SEX-MAGIC-POETRY-CORNWALL: THE POEMS OF PETER REDGROVE
A new study of the poems of one of Britain's best but underrated poets, Peter Redgrove (1932-2003). This book considers some of Redgrove's wildest and most passionate works, creating a 'flood' of poetry. Philip Hobsbaum called Redgrove 'the great poet of our time', while Angela Carter said: 'Redgrove's language can light up a page.' Redgrove ranks alongside Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He is in every way a major poet.
Jeremy Robinson's essay analyzes all of Redgrove's poetic work, including his use of sex magic, natural science, menstrual energy, psychology, myth, alchemy and feminism.
This new edition has been completely rewritten. With a bibliography and resources.
Illustrated. British Poets Series.
Peter Redgrove wrote to Jeremy Robinson about this book:
Sex-Magic-Poetry-Cornwall is a very rich essay... It is a very good piece... Your essay has an infectious enthusiasm, which I'm grateful for, and I especially like the places where you actually grapple with the language of my poems, which is like writing them again. It is a very good piece, which carries the reader with it... Your own approach is irreplaceable because it seems to me founded on your own individuality and personal experience of my poems - which is vastly gratifying... in the majority it is vastly stimulating and insightful. Always, I am grateful to you for your trouble, and your deep response to what I have written.
I like very much the way you have resurrected poems I had forgotten worked, like the clothes magic-wet and the alchemical honeymoon - I thought they didn't work because nobody had put them in context before of the elemental life that nudges into them always - and I like the cragginess of the prose poems in contrast. Your choice of quotations is excellent throughout, and this is the real point - plus enthusiasm.. it is like a laser gas into which you pump your enthusiastic energy, there is a sudden shift of atomic orbits, and the texts shine with their own weird and natural light!