Poet - Frank Redpath

The A63 Revisited

Waterstones in Hull are extremely supportive of Hull & East Riding writers, and carry a stock of many of the books mentioned on this site.

Frank Redpath

Frank Redpath (1927-1990)

When Frank Redpath died in 1990, he left his entire residual estate to the local pub - to buy his mates some drinks.

In honour of this big-hearted man (and by all accounts he was exceptionally so), and because our events always start with the title "100 FREE Pints", from now on we will rename all our events "The 100 FREE Pints Frank Redpath Continuing Memorial", and we are deeply honoured to do so.

RIP - Rest in Pub.

This is what The Rialto says about him.

Frank Redpath was born in Hull: he lived for some years in London, where he worked as a writer for children’s comics, but returned to Hull, where he taught at the College of Further Education.

Frank and John Wakeman (co-founder of The Rialto) were friends, they’d met in London in younger days. Frank was putting together a collection of poems, a follow-up to his first collection To The Village when he died. John took over as editor and How It Turned Out was published, with help from the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust and the, then, Eastern Arts Board, in 1996.

The book has a four page critical introduction by Sean O’Brien who, noting that Frank was a good deal more interested in writing poems than in publicising his existence, says that he hopes it will ‘finally bring him the readership that his fine, skilful, thoughtful poems deserve’. Sean’s conclusion is ‘the knowledge... that there are things only poetry can say, seems to have been Frank Redpath’s reason for writing’. Douglas Dunn calls his work ‘the poetry of Everyman’.

Much of the poetry, with the exception of the remarkable ‘Transit Camp,’ is quiet, mundane, domestic (never, somehow, domesticated). But the questioning, the examining consciousness is always there.

"Miss White"

Cat making nest in squatter's toilet

Chaps of my age, who’ve learnt it’s better to
Stay fast asleep, half-wake at night and go
Fumbling along the landing to the loo;
Don’t switch the light on, sit to have a pee,
Lean on the opened door edge: so,
Try to preserve insensibility.

It never worked: the thin white cat would hear,
Who slept, long-legged and awkward on the stair.

Aloof by day, a stalking elegance
Who rarely purred, but sometimes would bestow
Favour upon my knee and butt my chin,
What I’ll miss now is that surprising ghost
Who’d march in there to join me, climb into
My dropped pyjama trousers, make a nest.

Absurd familiar I named Miss White,
Gone, now, taking your gift: laughter at night.

The abiding image of Frank Redpath in this posthumously published collection of his poems “How it turned out” is of a man trudging up and down The Avenues of Hull (“Eden in the Avenues”), and occasionally venturing into the wilderness of Holderness (“To the Village”), in search of a meaning and purpose to life that he has long resigned himself to not finding. Either it isn’t there or it hasn’t bothered to contact him.

He therefore stands to the left of T.F. Griffin who has trodden those same streets, expecting vain love but considerably more promise and temptation, and quite a distance from Philip Larkin who was bloody angry about the way the world treated him and its occupants, and only to be sedated by writing and his jazz.

Frank Redpath’s poems are about things that barely happen, peons to the layer that lies beneath the mundane:

“- I wonder if all life will come to this –

Sharply recalled for no good reason: puzzling, powerless.”

(“Vacancies”)

as described in:

“…………………………… any train

That smelt of carriages and slowed to meet

Existing silence at a halt, clanked on, some feet,

Then stopped, then made a fuss, then started once again …”

(“Landscapes”)

or:

“Take, for example, that new-founded

Empire of willow-herb and celandine

Along two foundry walls, still in their places …”

(“Unstressed Areas”)

He has compelling signatures.

The most poignant is his snatched snapshots of thoroughly English, restrained, anal socialising with friends - “Night Walks, Tyn Gwndwn”, “New Year Visit”, “Mots d’Escalier”, “Story Time”, “Miss Er”, “An Elder Surprised” – so much felt; so little said.

There are forlorn late-night scenes: “Cornered”, “Eclipse”, “Surviving”,

the starkly-evoked rigmarole of army service: “After Dunkirk”, “Transit Camp”,

the under-the-radar terror of chronic illness: “Marked Changes”, “The Ballad of the Sad Balloon”, “Take One Answer”, “Frontiers”,

sharp insights into passion: “Miss Er”, “Information About Love”, At a Distance”, “Lyric”,

and explicit moments of surrealism: “Knitting”, “Curtains”, beyond the continuous ripple of the other kind.

Frank Redpath was, in fact, a very subtle, complex poet, continuously wrapped in loose ends, and far too modest to admit to his worth. (TR).

.... also "To the Village". There is no known copy available for sale, but Ian Parks has kindly offered to lend us his private copy,so it will be reviewed shortly.