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Penguin Modern Poets, Series I #6
Jack Clemo, Edward Lucie-Smith, George MacBeth
Penguin Modern Poets 6
- GenresPoetry
121 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
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31 people want to read
About the author
Jack Clemo
22 books2 followersReginald John Clemo (Jack Clemo) was a poet and writer, strongly associated both with his native Cornwall and his Christian belief. His work is visionary and inspired by the Cornish landscape.
He had no formal schooling after age 13, became deaf around age 20, and blind in 1955, about 19 years later. His early work was published in the local press; he first received recognition in connection with the Festival of Britain.
The massive china clay mines and works around which he grew up feature strongly in his work.
He had no formal schooling after age 13, became deaf around age 20, and blind in 1955, about 19 years later. His early work was published in the local press; he first received recognition in connection with the Festival of Britain.
The massive china clay mines and works around which he grew up feature strongly in his work.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 11, 2024
Penguin Modern Poets is a series of books, started in the 1960s to introduce contemporary poets to the general reader. Each volume contains a selection of representative work by each of three modern poets. The one reviewed here is number six, first published in 1964, which contains poetry by Jack Clemo, Edward Lucie-Smith and George MacBeth.
Jack Clemo was a Cornish poet, who was inspired by the clay landscape of his country. His poetry is dense and can be very bleak; saturated in the feel of the landscape, and with much religious imagery. He was both blind and deaf from quite an early age. I have reviewed his work separately, and you can find this under “The Map of Clay”, on my shelves.
The second poet, I shall review here. Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1933, the son of a British civil servant who had been assigned to Kingston, Jamaica. His ancestors had been some of the first white settlers to colonise the island, in 1627. Edward was raised in the privileged environment of the white colonial class, but his father was to die when he was eight years old. He and his mother then moved to England in 1946, and Edward was educated at King’s School, Canterbury. In 1949, still only seventeen he was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford University. However, it was full of older returning servicemen and he felt very out of place. Edward Lucie-Smith showed an early indication of his future works by writing art criticism for Isis”, Oxford’s student magazine, although he actually read History.
After his two years National Service, as an Education Officer in the Royal Air Force, Edward Lucie-Smith worked in advertising as a copywriter for ten years, before becoming a freelance author. Whilst working as a journalist, he met two other writers later to be famous, the poet Peter Redgrove and the playwright William Trevor. In 1961 the publisher Paul Hamlyn commissioned Edward Lucie-Smith’s first book, a short popular art history book on Peter Paul Rubens. This started a spate of art book writing, and he remains a prolific and widely published writer on Art. He has written more than a hundred books in total on a variety of subjects, chiefly art history as well as numerous translations, a novel based on the life of Gilles de Rais, and an influential popular book on photography, “The Invented Eye”, as well as his autobiography, “The Burnt Child”. He has written other biographies, poetry anthologies such as “The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse” and the “Penguin Anthology of British Poetry Since 1945” — plus of course, his own collections of poetry.
I enjoy his writing on Art very much, especially his most popular art book, “Movements in Art since 1945”, which first appeared in 1969. This, plus several others of his books, such as “Visual Arts of the Twentieth Century”, “A Dictionary of Art Terms” and “Art Today” (described by the “New York Times” as a book of “unconventional judgments”) are in use as standard texts world-wide. They do not convey new research, but concentrate on relaying the complexities of art history to a general audience.
Edward Lucie-Smith’s talents seem endless. His photographic work is represented in the “National Portrait Gallery” in London. He is also a curator, curating exhibitions both here and in the States, and a broadcaster. He has conducted several series of interviews, “Conversations with Artists” for BBC Radio 3. He has written articles for the now defunct “Listener”, the “New Statesman”, and also a contributes art reviews regularly to “The London Magazine”.
Although his work as an art critic is so very well-regarded and in the public eye, Edward Lucie-Smith has for a long time been invisible as a poet, falling into poetic obscurity for many years after his work, “The Well-Wishers” in 1974. Since then his poems have only appeared in limited editions until a few years ago, when a selection of later poems appeared.
However, the poetry of Edward Lucie-Smith begins with A Tropical Childhood in 1961, and many of those poems are contained in this volume. The poems are autobiographical, and roughly chronological, drawing from this early childhood in the tropics, then following on into school and college days. The very early poems, “A Tropical Childhood”, “The Polo Player”, “The Lime-Tree” and “Aubade” are strewn with details. Gunfire, the spray of the sea, a dead grasshopper devoured by ants; all merit equal attention through the eyes of a child. The polo game is impressionistic and fragmentary. The perfume of the lime tree, the peacocks and the boy slipping in dung, the blanket of snow in “Aubade”, the shocking, chilled terror of the ferret’s tremble, in “Rabbit Cry”, followed by deadly stillness as the “warren’s mouths began to shriek”. Edward Lucie Smith’s view of the tropics is of a sensuous landscape, overlaid with different kinds of emotional and spiritual hunger and pain.
