Chris Joyce (UK)
Richard Berengarten
I’m honoured to have been invited to add a tribute to Richard Berengarten but I do so under false pretences (or so it feels). For although I’ve known some of Richard’s work for a long time, it’s only in the last five or six years that I’ve got to know him a little personally. Meeting him on several occasions in recent times has given me an even greater sense of inwardness with the man and his work – kind, generous, humane.
One poem I already knew and greatly admired was the villanelle ‘In Memory of George Seferis (I)’. I quote here just two stanzas, the final tercet and closing quatrain:
Night’s chariot approaches, don’t delay.
Haul evening’s golden gate up, cross the moat.
The sun’s dark horses call your heart away.
You scent that whinnying wind? The horses neigh.
You see it now? You hear that perfect note?
Black is the light behind the blaze of day.
The sun’s dark horses call your heart away.
The tribute (from the collection Black Light) takes its epigram (Angelic and black, light …/Angelic and black, day …) from Seferis’s ‘Thrush’, from which I give here a few lines as translated from the Greek:
I heard the voice
as I was gazing at the sea trying to make out
a ship they’d sunk there years ago;
it was called Thrush, a small wreck; the masts,
broken …
other voices followed,
whispers thin and thirsty
emerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side
Light, angelic and black, …
Day, angelic and black …
If space permitted, I would quote the whole of another of Richard’s poems in the same form on ‘The death of children’, from the collection The Blue Butterfly. Here are the closing stanzas:
Death can’t deserve to reap such dividends
from these, who scarcely lived, their parents cry.
What justice is, nobody comprehends.
Bring comfort then, and courage. Strangers, friends,
are we not all parents when children die?
What justice is, nobody comprehends.
It is the death of children most offends.
A vein of tragedy (and here passionate anger) runs through much of his work. It is inextricable from his profound humaneness and the international breadth of his concerns – “I would rather think of myself as a European poet who writes in English than as an ‘English’ poet” – he says. It’s a privilege to know him.
Back to introduction here.
Next contribution here.