Poema en Inglés de White

8/11/2019 Poema en Ingls de White

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Letters from Gourgounel

London, Jonathan Cape, 1966.

Extract from the Prologue

After five years at university (with a break of isolation in between, at Munich) I left

Scotland where I knew I would live more and more by reaction only, and went to Paris.

But after two years in that city, I found reaction again setting in, and removed a few

miles out of it to the relative quietude of Meudon, where I lived in a house surrounded

by a garden of pear trees, apple trees, plum trees, peach trees, cherry trees, and began to

feel and live and express the kind of life I wanted.

In the same year that I removed out of Paris (a chambre de bonne on the seventh

floor, Avenue de Saxe) to Meudon (a room in that villa), I went on a spring trip to theSouth. I had heard that houses could be bought cheap in the Ardche, and I had got

together some extra cash by doing translations and several other odd jobs. I left from the

Gare de Lyon and arrived one April morning in Montlimar. There I hired a bicycle for

one franc fifty a day (a new tyre thrown in) and set out for this Ardche I had already

heard and read so much about. Michelet, for example, in his book The People, writes

in the month of May 1844, travelling from Nmes to Le Puy, I crossed the Ardche,that harsh country where man has created everything. Nature had made it so awful Itsounded like one of those desert places the old hermits were always looking for, akind of Thebaid. That was what I wanted.

ExtractsI go to sleep to the sound of thunder, and I wake to the sound of thunder. The sky is

grey and black, the forests are green, dark green, into black.

I no longer need to wash. I just take a step out of the house in the mornings and stand

naked for a while in the rain. Then I come back into the house, rub myself down, and

pull my chair to the mectraand begin my meditations. It is usually still half-dark and I

can hardly see. Sometimes I light a candle. Sometimes I simply wait till enough light

comes.

This morning there was a woodpecker at the mulberry trees, around five oclock. Ido not know if it is a recognized sign but it seemed to me he was calling the thunder.

The Tanargue replied to him just a little later.

The whole Cvennes is whirling with storms.
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Extract from the chapter Cimmerian Notes

There was a shirt-seller in Valgorge the next Sunday, and I needed a shirt. He had his

van parked, and his stall laid out beside it. Shirts he had, all sizes, pink, blue and grey.No one was buying a shirt till I stepped up.What size do you think? I asked the shirt-man. Two, said he, the shirts being marked from one to four. I off with the shirt I waswearing, and tried the two, but it was on the tight side. So I off with it, and tried the

three, which was fine. Which colour had been for me a matter of hesitation. Tempted by

the pink, and then fingering the blue, I finally took the grey. And I went on down

Valgorge with my new shirt on my back and the old one in my hand.

At the caf Rieu, a man appeared with an accordion, and shouted to me :

Do you want to dance?I dont know how, I said and went on dancing down the road. I was just a little

sorry for the man with the accordion.

Im not an organized dancer, I dont know any special steps, just the old pedestrianone-two, one-two, but there is a dancing god within me, and I have a dancing soul.

Sometimes it feels more like a lurch than a dance, but its a movement anyway,vigorous and sprightly whereas souls in general are flaccid and flat, or hard as nails. Ima dancer, all right, but youll never get me in a ballroom, I dont like to follow the band,I am wary even of an accordionist. What do I dance to ?lets say, the music of theworld. Not the spheres, no, just the world, the common-or-garden world.

Extract from the chapter The Music of the World

Press

Kenneth White introduces himself to his own countrymen in prose an verse,simultaneously. [] His is a new voice, distinctive and resonant, and although afterseveral readings I am still not sure of his destination, I approve of his direction. He

takes life and literature seriously. His aim is Truth or bust. []When he is writing as a gossipy reporter about life in the primitive Ardche he is first-

class, and you wish he would do more of it. But he has a deeper purpose. [] There isan acknowledged influence of Whitman, unacknowledged influences or echoes of Blake

and D. H. Lawrence, and a strong reminder of the Jefferies of The Story of my Heart. In

another way, Mr White reminds me of Colin Wilson, though they are very unlike except

in this deadpan confidence which they share. Wilson is the intellectual side of the coin,

White the poetic. What they share is this confident bright ring, this quality of being

outside the main-stream (or muddy-eddy) of contemporary classifications. Goodluck ! []So. Here are the first-fruits of a writer who may amount to something sizeable. At twice

the length, with twice the trivia and twice the documentation,Letters from Gourgounel

would have rivalledRing of Bright Waterin popularity (and surpassed it in profundity).

As it stands, it is a fascinating curiosity of literature, and may portend much more.

