Collected Poems by Anthony Burgess (best e ink reader for manga txt) 📕

Blake. (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2013, p. 407): ‘TIRZAH was the fifth, last, and most important of the daughters of Zelphehad. As the fifth, she represents sex… Tirzah is the creator of the physical body… and thus the mother of death.’ Inside Mr. Enderby, p. 230.

161. ‘Your presence shines about the fumes of fat.’ Written by Enderby, as part of the Arry and Thelma cycle that he composes for a kitchen chef. Inside Mr. Enderby, p. 45.

162. ‘The Dragon’s mouth will consummate our search.’ Written while Burgess lived in Adderbury, 1950-1954. Jackson calls this poem ‘Adderbury’, but Burgess does not provide a title. The poem appears in two separate parts in The Worm and The Ring. The first stanza given here appears on p. 99. On pp.150-1, the final two stanzas appear in exactly the same format as they do in Burgess’s autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God. The first stanza is thus missed by Jackson. In The Worm and the Ring, the character-poet is described as ‘a shrunken journalist who was writing a long comic epic in heroic couplets on the town and its denizens.’ (p. 99) The Worm and the Ring (London: Heinemann, 1961), pp. 99 and 150-151.

163. ‘Where sweat starts, nothing starts…’ This Empsonian poem is written by Fenella Crabbe, dealing with the idea that ‘[c]ivilisation is only possible in a temperate zone’. See Time for a Tiger (London: Heinemann, 1956), p. 59.

164. ‘Land where the birds have no song, the flowers.’ This poem is written by Fenella Crabbe on a manuscript ‘much scarred with fastidious alterations’. Victor Crabbe decides: ‘It was not a very good poem – confused, the rhythms crude.’ The Enemy in the Blanket (London: Heinemann, 1958), pp. 103–4.

165. ‘Cracks open the leaden corncrake sky with crass, angelic.’ Recited by Talbot ‘harshly and without nuance from a heavily corrected manuscript’. The Enemy in the Blanket, pp. 245, 365, 393.

166. ‘The afternoon hour has struck for you to.’ Crabbe finds it ‘impossible’ that his wife’s poem should have ‘a proleptic Eliotian image of an aged eagle with tired wings demanding to be released from the dressing-mirror’. Beds in the East (London: Heinemann, 1959), pp. 127–8.

167. ‘Rice-paper land, O lotus-footed.’ The lead character Denham tell us: ‘to my surprise, [Everett] began to quote one of his own, or Harold’s, or John’s, or Alfred’s poems.’ Who these people are is not explained. The Right to an Answer (London: Heinemann, 1960), p. 206.

168. ‘You take my heart with such unformed grace.’ Denham tells us that his friend Everett had written the verses about Imogen ‘when she was seven, though I only read them myself for the first time long after [our] first meeting.’ The Right to An Answer, p. 52.

169. ‘Beryl is the daughterly daughter.’ Lead character J. W. Denham attributes the poem to ‘some modern poetaster’, from which he has substituted the name ‘Ethel’ for ‘Beryl.’ The Right to An Answer, p. 4.

170. Epigraph On A Printer. Denham remarks to Everett that, even though he wrote it for Denham’s father, it could well be the poet’s own epitaph. The Right to An Answer, p. 211.

171. The Music Of The Spheres. Versions of this poem also appear in Byrne (1995) and The Worm and the Ring (1961). This, the longest version, from Inside Mr Enderby, p. 95.

172. ‘Not, of course, that either of us thought.’ The mention of steak and kidney pie with potatoes appears at the end of the poem. Janet Shirley, to whom it is read, ‘must have sort of nodded off while [her husband] Howard was reading this poem. It seemed to me to be a very boring poem, with no rhymes or rhythm in it either and I must have just dropped off.’ This poem acts a precursor to the attempted assisted suicide of Janet, which would have been followed by Howard’s suicide. One Hand Clapping (London: Peter Davies, 1961), pp. 102–103.

173. ‘In this spinning room, reduced to a common noun.’ Ascribed to F. X. Enderby, who composes the poem in a lavatory. Inside Mr. Enderby, pp. 54–8. See also Byrne (London: Hutchinson, 1995), p. 139.

174. ‘‘Perhaps I am not wanted then,’ he said. Enderby finds this in a number of anthologies, including ‘Poetry Now, A Tiny Garner of Modern Verse, Best Poets of Today, They Sing for You, Soldier’s Solace… Voices Within, and other volumes...’ Inside Mr. Enderby, p. 78.

175. ‘Tomorrow will be love for the loveless, and for the lover love.’ The first stanza also appears in The End of the World News (p. 118) when Courtland Willett sings the song to mark an early transit of Venus. The only difference in the 1982 version is that Willett’s verse has an exclamation mark at the end. See The Eve of St Venus (London: Hesperus, 2006), pp. 76–8.

176. ‘The moon awaits your sleeping: fear to be kissed’. This is the first of Lavinia Grantham’s poems that Richard Ennis reads ‘in a small tea shop.’ A Vision of Battlements (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1965), p. 152.

177. ‘The stoat’s cry tears long slivers of the night.’ Lavinia is singularly impressed when Ennis mentions the personal meaning of the poem: ‘Don’t you think you ought to eat your mixed grill?’ A Vision of Battlements, p. 155.

178. ‘And his hooves hammer me back into the ground.’ A Vision of Battlements, p. 180.

179. ‘Pigs snort from the yard.’ Lavinia plays down this poem: ‘That’s nothing to be proud of … that bit of nonsense. I wrote it as a joke.’ A Vision of Battlements, p. 182.

180. ‘Gasping in the dunny in the dead of dark.’ Enderby Outside (London: Heinemann, 1968), pp. 122–3.

181. ‘Dragged from his doings in the roar of youth.’ Enderby Outside, pp. 190–1.

182. ‘Archangels blasting from inner space.’ This is one of two cut-up style poems that are read by radical/psychedelic poets in this scene. Enderby Outside.

183. ‘Bells broke in the long Sunday, a dressing-gown day.’ ‘Five Revolutionary Sonnets’, Transatlantic Review, no. 21 (1966), pp. 30–32. Also in Enderby Outside, p. 8.

184. ‘Useless