Collected Poems
Authors: Alan; Sillitoe
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Collected Poems
Alan Sillitoe
CONTENTS
from
The Rats and Other Poems, 1960
Ruth's First Swim in the Mediterranean, 1952
On a Twin Brother's Release from a Siberian Prison Camp
from
A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems, 1964
from
Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems
and
Storm and Other Poems, 1968 and 1974
Ghosts: What Jason said to Medea
Gulf of Bothnia â On the Way to Russia
Love in the Environs of Voronezh
View from Misk Hill near Nottingham
from
Snow on the North Side of Lucifer, 1979
Lucifer: The Official Version of his Fall
from
Sun Before Departure, 1974â1982
On an Old Friend Reaching Jerusalem
Yam Kinneret (The Sea of Galilee)
In Israel, Driving to the Dead Sea
Ein Gedi (After Shirley Kaufman's essay: âThe Poet and Place')
from
Tides and Stone Walls, 1986
Landscape â Sennen, Cornwall
Derelict Bathing Cabins at Seaford
Derelict Houses at Whitechapel
Living Alone (For Three Months)
Delacroix's âLiberty Guiding the People'
A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight
PREFACE
Unlike a novelist, who may hide behind his fiction for the whole of his writing life, a poet who presents his collected poems displays the emotional history of his heart and soul. Such a record, however seemingly disguised, cannot be falsified, supposing of course that the poems are true to himself, and what poems are not, if they are poems? That is the condition which I have followed in assembling this collection: the assumption that the inner life is more discernible, though perhaps only after diligent searching, than any self-portrayal in a story or novel.
From seven short volumes written between 1950 and 1990 I have chosen less than half the verse published, and therefore ask myself whether, if the omitted matter were put into another book, would it present a different picture of the state of the heart and soul over the same period? That may be a novelist's question, but the answer is a fair âno', for the material left out was mostly the fat and gristle surrounding the meat of what is printed here.
I was surprised at times by the extreme revision most of the poems so obviously needed when, all those years ago, I had considered them indisputably finished. Even so, I can't imagine that in the years to come I shall see any cause to amend them again. Though I shall no doubt look into the book from time to time, I shall no more be tempted to re-write than I am when looking into a previously published novel. Only in that way do the novelist and the poet coincide in me, otherwise the two entities are so separate that we might be two different people. Why this is I shall never know, unless there are some things which can never be said in fiction. They simply don't fit, being drawn from an elevation of the psyche which the novel can know nothing about.
When I became a writer it was as a poet, but it didn't take long for fiction to obtrude, perhaps to fill in those spaces which must necessarily exist between one poem and another, my temperament having decided that during my life I could not be permitted to be unoccupied for a moment. Such periods of emptiness, being too fearful to contemplate, were duly filled, and have been so ever since. The unconscious fear of idleness prevents me from brooding too heavily on my fate except in such a way that produces stories and novels.