Maurice Wiggin, The Sunday Times

This little book on the Ardche reminds one of Travels with a Donkey. White doesnthave Stevensons smoothness, thank God, and he seems more genuinely eccentric.

There is an absurd hymn to mushroom hunting which would make an excellent schoolanthology piece. [] And as an old-fashioned study of man in communion with Nature,


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la Richard Jefferies,Letters from Gourgounelhas an almost hilarious irrelevance to

our space age. Why go to the moon, Mr White asks, when you can worship her,

standing buck naked in any field ?

John Montague, The Guardian

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Wild Coal

Paris, Club des tudiants dAnglais de la Sorbonne, 1963.

Introduction by Francis Scarfe, poet and director of the British Institute in Paris

This is a testimony, not a testimonial, but in the case of poems like Kenneth Whitesin which the whole stress is on the inward truth of men and things, one is immediately

face to face with the man. Since I first met Kenneth White when he was a brittle

sharpeyed student, I have been increasingly impressed by his ferocious honesty. He hasthat wilfulness, sense of purpose and of destiny which is an essential element in the

character of a poet or in poetry itself. He compels, irritates and excites the mind in much

the same way as D. H. Lawrence, and his poems have all that living freshness (or what

D. H. L. called starkness), of Lawrences. Nobody can read these poems without beingunder the spell of their naked vision and it is important to notice that the vision is

equally clean and original in his landscapes and townscapes. Another refreshing quality

is their energy which is both intellectual and nervous. The gift that White is probably

least aware of because it is entirely natural in his faultless sense of rhythm. I do not find

here any of those platitudes of rhythm or tone which are so common today : the poetsversification (if he has any) is as instinctive as his touch on the world. It would perhaps

be an impertinence to analyse such qualities in an introduction of this kind. It is moreimportant to point out especially to readers in France that poetry is passing through a

very bad phase in Britain. So far as Scottish poets are concerned and I have read themallI do not see one who approaches Whites honesty, clarity and seriousness. As forEnglish poetry, in the past ten years or so it has become much too cerebral and artificial.

I do not hesitate to say that a book like Kenneth Whites which contains at least a dozenpoems which can teach something to other writers ("Coffin Close" is a masterpiece), not

only stands against the current but may help to turn it and bring poetry back to what it

ought to be. And this is because he is more than intellectual. There is no split in his

personality, no distance between what he knows and what he feels, or between what he

is and what he writes.

Extracts

Morning Walk

It was a cold slow-moving mist

clotted round the sun, clinging

to the small white sun, and the earth

was alone and lonely, and a great bird

harshly squawked from the heronry

as the boy walked under the beeches

seeing the pale-blue shells

and the moist piles of mouldering leaves.
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Poem of the Whi te Hare

A thought that leaped out like a hare

over the moor, from behind a great rock

oh, it was a white leaping hare, andthe heather was a fine red world

for its joyance, just that day on the moor

a grey day marching on the winds

into winter, a day for a sparkling sea

three miles away in the trough of the islands

a day high up at the end of the year

a silence to break your heart, oh

the white hare leaping, see the white hare.

Winter Evening

Sun a beetroot thrown in mud

six oclock winter in Dumbarton Road

oatcakes and milk I buy at the dairy

as cars spit their way towards the ferry

the lampstands caught in beginning frost

send out whiskers of light that are lost

in the electric bonfires of the passing trams

while bored-looking women lug their prams

to family tea. I could go home at once and eat

but I wait till the rush is over in the street

and feel that deep loneliness cover my mind

now the moon has appeared like a turnip rind

above the cranes and the gables. The Caspar Hauser song

trails in my conscience as I trudge along

stopping at the corner to drink the milk

while a cat spick and span in genteel silk

black and with inaccessible eyes surveys with disdain

my enterprise decides he need not remain

and slips off into a close without a backward look

I think I shall make an excursion to Pollock

for I cannot return to my spurious homewhere all day Ive written of Jonahs tomb


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I shall take my trip on the trams and hope

that my spirits will be not too ashamed to elope

with the first image tossed from the citys rusty womb.