At around this time, the critic and poet Philip Hobsbaum invited Edward Lucie-Smith to join an avant-garde poetry discussion group, who met in London from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960. They were known simply as “The Group”, and as a poetic movement are now seen as being the successor to “The Movement”. The poets who met were mostly friends from Cambridge University, who had become dissatisfied with the way poetry was read aloud in the university. They included George Macbeth, Peter Redgrove, Alan Brownjohn, Peter Porter and Martin Bell. Ted Hughes occasionally attended. With Hobsbaum’s encouragement, Edward Lucie-Smith published A Tropical Childhood, which was highly praised. Overnight, Edward Lucie-Smith became a poet of note.
From then on “The Group” met once a week at the house of Edward Lucie-Smith, to discuss each other’s work, according to the analytical technique and objective comment of Philip Hobsbaum’s Cambridge tutor, F.R. Leavis. Before each meeting, six or seven poems by one poet would be typed, duplicated and distributed to the dozen or so participants. In November 1961, Edward Lucie-Smith wrote: “This is a group of poets who find it possible to meet and discuss each other’s work helpfully and without backbiting or backscratching…we have no axe to grind — this isn’t a gang and there’s no monolithic body of doctrine to which everyone must subscribe”.
He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum, leading its sessions and experimenting with forms, in particular the dramatic monologues for which he is well known, in “Confessions and Histories” in 1964. He became a prolific anthologist. With “Towards Silence” in 1968, his own poetry sought a new direction. He became weary of conventional verse forms, and of being labelled a “poet”. He began experiments with poster poems, concrete verse, and a kind of “performance poetry” poetry, solely for recitation. His last major collection, “The Well Wishers”, appeared in 1974. Since then his poems have appeared in limited editions if at all.
But “The Group” under the editorship of Edward Lucie-Smith and Philip Hobsbaum published A Group Anthology through the Oxford University Press, and several of those earlier poems are included in this Penguin selection. The foreword to A Group Anthology explains that the aim was to write “frank autobiographical poems” and “poetry of direct experience”, reinforcing the importance of discussion, and the writer’s need for “community to keep him in touch with his audience”.
Some of these early poems, plus the ones in A Tropical Childhood are the ones Edward Lucie-Smith is still known for. For instance “The Lesson”, which starts with the stark words:
“‘Your father’s gone,’” my bald headmaster said.”
This is a poem about grief, but it is a poem which describes all the complex gamut of emotions which the young boy runs. For as it continues:
“His shiny dome and brown tobacco jar
Splintered at once in tears” he confesses
“It wasn’t grief.
I cried for knowledge which was bitterer
Than any grief. For there and then I knew
That grief has uses - that a father dead
Could bind the bully’s fist a week or two;”
What a searingly honest reaction! Children, we know, can be very cruel. It is followed by:
“And then I cried for shame, then for relief.
I was a month past ten when I learnt this:
I still remember how the noise was stilled
in school-assembly when my grief came in.”
We then move into focus closely on one of Edward Lucie-Smith’s recurring symbols, a goldfish. Perhaps it is the short memory of the goldfish, perhaps its isolation, which parallels his own, perhaps that it lives in the moment. Perhaps “shining prison” is a metaphor for the prison of the boy’s boarding school; boring, repetitive - a trap with nowhere else to go. Perhaps the poet is illustrating the bright appearance as opposed to the inner darkness. And the proud flash of the fin, to illustrate the triumph at having achieved acknowledgement, even at such a price. Perhaps … but here it is:
“Some goldfish in a bowl quietly sculled
Around their shining prison on its shelf.
They were indifferent. All the other eyes
Were turned towards me. Somewhere in myself
Pride, like a goldfish, flashed a sudden fin.”
There is both guilt and underlying shame, and any grief is overshadowed by other emotions. This is a very frank description of the author at ten, and makes the reader wonder. We are expected, conditioned to feel grief at the loss of a relative. This is young boy at boarding school, who possibly never knew his father very well. But does it happen more often that we would care to think, that grief is not the main emotion felt when someone close dies? The grief which the boy felt, was in knowing that he should be sad, but isn’t. Perhaps this is quite a common, silent experience.
This is an example of one of Edward Lucie-Smith’s more accessible poems. He writes to express his feelings, thoughts and emotions in very simple words. By describing his own experience, Edward Lucie-Smith shows us a different side to death by writing of the boy’s confusion, mixed motives, and lack of understanding from inside.
After the publication of the anthology, there was a lot of publicity associated with the weekly meetings, and the large numbers of poets attending became unworkable. In 1965 “The Group” underwent a change, and the more formal “The Poets’ Workshop” was established under the leadership of Martin Bell.
The poems in this volumes predate the later terse, penetrating poems of human and social comment, but have hints of the erotic and the aesthetic tones which were to come.
Both “The Drill-Sergeant” and “A Prophet on the Underground” will be instantly recognisable portraits to anyone who has found themselves in that position. “The Hymn Tunes” rang a wry bell for me, and probably will for anyone who was ever sent regularly to Sunday School as a child.
Hymns, with their memorable tunes and reinforced by repeated singing, are a powerful form of propaganda. They plant themselves in the brain for a life–time. Edward Lucie–Smith effecively conveys something of the power of hymns and religious songs to make ear-worms which stick in the mind, working on the imagination:
“They often haunt me, those substantial ghosts,
Four-four, four–square, thumping in the brain…
… Now a hymn-tune floats
Teasingly into the mind, patterns a day
To its rhythm. And nags like sudden speech
In a tongue one used to know — quietly said
Words which move forward, always out of reach;
Still, though I cannot grasp what it is they say,
God’s tunes go marching through my echoing head.”
