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    Collected Poems
    Collected Poems
    Collected Poems
    Ebook260 pages3 hours

    Collected Poems

    By Alan Sillitoe

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    A sweeping collection of poetry from one of Great Britain’s most celebrated postwar writers.
     
    Bestselling British novelist Alan Sillitoe delves into the profound and personal world of poetry in this collection of two hundred poems written between 1950 and 1990. Culled from seven previously published volumes of verse—and including twenty-one newly collected works—Sillitoe employs wit, humor, aggression, and longing to take readers into the depths of his perceptions and philosophical musings.
     
    The compilation begins with Sillitoe’s early poems, which first appeared in The Rats and Other Poems (1960) while the writer was at work on his acclaimed novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. In “Shadow” a castaway meets a gentleman whom he recognizes as his own death. Meanwhile, a temperate climate renders death powerless in “Poem Written in Majorca.” And in “Excerpts from ‘The Rats’,” themes of mental exile, isolation, and the proliferation of corruption echo the sentiments of Arthur Seaton, the hero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
     
    Proceeding chronologically, the next section includes works from A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems (1964). Here, the reader encounters a haunting confrontation with suicide in “Poem Left by a Dead Man,” a meditation on the elemental yet incomparable suffering of a poet in “Storm,” and a description of metaphysical chores in “Housewife.” Selections from Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems (1968) and Storm and Other Poems (1974) follow, including such works as “Baby” and “Smile,” which ponder questions of inevitability and impossibility in everyday life.
     
    Unexpected perspectives on the Devil appear in the poems from Snow on the North Side of Lucifer (1979). Sun Before Departure (1974–1982) features the surreal and atmospheric “Horse on Wenlock Edge.” And the selections from Tides and Stone Walls (1986), including the koanlike “Receding Tide,” were inspired by a series of sea landscapes by photographer Victor Bowley. In the final section, New Poems (1986–1990), Sillitoe contemplates hope in the aftermath of war in “Hiroshima,” and deciphers an uncanny Morse code message in “Noah’s Arc.”
     
    At once dark and luminous, Collected Poems offers both a departure from and insight into the “kitchen sink realism” Sillitoe is famous for. These pages impart an intimate look into the heart and mind of one of England’s most celebrated authors, and convey a profound vision of life—one in which death is close, but laughter is never far away.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJul 12, 2016
    ISBN9781504035033
    Collected Poems
    Author

    Alan Sillitoe

    Alan Sillitoe was born in 1928 and left school at 14 to work in various factories. He began writing after four years in the RAF, and lived for six years in France and Spain. His first stories were printed in the ‘Nottingham Weekly Guardian’. In 1958 ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ was published and ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’, which won the Hawthornden prize for Literature, came out the following year. Both these books were made into films.

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      Collected Poems - Alan Sillitoe

      PREFACE

      Unlike a novelist, who may hide behind his fiction for the whole of his writing life, a poet who presents his collected poems displays the emotional history of his heart and soul. Such a record, however seemingly disguised, cannot be falsified, supposing of course that the poems are true to himself, and what poems are not, if they are poems? That is the condition which I have followed in assembling this collection: the assumption that the inner life is more discernible, though perhaps only after diligent searching, than any self-portrayal in a story or novel.

      From seven short volumes written between 1950 and 1990 I have chosen less than half the verse published, and therefore ask myself whether, if the omitted matter were put into another book, would it present a different picture of the state of the heart and soul over the same period? That may be a novelist’s question, but the answer is a fair ‘no’, for the material left out was mostly the fat and gristle surrounding the meat of what is printed here.

      I was surprised at times by the extreme revision most of the poems so obviously needed when, all those years ago, I had considered them indisputably finished. Even so, I can’t imagine that in the years to come I shall see any cause to amend them again. Though I shall no doubt look into the book from time to time, I shall no more be tempted to re-write than I am when looking into a previously published novel. Only in that way do the novelist and the poet coincide in me, otherwise the two entities are so separate that we might be two different people. Why this is I shall never know, unless there are some things which can never be said in fiction. They simply don’t fit, being drawn from an elevation of the psyche which the novel can know nothing about.

      When I became a writer it was as a poet, but it didn’t take long for fiction to obtrude, perhaps to fill in those spaces which must necessarily exist between one poem and another, my temperament having decided that during my life I could not be permitted to be unoccupied for a moment. Such periods of emptiness, being too fearful to contemplate, were duly filled, and have been so ever since. The unconscious fear of idleness prevents me from brooding too heavily on my fate except in such a way that produces stories and novels.

