Collected Poems

Reviews / Votes

Reviewed by Neil Curry in The North, Issue 35

Gloucester-born Ivor Gurney published his first slim volume, Severn and Somme, in 1917 when he was twenty-seven.It was very little different from the dozens of other Rupert Brooke-alike collections, as they have been called.Patriotic and idealistic. 'Now, youth, the hour of thy dread passion will come' and so on.But one brief poem does catch our attention. 'Bach and the Sentry' so clearly refers to an actual event.On guard duty one darkOctober night his spirit is lifted by the memory of a favourite Bach Prelude, but then he wonders whether, when he hears it again, after the war is over, it might not bring back the numbness he has just been feeling - the 'dull sense of No Man's Land again.' It is a provocative idea and expressed with such unfussy directness.

This is no ordinary soldier and no ordinary war poet.Six years earlier he had won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where his tutor, Sir Charles Stanford, whose pupils had included Vaughan Williams, Ireland and Bliss, declared that Gurney was potentially 'the biggest of them all'.And anyone who has heard the tenor Paul Agnew's recording of Gurney's 'Severn Meadows' will know why.There is such an eerie simplicity and beauty to the title song that it is hard to believe Gurney wrote it in the trenches of Caulaincourt in 1917 while serving as a private, a front-line infantryman, with the Gloucester Regiment.

He had enlisted early in 1915 and for two and a half years he fought in some of the most bloody areas of carnage: the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele.Wounded once, sent back into acton and subsequently caught in a gas attack, he was repatriated and cared for at Newcastle General Hospital, but after showing some signs of mental disturbance he was sent off to Lord Derby's war Hospital at Warrington, where they were pioneering the use of electric shock treatment.Out of the frying pan...

Discharged finally in 1918, like many others of his generation, he could not settle.He left the Royal College and over the next four years had a succession of jobs: farm labourer, tax official, cold storage worker and a silent cinema pianist.The only consistent thing was his poetry.In this new Collected Poems (which is not a Complete Poems) PJ Kavanagh gives us over one hundred poems which were written during those years of restlessness.

His battlefield experience still occupied his mind a great deal, but these are not war poems in the usual mould.He had grown out of Rupert Brooke.In a letter to his friend Marion Scott he had written perceptively that 'Brooke would not have improved with age.His manner has become mannerism.' And there is none of that rhetoric of outrage which we have grown used to either.he is very far removed from the likes of Owen and Sassoon and the officer corps.His firsthand accounts startle us with their actuality and distinctiveness. 'The Silent One'opens with one of those pitiful infantry advances over No Man's Land.one of his friends

faced unbroken wire; stepped over, and went,

A noble fool, faithful to his stripes - and ended.

The matter-of-fact tone serves to emphasise the pointlessness of it.But then comes farce.Gurney had been in this situation before and was keeping head down, when an officer

[in] the politest voice - a finicking accent, said:

'Do you think you might crawl through, there;there's a hole?'

The brilliance of observation in that word finiking and the whole nonsensical courtesy of it is matched by Gurney's reply:

In the afraid

Darkness, shot at; I smiled, as politely replied -

'I'm afraid not, Sir.'

We want to laugh, but as we do, we remember that men had been shot for less.

Gurney has been called the most coolly unillusioned of all English combat poets.That he saw things clearly is clear from the detail.When the Verey pistols are fired there is that 'Dreadful green light baring the ruined trees'.The troops huddle in 'low huts, candle-lit, shaded close by slitten oilsheets.' What also marks him out is his concern for others, and not others in the abstract but real live others such as the 'Welsh pit boys' singing 'David of the White Rock' and sharing their 'Woodbines breakfast'.

In his war poems he makes vivid what to us is extraordinary, but like Hopkins, whom he greatly admired, he is also a pot with the great gift of being able to celebrate the ordinary, what he calls 'the dearness of common things'.

...