This feels so familiar, and the memory so vivid.
“Imperialists in Retirement” is a poignant piece, about an old couple, pitiable, loving and protective of each other. They clearly used to be authoritative, but are now enfeebled with “the shut door of the years” … “Live in the past. One mustn’t grumble. Times change.”
“The Room” is also very immediate, describing the plundering of Tutankhamun’s tomb.
The stars from this collection for me however, are the Ekphrastic poems (ie. poems which have been stimulated by visual art). This is perhaps to be expected, given Edward Lucie-Smith’s overriding preoccupation and empathy with visual Art. In “On Looking at Stubbs’s ‘Anatomy of the Horse’”, Edward Lucie-Smith’s poem conveys the thoughts and gossip of local people, in the Lincolnshire village where Stubbs worked, preparing the horse’s carcass: “His calm knife peeling putrid flesh from bone”. Other Ekphrastic poems here are “Pieta,” “The Madness of Charles VI”, “Meditation of the Sibyl”, “Soliloquy in the Dark”, the very erotic “Rubens to Helene Fourment” and my personal favourite in this impressive collection, “Caravaggio Dying”:
“It goes. The fever leaves me. Even thirst
Is merciful and goes. My clumsy tongue
No longer bursts my lips. I’ve lost my anger.
It left, and left me empty. I greet smiling
My new-found death…
…My own head. Seen in mirrors. Cleanly axed.
By the frame’s edge. Then in my pictures painted:
Young, wigged with snakes and screaming – staring gorgon
Made for a prince to stare at…
Still other images. Enough to show
It was not only boys and women called me
Out into taverns, brothels, Roman alleys.
A fortnight’s painting paid for a month’s brawling;”
Link here for the full text of this longish dramatic monologue.
Caravaggio was the perfect subject. Found dead at 38 on a Tuscan beach, possibly of sunstroke and malaria, but more likely from infected wounds and lead poisoning from his oil paints, he had killed a man, brawled constantly, rowed with his patrons and fled from justice. He revolutionised painting with his dark and shadowy chiaroscuro style. Yet his life was the stuff of high drama, and Edward Lucie-Smith brilliantly conveys it in this intensely powerful poem.
I have only been able to give an impression of the breadth of this author’s work, but I do like his poetry very much. One critic said he writes: “personal poetry through an eclectic mix of stark imagery, sensuous description and bare truths. This is poetry you can feel.” This is a very good description, I think.
Poems by the third poet in this volume, George MacBeth, are reviewed link here.
List of poems in this volume:
A Tropical Childhood
The Polo Player
The Lime-Tree
The Lesson
Aubade
Rabbit Cry
The Drill-Sergeant
A Prophet on the Underground
The Hymn Tunes
Bad Dreams in Athens
Cardinal Bird
At the Roman Baths, Bath
On Looking at Stubbs’s Anatomy of the Horse
To Be Justified
A Sort of Sickness
Imperialists in Retirement
Thou
Pieta
A Feast For the Eyes
Absent
The Room
The Madness of Charles VI
Meditation of the Sibyl
Soliloquy in the Dark
Caravaggio Dying
Rubens to Hélène Fourment
Jack Clemo was a Cornish poet, who was inspired by the clay landscape of his country. His poetry is dense and can be very bleak; saturated in the feel of the landscape, and with much religious imagery. He was both blind and deaf from quite an early age. I have reviewed his work separately, and you can find this under “The Map of Clay”, on my shelves.
The second poet, I shall review here. Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1933, the son of a British civil servant who had been assigned to Kingston, Jamaica. His ancestors had been some of the first white settlers to colonise the island, in 1627. Edward was raised in the privileged environment of the white colonial class, but his father was to die when he was eight years old. He and his mother then moved to England in 1946, and Edward was educated at King’s School, Canterbury. In 1949, still only seventeen he was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford University. However, it was full of older returning servicemen and he felt very out of place. Edward Lucie-Smith showed an early indication of his future works by writing art criticism for Isis”, Oxford’s student magazine, although he actually read History.
After his two years National Service, as an Education Officer in the Royal Air Force, Edward Lucie-Smith worked in advertising as a copywriter for ten years, before becoming a freelance author. Whilst working as a journalist, he met two other writers later to be famous, the poet Peter Redgrove and the playwright William Trevor. In 1961 the publisher Paul Hamlyn commissioned Edward Lucie-Smith’s first book, a short popular art history book on Peter Paul Rubens. This started a spate of art book writing, and he remains a prolific and widely published writer on Art. He has written more than a hundred books in total on a variety of subjects, chiefly art history as well as numerous translations, a novel based on the life of Gilles de Rais, and an influential popular book on photography, “The Invented Eye”, as well as his autobiography, “The Burnt Child”. He has written other biographies, poetry anthologies such as “The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse” and the “Penguin Anthology of British Poetry Since 1945” — plus of course, his own collections of poetry.
