To me his most interesting period was in the early
>seventies when the struggle between opposites began to show up in those
>unexpected line-endings, very subtle discontinuities. I'd certainly
call
>that 'innovative' & maybe the more interesting in that RST was clearly
>not interested in innovation for its own sake. I'd like to quote a poem
Here's one with some of that quality. From the very nice selection in DJ
Enright's Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980. As a Welshperson
(not much of one) I think it monstrous that RS -- so I last heard from
Nate -- is not to be included in Keith Tuma's mammoth Book of British
Poets for Yanks.
At It
I think he sits at that strange table
of Eddington's, that is not a table
at all, but nodes and molecules
pushing against molecules
and nodes; and he writes there
in invisible handwriting, the instructions
the genes follow. I imagine his
face that is more the face
of a clock, and the time told by it
is now, though Greece is referred
to and Egypt and empires
not yet begun.
And I would have
things to say to this God
at the judgement, storming at him
as Job stormed, with the eloquence
of the abused heart. But there will be
no judgement other than the verdict
of his calculations, that abstruse
geometry that proceeds eternally
in the silence beyond right and wrong.
Here's a little one, also from the anthology, ok more too-achieved
rhetoric maybe & less formal contortion, but *listen to it, in a Welsh
accent (which I don't think he in fact had much of), or any good
muscular voice:
After Jericho
There is an aggression of fact
to be resisted successfully
only in verse, that fight language
with its own tools. Smile, poet,
among the ruins of a vocabulary
you blew your trumpet against.
It was a conscript army; your words,
every one of them, are volunteers.
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