{"id":2437,"date":"2021-03-01T12:44:09","date_gmt":"2021-03-01T12:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2437"},"modified":"2021-03-01T12:44:09","modified_gmt":"2021-03-01T12:44:09","slug":"john-glenday-selected-poems-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2437","title":{"rendered":"John Glenday, Selected Poems – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

John\u00a0 Glenday\u2019s Selected Poems<\/em> adds nine pieces to a selection of work from his five previous books. It\u2019s a small output for the time he\u2019s been writing but a very fine one.<\/p>\n

The main features of his work have been clear from the beginning: avoidance of rhetoric, meticulous craftsmanship, love of balanced forms, and skill in combining musical qualities with a conversational style. These features are integrally related to the way the \u2018I\u2019 of the poems seems to think and feel. His voice is quiet and measured, though what he says can be startling or disturbing. Even when directly addressing the reader as \u2018you\u2019, he seems to look inwards as much as outwards, weighing the accuracy of his words as he speaks. We see this in \u2018At Innernytie\u2019, where the rhythm suggests his reflectively pausing delivery:<\/p>\n

All we can ever hear
\nis the slipping by of things
\nas another night comes down.<\/p>\n

Everything changes forever:
\neverything remains.<\/p>\n

His images of the physical world can be as sharply particular as they\u2019re spare and delicate, but the things he writes about often hover elusively between being and not being. \u2018Undark\u2019, about the \u2018radium girls\u2019 who worked with radioactive luminous paint, is one of many poems imagining ghosts:<\/p>\n

And so they came back, those girls who painted
\nthe watch dials luminous, and died.<\/p>\n

They come back and their hands glow and their lips
\nand hair and their footprints gleam in the past like alien snow.<\/p>\n

Many writers would have set out to make us imagine the girls\u2019 lives before death, but it\u2019s the fantasy of their ghostly posthumous existence that haunts Glenday. The horror of their unwitting exposure both speaks for itself and is expressed in a metaphor of the radium as having \u2018burned through the cotton of their lives\u2019. The poem progresses into tentative, tantalizingly ambiguous suggestions of an almost metaphysical kind. This is typical. One of the things I find most absorbing and difficult to describe in Glenday\u2019s work is its repeated reaching into a region of counterfactual, rationally indefinable feelings that may express themselves in terms trailing strong religious associations \u2013 words like love, imagery of darkness and light, metaphors of wholeness and healing \u2013 often involving questions about the fit between ourselves and the world, in some absolute psychological or perhaps religious sense. Creating a city, Abaton, whose essence is its simultaneous nearness and impossibility, he makes us see our not seeing it<\/em> like this:<\/p>\n

no buttresses, no walls, no astragals,
\nonly those luminous avenues of weather
\ngathering the cluttered light like window glass,
\nall furnished in the traceries of wind and rain.<\/p>\n

The ambiguous relations between self and not-self are reflected in several fine love poems. In \u2018Blind\u2019, addressed to a lover or partner, the speaker recalls how lying beside her after a quarrel, he held her \u2018not for warmth or pardon, but for light\u2019. What follows is a reminiscence that supplies a tacit analogy for his love of her, taking an extraordinary empathic leap into the experience of a blind man:<\/p>\n

Remember that blind man
\nwho once passed us in the street?
\nHow he touched his stick gently<\/p>\n

against the world \u2013 just confirming the world
\nstill travelled with him \u2013
\nthen strode on as if something
\nthat was not darkness lay ahead?<\/p>\n

How swiftly and vividly the poem makes us see that blind man. It\u2019s typical of Glenday\u2019s quiet manner that it takes a moment to register the scale of the reangling of perception involved in \u2018touched his stick gently \/\/ against the world<\/em>\u2019, or to realize how much this picture says about the speaker\u2019s love for his partner and dependence on her strength.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

John Glenday, Selected Poems<\/em>, 176pp, \u00a314.99, Picador, Pan Macmillan, 6 Briset Street, London EC1M 5NR.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Ann and Peter Sansom and Suzannah Evans for permission to post this extract from my review of books by John Glenday, David Constantine and Sean Borodale in issue 65 of The North.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John\u00a0 Glenday\u2019s Selected Poems adds nine pieces to a selection of work from his five previous books. It\u2019s a small output for the time he\u2019s been writing but a very fine one. The main features of his work have been clear from the beginning: avoidance of rhetoric, meticulous craftsmanship, love of balanced forms, and skill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-glenday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2437"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2437"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2439,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2437\/revisions\/2439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}