AEROPLANES IN CHILDHOOD
Poems by Patrick Hare

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Patrick Hare was born in Kent in 1936 and educated at Ratcliffe College, Leicester, and Downing College, Cambridge. From 1965 he lived in Oxford, taught English at a school there, and had regular exhibitions of landscape paintings in the Playhouse Gallery. Since the mid-sixties he has published poems in a number of periodicals including Country Life, Critical Quarterly, Encounter, English, The Listener, Outposts, The Tablet, and more recently in The Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books, and also in two booklets in the Outposts series. He won the Greenwood Prize in 1975 and one of the runner-up prizes in the 1982 National Poetry Competition.

Several of the poems in this collection derive from people and events of childhood years spent in the village of Two Dales, Derbyshire.

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Cecil

At the high end of the garden, cases
Of padlocked glass creaked under the frost’s touch.
On the wall above a boy called Cecil
Appeared to sprout, since I saw only his
Jersey and strange head like a punished growth.
He ground soft stones, filled jars with ochre dust.
Had not the wall anchored him he would have
Hammered my bones and bottled their dust, too.
The air by the wall shook with threats and laughs,
Glass in the old cases trembled, slugs stopped.

After one grey week of snow he had gone,
Jars and fragments froze fallen in the earth.
I thought upon him in war. Over what
Bristling wall he gesticulated now
Shaking a stone at his young enemy.
In what unexpected rattling reply
He flailed and fell from view like a lopped growth,
His little dust spilling out of its jar.
The sky on the wall is emptied of him,
The creaking frames wink at winter and death.

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AEROPLANES IN CHILDHOOD
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: from a scraper-board drawing of a Derbyshire landscape made by J. A. Hare c. 1944
Publication: AUTUMN 1992 (64 pages laminated paperback)