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Some Times

Some times - not all - a few chosen moments or occasions seem to have some sort of significance for the author. In this collection these have been assembled in six sections. Those Days, the first, includes a wireless broadcast misunderstood in the late 1940s, the birth of a calf near a megalithic monument in Cornwall and trysts dared on the Pre-Cambrian hills looming above my school. Craft recalls with gratitude sculptors both classical and contemporary, a Japanese poet and three painters - all of whose works have studded my life with fascinating and beautiful revelations. Beyond the Rim refers to good times spent with friends like Ric Caddel, Thom Gunn and Peter Redgrove, who may seem now physically and temporarily absent but who, the poet firmly hopes, are "up there, somewhere, beyond the clouds".

The deliberately absurd title For Whose Eyes Only focuses on four love-affairs long over, conducted by no means innocently but without guilt. The fifth section, The Crystal Cabinet - like the shelves of a glassed-in piece of furniture in some modest country house - displays curiosities, experiments and five-finger exercises as well as poems translated from French, German, Japanese and Italian, whereas the final section, These Days, (prefaced by a quotation from Une Saison en enfer "Il faut être absolument moderne") reflects the credit crunch, the threats to literacy and the fact a friend and I were not drowned crossing different oceans during the Second World War. It also celebrates 45 years of happy married life plus aspects of the West Country where we've lived since we came back from Japan in 1972.

The book is dedicated to Peter Jay, prince of publishers, who has supported and encouraged my work since the mid-1960s, when he founded the magazine New Measure in Oxford, before going on to create Anvil Press in 1968. All the poems in Some Times have been written since the appearance of A Puzzling Harvest in 2002 with two exceptions - one, a complex palindrome put together in the Loire Valley during the summer of 1987, seemed somehow, I don't know why, not to belong in the Collected. It has now, I trust, found its niche close to a poem as intricate as its elaborate setting among the ruined temples of Cambodia just before the monsoon broke in 1969. The other, organised even earlier - an offspring from one of Prévert's joyous spoofs - needed to be in more eccentric company and has, I hope, at last "found its place" inside the cabinet of unusual items.

I have chosen 'Limnads' from the first section as a sample of what to expect, and it can be found in full below.

At school, among other useful pieces of information, we learnt about oreads who looked after mountains and dryads who protected trees, but it was not until relatively recently that I discovered from the Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology that there were also limnads who had the responsibility of caring for stagnant water - surely a most tedious and depressing task.

I chose to cast the poem in seven-syllable lines without punctuation so as to give the reader a dislocating sense of unfulfilment, mystery and (indeed) frustration. The "pool not quite up to being labelled a lake" lurks in a remote area of the Scottish Highlands. Far from anywhere, its deathly stillness, grey shadows and aura of secrecy would doubtless appeal to a limnad, if these sad and solitary nymphs are capable of any emotion.

Limnads

I saw one once or rather
salvaged a glimpse of pale grey
sorrow just as mist at dusk
drifted on the pewter-dull
sheen of a pool not quite up
to being labelled a lake
oval-shaped some thirty feet
across at its widest point
not fed by any trickle
I could hear half-concealed by
willows in their autumn state
unstirred that evening by wind

She it surely must have been
like her cousins Apollo
hires to keep birchwoods from harm
guard springs frequent gaunt uplands
watch over brooks she must tend
that place with melancholy
not warding off casual
wayfarers although no paths
lead there but unwilling or
unable to offer some
form of welcome shies away
from contact with immortals
also and wanders daylong
nightlong round her appointed
area unsinging formed
of haze and uncertainty
though dutiful like all her
replicas in charge of still
meres disused canals dark ponds
hard to locate preferring
overcast skies in steady
mourning for the unreturned
careful no tear of theirs should
dent an unruffled surface
anywhere standing waters
allow a blurred mirroring
of moon or sundisc only
to let it go again with
no sense of loss no regret
just quiet grief waiting for
nothing to occur once more

from Some Times by Harry Guest
Anvil, 2010


Harry Guest was born in Penarth in 1932. He read Modern languages at Cambridge before beginning a career as a teacher in schools and universities in Japan and England. With his wife, Lynn Guest, a historical novelist, he now lives in Exeter. His Collected Poems, A Puzzling Harvest, was published by Anvil in 2002.