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- Herausgeber: Oxford Poets
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In To the War Poets John Greening sends dispatches across the decades. In a sequence of verse letters he addresses the poets of the First World War directly, making connections yet always aware of distance: 'No larks, / just the passing of traffic.' Greening 'explores Englishness', but also, in his translations from German poets, goes beyond it. From the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial in 1939 to the security forces' shut-down of Heathrow airport in 2006, the presence or threat of conflict underlies Greening's precise, unsentimental writing.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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JOHN GREENING
To the War Poets
To Jürgen Sandmann
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the editors of the following publications, in which poems in this book have appeared: Agenda (‘Dropping Slow’, ‘Eglwys Llangwyfan’, ‘Hiraeth’); Areté (‘To Rudyard Kipling’); Bow-Wow Shop (‘Africa’, ‘The Island’, ‘In Trafalgar Square’, ‘So it Runs’, ‘Wadi Halfa’); Brindin Press website (translations of German poets); Critical Quarterly (‘Aldermaston’, ‘Odyssey’); Horizon Review (‘Cycle with Cytologist’, ‘Hounslow’, ‘The Train’); Ink, Sweat & Tears (‘Forge House’); The Interpreter’s House (‘Waldo Williams in Perry’); London Magazine (‘Causeway’); Modern Poetry in Translation (poems by Ernst Stadler, ‘To the Sun (after Akhenaten)’); Poetry Review (‘To Edward Thomas’, ‘Field’, ‘American Music’); Quadrant (‘Colonial’, ‘Elgar’, ‘The Hope Valley Line’); The Rialto (‘Reading John Clare’); Seam (‘Middlesex’, ‘Piano’); The Spectator (‘To John McCrae’); Stand (‘To Laurence Binyon’, ‘To Julian Grenfell’); The Times Literary Supplement (‘To Isaac Rosenberg’, ‘11’, ‘Kentish’); The Use of English (‘Yeats Dances’, ‘To Rupert Brooke’).
‘New World’ featured in the programme for the Czech Philharmonic’s concert at Symphony Hall, Birmingham and on the hall’s website, for which I am grateful to Julie Boden. The Edmund Blunden verse letter appeared in the Blunden Online journal: thanks to Margi Blunden. ‘Reading John Clare’ was a contribution to the Festschrift for John Lucas, Speaking English. ‘The Hope Valley Line’ was included in The Quadrant Book of Poetry (ed. Les Murray). ‘Awre’ was used to preface Michael Greening’s book A Family Story. I am grateful to Martin Carver for letting me take as an epigraph to ‘The Mounds at Sutton Hoo’ a quotation from his invaluable book Sutton Hoo, Burial Ground of Kings?
I owe a particular debt to my colleague Bill Skinner for organising the battlefields trip during which many of the verse letters were drafted. ‘To One Who Was With Me’ is dedicated to Helen Morrell, who was at the St Julien memorial with us when she received news of the death of her friend Dermot Sheridan in a helicopter crash.
Contents
Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild train-loads?
Wilfred Owen
War
Georg Heym (1887–1912)
He’s risen now, who slept so long,
He’s risen from deep vaults, among
The day’s remains. Huge and unknown
He stands. His black hands crush the moon.
Into the cities’ evening crack
A shadow-frost falls, alien dark.
It makes the downtown bustle freeze.
Go quiet. Glance round. No one sees.
In side-streets, something grasps an arm.
A question. Answerless. Stay calm.
Far off, the bells are trembling thin
And stubble stirs on each sharp chin.
He’s started. There, up on the fells
He’s dancing, shouting: Men! To kill!
And when he shakes his dark head, chains
Of skulls go rattling round his brain.
A moving tower, he tramples out
The last of light. The river clots
As countless bodies staunch and dam
Its reedy flow. The white birds swarm.
He steeplechases through the night
This red wild-shrieking hound, and out
Of darkness spring night’s secret shows,
Footlit as if by lava flows.
