Collected Poems Anthony Burgess (best pdf reader for ebooks txt) 📖

to hope to hold off.’ Enderby, interrupted at the end of the poem, doesn’t have the opportunity to complete the penultimate line which, in the Jackson, version appears as follows: ‘The final kiss and final/Tight pressure of hands.’ Enderby Outside, pp. 30-31.

185. Curtal Sonnet. The Curtal Sonnet is most closely associated with Gerard Manley Hopkins. For example, ’Peace’, written in 1879 is an eleven-line sonnet: ’A Curtal Sonnet in “standard” Alexandrines’. See Hopkins, Poems and Prose, ed. W.H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), pp. 42, 232. Enderby Outside, p. 45.

186. ‘Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury, rounded by river.’ Enderby Outside, pp. 80–1.

187. ‘I sought scent, and found it in your hair.’ Enderby Outside, p. 102.

188. ‘The urgent temper of the laws.’ In response to this, ‘Out of a trance somebody farted.’ Enderby Outside, pp. 141-2

189. From The Circular Pavane. Enderby Outside, pp.181–2.

190. ‘At the end of the dark hall he found his love.’ Enderby Outside, p. 209.

191. ‘Independence Day.’ This is labelled c. 1993. ‘And, like a fetal marmaset [sic]’ is a restored, previously struck-through line from the MS. The last five lines follow the version used by Paul Phillips in A Clockwork Counterpoint. A shorter version appears with a variant line (‘My brain was freer/And scrawled a cancellation then’) in Little Wilson and Big God, p. 194. See Phillips, A Clockwork Counterpoint, p. 407.

192. ‘They fear and hate.’ Enderby Outside, pp. 219–21.

193. ‘So will the flux of time and fire.’ Described as lines towards a Horatian ode for the king of Denmark. Enderby Outside, p. 227.

194. September, 1938. Enderby Outside, pp. 239–240.

195. Summer, 1940. Enderby Outside, p. 240.

196. Spring In Camp, 1941. Enderby Outside, p. 240.

197. The Excursion. Enderby Outside, p. 241.

198. Eden. Enderby Outside, p. 242.

199. ‘And as the Manhattan dawn came up.’ This poem is read out by another of Enderby’s composition students, a Nordic man called Sig Hamsun. This verse is described by Enderby as ‘rather sloppy and fungoid’, like ‘its execrator’. The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1974), p. 60. ‘Then as the moon engilds the Thalian fields.’ Specimen lines from a play called The Love of Hostus for Primula by a Gervase Whitelady. Both the play and the playwright are fictions, created by Enderby. The Clockwork Testament, p. 49.

200. ‘So the world ticks, aye, like to a ticking clock.’ Soliloquoy by a minor character named Retchpork. Enderby produces this work of fiction, under pressure to sustain the lie he has told about the existence of an Elizabethan poet named Gervase Whitelady. He tells his students that this comes from a play called ‘Give you good den good my masters’. See The Clockwork Testament, p. 51.

201. ‘You went that way as you always said you would.’ Enderby encounters these lines in a volume of his own work that is brought to him by a psychopathic woman. Although he cannot remember writing them, he decides that he possessed genius at the time. The Clockwork Testament, p. 112.

202. ‘The work ends when the work ends.’ This is an improvised verse recited by a time traveller child called Edmund in order to mark the death of Enderby. His teacher decides that the verse is inappropriate, and accordingly rebukes him. The Clockwork Testament, p. 122.

203. In Memoriam Wystan Hugh Auden KMT. Mark Twain Journal, vol. 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1975). Copy at IABF.

204. A Christmas Recipe. Hand stitched and bound booklet. Limited edition of 100 copies. Labelled ‘Seasons Greetings from Anthony & Liana Burgess. Buon Natale 1977.’ A Christmas Recipe (Verona: Plain Wrapper Press, 1977).

205. Limerick: The Angler Of Kinsale. Burgess provides this limerick as an example of Irish place name limericks, which he says Patrick Stevenson was engaging in. Patric(k) Stevenson (1909-1983) was a poet and prolific painter, who lived in County Down, Ireland. ‘Something lyrical, something terrible.’ Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 1978, p. 576.

206. ‘I had not thought to hear.’ The verse is recited by Toomey after remembering how he met the character Valentine Wrigley: ‘He had read an article I had contributed to the English Review on the poetry of Edward Thomas and had written me a letter saying that he had thought himself to be the only admirer of Thomas’s work.’ The poem is enclosed in this letter. Earthly Powers, p. 61.

207. ‘Thus kneeling at the altar rail.’ Dawson Wignall is the fictional poet laureate who Toomey meets via the British Council in Malta. Toomey owns a ‘revised Oxford Book of English Verse, bloody Val Wrigley as editor... I did not care for what I found – insular, ingrown, formally traditional, products of a stunted mind. Wignall’s themes derived from Anglican church services, the Christmas parties of his childhood, his public school pubescence, suburban shopping streets; they occasionally exhibited perverse valleities of fetischistic order’ (Earthly Powers, p. 23).

208. ‘Do ye the savage old law deny.’ Of this, the lead character Toomey notes, after performing it to his friend Val: ‘It needs tidying up a little, of course.’ He smiled, not at me, but in pleasure at his performance’ (Earthly Powers, p. 62).

209. ‘The kind of laugh that Wodehouse imparts is.’ The fictional poet Wrigley writes this in response to P.G. Wodehouse being ‘captured by the Germans in his French villa and persuaded to talk very freely and indiscreetly, though also humorously, on Berlin radio’. See Earthly Powers, p. 438.

210. ‘A glance or gander of this gandy dancer.’ Toomey notes that this verse is ‘A long way from the thrush in the heart of Ealing.’ The verse is one of Wrigley’s published works: ‘From a big side pocket, he pulled a thin book. Valentine Wrigley. Faber and, highly reputable. The title: A Feast of Cinders.’ The style of this verse is reminiscent primarily of Hopkins (‘wavewhite preen’, ‘gandy dancer’) but there may be elements of Whitman, too. See Earthly Powers, p. 214.

211. ‘The young things who frequent movie palaces.’ Carl Jung, who hears this limerick in the novel, is ‘prudishly embarrassed’ by it. End of the World News: An Entertainment (London: Hutchinson, 1982).

212. The Wiggle Poof.