on Elaine Randell

Half a Century

In ‘Aesthetic’, an early Charles Tomlinson poem from 1952, we are told with a tone of direct confidence that reality is not to be sought in the ‘concrete’ but ‘in space made articulate’. Twenty-one years later Elaine Randell published her short book Telegrams from the Midnight Country from Blacksuede Boot Press, the small publishing firm founded by herself and her husband Barry MacSweeney:

See how the tree comes to
ward.
A heavy wind here pesters
loose wood.
Sky steps are light.
The birds fly up ec
static.
                   (‘For You – Today’)

Ecstasy reveals the thrill of overwhelming delight, elation, a movement away from the stillness of contemplation, and it anticipates a later poem by Randell, ‘Easter 2014, Romney Marsh’, in which a skylark is heard ‘above the tractor’ before being seen:

Who could not be charged
by his ecstatic salute to life
upwards and yet further up he shows how to sing while flying
while
plummeting
vertically effortlessly hovering before parachuting back.

This new volume of collected poems and prose ranges over some fifty years and does not reflect repetition but development. Light ‘Sky steps’ become a ‘salute to life’ and as if in recognition of such forward movement a later uncollected poem is titled ‘The transformative power of the minute’. Our present contains our past, albeit often in echoes, and the Orphic music can be heard in air as words map spaces and bring to mind Gaston Bachelard’s words from 1958 concerning ‘inhabited space’ transcending ‘geometrical ...