25. ‘The House of Taps’: dedicated to Penelope Shuttle.
26. ‘The Haunted Armchair’: ‘Redgrove solus, as invincible virgin.’ [PR to Dilly Creffield]
27. The Hermaphrodite Album: a collection of poems by Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle, in which the authors of individual poems were not identified.
28. Sons of My Skin: this was Redgrove’s first Selected Poems, drawing on his collections up to 1973. It also contains a number of otherwise uncollected poems, from which these have been chosen.
29. ‘The Oracle’: ‘He’ in this poem is John Layard.
30. ‘Sam’s Call’: based on a family anecdote from Redgrove’s Art School colleague Derek Toyne.
31. ‘Dog Prospectus’: Redgrove wrote this poem after an unhappy experience at Colgate University, New York State.
32. ‘Tapestry Moths’: Hardwick Hall is a great Elizabethan house in Derbyshire, famous for its extensive windows and its tapestries, which Redgrove visited in 1973. He probably had in mind a tapestry representing a fruit seller (actually female) in the Entrance Hall.
33. ‘Dance the Putrefact’: broadcast on Radio 3 in 1975.
34. ‘God Says “Death”’: mire-drummer: bittern.
35. ‘Living in Falmouth’: Trelissick is a garden, now owned by the National Trust, near Truro, Cornwall. The Carrick Roads is a large natural harbour navigable from Falmouth to Truro.
36. ‘Excrementitious Husk’: St Cuby is a church at Cuby, near St Austell in Cornwall, restored in the nineteenth century.
37. ‘Rev. Uncle’: ‘’Obby ’Oss’ alludes to the ancient festival held on Mayday in Padstow, Cornwall, which Redgrove describes in The Colour of Radio and The Sleep of the Great Hypnotist.
38. ‘Tall Hairdo’: goffered: fluted. St Materiana’s is an eleventh-century church at Tintagel, Cornwall.
39. ‘At the Street-Party’: ‘The biblical echo to the smelling of the son is Genesis 27:27; Isaac blessing Jacob disguised as Esau.’ [PR]
40. ‘Gwennap Cross’: near Redruth in Cornwall.
41. ‘The Cave’: codling is both a species of apple and a species of moth that feeds on apples.
42. ‘From the Life of a Dowser’: a dowser is a water-diviner. ‘Fenten ow Clyttra’ is Cornish for sparkling well.
43. ‘Renfield before his Master’: Lola Montez (1820–61) was an Irish-born dancer and mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Redgrove pasted into his journal a newspaper clipping with a photo of her and the caption: ‘Lola Montez shook up San Francisco with her spider dance and set the citizens gawking by walking two greyhounds on a leash while a parrot perched on her shoulder. She smoked cigars, gambled in forbidden saloons and claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron.’ ‘The karast is literally the god or person who has been mummified, embalmed, and anointed or christified’, Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt the Light of the World, p. 218. This is one of many details that Redgrove derived from the works of the Victorian Egyptologist Gerald Massey, to whom he dedicated both The Apple-Broadcast and The Man Named East.
44. ‘Silence Fiction’: loosely based on C.G. Jung’s account of a dream which, he said, led to the discovery of the collective unconscious: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, London, Fontana, 1967, p.184.
45. ‘Call’: dedicated to the poet Frances Horovitz, a close friend of Redgrove, who died of cancer in 1983.
46. ‘In the Pharmacy’: dedicated to a student of Redgrove’s at Falmouth School of Art.
47. ‘The Green Tower’: the church is St Euny’s in Redruth, Cornwall, which is near the hill of Carn Brae, site of Neolithic and Iron Age settlements, and a medieval castle.
48. ‘The Quiet Woman of Chancery Lane’: there are a number of pubs with this name and sign, immortalised by Hardy in The Return of the Native, but not in Chancery Lane, the main thoroughfare of London’s legal quarter.
49. ‘The Funeral’, ‘Warm Stone for N’: Redgrove’s mother Nancy (or Nan) died in 1980.
50. ‘Cloudmother’: dedicated to Derek Power, the first Chair of the Falmouth Poetry Group.
51. ‘Local’: dedicated to Gerald Massey (see note to ‘Renfield before his Master’). ‘The Quiet Woman’: see note to ‘The Quiet Woman of Chancery Lane’.
