The Balcony Tree - Softcover

Middleton, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0856359815 ISBN 13: 9780856359811

Publisher: Sheep Meadow Pr, 1992

Synopsis

Increasingly sought after by contrary poets on both sides of the Atlantic, Christopher Middleton's work develops fresh aspects in The Balcony Tree. There is a grief for time as history pulverizing the very structures of belief it articulates; there is a celebration of the lyrical cogito as a subversive agentcook, angel or clown - in the ceremonies of imagination.
Pointedly counterthematic as they are, these poems turn upon varieties of feeling clarified otherwise than in more cryptic earlier work. The art consists in the modelling, fusion or collision of images born from feeling and eruptive when, for all it is worth, imagination splits waves of time into sensuous particles, and so may rightly mistake an instantaneous fiction for some still distant truth.
If 'self' as an instrument of feeling is 'put on the line', still it rules no roost. At most a voice abides, murmurous, observing the imperative long ago divined by Julie de Lespinasse: 'Glide, mortals, don't push it.'
Equally apposite might be the words of Edward Lear about to leave Corfu: 'Goodbye, my last furniture is going: - I shall sit upon an eggcup and eat my breakfast with a pen.'

About this title

About the Author

Born in Cornwall in 1926, CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON studied at Merton College, Oxford, and taught German at Kings College, London. Since 1965 he has taught at the University of Texas, Austin.

Reviews

Middleton ( The Pursuit of the Kingfisher ) has been teaching in the U.S. since 1965, but his poetry continues to originate from a decidedly British sensibility. Due to gaps in culture, his attempts to record everyday events (a couple parting at a train station, walking the dog, a new neighbor) take on a staid quality, helped neither by his British spellings nor by uniform-length stanzas. Archaic grammar seems incongruous with the poems' insignificant surface. "But into you I leaned / And felt a trembling go / From all my body out / Into your sudden sleep," he says, recalling a tender moment. More accessible, and decidedly more interesting, than the majority of poems here are nine surreal prose pieces that form the book's final section. Intimate and vividly detailed, these ironic accounts seem lifted from a historical chamber of horrors: the funeral of a clown during Russian-Polish strife in 1920, soldiers in 1939 encamped by the sea, the importance that Turkish peasants attach to sleeping on their roofs. Both less formal and more imaginative, these closing works accomplish what the poems fail to achieve, turning trivialities into portents.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sheep Meadow Pr
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0856359815
• ISBN 13: 9780856359811
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 94