I looked, and suddenly I saw. Saw it all,
crowns, donkey, trumpets, oldies,
the clown.
I can't explain, but I saw. Like
everyone else,
I shouted Hosanna!
It might seem that there is no longer any place for a poet who does not, like Raine or Fanthorpe, cultivate the precise and eloquent detail; the irreplaceable fact rather than the broad generality. After all, ever since Ezra Pound harangued poets with the injunction (never mind that he himself often ignored it) that poetry should be at least as well written as prose, the precept has become a virtual dogma, intoned solemnly in all the writing schools. But as Thwaite demonstrates in his splendid Late Poems, published to mark his 80th birthday last June 23, the most memorable poetry utterly eludes such prescriptions and is triumphantly self-subsistent. Consider "Inheritance" which I quote in its entirety:
These little steps and quivers
Remind me of my mother's,
Yet now they are made by me
In part-senility —
Gestures and postures passed
Across the years, not lost
But, as if imitated
By limbs, and flesh, and features,
With movements and with gestures,
So that what was me
Becomes this parody,
Shuddering and moving on
In jerks, till I have gone
For something else to inhabit
This inherited frame,
The same and not the same,
Inhabit, inherit, give credit
To the little steps and the quiver
Linking me to my mother,
And all that has passed,
And all that is not lost.