I enjoy his writing on Art very much, especially his most popular art book, “Movements in Art since 1945”, which first appeared in 1969. This, plus several others of his books, such as “Visual Arts of the Twentieth Century”, “A Dictionary of Art Terms” and “Art Today” (described by the “New York Times” as a book of “unconventional judgments”) are in use as standard texts world-wide. They do not convey new research, but concentrate on relaying the complexities of art history to a general audience.
Edward Lucie-Smith’s talents seem endless. His photographic work is represented in the “National Portrait Gallery” in London. He is also a curator, curating exhibitions both here and in the States, and a broadcaster. He has conducted several series of interviews, “Conversations with Artists” for BBC Radio 3. He has written articles for the now defunct “Listener”, the “New Statesman”, and also a contributes art reviews regularly to “The London Magazine”.
Although his work as an art critic is so very well-regarded and in the public eye, Edward Lucie-Smith has for a long time been invisible as a poet, falling into poetic obscurity for many years after his work, “The Well-Wishers” in 1974. Since then his poems have only appeared in limited editions until a few years ago, when a selection of later poems appeared.
However, the poetry of Edward Lucie-Smith begins with A Tropical Childhood in 1961, and many of those poems are contained in this volume. The poems are autobiographical, and roughly chronological, drawing from this early childhood in the tropics, then following on into school and college days. The very early poems, “A Tropical Childhood”, “The Polo Player”, “The Lime-Tree” and “Aubade” are strewn with details. Gunfire, the spray of the sea, a dead grasshopper devoured by ants; all merit equal attention through the eyes of a child. The polo game is impressionistic and fragmentary. The perfume of the lime tree, the peacocks and the boy slipping in dung, the blanket of snow in “Aubade”, the shocking, chilled terror of the ferret’s tremble, in “Rabbit Cry”, followed by deadly stillness as the “warren’s mouths began to shriek”. Edward Lucie Smith’s view of the tropics is of a sensuous landscape, overlaid with different kinds of emotional and spiritual hunger and pain.
At around this time, the critic and poet Philip Hobsbaum invited Edward Lucie-Smith to join an avant-garde poetry discussion group, who met in London from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960. They were known simply as “The Group”, and as a poetic movement are now seen as being the successor to “The Movement”. The poets who met were mostly friends from Cambridge University, who had become dissatisfied with the way poetry was read aloud in the university. They included George Macbeth, Peter Redgrove, Alan Brownjohn, Peter Porter and Martin Bell. Ted Hughes occasionally attended. With Hobsbaum’s encouragement, Edward Lucie-Smith published A Tropical Childhood, which was highly praised. Overnight, Edward Lucie-Smith became a poet of note.
From then on “The Group” met once a week at the house of Edward Lucie-Smith, to discuss each other’s work, according to the analytical technique and objective comment of Philip Hobsbaum’s Cambridge tutor, F.R. Leavis. Before each meeting, six or seven poems by one poet would be typed, duplicated and distributed to the dozen or so participants. In November 1961, Edward Lucie-Smith wrote: “This is a group of poets who find it possible to meet and discuss each other’s work helpfully and without backbiting or backscratching…we have no axe to grind — this isn’t a gang and there’s no monolithic body of doctrine to which everyone must subscribe”.
He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum, leading its sessions and experimenting with forms, in particular the dramatic monologues for which he is well known, in “Confessions and Histories” in 1964. He became a prolific anthologist. With “Towards Silence” in 1968, his own poetry sought a new direction. He became weary of conventional verse forms, and of being labelled a “poet”. He began experiments with poster poems, concrete verse, and a kind of “performance poetry” poetry, solely for recitation. His last major collection, “The Well Wishers”, appeared in 1974. Since then his poems have appeared in limited editions if at all.
But “The Group” under the editorship of Edward Lucie-Smith and Philip Hobsbaum published A Group Anthology through the Oxford University Press, and several of those earlier poems are included in this Penguin selection. The foreword to A Group Anthology explains that the aim was to write “frank autobiographical poems” and “poetry of direct experience”, reinforcing the importance of discussion, and the writer’s need for “community to keep him in touch with his audience”.
Some of these early poems, plus the ones in A Tropical Childhood are the ones Edward Lucie-Smith is still known for. For instance “The Lesson”, which starts with the stark words:
“‘Your father’s gone,’” my bald headmaster said.”
This is a poem about grief, but it is a poem which describes all the complex gamut of emotions which the young boy runs. For as it continues:
“His shiny dome and brown tobacco jar
Splintered at once in tears” he confesses
“It wasn’t grief.
I cried for knowledge which was bitterer
Than any grief. For there and then I knew
That grief has uses - that a father dead
Could bind the bully’s fist a week or two;”
What a searingly honest reaction! Children, we know, can be very cruel. It is followed by:
“And then I cried for shame, then for relief.
I was a month past ten when I learnt this:
I still remember how the noise was stilled
in school-assembly when my grief came in.”
