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Life Class
'Life Class' is an autobiographical poem covering the narrator's beginnings as a worshipper of nature, later an organic gardener (before this was fashionable), living in cottages on the Pennines, and also some years in Greece.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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About the author
Glyn Hughes
53 books6 followersGlyn Hughes has won national prizes and awards for his poetry collections. His first book, Neighbours, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Welsh Arts Council Poet’s Prize.
He was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize as well as the David Higham Prize for his first novel, Where I Used To Play On The Green. He was short-listed for The Whitbread Novel of the Year for The Antique Collector, also for the James Tait Black Prize, and the Portico Prize.
He was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize as well as the David Higham Prize for his first novel, Where I Used To Play On The Green. He was short-listed for The Whitbread Novel of the Year for The Antique Collector, also for the James Tait Black Prize, and the Portico Prize.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 29, 2024
Glyn Hughes is a bit of a discovery for me. I read ‘The Hawthorn Goddess’ about a year ago, and haven’t reviewed it yet because I felt I wanted to re-read it before doing so: it seemed so compacted with ideas worked out in a narrative that was event-rich and emotionally intense that it demanded another reading to grasp its impact on me more securely.
Much the same with ‘Life Class’: not a novel, but an autobiographical narrative in free verse. I came away from Hughes’ dealing with his childhood, his parents, his father’s gypsy lover, his deep friendship with a friend ‘whom I shall call Farley’, two marriages, a further complicated relationship/marriage (I wasn’t sure) forged during a stint in Lawrence’s Eastwood as a writer-in-residence, and always, behind all of this, a deep, deep love of and dependence on Nature for his personal and artistic health and happiness.
An incurable romantic, who concludes his account more quietly in his seventies:
“We had believed – my friend, Farley, and I –
that over the hill there was a Paradise;
beyond the horizon was a sensuous
Tahiti dreamed up by Gauguin”,
but acknowledges that ‘Gauguin died too young of syphilis” and that now
“…I find that the Paradise ‘over the hill’
is the flower at my door
that makes one want to live after all”
and that he still has the capacity to experience “the panting of a boy / once again waiting for beauty to alight at a station.”
Like ‘The Hawthorn Goddess’ – and there is a remarkable passage in ‘Life Class’ about that novel’s genesis when, after the end of his second marriage in Greece, he returns home to West Yorkshire and goes through what must have been some sort of breakdown, wandering the landscape in all weathers drawing in the history and ancient spirit of the land and water and sky, envisioning Anne Wylde, his ‘Hawthorn Goddess’ – like that novel, ‘Life Class’ deserves a second reading and benefits from it. The intensity of the experience of the first reading is more easily absorbed on a second. For me, this is a sure sign of writing that works at a level that will prove long-lasting.
A poem that in its composition and in the reading of it, I think well illustrates Eliot’s pronouncement
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Much the same with ‘Life Class’: not a novel, but an autobiographical narrative in free verse. I came away from Hughes’ dealing with his childhood, his parents, his father’s gypsy lover, his deep friendship with a friend ‘whom I shall call Farley’, two marriages, a further complicated relationship/marriage (I wasn’t sure) forged during a stint in Lawrence’s Eastwood as a writer-in-residence, and always, behind all of this, a deep, deep love of and dependence on Nature for his personal and artistic health and happiness.
An incurable romantic, who concludes his account more quietly in his seventies:
“We had believed – my friend, Farley, and I –
that over the hill there was a Paradise;
beyond the horizon was a sensuous
Tahiti dreamed up by Gauguin”,
but acknowledges that ‘Gauguin died too young of syphilis” and that now
“…I find that the Paradise ‘over the hill’
is the flower at my door
that makes one want to live after all”
and that he still has the capacity to experience “the panting of a boy / once again waiting for beauty to alight at a station.”
Like ‘The Hawthorn Goddess’ – and there is a remarkable passage in ‘Life Class’ about that novel’s genesis when, after the end of his second marriage in Greece, he returns home to West Yorkshire and goes through what must have been some sort of breakdown, wandering the landscape in all weathers drawing in the history and ancient spirit of the land and water and sky, envisioning Anne Wylde, his ‘Hawthorn Goddess’ – like that novel, ‘Life Class’ deserves a second reading and benefits from it. The intensity of the experience of the first reading is more easily absorbed on a second. For me, this is a sure sign of writing that works at a level that will prove long-lasting.
A poem that in its composition and in the reading of it, I think well illustrates Eliot’s pronouncement
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Displaying 1 of 1 review