It’s been a big week in Britain for saying how much you like Larkin’s poetry. Nadhim Zahawi, Secretary of State for Education, began it when he tweeted “Larkin and [Wilfred] Owen are two of our finest poets”. Others agreed. Rachel Cooke informed Guardian readers that “Larkin’s poems […] are extraordinarily beautiful, extremely profound”, while Tomiwa Owolade told UnHerd: “I taught Larkin to my students because his poems move me at a visceral level”.
The last time the discovery of a new Larkin poem was announced — in the Times Literary Supplement in 2015 — it rather unfortunately turned out to be by somebody else. So I hope everyone will be excited to know that new Larkin poems are now available.
I got mine in the post yesterday. They are untitled, but numbered 1-100. Here are some favourites from a first reading:
5
Enclave glow, where
light was urged
around shadow
27
Such and such a wood
is not all places, a thud
of spirit it attaches
57
Apparent tree speared by horizon,
clear at its own arising
74
No rarity like thistles in the wind,
an asperity of reception to bind
Here, without doubt, is the poet of whom J.H. Prynne said:
Larkin’s work is highly interesting to me […] the language that we’re normally accustomed to find swirling all around us is mammal language, that is to say it’s promoted by pronouns that are actions of agency with intentional structures, making and causing activities to occur through the force of verb structures which are built into the habits of the human language community. They are muscular and they are assertional. And the language that Peter is interested in is not muscular because trees do not have muscles, and therefore are not in that sense assertional structures.
This is memorably put re: trees, and an illuminating way to think about how Larkin evokes landscapes that are almost without human presence; where plants, earth, air and weather are barely grazed by the lyrical perception of a living, rhyming relationship between things (“A tree without a soul watching / one adjacent prayer touching”).
It’s a kind of lucid organic abstract sketching that’s never been done in English before, and the resulting poems — which are best read as self-echoing sequences rather than single pieces — are frequently beautiful. To buy a copy of Peter Larkin’s sounds between trees, find your way through the woods to Guillemot Press: https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/peter-larkin-sounds-between-trees
It occurs to me, of course, that there is another poet called Larkin, who everyone is always talking about in this country — and if that’s your bag, I wrote about him here: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2022/06/philip-larkin-is-not-being-cancelled-schools