissioned to produce portraits of well-known people. A collection of these drawings is still in the possession of his family. Although he gained little popular success in his lifetime, his work was highly respected by his peers, and his friends included Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene. His works are now included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Imperial War Museum.
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October 26, 2016
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction, by R. W. Maslen
A Note on the Text
Further Reading
--Birth of Day
--Vikings
--Coloured Money
--If I Could See, Not Surfaces
--Palais de Danse
--Rhondda Valley
--Heaven Hires Me
--The Metal Bird
--The Cocky Walkers
--Poplar
--These Eyes Have Noosed a Hundred Hills
--Mané Katz
--Two Seasons
--Autumn: The lit mosaic of the wood
--The Crystal
--To Maeve: You walk unaware
--Poem: Body and head and arms and throat and hands
--How Foreign to the Spirit's Early Beauty
--Sing I the Fickle, Fit-for-Nothing Fellows
--El Greco
--Spring
--Watch, Here and Now . . .
--Au Moulin Joyeux
--Van Gogh
--I, While the Gods Laugh, the World's Vortex Am
--Epstein's Adam
--Burgled Beauty
--September 1939
--We Are the Haunted People
--She Whose Body Was in Pain
--Now Are Gathering in the Skies
--Where Skidded Only in the Upper Air
--The Boy
--The World
--The Women of the World Inhabit Her
--O Heart-Beats
--Sensitive Head
--The Sands Were Frosty When the Soul Appeared
--I Could Sit Here an Age-Long of Green Light
--Dreams
--Where Got I These Two Eyes that Plunder Storm
--I, Like an Insect on the Stainéd Glass
--Swung through Dead Aeons
--Autumn: There is a surge of stillness bred
--Eagle
--The Sap of Sorrow Mounts This Rootless Tree
--Moon
--No Creed Shall Bind Me to a Sapless Bole
--As Over the Embankment
--Blake
--Fame Is My Tawdry Goal
--Often, in the Evenings
--I Am Almost Drunken
--Balance
--The Torch
--Stand with Me
--I Sing a Hatred of the Black Machine
--Lit, Every Stage
--She Does Not Know
--Life Beat Another Rhythm
--Oh Sprightly and Lightly
--What is That against the Sky?
--Oh I Must End This War within My Heart
--Beauty, What Are You?
--The Modelles
--I Found Myself Walking
--Along with Everything Else
--Am I to Say Goodbye to Trees and Leaves?
--To All Things Solid as to All Things Flat
--When God Had Pared His Fingernails
--For All Your Deadly Implications
--O She Has Walked All Lands There Are
--Grottoed beneath Your Ribs Our Babe Lay Thriving
--In the Fabric of This Love
--May 1940
--Troop Train
--Fort Darland
--In the Lion's Yellow Eyes
--Every Gesture Every Eyelid's
--Leave Train
--The Shapes
--To a Scarecrow Gunner
--From the Hot Chaos of the Many Habitations
--Rather than a Little Pain
--The Two Fraternities
--With People, So with Trees
--Onetime my Notes Would Dance
--London, 1941
--The Sullen Accents Told of Doom
--Before Man's Bravery I Bow My Head
--The Spadesmen
--The Craters
--They Move with Me, My War-Ghosts
--Had Each a Voice, What Would His Fingers Cry
--What Is It Muffles the Ascending Moment?
--I Am For Ever With Me
--The Sounds
--The Colt
--The Burning Boy
--Is There No Love Can Link Us?
--Swan Arrogant
--London Buses
--A Reverie of Bone
--Suddenly, Walking along the Open Road
--They Loom Enormous
--Maeve
--What Can I Ever Offer You
--O, This Estrangement Forms a Distance Vaster
--An April Radiance of White Light Dances
--May 1942
--Blue as the Indigo and Fabulous Storm
--Curl Up in the Great Window Seat
--Digging a Trench I Found a Heart-Shaped Stone
--Absent from You Where Is There Corn and Wine?
