Collected Later Poems

August Kleinzahler says, ‘Christopher Middleton is, and remains, a shocking man. One hardly knows where to begin...’ There are few risks Middleton will not take in his poems. For six decades and more he has uncovered new dimensions in language. The last decade has been one of continuous discovery and extension. His English is an open medium, responding to Arabic, German, Spanish, French and other media. And English is eloquent in its nonsense as much as in its sense. His poems do not linger in the dank alleyways of self: he is always a maker and a shaper, of things that become durable resources for the reader, that refine and extend how we think, see and feel through formed language. All quotations from the Bow-Wow Shop’s ‘Tributes to Christopher Middleton’, www.bowwowshop.org.uk, 2013

Table of Contents:
The Tenor on Horseback For Preface a Lacuna The Part of Gravity The Poem Lost Body Count A Pair of Herons A Sonnet of Nice Goats Keyboard This Confidence The Tenor on HorsebackMetapontum: The Necropolis Saying Goodnight to Kate The First Portrait Orbiana The Aquinas Anecdote Pseudo-Paracelsus Imagine Mallarmé Chekhov at Sumy Chekhov in a Park Judge Bean Felo de se Senex The Whelk Ancient Emigré (Irish) Elegy with Offenbach Pictogram for a Maquisard Election Eve in the Lord’s Republic Against Frenzy A Paper Snake The Wine Merchant’s Secret The Incident Whatever MovesThe Wind-Chimes Small Change, AD 147–8 The Brink Homily with Reeds Marginalia:The Third Man Reconsidered A Demon Sniggering A Happy Captain BouillonsOf Adverse Atmospheres 50From the Cat 51Exile (from the French of Léon-Paul Fargue)In Memory of W.G. Sebald 56 Poems 2006–2009 The Enjoyment of Shouting Artist Unknown The Dance Itself The Strategy of Apanea Among Egyptian Cenobites A Longer Wind The Very Capable Waitress Calligraphy A Grackle with a Greek Motif The Veil From Rilke (March 1924) The Holly Branch Mole-Catching Lyric of the Dove Goonhilly Downs (1939) Hammersmith Memorabilia of February 9, 2008 Samuel Palmer’s Ghost Goes Scavenging A Symbolist Goldfinches The Inventor The Victorian Photo Daubigny’s Mill In a Hammock between Trees From Doctor Clown At 80 Of the Belovèd Someone Savanna Rose Some Birds Among Events Unreported The Boy and the Piano Some Remaining Masonry An Apparition Poem Forty-Four The Old French Wine Glass Homage to Alkan The Pepper Brandy The Enjoyment of Shouting Vestigios de España The Vine that Lost its Elm Today The Laundress Symposium Trampoline Pavane From Georg Trakl In Slow Motion Phantom Caravan Byzantium Revisited Another Melancholy Slight Poems Prologue: Ask Herodotus Aquatint An Exercise in Direct Discourse A Spider’s Web Caught in Amber Being There On Ceasing to Perceive Palingenesis A Postcard from Alexandria 1908 Update on the Phrygian Mode Rousseau A Stuffed Shirt The Saint Preaches to the Birds Rattlesnake The Moonshine In Old Houses Melody Roughly Thus was the Beauty of Certain Facts Delineated What the Hedgehog Said, A.D. 360 The View Back from Whirling Weathervanes Seniority Not Forgotten Like the Words Above their Ink When out of Heaven (Friedrich Hölderlin) Remembering White Chickens On the Eve of Independence Day Then The Four Curios Seniority (2) The Halving of France Feuilleton 10: Rather Vague About Vienna Epilogues Old School Remembered In Memory of the Great Edward FitzGerald (1809–83) History of the Hat For Want of an Axiom Old Dunwich / In Writing, Memory Reminiscence Remembered In the American Park The Murmur of Erasmus How Blacktop Burned Beethoven Overheard in the Agora Leo III Iconoclast Daphne Happening Vasily Kalinnikov Composes Variation on Orhan Veli Kanık’s Poem about Listening to Istanbul Two Poems of Love Zamoscz Alt-Hermannstadt / Bukovina Lonesome Toper, Busy Barmaid Like Heart’s Desire Sonnet of Irreconcilables Figure of Relation, the Part of Speech A Parable for Rembrandt Banality Overwhelming You Did Not Wake Up A Dainty Shopper Of Sympathy The Shorter Breath The Night On the Road from Van Kure to Urga Kangaroo Belshazzar Variation on Prose by Rudolf Kassner The Ragged Verses A Company of Ghosts 1 The Space of the Mandarin Duck The Halcyons Flew Out to Sea Homily Creek A Kinglet The Avocet For the Birthday of John Keats in 1795 2 Whispers of Rumi The Pendulum Stilled Apropos The Golden Ass A True Tale of the Anecdotes Improvised by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam For Shuntaro Tanikawa 3 A Saddle for DaedalusFaux-Naif: