A voice worth listening to

I could tell you about Graham the man, the hard-drinking, wild and wayward Scots poet who spent most of his life in Cornwall among the artists of St Ives, but I hear his voice in my head saying, ‘Tell them about the poems’. So I will.

Graham’s are the most talkative poems of the 20th century. They talk to the reader, to friends (dead and alive), to his wife, to himself (or selves), to the muse, to silence, to the alphabet and, perhaps most importantly, to language itself.

Here he is in ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’ talking to his dead artist friend:

This is only a note To say how sorry I am You died.

and to his wife, Nessie:

Are you asleep I say Into the back of your neck For you not to hear me.

(‘To My Wife at Midnight’)

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‘I am an expert of aloneness,’ he wrote to a friend and it is a combination of this inner loneliness and a passion to use words in the impossible task of ‘telling/ Each other alive about each other/ Alive’ (‘What is the Language Using Us For?’) that is the driving force behind his work.