--I am the Slung Stone that No Target Has
--If I Would Stay What Men Call Sane
--Poem: Taller than life, deployed along the shallows
--The Glassblowers
--Dead Rat
--For Maeve: You are the maeve of me
--Tides
--Because Last Night My Child Clung to My Neck
--Poem: My arms are rivers heavy with raw flood
--The Three
--The Consumptive. Belsen 1945
--This German Pinewood
--The World is Broken without Love
--Yet Who to Love Returning
--Victims
--Poem: Remote, that baleful head of his
--All Eden Was Then Girdled by My Arms
--The Vastest Things Are Those We May Not Learn
--Poem: It is at times of half-light that I find
--Each Day We Live Is a Glass Room
--As a Great Town Draws the Eccentrics In
--Conscious that Greatness Has Its Tinder Here
--The Restaurant
--If Trees Gushed Blood
--When the Heart Cries in Love
--What is that Noise in the Shaking Trees?
--Neither to Captain nor be Captained, I
--Crumbles the Crested Scroll
--Wayward O World and Unpredictable
--O Love, the World's Solution
--When Tiger-Men Sat Their Mercurial Coursers
--This Field is Dim with Sheaves
--Brave Lies Conspiring in the Three-Hued Flag
--Are We Not the Richer?
--The Pit-Boy's Lung Is Black
--Crisis
--It Is the Malady
--At My Inmost Heart Is Fear
--This Is the Darkness
--I Cannot Find It in Me to Be Gay
--There Is No Difference between Night and Day
--The Heart Holds Memories Older than the Mind's
--Lug Out Your Spirit from Its Cage of Clay
--There Is an Aristocracy of Love
--Poem: How dangerous a thing
--Into the Sky All Men Must Turn Their Eyes
--And I Thought You beside Me
--Into the Dusky Well
--Satan
--Features Forgo Their Power
--Let Dreams Be Absolute
--The Birch Saplings
--His Head and Hands Were Built for Sin
--I Have Become Less Clay than Hazel-Rod
--Cold Island! The Splenetic Air
--Rembrandt
--Victoria Station. 6.58 p.m.
--Half-Light
--How Shall I Find Me
--Let the Result Be What It May
--Sark; Evening
--That Phoenix Hour
--Robert Frost
--The Wings
--Written About a Piece of Paper when About to Draw
--As Battle Closes In My Body Stoops
--When All Is Said and Done
--Possessionless, O Leveret
--Love So Imperilled Is
--Love's House
--The Flag Half-Masted Is a People's Poem
--Love, I Had Thought It Rocklike
--Swans Die and a Tower Falls
--And Are You Then Love's Spokesman in the Bone?
--For Ever through Love's Weather Wandering
--The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb
--To the Illegitimate of War
--Truths Have no Separate Fires but from Their Welding
--Poem: He moves along the bleak, penumbral shire
--An Ugly Crow Sits Hunched on Jackson's Heart
--Poem: As much himself is he as Caliban
--Snow in Sark
--Poem: The paper is breathless
--Conceit
--Out of the Chaos of My Doubt
--To Live at All Is Miracle Enough
--The Old Grey Donkey
--As the Kite that Soars
--Poem: What panther stalks tonight
--The Rebels
--Poem: With power supernal dowered
--And Then I Heard Her Speak
--The Flight
--As I Watched between Two Forests
--Heads Float about Me
--Swallow the Sky
--Coarse as the Sun Is Blatant
--Through the Voluminous Foliage of the Mind
--On Fishing Up a Marble Head
--Poem: That lance of light that slid across the dark
--Poem: When I was wounded
--Poem: Out of the overlapping
--Poem: As though it were not his, he throws his body
--Break Through Naked
--Poem: Thunder the Christ of it
--Hail! Tommy-Two-Legs
--Great Hulk down the Astonished Waters Drifting
--For Maeve: Now, with the rain about her
--An Armful of Roses
--I Cross the Narrow Bridges to Her Love
--My Malady Is This
--At Such an Hour as This
--Staring in Madness
--For God's Sake Draw the Blind
--A Presage of Death
--The Eclipse
--Lies! Lies! It Is All Lies and Nothing Else
--Love Is an Angry Weather
--O Love, the Steeplejack
--She Lies in Candlelight
--Than Paper and a Pen
Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Acknowledgements
Introduction, by R. W. Maslen
A Note on the Text
Further Reading
--Birth of Day
--Vikings
--Coloured Money
--If I Could See, Not Surfaces
--Palais de Danse
--Rhondda Valley
--Heaven Hires Me
--The Metal Bird
--The Cocky Walkers
--Poplar
--These Eyes Have Noosed a Hundred Hills
--Mané Katz
--Two Seasons
--Autumn: The lit mosaic of the wood
--The Crystal
--To Maeve: You walk unaware
--Poem: Body and head and arms and throat and hands
--How Foreign to the Spirit's Early Beauty
--Sing I the Fickle, Fit-for-Nothing Fellows
--El Greco
--Spring
--Watch, Here and Now . . .
