Collected Poems 1951-2000 Revised Edition

Charles Causley’s Collected Poems 1951-2000 is the sort of book that sits quietly on the shelf while containing half a century of weather, ghosts, schoolrooms, sailors, saints, children, wars, devils, Cornish lanes, hymns, old griefs and sudden little stabs of beauty. Causley was one of those poets who did not need to shout about difficulty in order to be difficult. He could write with nursery-rhyme clarity and then leave something dark standing at the end of the line, looking as though it had been there all along.

This revised edition gathers poems from across his long career, beginning in the post-war years and carrying on into the end of the century, which is a respectable stretch of time for any poet to keep noticing things without becoming unbearable about it. Causley’s world is rooted in Cornwall and childhood, memory and myth, but it is never merely picturesque. The sea is not just scenic. The dead are not just absent. Children are not decorative. Songs are not innocent simply because they rhyme.

There is a lovely irony in Causley’s plainness. His poems often look approachable, even simple, as if they might be safely handed to a schoolroom or read aloud without alarming the furniture. Then the trap closes softly. A line turns. A ghost enters. War breathes through a ballad shape. A child’s voice becomes suddenly ancient. The old forms, the rhymes, the songs and legends, are not quaint packaging; they are the clean little vessels in which he carries sorrow, wonder and unease.

Causley knew how close the folk song is to the graveyard, and how near the nursery can be to the nightmare. His poems move between the everyday and the uncanny with no fuss at all, which is how you know the uncanny has been living there rent-free. Sailors, mothers, schoolchildren, soldiers, biblical figures, local characters and spectral presences pass through the pages, each given enough music to become memorable and enough shadow to avoid becoming cute.

This is a substantial collected volume for readers who like poetry that can be read, reread, spoken aloud, half-remembered, and then suddenly understood years later in a worse light. It is literary without being upholstered, lyrical without being syrupy, accessible without being thin. Causley’s gift is that he can sound traditional while quietly rearranging the emotional furniture behind your back.

For lovers of twentieth-century poetry, Cornish writing, ballads, war poems, folklore, childhood memory, religious imagery, and poems with clear surfaces and deep water underneath, this is an excellent shelf companion. It is the kind of collected poems that may begin as “I’ll just read one” and end with you staring at the wall because a small rhymed thing has behaved with unnecessary accuracy.

As New copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A clean, sharp Picador volume, almost indecently fresh for a book carrying fifty years of ghosts, bells, beaches and human weather. Ready for any poetry shelf that prefers its darkness tuneful and its beauty slightly haunted.

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