In a memoir as vivid and unpredictable as any novel, Roger Garfitt takes us into his confidence as he tries on different selves, from stable boy to jazz dancer, from Oxford dandy to Sixties drop-out.
Elegy turns into affirmation, 'binding the pulse / back into the body', in this new collection by Eric Gregory Award-winning poet Roger Garfitt. Roger Garfitt has published sparingly but always to good effect. The Action reveals the individual character of each poem and sequence, 'written only when the internal pressure demands and the slow pace of craft allows'. Carol Ann Duffy observed in The Guardian that 'he clearly believes, quite rightly, in the Muse and his approach has the patience of a journeyman's to his craft'. Hard-won, but not austere, the poems are marked by tenderness and passion; quiet humour rather than irony runs through them. Sean O'Brien writes, 'He is both a meticulous re-creator of, for example, the effects of light, and a sociable poet who sees place as expressive of its inhabitants... The minuteness of his attention is often rewarding... an intriguing counterpart to the more public work of Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison.
Following his Unfolding Mallarme: The Development of a Poetic Art, this book is the second in Roger Pearson's authoritative two-volume study of the work of Stephanie Mallarme (1842-1898), and the first comprehensive study of Mallarme's 'poetry of circumstance' in any language. For Mallarme,in a world without God, the role of the poet is to break the silence with language and to confer upon the contingency of circumstance a therapeutic semblance of formal and semantic pattern. Literature provides a 'translation of silence', 'intimate galas' in which the mysterious drama of the humancondition is performed for and by the reader on the stage of the verse poem, the prose poem, and what Mallarme calls the 'poeme critique'. In Part 1, Pearson examines the prose poems within the context of Mallarme's writing about the theatre. In Part II, he focuses on the 'circumstanzas' - thefamous 'Tombeaux', 'Hommages', 'Eventails', and 'vers de circonstance' - in which Mallarme invests the quotidian with the 'glorious lie' of poetry. In a series of close readings Pearson demonstrates how complex poetic structures, and especially the sonnet, may serve to guide the human search formeaning and shape our anguish in a 'ceremony of the Book.
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