Peter Redgrove

Poems of honey, wasps and bees; orchards and apples; rivers, seas and tides; storms, rain, weather and clouds; waterworks; labyrinths; amazing perfumes; wet shirts and 'wonder-awakening dresses'; the Cornish landscape (Penzance, Perranporth, Falmouth, Boscastle, the Lizard and Scilly Isles); the sixth sense and 'extra-sensuous perception'; witchcraft; alchemical vessels and laboratories; yoga; menstruation; mines, minerals and stones; sand dunes; mud-baths; mythology; dreaming; vulvas; and lots of sex magic.

This book looks at poetry (and prose) from every stage of Peter Redgrove's career, and every book. It includes pieces that have only appeared in small presses and magazines, and in uncollected form.

This new edition has been rewritten completely and includes a new introduction and bibliography.

Illustrated. British Poets Series.

EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER ONE, ON POETRY AND LIFE

...this 'strangeness' is 'strange' because reality is so fucking extraordinary, and strange too because most of us try to live without strangeness, and construct something called the 'ordinary' which never existed. Actually, the strangeness is so ordinary as to be quite natural. The strangeness is wonder and what is wondered at is so wonderful that it is strange we do not wonder more.

Peter Redgrove, letter to the author (March 5, 1993)

Peter Redgrove's poetic code is to create poems which describe or actualize this strangeness of living. The strangeness is here, all around us, he says, but we become immune to it. The poet's task is therefore to refresh body and soul, so that the incredible beauty and strangeness of life is once again experienced. The emphasis is on direct experience, not on abstraction or distance. Redgrove hates the synthetic and artificial. Redgrove's poetic ethic is one of direct touches - the Blakean (and Coleridgean) direct contact stemming from the cleansing of the senses.

Peter Redgrove wrote to Jeremy Robinson about this book:

Your essay has an infectious enthusiasm, which I'm grateful for, and I especially like the places where you actually grapple with the language of my poems, which is like writing them again. It is a very good piece, which carries the reader with it... Your own approach is irreplaceable because it seems to me founded on your own individuality and personal experience of my poems - which is vastly gratifying... in the majority it is vastly stimulating and insightful. Always, I am grateful to you for your trouble, and your deep response to what I have written.