Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

It would be remiss of me not to revisit Hamburger before his centenary year ends. I wonder who else has marked it; not even PN Review as far as I can see, a surprising omission given that Carcanet ‘inherited’ Hamburger when they absorbed Anvil’s list and then published A Michael Hamburger Reader, available here, ten years after Hamburger’s death (and five after its editor, Dennis O’Driscoll’s).

His final collection, Circling the Square (Anvil Press Poetry, 2007), was published not long before he died, in June of that year.

His love of nature, particularly in his adopted home county, shone forth to the end, none more so in the poem below, suffused with colour and light, fading to darkness at its close. As ever, his syntax was slightly, but likeably, awry, here within the penultimate stanza.


Winter Evenings, East Suffolk

The sun’s and our days are shortening
While before solstice the visible moon fills out,
What on these lowland wide horizons lingers
As though to reiterate, recall, is dusk:
On the south-western from flame to glimmer
Slowly the glow subsides
From scarlet to roseate, amber drifts and shifts
Or else to a strip of blue
Deeper than any a summer noon sustained.
If a black cloud hangs there it shines
Rimmed with departing light.

December’s last leafage responds:
A red so dark on this maple
It’s nightfall too, detained,
Wisps of pale yellow to ochre
On the rugosa stems wilting
As on those with buds for another year.

Then, moon not yet full, whole skies
Whether clouded or clear
And silver tarnishing.

Never a night is total
Until our vision, dimmed,
Disowns the shapes, the shadows,
All colours mixed on palettes too far away.