Song of the Coffi n Close

Have you heard of the Coffin Close, boys

have you heard of the Coffin Close

its one of lifes rare joys, boysit smells like a summer rose

yes, it smells like a summer rose

Have you ever climbed up the stair, boys

have you ever climbed up the stairwhere the lavvy-pan overflows, boys

and gives you a whiff of rotten air

yes, a whiff of rotten air

Have you ever fallen down the stair, boys

have you ever fallen down the stair

and buried your sensitive nose, boys

in the filth and muck which is there

yes, the filth and muck which is there

Have you ever come up at night, boys

have you ever come up at nigh

when the burner throws its rays, boys

you see many a ghastly sight

yes, many a ghastly sight

Have you ever seen Bill McNeice, boys

have you ever seen Bill McNeice

lying dead to the world, boys

and a cat being sick in his face

yes, a cat being sick in his face

Have you ever seen Mary Cape, boys

have you ever seen Mary Cape

she often hangs there on the stairs, boys

coughing her insides up

yes, coughing her insides up

You all know the Coffin Close, boys

you all know the Coffin Close

if I bother you all with my noise, boys

its all for a very good causeyes, its all for a very good cause


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I live in the Coffin Close, boys

I live in the Coffin Close

very soon theyll be taking meout, boysand my head will come after my toes

yes, my head will come after my toes.

Press

Wild Coal waspublished in France a few years ago in a limited edition. The appearance

of this volume should establish Mr. White as one of the two or three finest poets of his

generation. It would be possible to trace in these poems Mr. Whites literary ancestrypossible, but superfluous. For what matters in his poetry is his own response to the

visible world, and to his experience of life, his own vision of what it means to be a

human being in the slums of Glasgow and in the invigorating landscapes and seascapes

which are the source of his most impressive poetic images. Mr White is a poet of

winter, of ice, frost, snow, fog, red berries, gulls in frozen skies. His world is one of

harsh purity, or arrogant coldness.John Press,Punch

The Cold Wind of Dawn

London, Jonathan Cape, 1966.

Authors presentation

The Cold Wind of Dawn, my first book of poetry to be published in English, is

divided into three parts : Virgin Territory, Zone, Naked Ground. The middle partis urban and communitarian, more specifically, anarcho-nihilistic. The first and third

part are concerned with a larger, more-than-human context. The first part represents an

entry into this context, the third part a radicalisation of that initial contact.

The landscape is recognizably Scottish : a lowland and highland Scotland seen as

though (which is geologically the case), the ice-sheet had disappeared only recently,leaving a territory of deep fractures, abrupt nonconformities, acute oulines. The

townscape is that of an industrial civilisation on the wane and a humanity alienated,

stunted, bruised and brutalised.

Back of all that, there is an emergent mindscape, the attempt to move into another

dimension. If a religious-apocalyptical vocabulary is still used, it is as combustion, not

as faith. The impulse is to get back through to a beginning (dawn) with fresh energyand without illusions (cold wind), a whole energy-field.

This book is the first expression of that energy-field.

Extracts

Near Wi nter
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Let winter now come

ox-laden sky

cold spume of rivers

nakedness of moors

mist in the forestlet winter now come

the spoor of animals

blue in melting snow

the sun polished hard

birds and berries

bronzen shadow

water icy and thin

black crust of earth

oar glint of stone

let winter now come

seaweed covers the moon

wind harrows the firth

the islands glint in fog

I fish in cold waters

my boat black as tar

the horned rowlocks

creak to the oar

let winter now come.

New Moon

These walls have grown sullen, and I

lodged between a dairy and an antique shop

between a station and a library, read

no future, live no present, sick

with a bellyful of memory, my skull

like an old tin can that rattles, yet

the sun will move northwards, rising

in the frozen heavens, and the day

will lengthen. New at the monthsbeginning, the moon, on the fifteenth night

being close to earth and very full

will raise the tides like whales along the coast.

Song about the uselessness of life

We were brought up hale and heartythough our mothers breast was clarty


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and a whisky dribble sometimes touched our lips

we were dragged up by the ears

through a maze of ragged years

and our staff of life was Tally fish and chips

When the nation came to call uswe were fourteen and quite gallus

and we thought the future held the promised land

but the City quickly taught us

that a mans own work and thought iswhat the sparrows to the eagle, to the mighty ocean, sand

We were there to aid production

meant to work without objection

and the prize they held before us was : a wage

just to keep ourselves alive

so the happy few might thriveand eat the cake of righteousness within their gilded cage

So the slaved enslave the slaves

since we first dwelt in the caves

and Societys a hellish rigmaroleyou may think that the Creator

planned it all when on the batter

and may turn your arse sky-blue for the saving of your Soul

You may try to get together

call the other man your brother

and the venture may seem hopeful for a spell

you may form associations

you may draw up regulations

but your brothers son will twist them all to hell

About the problem that remains

we have often beat our brains :

is it worth while hanging on then after all ?

there must be some solution

to societys pollutionif you find it, dont forget to give the call.

The Cold Wind of Dawn (sections 2, 3, 4)

2.

