Foreword

by John Cotton, Past Chairman, The Poetry Society

The poetry of Peter Cundall is very much an urban poetry. There is about it the regretful resignation that is the shared experience of the city dweller and in such his poetry expresses the common lot of a sizeable part of contemporary society. A society where we find ourselves ‘trading dreams’. It is a poetry of caution where we are ‘more full of talk than fight’.

In ‘Green Piece’ Peter Cundall expresses precisely the ambivalence of the town dweller towards the life that ‘is all that stands/between us and Mother Nature’. Yet while this is expressed as something lost, something essentially missing, it avoids the sentimental trap and recognises with a clear eye a ‘natural’ world ‘where we can’t see the blood for the trees’.

‘So we didn’t change the world’ the poems say. But what the Hell? There is no chance of ‘extra time’. It is this clarity and steady-eyed uncompromising vision that gives Peter Cundall’s poetry its value. It possesses that Hardy-like quality of unflinchingly looking at things as they are. It is in this that his poetry touches upon essential truths. And the language of the poetry underlines this. It is a language concisely direct, eschewing ornamentation, and as such is suited to the arguments the poems pursue. If you are looking for verbal pyrotechnics, look elsewhere. This is a poetry where feeling counts. In this way it touches upon an essential nerve of our common experience where its pleasure is not the gift ‘but the unwrapping’. Not that there is not verbal playfulness to be encountered:

‘The acceptable
face of Capitalism will
lose its dirty Marx’.

Yet the deep regret expressed by the poems is shot through with very real and redeeming moments of tenderness and insight, as in ‘Proprieties’ and in ‘Old Ladies’ where

‘...it’s not the thing
itself much changed;
only the packaging’

A world where our tristesse can be tempered by small kindnesses.

Who better to illustrate these poems than Jack Yates who over the years has chronicled in his art the urban scene with its regrets, its follies and its pleasures. What better commentary on and underlining of Peter Cundall’s poems could there be?

John Cotton

These poems first appeared in Priapus, The Sunday Times, Kaleidoscope, The Little Man and the Nude, and Fragments.