Swimming Chenango Lake

Selected Poems

Charles Tomlinson, David Morley

• Publisher: Carcanet Classics
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781784106799
• eBook ISBN: 9781784106805
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

William Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson's poetry: 'He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.' Of all the poets of his generation, Charles Tomlinson was most alert to English and translated poetry from other worlds. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz admired how he saw 'the world as event... He is fascinated—with his eyes open: a lucid fascination—by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things.' Tomlinson's take on the world is sensuous; it is also deeply thoughtful, even metaphysical. He spoke of 'sensuous cerebration' as a way of being in the world. His poems are always experimenting with impression and expression. This dynamic selection, edited by the poet and Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley, presents Tomlinson to a new generation of readers.

The Flood (1981)

Snow Signs

They say it is waiting for more, the snow

Shrunk up to the shadow-line of walls

In an arctic smouldering, an unclean salt,

And will not go until the frost returns

Sharpening the stars, and the fresh snow falls

Piling its drifts in scallops, furls. I say

Snow has left its own white geometry

To measure out for the eye the way

The land may lie where a too cursory reading

Discovers only dip and incline leading

To incline, dip, and misses the fortuitous

Full variety a hillside spreads for us:

It is written here in sign and exclamation,

Touched-in contour and chalk-followed fold,

Lines and circles finding their completion

In figures less certain, figures that yet take hold

On features that would stay hidden but for them:

Walking, we waken these at every turn,

Waken ourselves, so that our walking seems

To rouse some massive sleeper out of winter dreams

Whose stretching startles the whole land into life,

As if it were us the cold, keen signs were seeking

To pleasure and remeasure, repossess

With a sense in the gathered coldness of heat and height.

Well, if it’s for more the snow is waiting

To claim back into disguisal overnight,

As though it were promising a protection

From all it has transfigured, scored and bared,

Now we shall know the force of what resurrection

Outwaits the simplification of the snow.

Their Voices Rang

Their voices rang

through the winter trees:

they were speaking and yet it seemed they sang,

the trunks a hall of victory.

And what is that and where?

Though we come to it rarely,

the sense of all that we might be

conjures the place from air.

Is it the mind, then?

It is the mind received,

assumed into a season

forestial in the absence of all leaves.

Their voices rang

through the winter trees and time

catching the cadence of that song

forgot itself in them.

For Miriam

I

I climbed to your high village through the snow,

Stepping and slipping over lost terrain:

Wind having stripped a dead field of its white

Had piled the height beyond: I saw no way

But hung there wrapped in breath, my body beating:

Edging the drift, trying it for depth,

Touch taught the body how to go

Through straitest places. Nothing too steep

Or narrow now, once mind and muscle

Learned to dance their balancings, combined

Against the misdirections of the snow.

And soon the ground I gained delivered me

Before your smokeless house, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication to Brenda Tomlinson
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Selected Poems
• Prologue Swimming Chenango Lake
• Relations and Contraries (1951)
• The Necklace (1955, 1966)
• Seeing is Believing (1958, 1960)
• A Peopled Landscape (1963)
• American Scenes and Other Poems (1966)
• The Way of a World (1969)
• Written on Water (1972)
• The Way In and Other Poems (1974)
• The Shaft (1978)
• The Flood (1981)
• Notes from New York and Other Poems (1984)
• The Return (1987)
• Annunciations (1989)
• The Door in the Wall (1992)
• Jubilation (1995)
• The Vineyard above the Sea (1999)
• Skywriting (2003)
• Cracks in the Universe (2006)
• Epilogue The Door
• Afterword by David Morley
• About the Author
• Carcanet Classics include
• Copyright