52. ‘Pneumonia Blouses’: nenuphar: water lily.
53. ‘Horse Looking over Drystone Wall’: a response to one of a number of photographs of the Scilly Isles by the Falmouth-based photographer Simon Culliford, to whom the poem is dedicated.
54. ‘Thunder-and-Lightning Polka’: dedication: J.H. Barclay was a retired biscuit-manufacturer from Bootle, who collected Redgrove’s work and was one of his most devoted readers.
55. ‘Into the Rothko Installation’: Redgrove wrote this poem spontaneously as a response to the Rothko Room at the Tate, and was subsequently invited to contribute a poem to the gallery’s anthology With a Poet’s Eye (Tate Gallery, 1986).
56. ‘Summer’: ‘Shivering Mountain’ is Mam Tor near Castleton in Derbyshire. This passage is based on notes Redgrove made during a visit there, sixteen years before the poem was published, an extreme example of his method of ‘incubation’.
57. ‘Stench and Story’: ‘the Roads’: the Carrick Roads (see note to ‘Living in Falmouth).
58. ‘Eight Parents’: Redgrove’s father died in 1989.
59. ‘My Father’s Trapdoors’: Maskelyne: the name of a family of stage magicians. The one Redgrove saw as a boy must have been Jasper Maskelyne, 1902–74. ‘Soup-and-fish’: colloquial term for men’s evening dress.
60. ‘Esher’: a town in Surrey, six miles from Redgrove’s childhood home in Kingston on Thames.
61. ‘Davy Jones’ Lioness’: an unusual example of a poem that was directly inspired by a dream.
62. ‘Enýpnion’: this Greek word, more usually transliterated ‘enupnion’, means dream.
63. ‘Leather Goods’: there is a shop in Falmouth which sells leather retrieved from shipwrecks, but not to my knowledge human skin. ‘Manacles’: notoriously treacherous rocks off the Lizard peninsula, Cornwall.
64. From ‘Assembling a Ghost: Ms Potter’: inspired by the death of Redgrove’s first wife, Barbara, in 1994.
65. ‘Wheal Cupid’: the name of a disused mine at Lelant, near St Ives, Cornwall.
66. ‘Orchard End’: the name of Redgrove’s childhood home in Kingston on Thames.
67. ‘Collected’: ‘With such hair too… /Used to hang and brush their bosoms’: from Robert Browning’s ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, stanza 15.
68. ‘Squelette’: see note to ‘Assembling a Ghost: Ms Potter’.
69. ‘Limestone Cat’: dedicated to Neil Roberts, critic, biographer and editor, who showed Redgrove a petrified cat in a Derbyshire pub.
70. ‘Spiritualism Garden’: when Redgrove was ten or twelve years old his mother confided in him about, and possibly made him complicit in, one or more abortions. He became preoccupied with the thought that the foetuses might be buried in the garden at Orchard End.
71. ‘Afterglow Laboratories’: in 1941 Redgrove was evacuated with his mother and younger brother to Llandudno in North Wales. ‘Ora et labora’ (Pray and work) was the motto of Taunton School when Redgrove was a pupil. It has recently been changed to the corporate-sounding ‘Offering more’.
72. ‘Nude Descending’: see Marcel Duchamp ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’.
73. ‘Orchard End II’: see note to ‘Orchard End’.
74. ‘Last Poem’: transcribed by Penelope Shuttle from Redgrove’s handwritten draft.
