The Balcony Tree

by Christopher Middleton

Increasingly sought after by contrary poets on both sides of the Atlantic, Christopher Middleton's work develops fresh aspects in The Balcony Tree. There is a grief for time as history pulverizing the very structures of belief it articulates; there is a celebration of the lyrical cogito as a subversive agentcook, angel or clown - in the ceremonies of imagination.Pointedly counterthematic as they are, these poems turn upon varieties of feeling clarified otherwise than in more cryptic earlier work. The art consists in the modelling, fusion or collision of images born from feeling and eruptive when, for all it is worth, imagination splits waves of time into sensuous particles, and so may rightly mistake an instantaneous fiction for some still distant truth.If 'self' as an instrument of feeling is 'put on the line', still it rules no roost. At most a voice abides, murmurous, observing the imperative long ago divined by Julie de 'Glide, mortals, don't push it.'Equally apposite might be the words of Edward Lear about to leave 'Goodbye, my last furniture is - I shall sit upon an eggcup and eat my breakfast with a pen.'

Paperback

First published December 1, 1992

About the author

Christopher Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford, and then taught at the University of Zurich, at King's College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Holderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann and many others. Over the last two decades Carcanet has published six books of his poems, Intimate Chronicles (1996), one book of his experimental prose and two volumes of essays, as well as his Selected Writings and Faint Harps and Silver Voices, a collection of verse translations.

He has received various awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

821.914 M628b 1992