Peter Redgrove (1932–2003)

The three male, British poets in this classic collection are all quite distinguished (D.M. Thomas is better known as a novelist than a poet; Scottish writer D.M. Black is a well-known psychotherapist in his day-job), but maybe I was reading it at the wrong moment, none of them really grabbed me. The pieces included here from Black and Redgrove are mainly in a surrealist vein, something that perhaps worked better in 1968 than half a century later, and the same probably goes for D M Thomas's science-fiction lyrics. Very David Bowie...

I quite enjoyed Black's long poem "Without equipment", which slides into nonsense language and then back to normal speech, and Redgrove's Wordsworthian lyric, "The Force", but there wasn't much else that stuck with me on a first reading.… (more)