It has probably not entirely escaped your detective faculties that - on this day - love, as they say, is in the air. Similarly, when Prince William's most intimate courtiers observed his reaction to Kate Middleton, they muttered to themselves that love was in The Heir. But enough of that.
In our household this morning, we honoured the blessed Mr. Valentine in the traditional manner by exchanging greetings cards. In addition, and in flagrant contravention of ratified marital policy, my wife, knowing my predilection for writing which fails to reach the right-hand edge of the page, presented me with a copy of Salt's Best British Poetry, 2012.
I haven't opened this book yet, but I am issuing British Poetry with a stern warning that, if I fail to discover a plenitude of form and structure within its ranks, there will be a strongly-worded sestina coming its way.
For my part, I embellished my offering with a hand-made, rhyming acrostic in iambic pentameter (for the most part - a small dactyl crept in through the metre-flap at the beginning). I have, of course, taken the precaution of marrying a person with an even number of letters in her name, and so have been able to produce several versions of this form for her in a manner that has been pleasingly challenging on each occasion.
Which brings me to my point. Being ever-vigilant for the slightest pretext for proselytizing the pluralistic pieces of Mervyn Peake (apologies if your browsing device just showered you with saliva), I wanted today to share one of my favourite love poems, which nestles quietly in a shady arbour within the Peake canon. It was written for his wife, and runs thus:
To Maeve
You walk unaware
Of the slender gazelle
That moves as you move
And is one with the limbs
That you have.
You live unaware
Of the faint, the unearthly
Echo of hooves
That within your white streams
Of clear clay that I love
Are in flight as you turn,
As you stand, as you move,
As you sleep, for the slender
Gazelle never rests
In your ivory grove.
This is vintage Peake, with arcane words such as 'clay' and 'grove' perfectly suiting the romantic theme, and the rhythm beautifully evoking the animal movement and stillness being described.
By the way, there are only 364 shopping days to Valentine's Day, so I am obliged to remind you that I can offer a range of poetic products to enchant your inamorata/o. Contact me for a full tariff; (sonnet sequences comprising twenty or more elements are charged at a premium rate, but bulk discounts may be negotiable).
With the trailers over and the first episodes of winter upon us, my thoughts turn to appropriate reading matter, and in particular a perennial favourite. Mervyn Peake's Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions) has been delighting me since before blogs were born; in fact its title alone has given me more pleasure than many entire books. Peake was a maverick figure in British arts, in that not only did his work span so many forms and genres (illustration, fine art, poetry, prose, plays and theatrical design) but it was generally informed by a uniquely intense and eccentric vision and style.
Inevitably, not everything that gushed out of this creative ferment into so many moulds was successful; much of the poetry (for which Peake is comparatively little-known, but hats off to publishers such as Fyfield at Carcanet and Colin Smythe for keeping this work in print) is derivative and over-wrought, while even the (pun intentional: Peake loved the form) towering genius of the Gormenghast books could have been refined with better editing. Often, however, form, content and talent combined to produce pieces as brilliant as they were individual. I can't think of anything that matches Peake's novella-length rhyming poem of World War II - The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, and many of the Nonsense Poems are unflawed gems.
Letters from a Lost Uncle is also an entirely successful and highly individual piece (owing something, however, to The Little Prince) that balances its verbal and visual content as well as it combines its appeal to children and adults. The book comprises a series of letters and drawings from the titular figure which describe his exploits in a version of a polar environment that does not strictly accord with environmental accuracy. The uncle is an absurd but gentle caricature of the intrepid, self-reliant explorer, having, for example, acquired a swordfish's proboscis for a leg after having lost his natural version in a near-fatal tussle with the same beast. He writes in a comically bluff and irritable style, affecting to disdain the business of writing because it makes him
'feel like a woman...when there is so much danger and excitement in the arctic to be getting on with'
but gradually becoming both more absorbed and more lyrical as the business of enshrining his adventures for his nephew proceeds, and voicing some typically Peakeish prose as he does so:
'Many and various things happened to me at the coloured ports; in the black harbours, and up creeks of fever'
'Ahead, and every side, great glittering steeples of ice began to show above the horizon, just as though we were approaching a city of glass churches'.
In fact this transition from resentful scribe to rhapsodic journalist can be seen as a metaphor for the transforming powers of creative expression, although not perhaps by the average seven-year old.
In typical Peake fashion, some of the best results arrive when verisimilitude is cheekily poked in the ribs by imagination, such as the appearance of the knotted-tail moose.
The drawings are a superb combination of accuracy, imagination and detail, often with deft comic aspects, and they are beautifully reproduced in the Methuen reissue, which also restores the yellow tint of faded manuscript to the uncle's typewritten passages, on which he has scribbled various addenda in a tiny, cramped hand, and onto which various substances, including blood, are periodically dripped.
The narrative drive for the story, and an element that suffuses it with that spiritual, transcendent quality that characterises the best of this kind of story-telling, is the uncle's quest for The White Lion, a fabled, monarchical figure, to encounter which the uncle has undergone this whole comic quest of adventure, battle, endurance and triumph. The climax of his hsearch is satisfying and enigmatic, and certainly won't be revealed here.
In other words, buy the book, and several spare copies for Christmas presents.
P.S. Those splendid people at Peter Owen ought also to be mentioned in the context of keeping alive Peake's words and images.
