101 Letters: Christopher Middleton

John Clegg introduces our new collection of Middleton's letters

This week’s article is by John Clegg, editor of Christopher Middleton’s 101 Letters, which is published this month. Get 15% off 101 Letters using code JULYBOOKS15 here.

I first read Christopher Middleton on a daybed in Durham, looking out from a full-length window over the Wear in spate. I remember an entire willow tree had detached itself from the bank and drifted past, and I registered the willow and went back to the book, Two Horse Wagon Going By; it began with a metaphor the wrong way round, the concrete described in terms of the abstract, in the poem ‘Old Water Jug’,

Like one of the old ideas

It won’t hold water any more,

I was bowled over by it. Two months later in Deansgate Waterstones I bought his Collected Poems for £25, the most I’d ever paid for a book, and read it and read it again; it was electrifying. I’d been impressed as an undergraduate by Robert Lowell’s semi-critical distinction between ‘the raw and the cooked’ in poetry, but that went out the window with Middleton, whose work so clearly participated wholeheartedly in both. The distinction didn’t make any sense after you’d read him. Lowell made it sound as though you needed to renounce one to get the other - Middleton offered both together, both indispensable, half wild man of the woods, half pernickety wunderkind.

I should have written to him. Instead, as he became my favourite living poet, I realised that I had no idea what he looked like and decided to keep it that way. It was only the day after he died that I saw a picture of him: I’d been sure that he had a beard but the real beard was neater than I’d imagined, the face was stern, kind, puzzled. I knew a little about his life (I’d moved to London, started working in a bookshop, and had met by chance Marius Kociejowski, one of Middleton’s dearest friends: they spoke on the telephone every week, and Marius when he came in would tell me about their conversation). I found out more, speaking with other friends, and finally I ended up editing his letters.

Almost everyone I spoke to whom he was in correspondence with mentioned their delight at receiving a letter from Middleton; they were letters their recipients read and reread, for the quality of the prose, for his attention to the questions they asked or the points they raised, for his gossip, for his enthusiasm - enthusiasm not just for poetry but for music, food, landscape. They are civilised letters, deeply so, touching on everything which is good and important in life. Anyone who enjoys his poetry, translations, or essays will, I believe, appreciate the letters.

But perhaps instead you want to know where to start with the poems. For me, the collections most central to his achievement are his first three books with Carcanet: The Lonely Suppers of W.V. Balloon, Carminalenia, and Two Horse Wagon Going By, the best three-book run of any poet I can think of. Before that, his poems were magnificent but didn’t cohere with one another; it’s hard to believe that the poems in torse 3 and Our Flowers & Nice Bones were written by the same poet. Afterwards, there is no falling off in quality, but perhaps there is less rowdiness and certainly there is less silliness. For me, silliness is one of the great joys of Middleton (I think particularly of that magnificently daft poem Woden Dog), but I can imagine sensible readers who prefer his work post-1990 - and there is still, I promise, a great deal of silliness; not to mention delight, and wisdom, and his unmistakable command of syntax which allows his poems their magnificent range, the sense of walking on stilts while everyone else goes by at their normal height.

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This week’s article is by John Clegg, editor of Christopher Middleton’s 101 Letters, which is published this month.

Get 15% off 101 Letters using code JULYBOOKS15 here.