The Reverie Russia and Holland The Legend of St. Jerome A Tarahumara Jug An Archaic Greek Vase Painting 4 During The Aftermath 5 The Touch of Autumn before Evensong From a Family Album The Enchanted Scrivener 2Into the Clay The Game of Conkers 6 A Tulip Tree Of Music from a Sunken System Of Imminence The Trojan Philanderer Mother by the Lake 2The Desolation 7 A Testimony for the Deaf Promenade Juniperus Americanus The Leveret The Substance Having Uncertain Signs 8 The Devil’s Innocence 9 (For the Crows) Arp’s Arcs Household ConversationA Newcomer in the Small Port Just Look at the Dancers Eleven Canticles Sumac A Difference of Degree Boy with a Long Pale Face Sparrows The Messengers Editorial for the Snail Ichor O fons Bandusiae Early Ionian From the Grotto Merlin Fumes Not to Rhyme John Clare to his Muse In Living Memory The Poem of 2 a.m. Nursing a Wound on Blue Heron Island Over Low Thresholds Turning The Lakeshore in Springtime Of the Pigeon that Spoke not a Word On a Poem by Kurahara Shinjiro Tiepolo: Study of a Child All Over for Falstaff The JerbilThe Gnats The Wren’s Oration Cypress by the Stairway Petition for a Joint Passport Café Pamparigousto The Music Come and Gone Reconocimiento a J.L.B. Thrones An Earthwork: The Devil’s Dyke The Menander Fragment The Stained-Glass Gyroscope The Ride from Urga Monostichs Monostichs 1 Monostichs 2 Monostichs 3 Monostichs 4 Monostichs 5Monostichs 6: Sequel to Monostichs 5 Monostichs 7 Monostichs 8 Monostichs 9 Monostichs 10 Monostichs (Spurious) Monostichs 11 Monostichs 12 Monostichs 13 Monostichs 14 Monostichs (Spurious) Monostichs 15 Monostichs 16 Monostichs 17 Forty Days in the Calypso Saloon 1 From the Papers of Esteban Seferiades The Fig Tree Ivy and Ocean Orchards in Cappadocia The Living Bracelet Rising Returning to Mycenae A Dolphin Theophany in Fener Seferiades On the Lakeshore Esteban Seferiades Welcomes Longevity The Saintliest of Men 2 Confusions 1: The Fable Oxford 1949 A Walk from the Orangerie Mutual Aid Elegy: The Calypso Saloon In the Fossil Record Some Woodpeckers The Ghosting of Paul Celan Confusions 2: The Phantasm Embers, Not Entirely in the Manner of Jean Follain A Worm’s Theorem Triple Hiatus Leonardo da Vinci’s Cecilia Gallerani From the Distant Place 3 A Winter Landscape, 1646 A True Tale from Schwabing Fennel Of the Mistaken Mendicant The Spring Sunday A Hatful of Spectres A Pine Siskin Water at Not More than Six Feet Confusions 3: The Belief On Setting Out by Stagecoach for the Southwestern Territories Two Squibs Coda Frescoes with Graffiti The Transfigured Don JuanNear Oblivion Volta A Construction for Gnostics Sehnsucht An Ephemerid Calligraphy Sacred King and Drunken Boat Homage to Renoir No Say A Bird Lantern Souvenir of Hamburg, 1946 Near Lakenheath The Race Across the Quicksand From Our Imagery of Early Greeks Remembering Johannes Bobrowski (1917–65) Old Shrines ‘If From The Distance…’ Go with Isaac Rosenberg Among Signs On the Futility of Pathos Haikus Poems Without a Subject Two Antiques On Two Strips of Parchment Items in a Showcase Rilke on the Street Çanakkale Three Translations Prometheus Saxifrage Claudius the God (Zbigniew Herbert) Avowal A Keeper of the Reliquary Two Poems Mistakenly Omitted from Collected Poems The Child at the Piano January 1919 Three Tributes The Lost Elegy Gingo BilobaExcavated Poem Interim The Path Long Overgrown Dilemma after a Serious Accident Our Rain Crow The Wicker Chair Caducity Fragment for a Lost Girl The Typesetter’s Visit to Cavafy Eurydice Perceived Notes Index of TitlesIndex of First Lines

About the Author :
Christopher Middleton, born in Cornwall in 1926, is a poet and translator, especially of German literature. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and held academic positions at the University of Zürich and King’s College London before becoming Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He retired in 1998. His Collected Poems appeared in 2008.

Review :
Poems, translations, essays - Christopher Middleton's are among the most visited books on my shelves; always dependable for re-exciting the possibilities of language. Jennie Feldman The poet's ancestry, his Englishness, is relegated without denial. But the movement, whether it is generated in America, Provence, or Cappadocia, is always of encounter - of an eroticism, with the inner and outer, a profound in-touchness with the multiplicities of existence - a mark of all important poets. Tom Lowenstein