Holy Toledo!

John Clegg

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784102609
• eBook ISBN: 9781784102616
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Sometime during the twentieth century, the self-mythology of the literary critic fused with that of the cowboy: lone outriders practising a defunct trade. In Holy Toledo! John Clegg tracks the critic's silhouette over the dangerous, sundrenched landscapes of New Mexico, California, Nashville, Utah, Oxford, Cambridge, and London. Here is Donald Davie listening to gospel radio in a Nashville taxi, and here is F.R. Leavis standing on a chair, 'unscrewing instead the world from round the lightbulb'. Vistas of bristlecone and citrus groves, pocked with fruit fl ies and rain birds, fuse with the glib-core of Oxbridge England, the university science labs where 'all three entrances felt like the back way'. Holy Toledo! is a history of English literary criticism in the twentieth century, a bestiary of the American Southwest, an unreliable guide to the desert. Generous, humorous, happily askew, Clegg's first Carcanet collection signals the flourishing of an 'emerging' poet as a major voice. 'No poet writing today matches John Clegg for wit and rigour. Holy Toledo! opens up a brilliant, uncanny frontier between the American West and the England of Empson, Davie and Woolf. Questioning language, rejoicing in it, Clegg's poetry plunges headfirst into the Great Tradition and comes out swinging.' (Dai George) 'Shaking off the dust of Cambridge, John Clegg spoors Bloomsbury, and then – Holy Toledo! – enters some western from another planet. Whatever horse he rides he makes it go, a lasso his modus operandi for capturing images.' (Marius Kociejowski)

CONTENTS

Socorro

The Lasso

The Great Tradition

Zorro in the Bear Republic

Fly Lab

Lacklight

Figtree

Tenaya Overwintered in Yosemite

Duet

Holy Toledo

Signal

Heroes of Arventine

From the Journals of Don Diego de Vargas

An Offer of Service

Roadkill Ocelot

A Translation of ‘The Andalusian Fountains’

Real Stories: A B-Side

Bloomsbury

New Bearings

Larval Midgut

Shelving

Socorro

The Long 1850s

The Warren Commision

The Common Pursuit

Candidates

Milton’s God

Donald Davie in Nashville

Ramsonde

High Table

Yvor Winters and Buffy Summers

In a DARPA Lab

Firewatching

Two Birds

Guatavita

For the Old Cavendish Laboratories

Rain Bird

A Blended Index

T for Texas

What Grows, and Some Divisions

The Signal and the Noise

Revaluation

The Field Goal

Peach Tree

 

Notes

Acknowledgements

 

 

 

‘But then again outside, scarcely a hundred steps before this incomparable city, it should be conceivable to meet a lion on one of the unconcealed paths and make him beholden to one by something quite unintentional in one’s bearing.’

 

Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to

Princess Marie von Thurn-und-Taxis Hohenlohe

Toledo, All Souls’ Day 1912

SOCORRO

Stumbling over that fabled city –

some Piro Indians, sat in a loose circle.

One offered water, another

the group’s first and only

deliberate gesture:

then salt crystals on the horizon

dissolved and refocused:

Teypana pueblo, its lowslung adobe,

its flood precautions.

In the desert it was the god Thirst

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Socorro
• The Lasso
• The Great Tradition
• Zorro in the Bear Republic
• Fly Lab
• Lacklight
• Figtree
• Tenaya Overwintered in Yosemite
• Duet
• Holy Toledo
• Signal
• Heroes of Arventine
• From the Journals of Don Diego de Vargas
• An Offer of Service
• Roadkill Ocelot
• A Translation of ‘The Andalusian Fountains’
• Real Stories: A B-Side
• Bloomsbury
• New Bearings
• Larval Midgut
• Shelving
• Socorro
• The Long 1850s
• The Warren Commision
• The Common Pursuit
• Candidates
• Milton’s God
• Donald Davie in Nashville
• Ramsonde
• High Table
• Yvor Winters and Buffy Summers
• In a DARPA Lab
• Firewatching
• Two Birds
• Guatavita
• For the Old Cavendish Laboratories
• Rain Bird
• A Blended Index
• T for Texas
• What Grows, and Some Divisions
• The Signal and the Noise
• Revaluation
• The Field Goal
• Peach Tree
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright