Collected Poems: Mervyn Peake

Published to mark the 40th anniversary of his death, this comprehensive edition of the poetry of Mervyn Peake includes pieces that touch on some of the most significant historical moments of the 20th century. His celebrated works range from the unemployment epidemic in pre-war Britain to the horrors of the blitz and the concentration camp at BergenBelsen, with each serving to anchor the fantasy world of his celebrated Gormenghast books. Black and white illustrations, drafted by the author, accompany the verse, along with previously unpublished illustrations and photographs.

Mervyn Peake is the author of the Gormenghast novels, which includes Titus Groan, as well as several poetry collections. Robert Maslen is a professor at the University of Glasgow and a visiting professor at Dartmouth College.

Introduction	p. 1
A Note on the Text	p. 13
Further Reading	p. 15
Birth of Day	p. 21
Vikings	p. 21
Coloured Money	p. 22
If I Could See, Not Surfaces	p. 23
Palais de Danse	p. 25
Rhondda Valley	p. 27
Heaven Hires Me	p. 30
The Metal Bird	p. 31
The Cocky Walkers	p. 31
Poplar	p. 33
These Eyes Have Noosed a Hundred Hills	p. 33
Mane Katz	p. 34
Two Seasons	p. 35
Autumn: The lit mosaic of the wood	p. 36
The Crystal	p. 37
To Maeve: You walk unaware	p. 38
Poem: Body and head and arms and throat and hands	p. 39
How Foreign to the Spirit's Early Beauty	p. 39
Sing I the Fickle, Fit-for-Nothing Fellows	p. 40
El Greco	p. 41
Spring	p. 41
Watch, Here and Now ...	p. 42
Au Moulin Joyeux	p. 43
Van Gogh	p. 44
I, While the Gods Laugh, the World's Vortex Am	p. 44
Epstein's Adam	p. 45
Burgled Beauty	p. 46
September 1939	p. 47
We Are the Haunted People	p. 48
She Whose Body Was in Pain	p. 49
Now Are Gathering in the Skies	p. 50
Where Skidded Only in the Upper Air	p. 50
The Boy	p. 51
The World	p. 52
The Women of the World Inhabit Her	p. 52
O Heart-Beats	p. 52
Sensitive Head	p. 53
The Sands Were Frosty When the Soul Appeared	p. 54
I Could Sit Here an Age-Long of Green Light	p. 54
Dreams	p. 55
Where Got I These Two Eyes that Plunder Storm	p. 56
I, Like an Insect on the Stained Glass	p. 57
Swung through Dead Aeons	p. 57
Autumn: There is a surge of stillness bred	p. 58
Eagle	p. 59
The Sap of Sorrow Mounts This Rootless Tree	p. 60
Moon	p. 60
No Creed Shall Bind Me to a Sapless Bole	p. 61
As Over the Embankment	p. 62
Blake	p. 63
Fame Is My Tawdry Goal	p. 63
Often, in the Evenings	p. 64
I Am Almost Drunken	p. 65
Balance	p. 65
The Torch	p. 66
Stand with Me	p. 66
I Sing a Hatred of the Black Machine	p. 67
Lit, Every Stage	p. 68
She Does Not Know	p. 69
Life Beat Another Rhythm	p. 70
Oh Sprightly and Lightly	p. 70
What is That against the Sky?	p. 71
Oh I Must End This War within My Heart	p. 71
Beauty, What Are You?	p. 72
The Modelles	p. 73
I Found Myself Walking	p. 73
Along with Everything Else	p. 74
Am I to Say Goodbye to Trees and Leaves?	p. 74
To All Things Solid as to All Things Flat	p. 75
When God Had Pared His Fingernails	p. 75
For All Your Deadly Implications	p. 76
O She Has Walked All Lands There Are	p. 76
Grottoed beneath Your Ribs Our Babe Lay Thriving	p. 77
In the Fabric of This Love	p. 79
May 1940	p. 79
Troop Train	p. 80
Fort Darland	p. 80
In the Lion's Yellow Eyes	p. 81
Every Gesture Every Eyelid's	p. 82
Leave Train	p. 82
The Shapes	p. 83
To a Scarecrow Gunner	p. 85
From the Hot Chaos of the Many Habitations	p. 85
Rather than a Little Pain	p. 86
The Two Fraternities	p. 86
With People, So with Trees	p. 87
Onetime my Notes Would Dance	p. 87
London, 1941	p. 88
The Sullen Accents Told of Doom	p. 89
Before Man's Bravery I Bow My Head	p. 90
The Spadesmen	p. 90
The Craters	p. 91
They Move with Me, My War-Ghosts	p. 93
Had Each a Voice, What Would His Fingers Cry	p. 95
What Is It Muffles the Ascending Moment?	p. 95
I Am For Ever With Me	p. 96
The Sounds	p. 99
The Colt	p. 101
The Burning Boy	p. 102
Is There No Love Can Link Us?	p. 103
Swan Arrogant	p. 103
London Buses	p. 104
A Reverie of Bone	p. 106
Suddenly, Walking along the Open Road	p. 116
They Loom Enormous	p. 117
Maeve	p. 117
What Can I Ever Offer You	p. 118
O, This Estrangement Forms a Distance Vaster	p. 118
An April Radiance of White Light Dances	p. 119
May 1942	p. 119
Blue as the Indigo and Fabulous Storm	p. 120
Curl Up in the Great Window Seat	p. 121
Digging a Trench I Found a Heart-Shaped Stone	p. 121
Absent from You Where Is There Corn and Wine?	p. 122
I am the Slung Stone that No Target Has	p. 123
If I Would Stay What Men Call Sane	p. 123
Poem: Taller than life, deployed along the shallows	p. 124
The Glassblowers	p. 125
Dead Rat	p. 128
For Maeve: You are the maeve of me	p. 129
Tides	p. 129
Because Last Night My Child Clung to My Neck	p. 130
Poem: My arms are rivers heavy with raw flood	p. 131
The Three	p. 132
The Consumptive. Belsen 1945	p. 133
This German Pinewood	p. 135
The World is Broken without Love	p. 136
Yet Who to Love Returning	p. 136
Victims	p. 137
Poem: Remote, that baleful head of his	p. 138
All Eden Was Then Girdled by My Arms	p. 139
The Vastest Things Are Those We May Not Learn	p. 139
Poem: It is at times of half-light that I find	p. 140
Each Day We Live Is a Glass Room	p. 141
As a Great Town Draws the Eccentrics In	p. 141
Conscious that Greatness Has Its Tinder Here	p. 143
The Restaurant	p. 143
If Trees Gushed Blood	p. 144
When the Heart Cries in Love	p. 144
What is that Noise in the Shaking Trees?	p. 145
Neither to Captain nor be Captained, I	p. 146
Crumbles the Crested Scroll	p. 147
Wayward O World and Unpredictable	p. 147
O Love, the World's Solution	p. 147
When Tiger-Men Sat Their Mercurial Coursers	p. 148
This Field is Dim with Sheaves	p. 149
Brave Lies Conspiring in the Three-Hued Flag	p. 149
Are We Not the Richer?	p. 150
The Pit-Boy's Lung Is Black	p. 151
Crisis	p. 151
It Is the Malady	p. 152
At My Inmost Heart Is Fear	p. 152
This Is the Darkness	p. 154
I Cannot Find It in Me to Be Gay	p. 154
There Is No Difference between Night and Day	p. 155
The Heart Holds Memories Older than the Mind's	p. 155
Lug Out Your Spirit from Its Cage of Clay	p. 156
There Is an Aristocracy of Love	p. 156
Poem: How dangerous a thing	p. 156
Into the Sky All Men Must Turn Their Eyes	p. 157
And I Thought You beside Me	p. 157
Into the Dusky Well	p. 158
Satan	p. 159
Features Forgo Their Power	p. 159
Let Dreams Be Absolute	p. 161
The Birch Saplings	p. 161
His Head and Hands Were Built for Sin	p. 162
I Have Become Less Clay than Hazel-Rod	p. 163
Cold Island! The Splenetic Air	p. 164
Rembrandt	p. 165
Victoria Station. 6.58 p.m.	p. 165
Half-Light	p. 166
How Shall I Find Me	p. 167
Let the Result Be What It May	p. 167
Sark; Evening	p. 168
That Phoenix Hour	p. 168
Robert Frost	p. 169
The Wings	p. 169
Written About a Piece of Paper when About to Draw	p. 169
As Battle Closes In My Body Stoops	p. 170
When All Is Said and Done	p. 170
Possessionless, O Leveret	p. 171
Love So Imperilled Is	p. 171
Love's House	p. 172
The Flag Half-Masted Is a People's Poem	p. 173
Love, I Had Thought It Rocklike	p. 174
Swans Die and a Tower Falls	p. 176
And Are You Then Love's Spokesman in the Bone?	p. 177
For Ever through Love's Weather Wandering	p. 177
The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb	p. 178
To the Illegitimate of War	p. 202
Truths Have no Separate Fires but from Their Welding	p. 203
Poem: He moves along the bleak, penumbral shire	p. 203
An Ugly Crow Sits Hunched on Jackson's Heart	p. 204
Poem: As much himself is he as Caliban	p. 205
Snow in Sark	p. 205
Poem: The paper is breathless	p. 206
Conceit	p. 206
Out of the Chaos of My Doubt	p. 207
To Live at All Is Miracle Enough	p. 207
The Old Grey Donkey	p. 208
As the Kite that Soars	p. 209
Poem: What panther stalks tonight	p. 209
The Rebels	p. 210
Poem: With power supernal dowered	p. 211
And Then I Heard Her Speak	p. 212
The Flight	p. 213
As I Watched between Two Forests	p. 214
Heads Float about Me	p. 214
Swallow the Sky	p. 215
Coarse as the Sun Is Blatant	p. 216
Through the Voluminous Foliage of the Mind	p. 216
On Fishing Up a Marble Head	p. 217
Poem: That lance of light that slid across the dark	p. 218
Poem: When I was wounded	p. 218
Poem: Out of the overlapping	p. 219
Poem: As though it were not his, he throws his body	p. 220
Break Through Naked	p. 221
Poem: Thunder the Christ of it	p. 222
Hail! Tommy-Two-Legs	p. 223
Great Hulk down the Astonished Waters Drifting	p. 224
For Maeve: Now, with the rain about her	p. 224
An Armful of Roses	p. 225
I Cross the Narrow Bridges to Her Love	p. 226
My Malady Is This	p. 226
At Such an Hour as This	p. 226
Staring in Madness	p. 227
For God's Sake Draw the Blind	p. 227
A Presage of Death	p. 228
The Eclipse	p. 228
Lies! Lies! It Is All Lies and Nothing Else	p. 229
Love Is an Angry Weather	p. 229
O Love, the Steeplejack	p. 230
She Lies in Candlelight	p. 230
Than Paper and a Pen	p. 231
Notes	p. 233
Index of Titles	p. 246
Index of First Lines	p. 253
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

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