"Black Bones" by Peter Redgrove

That is a human skeleton under the cataract,

The jet bones shining in the white noise,

The black bones of a man of light.

It is a cascade that accepts

Human form from the bones

That have walked into it, and stand;

It must have been his method of death

To walk into a waterfall and be washed away,

Licked clean down to the jetting bones;

And the bones articulate the roar

Of the cataract that seems to speak

Out of the ribs and skull: 

His white-haired sermon from the pelting brow,

The unfathomable water-lidded sockets;

Clad in robes that are foam-opulent,

And never the same clothes twice.

Most poems in the English-language tradition, whether lyrical, dramatic, or narrative -- the poems of Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, and Larkin -- express an emotion about a past experience, often in an effort to understand it.

But English poetry has another tradition. Those poems too can take many forms, but they are after something else. They try to present experience more directly -- and as vividly and truthfully as possible. This is a poetry of the present tense, in which the writer tries to capture the flux of life itself, in the hope that an experience that has provoked a particular emotional and intellectual response in the writer will produce a similar one in the minds of readers.

Practitioners of this second kind of English poetry include Thomas Traherne, William Blake, and Allen Ginsberg. And one of the leading exponents of this 'poetry of the present tense' in the postwar period has been the British poet Peter Redgrove.

In an interview with The Hudson Review in 1975, Redgrove said, 'The poems are supposed to be experienced, I would say, in a light trance. That is to say in a trance of concentration.' The result has been a body of richly imaginative work, which I began to explore when Redgrove first gained widespread attention in Britain in the 1970s.

If you find this Redgrove poem intriguing, I hope you'll look for his Collected Poems, which I reviewed for The Manhattan Review (see first link below.) It is in print in both the UK and North America, and many municipal and university libraries should have a copy.

Peter Redgrove in 1982 (photo by Lynn Saville;
courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)

• My review of Redgrove's Collected Poems for The Manhattan Review
• Philip Fried's 1982 interview with Redgrove
  
• Paul Batchelor's review in The Guardian
  
• Robert Crawford's review in The London Review
  
• More about Peter Redgrove from the Poetry Foundation

'Black Bones' is from Peter Redgrove's Collected Poems (edited by Neil Roberts, Jonathan Cape, 2012); reprinted with the kind permission of Penelope Shuttle.