[Clive Watkins]

Bob Mezey: 1935 – 2020

I learned today that Bob Mezey has died. Some of the older hands round here will remember his acute, well-informed and forceful—indeed, sometimes peppery—contributions to the board back in the early 2000s. He was a fine poet, in both metrical and non-metrical forms, though privately in later life he came to regret having given so much time in his middle years to non-metrical verse. I first came across his work in November 1963 when I acquired a copy of Donald Hall’s Penguin anthology Contemporary American Poetry. Bob was the youngest poet represented. Hall included six poems, all in metre and all rhymed. I remember that I was particularly struck at the time by “The Funeral Home”. Later, I got to know other fine poems. Two I particularly like are “Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel (1925)” and “Hardy”. Indeed, Thomas Hardy was one of Bob's favourite poets. He compiled an excellent selection of his poems for Penguin.

I remember meeting Bob in 2004, when he came over to the UK. One of the primary purposes of his trip was to revisit the Hardy Country in and around Dorset. I arranged accommodation for Bob, for my publisher-friend, Phil Hoy (of Waywiser Press), who unfortunately had to leave after a couple of days, and my wife and myself in a thatched cottage outside Dorchester. We visited Hardy’s birthplace in Upper Bockhampton; we visited Max Gate, where Bob’s reputation as a Hardy specialist gained us access to parts of the house not usually on view; we visited the Museum in Dorchester where his workroom is set up behind glass. We had tea with James Gibson, the editor of Hardy’s Complete Poems.

We also fulfilled one of Bob’s particular aims for the trip. On his last visit to the area some years before, he had been in the company of the poet and translator Dick Barnes. With Dick Barnes, Bob had produced a samizdat edition of a large selection of the poems of Borges. Copyright problems had prevented this from reaching print legally. (Later, Bob sent me a copy from the U.S.A..) Bob wanted to stand by the bridge in Weymouth and recite Hardy’s poem “The Harbour Bridge”. It was a sunny day; the streets were busy with tourists and locals; but Bob took up his position below the bridge and, in a strong voice, did indeed recite the poem. Passers-by were variously puzzled, amused or indifferent—or, in one case, annoyed that someone was standing motionless amid the throng of pedestrians. Bob was not deterred but continued through all thirty-two lines. To my wife and I, it seemed that, in this complex act of homage and commemoration, Bob was paying a debt of friendship and honour.

Part of my last day with him was spent in Bemerton, a hamlet on the western outskirts of Salisbury. I knew from our conversations in the previous few days that one of Bob’s favourite poets was George Herbert (as he is one of mine). Herbert (1593—1633) had, at the end of his short life, been the vicar of Bemerton. On that last day, we were to put Bob on a London train in Salisbury, but I knew that it would be possible to visit Bemerton before we parted. So, without telling Bob what we were planning, we drove to Bemerton first. When he realized where we were, he was clearly moved. The three of us went into the tiny church. There was no one else about. We looked at the few monuments for a while and then found ourselves sitting in the front pews in a contemplative silence. Bob had his head down. After a few minutes he slowly raised it and began reciting from memory Herbert’s poem “Church Monuments”. This was impressive on at least two levels. First, Bob had had no awareness that we were going to be in Bemerton: his recitation was not in any way rehearsed. The second was the sense that, as with the recitation at Weymouth the previous day, Bob was honouring a long tradition to which, through love and scholarship, he had made himself a deserving member. Among the last few lines of Herbert’s poem are these:

Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem
And true descent: that when thou shalt grow fat,

And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know,
That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust
That measures all our time; which also shall
Be crumbled into dust.

Bob was, I think, no more a Christian than I am, but these lines still have persuasive and monitory force.

Clive Watkins