We then move into focus closely on one of Edward Lucie-Smith’s recurring symbols, a goldfish. Perhaps it is the short memory of the goldfish, perhaps its isolation, which parallels his own, perhaps that it lives in the moment. Perhaps “shining prison” is a metaphor for the prison of the boy’s boarding school; boring, repetitive - a trap with nowhere else to go. Perhaps the poet is illustrating the bright appearance as opposed to the inner darkness. And the proud flash of the fin, to illustrate the triumph at having achieved acknowledgement, even at such a price. Perhaps … but here it is:
“Some goldfish in a bowl quietly sculled
Around their shining prison on its shelf.
They were indifferent. All the other eyes
Were turned towards me. Somewhere in myself
Pride, like a goldfish, flashed a sudden fin.”
There is both guilt and underlying shame, and any grief is overshadowed by other emotions. This is a very frank description of the author at ten, and makes the reader wonder. We are expected, conditioned to feel grief at the loss of a relative. This is young boy at boarding school, who possibly never knew his father very well. But does it happen more often that we would care to think, that grief is not the main emotion felt when someone close dies? The grief which the boy felt, was in knowing that he should be sad, but isn’t. Perhaps this is quite a common, silent experience.
This is an example of one of Edward Lucie-Smith’s more accessible poems. He writes to express his feelings, thoughts and emotions in very simple words. By describing his own experience, Edward Lucie-Smith shows us a different side to death by writing of the boy’s confusion, mixed motives, and lack of understanding from inside.
After the publication of the anthology, there was a lot of publicity associated with the weekly meetings, and the large numbers of poets attending became unworkable. In 1965 “The Group” underwent a change, and the more formal “The Poets’ Workshop” was established under the leadership of Martin Bell.
The poems in this volumes predate the later terse, penetrating poems of human and social comment, but have hints of the erotic and the aesthetic tones which were to come.
Both “The Drill-Sergeant” and “A Prophet on the Underground” will be instantly recognisable portraits to anyone who has found themselves in that position. “The Hymn Tunes” rang a wry bell for me, and probably will for anyone who was ever sent regularly to Sunday School as a child.
Hymns, with their memorable tunes and reinforced by repeated singing, are a powerful form of propaganda. They plant themselves in the brain for a life–time. Edward Lucie–Smith effecively conveys something of the power of hymns and religious songs to make ear-worms which stick in the mind, working on the imagination:
“They often haunt me, those substantial ghosts,
Four-four, four–square, thumping in the brain…
… Now a hymn-tune floats
Teasingly into the mind, patterns a day
To its rhythm. And nags like sudden speech
In a tongue one used to know — quietly said
Words which move forward, always out of reach;
Still, though I cannot grasp what it is they say,
God’s tunes go marching through my echoing head.”
This feels so familiar, and the memory so vivid.
“Imperialists in Retirement” is a poignant piece, about an old couple, pitiable, loving and protective of each other. They clearly used to be authoritative, but are now enfeebled with “the shut door of the years” … “Live in the past. One mustn’t grumble. Times change.”
“The Room” is also very immediate, describing the plundering of Tutankhamun’s tomb.
The stars from this collection for me however, are the Ekphrastic poems (ie. poems which have been stimulated by visual art). This is perhaps to be expected, given Edward Lucie-Smith’s overriding preoccupation and empathy with visual Art. In “On Looking at Stubbs’s ‘Anatomy of the Horse’”, Edward Lucie-Smith’s poem conveys the thoughts and gossip of local people, in the Lincolnshire village where Stubbs worked, preparing the horse’s carcass: “His calm knife peeling putrid flesh from bone”. Other Ekphrastic poems here are “Pieta,” “The Madness of Charles VI”, “Meditation of the Sibyl”, “Soliloquy in the Dark”, the very erotic “Rubens to Helene Fourment” and my personal favourite in this impressive collection, “Caravaggio Dying”:
“It goes. The fever leaves me. Even thirst
Is merciful and goes. My clumsy tongue
No longer bursts my lips. I’ve lost my anger.
It left, and left me empty. I greet smiling
My new-found death…
…My own head. Seen in mirrors. Cleanly axed.
By the frame’s edge. Then in my pictures painted:
Young, wigged with snakes and screaming – staring gorgon
Made for a prince to stare at…
Still other images. Enough to show
It was not only boys and women called me
Out into taverns, brothels, Roman alleys.
A fortnight’s painting paid for a month’s brawling;”
Link here for the full text of this longish dramatic monologue.
Caravaggio was the perfect subject. Found dead at 38 on a Tuscan beach, possibly of sunstroke and malaria, but more likely from infected wounds and lead poisoning from his oil paints, he had killed a man, brawled constantly, rowed with his patrons and fled from justice. He revolutionised painting with his dark and shadowy chiaroscuro style. Yet his life was the stuff of high drama, and Edward Lucie-Smith brilliantly conveys it in this intensely powerful poem.
I have only been able to give an impression of the breadth of this author’s work, but I do like his poetry very much. One critic said he writes: “personal poetry through an eclectic mix of stark imagery, sensuous description and bare truths. This is poetry you can feel.” This is a very good description, I think.
Poems by the third poet in this volume, George MacBeth, are reviewed link here.
