Moonlight, Waterlight and Opal

‘Moonlight, Waterlight and Opal are good
Corinthians, bad friends for a young man,’
Said I, cronelike in my self-motherhood –
Jealous, perhaps, for the more homely clan.

I loved their glitter, like a mirror’s face
Held to my revel with such flattering care.
And when it might have tarnished, with what grace
Moonlight, Waterlight, Opal were not there!

These moonbeam niceties, sweet to undergo,
Have been an austere discipline, the less
Exceptionable in that trifling so
I’ve learned to be content with nothingness.

Punishment Enough

They say that women, in a bombing-raid,
Retire to sleep in brand-new underwear
Lest they be tumbled out of doors, displayed
In shabby garments to the public stare.

You’ve often seen a house, sliced like a cheese,
Displaying its poor secrets – peeling walls
And warping cupboards. Of such tragedies
It is the petty scale that most appals.

When you confess your sins before a parson,
You find it no great effort to disclose
Your crimes of murder, bigamy and arson,
But can you tell him that you pick your nose?

If after death you pay for your misdeeds,
Surely the direst and most just requital
Would be to listen while an angel reads
Before a crowd your endless, mean recital:

Golf scorecards faked, thefts from your mother’s purse …
But why should Doomsday bother with such stuff?
This is the Hell that you already nurse
Within you. You’ve had punishment enough.

Je Suis François …

from François Villon

Francis by name, France’s by birth
(I’ve never had much luck on earth),
At Paris first I op’d my eyes
(It is a hamlet near Pontoise);
And soon my neck, to end the farce,
Must learn how heavy is my arse.
 

This is the first complete edition of the poetry of Norman Cameron (1905–53) to appear in Britain. As Jonathan Barker writes in his introduction, it is ‘the product of the shared transatlantic enthusiasm of Warren Hope and myself for the work of a poet whom we both see as unjustly neglected.’ Cameron has never lacked admirers among his fellow poets – Roy Fuller, Geoffrey Grigson, Robert Graves, among others – but since his skilful, moving and quietly memorable poems have not been reprinted since 1957, they have not reached the wider audience which they deserve.

The growing appetite for his work was anticipated by Warren Hope, whose research for the 1985 American edition brought to light thirteen uncollected poems and some translations from Heine and the Czech poet Nezval. In this edition, the poems are followed by selections from his verse translation of Villon; all his miscellaneous verse translations (except those of Rimbaud, which are published by Anvil in a separate volume); and his juvenilia.