Purchase: Collected Poems

It’s as if we had found a new Gormenghast manuscript tucked away behind one of Peake’s canvases... (p.2)

Indeed, R. W. Maslen’s recent edition of Mervyn Peake’s (1911-1968) poetry presents just such a treasure. Alongside the recent study by Peake’s son Sebastian, Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art (2006), this collection grants us the timely opportunity for a thorough reassessment of Peake’s unique literary and artist contributions, on the fortieth anniversary of his death. The BBC television series adaptation of Gormenghast (2000) directed by Andy Wilson is also acknowledged by Maslen as important in gaining a wider appreciation for his work. Comparisons with Peake’s fantasy trilogy are therefore inevitable.

Here, as the above quotation suggests, the reader is being offered much edited and previously unpublished material from Peake’s extensive output. As we can see from the extensive notes, meticulous care appears to have been taken by the editor where attention to the original manuscripts is concerned. The poetry has been arranged chronologically from 1929 to 1960 with a handful of undated poems in their own section towards the end. As Maslen rightly claims this structure “enables us to trace the development of his poetic talent” (p.4). We are provided with three lists of contents: a sequential, an alphabetical and an index of first lines. For the student or scholar of Peake, this collection therefore proves both accessible and indispensible.

The collection begins appropriately with ‘Birth of Day’ (1929) accompanied by an illustration of mother and child, one of several domestic depictions of Peake’s wife Maeve Gilmore and one of their three children, most likely in this instance to be Sebastian, the eldest. Poems for Maeve reoccur throughout, binding a certain sense of marital bliss and inevitably raising ideals of the modern muse. Allusions to children and infants also recur though they are often less specific. As with Peake’s literature and illustrations for children, including Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939), a slightly more menacing set of undercurrents in childhood are revealed, and much of the poetry continues to use the child or infant as a much darker metaphor.     The collection’s pinnacle is perhaps ‘The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb’ (1947), an ironically playful, epic poem compete with the images Peake himself used as illustration. A newborn baby is metaphorically interwoven with a flying bomb; “the bombs for its birthday lullaby”.  Its narrative descent is further emphasized by the short stanzas and alternate line rhyme scheme, ABCB. The threat of the bomb is described as “a ton on a manuscript” rendering the writer’s work unreadable, an efficient metonymy which warns culture of the danger of war. We are reminded of the burning of the library in Titus Groan, a clear allusion to the Nazi’s ‘degenerate’ book burning of 1933. Throughout the collection Peake displays continued awareness of the materiality of his own writing. It is these self-referential fragments which we can imagine being scrawled on scraps of cigarette packets that in some ways become Peake’s greatest gems. One example is literally entitled ‘Written about a piece of paper when about to draw’ (c.1946). Maslen wisely concludes the collection with another example of such poems (undated). Indeed for the poet/ artist what else is there ‘than paper and a pen’? As Maslen suggests they, read, in fact, like verbal counterparts to the thousands of sketches (p.4)

The ephemerality of these short works makes his extensive bomb imagery all the more ominous. Gilmore tells us that “an idea for a poem would grow as suddenly as the flight of a meteor” (1970, p.28). Meanwhile, the infant, having “lived all this before” (p.193), serves as a stock character representing universal human history, and the poems ends on a theme of creation/ destruction (p.4),  a death and rebirth with the baby “coiled in the womb again” (p.201).

The recurrent themes of cycles; cycles of life, the seasons and the weather, are as present in this collection as they are in the obsessive ritualistic aspects of the Gormenghast Trilogy. For Peake such recurrence seems to have been a narrative device, effectively marshaled to build and preserve history during an unstable period of cultural, political, social and economic crisis. Peake’s status as a ‘war artist’ is thus confirmed in this collection, though the allegory we find in such novels as Titus Groan (1946) is perhaps chipped down to the more compact use of metaphor in many of these poems.

The influence of international Surrealism also seems readily apparent in Peake’s œuvre, particularly the poet André Breton’s morbid images of a window that cuts a man in two from his ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924) and glasshouse metaphor for the knowing of the self in his novel Nadja (1928). This can be compared with Peake’s drawing The smashing of another window pane (c.1940), an image of a soaring naked figure sharply contrasted by the broken glass surrounding him (p.142). Other less obvious comparisons with Surrealist imagery could be made, and though this connection may be tenuous; that both appear to have raided the realms of darker fantasies in an attempt to respond to the cultural and political climate.  The collection as a whole does not just present the nostalgic Peake we might believe ourselves to be acquainted with. Any nostalgia should be perceived as a more profound understanding of history rather than conservative, reactionary or escapist. Here he is gifting us something edgier and more complex.

Literary and art historical references are readily apparent throughout. Homages include William Blake, Rembrandt, Jacob Epstein, “the Dutch Icarus” and “pirate of sunlight” Vincent van Gogh (p.44), and El Greco, though Maslen also includes the influence of Francisco Goya, T.S Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Tenniel, Lewis Carroll and Peake’s friend Dylan Thomas, among others. Peake perhaps looks to Blake above all, both as a former student of the Royal Society of Art and as a literary and visual polymath. We can look to both for the true meaning of the interdisciplinary.

Carcanet, 259PP.,  £12.95,
978-1-85754-971-3