--Au Moulin Joyeux
--Van Gogh
--I, While the Gods Laugh, the World's Vortex Am
--Epstein's Adam
--Burgled Beauty
--September 1939
--We Are the Haunted People
--She Whose Body Was in Pain
--Now Are Gathering in the Skies
--Where Skidded Only in the Upper Air
--The Boy
--The World
--The Women of the World Inhabit Her
--O Heart-Beats
--Sensitive Head
--The Sands Were Frosty When the Soul Appeared
--I Could Sit Here an Age-Long of Green Light
--Dreams
--Where Got I These Two Eyes that Plunder Storm
--I, Like an Insect on the Stainéd Glass
--Swung through Dead Aeons
--Autumn: There is a surge of stillness bred
--Eagle
--The Sap of Sorrow Mounts This Rootless Tree
--Moon
--No Creed Shall Bind Me to a Sapless Bole
--As Over the Embankment
--Blake
--Fame Is My Tawdry Goal
--Often, in the Evenings
--I Am Almost Drunken
--Balance
--The Torch
--Stand with Me
--I Sing a Hatred of the Black Machine
--Lit, Every Stage
--She Does Not Know
--Life Beat Another Rhythm
--Oh Sprightly and Lightly
--What is That against the Sky?
--Oh I Must End This War within My Heart
--Beauty, What Are You?
--The Modelles
--I Found Myself Walking
--Along with Everything Else
--Am I to Say Goodbye to Trees and Leaves?
--To All Things Solid as to All Things Flat
--When God Had Pared His Fingernails
--For All Your Deadly Implications
--O She Has Walked All Lands There Are
--Grottoed beneath Your Ribs Our Babe Lay Thriving
--In the Fabric of This Love
--May 1940
--Troop Train
--Fort Darland
--In the Lion's Yellow Eyes
--Every Gesture Every Eyelid's
--Leave Train
--The Shapes
--To a Scarecrow Gunner
--From the Hot Chaos of the Many Habitations
--Rather than a Little Pain
--The Two Fraternities
--With People, So with Trees
--Onetime my Notes Would Dance
--London, 1941
--The Sullen Accents Told of Doom
--Before Man's Bravery I Bow My Head
--The Spadesmen
--The Craters
--They Move with Me, My War-Ghosts
--Had Each a Voice, What Would His Fingers Cry
--What Is It Muffles the Ascending Moment?
--I Am For Ever With Me
--The Sounds
--The Colt
--The Burning Boy
--Is There No Love Can Link Us?
--Swan Arrogant
--London Buses
--A Reverie of Bone
--Suddenly, Walking along the Open Road
--They Loom Enormous
--Maeve
--What Can I Ever Offer You
--O, This Estrangement Forms a Distance Vaster
--An April Radiance of White Light Dances
--May 1942
--Blue as the Indigo and Fabulous Storm
--Curl Up in the Great Window Seat
--Digging a Trench I Found a Heart-Shaped Stone
--Absent from You Where Is There Corn and Wine?
--I am the Slung Stone that No Target Has
--If I Would Stay What Men Call Sane
--Poem: Taller than life, deployed along the shallows
--The Glassblowers
--Dead Rat
--For Maeve: You are the maeve of me
--Tides
--Because Last Night My Child Clung to My Neck
--Poem: My arms are rivers heavy with raw flood
--The Three
--The Consumptive. Belsen 1945
--This German Pinewood
--The World is Broken without Love
--Yet Who to Love Returning
--Victims
--Poem: Remote, that baleful head of his
--All Eden Was Then Girdled by My Arms
--The Vastest Things Are Those We May Not Learn
--Poem: It is at times of half-light that I find
--Each Day We Live Is a Glass Room
--As a Great Town Draws the Eccentrics In
--Conscious that Greatness Has Its Tinder Here
--The Restaurant
--If Trees Gushed Blood
--When the Heart Cries in Love
--What is that Noise in the Shaking Trees?
