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“The eye gasps, and gives up its perfume/ Like a
night-flowering plant”. Reading Redgrove is a sensurround experience.
In his poem ‘Into the Rothko Installation’, even the red aromas
and trembling black lintels of the Rothko Room pulse with electro-erotic
currents. For this master of synaesthesia, eyes can smell and odours have
colours.
Ciaran Carson, reviewing Redgrove’s Selected Poems in the summer
2000 issue of Poetry London, wrote: “How brilliant a poet Redgrove
is, how full of energy and blood-orange pith and pips and juice, how he
goes straight for the jugular and opens up rich veins of verbal haemoglobin…and
how underrated, it seems to me, he is in the received hierarchy of contemporary
English poetry — at least as good as Ted Hughes.”
I hope this creative giant is at the very top of the poetry hierarchy.
If he’s not — why not? Is it because contemporary British
poetry is tame and he is wild? Is it because British poetry is still at
heart conservative and he is innovative? Redgrove was an exception, experimenting
in his alchemical Cornish word-laboratory with spiralling sea-spouts,
magnetic force fields and technicolour pheromones.
What was even more extraordinary, he could write about happiness, which
is so hard to do — not just happiness but rapture. And he could
write about sex, which is also devilishly hard to do well, and he did
it wondrously, rudely and elegantly, describing the world about him as
if he was in love with every cube of air. Since his death last year, there
is no one to replace his example as a practising poet. That’s what
apprentice poets need — him, and lots more independently minded
role models; living proof that poetry is free and kicking. I was lucky
to come across his work early on when I was at art school. He, along with
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, was revered by my fellow sculpture students
for the vivid and entire visual world he created.
Message poetry is ‘out’ and Redgrove’s poetry has his
message: ideas he’s brewed with that inventor’s mind of his,
coming at us from an insider science angle. Also, his poetry engages with
“womanist” issues (to quote his own term for it). And it is
passionately ecological. But he negotiates his themes through images,
which is why, however message-driven his work might be, every poem is
always fresh. The language, with its musical and humorous word play, pushes
the boundaries of English. The imagery, with its fecundity and concreteness,
pushes the boundaries of the imagination.
Is it because he writes so exuberantly that he’s not more fashionable?
His poems are expansive, but they are also delicate and subtle. Is it
because they are difficult? Although there are arcane pieces, these are
amply balanced by poems of simple power and clarity. He has a pantheon
of symbols. From the outset he made his own world. And what a rich and
full cosmos it is — the world about us at its most vital. But it
is his world, just as Yeats’ world was his own. There are not many
British poets writing now who order their imagery in such a systematically
mythmaking way. The trend is to touch an image lightly and then move on,
not to extend a complex metaphor. I would go so far as to say that there
is an anti-symbolist drive in British poetry; that a personalised symbolism
is currently out of favour.
While writing this, I keep dipping into the dozen or so books of his
I have, including the slim but solid gold Selected Poems (Cape, 1999)
and his glorious last collections, From the Virgil Caverns (Cape, 2002)
and Sheen (Stride, 2003). How distracting they are, these books illuminated
like Aladdin’s caves. They send me rushing back to a poem I’m
working on at the moment. His words are keys that unlock the caskets of
my own imagination. That’s the effect he will have on you, if you
haven’t already discovered this magician.
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