In the early years of the 1920s, when Gurney was trying to work out what was happening to him and to the country, the masters of the new modernism - men who, interestingly, had never seen active service - marched off in quite another direction and forgot all about him, but we are finding now that there are voices from that period which speak to us with a far greater immediacy than the Ezra Pounds and the TS Eliots ever did, and Ivor Gurney's is one of those voices.

This is a fine new edition.There are poems here we have not had the chance to see before.PJ Kavanagh's perceptive introduction has been retained, but in all other aspects it is a great improvement on the 1982 edition from OUP which was so badly designed - cluttered and ugly.Carcanet are to be congratulated. Fred Beake, Acumen, January 2005:

Review of Ivor Gurney, ,Collected Poems, and Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works (University of California Press)

Gurney's self is almost the subject of his poems. However, this is slightly misleading, because through the medium of Gurney's self, we see scenes from the Great War, or his beloved Gloucestershire, with a curious detachment, as if we were there. Thus his 'Costwold Ways' is a list of things seen on walks that summarize the history of the area, or in 'The Silent One' it is somehow us and not Gurney who is being asked to make a stupid crawl through the trench wire, and declines. It is often said, of course, that Gurney's poetry is the summary of his own tragedy, but I think the strength of it lies in its distancing of that material, and making it more universal. This obsession with Gurney's personal tragedy tends also to obscure his frequent exuberance. Gurney is a poet with far more joy and light than it is fashionable to say...

These are difficult books to review because they both contain so many shifts of direction, but suffice it to say that they are both books to read and re-read, and of great long-term importance. There will no doubt be more editions. Ivor Bertie Gurney was born in 1890 in Gloucester where he became a choirboy and an organ scholar, imbibing that rich tradition of anglican choral music and psalmody which had such an effect on his own work. He went on to study at the Royal College of Music where his composition tutor considered him one of the finest students he had ever had, surpassing in potential even Vaughan Williams.

Ivor, however, was an unstable character, prone to bouts of depression, eating disorders and generally odd behaviour. His experiences in the First World War, in which he served as a private; exacerbated these problems; he returned from the front incapable of holding down any kind of employment or of maintaining normal relationships.

He was never dangerous, though; he loved walking long distances at night, he was sometimes convinced he was being attacked by radio waves, he gave up sleeping and some of his poems betray an obsession with washing (which he called 'laving'). His family could not cope with his peculiarities - or his need for money - and in 1922 he was committed to an asylum. He remained confined the rest of his life, dying of TB on the last day of 1937.

By summarising Gurney's life thus, I have already disappointed his editor P. J. Kavanagh, who writes: 'my dearest wish would be for the reader to approach him first with no knowledge at all of his medical history.' Gurney himself often seemed able to ignore that medical history - the poems he wrote while confined rarely mention hs surroundings - just as he was earlier able to imagine himself back in his beloved Gloucestershire while sitting in a trench, and to compose poems and songs in the English pastoral idiom against the din of exploding shells. He maintained a sort of detachment in order to write- except for those moments of awful lucidity where he recognised himself as 'wasting in one/ Packed ward, where ceiling flat-white is for heaven'.

The fruits of Gurney's life are some exquisite song-settings, and a collection of admittedly uneven poetry, some of which is as lyrical and heartrending as his best songs. Sometimes

he combined his two talents, setting a number of his own lyrics to music - most notably 'The Wanderer', whose concluding lines' Do not forget me quite,/ O Severn meadows' are quoted in a memorial to him in Gloucester Cathedral.

Gurney's Collected Poems were first published in 1982; in this revised and corrected edition the poems have been ordered differently to present a clearer picture of the poet's progress, the gradual disintegration of his mind shot through with flashes of clarity.

Even people who do not normally read poetry will be touched by the story of Ivor Gurney, as portrayed in his own words - for he is not as 'detached' as he may at first appear. Many of his war poems include details about the life of the common soldier missing from the works of officer-poets, while his best short poems, as the darkness began to close around him, are unassuming, direct and memorable in their sorrowful simplicity:

The songs I had are withered

Or varnished clean

yet there are bright tracks

Where i have been,

And there grow flowers

For others' delight.

Think well, O singer

Soon comes night.