Stanley Cook: Selected Poems E-Book

Stanley Cook

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 89

Beschreibung

Stanley Cook (19221991) was much admired in his lifetime but never achieved the popular audience and critical reputation his work deserved. Cook went his own way, sanguine about the fashions of the poetry establishment, and quietly writing some of the most readable, intelligent and vividly achieved poems of our time.

Leseprobe

Edited and Introduced by

JOHN KILLICK

This ebook original Selected Poemspublished 2014 bysmith|doorstop BooksThe Poetry BusinessBank Street Arts32-40 Bank StreetSheffield S1 2DS

www.poetrybusiness.co.ukCopyright © the Estate of Stanley Cook 2014ISBN 978-1-910367-15-5

This selection (c) John Killick 2014.The Estate of Stanley Cook hereby asserts Stanley Cook’s moral right to be identified as the author of this book.British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design and ebook generation by alancoopercreative.co.uk

smith|doorstop Books is a member of Inpress,www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Distributed by Central Books Ltd., 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN.

The Poetry Business is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation

Contents

Prelude

Rembrandt

To John Clare

Austerfield

Austerfield Church

Austerfield

My Father’s People

Portraits 1

Tom

Mr Elvidge

Mr Salt

Betty

The Landlord

Grandfather Jacques

Charlie Peace

Sheffield

Sheffield

The Cholera Monument, Sheffield

Woodside

Walk Into Town

fromForm Photograph

5

8

9

15

16

22

23

24

27

29

School

Schoolday

School Reports

Letter To New Ireland

School In The Holidays

Leaving Teaching

Staff Photograph

1

10

11

21

23

24

Townscapes

Pigeon Cotes On Penistone Road

Life In A Yard

An East End

Woods

Woods Beyond A Cornfield

King’s Wood

Picture Of A Cornfield

Woods By Cornfields

Wood On The Way To Pilsey

Wood By A Road

Portraits 2

Mr Wheeler

Couple In A Semi

A Proper Comic

Jimmy Seamus

Great-Aunt

Grandpa Spencer

Miss Cartwright

Times And Seasons

Late Afternoon

Summer Evening

Autumn Evening

Roads

Calder Valley: At The Top Of The Ainleys

Leaving Huddersfield By The A616

View

Plants

Snowdrops At Midnight

The Wood Anemone

Mild November

The Flower

The Jamjar

Postscript

Day Of The Second Funeral

Ward 6B

INTRODUCTION

Stanley Cook’s poems are indeed ‘like life’ – a specific life lived in a specific place – but in their qualities of observation, of humanity, and of musicality – they speak a universal language to those who take the trouble to read them.

The poets he most resembles, it seems to me, are Norman Nicholson and John Clare. They are all three rooted in place, proudly provincial, and deeply interested in the natural environment. In addition, Cook and Nicholson are at pains to reflect the Northern scene, with both being fascinated by industrial landscapes.

Cook was born in Austerfield in South Yorkshire in 1922, and was educated in a village school, at Doncaster Grammar, and at Oxford. He worked as a schoolteacher for most of his life, and latterly as a lecturer. He was married, with three children, and died in 1991.

Throughout his life Cook wrote copiously, and pamphlets and books were published. He wrote poetry for children too, and there is a cache of remarkable concrete poems. When Peter Sansom and I edited his Collected in 1995 we were also faced with over a thousand poems still in notebooks.

Stanley Cook was an unusually modest man, in person and in his writing; he never sought to promote his work, and so he has languished in semi-obscurity. And yet I believe he craved the audience he deserved. ‘A poet should write only about what he knows’ he said. He also said ‘I hope the steelworker and his wife next door would never need a dictionary to read my poems’.

Stylistically, these are plain poems, but they do not eschew the occasional striking metaphor. We encounter numerous long paragraphs, made up of long sentences, halfway between speaking and versifying. Rhyming couplets are common, and metres are largely iambic. I often get the impression of overhearing the soliloquies of an eloquent, insightful and witty member of a community.

Once when I was driving Stanley to a reading we came to the panorama described in Calder Valley: At the Top of the Ainleys. He said it was his favourite view in the world. In the poem he concludes ‘You see it all and have to become a part’. He was a man possessed of a profoundly democratic spirit, which is something we should never let go out of fashion.

My selection comes from the Collected Poems (smith|doorstop, 1995). I have taken the liberty of arranging the poems thematically, in the interests of coherence. In such a consistent oeuvre I regret it has been necessary to omit much fine work.

JOHN KILLICK

Prelude

Rembrandt

My poems should be as sure, not flattering

For her whiteness any woman,

Nor favouring the mill child clattering

To early death, his thin legs swollen

Into clogs, but all things human

I should expose. No face has stolen

Importance from the clothes beneath

In work of his; but, as was true,

People he painted had the hands,

The hair and eyes to sorrow in,

The legs and faces for rejoicing,

Yet he forbade his heart to grieve

About some haycock huge old man,

Alone in the amber afternoon,

Or to be pleased with children playing

Whose knee backs dimpled as they ran.