List of poems in this volume:
A Tropical Childhood
The Polo Player
The Lime-Tree
The Lesson
Aubade
Rabbit Cry
The Drill-Sergeant
A Prophet on the Underground
The Hymn Tunes
Bad Dreams in Athens
Cardinal Bird
At the Roman Baths, Bath
On Looking at Stubbs’s Anatomy of the Horse
To Be Justified
A Sort of Sickness
Imperialists in Retirement
Thou
Pieta
A Feast For the Eyes
Absent
The Room
The Madness of Charles VI
Meditation of the Sibyl
Soliloquy in the Dark
Caravaggio Dying
Rubens to Hélène Fourment
July 12, 2024
все, до біса, яке ж це лайно собаче
антологія представляє собою трьох випадкових авторів, яких повʼязує бодай як лише роздуте его, переоцінена самовпевненість та повна бездарність
перший чел легенда, я прочитала всі і кожен з представлених його тут віршів, і не було жодного без слова "глина". як же він любить ту глину, який же невичерпний цей символ родючості, немов маріі, матері-природи, які ж на тій глині привабливі купки багна, що немов жіночі груди, а святе стікання дощу немов порізані вени христа. о, ісусе, ну ще один-то релігійно-будівничий вірш сприйняти серйозно можна, але коли їх 30~ однакових, як ідейно, так і лексично, та й настільки однакових, що немов штучний інтелект відповідав усьому класу на одне і те саме дз, то як це можна витерпіти? я стала джокером і через силу стиснутих зубів прочитала все, очікуючи все таки не отриманого світла в кінці мого шляху.. однак той глиномес найкращий з трійки, бо в нього хоч якийсь стиль наявний, при тому вкрай автентичний
другий чел така ригота, він пише про все і ніпрощо одразу, ніяких тем чи ідей, просто випадкові сцени з життя, і його я не смогла прочитати і половини. один вірш про мертвого батька, інший про сон під час подорожі у грецію, а третій чомусь про розчленування коня для анатомічних дослідів? і всі вони такі нудні і примітивні це ТРАТА МОГО ЧИ БУДЬ ЧИЙОГО ЧАСУ
і коли я думала, що гірше бути не може, гірше стало. ну так я вже налаштовувалася дихальними медитативними практиками на цю справу, так я хотіла щоб мені хоч щось сподобалося, але alas... третій чел.... якісь вічно політичні коментарі, вбивати це плоха нетвойне, якась духота історична про князів велікаангліі, і ще більш того для кожного вірша є прозове глибинне пояснення укладених сенсів. як вам от вірш про нац*ка, що кожноі ночі перед сном молиться на портрет дружини гітлера немов на марію, але замість скласти руки, він іх кладе на свій прутень? класно? все поняли? дуже сучаснл і креативно я вважаю як метафора, аплодую разом з іншими пасажирами маршрутки; або ось ще попроще вашому примітивному свідомому – вірш називається "історія перед сном" і розказує про те, як браконʼєри вбивають макакічей, а вони не тупиє і заводят тих менів на гострі пікі і тим самим вбивають іх. окей. товстолобий коментар про екосвідому позицію, круто, а тепер увага примітка автора до написаного: нарація від сторони мурахи, що розказує своім дітям, як вимерли всі люди. добре. а наступний вірш був з якимто незрозумілим наіздом на євреів (а після ніжноі приміточки стало ясно що то було дуже локально і привʼязано до того року і якоісь конкретноі тоді подіі 🌷) то словом я уже нахрен цей цирк закрила недочитавши кілька сторінок
мені одвічно буде незрозуміло, чому поети 60х сполученого королівства так були повернуті на уславленні християнства у найдивніший можливий спосіб, водночас одвічних гімнах хіті, найнудніших засудженнях насильства та історіях з власного життя. нікому в житті не рекомендую цей шлак
антологія представляє собою трьох випадкових авторів, яких повʼязує бодай як лише роздуте его, переоцінена самовпевненість та повна бездарність
перший чел легенда, я прочитала всі і кожен з представлених його тут віршів, і не було жодного без слова "глина". як же він любить ту глину, який же невичерпний цей символ родючості, немов маріі, матері-природи, які ж на тій глині привабливі купки багна, що немов жіночі груди, а святе стікання дощу немов порізані вени христа. о, ісусе, ну ще один-то релігійно-будівничий вірш сприйняти серйозно можна, але коли їх 30~ однакових, як ідейно, так і лексично, та й настільки однакових, що немов штучний інтелект відповідав усьому класу на одне і те саме дз, то як це можна витерпіти? я стала джокером і через силу стиснутих зубів прочитала все, очікуючи все таки не отриманого світла в кінці мого шляху.. однак той глиномес найкращий з трійки, бо в нього хоч якийсь стиль наявний, при тому вкрай автентичний
другий чел така ригота, він пише про все і ніпрощо одразу, ніяких тем чи ідей, просто випадкові сцени з життя, і його я не смогла прочитати і половини. один вірш про мертвого батька, інший про сон під час подорожі у грецію, а третій чомусь про розчленування коня для анатомічних дослідів? і всі вони такі нудні і примітивні це ТРАТА МОГО ЧИ БУДЬ ЧИЙОГО ЧАСУ
