Collected Poems

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Review of Mervyn Peake's Collected Poems in the Guardian.

Far from Gormenghast

Jay Parini finds much to admire in Mervyn Peake's collected poems

Mervyn Peake died 40 years ago, at the age of 57, and not many readers knew much about his poetry, although he had published six volumes in his lifetime. His most acclaimed work, of course, was the trilogy of fantasy novels focused on the castle of Gormenghast and featuring a tormented hero called Titus. These strangely beautiful, elusive fictions have attracted a cult following, and they have had many influential admirers, including CS Lewis and Graham Greene. But the poetry was central to Peake's project as a writer, and he illustrated his own work quite brilliantly. Now comes this complete edition of his poems with the poet's illustrations.

Peake's verse found a small but appreciative audience with a posthumous selection of his work that was published by Faber in 1972. But that book is long gone, and the scope and nature of his poetry will surprise and delight many new readers. At his best, he's a haunted and haunting poet (not quite as mad as in the metrical ravings of Lord Sepulchrave in Titus Groan). Unlike his fantasy novels, however, there is nothing vague or mysterious about the world he summons, as in "The Glassblowers", which depicts women blowing glass for cathode ray tubes at a wartime factory in Birmingham. "A lyric ease pervades their toil," he writes, noting that the work makes "Their firelit bodies lordly as they blow".

In the "molten language" of the glassblowers, Peake finds "a poetry of barbarous birth" that grows in "this theatre of fitful light", the urban factory. While the lighting may be "fitful", the poet's imagination blazes. Peake is a late romantic, a lamp unto himself, shining his light on the world as he finds it. And it's often a dismal world, one torn apart by war.

Peake's finest poems emerged from his experiences in the second world war. "The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb", for example, tells the story of an infant subjected to the terrors of the Blitz. It features a sailor who runs through the city streets with the baby in his arms. The poem's innocent ballad form seems utterly incongruous, given the harsh material, with the shattered rooftops and "monkey-flames" of bombs that destroy everything in sight. Tons of explosives fall on the world, and Peake evinces this destruction with hammering lines:

And a ton came down on a coloured road,

And a ton came down on a gaol,

And a ton came down on a freckled girl,

And a ton on the black canal,

And a ton came down on a hospital,

And a ton on a manuscript,

And a ton shot up through the dome of a church,

And a ton roared down to the crypt.

Many of Peake's war poems repay close reading, and among the finest is "The Consumptive. Belsen, 1945". He was sent to the horrific camp at Belsen in the immediate aftermath of the war to record the devastation as an artist. In a hospital, he stood before a dying girl just an "hour before her last / Weak cough into all blackness". He sketches in words the "chalk-white walls" and the "great / Ash coloured bed" where the girl lies. Noting "her limbs like pipes, her head a china skull", he rues his own failure to connect fully to her pain. "Her agony slides through me," he confesses. The poem is ultimately about the failure to connect, and how one person's agony is not another's. Yet Peake nevertheless communicates the agony, the girl's and the artist's as well, recalling the misery of war, its endless awful ramifications.

In a more neutral vein, there is this moving poem about a young soldier heading to visit his sweetheart, called "Leave Train":

To your loveliness I travel

Through a bronze and yellow land.

England burns away November -

Every bough is a lit marvel

Pointing with a sentient hand

To where you stand -

Loveliest ember in the autumn's amber.

The qualities of this poem - its affecting system of linked sounds and lyric grace - are found everywhere in Peake's Collected Poems. (Not surprisingly, his friend Dylan Thomas was a profound influence.) While there are quite a few rough drafts here, which really seem like notations for poems that might one day be accomplished, this remains a landmark volume of sorts, a testament to a poet who never quite achieved the level of attention that he deserved. It would be mistaken to think that Peake is some lost genius of English poetry: he is not that. But his gift was real, and his work worth reading.

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