Over the great world the cold has come

the voice of the great companions is dumb

the old moon follows its path through the darkthe sun of our days is red and stark


10/26

there is sorrow in turning ones mind awayI am lonely as the wind that opens the day

3.The bone of my hand the bone of my skull

and the sharp cry of the arctic gull

I cried in rage for a tongue of fire

I travel through winter with that desire

hold the boat calmly on her course

till the wind of dawn springs into force

4.

The wave in the darkness pulses slowa floating buoy sheds a momentary glow

the sky is filled with unseen flight

in the east appears a ragged light

I hear a low wind over the firth

and the day bursts out from its night of birth.

Press

Many of the poems in The Cold Wind of Dawnwere printed in Wild Coalwhich was

published in France a few years ago in a limited edition. [] White's later poems aremore intense and concentrated than his earlier verse, more savage in their delineation of

the world of nature, more impassioned and uncompromising in their celebration of

mans unity with created things. []Mr. White is a poet of rare quality.

John Press,Punch

Kenneth Whites voice is one of affirmation and joy; the same exultation that is foundin Burns, Blake, Whitman and Lawrence ; a passionate longing to communicate through

a poetry that is not removed from the layman, too many of whom were bored or scared

away from poetry long ago. []Whites first volume of poems, The Cold Wind of Dawnis a remarkable achievement byany standards. [] Many of his poems vibrate with an organic energy that is far too rarea force in much contemporary verse.

Graham Ackroyd,Akros

The wind of the title poem whistles through this book, not always gaily by any means

but often with intensity and passion, necessary procreators of genuine poetry.

Kenneth Whites first collection of poems to be published in England (following two inFrance) reveals a young poet acutely aware of himself, in the Wordsworthian tradition,

in relation to his environmentof grim Glasgow streets, but chiefly of the elemental

world of storm, sea, and stars, a world of woods and the wild wind crying through them.[]


11/26

After so much of the stone for bread sort of writing today, wilfully contrived to swellthe trivial into significance, here is what many of us need : refreshment for the soul.

Phoebe Hesketh, The World of Books

The poems are all of a piece with the prose : high-flying if not high-flown, vibrant with

stress. Again the Whitman influence is strong. He sees himself big, dares all. Hebelieves in himself ; there is no trace of irony, humour or self-deprecation. He may be

wise ; the world tends to take writers at their own valuation, and his innocent arrogance

is refreshing, if open to parody. Shrewdly he says : Personal force can work wonders;without it talent is nothing. [] I hope his mastery of language will grow, for hisambition demands, and deserves, no less than mastery.

Maurice Wiggin, The Sunday Times

The Most Difficult Area (El camino ms difcil)

London, Cape Goliard, 1968.


This is the book of a crisis. A crisis concerning both identity (the nature of the self)

and intentionality (what can be done with existence other than just reproduction of the

same, or the production of worse).

Yeats spoke of the fascination of the difficult, but turned, like so many others, that

fascination into a mystery. Mallarm grappled more with the reality of that difficulty (Iam no longer that Stphane you know, but a faculty of the universe), then veeredaway from it into ultra-aesthetics.

Like so many problems, the solution can only be found in a larger field with different

co-ordinates. This radical break with literature and poetry as commonly understoodmeant for me also a break with Great Britain, the whole Anglo-Saxon context seeming

to me totally beside the point.This, the second of my books of poems to be published in my homeland, was also

the last I was to publish there for twenty years.

Extracts

The Wandering Jew(On a picture inThe Book of Hours of Anne de Bretagne)

Comes out of the white wastes

at four oclock in the afternoon maybesome time in the XVth century or eternity

wrapped in a darblue cloak of grief(like Ceres when she searched for Proserpine)
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12/26

a dog there scowling at his frozen heels

looking for refuge at this French house

where the servants are busy with food and firewood

(what chance has he ?) his foot is on the stair

(perhaps they will not know him ? have forgotten ?

it is so long ago : it would be good to stayperhaps this house needs a secretary ?) He enters

next day along the hedges, a blizzard blowing.

The Study at Cul ross

The lower room is full of objects

historys ordered bric-a-bracin which visitors inherently bored

show intelligent interest

The upper room is still empty

there (in that small cartesian cell)

remains the merest chance

for the essential to happen.

Theory

1.

The white cell almost in darkness

outside : rocks in abruption, sea-

silence wavering. It is there

2.

Rough shape, clifted, that kwartz

chaos-given, ashored, tide-washed and

in the good space gazed-at

3.

Castthe first stone ; only thethrust and the not-silver, not-white, not-crystal

splashno reading in the widening circles

4.

Great reason grasped, the twelve-worded

orator walks on the shingle

with quiet eyes.

