Selected Poems: (Salt Modern Poets)

Nuttall grew up in a remote valley of Herefordshire, where his father became the village schoolmaster. Nuttall formed his standards of assessment in this valley and they have not altered very much since. He trained as a painter in the years following the Second World War, and in 1962, as a result of a session at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, and as a result of meeting Bob Cobbing, he began writing poetry. In 1975 Nuttall was elected chairman of the National Poetry Society and held this chair throughout the confrontation between the modernists and the neo-Georgians for which the NPS formed an arena. In that year he was Poets’ Conference nominee for Poet Laureate. This book is a selection made from the work of a lifetime that coincided with the Cold War. It is clearly the writing of a man who expected the human species to terminate within his lifespan. An elegiac mood prevails behind the scatology and verbal clowning. Nuttall’s long line is much in evidence, punctuated by staccato percussive passages. The content always reverts to a gravitational concern with the way in which physical love must transform the repellent without euphemising or diluting its Swiftian character. The poems we have are mostly desperate, the poems of a man who is afraid the light is going to go out forever, a man in panic. They echo and extend Nuttall’s involvement with jazz, in the rhythms, breathe-groups and harsh tonalities. The alternative disciplines of Welsh poetry, learned through Hopkins, make them relentlessly dynamic. Nuttall has lived first by teaching fine art in schools and polytechnics, finally by acting small parts in film and television. He has been busy across a broad range of creative disciplines but it is in his poetry that his inimitable concerns are most clearly seen.

Table of Contents:
Waiting For The Holocaust Windows I shall invite my little friends to tea A phrase cracks through They come like a wall, stalk forward gravely It wouldn’t reach in the summer night Little Miss Muffet Summer drops dollars An ancient thing Dangerous to drink day Insomnia Notes Towards a Suicide Note Ruth & Rover Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me To Almighty God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, Lord of Time and Father of the Universe Schoolmistress Autobiography Gutter Grace Dogs came to us Locked buckled couple Your sleepy musk is a season’s tang To My Wife Could see her a milky thing Spread thighs bowstrung with your stretch pants Them There Eyes It’s a long way out on the swell of gristle Skeins of groundmist Girl forked on horizon sticks The Voyeur Mother & Daughter Summer The Twin In the Park When it had all been told Barking Jumpin’ at the Maudesley A pale old woman sits in a thicket Sun Sequence Lightning Sequence Driving the jumper Blood let / melt light As a breast Day breaks brittle blades around my heart Medieval : England Open my bones when the rain spills Pig proud pain for the pit of her Murder Song There’s going to be Small room big bed DaDa Kwela for a Situation There was a cabbage Acres of wreckage strewn round a rhino Pig on a prong Scissor. Trunk. Elephants. Still Life I Still Life V Still Life VII Still Life IX Still Life X I wandered lonely as a seal The red turkey Green rippers split curtains George the corner crocodile Pennine Three Takes of the Same Chorus I embrace an apple twice I shelled a boiled egg badly A little shrieker Sheets aghast at an air’s intake He goes out on an always Sunday frequently bird with fall-coals Handful shaved out of moorland I am a hill The Split Premonitions of Divorce Europe – Medieval Newhaven Ferry Dogwind Debts Four-Way Pogrom To Feminists Summer Holiday Jeff Nuttall’s Psychedelic Poem Domestic Interior – Late Night Margaret Thatcher And The Fox Suburban Garden Goodbye to Leeds (Regret) Two Takes of the Same Chorus Puritans Welsh Bay Cloudscape “The levels of gold are constant. . . .” Summer I yawn for a fishboy shy among bilberries An essence so delicate Love is a goad, a goatfoot god The surly postman Sea food salt pond And the bee on wheels has laments on a stick Autumnal Tremble vigil Every night is a curtain over deeper dark Oysterflesh nurtures pearl Shot Theft Wet Kestrel Sentinel Shrike Shriek When it comes Stands at the stairs’ turn The Familiar Ghosts The Coast Sculptures Maintenance Ejaculation Siege Radnor Sunset Mediterranean Return Trip Mischief Hillside Pregnancy Channel-Crossing Woman Approaching Sore as a sandrock 16th August 1981. Bedroom, Scarcroft. Banks of vapour, flower-strewn Humped cherrywool and a cockatoo whisp Scenes and Dubs Three Scenes: West Yorkshire Dub One Three Scenes: North of England Dub Two Two Scenes: England Dub Three Three Scenes: Todmorden Dub Four Two Scenes: North of England Dub Five Three Scenes: England Dub Six Two Scenes: North of England Dub Seven Three Scenes: London Dub Eight Three Scenes: Lancashire Dub Nine Three Scenes: Algarve Dub Ten Three Scenes: Todmorden Dub Eleven Three Scenes: Manchester Dub Twelve Houses Prologue: Dream Houses I. Alcohol II. The Relationship III. Religion IV. Travel V. Nationality VI. Art VII. Language VIII. Anxiety IX. Body X. Sleep Epilogue: Dream House Abergavenny Breakfast at Guernsey Grove Hotel Bar, Harrogate. August 1992 Putney Antique Fair Spaghetti Bed Crash For Basil Sleep Lower Usk A social chrysalis looks like a tin bug Some mumble so dim Sketch for Autumnal Autumnal When the wind whisks at first-light leakage The rain sends children He’s lain by us all night We set him high on a windowsill

About the Author :
Jeff Nuttall was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, in 1933 and grew up in Herefordshire. He trained as a painter in the years following the Second World War and began writing poetry in 1962. He published widely with Writers’ Forum, Turret Press, Unicorn Press, Fulcrum, Trigram, Pirate Press, Rivelin and Penguin (Modern Poets No. 12). He taught fine art in schools and polytechnics, and acted in film and television. He lived in Crickhowell, Wales and died in 2004.

Review :
Overall, Nuttall’s Selected Poems conveys a sense of how language can be manipulated for different ends. His novel painterly and musical poetry form a distinctive approach and legacy that has been marginalized more from the lack of an appropriate critical language than anything else. Combined with his critical writing, his poetry offers a celebratory vision of nature and the body, as opposed to material greed and shallowness. Seven hundred people, many of whom were taught by Nuttall, attended his London memorial event. He inspired them to fulfil their potential. The Selected Poems (Salt) of the poet, novelist, artist, musician, actor and cultural commentator Jeff Nuttall, published very shortly after Nuttall's death in January 2004, offers an excellent selection of Nuttall's poetry, and acts as a superb, if unplanned, memorial to this multi-talented and influential man.