INDEX OF TITLES
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
Abattoir Bride, 411
Absolute Ghost, The, 65
After the Crash, 186
Afterglow Laboratories, 454
Against Death, 9
Agnostic Visitor, The, 131
All the Skulls, 1
51
Among the Whips and the Mud Baths, 205
Annalee and Her Sister, 375
Apple-Broadcast, The, 252
Apprentice, 444
Archaeologist, The, 17
Argus, 380
Arrivals, 427
Artist to his Blind Love, The, 82
Assembling a Ghost, 407
At Home, 340
At Richmond Park, 382
At the Cosh-Shop, 312
At the Old Powerhouse, 428
At the Street Party, 219
At the Window on the World, 418
Autobiosteography, 185
Autumn Loveletter, 473
Ball Lightning, 467
Bedtime Story for my Son, 15
Being Beauteous, 38
Bibliophile, 403
Big Sleep, The, 322
Bird, The, 12
Black Bones, 385
Blackthorn Winter, 354
Body, Mind and Spirit, 443
Born, 183
Boy’s Porridge, 410
Brainwall Cornghost Horsestorm, 125
British Museum Smile, The, 216
Brothel in Fairyland, The, 288
Buveur’s Farewell, 360
Buzz, 440
Call, 263
Carcass, 333
Case, The, 74
Cat and Tree, 396
Cave, The, 227
Christiana, 95
Climax Forest, 384
Cloudmother, 280
Collected, 417
Collector, The, 14
Contentment of an Old White Man, The, 56
Core, 472
Cornish Persephone, 468
Corposant, 31
Dance the Putrefact, 168
Davy Jones’ Lioness, 404
Decreator, 68
Delivery-Hymn, 218
Dentist-Conjurers, 442
Dewy Garment, A, 317
Directive, 58
Disguise, 30
Doctrine of the Window, The, 145
Dog Prospectus, 141
Doll-Wedding, 151
Domestic Suite, 337
Dr Faust’s Sea-Spiral Spirit, 109
Dr Immanuel Rath, 3
Dream-Kit, 245
Drink to the Duke, 300
Dry Parrot, 321
Dynamite Doctors, The, 337
Earth Shakes Away its Dead Like Crumbs from a Cloth, 224
Eight Parents, 379
Elderhouse, 435
Entry Fee, 339
Enýpnion, 406
Erosion, 124
Esher, 403
Excrementitious Husk, 201
Expectant Father, 37
Eye-Bestowing, 299
Falmouth Clouds, 355
Familiar, 399
Fantasia, 46
Far Star, 319
Ferns, The, 56
Flies, 13
First Earthquake, The, 327
Fish, 382
For David, 127
For No Good Reason, 27
Force, The, 53
Four Poems of Love and Transition, 359
Frankenstein in the Forest, 107
Frog-Leap Plops, 184
From the Life of a Dowser, 229
From the Questions to Mary, 132
From the Virgil Caverns, 429
Full Measures, 228
Funeral, The, 275
Geodic Poet, 347
Ghosts, 27
Girl Reading My Poetry, The, 318
God Says ‘Death’, 187
Grand Buveur I, 300
Grand Buveur II, 301
Grand Buveur X, 304
Grand Lunacy, The, 188
Green Tower, The, 265
Grimmanderson on Tresco, 231
Guarded by Bees, 192
Guardian, 4
Guarnerius, 380
Guns and Wells, 238
Gwennap Cross, 220
Half-House, The, 144
Half-Scissors, The, 109
Harper, The, 475
Harvest, 329
Haunted Armchair, The, 106
Heart, The, 264
Heir, The, 57
Henrhyd Waterfall, 452
Her Shirt Open, 311
Horse Looking Over Drystone Wall, 309
House in the Acorn, The, 55
House of Taps, The, 105
Housekeeper, The, 249
Huge Old, 440
Hush! The Sun, 90
I See, 53
I Stroll, 30
Idea of Entropy at Maenporth Beach, The, 103
In Autumn Equinox, 285
In Company Time, 47
In the Hall of the Saurians, 310
In the Lab with the Lady Doctor, 358
In the Pharmacy, 264
In the Vermilion Cathedral, 166
In the Year of the Comet, 452
Intimate Supper, 100
Into the Rothko Installation, 315
Journey, The, 246
Joy Gordon, 343
Last Poem, 478
Laundromat as Prayer-Wheel, The, 235
Lawn Sprinkler and Lighthouse, 437
Lazarus and the Sea, 10
Leather Goods, 406
Lecture Overheard, 237
Legible Hours, 303
Light Hotel, 208
