Sean Rafferty: Collected Poems

by Nicholas Johnson (Editor)

The poetry of the Scottish writer Sean Rafferty's has been a well-kept secret over four decades. Concentrating on his life and his art, he was hardly noticed until 1973 when a small Grosseteste selection appeared. A decade later his poems were featured in PN Review, submitted not by the poet but by an admirer, Ted Hughes. Later still, two small selections were published. In the year before his death he agreed that Carcanet could publish his Collected Poems. This book includes the only interview he ever conceded, with his editor the poet Nicholas Johnson.

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1996

Reviews

[Jon Corelis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems, by Sean Rafferty. Edited by Nicholas Johnson. Etruscan Books. 176 pp; L8.

A great poet can never be explained, but can always be recognized. Typical characteristics may include the ability to speak of private misery with universal validity, a voice which vividly incarnates its owner's personality in every line, an unstrained mastery of all the various linguistic and cultural traditions of which any poet is the product, and perhaps most telling of all, a dawning awareness on the part of the reader that here are poems not so much to be read as to be lived with. Sean Rafferty by all these criteria is unmistakably a great poet. The universalizaton of personal grief, one of the oldest and most important functions of poetry, is achieved with heartbreaking success in a group of poems on loss early in the volume, as in 'In May the month of miracle' (most poems in this collection are untitled and thus must be identified by first line):

The white hawthorn the lilac massed
to dwarf my mourning where I passed;
they were like alien angels come
before their time to greet her home.

Too early come the cruel frost
that claimed my love too early lost
their promise for a tribute gave
and wept their flowers into her grave.

We can discern behind the seemingly artless accents of these lines a characteristic diction and technique which is learnedly traditional (that second stanza would not seem out of place in Marvell) yet staunchly modernistic (nor would the first in Frost). Also typical of this poet is the slight, deliberate idiosyncrasy of syntax and punctuation which gives a startling extra dimension to the poetic voice, a voice which expresses, with intense emotion under utter control, a vision in which the external world becomes not merely symbolic of the poet's emotions, but fused into identity with them.

Similar qualities distinguish Rafferty's several poems on the lost innocence of childhood, of which 'On the green hill of childhood keep...' ranks with 'Fern Hill' as one of our definitive statements of the theme. It is very hard not to quote the whole of this wonderful poem, but perhaps its ending lines will suggest how Rafferty has achieved the miracle of writing about childhood with deep feeling unmarred by sentimentality:

Run where you will
you cannot trespass, if you fall you fall
only where grass is soft; though ripe fruits reach
into your mouth they do not tempt but teach
a simple lesson and no sin to eat:
the sloe how bitter but the bramble sweet.

The timelessness of much of Rafferty's verse is demonstrated in an elegiac ballad on old William Woosery, which could almost have been written at any time in the past four centuries but which does not sound in the least artificially archaic. 'An old man mumbling in a public bar' (these poems seem full of old men and they are all tough and touchy and flawed and kind and beautiful) gives us what is, for all that it is set in a bar room, one of our literature's classic statements on the sameness of all wars: it is what 'The Battle of Blenheim' might have been if 'The Battle of Blenheim' were not ghastly. War is also the theme of '1945' and '1959', which present a horrifying vision of past and present hellishly jumbled together both physically and culturally in the urban landscape of London after World War II, which Rafferty unforgettably calls "a war the surrealists won." It must not be thought, however, that such melancholy themes exhaust Rafferty's poetic range: he is also capable of producing some of the most splendid comic verse of the century. High points of his work in this manner include 'A Near Thing', a sort of combination of P. G. Wodehouse and Noel Coward with a touch of Samuel Beckett, and 'Liebestod', perhaps the most puzzlingly hilarious poem in English since 'The Aged Aged Man', which gives us among much else the (deliberately Betjmanesque?) lines;

Smile to me, smile to me
speak with your smile to me,
speak to me over the din;
Oh how I wish I was oiling your bicycle
then we could go for a spin

That, like all high comic verse, stays funny no matter how many times you read it.

Enough has been said to indicate that this is a book which any reader of English language poetry should own. The publisher has done a great service in bringing Sean Rafferty's verse to the public in a volume so handsomely produced, and designed in such evident sympathy with the
poet's sensibility. It is much to be hoped that as a result the works of this poet, who is in none of the major reference works or anthologies but belongs in them all, will be recognized as among the finest literary products of the past few generations.

[Michael Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

includes an interesting conversation with rafferty