James Kirkup
About James Kirkup | Two poems: The Day Ahead and Poet Acrobat | Three reviews
ISBN 978-1-906700-03-4
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James Kirkup (1918 - 2009) was a prolific poet and translator. His work includes several dozen poetry collections, six volumes of autobiography and over a hundred monographs of original work and translations. He was a skilled writer of haiku and tanka. Marsden Bay is his final collection of new poetry.
James Kirkup was born in South Shields on 23 April 1918 and attended Durham University in Newcastle. He became the UK's first poet-in-residence when he took up the post of Gregory Poetry Fellow at Leeds University from 1950 to 1952.
In 1952 he moved to Gloucestershire and was visiting poet at Bath Academy of Art for the next three years. He then taught in a London grammar school, before leaving the UK in 1956 to live and work in Europe, America and the Far East. He settled in Japan, lecturing in several universities.
Amongst his honours, James Kirkup held the Atlantic Award for Literature from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1950, became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962, won the P.E.N. Club Prize for Poetry in 1965 and was awarded the Scott-Moncrieff Prize for Translation in 1992.
In 1997 he was presented with the Japan Festival Foundation Award and invited by the Emperor to the New Year Poetry Reading at the Palace in Tokyo.
James Kirkup lived in Andorra, until his death in May 2009. Dorothy Fleet, his friend and archivist, said: "He had been getting increasingly frail and had become virtually housebound, but he was still working and creative."
Red Squirrel was thrilled to be able to publish Marsden Bay, a collection of James Kirkup's recent work. As a poet, he had an international reputation, but this final collection renewed his connection with his native North-East.
Publisher Sheila Wakefield adds:
"The world is a lesser place without James Kirkup. Although I've been familiar with his work since I was eleven years old, I was truly honoured to publish James, and privileged to know him. Red Squirrel will continue to publish his work, as he requested."
In December 2009, Red Squirrel also reissued A Bewick Bestiary, James's 1971 collection of poems inspired by and illustrated with Bewick woodcuts. We are also delighted to be able to offer a limited number of copies of James Kirkup's earlier book, Zen Contemplations, at the price of £3 + 50p postage and packing.
Red Squirrel Press is now able to anounce the first annual James Kirkup Memorial Poetry Competition. The closing date is 31 December 2009; winners will be annouced at an event on 23 April 2010 (James Kirkup's birthday) at South Shields Central Library.
Judges for the first competition are Tom Kelly, Terry Kelly and Alistair Robinson. Entry is free, and open to everyone over 17 years old.
The Day Ahead
Born of black night -
the first breath of pink
on dawn clouds is always
perfect, never vulgar,
a Venetian ceiling by Tiepolo.
The grey - scrolled now
with silver-gilt - parts on
a blue so ethereal, so
tranquil, it can hardly be
credited, framed in stronger rose.
Then flocks of white proceed,
slowly mending the pearl, the grey
as the pink, hotter now, and
the blue, less fragile, dissolve
in lowering canopies of black.
Poet Acrobat
To the brassy orchestras of his daily life
He goes through the usual paces high above
non-existent audiences holding their breath
while he keeps wasting his upon the dead paper
white with fright formed by all those upturned masks waiting
for the next death-defying dive - in a silence
deep as a grave's, as he balances his books of
still unwritten words on time's treacherous trapeze
in unspeakable messages of warning, or
wonder, or simply personal worries that he
tries effortlessly to keep to himself - the one self
he has - while the silent human audiences
always hesitating to applaud those efforts
he appears to make so effortless, still sit
gaping at hands outstretched to the Big Top's only
heaven - his one support in life's shrill silences.
"Currently living in Spain's Andorra region but previously resident in America and, for a long period, Japan, James Kirkup has an international reputation as a poet to go with this multi-continent background. And yet his native North-East - he was born in South Shields in 1918 - still pulls.
"In this latest collection he remembers how his father, obsessed with the football pools, sat marking the fixture lists in the South Shields Gazette and Shipping Telegraph with his carpenter's
Flat chisel-point indelible pencil.
"A North-East New Year is also recalled:
And where is that dark-haired
Midnight visitor
Come on the stroke of twelve to bring
A good new year, his trouser pockets
Filled with lumps of coal...
"A strong vein of retrospection runs through the collection. Sometimes it is mixed with introspection, as in these lines prompted by re-reading his early poems:
It is like looking at old
Sepia photographs of childhood
so much innocence, fresh beauty.
Yet within my heart and soul
I know there is still that core of truth
Undefined, inexhaustible well of love
For life and all its manifestations...
"Britain's first-ever poet-in-residence - at Leeds University is 1952 - Kirkup has won numerous poetry prizes and in 1997 he was invited by the Japanese Emperor to read at the palace. How splendid, therefore, that this distinguished poet is still published in the North-East.
Harry Mead, Northern Echo
"James Kirkup is a poet and translator who was born in South Shields in 1918, and now lives in Andorra. He has published several dozen poetry collections and this latest collection is full of jarring vitality and teems with life (and death). In A Last Wish he states: "I often wanted to/ cut somebody's head off/ so as to hear the sound/ of blood streaming/ from the jugular" while in Beijing Flu, "I lie night after night/ listening to the next spasm -/ how musical the strings of phlegm/ the keyboards of catarrh!" We also get poignant little vignettes. In memory of Yamaguchi Takeyoshi concerns a librarian (now deceased); For A Friend Who Died Of AIDS is self-explanatory; and the final brilliant poem, Final Scores is about the poet's father, who he never really got to know and whose memory is constantly evoked by the weekly radio readings of football scores. (The filling in of football coupons was one of the only things that they ever did together). This is a superbly readable collection hanging meat on the bones of the passing of time."
"James Kirkup has published several dozen books of poetry. Now in his 91st year, he has reached the age when, as he puts it, 'on birthdays you get more candles than cake.' 'They seem to take/a whole lifetime to extinguish,' reads a line in his poetry.
"Not surprisingly, there is a gentle autumn beauty to his latest book, Marsden Bay (Red Squirrel Press, £6.99). He writes about young love, fading love and enduring love, about solitude and melancholy, suffering, hope, imagination and the sheer privilege of still being alive.
"It's a book about the loss of memory. In A Graveyard In The Floods, he watches 'ancestral records all mossed/sinking out of sight/beneath this ever-rising/indifferent tide/of forgotten memories/and names, once bright, now vanished.'
"But there are also some wonderful memory poems here, notably Reading Old Poems, For A Friend Who Died Of Aids, Sonnet, the beautiful Midnight Carol Singers and the unbearably painful Final Scores. Perfect. Let's hope that this is not Kirkup's last book.."
Andy Croft, The Morning Star, December 2008