The disconsolate truffle
"...man is not a natural product of nature -
he is an excrescence like the truffle,
a cancer, an illness, it is only his high
gamy flavour that makes him acceptable!"
Schwartz, a psychologist, in Lawrence Durrell's Constance
I'm fed up being a fungus,
bored with living underground,
why couldn't I be Pegasus,
a flying horse, renowned?
I resemble a potato,
I may end in a risotto:
but I want to write like Plato
and to draw and paint like Giotto.
I'm buried beneath an oak tree,
clever pigs will sniff me out:
but I want to go on an odyssey
and see a waterspout.
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From book reviews:
He is adept at the discreet manipulation of abstractions: in 'Blackness', for instance, which resolves into the conceptual
intensity of an epigram, "the ultimate test / nobody fails, nobody passes". The expert combining of abstract and material
is one of the marks of the style of this whole volume, unobtrusive images filling in some conceptual or perceptual blank,
as in 'A Contemporary hell'. The last poem talks of "Small purposes perhaps / limited purposes", but the verbal accomplishment
and intelligent responsiveness through all the poems make this trace of modesty seem more pronounced than it need be.
- Lawrence Normand in Poetry Wales
Echoes of Donne in the love poems of Section IV are re-echoed in the constant preoccupation with death and the corruption
of the flesh. Paradoxically, the return to the earth is viewed in a rather optimistic way: since there is no God, no meaning,
existence is enough ("Being is the only meaning here") and a return to nature's the best we can hope for, rolled round (with
Lucy) in earth's diurnal course, and all that. But there is anguish, disgust and anger here, as well as the consolation of
one day feeding the cherry tree with one's flesh ('Prunus Avium').
- Katie Jones in Planet
The largeness of Poole's cosmic perspectives gives to the best of his love poems (e.g. 'A Meditation after Love' and
'Extravagant love') an impressive metaphysical dimension. Night and darkness are constantly praised - "a medium to move in
with freedom / like a province of the mind... a second world that imagination also / may apprehend, reorder, amplify". ...Poole
is a distinctive and interesting voice; he is at his weakest when dealing with human social activity, at his best when
articulating his sense of cosmological pattern and movement. There is occasionally some rhythmic flatness, but a poem such
as 'Dust' is achieved by a considerable technical mastery that demands admiration...
- Glyn Pursglove in New Welsh Review
gwales.com review of Natural Histories
Buy Natural Histories from Amazon.co.uk
Natural Histories was published by Zena Publishers
Copies of Natural Histories are available for £5.95 (with free p&p) from Richard Poole, Glan-y-Werydd, Llandanwg, Harlech, Gwynedd LL46 2SD. Cheques or postal orders only, please, made payable to Richard Poole.
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