WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Number two
FIVE POEMS------
The praise of death falls
light as
light on flowers. We are
comfortable, warm
and certain as the night
of cause and plan. The hand
that trembles
trembles like a fan, the bones
wake out of it. She shuts the door the
flowers die. It all so
lightly shakes.
--------------------
Sweet light snow
flakes smiling people
crush under
foot. The gangster is
dead and fallen on
flowers. Hand slices three
hours snow off the wind
screen all down
night sky.
-------------------------------
N.A.B.
Cold morning in the white
room. Old man
blowing plumes of pipe
smoke rose
and blue. We are all waiting
for money.
--------------------------
Marrakech they're off
to. Well
forget the star
coat but try for red. You'll
come home tanned and sleep three
days, see you by
the river? (Fleurs
du mal, advisedly.)
----------------------------
Rose hips
in the bowl. This
found or
left, enough, making
no demands. My bones
sing hard melody.
----------------------------
These poems are by Ray Crump, and were written circa 1968. He was at the
time a student at Cambridge and that's just about all I know about him. He
knew J.H.Prynne and may have studied under him. He contributed poems like
these to The English Intelligencer, Collection, The Park and probably other
magazines of that time. He knew a London poet called Geoffrey Hazard and
in 1968 they planned a magazine together called Little Wren, which never
appeared. There was no collection, though about two years later I did see
in Better Books a small book by him published by an obscure American small
press, which I foolishly didn't buy. Perhaps he went to the States.
I've got my own typescript collection of about 60 of these poems and three
short sequences, some unpublished. They're mostly short and stuttery like
these, with very short and/or broken lines. They don't all have the
epiphanic concentration of these, some are plainer (like the third here),
some are beset with strangely literary terms like "'twas". Perhaps a lot
of them don't come off at all. But there's something unique about these
little pieces at their best, a unique way of cutting abstracts and symbolic
fragments into that calm pseudo-oriental short-line pastoral daze, and I
thought his handling of line-end could be very skillful.
I don't suppose anybody knows.....
I'll repeat this on Poetry Etc. (I don't normally approve of such
doublings) because although it's an issue of British poetry if he did go to
the States somebody somewhere out there might....
/PR
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|