A kind of novel, the story of an illicit love affair told in 101 sonnets, GREEN, RED, GOLD is an ambitious and sustained achievement. Writing one sonnet is difficult enough for most poets. Many of these sonnets are beautifully done, light and musical, moving towards their
deft and neat concluding couplets. Andy Croft |
Two stunning new books of poetry have been published this year. One is a sonnet sequence telling the story of a near-adultery, a saved marriage, and a marvellous disquisition on the nature of love, sacred and profane.
The other is a witty trilogy - in conventional metrical verse, ottava rima and rhyme royal - on, respectively, the Queen's Jubilee, the art of translation, and a visit to Chartres Cathedral with a wife, a mistress and a muse.
Both of these brilliant books are by the same person. Here is a poet who actually has something to write about, who has been honing his craft for more than quarter of a century of grown-up life - he's in his mid-fifties - and who is on top form. Yet, mysteriously, the author is not famous as a poet at all, even though at his best he is as good as Auden.
His name is William Radice, who is well known as a translator of Tagore. He is a noted Bengali scholar and he lectures in that language at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He also translates opera libretti - he wrote the 1995 Turandot for the ENO. He has written more than 30 books. I have been following his poetry ever since Oxford days, and although he was always a clever writer, there was a costive feeling to some of the early verse. These two new books, however, are a pair of absolute stunners.
The trilogy was published by Writers Garden, 162 Lake Gardens, Kolkata (Calcutta). It is called This Theatre Royal. It is a retelling in rhyme royal of the Book of Jonah; only the prophet is not sent to Nineveh - he is sent to Windsor to denounce its wickedness, the selfishness and greed of the Royal Family.
It begins: "Dear Queen Elizabeth, I've pondered long/ About this tribute to your Jubilee." The tone, affectionate and not disrespectful, seems exactly right. I don't think any Poet Laureate has got the tone right in addressing the monarch. "Dear Queen: hence the restrained form of address/ I've used for you - a careful compromise/ Between obsequiousness and chattiness."
He "expresses candidly/ Ambivalence that even you [the Queen] must feel ", and he ends up by addressing the Prince of Wales, likening his poems to red-bloomed runner beans climbing up canes. "To soothe your pains - /Your mother's too - they'll celebrate your time/ With (pure organic!) Produce from the prime/ Years of my life."
Without being either silly or sycophantic, the poem is a wonderful celebration of why one values a constitutional monarchy. "There's glory/ In sheer continuation of a line./ The bottle's more important than the wine." Isn't that good?
Faith and the conflicts of sacred and profane love heighten the tension in the fascinating relationships unfolded in Radice's verse-novel sonnet sequence Green, Red, Gold (Flambard Press). The lady he loves, and who clearly wishes to love him fully, is an Irish Catholic. The wife is an agnostic. He (unlike an evangelical brother who is mentioned more than once in the poems) is a wishy-washy, with a love of the Northumbrian saints.
There are marvellous evocations of Lindisfarne and the coastline up there as the romance begins, and hits the rocks. I was really moved by this story. I keep remembering it, and thinking I've read a fat full-length novel. The whole story is ingeniously crammed into 101 short poems.
Andrew Motion said he would stay only 10 years as Laureate. Radice would do the job marvellously, but has probably not sat on enough Arts Council committees or sucked up to enough public figures to have a hope of being chosen.
A N Wilson |
