Selected poems, 1951-1974

by Charles Tomlinson

AS NEW FIRST EDITION dust jacket hardcover, clean text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; jacket clipped WE SHIP FAST. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201601887 Poet, artist, and translator Charles Tomlinson was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire in 1927. Fluent in German, French, and Italian, he read English at Queen’s College Cambridge, studying with poet Donald Davie, who was an early influence and later became a close friend. Tomlinson taught elementary school before joining the University of Bristol, where he taught for 36 years. His collections of poetry include Relations and Contraries (1951), American Scenes and Other Poems (1966), To Be Engraved on the Skull of a Cormorant (1968), The Shaft (1978), Jubilation (1995), Skywriting and Other Poems (2003), for which he won the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and New Collected Poems (2009). Tomlinson’s work is known for its attention to both visual and aural perception, its painterly effects, and its cosmopolitan, even urbane, style and subject matter. Though he wrote of the natural world, especially in his early work, his philosophical bent and interest in other places and cultures—as well as his highly regarded work as a translator—made him somewhat of an outsider in British poetry. According to the critic Michael Hennessy, “Tomlinson is the most international and least provincial English poet of his generation. At a time when most of his contemporaries were drawing inward, nursing and grooming their ‘Englishness,’ Tomlinson was traveling, engaging with the world, and enriching his work through the agency of American, European, and even Japanese poetic traditions.” We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.)

149 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1978

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the years when most of these poems were written and published, Charles Tomlinson was establishing a reputation as someone aloof from the English poetry scene of the time due to his international inspirations. As The Movement (“no more poems about foreign cities”) typified by Philip Larkin was ascendant in Britain, Tomlinson first went to Italy for a time, read the poetry of the American modernist Wallace Stevens which was still little known in Britain, and eventually traveled widely in the USA.

This gives Tomlinson’s poetry of these years a very cosmopolitan feel in its settings, though Tomlinson is not an academic poet of quotations from or nods to European literature à la Eliot or Pound. Sometimes the poems are simply observations of snowy landscapes, draughty village churches, or the shifting light of sunsets, albeit ones far from England, and they demand no especial erudition on the part of the reader. Music and painting, however, were close to Tomlinson’s heart (and he was a painter himself). It therefore helps if one knows, for example, something about Arnold Schoenberg’s music in order to appreciate the homage found here to that composer’s Violin Concerto:

At its margin
the river’s double willow
that the wind
various
disrupts, effaces
and then restores
in shivering planes:
it is
calming morning.
The twelve notes
(from the single root
the double tree)
and their reflection […]

In Tomlinson’s observations of America, this fondness for the fine arts can mingle curiously with the sort of humble and provincial towns that the poet drove through, as in “At Barstow” about a truck-stop village:

Nervy with neons, the main drag
was all there was. A placeless place.
A faint flavour of Mexico in the tacos
tasting of gasoline. Trucks refuelled
before taking off through space. Someone lived
in the houses with their houseyards wired
like tiny Belsens. The Götterdämmerung
would be like this. No funeral pyres, no choirs
of lost trombones. An Untergang
without a clang, without
a glimmer of gone glory
however dimmed. At the motel desk
was a photograph of Roy Rogers
signed. […]

Such were the features that first struck me about Tomlinson’s poetry, but what made this selection a real pleasure to dip into again and again for months, was Tomlinson’s deftness with meter, enjambment, and often “two-ply” or “three-ply” verse where successive lines are differently offset to dazzling effect. Even the minor poems in this collection are largely worthwhile in this regard, but “Swimming Chenango Lake”, often regarded as the poet’s masterpiece, serves as a particularly good example of Tomlinson’s art, though, alas, I cannot seem to preserve the elaborate indentation in this review form:

Winter will bar the swimmer soon.
He reads the water’s autumnal hesitations
A wealth of ways: it is jarred,
It is astir already despite its steadiness,
Where the first leaves at the first
Tremor of the morning air have dropped
Anticipating him, launching their imprints
Outwards in eccentric, overlapping circles.
There is a geometry of water, for this
Squares off the clouds’ redundances
And sets them floating in a nether atmosphere
All angles and elongations: every tree
Appears a cypress as it stretches there
And every bush that shows the season,
A shaft of fire. It is a geometry and not
A fantasia of distorting forms, but each
Liquid variation answerable to the theme
It makes away from, plays before:
It is a consistency, the grain of the pulsating flow.
But he has looked long enough, and now
Body must recall the eye to its dependence
As he scissors the waterscape apart
And sways it to tatters. […]

After reading this selection, discovered in a library, I wanted to order Tomlinson’s Collected Poems and see, firstly, what all he had written during these years, and secondly, what he wrote in a career that lasted decades further after 1974. This book is all in all a very good advertisement for the poet.