David, Amazon UK comments section is temporarily on the blink, but I'll post the following five star review later today:
I take issue with the first review of this book. I screened the title sonnet as one of the dozen best poems of the year at Eratosphere, the international virtual workshop devoted to form. Our judge was the noted Chicana poet, Rhina Espaillat. Here is the poem, and here are Ms Espaillat's thoughtful comments:
Talking to Lord Newborough
I’d perch beside your gravestone years ago,
a boy who thought you old at forty-three.
I knew you loved this quiet place, like me.
We’d gaze towards Maentwrog far below,
kindred spirits, and I’d talk to you.
Sometimes I asked what it was like to die—
were you afraid? You never did reply,
and silence rested lightly on us two.
These days the past is nearer, so I came
to our remembered refuge on the hill,
expecting change yet finding little there:
my village and the Moelwyns look the same,
Saint Michael’s Church commands the valley still—
but you, old friend, are younger than you were.
(Lt. William Charles Wynn, 1873-1916,
4th Baron Newborough, whose grave overlooks
the Vale of Ffestiniog in North Wales)
The scene and situation are set at once, so that communication is clear at the surface level. The mystery occurs at a deeper level, and is subtler, in what the poem suggest about memory and time: "These days the past is nearer." We think of the past as retreating into a farther distance, as do the dead, but this poem reverses that notion, and implies that the dead "remember" with us.
I found myself feeling not only surprised, but persuaded by this tender but unsentimental sense of identification with those who are closer than they were when they "left" us, because now we're approaching them. The end feels wholly true, and the force of the poem is greater than it would have been if the language were not so unobtrusively ordinary.
And then, just to compound the strangeness of the poem, a rereading reminds you that this particular "old friend" was a stranger, after all, "met" beside his gravestone by an imaginative and sensitive boy! Remarkable poem. --R.P.E.
The poem's point of departure is in fact Bob Dylans's "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." I confirmed this hunch with the author during our discussion of the sonnet at the Eratosphere. If this is the stuff of greeting cards, I'd like to buy a lifetime supply of them. --Tim Murphy
[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited June 18, 2006).]
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