--Neither to Captain nor be Captained, I
--Crumbles the Crested Scroll
--Wayward O World and Unpredictable
--O Love, the World's Solution
--When Tiger-Men Sat Their Mercurial Coursers
--This Field is Dim with Sheaves
--Brave Lies Conspiring in the Three-Hued Flag
--Are We Not the Richer?
--The Pit-Boy's Lung Is Black
--Crisis
--It Is the Malady
--At My Inmost Heart Is Fear
--This Is the Darkness
--I Cannot Find It in Me to Be Gay
--There Is No Difference between Night and Day
--The Heart Holds Memories Older than the Mind's
--Lug Out Your Spirit from Its Cage of Clay
--There Is an Aristocracy of Love
--Poem: How dangerous a thing
--Into the Sky All Men Must Turn Their Eyes
--And I Thought You beside Me
--Into the Dusky Well
--Satan
--Features Forgo Their Power
--Let Dreams Be Absolute
--The Birch Saplings
--His Head and Hands Were Built for Sin
--I Have Become Less Clay than Hazel-Rod
--Cold Island! The Splenetic Air
--Rembrandt
--Victoria Station. 6.58 p.m.
--Half-Light
--How Shall I Find Me
--Let the Result Be What It May
--Sark; Evening
--That Phoenix Hour
--Robert Frost
--The Wings
--Written About a Piece of Paper when About to Draw
--As Battle Closes In My Body Stoops
--When All Is Said and Done
--Possessionless, O Leveret
--Love So Imperilled Is
--Love's House
--The Flag Half-Masted Is a People's Poem
--Love, I Had Thought It Rocklike
--Swans Die and a Tower Falls
--And Are You Then Love's Spokesman in the Bone?
--For Ever through Love's Weather Wandering
--The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb
--To the Illegitimate of War
--Truths Have no Separate Fires but from Their Welding
--Poem: He moves along the bleak, penumbral shire
--An Ugly Crow Sits Hunched on Jackson's Heart
--Poem: As much himself is he as Caliban
--Snow in Sark
--Poem: The paper is breathless
--Conceit
--Out of the Chaos of My Doubt
--To Live at All Is Miracle Enough
--The Old Grey Donkey
--As the Kite that Soars
--Poem: What panther stalks tonight
--The Rebels
--Poem: With power supernal dowered
--And Then I Heard Her Speak
--The Flight
--As I Watched between Two Forests
--Heads Float about Me
--Swallow the Sky
--Coarse as the Sun Is Blatant
--Through the Voluminous Foliage of the Mind
--On Fishing Up a Marble Head
--Poem: That lance of light that slid across the dark
--Poem: When I was wounded
--Poem: Out of the overlapping
--Poem: As though it were not his, he throws his body
--Break Through Naked
--Poem: Thunder the Christ of it
--Hail! Tommy-Two-Legs
--Great Hulk down the Astonished Waters Drifting
--For Maeve: Now, with the rain about her
--An Armful of Roses
--I Cross the Narrow Bridges to Her Love
--My Malady Is This
--At Such an Hour as This
--Staring in Madness
--For God's Sake Draw the Blind
--A Presage of Death
--The Eclipse
--Lies! Lies! It Is All Lies and Nothing Else
--Love Is an Angry Weather
--O Love, the Steeplejack
--She Lies in Candlelight
--Than Paper and a Pen
Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
March 13, 2019
What is one supposed to say about the book of poems that are so beautiful, so powerfully emotional, so sincerely touching and so capable of penetrating to the deepest abysses of the reader's soul? One can only remain lost for words... Even if I could try, or dare to try, to describe what they are about I would be utterly shamed with the simplicity of the language used to do so, as there are no words, not even those unuttered, that can even begin to explain the complexity and intensity of the pictures and emotions these poems are charged with.
Peake's verses play the keys of the reader's soul as if it were a piano. Yet, the music can only be heard in the reader's heart.
Peake's verses play the keys of the reader's soul as if it were a piano. Yet, the music can only be heard in the reader's heart.
June 30, 2012
Peake wrote many of these poems around the time of the Second World War, and that is the key to unlocking many of those that I would have otherwise found obscure. On the other hand, many of them are also overtly about the war, not least the magnificent Rhyme of the Flying Bomb.
As one of Britain's official war artists and one of the first into the Nazi death camp of Belsen, Peake's shock and horror at the atrocities he witnessed is palpable. His poem The Consumptive. Belsen 1945 describes the last wracking minutes of the life of a young woman and Peake's guilt at his fascination with her as an artistic subject - how can he find within her pain and suffering an object to be aesthetically appreciated? His war experiences as an artist and as a serving soldier badly affected him and he suffered a nervous breakdown.
