Ovidian Slips
 

Ovidian Slips 

[Opening]

Ovidian Slips

Ovidian Slips and Nothing More.
        I had come to the lips
of The Sybilline River. What
        had I come to the sybilline river for?

Note
In days of old it was perhaps my ambition to be known as one of The Three Neglected Poets of The Island of Britain --- one who pottered on regardless.

I had spent some years in the 1970's in the mythic Welshstuff, though without mastering the language. Later, with a similar impediment, I returned to the Classical Classics, largely in English poets' translations. I liked Ovid, especially now that I felt clear of the Gravesian/Frazerian preference for a notion of Primordial Ritual to Ovid's supposed urbanity and sophistication---a prejudice that, incidentally, I felt at the time that Ted Hughes was still subject to. Unbeknown to me, at the same time, Faber had commissioned a collection of versions of Ovid from the famed poets of the day, a project that fruited by the main stream.

In making Ovidian Slips I was using a version of the Mabinogi of Pwyll Prince of Dyfed that I'd concocted back in the Aboriginal Dream-Time of the 1970's, involving Celtic ideas of battle or encounter at the ford, in living memory of adolescent senses of initiation, but now, in the early 1990's, I let it twine both latinate and newly personal, yet fay, in shockingly recent ways.

The poem might be set at Lumb Falls, Crimsworth Dene, Horsebridge Clough.

The Lucent School, the last of the sequence of four poems, might be thought to allude to my peers as poets. On the other hand, I don't expect a repeat of two miraculous happenstances when I found myself bathing in a river-hole with three bonny lasses, and all of us in sunshine with our nakedness: once at Three Shire Head, down in The Peak, and once at Washfold Lumb, up Turvin Brook, Cragg Vale.

I could name each set of women in poetic declamation if I weren't so tongue-tied and rooted like a flag at each wet spot.

I do like a tuberous rush, with iris flowers.

[Close: [from The Lucent School]]

The pool was fully solipsism, but so full
of others some of whom were sporting far
more nakedly than I, who shades his eyes
to find in some particulars
of ocular response a love all over.
With the splash of an unqualified explosion
and a shrilling larynx
    I had waded in.