William Plomer: Selected Poems

by William Plomer, Neilson MacKay (Editor)

He was E. M Forster’s ‘favorite contemporary poet’. W. H Auden extolled his ‘first-class visual imagination’. Stephen Spender considered his output ‘among the best English poems written in the present century’. Yet for most readers, William Plomer (1903—1973) is now a faintly-remembered name. Born in Pietersburg, South Africa, Plomer settled in London in 1929, where he went on to occupy a central position in English letters. By the time of his death he had published ten books of poetry. In a voice impersonal and strange, Plomer’s best poems reveal a mind that delights in the ‘sensory, pictorial and plastic’ (though not, as he thought, at the expense of the metaphysical).

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1940

About the author

William Charles Franklyn Plomer CBE (he pronounced the surname as ploomer) was a South African and British author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor. He was educated mostly in the United Kingdom, but described himself as an "Anglo-African-Asian".

He became famous in the Union of South Africa with his first novel, Turbott Wolfe, which had inter-racial love and marriage as a theme. He was co-founder of the short-lived literary magazine Voorslag ("Whiplash") with two other South African rebels, Roy Campbell and Laurens van der Post; it promoted a racially equal South Africa.

He spent the period from October 1926 to March 1929 in Japan, where he was friendly with Sherard Vines. There, according to biographers, he was in a same-sex relationship with a Japanese man. He was never openly gay during his lifetime; at most he alluded to the subject.

He then moved to England, and through his friendship with his publisher Virginia Woolf, entered the London literary circles. He became a literary editor, for Faber and Faber, and was a reader and literary adviser to Jonathan Cape, where he edited a number of Ian Fleming's James Bond series. Fleming dedicated Goldfinger to Plomer. He was active as a librettist, with Gloriana, Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son for Benjamin Britten.

Reviews

[Kimberly Uys · Rating 5 out of 5]

Met hoë verwagtinge het ek die digbundel op bladsy 15 oopgeslaan en begin lees aan “Dwaling”- die eerste gedig wat in die bundel verskyn. Sonder huiwering kan ek verseker dat hierdie digteres ń enorme impak op my liefde vir poësie gemaak het. Haar skryfkuns verleen vlerke aan my siel. Hierdie bundel bevat van die bekendste Afrikaanse gedigte (insluitend Bitterbessie Dagbreek, Ontvlugting en Die Kind wat Doodgeskiet is deur Soldate by Nyanga).
Alhoewel ek- as individu- nie al Ingrid Jonker se gedigte ten volle verstaan nie, voel ek ń konneksie met háár deur die skryfstyl en kreatiewe gebruik van woorde wat in die verskeie gedigte gevind word.
Hierdie is definitief nie die laaste keer wat ek die woorde van Ingrid Jonker gaan inneem nie.
Die Versamelde Werke bevat al Ingrid Jonker se digbundels (Ontvlugting, Rook en Oker, Kantelson) asook haar jeugwerke. Ontvlugting, sowel as Rook en Oker, is albei voor haar dood gepubliseer. Kantelson is slegs ná haar dood gepubliseer.
Ek beveel hierdie bundel aan vir énige individu wat ń liefde vir letterkunde en poësie het!

Ingrid Jonker is ń ikoon wat se legende verewig is deur haar digkuns!

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mixed bag, it is hard to deny that this work has dated to a degree that makes it unlikely to recover its former popularity. Nevertheless, nice poems are included which reward the visitor and I suggest that my second hand copy with its tattered dust cover and fading pages, passed from hand to hand outside the gaze of the casual public like samizdat literature in soviet era Russia, could be described in the same way as a very old and worn teddy bear for which the correct term is "much loved." It is a pity that none of these poems seem to be accessible on the net via Google, or in the usual poetry sites. I wonder are there copyright issues?