Lights in the Mist, 279
Like a Rock, 292
Limestone Cat, 438
Living in Falmouth, 195
Local, 304
Looms of the Ancestors, The, 190
Luckbath, 459
Malagueño, 34
Man Named East, The, 284
Marmalade, 348
Master Piss-on-Himself, 302
Memorial, 16
Menopausa, 338
Minerals of Cornwall, Stones of Cornwall, 96
Mists, 28
Moon Disposes, The, 99
Moonbeast in Sunshine, 167
More Leaves from my Bestiary, 32
Moth-er, 460
Mothers, 282
Mothers and Child, 289
Moths, The, 395
Mountain, The, 372
Move to Cornwall, A, 195
Mr Waterman, 39
My Father’s Kingdoms, 182
My Father’s Spider, 217
My Father’s Trapdoors, 388
My Prince, 463
Ninety-Two Demons, The, 203
Noise, 60
Nude Descending, 462
Nude Studies III: The Speleologists, 420
Nude Studies VI: The Horse, 409
Old House, 11
Old White Man, The, 83
On Losing One’s Black Dog, 158
On the Patio, 215
On the Screaming of Gulls, 63
One Time, 183
Or was that when I was Grass, 181
Oracle, The, 133
Orchard End, 417
Orchard End II, 477
Orchard With Wasps, 234
Orphelia, 373
Paradise of Storms, The, 459
Passing Cloud, A, 383
Peachware, 204
Pheromones, 243
Philosophy in Welshese, A, 134
Phlebas the Phoenician, 3
Pianism, 476
Picking Mushrooms, 21
Pictures from a Japanese Printmaker, 154
Pigmy Thunder, 371
Place, 191
Play, The, 17
Playing Dead, 316
Pneumonia Blouses, 309
Popular Star, 373
Pregnant Father, The, 10
Proper Halo, The, 274
Pure Chance, 397
Quasimodo’s Many Beds, 91
Quiet Time, 336
Quiet Woman of Chancery Lane, The, 267
Rainbow, The, 469
Renfield Before His Master, 232
Required of you this Night, 61
Reservoirs of Perfected Ghost, 434
Rev. Uncle, 207
Rich Jabez Dog, 179
Rock, Egg, Church, Trumpet, 225
Room in the Trees, The, 59
Rough and Lecherous, 202
Round Pylons, 334
Saluting Willa, 222
Sam’s Call, 136
Scarecrow, A (AWM), 46
Scarecrow, A (IHS), 320
Sea-Eye, 398
Sean’s Description, 189
Seconds, Drops, Pence, 259
Secret Breakfast, The, 248
Secret Examination, The, 353
Secretary, The, 36
Serious Readers, 145
Sermon, The, 70
Shadow-Silk, 97
Shaving, 185
She Believes She Has Died, 283
Shearing Grass, 14
Shell, A, 396
Shells, 270
Shrinking Clock, The, 184
Silence Fiction, 251
Silent Man, A, 45
Silicon Stars, 204
Sire of Branches and Air, The, 222
Six Odes, 121
Sixty Stags, 347
Skin, The, 164
Small Death, A, 101
Small Earthquake, The, 353
Sniffing Tom, 357
Snow-Shirt, The, 121
Solid Prayers, 451
Some Books, Some Authors, Some Readers, 126
Somebody, 165
Song, 241
Spiritualism Garden, 450
Spring (AB), 215
Squelette, 421
Staines Waterworks, 386
Stains, The, 143
Starlight, 333
Stench and Story, 371
Stronghold, The, 28
Summer, 328
Sweat, 63
Sunday Afternoons, 60
Tall Hairdo, 209
Tapestry Moths, 142
Terrible Jesus, The, 163
Theme-Dream, 476
They Come, 412
This Cornish Passage, 136
Three Aquarium Portraits, 152
Thrust and Glory, 193
Thunder-and-Lightning Polka, 314
To the Black Poet, 331
To the Water-Psychiatrist, 272
Toad and Others, 376
Tom as Supernatural Presence, 449
Transactions, 278
Trashabet, 148
Tree of Swords, 165
Trial by Mallet, 470
True Wasp, 471
Tsunami, 434
Twelvemonth, A, 146
Under the Duvet, 268
Under the Reservoir, 354
Variation on Lorca, 35
Vicarage Mooncakes, 188
Visible Baby, The, 179
Warm Stone for N, 277
Wave-Birth, 349
Weddings at Nether Powers, The, 206
Wheal Cupid, 411
White, Night-Flying Moths Called ‘Souls’, The, 239
Whitsunwind, 287
Whole Music at Pod’s Kitchen, The, 194
Collected Poems Page 41