While this collection shows Peake to have been a war poet of incredible power, that's only a part of his genius. There are poems about nature and art, people in streets and factories, childhood and parenthood, poems of aching melancholy and rapturous joy. And love. Several of the love poems are dedicated to Peake's wife, Maeve, but it's a fair bet that they're nearly all about her.
A Reverie of Bone is a gothic masterpiece, as on an imagined (I assume) journey through a desert, the poet sees the skeletons of a man and his horse momentarily uncovered by the shifting sands, which inspires a meditation on mortality that put me in mind (subject-wise, not stylistically) of Omar Khayyám.
I Sing a Hatred of the Black Machine is condemnation of industrialism, capitalism and greed: William Blake's dark, Satanic mills on a global scale.
I didn't understand all of the poems, and some critical apparatus from the editor might have helped but, on the other hand, you then run the danger of being ensnared in somebody else's interpretation. I'll certainly be dipping into this book over and over again, so maybe some of what is presently dark will become clear.
And if the words weren't enough, the poems are enhanced by Peake's own brilliant and bizarre illustrations.
As one of Britain's official war artists and one of the first into the Nazi death camp of Belsen, Peake's shock and horror at the atrocities he witnessed is palpable. His poem The Consumptive. Belsen 1945 describes the last wracking minutes of the life of a young woman and Peake's guilt at his fascination with her as an artistic subject - how can he find within her pain and suffering an object to be aesthetically appreciated? His war experiences as an artist and as a serving soldier badly affected him and he suffered a nervous breakdown.
While this collection shows Peake to have been a war poet of incredible power, that's only a part of his genius. There are poems about nature and art, people in streets and factories, childhood and parenthood, poems of aching melancholy and rapturous joy. And love. Several of the love poems are dedicated to Peake's wife, Maeve, but it's a fair bet that they're nearly all about her.
A Reverie of Bone is a gothic masterpiece, as on an imagined (I assume) journey through a desert, the poet sees the skeletons of a man and his horse momentarily uncovered by the shifting sands, which inspires a meditation on mortality that put me in mind (subject-wise, not stylistically) of Omar Khayyám.
I Sing a Hatred of the Black Machine is condemnation of industrialism, capitalism and greed: William Blake's dark, Satanic mills on a global scale.
I didn't understand all of the poems, and some critical apparatus from the editor might have helped but, on the other hand, you then run the danger of being ensnared in somebody else's interpretation. I'll certainly be dipping into this book over and over again, so maybe some of what is presently dark will become clear.
And if the words weren't enough, the poems are enhanced by Peake's own brilliant and bizarre illustrations.
September 4, 2013
Having started on Gormenghast, I was taken aback by the fantastic poetry with which Mervyn Peake writes his novels. As a result, I decided to look into his poetry - and wasn't disappointed.
There's something almost Blakean in his work, with their rhythmic verbosity, and this collection presents a fascinating chronological look at his work. You can see repeated themes (his wife, the moon) emerge and be revisited as he writes more - and then see the change wrought upon him as he's called up to fight in the Second World War.
Whilst, as with any 'collected' edition, there are some poems that lack focus or clarity, I feel that there are enough gems in here to make it a fantastic read for anyone who likes Peake's style - and it's a great wander through the life and thoughts of an under-appreciated author.
There's something almost Blakean in his work, with their rhythmic verbosity, and this collection presents a fascinating chronological look at his work. You can see repeated themes (his wife, the moon) emerge and be revisited as he writes more - and then see the change wrought upon him as he's called up to fight in the Second World War.
Whilst, as with any 'collected' edition, there are some poems that lack focus or clarity, I feel that there are enough gems in here to make it a fantastic read for anyone who likes Peake's style - and it's a great wander through the life and thoughts of an under-appreciated author.
July 3, 2018
My thanks to C.S. Lewis for a reference to this author in one of his books. Lewis was referring to Peake's fantasy novels, but my library had this volume of poetry, which was astoundingly beautiful. I only had it for three weeks, which meant I couldn't do justice to all 230 poems, but I thoroughly enjoyed Peake's easy cadences, rich vocabulary and brilliant imagery.
