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Stephen Romer’s first collection, Idols, was published in 1986, and three collections later, Set Thy Love in Order: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2017. He has been active as a translator from the French (Decadent Tales, Paul Valéry, Yves Bonnefoy and Gilles Ortlieb notably). A book of essays, Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism was published this year. He teaches English at the University of Tours, and French translation at Brasenose College, Oxford.
A copy of Stephen’s latest collection, Set Thy Love in Order, New & Selected Poems, can be purchased by following the link.
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Stephen writes:
The editor of High Window kindly invites me to present some poems that ‘represent the best of me’… a task fraught with difficulty ! I had thought, originally, to republish a series of poems composed on and around the Loire, a river whose rhythms I have the good fortune to live by for much of the year. These poems, much possessed by solitude, were I now see premonitory of what many of us experienced during the strange months of lockdown, which seem already distant. But in the event I have chosen only one Loire poem here, ‘Curfew’, and that was written in the middle of the pandemic.
For the rest I have chosen recent, unpublished work, for enough vanity remains in the middle-ageing poet to think that the newest work must be the most trenchant or urgent, and therefore, so the logic goes, representative.
I write few poems now—it is experience, again, perhaps imposes restraint. Certainly the pressure of the occasion must be considerable if verse is to be committed. Also I have been engaged in writing critical prose, and the effort has undoubtedly shrunk the creative source—though I hope not forever.
What follows is simply an observation—or a growing conviction—
and is in no way a formal ‘presentation’ of the poems which must speak for themselves. Recently I read an account of Seamus Heaney’s Letters, and the reviewer quoted a passage in which the poet defends, with passion, the existence of poetry as essentially the private art. At one point Heaney declares ‘I am not a Brechtian’, by which he means that, for him, poetry can never be a collective exercise or project. I am not a Brechtian either.
In the current state of public affairs, it seems more than ever that one is bruised by every encounter with the media (not to mention the malebolge of social media), where the red ugly angry snout of political or cultural ideology is thrust into one’s space. This is especially the case in the realm of the so-called culture wars, which seem so frequently an assault on reason, and where one appears forced to take sides over some insoluble moral question at all times of the day or night. More than ever then, in this overheated context, poetry seems to be a refuge for nuance, complexity, ambivalence. A space to explore difficult matters or situations, and to feel (as well as think) them through. Bonnefoy called poetry the ‘antidote to ideology’.
If any of these poems are political I would argue that they are so only incidentally, so to speak, and post-facto. As I say, I write little now, and if I can hold on to just one thing, under immense pressure, it is this freedom : to write without political designs upon my reader, however well-intentioned such designs may be. I would have it no other way, ever.
SR
May, 2024.
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Stephen Romer: Four Poems
CURFEW
Breaking curfew—the first of our lifetime—
the village shuttered at the hinge of the year,
footfall amplified on the bitter track,
the moon rode high chill empty,
a zenith of judgement
over the bruised planet.
(Earlier, though, at dusk,
she was immense, yellow, companionable,
I could say jocund.)
But in the wee hours when we walked
she had withdrawn,
the great river also hid herself in frost.
(1.1.2021)
DROUGHT
Arrived near evening, it was silent,
not a stonefall to break the trance.
It was still there, the outer walls, but
nothing breathed in your eden.
There had been music,
heart stopping dissonance
resolved, as I journeyed below the rocky crest.
Then the wind rose and the sky went dark.
All the burning world
held up its multitudinous mouths
to the storm, passing and passed,
before a tantalus, now a memory, but lest
I forget, lest I forget, there was sweet water
teeming ankle-deep in the street !
UNDER CANIGOU
(for Sonia and Michelle, the gauche mystique)
Liberty guides us
on the narrow path
her ponytail a torch
for the groaning peoples.
Someone has dropped
a bead of pomegranate,
I imagined Kore rapt
in the act of eating
in this shaded place
of wild asparagus,
and taken underground
to ruction the surface.
For a moment I am dazed,
it seems the rocks are glinting, it is
mica, I cannot grasp
this universal flashing
it is mica in the rocks
the rocks glitter,
Theotokos is in her
canopy of rock
mica is mined
by the children of Jharkand
in Bihar state,
the newfound
torrent surges
below the towering cork-oak,
it is early spring
the sufferings do not end
the mica flashes
I try to hold this knowledge
in my head.
FROM THE SAFE ROOM
1
Russian chess
is what I call your particular
metaphysical inquiry
excruciatingly drawn out
where the stakes are always
all or nothing, heaven or hell
or purgatory : the co-ordinates
are set by you but they shift or
gang up, they turn in a circle
or return as karma, they are
swallowed up, superseded,
the temple of the occult,
the momentary stay, the holding
position, the room, the refuge
on the glacier of your inquiry,
regularly burned and razed.
It’s a mirror game
in which you are forever
cornering yourself, an equation
that never quite comes out
or does but the result is wrong ,
a rubik cube with a fault,
a bone you’ve chewed
a thousand times, a sheer bloody
El Capitan where a handhold
can vanish in an aeon or in a
minute, and the next you text me
to say, having shifted an
integer, changed a quantity,
you are risen like a hawk
from the morning’s despair, and
as of now (as of now) you are
healed, the basis of your
system is solid, and once again
I believe you.
2
There was calm tonight on our mountain of the heart,
a momentary stay, and you spoke at length
from the safe room. Images from Webb
showing the early universe suggested
nothing very much, if not the random.
We blinked a moment in the ancient light.
Too random anyway for occult system
but where you stay is bliss, this warm summer night,
settled in the thought of the Zero Sum.
You spoke at length from the safe room,
your distant station, remote as the future
after the expansion and the slowing down, it felt
we were galaxies moving out
my head coming slowly away.
3
Walking back to my hotel with the garish violet strip
past the newbuilds and Aldi on the way to the
municipal dump on the dank February road
under the fixed stars fresh from a doorstep confession
of difficulty and a straitening of life to its spartan
unfurnished minimum the grey schlep you tramped
for many months in the prison yard of your thought :
how power destroys all and indifference is absolute
I thought I could lie out and die under the fixed stars
lie out on the cold grey dogshit grass just there and then
as others must lie cold in fragile tents in shuddering
fear tonight : but go further look closer in the shit grass
to the pullulation of indifferent matter and up again
to the fixed stars and how then I saw you transfigured
like the night transfigured standing out in the singularity
of your courage and your solitary exploration all of us
pitched here thrown here and seeking meanings in the
fixed stars or the indifference of matter the shadow cast
by your muffled figure as when we passed in the gloom
and almost went our ways unseeing then a double take
and extraordinary it seemed how then we crossed over and
embraced in the gathering dark with the sharpest
thinnest rind of the moon malevolent gleam beneath its eyelid
or the new moon cradling the old moon in its lap.
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The High Window 