About the Book
In Darkness Inside Out Rodney Pybus takes the reader on a series of excursions within real and imagined, beautiful and barbaric worlds. From Suffolk to Cape Town, from comedy to elegy, Pybus's poems explore the collusions of language and memory, the layerings of time and loss. A sequence set in the new South Africa closes this absorbing collection. Pybus shows that it is finally the work of the imagination that best turns darkness inside out.
Table of Contents:
LEAVES FROM EACH TREE Veronica Lake Borderline Quartet for the Lion Leaves from each tree Olga and the others Not symphoniously, but the Kreutzer Madam, the source Speaking of Angels Cob and Pen Small Illuminations Chanteloube and the Pleasures of the Text Mariana Now Cultural Three Hoopoes in a Drawer The Man from Elsewhere Bridling at Birdsong Cultivation Moycullen 'Our Friends in the North' That Other Martinet Settle Down Urnings Flesh Markets October Flowers in Prague Like Voluptuous Birds Reading the Air at Southwold DOWN ON THE CAPE View from the Table Top Communication Studies Economics at 100 Tennyson Street Outside the Cafe Mozart Just So Long (As) Gnomic Aorist No End of a Lesson BACK TO THE FUTURE 'Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is' White Grass Straight, No Chaser Jammy Last Reel at the Essoldo New Designs from the Autumn Catalogue The Peppered Moth, Among Other Things Six in Sepia Bright Cloud Early Morning Late Twilight O Shine That Field The Valley Thick With Corn When a Wood Has Skirts A Fig of Consequence Darkness Inside Out Pepper's Ghost S'quim & Stuff STILL A WAY FROM GOOD HOPE Snowman Mountainwood Afterwards Coda Notes
About the Author :
Rodney Pybus was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1938 and educated at Cambridge, where he read Classics and English. In the 1960s and 1970s he worked in the north-east of England as a newspaper journalist and a writer-producer in television, specialising in documentary films, and arts and education programmes. He was a Lecturer in Mass Communication in the School of English & Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 1976-79.
After working for Northern Arts in Cumbria and the Lake District, he moved in 1983 to Suffolk, where he still lives. He has taught creative writing at all levels of education from primary schools to universities and adult education, and English Literature and Media Studies to A level students.
He was for many years a co-editor of the literary quarterly Stand (founded by the poet Jon Silkin in 1952), and has given readings of his poetry widely in Britain, and also in Ireland, France, South Africa, Australia and the Canary Isles. His writing has appeared in the United States, Australia, Russia, Denmark, Spain and France, and been translated into French, Spanish, Russian, Czech, German and Romanian. He has travelled widely in Europe, and in South Africa, in which he has a special interest.
Awards and prizes include a Hawthornden Fellowship; Arts Council of Great Britain Writer’s Fellowships in Suffolk and Cambridge; The Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize; Society of Authors travel grant; 1st prize, Peterloo International Poetry Competition; major prizes in the National Poetry Competition and the Arvon International Poetry Competition.
Review :
Birds, butterflies, Samuel Palmer, Leoš Janáček, a modern Mariana ('She knew she'd get no chance on Dating Game'), Victorian stage trickery, the closure of a cinema- any subject seems to suit Rodney Pybus's questing, easy-going style. His first collection of poems for sixteen years is generous in length but also in spirit (nineteen of them are dedicated to or in memory of individuals), and Darkness Inside Out brims with anecdotes. In 'Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It is', for example, the poet receives an edition of Wallace Stevens wrapped in 'Scraps of packing paper ... listing details of / The Hartford Mutual Funds', and emails the booksellers to thank them for this 'witty touch', only to be told, 'No, we had no idea / Stevens had anything to do with the Hartford...'. The voice is congenial, witty and informative, although the gas is sometimes turned down a trifle too low.
Much here is elegaic ('That Other Martinet' is a touching memoir of an elderly brother) but there is a spontaneity that is appealing. In the wryly titled 'Straight, No Chaser', a boyhood skiing injury and a young man's reckless snow-slide on a sack prompt the thought (with an ominous final half line)
That's the way to go, down into
the comfort and smother of the downy snow.
The teeth of the snarling cold are sharper now,
though,
each time I do it, the moon's just a poignant
silver,
and I'm travelling quicker.
Snowball-like, then, the poet gathers as he goes, his poems sedimetary rather than igneous. There is indeed much detail about many places, notably South Africa and his native Newcastle- a remainder that Rodney Pybus will always be associated with Stand magazine, which he co-edited with Jon Silkin. Suffolk features too, his home for thirty years, and we quickly sense the presence of another adoptive East Anglian, W. G. Sebald. The author of The Rings of Saturn is only just off-stage in 'Urnings' (while Sir Thomas Browne is lef on a dance through clause and sub-clause, pun and proverb), and is commemorated at length in Pybus's excellent 'Reading the Air at Southwold', with its tautly organized series of loosely connected incidents.
