The Balcony Tree Middleton, Christopher

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.'

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.