From time to time I continue the optimistic search for the novels of Rosemary Tonks at affordable prices. I only have to be reminded of her to return to her poems and realize that I love her even more than I did before. It's an interesting exercise to find out exactly what price one will go to but finding Halt During the Chase, the last of the six novels, First Edition (as if there were any others), 1972, for £27.11 inc p+p and VAT because it's coming from France, helped define that.
The other copy available on Amazon New and Used is £174.74.
I can hardly wait for it to arrive and be its new owner because I want to be as much as I can one of that small but elite group of Rosemary admirers. Gathering the other five novels might never happen because they won't all be findable under £30 but, if I ever do, I hope I don't go through what I did with Richard Yates, putting together the complete works for myself, nearly all from America before they were all re-issued in paperback here. I don't think that will happen with Rosemary.
It led me to wonder if I could fit her into my Top 6 Poets. Top 6 was a feature here once and still can be if anybody wants to contribute one. On any theme but literary, musical or art for preference. So,
Top 6 Poets
Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn go in automatically. I might not even be particularly interested in poetry if I wasn't interested in them.
Elizabeth Bishop also has her own shelf here and perhaps only suffers in comparison for not having been regarded as essential for as long.
John Donne. Can't be left out.
Auden. Huge respect. I prefer to judge people on a significant amount of 'best' work rather than an average over an excessively prolix output.
And, so, the sixth place, which had gradually become a bit of a 'wild card', like a Top 5 plus 1. I can get Rosemary in there and that's where she might belong but I spent some time last night making a list of candidates and there's twenty-two others.
The serious contenders for the sixth place are Norman MacCaig, whose Collected can't be opened without something wonderful being found there; Shakespeare, Ovid, and then gradually the case to be made becomes more partial. So that's nine. The six is the five plus one from the repechage.
Bearing in mind that my Top 6 is an odd combination of 'best' in some objective way and 'favourite' in as much as I like them (which is where Rosemary's chance to get in ahead of Shakespeare and Ovid lies), the other 18, in some sort of order but not a definitive order, are Seamus Heaney, August Kleinzahler, Derek Mahon, Chaucer, Sean O'Brien, Sylvia Plath, Edward Thomas, Catullus, Tony Harrison, Louis MacNeice, Roddy Lumsden, Thomas Hardy, Keats, Horace, Paul Muldoon, Eliot, Marvell, Tennyson.
And that is about the 'canon according to me', plus things by Alun Lewis, Douglas Dunn, Julia Copus, maybe Fulke Greville ought to be in the canon, Baudelaire and the list goes on, as lists tend to do, with the proviso that one has overlooked somebody essential like the author of Wulf and Eadwacer.
So, since the point was to see if Rosemary Tonks makes it into the Top 6 or not, let's put her in.
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch, in a purgatory of indecision worthy of Hamlet or Prufrock, I keep kicking the can down the road on when to pack in full-time paid work. I'm stuck between Larkin's Toads and Toads Revisited in a place that even he didn't envisage.
The concern is what fruitfully might fill the days rather than the further accumulation of cash that I probably won't ever need. 'Fruitfully' is the important word but the fruit doesn't have to be an end result, it can be mere enjoyment.
The other thing I sketched out on the back of an envelope last night was chapter 1 of my Thom Gunn book. How to write a book, as I discovered in writing a 'blizzard of errata' in the one draft of my bike racing novel, is to make a few notes on the back of envelopes, one envelope per chapter, and then sit in front of the bloody computer and bash it out. That is horrendous work if you have to make up a story but it might not be so bad just trying to organize 40-odd years worth of thinking, and assimilating other people's ideas, about a favourite poet. It might just be possible. It doesn't matter if it doesn't see print.
It is ten years, I notice, since August Kleinzahler's book on Music was published and I enquired of him at his appearance at the LRB Bookshop if there were any late, unpublished Gunn poems and he just about said 'no', and I asked if any biography was forthcoming and he said there might be. But it hasn't transpired. If you want a job doing, you sometimes have to do it yourself. It won't be a biography, it will bring together a shelf-full of books into a summary of what I made of them.
Publishers, by all means get in touch. Don't all rush at once.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
