George Barker
A British poet who spent quite a number of years over the pond, in NYC's SoHo (and that after another sejour, in Japan), a guy who fathered fifteen children (by four women, wow!), catholic and bohemian (honi soit qui mal y pense), frank and elusive (according to Robert Fraser), tender and boisterous (according to the same), largely forgotten nowadays (as it happens), considered a genius in his time (T. S. Eliot dixit); that was (just in a few words) George Barker; Peter Wilby wrote about Barker (in an article published by The Guardian in 2008) that his work was passionate, intellectually challenging and higly original, his language incantatory and often hypnotic, with echoes of Blake, Housman and Verlaine; to frame Barker's opus a little more, let's add that he was associated with the New Apocalyptics (whatever it means; actually a literary confrery of the forties cultivating the mythical and the surreal as a reaction against realism); here is one of his poems (I promise to come with some more):
O Who Will Speak From A Womb Or A Cloud?
Not less light shall the gold and the green lie
On the cyclonic curl and diamonded eye, than
Love lay yesterday on the breast like a beast.
Not less light shall God tread my maze of nerve
Than that great dread of tomorrow drove over
My maze of days. Not less terrible that tread
Stomping upon your grave than I shall tread there.
Who is a god to haunt the tomb but Love?
Therefore I shall be there at morning and midnight,
Not with a straw in my hair and a tear as Ophelia
Floating along my sorrow, but I shall come with
The cabala of things, the cipher of nature, so that
With the mere flounce of a bird's feather crest
I shall speak to you where you sit in all trees,
Where you conspire with all things that are dead.
Who is so far that Love cannot speak to him?
So that no corner can hide you, no autumn of leaves
So deeply close over you that I shall not find you,
To stretch down my hand and sting you with life
Like poison that resurrects. O remember
How once the Lyrae dazzled and how the Novembers
Smoked, so that blood burned, flashed its mica,
And that was life. Now if I dip my hand in your grave
Shall I find it bloody with autumn and bright with stars?
Who is to answer if you will not answer me?
But you are the not yet dead, so cannot answer.
Hung by a hair's breadth to the breath of a lung,
Nothing you know of the hole over which you hang
But that it's dark and deep as tomorrow midnight.
I ask, but you cannot answer except with words
Which show me the mere interior of your fear,
The reverse face of the world. But this,
This is not death, the standing on the head
So that a sky is seen. O who
Who but the not yet born can tell me of my bourne?
Lie you there, lie you there, my never, never,
Never to be delivered daughter, so wise in ways
Where you perch like a bird beyond the horizon,
Seeing but not being seen, above our being?
Then tell me, shall the meeting ever be,
When the corpse dives back through the womb
To clasp his child before it ever was?
Who but the dead can kiss the not yet born?
Sad is space between a start and a finish,
Like the rough roads of stars, fiery and mad.
I go between birth and the urn, a bright ash
Soon blazed to blank, like a fire-ball. But
Nothing I bring from the before, no message,
No clue, no key, no answer. I hear no echo,
Only the sheep's blood dripping from the gun,
The serpent's tear like fire along the branch.
O who will speak from a womb or a cloud?
(text source: Poem Hunter)
Quite difficult, almost impossible to read, but the effort should be rewarding, believe me. Try to read it aloud, without haste, don't care about some words that seem senseless. And you will discover that line after line you've entered something like a holy (or demonic?) space, keeping you seducted by something like an incantantion, a piece of ancient divination, of wizardry, a mantra.
(A Life in Books)
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