The Crab Nebula


13/26

In this lighted chaos I

live and move and have my being

in this mass of incandescence

the birthplace of a world perhaps

at least of a dancing star

in this lighted chaos I

no longer think or feel but am

involved in this swirling matter

the form I was no longer holding me

the form I will be not even imagined.

Press

Whites poems are not easy to write about. Often, they demand contemplation andsilence rather than review and thesis. Its not that theyre difficult to understand or that

they need a great deal of academic exegesis. They are mostly simple. They are alsoloaded. They are loaded with learning and also with that lovely lightness (if lightness is

a load) that is close to the Tao and to the old poetry of China and Japan.

Sean Dunne,Poetry Ireland Review, n 29.

Man may be pitiable, ugly, tormented, lostbut White stubbornly refuses, in his latestvolume, The Most Difficult Area, to accept momentary literary fashions and keeps on

writing with an eye on man contemplating his condition honestly in poems that often

oscillate between violently expressionist representation and a clarity that strikes as true

and hard as knuckle-bones, and clear, precise poems that perhaps owe something to the

Chinese.

Graham Ackroyd,Akros

The Bird Path

Collected longer poemMainstream Publishing, Edinburgh and London, 1989.


This book (collected longer poems 1964-1988) marked my return to English-language publishing.

Along with the longer poems of my earlier books, The Cold Wind of Dawnand The

Most difficult Area, it gathered in poems from books that, after my break with Britain in

1967, had appeared (in bilingual editions) in Paris, books such asLe Grand Rivage,Mahamudra, Atlantica, Les Rives du silence.
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Its title refers in the first instance to a movement of migration across the territories.

But, on a more intellectual level, the term the bird path has a long tradition behind it,going back to shamanism, where the bird path represents the path of the spirit fromthe personal and the social to the cosmic, and present in the meditative context of

Chinese Chan where it indicates the movement of a mind free of simple identity,

simple location and simple direction.I made the connection beween these outlandish" notions and the local context by a

reference to an old Celtic text, the Story of Branwen: You will be a long time on theroad, but in Harddlach you will be rejoycing seven white years and the birds of Riannon

singing to you over the water.

Extracts

I nterpretations of a Twisted Pine

1.

I started off

by growing uplike everybody else

2.

Then I took

a bend to the south

an inclination east

a prolongation north

and a sharp turn west

3.

Now, approaching me

be prepared for grotesquerie

there are more than pines in my philosophy

4.

Yes, Im something more than a pineIm a cosmological sign

5.

Im idiomaticIm idiosyncratic

Im pre-socratic

6.

Im maybe Chinese too


15/26

like Li Po, Tu Fu

and Mr Chuang-tzu

7.

I live quietlybut storms visit me

I do a metaphysical dance

at the heart of existence

8.

The branches of my brain

are alive to sun and rain

my forest mind

is in tune with the wind

9.

Behold the mad pine

stark on the sky-line.

I n the Nashvak Night

A summer night on the Labrador

in the twilight watching countless birds

settled and asleep

only a few still on the wingthat passing flight of Sabine Gulls

is this a death

or the prelude to another life ?

the question is all too heavy

breenges into this rippling silence

like a bull into china

better simply to waittaking pleasure in the twilight

tongues of water

tongues of water from the Labrador

running up the bays and fiords

lapping against the archaean rocks

will say the poem beyond the questioning

the birds are asleep

geese, duck, brant, deal, plover

all are asleepas though this land were one great sanctuary


16/26

a place to rest

on the long trail of the migrations

a place to rest

here in the stillness

halfway between the Old World and the New

moving in deeper

ever deeper

into a world

that is neither old nor new

a world

neither old nor new

on the bird path

feeling it out

dawn comes

with the cry of the wild goose.

Press

The Bird Pathis the first substantial edition to appear in its original English. []Heaney, who knows about cadence, is quoted on the dust-jacket as findingBird Path

erudite, elemental, big and bold the kind of poetry MacDiarmid hoped for. The

collections scale and sustained pitch of world-music certainly emulates the JoyceanMacDiarmid ofA Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. But while MacDiarmid [] came torecognise without curing his writings besetting deficiency of rhythmic pulse, Whiteabounds in rhythmic inventions. His book contains even more of the kind of poetry W.

C. Williams wanted, [] and unlike most of Williams disciples on both sides of theAtlantic (unlike, indeed, most poets I can think of) White seems to have found his

mature style and voice quite independently of any master. The living poet he most

closely resembles and parallels is another who is disgracefully neglected here, Gary

Snyder. Both aspire to, and with a wonderful frequency and ease inhabit, that air of

fresh breath and perpetual greening of the spirit that might just save us yet. To switch

from the banalities of so-called leaders and headlines to White in full flight is to levitate

in pure delight.