і коли я думала, що гірше бути не може, гірше стало. ну так я вже налаштовувалася дихальними медитативними практиками на цю справу, так я хотіла щоб мені хоч щось сподобалося, але alas... третій чел.... якісь вічно політичні коментарі, вбивати це плоха нетвойне, якась духота історична про князів велікаангліі, і ще більш того для кожного вірша є прозове глибинне пояснення укладених сенсів. як вам от вірш про нац*ка, що кожноі ночі перед сном молиться на портрет дружини гітлера немов на марію, але замість скласти руки, він іх кладе на свій прутень? класно? все поняли? дуже сучаснл і креативно я вважаю як метафора, аплодую разом з іншими пасажирами маршрутки; або ось ще попроще вашому примітивному свідомому – вірш називається "історія перед сном" і розказує про те, як браконʼєри вбивають макакічей, а вони не тупиє і заводят тих менів на гострі пікі і тим самим вбивають іх. окей. товстолобий коментар про екосвідому позицію, круто, а тепер увага примітка автора до написаного: нарація від сторони мурахи, що розказує своім дітям, як вимерли всі люди. добре. а наступний вірш був з якимто незрозумілим наіздом на євреів (а після ніжноі приміточки стало ясно що то було дуже локально і привʼязано до того року і якоісь конкретноі тоді подіі 🌷) то словом я уже нахрен цей цирк закрила недочитавши кілька сторінок
мені одвічно буде незрозуміло, чому поети 60х сполученого королівства так були повернуті на уславленні християнства у найдивніший можливий спосіб, водночас одвічних гімнах хіті, найнудніших засудженнях насильства та історіях з власного життя. нікому в житті не рекомендую цей шлак
December 23, 2017
A strange collection of three very diverse minor poets, all with a sense of being on the fringe - born between 1916 and 1933 in Cornwall, Jamaica and Scotland.
Jack Clemo was intensely religious, and wedded to the (to me, depressing) clay pit that was the physical backdrop to the tiny cottage in which he lived his first 50 years.
Edward Lucie-Smith's poetry reflects his (white, affluent) Caribbean early years, his English schooling, gay orientation and life in art criticism.
George MacBeth's poems are written in a bewildering array of voices, encouraging him to provide explanatory notes at the end:
"The Son. A mortuary attendant rapes the body of a dead woman. He associates her with his mother, who died of liver disease.
"Mother Superior. The principal of an order of nuns is speaking. The order consists of a number of pregnant women whose duty is to bear uncontaminated children in the event of a nuclear war.
"Early Warning. An Eskimo speaks. He is dying of radiation disease which he has contracted from the bones of an American pilot of a nuclear bomber which has crashed.
"Bedtime Story. A giant ant is telling a bedtime story to one of its children." This poem also features in the classic Science Fiction poetry anthology "Holding Your Eight Hands".
I dislike Clemo's archaic religiosity, but respect his skill. I identify with Lucie-Smith's upbringing, described in his earlier tight formal verse, but have no interest in his later rambling art poems. I find MacBeth the most memorable.
Jack Clemo was intensely religious, and wedded to the (to me, depressing) clay pit that was the physical backdrop to the tiny cottage in which he lived his first 50 years.
Edward Lucie-Smith's poetry reflects his (white, affluent) Caribbean early years, his English schooling, gay orientation and life in art criticism.
George MacBeth's poems are written in a bewildering array of voices, encouraging him to provide explanatory notes at the end:
"The Son. A mortuary attendant rapes the body of a dead woman. He associates her with his mother, who died of liver disease.
"Mother Superior. The principal of an order of nuns is speaking. The order consists of a number of pregnant women whose duty is to bear uncontaminated children in the event of a nuclear war.
"Early Warning. An Eskimo speaks. He is dying of radiation disease which he has contracted from the bones of an American pilot of a nuclear bomber which has crashed.
"Bedtime Story. A giant ant is telling a bedtime story to one of its children." This poem also features in the classic Science Fiction poetry anthology "Holding Your Eight Hands".
I dislike Clemo's archaic religiosity, but respect his skill. I identify with Lucie-Smith's upbringing, described in his earlier tight formal verse, but have no interest in his later rambling art poems. I find MacBeth the most memorable.
June 5, 2025
The last of the Penguin Modern Poets series which I own, in a box set of the first six selections. Like the first four, there is no strong link between the poets (the exception being the fifth of the series, which contains three of the beat poets, and which I think is by far the most successful of all of the volumes).
This selection starts with Jack Clemo - given the difficulties he suffered, any poetry would be incredible: a truncated education, and, later, blindness. The poetry is full of fantastic images, often derived from his Cornish origins, and reflecting his strong Christian faith. This may be some of the best religious poetry ever written. 5*s.
Edward Lucie-Smith was born in Jamaica, and this is an essential part to his his poetry, as Clemo's life is to his. The poems - at least the ones collected here - almost all end with at least a downward mood, loneliness, desolation, destruction, or death. The best of the poems are the shorter ones; I would gladly swap Caravaggio Dying for several more short ones. (It still has downbeat endings to each stanza: "I greet smiling My new-found death...No one supposed, not even I, I'd live to be much older...As children come To watch a father's deathbed, they are with me." And so on. If I came across one of these in a collection shared with other poets, I think I would like it, but not so much in a set of poems for a single author. 2*s.
