Outstripping Gravity
di Michael G.R. Tolkien
Redbeck Press, 2000, pp. 82
Firmato dall’autore
Brossura
Raccolte di poesie di Michael G.R. Tolkien, figlio di Michael H.R. e nipote di J.R.R. Tolkien, autografato.
L'autore
Michael George Reuel Tolkien,
docente, scrittore e poeta è nato a Birmingham l’11 gennaio 1943, da Joan
Griffiths e Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien, secondogenito del professor
J.R.R.Tolkien. Michael G.R. è il primo nipote dell’autore del Signore degli Anelli e, tra nonno e
nipote, vi è stato un rapporto speciale così emerge dalla corposa
corrispondenza tra i due fino al 1973 e che è possibile leggere nel volume di
Christina Scull e Wayne G. Hammond The
J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology (HarperCollins)
così come nelle Lettere curato da Humphrey Carpenter (Bompiani) – e dai
racconti dello stesso Michael G.R.
I ricordi del nonno, si posso
leggere qui:
based on a public talk* requested by The Leicester Writers' Club at College
of Adult Education, Wellington Street - October 19th, 1995.
This essay took shape from two linked occasions:
1.) A talk and discussion in ‘an evening of fantasy’ shared with the
novelist Graham Joyce at the Leicester Adult Education College: 21st Oct.,1997.
2.) A lecture on Tolkien’s Fantasy given at the Swanwick 50th Writers’
Summer School in Derbyshire: 11th Aug.,1998.
Address given to The Tolkien Society at the A.G.M. dinner - Birmingham.
April, 1998.
Themes and emphases in JRR Tolkien’s Essay on Fairy Stories related to Michael
Tolkien’s tale, Rainbow.
Lecture given at The Tolkien Society’s Return of the Ring Celebration: Loughborough
University: August 2012 (Uncut version with appendices
Questo libro va a unirsi agli
altri libri appartenuti e firmati da M.G.R: The
Gay Galliard di Margaret Irwin, The Winter’s Tale di William
Shakespeare e ai suoi libri di poesia Exposures e No Time for Roses.
Libri che trovano posto nella mia
biblioteca accanto ad altri appartenuti e firmati da membri della famiglia
Tolkien: a Tolkien padre (lettere del 1926,
e 1973,
e una lettera con libro del 1970),
ai figli Michael H.R. (Le
avventure di Tom Bombadil, Leo
VI’s Concept of Divine Monarchy.
Illustrated
in a Cave Chapel, e A
History of the Greek World 323-146 B.C.) Priscilla (The
Garden di Sackville-West) e John F.R. (The
Church in the Christian Roman Empire, 2 voll.) e un segnalibro che
la sorella di Michael G.R., regala a suo padre M.H.R. nel 1962.
Note dell'autore
In December 1999 Shoestring Press published Reaching for a Stranger,
which complements the earlier collection, Learning Not to Touch, providing a
bridge to this, his first full-length book.
The four sections of Outstripping Gravity read as entities preoccupied
respectively with rootedness, relationships, notions of escape, the
imponderable. But cross-related parallels and contrasts will be found to draw
the parts into a whole.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of some of these poems have appeared in:
Agenda, Envoi, Iota, Leicester
Poetry Soc. Anthologies '98
and '99, Orbis, Other Poetry, Poetry Nottingham, Poetry Now, Prop, Seam,
Staple, Tabla '98, Tears in the Fence, The Affectionate Punch, The Penniless
Press, The Rialto, The Swansea Review, This Is.
Thanks are due to Shoestring Press for permission to include two poems
from Reaching for a Stranger, and to Tom Tolkien for assembling some of these
poems in publishable form (as Turn of the Tide) for the East Midlands Arts New
Voices Tour (1998)
The author is especially grateful to John Forth and Paul McLoughlin for
their detailed and challenging appraisals and suggestions.
The cover illustration is from a painting by Dorothy Harding in The Book
of Myths by Amy Cruse (Harrap:1925) Thiassi carries off Loki attached to the
stick with which he attacked the disguised storm giant.
Epigraph
'Two errors: first, to take everything literally; secondly, to take
everything spiritually...'
(Blaise Pascal: Pensees:1670)
OUTSTRIPPING GRAVITY
For Robert Turner: 1946-1998
The night of the day I now know you'd died
thousands of miles north of here, I couldn't
face the mad frown of the full tropical moon.
Any moment it would rise from its false-
dawn glow on the rim of cliffs that billow
behind avenues twinkling tier after tier
to exclusive crests.
Had I faced it as I try to in memory of you,
would I have felt anger and confusion
in your spirit, its need to return to the earth
willingly left in perfect turbulence
twenty years to the day after you'd first
shouldered the odds against touching down
from serious bird games?
Not for you that transit jail of ghosts
suspended in their manias and longings,
who once or twice a year stampede towards
us when the tug of waters breaks their bounds.
Only your body dropped, intact but for a bruise
on the nose you said was a nuisance
at icy altitudes.
Hard to believe the morning after the news,
the moon swimming on its back as I paddle
through black sand and the sea's indifference,
till one gull stands its ground then scales sheer
rock without straps, cramp, crackling radio
or freak eddy to crumple the kite that makes it
lighter than air,
circling like you to cherish our screwed-up
searches and the lives your vision changed,
before soaring into the unexplored on thermals
no bird dreamed of but you had practised,
as if for the long cruise from which you may
come burning back to teach us in other ways
that heights depend on scale and there's more
to flight than flyingù.
(pp. 82-83)