Michael Horovitz, The Spectator

One word used of White by several admirers is unclassifiable. [] But to seek to gobeyond classification is not to be unclassifiable, and White belongs clearly in a

tradition, mainly American, which includes writers like Emerson, Whitman, Henry

Miller and Gary Snyder. These people, like White, have been influenced by Eastern

mystical ideas, without ceasing to belong in the Western world or be aware of science

and the problems of modern life. All, in different ways, tend to repudiate much of

mainstream Euro-American literature ; they wish to live with both sensual and

intellectual intensity []. White is not unclassifiable: he belongs, at his best, very


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impressively, in a great modern tradition.

D. M. Black, Chapman,n 65.

Handbook for the Diamond Country

Collected shorter poemsMainstream Publishing, Edinburgh and London, 1990.

Authors preface

These poems were written around the world, from Scotland out.

The earliest are from The Cold Wind of Dawn(London, 1966) and The Most Difficult

Area(London, 1968). Thereafter, they come from the French bilingual volume Terre de

Diamant (Paris, 1983). And there are quite a few hitherto uncollected.

In his free meditation on a phrase from Heraclitus, Heidegger says this : It is long,the road that is most necessary for our thought. It leads to that simplicity which is what

must be thought of under the name of logos. There are still very few signs around toshow us this road.What Im presenting here are maybe a few signs arising from one body-minds

attempt to follow that road.

Extracts

A H igh Blue Day on Scalpay

This is the summit of contemplation, and

no art can touch it

blue, so blue, the far-out archipelago

and the sea shimmering, shimmeringno art can touch it, the mind can only

try to become attuned to it

to become quiet, and space itself out, to

become open and still, unworlded

knowing itself in the diamond country, in

the ultimate unlettered light.

Meditant

It was the cold talk of the gulls he likedand rain whispering at the western window
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long days, long nights

moving in

to what was always nameless

(though the walls were hung with maps

and below him

lay a library of science)

Outside

at the end of that dark winter

he saw blue smoke, green waters

as hed never seen them beforethey were enough

a black row busy on a branch

made him laugh aloud

the shape of the slightest leaf

entertained his mind

his intellectdanced among satisfactory words.

Report to Er igena

"Labour" suddenly seems exactly right

hard slogging, no facility

like learning the basis of a grammar

working your way into unknown logic

its earth in labour makes for diamond

here on this nameless shore, knowing the work

who are the workers ? who the travellers ?

reality workswonders ? travel-travail

the old signs come out of the morning

the skull fills and empties with the tide

energy gathered, the first act

ragged coast, rugged, rough windsthe language bears us, bares us

rock province, rootsand lights.

A Snowy Morning in Montreal

Some poems have no title

This title has no poem

its all out there.


19/26

Press

Open form does not mean you cannot be spare and concise, any more than W. C.Williams no ideas but in things means no ideas at all; two of the numerousexperimental propositions proved in the course of WhitesHandbook for the DiamondCountry. He composes music as sharp, sweet, subtle and immaculate as Heaneys, or

anyones: the lip-lip-lipping/of grey water on white sand; Field after field/myeyes cant see/enough of this whiteness. He hascomposed an original fleet-footedbody of work so transcendently far from the corrosive careerism of London-Oxbridge

and transatlantic literary hierarchies as to make them seem marginal as well as grubby.

Michael Horovitz, The Financial Times

The diamond country is not so much another country as another state or space ofmind. And as one reads through theHandbookone notices that the direction is always

towards the white, towards the removal of the stain of the self, until the thing spokenof seems to speak of itself without any intermediary. One is in the territory of the haiku,

of which it has been written A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand

beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean The haiku attempts to abolishthe boundary between geographical space and mental space and thus enlarges the

territory of being.

Many of the poems in theHandbookare haiku, or sequences of haiku, although

Kenneth White ignores the stricter demands of the form, wisely considering that the

strict counting of syllables is, in English, an eccentricity. In compensation he makes

subtle use of assonance and alliteration and places the line endings with an eye to both

the sensual and the sensible.

Douglas Sealy,Irish Times.

In Britain, poetry is still seen as one of the decorative arts, a verbal equivalent of

ornaments on the mantelpiece. [] More radical commentators see poetry in much thesame fashion. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the

point is to change it, said Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach, and the left wing hastended to take the same attitude to poetry. [] White challenges this view. The verytitle of his Collected Shorter poemsHandbook for the Diamond Countryhas a

practical ring, as if it were a kind of prospectors guidebook to regions of the mind. []Each poem of the book contains moments of perception that leads to a new way of

responding to whats around us, a new feeling of identification and respect. Thecumulative result of that is a new attitude and a different set of priorities.