George MacBeth concludes this collection, and thus is the last that I will review, as the first six volumes are all I have. MacBeth perhaps appears to be the most conventional poet here; Scottish, with an Oxford education followed by working for the BBC, and believing that poetry is best served by reading aloud, but there is more to the poetry than just the conventions of the time. Poems like The Return,The Son or Mother Superior (the first three anthologised here) seem to have something to say, but it's hard to know exactly what is meant, at least to me. They're opaque in meaning, but have a definite effectiveness (which must have appeared to the person who selected his poetry, as he is the only poet from the eighteen who is given a set of notes to aid the reader - which I did not read until after I had read them). These poems are all early, from before he was 32 - he lived to his sixties, long after the publication of this book. There is a good deal of what might be considered northern bleakness, "smoothed by the Greenland wind" in the desolate Early Warning - a poem, however, which is immediately followed in this collection by Bedtime Story, a dream of the tropics (but one which ends with a reminder of the fate of the dodo - warmth cannot last). An uncomfortable poet to read but definitely worth having a go - 4*s.
This selection starts with Jack Clemo - given the difficulties he suffered, any poetry would be incredible: a truncated education, and, later, blindness. The poetry is full of fantastic images, often derived from his Cornish origins, and reflecting his strong Christian faith. This may be some of the best religious poetry ever written. 5*s.
Edward Lucie-Smith was born in Jamaica, and this is an essential part to his his poetry, as Clemo's life is to his. The poems - at least the ones collected here - almost all end with at least a downward mood, loneliness, desolation, destruction, or death. The best of the poems are the shorter ones; I would gladly swap Caravaggio Dying for several more short ones. (It still has downbeat endings to each stanza: "I greet smiling My new-found death...No one supposed, not even I, I'd live to be much older...As children come To watch a father's deathbed, they are with me." And so on. If I came across one of these in a collection shared with other poets, I think I would like it, but not so much in a set of poems for a single author. 2*s.
George MacBeth concludes this collection, and thus is the last that I will review, as the first six volumes are all I have. MacBeth perhaps appears to be the most conventional poet here; Scottish, with an Oxford education followed by working for the BBC, and believing that poetry is best served by reading aloud, but there is more to the poetry than just the conventions of the time. Poems like The Return,The Son or Mother Superior (the first three anthologised here) seem to have something to say, but it's hard to know exactly what is meant, at least to me. They're opaque in meaning, but have a definite effectiveness (which must have appeared to the person who selected his poetry, as he is the only poet from the eighteen who is given a set of notes to aid the reader - which I did not read until after I had read them). These poems are all early, from before he was 32 - he lived to his sixties, long after the publication of this book. There is a good deal of what might be considered northern bleakness, "smoothed by the Greenland wind" in the desolate Early Warning - a poem, however, which is immediately followed in this collection by Bedtime Story, a dream of the tropics (but one which ends with a reminder of the fate of the dodo - warmth cannot last). An uncomfortable poet to read but definitely worth having a go - 4*s.
July 31, 2021
Jack Clemo: Incredibly dull poetry. With all the subtlety of a brick, this selection of Clemo’s poetry really just talks about God, clay pits, or how clay pits are in some way divine. Absolutely not for me.
Edward Lucie-Smith: Some interesting poetry, particularly the earlier selected poems about island life. I think I would benefits more from reading Lucie-Smith’s collections to establish thematic links more easily.
George MacBeth: Absolutely mind-blowing! I enjoyed each and every poem by MacBeth which are so beautifully varied - a man masturbating over Hitler’s mistress, a boy turning into an owl, an Eskimo dying of radiation sickness. I have just ordered MacBeth collected poems as they are incredibly beautiful in form and style but also so curious that it was hard not to love this selection.
Edward Lucie-Smith: Some interesting poetry, particularly the earlier selected poems about island life. I think I would benefits more from reading Lucie-Smith’s collections to establish thematic links more easily.
George MacBeth: Absolutely mind-blowing! I enjoyed each and every poem by MacBeth which are so beautifully varied - a man masturbating over Hitler’s mistress, a boy turning into an owl, an Eskimo dying of radiation sickness. I have just ordered MacBeth collected poems as they are incredibly beautiful in form and style but also so curious that it was hard not to love this selection.
April 5, 2020
Clemo's verse is a mere mouthpiece for a dour and suffocating sort of Protestantism. Lucie Smith is better: his forms and structures are attractive, without being too noticeable. Macbeth explains his poems with notes at the end - which must have had the IA Richards fans spitting tacks. Of its time, but I'd say Smith and Macbeth are still worth a look.
April 22, 2020
This series of books is always intriguing. I really like the gritty Cornish Christianity of Jack Clemo. Edward Lucie Smith is interesting but not a favorite - not sure why. George Macbeth I found difficult until I found the notes at the back of the book (only bit of this review which is really useful) after which I found them more interesting (enjoyable would not be the word to use.)
March 27, 2018
George MacBeth is far superior.
October 23, 2025
Especially liked poems by Jack Clemo. Recommend a read... multiple times through your life... and hopefully whilst within states of awe
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