To John Clare

Ghosts of smoke from the low cottage chimneys

Fail to define themselves, as they drag in the breeze

Beneath the weight of the rain-filled air

That utters the first stammering drops of a shower.

Evening comes on and trees are dark

As a patch of damp; flowers from hemlock

And hedge parsley beaten down

By previous rain dim on the ground.

Nothing clear remains for me to measure by

As shadows gather momentum towards the night;

Real and imaginary sorrows move

Gigantically within the gloom.

Too dark to read: all I do is remember

Parts of your poems; time is maddening enough –

That all these trees stand around to pick

Your buried bones – without the world’s neglect.

Austerfield

Austerfield Church

Large size leather leaves of ivy fall

In separate splashes down the churchyard wall

And a weeping willow trails long locks to order

Over a local magnate’s recent grave;

Two pines catch cones in season but must wear

Dark mourning capes of needles all the year:

Appropriately, for all but dead are gone

And the church is empty and clean as a museum.

The frisky dragon carved above the door

Need flick his tail at evil powers no more

And the single bell no longer needs to trot

From its stabling arch the Sunday evening quiet.

The last generation, with angels at their heads,

Lie with their wives in double marble beds

Down by the road: but round the back of the church

A few flat gravestone rafts, almost submerged,

Are the only effort at identity;

Our predecessors, in anonymity,

Renewed the unmown grass and yearly gave

The thorns and ornamental red flowers of may.

We can no longer contribute to that tree

Nor can the passing bell bleed slowly for me

Where the beautiful and fluctuating sky

Keeps my father and mother beneath its eye.

Austerfield

How shall I begin, not a poem but an obituary –

My own, if I succeed? The grass was always a sea,

I must admit, and every heavenward tree

I ever climbed sailed there; we played inside

the hollow heart of a bush but the field’s green tide

Kept lapping the fancy leaves of our holly boat

Till the time came for tea and we drowned to get home.

The air stole back our breath in excited words

And stole their breath back, too, from the singing birds:

I exhausted the subtle scent of the bluebells in vain:

It seemed a relief to feel the definite pain

of headache from smelling the sandhill poppies too hard;

And people watching horribly in a farmyard

A pig making no effort to get away

When they cut its throat were true enough for one day,

But there was nothing intelligible to prime

The shallow bewilderment of my heart and mind.

I suppose that the wind, all these years after,

Reprints the same ripple upon the water

And the leaves the Spring unwraps are just as green

As when I studied them – but what did they mean?

My Father’s People

In Gainsborough, South Kelsey, Morton and Scotter

The apple trees print a forgotten alphabet

On parchment of ground beside the inherited

Rosy brick of cottages and farms;

Streets made to measure horse and cart still serve

The shabby numbered gates of once busy works,

The unemployed that no longer dress up to sign on:

And I could panic that all my uncles and cousins

Who once worked here are dead, only alive

In flashes of anecdote from aging widows.

For a family supposed to be fond of its stomach

That killed and hung its pigs and made one mouthful

Of cheesecakes and tarts they had indifferent health

Those connoisseurs of chitterlings and chines

Living on one lung or dying of ulcers.

Failing a poem, what else would they do but eat

The beautiful land I too find fascinating?

Poor writers, who gathered only at funerals

Or added to a Christmas card

‘Mother died this June.’

Portraits 1

Tom

It dealt our childhood first, and he and I

Were much alike: awkward and rather shy,

Getting more fist than we gave. We accepted the fact

He had the better cards: a cricket bat

And stumps from an uncle, with which his one-man side

Beat mine for hours on end; a fountain pen prize

In a handwriting competition; an ear for music

When I was a joke in the choir; a wall to sit

Upon in summer when the stones were warm

And talk of county cricket we never saw;

A better front room with newer easy chairs,

Where I made love to his sister in later years.

Leaving school, he delivered for a grocer;

When war and rationing came, he knew who hoarded

Among the leaders of local society,

But never allowed their greed to make him angry.

Since the war he works as a porter in town.

He hasn’t won the pools; he lives alone

And sees to himself; not even a pen friend

And unlikely to marry except by accident.

If I earn more, it might have been otherwise;

And if I am happier, I apologize.

Mr Elvidge

Change overtook the blacksmith quicker than time.

When I was at school and he was in his prime

The word that Elvidge was shoeing soon got round

And after school we raced each other down

To see him tucking the horse’s leg beneath his arm,

Or we watched him from the half-door, working at the forge,

His hammer driving the sudden cats of sparks

That scratched our eyeballs, from their hiding place in the dark.

Outside, a midden of broken machinery.

Flabby with flakes of rust, made history;