      The earliest poems in The Rats volume came while I was working on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but all the other poems were written during the progress of various novels. The sentiments deployed in The Rats bled into the views of the hero of my first novel, but from that point on, poetry and fiction came out of totally different territories. A later volume, Tides and Stone Walls, was written to a series of remarkable photographs by Victor Bowley, and the poems chosen from that book are those which in my view rely on the photographs least, though even then they were directly inspired by them. Twenty-one more recent poems at the end of the present book are ‘new’ in that they have not been previously collected.

      The Rats and Other Poems was written by an exile returning to England who, having spent a total of eight years out of the country before the age of thirty, expected to go away again to write in an isolation which he had found congenial. It did not happen, but it has always seemed to me that a poet and writer, wherever he lives, even if on home territory, suffers exile for life. Geography notwithstanding, such displacement is a kind of mental stand-off from the rest of society, giving the detachment to see the surroundings with a calculating eye – not an emotionally cold eye, but one which uses language and observation from a standpoint entirely personal.

      ALAN SILLITOE

      from The Rats and Other Poems, 1960

      SHADOW

      When on a familiar but deserted beach

      You meet a gentleman you recognize

      As your own death, know who he is and teach

      Yourself he comes with flower-blue eyes

      To wipe the salt-spray from all new intentions,

      And kiss you on each sunken cheek to ease

      Into your blood the strength to leave this life:

      (A minor transmutation of disease)

      To watch the mechanism of each arm

      Inside your arms of flesh and fingernail,

      To despise the ancient wild alarm

      Behind each eye. Shaking your hand so frail

      Your own death breathes possessive fire

      (A familiar voice that no one understands)

      Striding quickly, sporting elegant attire,

      Coming towards you on these once deserted sands.

      POEM WRITTEN IN MAJORCA

      Death has no power in these clear skies

      Where olives in December shed their milk:

      Too temperate to strike

      At orange-terraces and archaic moon:

      But Death is strong where hemlock stones

      Stand at the foot of cold Druidic hills;

      There I was born when snow lay

      Under naked willows, and frost

      Boomed along grey ponds at afternoon,

      Frightening birds that

      Though hardened for long winters,

      Fled from the nerve-filled ground,

      Beat their soundless wings away

      From Death’s first inflicted wound.

      RUTH’S FIRST SWIM IN THE MEDITERRANEAN, 1952

      The water that touches your thighs

      Swallowed the STRUMA.

      Water that folded the wings of Icarus

      Climbs your limbs, sharp with salt

      That stiffened the beard of Odysseus.

      Tragedy, comedy, legend and history –

      Invisible wakes through centuries

      Of exiles seeking home:

      You turn and look as if at

      The wandering Ark of the Hebrews,

      Then cleave the waters of your Inland Sea.

      OUR DREAM LAST NIGHT

      You had a dream last night:

      Deep in my primeval sleep

      A match was made between my heart and yours

      And I moved into love with you

      And found your body willing.

      Maybe it began with you

      When deep in your primeval sleep

      A wielding of desire for some

      Fulfilling (too matter of fact

      And clumsy in afternoon or evening)

      Drew me out of some too private dream

      And held us plough to furrow.

      No judgement made, for neither side

      Can settle on the cause,

      And no more thought is here but this:

      What if a birth should come

      Out of our midnight dreams?

      TO RUTH

      If I throw out my arms and strike

      The night that comes, open my heart

      To whoever guards survivors, favours struggles

      Carries sunshine garlanded about

      Her waist, will my fight fail?

      Will I unbuckle my resistance

      In the darkness? Let ice melt

      Fear kill, suffer death to take me?

      Though passion is not greatness

      Nor greatness passion

      When measured by such fluid odds

      As sunlight and death,

      Passion augments

      The alchemy of returning life

      Stands the blood high in its demand,

      Becomes supremely knowing,

      And draws me back

      Into the living battle of our love.

      OUT OF MY THOUSAND VOICES

      Out of my thousand voices

      I speak with one

      To the waves and flying saltfoam,

      Flinging the dovetailed words

      Of a single voice

      At the knife-edged prow

      Of the ship unbreakable

      That carries her away.

      I throw the one remaining voice

      Of all my thousand out to sea

      And watch it curving

      Into the black-paunched water

      Like a falling star,

      A single word of love

      That drops into the grave,

      A thousand echoes falling by her ship.

      ISLANDS

      One great problem poses:

      What is that island we’re passing?

      Green hills, white houses,

      Grey peak, a blue sky,

      Ship sailing smooth.

      These problems arise

      On islands that pass,

      White houses lived in

      And mountains climbed,

      Clouds moving like ships

      And ships like clouds.

      We on deck open baskets for lunch

      To feed the problem of each white island

      Of how steep such contours

      And shallow those bays,

      And who keens that song

      In pinewoods by the shore.

      ‘How beautiful it is’ –

      And how remote, waiting for other islands

      We shall pass, puzzled that the birds

      Can dip their

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