Hugh Macpherson, Scottish Book Collector

Open World

Collected Poems 1960-2000Edinburgh, Polygon, 2003.
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Publishers presentation

Kenneth White has long enjoyed an eminent international reputation and is now

increasingly recognised in his own land as one of Scotlands finest poets and mostcreative thinkers.

This book is a landmark. A collection spanning four decades of work includes poemsthat range from early city ballads marked by the humour and wit of a strong folk

tradition to the open sequences of an Atlantic Atlas.White uses a wide spectrum of forms, in a highly distintive way, from the sharp

phenomenology, the lucidity and translucence of the short diamond poems, to thepolyphony of the longer itinerary-poems that explore landscape and mindscape.

But what is most striking is the ongoing force. Poetry here reaches out to the highest

dimensions of philosophical contemplation and spiritual realisation.

Extracts

Finisterra

orThe logic of Lannion Bay

It's in the shape of the headlands

it's in the way the wave

breaks along the shoreline

(with a slow motionshpoofagainst the rocks)

it's in the variant light

it's in the clear silence of this April morning

up at Yaudet

which was Roman groundbefore it yielded

to the syntax of Christianity

you can watch the Lguer

(which recalls the Loire

as well as all other Ligurian waters)

running down to its estuary

in brilliant bluegreen ripples

thereafter

to walk along the coastal path

from, say, Goaslagorn valley

to the beach of Pors Mabo

is to move between foam and flourish

wondering what whiteness

you'll ever be able to add to those whitenesses

the points one has in mind

are Dourven

(off it, the wreck of the Azalea)

Bihit

hiding to view the isle of Milo(to whom Brandan may have paid a friendly visit)


21/26

and way far off

lost in the light and spray

the land's end, Roscoff

heather, thorn and pine

gorse and whinrush down

to curving, sandy beaches

and it's a large arc of land

indicating the Atlantic

lies extended before you

years ago, I remember

when first I came here

sitting with my back to a pine

above Pors Mabo

reading Pyrrhoin Estienne's XVIth century version :

Is this work seriousor is it just full of noise ?I'll think it over.What's it all about?I don't get the drift of your question.What have you defined?I never define. What do you do, then? I just keep looking.

looking at this place

looking into this place

and at the same time

into the circuits of my mind

in Summer dawns

in golden autumn evenings

in chill winter mists

something like those old taoists

who founded the Academy of Gulls(a bird and an eye, a bird and an eye :

ideogram for monastery)

an academy without walls

active contemplation : no ideals, no idols

and no over-hasty

over-personal, over-poetical projections

rather long-ranging recognitions

in space and in time

as one who has studiedthe grammar of granite


22/26

I have walked here

as one who would equate

landscape with mindscape

I have walked here

as one who loves

the ways and the waves of silenceI have walked here

who knows

maybe in years to come

some time after the aftermath

a curious tourist from outer space

will walk along this selfsame path

and be aware of my ghost :

still looking out at the lines

still looking into the light.

At St Matthews Point

When Matthew fared out from Galilee

he was making vaguely for the Celtic Sea

over there, at the end of the land

he met old Enoch, with a book in his hand

since he himself had written a book

Matthew was eager to have a look

its all about wind and rock and wavehow they become and how they behave

what about God and love and sinwhat salvation is there in a fishs fin?

old Enoch, he made no reply

just kept gazing at sea and sky

Matthew thought, this is something new

Ill stick around for a year or two.

Black Sea LetterRecalling Ovid

Another Sarmatian winter setting in

goats blethering in what passes for a garden

rain falling when it isnt poisoned arrows

(how many summers since I smelled a Roman rose !)eyes bleary, frosty weather on my chin


23/26

why bother writing yet another book ?

well, it keeps my mind off stupid folk

the scratching of my stilus on the page

is music to my ears and cools my rage

I know now Ill be here until I croak

so, heres a man will listen to the snowand let the hours come, long and slow

such distance and such silence, all I wish

salt fish is now my favorite dish

I was a famous Roman poet, years ago.

