Love-life
It seems that we must get used to this rhythm -
staccato, nefarious;
the days when our life glides on in the smooth
lit inwardly with the brilliance
of the bunched flashed stars the wind creates
outside our windows
in the canopies of beech and sycamore;
then days when it moves not at all,
frantic to move -
a schooner in the doldrums,
suffering the curse of its own being.
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From book reviews:
Poole's writing can be conceited in the "metaphysical" way that offended Dryden and Johnson, as in this Donne-like
astronomical metaphor from 'The Dressing': "Your planetary acolyte, / I wake to your body's sun's dynamic / gravitational
pull," or in this ingenious comparison later in the same poem that succeeds in intellectualising eroticism of the
dress-tease situation despite the sexual connotations of the metaphor's vehicle, swords and scabbards: "You slice
through underskirt and skirt, a sword-blade in a double sheath / unscabbarded too dangerous by half." (Incidentally but
relevantly, this poem contains a most Marvell-like rhyme: "my immediate bliss / provokes in me a sweet paralysis".) Yet
such self-conscious "wit" is not common in Poole's work, and if his love poetry is to be linked with that of the Metaphysicals,
it is not so much on stylistic grounds as because he is less concerned with expressing feeling than with understanding a
condition in order to attempt a definition of love, to use the title of a Marvell poem.
- Peter Elfed Lewis in Poetry Wales
In 'Father and Son' there is a delightful account of the intimacy between man and child and paradoxically of the distance
which separates them. Poole has a sense of humour and a feeling for the drama in everyday life. The baby, teething:
"shrieked like a train in a tunnel", but got: "in a few days, a good money's worth, / ...drew blood from my finger."
- Wendy Crockett in Madog
Richard Poole's Goings shows clear evidence of a serious and talented poet. His philosophic and speculative interests
lead him sometimes into an arid and clumsy dialectic; at other times, most often in his love-poems, sharpness of intellect
crystallizes emotion and imagery that is both strong and delicate, such as the diamond in 'Night-Speech': "The darkness
is alive with us; / the sheer diamond on which we turn motionless..." He writes about birth, copulation and death. He should
stick with them, his poems on these topics are full of promise.
- D. M. Thomas in The Times Literary Supplement
The poems about death - especially the title poem 'Goings' - describe the people who have died, and the process of their
growing old, not with emotion exactly but with careful observation of how they met it: "She had long waited, wanted, /
long prayed for this death, / knowing that life lends, that life never gives, / that in giving death alone is absolute."
He speculates about what comes after, as one does at funerals, finding no answer. In fact, intelligent speculation, combined
with a sense of its limits - "I despise the mind's mocking, seductive planetarium" - characterises most of these poems.
- Emma Fisher in The Spectator
The masterpiece is the last poem in the collection, 'Love Match' in which what he has described in an earlier poem
('Eight Months') as "that mutual violence - / the crash, the sweetness" is presented through each partner's experience
of the event, given in alternate verses. It is a beautiful poem, with no pretension or trite embellishment, and an exciting
poem too., not only because of its honesty: the coupling is presented as the perverse campaign it nearly always is.
Separateness is there even at the moment of closest union: "Time burst. They shuddered, / together falling apart."
And the last verse, which could so easily have been trite, honestly sustains the paradox: "The lust sated, love given /
immanent in her smile - / was it an enemy's?" This poem - exact, controlled, cogent - is the most notable of the collection.
If Richard Poole's best writing can be taken as an indication of his potential, he could easily become a strong, individual
voice in Anglo-Welsh poetry.
- Philip Owens in The Anglo-Welsh Review
"Goings" and other poems was published by Christopher Davies
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