A few poems were aimed at the apartheid regime of South Africa, for which the most effective rebuke was often mockery. Johanesburg I and II could easily be recycled to comment on current issues in Western capitalism. The first descibes how today's "pillars of a Christian state" conveniently overlook the wild conditions under which they fought and cheated their way to wealth as "lordly anarchs of the veld".

Along the Rand in eighty-five
Fortunes were founded overnight,
And mansions rose among the rocks
To blaze with girls and light;

In champagne baths men sluiced their skins
Grimy with auriferous dust,
The oiled and scented, fought to enjoy
What young men must;

Took opportunities to cheat,
Or meet the ost expensive whore,
And conjured up with cards and dice
New orgies from veins of ore;

Greybeards who now look back
To the old days
Find little in the past to blame
And much to praise -

Riding bareback under stars
As lardly anarchs of the veld,
Venison feasts and tribal wars,
Free cruelty and cartridge belt;

Pioneers, O pioneers,
Grey pillars of a Christian state,
Respectability has turned
Swashbuckler prim and scamp sedate;

Prospecting in the brain's recesses
Seek now the nuggets of your prime,
And sift the gold dust of your dreams
From drifted sands of time.

Johannesburg II is more hard hitting but perhaps too lengthy to type it out here. There are also a selection of very appealing nature poems reflecting on South African scenes. This is followed by Poems of Japan, which are quite playful, but perhaps tending to stereotype for a Western readership. A lengthy poem about "Captain Maru" reads like a Boys Own story for younger readers to be honest, with references to Shoguns and sea voyages,

... Maru, with cuture at his elbow like a wine,
The dictator as host, open but reserved,
Maru to a lady presenting a gift
Tied with white and scarlet, the perfect samurai
With a pattern of blossoms on his sword.
Maru being boyish with a boy, astute,
Learning to treat women in the Western way,
Maru at the self possessed narrowing his eyes -
Could the young resist? The voyage is begun.

The twin screws of ambition drive the hull
And Maru heads the table and the ship,
The abbot of its drilled, monastic life.
With much to teach and learn, he shows
That Maru is commander of himself.
...
Fresh from the bath, to chant the classics,
A deep chested dirge, a stylized howl,
And later silence, to exercise his soul...

...Maru has a week
Before he sails again, and so he turns
Takes train to a quiet place on the coast,
For Maru is of course a family man
And skipper of an ever growing crew
Of little Marus full of national pride.
There only in the evening, on a terrace by the sea,
Is Maru tender, like a girl with dolls
Handling his babies, whose little gowns
Are wreathed already with the blossoming sword.

They don't write 'em like that any more! The Aburaya is more sophisticated but no less caricatured: clever writing and wordplay in the service of no particular end.

A hare lipped hag beneath an ancent gable
Where the phoenix and the peony have yielded to the spider and the bat,
Puts by her broom of twigs, stands up as straight as she is able,
Sniffs, is swallowed by a cave-like doorway, and is followed by the cat.
...

One family has lived here since pre-processional days,
Buddhists of the Zen sect, splitting meditative hairs,
Pleased to be obsequious when the building was too small,
And now it is too big content to stare at a blank wall,
Ready for the retinues of emperors or nobody at all,
...

Remaining poems seem to have an English setting and are whimsical and lightweight. I only paused over one for its social comment, which remains topical:

Vagabond Love

The made love under bridges, lacking beds,
And engines whistled them a bridal song,
A sudden bull's-eye showed them touching heads,
Policemen told them they were doing wrong;
And when they slept on seats in public gardens
Told them, "Commit no nuisance in the park" ;
The beggars, begging the policemen's pardon,
Said they thought as it was after dark -

At this the law grew angry and declared
Outlaws who outrage bye-laws are the devil;
At this the lovers only stood and stared,
As well they might, for they had meant no evil;
"Move on", the law said. To avoid a scene
They moved. And thus we keep our cities clean.

I suppose I shouldn't cite entire poems in a review, but if I don't will they not be lost forever?

[Con Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great new reprint.