Press

Open WorldThe Collected Poems 1960-2000emerges as a testimony to the writersprolific output and provides a resting point, a place in which to take stock, assess and

reassess the work as a single stream, enabling the full arc of the journey or trajectory tobe experienced. []Open Worldcomes at a time when Whites work is emerging, massively andluminously, from years of relative obscurity in his homeland. One reason for this

obscurity is, perhaps, that his poetry resists assimilation into any of the predominant

post-war factions in Scottish poetry or intellectualism ; it is mercifully free of any

obvious local inheritance. [] It seems to serve the Earth but has no master.Peter Urpeth, Northings,Highlands and Islands Arts Journal

Kenneth White has described his three-fold approach to writing using the image of an

arrow : his essays are the feathers, giving direction ; his way-books are the shaft,

dynamic exploration of the world ; and his poems are the arrow-head, the point of it all.The publication of Open Worldmarks forty years of productive arrow-head honing.

This wonderful, highly recommended poetry collection is well named, offering a

prescription for a wide-open engagement with the world around us. [] Whites poemsabound with fresh air, salt air, gulls and gannets, but also many pointers to open-minded

thinkers, such as Eckhart, Duns Scotus, Pelagius, Han Shan, Basho, and Schopenhauer.

[] White convincingly encourages us to get out into the wild world, engage with thechaos of it all, love it more, and converse with what is intelligentfrom grey heron toHeraclitus, from boulder to Buddha. As he says : The world is always more open thanwe think.

Padmakara,Dharma Life(England)

Latitudes & Longitudes

Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies.

University of Aberdeen, 2013.
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Editor's presentation

Kenneth White's work has always been global in scale and local in concentration and in

this new book of poems, his first since his collected poems Open World(2003), he

travels out from Scotland across Europe to traverse the Americas and Asia before

coming back to Armorica, the northern French coast where he now has his home.Populated by intellectual nomads like himself, from the medieval philosopher Erigena

by way of David Hume to Edmund Husserl,Latitudes & Longitudescharts alternative

paths throught he cultural inheritance of both West and East, in order to recover a

fundamental earth-poetics.

Hailed by many as Scotland's most important poet-thinker since Hugh MacDiarmid,

and by many others as one of the most significant writers working anywhere today,

Kenneth White's poetry co-ordinates the intensity of immediate responsiveness to the

natural world with a perspective on universal history which mounts a powerful

challenge to the values of modernity.

ExtractsMackenzies Report

I, Mackenzie, Alexander

gather these notes together

in the midst of the American wilderness

to tell of our expectation

state and progress

in the course

of that memorable journey we made

from Fort Chipewyan to the Pacific Ocean

with myself, McKay and a dog

were ten French Canadians

(the best canoe-men you can get

except of course for Eskimos and Indians)

all aboard a crazy boat

loaded to the gunwhale

with 3000 pounds of heterogeneous material

day after day we spent

paddling, poling, towinglugging packages over portages :

tedious and toilsome labourbut what splendid beauty everywhere !

tall cliffs, red and grey

a multitude of rapids and cascades

birch, cedar, hemlock, willow

lofty blue mountains crowned with snow

doing trade with the Beaver People

the Rocky Mountain bands

the Salmon Folklearning how they talk


25/26

looking into their ways of living

in those extreme northern lands

to the armchair geographers

this definitive message :

having travelled the roadI can say with no fear of reproach

there is no fabulous North-West passage

leading to some Asia indolent and rich

only a wan and silent water

a seaweed-covered beach

involved in fog

inhabited by seal and otter

I entrust this letter

to a battered old rum-cask

which I hereby deliverthis June 27th, 1793

to the waters of the Unnamed River

thinking that, who knows

one day someone in the future

will discover it with eyes full of wonder.

Letter from the Indian Ocean

Banana leaves

flap indolently at the window

elegant vanilla

climbs inch by inch up a palm

an emeraldgreen lizard

flickers over grey granite boulders

tweetering sunbirds

flit from one flower to another

white-tailed phaetons

cross and recross the sky

lying open on the table

an album of paleo-geography

a notice on the door says

Gone away to Gondwana.

A Monk in Tibet


26/26

Up in these highlands

that look down over

the criss-cross roads of Eurasia

seen from the outside

this country of ours is hard and harsh :icy ridges, cold scrub, salt-encrusted wastes

but here in this stony cell at Sa-Skya

between the Kunlun and the Himalaya

I contemplate the morning clouds

wrap myself in the snow of meditation

and walk for hours on end

in the pure land of the liberated mind.

On the Road to San Remo

Sunset on the Ligurian coast

and a wild wind blowing from the West

Nietzsche holds his head in Genoa

while Shelley drowns in the tide off La Spezia

the man at the wheel turns round and says

Italys in a hell of state these days

sure, I answer, Ive heard the storybut there are still some signs of the paradiso terrestre

a full moon was rising in the sky

like the premise of a lonely philosophy.

Poema en Inglés de White

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