One example is the poem "The Vastest Things"
"The vastest things are those we may not learn.
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of."
This book is a real treat for lovers of fine poetry.
One example is the poem "The Vastest Things"
"The vastest things are those we may not learn.
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of."
This book is a real treat for lovers of fine poetry.
Read
June 16, 2025I've had a copy of this on the shelf for over a decade. I've dipped in and out of it several times over the years. But I started it again in December and finally finished last Saturday. I'm a huge fan of Peake's Gormenghast books (or at least the first two), and was happy to find that at his best he's as good a poet as a novelist.
There are some great poems here and a lot of good ones too. And some that didn't work as well for me. But the good and great ones made it well worth the reading.
Many, if not most, of them were written in London during WWII, and so, naturally, death and war are major themes throughout. And that sense of being on edge, the constant threat of violence, resonated given the turmoil the world is in now.
The best poem in here, for my money, though, was The Glassblowers, which was also the title of a series of paintings he did including the one on the cover.
Highly recommended!
There are some great poems here and a lot of good ones too. And some that didn't work as well for me. But the good and great ones made it well worth the reading.
Many, if not most, of them were written in London during WWII, and so, naturally, death and war are major themes throughout. And that sense of being on edge, the constant threat of violence, resonated given the turmoil the world is in now.
The best poem in here, for my money, though, was The Glassblowers, which was also the title of a series of paintings he did including the one on the cover.
Highly recommended!
October 31, 2022
Peake has peered down at me from my writer's desk for close to three years now. I have this fantastic photograph of him with this wonderful jumper on and his arms folded. His face, along with many other writers I admire, looks down at me and shames me in my procrastination.
He's one of the authors I would have loved to have met. His mind just seemed so shadowy and yet the depth of his emotional world just shines out like red flame from within the black depths of garnet.
Many of the poems in this collection made me even more certain that we'd have understood each other well. His poem 'Often, in the Evenings' (pg 64) really sums up my own feelings of death. And his poem 'There Is No Difference between Night and Day' (pg155) with the line....
'The beasts of midnight wander through the skull'
I mean, that just captures things so brilliantly.
His ode to 'Van Gogh' (pg 44) is a fitting tribute that manages to bring alive the essence of Gogh's painting style splendidly.
What you have to admire more than anything else is the subject matter is so bleak and yet there's always this ember within that smoulders away and intoxicates with a flick of the images he brings alive. Most people try to write poems about the realm of horror he has experienced and they fail desperately... clinging to cliche as they are washed away by its immeasurable swells. But Peake just gets it. He presents hope and beauty within this subconscious domain. And throughout it there is this almost mythic aspect too because his adoration for Maeve brings in this Orpheus and Eurydice dimension. His love poems to her are beautiful.
I'll always have a love for Peake's writing and I'm going to embark on another reread of Titus Groan whilst I'm in Belfast this week.
He's one of the authors I would have loved to have met. His mind just seemed so shadowy and yet the depth of his emotional world just shines out like red flame from within the black depths of garnet.
Many of the poems in this collection made me even more certain that we'd have understood each other well. His poem 'Often, in the Evenings' (pg 64) really sums up my own feelings of death. And his poem 'There Is No Difference between Night and Day' (pg155) with the line....
'The beasts of midnight wander through the skull'
I mean, that just captures things so brilliantly.
His ode to 'Van Gogh' (pg 44) is a fitting tribute that manages to bring alive the essence of Gogh's painting style splendidly.
What you have to admire more than anything else is the subject matter is so bleak and yet there's always this ember within that smoulders away and intoxicates with a flick of the images he brings alive. Most people try to write poems about the realm of horror he has experienced and they fail desperately... clinging to cliche as they are washed away by its immeasurable swells. But Peake just gets it. He presents hope and beauty within this subconscious domain. And throughout it there is this almost mythic aspect too because his adoration for Maeve brings in this Orpheus and Eurydice dimension. His love poems to her are beautiful.
I'll always have a love for Peake's writing and I'm going to embark on another reread of Titus Groan whilst I'm in Belfast this week.
July 25, 2020
I really liked it. I am not a native English speaker, but the cadence and musicality of the words have transported me and made me read, as if they were songs. Especially The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, which has mesmerized me.
May 27, 2020
Peake kommer jag alltid hålla högst som prosastilist, men han kunde skriva riktigt bra poesi med.
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