One Thing a Poem Should Not Be Like

An old man who’s avoided
The relentless

Midday sun and is now
Shuffling his feet

In the shade.

The Rain and The Glass, 99 Poems, New and Selected, Robert Nye

The Rain and the Glass, 99 Poems, New and Selected, Robert Nye, Greenwich Exchange, London, 2004.

I first became acquainted with the poetry of Robert Nye when I received my contributor’s copy of The London Magazine for February-March 2003; shortly thereafter, I began a brief correspondence with him, during which he was so kind as to send me two of his poetry books, 14 Poèmes with 12 collages by Cozette de Charmoy (in French with the original English en face) and The Rain and the Glass, 99 Poems, New and Selected. Here is Nye's enchanting introduction to that book:

“One afternoon in 1952 for no apparent reason I fell asleep by a window in the front room of my house in an Essex seaside resort where I was living with my parents. It was winter and rain was beating against the glass. In my sleep, which was deep, I dreamed a poem. In the dream it was night and there was a different house and rain at another window. There was no ‘I’ in the dream, only this other house and the rain and the glass, and a very strong sense that the dreamer was the rain and the glass, and all this coming as words and rhythms heard and felt, blindly, not as things seen. The essence of the dream was perhaps rhythm, but its substance came as words. When I woke I wrote these words down, adding punctuation and (later) a title. I was 13 years old. It seemed to me that for a moment I had fallen awake. It was after this dream that I knew what I had to do for the rest of my life.

This book contains 39 poems written since the publication of my Collected Poems in 1995, together with 60 selected from that volume. The order in which the poems are presented is more or less the reverse of chronological, so that the last poem in the book is in fact the earliest, that dream poem.

Most of the poems are as first written, some have been revised over the years in the interests of sound or sense or both, a few (having been revised) are now returned to their original innocent state.

The craft, as has been noted, is long to learn. And the last lesson (like the first) may be that craft at best is only half the story, for poetry is not a product of the will. I have spent my life trying to write poems, but the poems gathered here came mostly when I was not.”

—Robert Nye, Foreword to The Rain and the Glass.

In keeping with the spirit of Nye’s introduction, the two poems that follow are the first and last in the book but the latest and earliest, respectively, to be written. Readers wishing to read the poems in-between will have to get the book!


WORDS ON THE WIND

I heard a voice calling
‘Do not be afraid
For blessed is he
Who is what he was
Before he was made.’

They came on the wind
Those singular words
And on the wind went.
Perhaps all it was
Was the calling of birds?

Perhaps all there is
Is the calling of birds
As they’re blown on the wind
And we just mistake it
For singular words?

God knows I don’t know
But now night is falling
I am what I was
Before I was made,
And this is my calling.


LISTENERS

Listening silence in the glass
The listening rain against.
All in the silent house asleep,
The rain and the glass awake;
All night they listen for a noise
No one is there to make.

All in the silent house asleep,
The rain and the glass awake;
Listening silence in the glass
The listening rain against.
All night they listen for a noise
Their silence cannot break.

The Dud

It dropped

Onto the poet’s lap
Just as he was about

To explode.

Geyser

—for Tony Hayward, CEO of BP

You’re always gushing about
Tapping and refining your poetic

When it’s your style
That’s crude.

Fogbound

misty-eyed
wayfarer clearly misguided lost
in transition taken in
.
by the way the mist was not
.
missed