Glyn Hughes, Memorial Service, Halifax

I regret that I couldn't be at the memorial service for Glyn Hughes today.

Glyn was a fine poet, novelist, painter and loyal friend.

     (The 1991 Christmas card is entitled "Figures entering Paradise"

1990

I have been reading through his poetry and our extensive (30 year) correspondence.

He sent me a letter on February 5, 1981, after his December 1980 visit to Thessaloniki for a poetry reading.

We visited Petralona Cave. In his letter he wrote:

"I managed a poem about Petralona, after all- I'll never forget that experience, it was very wonderful. Altogether it was one of the best trips I've ever had to read poems anywhere...."

The poem was published in the New Statesman on 26.3.1982, and again in his collection "Dancing Out of the Dark Side" (Shoestring Press, 2005). I have several hand-typed versions of the poem, each with minor variations from the published version of Petralona Man, which begins with a note:

Antedating Cro-Magnon Man, he was discovered in a cave in northern Greece, in sight of Mount Olympus.


The poem finishes

The ice melted, earth turned green and bright.
As frightened as he'd been to enter, he came out
and saw across sea and plain
this same view of Mount Olympus,
its vast sunlit saddle a seat of the gods.


If I'd been able to make it to Halifax today, I would have offered to read that poem.

In the same letter of February 1981, he sent me a poem about the death of his mother. She had died while Glyn was in Salonica, but no one had known where to find him, in order to tell him.

"My scarf of fate's now long enough..."

One of Glyn's many great poems with a Greek theme or connection is Lemon Juice. The first verse is not included in the published version (in Dancing out of the Dark Side).


Some never know what their gifts were until the end,
their talents nor their good fortune either
until the end of life. But this I learned:
one small and precious skill I had
of extracting juices from a fruit....


In a different marriage now I show how to do it -
the table-fork moved like a pendulum
across each cheek sliced from a lemon
and the juice trailed over salad for its piquancy


leaving on my hands
a final, cleansing sting of bitterness.


***


The Glyn Hughes I knew was never a bitter man, although he may have had his regrets.

He wrote only a few blog postings. He did have a website. I was always glad to receive a letter, card, poem, water colour sketch or email.

***

A fine review in The Guardian Books of the Year, 26.11.2011, by Simon Armitage:

'Although most people knew him as a novelist and indeed a painter, Glyn Hughes had been quietly publishing poetry since the 60s. A Year in the Bull-Box (Arc Publications) is a poem-sequence detailing the turning of the seasons and the eternal processes of nature from the vantage point of a "bull-box" (that's a stone hut to you and me). It is also a meditation on mortality, written as Hughes succumbed to the cancer that was to take his life earlier this year. In those last twelve months he seemed to have found a grace and contentment that is both humbling and inspiring, and I don't ever remember being as moved by a book of poems.'


"I don't ever remember being as moved by a book of poems."


I concur.