One Another
£8.95
In his introduction to Peter Dale’s Edge to Edge: New & Selected Poems, Grey Gowrie wrote: “Except for his Villon translations … which stand among the great modern translations … Peter Dale has been neglected in reputation … He is the long-distance runner of his generation and it is exciting to follow his development. His lines ring true because that is precisely what they are.”
Central to Dale’s poetic achievement is One Another, a sequence of sixty sonnets that deals with a long-term relationship between a man and a woman, and which, to adapt Gowrie’s words, succeeds in telling the complicated truth about that relationship – what was and wasn’t communicable, what was and wasn’t shareable – by employing constantly shifting temporal and emotional perspectives. As the poet himself has described it, the sequence resembles “a kaleidoscope – with perhaps an unusual amount of dark fragments in it – each turn of which discloses a new pattern, a different constellation.”
Writing about One Another’s first edition, the critic William Bedford wrote: [This is] “a substantial work in which the fusion of narrative line and poetic intensity is complete … One Another is a fine book, ambitious and serious in its themes, using language carefully and quietly to explore ideas first touched on in The Storms. It is also a brave and generous book, using respectfully a much maligned form … Such a combination of ambition and reticence seems to me to be essentially part of Dale’s achievement … as a poet, an achievement that has a great deal to do with seriousness and with courtesy. One Another is both a confirmation and a development of his talent.”
One Another
As a sequence of love sonnets, Peter Dale’s One Another can take its place beside the 16th and 19th century masterpieces of the genre. Rich, brooding, and dense with intimate detail, the poems capture with grace and tact the poignancy of would-be timeless emotion caught ineluctably in time passing.” – Dick Davis
“Peter Dale is the most underrated poet of his generation, and his sonnet sequence One Another, his ‘morphology of an emotion’, one of the most undervalued volumes of the 1970s.” – Michael Donaghy
“The best of these poems are engaging, immediate and direct – to the point where the writer disappears and the reader is confronted intimately with the subject – as if thought and feeling, and observation, derive exclusively from within the reader’s mind, perception and reaction seamlessly one.” – David Storey
“400 years ago John Donne told his lover, ‘We’ll build in sonnets narrow rooms.’ Exploring every conceivable arrangement of this inexhaustible form, Peter Dale has built himself and his readers a spacious mansion.” – Timothy Murphy
Reviews of One Another
“Peter Dale’s new collection seems to me certainly the most distinguished he has produced to date. It is a sonnet sequence, charting a love relationship in which both partners ‘speak’; and this formal device, varying the sexual persona from poem to poem, interestingly embodies the thematic motif of relatedness-in-separation which runs through the narrative … Dale has always worked best in fairly rigorous iambic forms, sensing adroitly when to ruffle, slacken or telescope a line, and it therefore isn’t surprising that the sonnet form works for him so impressively. His work has always been unheroically low-keyed … but here, while preserving that ‘literalism of the imagination’ at which his poetry is so accomplished, he ventures into more explicitly lyrical terrain, more imaginatively fertile than before, perhaps more confident that the terseness of the form will curb emotionalist excess …” – Terry Eagleton, Stand Magazine
“One Another is an impressive and moving sequence; courageous also … in touching so truthfully the intimacies we find unspeakable …” – D.M. Thomas, Times Literary Supplement
“It is poetry of a very high order quite worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as that published in its decade by Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill, and F.T. Prince … “ – W.G. Shepherd, Agenda
Moon
These hands are so old. I don’t know what to think.
They hold their own when I have lost my grip.
They know of ways around that you let slip.
You tremor like water just above the brink.
I watch your face for thoughts, for mood – your face
wizened a moment by movements soft as time.
Look, love, I’ll gather what your features mime.
Your eyes reflect a light I cannot place.
Now you are young again. In the low light
your skin-tone has the mother-of-pearl that blurs
the rimless moon in mist. That’s the rare sight
you always bring to mind now, though you smile:
and what if that means frost and heavy furs?
You’d lie there still, my love, in all your style.
The Waywiser Press
Silence
Cloud stilted along on two great spokes of light.
And then to enter the room, its shadow cool.
A bowl of roses, the oak-table, white blooms
like slow swans reflected in its pool, plumes
brushed by a moment’s breeze. A dusty gold
fizzing a shaft of sun, the mullion’s shade
leading across the carpet – shoulders bare,
shadowed by a great silence of cascading hair,
the woman sitting, focused within her mind,
(myself unseen) hands folded in her lap
cupping the darkness loosely like a bird,
book on the floor accordioned.
To find you there,
presence to presence. Cloud happens to change
the light. You turn as though you heard it move.
The Waywiser Press
Excerpts
Moon
These hands are so old. I don't know what to think.
They hold their own when I have lost my grip.
They know of ways around that you let slip.
You tremor like water just above the brink.
I watch your face for thoughts, for mood - your face
wizened a moment by movements soft as time.
Look, love, I'll gather what your features mime.
Your eyes reflect a light I cannot place.
Now you are young again. In the low light
your skin-tone has the mother-of-pearl that blurs
the rimless moon in mist. That's the rare sight
you always bring to mind now, though you smile:
and what if that means frost and heavy furs?
You'd lie there still, my love, in all your style.
The Waywiser Press
Silence
Cloud stilted along on two great spokes of light.
And then to enter the room, its shadow cool.
A bowl of roses, the oak-table, white blooms
like slow swans reflected in its pool, plumes
brushed by a moment's breeze. A dusty gold
fizzing a shaft of sun, the mullion's shade
leading across the carpet - shoulders bare,
shadowed by a great silence of cascading hair,
the woman sitting, focused within her mind,
(myself unseen) hands folded in her lap
cupping the darkness loosely like a bird,
book on the floor accordioned.
To find you there,
presence to presence. Cloud happens to change
the light. You turn as though you heard it move.
The Waywiser Press
