Ted Walker (1)

A Slightly Foxed edition, delightful to hold and to read. I am not familiar with Ted Walker's poetry, but from his prose I would have guessed him to be a poet. He writes with grace and beauty of his childhood in Sussex before, during and after WWII. At times, there is a stream of consciousness feeling to the writing as he moves from one memory to another, and clear bright images nearly pop from the page. On the day that the local beach was once again open after the danger of mines and show more invasion was deemed past: "The tide was far out, the sun was just setting. There were hundreds of people strolling, their faces lit with pink delight. This, then was what Peace was: to stand and gaze at the unsinister sea; to pick up a streamer of bladder-wrack and watch it lift with the wind." I also must confess that many a sentence floated past me on the beauty of its phrasing without leaving any impression of its sense behind....I often have this feeling when reading poetry, and frequently I don't mind it enough to go back and sort out the meaning. Then there are full-of-meaning sentences that cast me right back to the age of 4 or 5, as in Walker's description of his first day of school: "In an apple-green room (containing chairs so stupidly small you did not have to climb in order to sit on them) I was unstrapped from my push-chair by a strange woman who asked me my name. I wondered why she asked it: everybody, surely, knew who I was?" How well I remember that awful moment when my mother left me in my kindergarten classroom, and suddenly I realized that nobody in that room knew who I was, or where I belonged. This is one of the wonderful parts of reading excellent memoirs---they remind you of things about yourself that you had forgotten, even when you are as widely separated from the author as a country girl from the Pennsylvania woods is from an English schoolboy who went off to Cambridge when she was not yet two years old. Trust a poet to know what those things are. show less

Plusieurs poèmes concernant la Chine, l'Asie