Between Coincidences and Chance: selected poems  

by Richard England

published by Kite Publishers

Richard England’s great reputation rests as much on his outstanding graphic artistry and his volumes of verse as on his long and successful architectural career.

His new collection of verse, which includes many pieces that are entirely new as well as verse from two gloomily magnificent books from his COVID years – Lazarus and Cain – might perhaps be intended as a farewell by England, artist in verse, judging by the presence of many pieces on the end of life and the author’s travel towards death, and his musing on life after death.

I suspect that this work is a complex supplement to his remarkable Lazarus. His ardent verse dedication to his wife Myriam on the first page of text makes it even more probable that the book is in some ways a profoundly solemn summing up of his long life with the woman he has always much loved.

In his foreword to the book, England says he is investigating the link between poetry (words and silent intervals) and architecture (solid structures with “intermittent spatial voids”).

Poems for him consist of words and “invisible words” between the words, providing the “taste of words” and “the intermittent voids and silence of the pauses”. As for architecture, he quotes Le Corbusier as saying that when a construction touches the heart it is then architecture, but only if it does so.

He sees the present work as being akin to the poetry of great mystics like San Juan de la Cruz or San Francesco d’Assisi, and practically at the end of the book he has a page containing his feeling and knowledge that “poetry is also a form of prayer”.

This can apply not just to this volume but to poems in previous volumes like Tapestries and Sanctuaries and more strongly in his recent works Lazarus and Cain, while in the present volume the mystical lament is predominant.

Stylistically, his pieces, with all the texts printed throughout in capital letters, and often in perpendicular form, sometimes recall the gothic style in architecture when so many churches reached an apogee as prayers and meditations in stone and the statues inside them were often shaped to express devotion and emotion. 

England in his foreword speaks of “journeys in the soul visual and aural”.  His new poems strike the reader perhaps more visually than aurally, though it might be argued that the poems’ aural appeal though rarely melodious, lies in the dignified solemnity of words and verses.

The book has been structured into several groups of verses, each of which has an evocative title and is introduced by a striking full-page image by Damian Darmanin whose name appears on the book’s title page together with England’s name. These richly colourful and image-laden pictures are unlike in tone and style those in England’s previous verse collections and make a deliberate contrast with the frequent spareness of the verse.

Stylistically, his pieces, with all the texts printed throughout in capital letters, and often in perpendicular form, sometimes recall the gothic style in architecture

I should also add that the illustrations preceding the sections titled Hades onwards are much more subdued in colour, and indeed that the illustration introducing the Hades section depicts a huge complex and sinister towered building, grey in hue, opposite which appears Dante’s famous line Lasciate ogni speranza voi che entrate.

While this does not, I am sure, depict life after death as being confined solely to hell, it surely evokes the fear of the poet and indeed of most others, about the fate they will be assigned after life’s end. 

In this section he includes Lazarus’s disturbing monologue first published in the book Lazarus, in which the resurrected man tries to revive his after-death experiences but can do so only in the vaguest fashions. The poet is perhaps sad, disappointed, that the one man to have experienced eternal life before being hauled back to life is unable to give a clear picture of the experience he so briefly went through.

Co-incidence and Chance

The sections before Hades provide a vivid picture of the doubts and fears the poet is experiencing in his late years and some even earlier. I myself am much held by the piece on page 17 in which he asks himself who he was before he became what he is, a person replacing the personality he had not wanted to have at the time, and “Is he now the person he actually wanted to be and not necessarily the man he has become?”

Another piece on page 33 shows a certain anguish at the thought of having aspirations that he never achieved.  The passage of time disturbs him greatly, being something, he has, like the rest of us, been unable to control. In a later piece (page 46) he dolefully contrasts what he calls “the music of the soul” to which he could in the past listen in moments of solitude, with the silence he experiences “in the clamour and clatter” of the life he now lives.

He reserves most of his shortest poems to the last sections, some of them elegant and conveying what he knows he can or will not anymore do, or pithily conveying his deep doubts about his present being and doing. These have epigrammatic pithiness as against the usual verse melody. A good example is “WHAT / WILL / HAPPEN / TOMORROW / IS / ALREADY / BUT / A / MEMORY.”

Those who already have all or some of the very striking earlier England volumes will certainly want to add this volume to their shelves. Most will certainly want to have a remarkable volume in which an aged artist muses on his now hazy past, his swiftly pacing late years, and the eternity that beckons.