James Byrne reviews Peter Redgrove's From the Virgil Caverns

James Byrne reviews From the Virgil Caverns by Peter Redgrove, published by Jonathan Cape at £8.00, in issue 4 of The Wolf. The review follows the poet's death and treats the book as his last collection. Byrne, who says he came to Redgrove late, opens with Douglas Dunn's verdict that the psychic turbulence of these poems has a match only in Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes, and he sets out to test whether the comparison holds.

Byrne finds it does. He compares the raw metaphor and imaginative reach to Plath, noting that Redgrove's Lazarus and the Sea took up the same story as Lady Lazarus some years before it, and the interlaced narrative and metaphor to Hughes. He reports that some poems overwhelmed him so much that he had to stop and pause before continuing, and he reaches for the word 'visionary', with a nod to Blake. Among contemporaries only the early work of John Burnside, he says, treads as deliberately between the interior and the unknown. He also stresses the humour: dentists and undertakers appear as conjurers within the poet's carefully managed environment.

On craft, Byrne admires the triadic stanzas, which can fragment a poem but give many lines room to stand alone, and singles out the sequence on Redgrove's father, naming 'Father in Mirror', 'My Father's Teeth' and 'Arrivals'. He praises the water poems 'Elderhouse', 'Tsunami' and 'Sea Visit', and calls 'Sleepers Beach' one of the best recent nature poems he has read. Redgrove published twenty-one volumes of poetry, and Byrne finds him here at full range and lucidity, enjoying the elasticity of language without vanity.

Byrne adds that Redgrove also wrote prose and radio plays, and that the small press Sheen planned a final volume of his unpublished poems for October, along with a memorial volume with contributions from Burnside, Andrew Motion and Peter Porter. He answers critics who found the work hard to access by arguing that it is accurate and systematic, and that it creates new perspectives instead of impossible ones. He ends with the hope that Redgrove will eventually receive the recognition his achievement deserves.

Work

From the Virgil Caverns

Author

Peter Redgrove

Publisher

Jonathan Cape

Poems in this selection

• Father in Mirror
• My Father's Teeth
• Arrivals
• Elderhouse
• Tsunami
• Sea Visit
• Sleepers Beach

Peter Redgrove's poetry has always had a quite unusual accuracy and is systematic in method

James Byrne, The Wolf, issue 4