In The Event

By John Birtwhistle

John Birtwhistle has said that 'one writes each poem just to learn how to write it,' and insists that he 'doesn't care a dried pea for Artistic Development or Finding One's Own Voice.' The result, of course, is that a strongly recognisable voice comes through. For all their variety of forms and ideas, his poems are consistent in their visual precision, their scrupulous phrasing, and their formal clarity. These qualities are brought to everything he touches, whether it is a passing moment of childhood, a natural detail, a wryly stoic observation, or perennial emotions in the face of events from before birth (first foetal movements) to after burial (removal to an ossuary). Many scores of individuals are named or make their appearance in some way. If one poem is satiric, the next is unashamedly lyrical. Several reflect on the adequacy of art, and a feature is the stream of very short pieces by way of illustration or riposte, like the border of the Bayeux Tapestry. Wit and feeling are so interwoven in Birtwhistle's technique that when it comes to the register of loss and death, he is able to find what an otherwise hostile critic admitted 'can be a kind of bridled eloquence.' Word frequency analysis shows a high incidence of time, thought, light, morning, child, apple tree, painting, and fossil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781800170650

John Birtwhistle

John Birtwhistle was born in Scunthorpe in 1946. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 1975 and ten years later his third book was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Nearly all his work has been supported by public money, whether through education as a Lecturer in English at the University of York, or through Arts Council funding of books, fellowships and opera, or through the NHS income of his wife Mireille. Since 1992, he has lived in Sheffield with his family. He is working on a new collection of poems, and on a book about poets confronting death.

Book preview

JOHN BIRTWHISTLE

in the event

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Note

The Path to Courrières

An Appearance of Spring

Life-Writing

The Core

Antiquity at Arles

Specimens of Magnolia

Not that I always Notice

An Oak Table

From a Journal of the Plague Year

Message Received

The Chosen

Written under the Wisteria

Tree Surgeons

Dreamt Entirely in Sound

The Quickening

For One Night Only

To See You as Marthe Bonnard

The Agave

Admiration

Propriety

The Sling

Thinking to Tease a Man I Thought a Lout

Stances

‘Where Do Your Poems Come From?’

In Wicksteed Park

Splendour in the Grass

All History Will Be Cleared

Gratified Desire

The Seventh of November, 1956

Verse

Destiny

Rock Art

Seva

Last Evers

Children Crossing

After Langland

Son of Grief

The Queen’s Shilling

Control of the Pass

Throughout the Siesta

On a Pebbly Beach

Cherry on the Cake

On the Northern Line

Riddance

Side Light

Metamorphosis

By Derwent Dam

Calling Jamie

Emblem

Two Songs from a Mock-Pastoral Interlude

‘A Room in Saumur’

For Future Reference

A Sighting

Reclining Buddha

To the Lighting Engineer

The Fabric of the World

Lost from Housman

Notices at an Exhibition of Rodin’s Doors

On a Certain Poet

The Rice Workers are on Strike

Sigint

Academic Feedback

Once in Belgrade

An Entrepreneur’s Progress

That We Are All Members of One Another

At the Barber’s

In the Stylish Lamp

‘Balliol Men Still in Africa’

Of the Ninety Aeschylean Tragedies

John Bradford, Executed 1555

In the Chippy

The Best Excuse I Ever Heard

A Dutch Interior

An Inquiry into the Portrait of John Whitehurst

On a Detail in an Imaginary Painting

‘Crouching Venus’

On a Miniature by Anton Webern

One Singing

Review

This November Morning

Wisdom

Dwelling on Li Po

From the Stream

A Fallacy

An Archaeologist Explains a Scar

Special Collections

On a Guided Tour

Sweet Ouse Run Softly

To Every Thing There is a Season

Some Properties of ‘Vanitas Paintings’

In Times of Pestilence

Silver Birch

At Swine Sty, 1st July 2020

An Insight

The Care-Bed

To One Who Took His Own Life

Versions of Four Japanese Jisei

Orders Of Burial

By the Way

The Same

‘Where’s the Poetry in That?’

‘I Sing A Rainbow’

Thanks to Bashō

An Humble Petition to the Fairy Officers

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also By John Birtwhistle

Copyright

For my children

Verweile doch, du bist so schön

NOTE

Courrières is a commune near the Belgian border of France. The first coal shaft was sunk there in 1849 and a mining concession was granted in 1852. In 1906, an explosion killed 1,099 miners. On that occasion, German workers came to help rescue their French comrades – the basis for G.W. Pabst’s classic film Kameradschaft (1931). On 28 May, 1940, an SS division set fire to the village and shot forty-five hostages.

THE PATH TO COURRIÈRES

An 1854 oil sketch by Jules Breton

The gleaner in her shawl, the rough linen sling

at her waist, figured against the evening sky

as she returns to her village, is absent here;

it is the painter himself who trudges home

in the receiving dusk, his harvest done.

The place of the woman is held by the tallest elm,

its crown drawing a scatter of silent rooks.

The path leads the eye peacefully round

to the low houses, brick-red and white,

and to the church tower and beyond.

No hint of surveyors, trial drillings already

there at the time as