“I believe the work of the poet should be existentially grounded. Being a poet is an interior vocation, not a selected career ...”
“Part of the exacting work of the poet is to annihililate the mind’s protective defences and to silence the seductive voices of what others would like to hear ...”
“Poets are the votaries of language ...”
“Poets have little choice but to live between the menacing hammers, still labouring to utter the multiform truths of our being here and of our being now ... keeping open the creative possibilities of consciousness ...”
These are some of the claims made by Peter Abbs for the contemporary role of the poet. The Flowering of Flint is a selection from work written over three decades in the spirit of his poetics.
The poems range widely. Some are deeply personal issuing from the immediate pressure of experience: the haunting memories of childhood, the harrowing death of parents, the experience of love; some are disturbing eco-poems responding to the current violation of the planet; while others are more impersonal, exploring through the strategies of persona and impersonation, other poets’ experience – apprehensions of the ephemeral, the erotic and the transcendent. The voices of Sappho, Nietzsche and Rilke reverberate, suggesting that only in the resonating echo-chamber of a long tradition can the contemporary poet hope to fulfill the task of imaginative representation and consilience.
Reviewing Peter Abbs’ poetry Kathleen Raine wrote that he had written some of the finest poems of his generation, while the American poet Dana Gioia claimed that he is: `the rarest writer – a philosophical poet with a genuine lyrical gift.’
The Flowering of Flint selected from seven previous volumes closes with a sequence of new poems which elaborate the themes of the whole volume, while pointing, in the last poem, to a new and freer idiom. In his preface Peter Abbs writes: `I would like to think that I am not comfortably settling down but keeping faith with the ineffable spirit of life itself.’
Table of Contents:
Foreword
From For Man and Islands 1978
Prelude
The Word
It
The Death of Three Cocks
Evening after the Maelstrom
From Songs of a New Taliesin 1981
Good Friday
This Nomadic God
From Icons of Time 1991
Prologue
Who I am
Fragments from a Catholic Childhood
Premature Brith
At the Oak Woods
Unread Signs
The Look-out Tower in the Oak Woods
Myrtle Cottage at West Runton
The Other Child
The Vocation
The Loss of Faith
Father and Son
Tongue-Tied
Language!
Generations of Farm Hands
Predicament
Winter Visit
A Conversation with the Doctor at the time of the Chernobyl Disaster
Crisis
November Garden
Other Memories
FF11506 Driver
The Singing Head
Coda
The Buddha Statue
Open to Change
From Personae 1995
Prologue
Song of Orpheus
Fallen Man with One Wing
In Defence of the Raven
The Messiah
Rembrandt in Winter
Letter to Theo from his Brother: June 1889
Egon Schiele in Prison: April 1912
Stanley Spencer’s Beatitude
Dante to Virgil at the Entrance to Hell
The Love Song of Peter Abelard
Emily Dickinson’s Declaration
D. H. Lawrence’s First Lesson: the Apple
Homage to Simone Weil
This Head
New Constellations
From Angelic Imagination 1997
In the Beginning
A Tempest for our Times
On Seeing Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid in the Rijksmuseum
Artist’s Manifesto
The Shadow on Bonnard’s Face
Intimations of Mortality
Too Near to Death
Psalm
Angelic Imagination: a Poem in Five Movements
The Night Journey
From Love after Sappho 1999
Post-Modern Love
Incomparable Beauty
First Fall-Out
Kamikase Stars
A Bleeding Wreath
Las Vegas Perhaps
Under the Burning Sycamore
Pisces
Descendants of the Fireball
Jewels of Consciousness
Speaking of Eros
At Cuckmere Estuary
A Mantra of Accidental Light
A Violent Cleansing
Navigating Darkness
Last Rites
At Cromer Hospital
All Night in Hospital
Travelling to a Foreign Land
Extreme Unction
At the Old House
On Sheringham Beach
A Girl in Sepia
The Dance of Syllables
Alchemists down the Age
The Naming of Things
Sprigs of Rosemary
The Aura of your Face
Massage
A White Dark-Scented Rose
Love’s Unicorn
Girl with a Flute
The Marriage of True Minds
The Dance of Syllables
The Song of Words
From Viva la Vida 2005
Child of Pisces
Falling like Gulls
Head Gardener
Aspen Leaves
Grandmother Reading at Myrtle Cottage
The Glass Dome of Childhood
A Catholic Childhood
The White Gull’s Beatitude
Other Gifts
The Silent One
A Raw Planting
Flowering Gorse
Out of Touch
It Returns
The Flowering of Flint
Ecce Homo: On Nietzsche’s Madness
Against the Cold
If you Should Meet Socrates
Life as Dance
Under the Bell-Tower in Genoa: Summer 1877
Seiltaenzer
At the Foot of the Alps
In the Piazza: Turin, 3rd January 1889
Prometheus and the Eagle
In the Psychiatric Clinic: Jena, 19th January 1889
Uebermensch
Requiescat in Pace
The Living Word
Ars Poetica
New Poems
Learning How Not to Live
Witnessing
Living with Aphrodite
In Praise of Chinese Soup
Carving Stone
The Way
