Passages
**A brand-new collection of David Heidenstam’s latest poems.**
**His previous collection, Fault Lines, was chosen for the shelves of the National Poetry Library, London, UK.**
**A brand-new collection of David Heidenstam’s latest poems.**
**His previous collection, Fault Lines, was chosen for the shelves of the National Poetry Library, London, UK.**
David worked very hard to get Passages published, and as it happens managed that shortly before he died. He says in the introduction that some of the poems are reworkings of ones written decades ago, and others are new, although which fall into which category is not clear.
As has been mentioned, David well knew his style had always been unfashionable, although that hardly stopped discerning poetry magazines from choosing to publish his offerings. And he understood the criticism that some of it was either bleak or introspective, or both!
Even so, I always felt that view was overplayed, ignoring the understated lyricism and the universality of meaning and relevance that marked much of his output. And while Passages includes introspection there is also that lyricism and universality. In particular, water and the sea serve to produce those effects.
David was really just a landlubber, but he had twice crewed on sailing yachts across the Atlantic, and readers of his brilliant Tales for my Dog will recall how the sea figures prominently and crucially in some of those short stories. Hinting at what the French writer Romain Rolland called the “oceanic feeling”.
There is also in Passages, perhaps accidentally but appropriately, a touch of the elegiac, as in The Long Road, which mentions the extinction of humanity, yet concludes:
“But life is prodigal,
and the universe a dance
of which our minds are part.
And each death not the end of this;
nor all our deaths the secret
at creation’s heart.”
Words I quoted to finish my eulogy at David’s funeral service in Norwich, and which in part will be on his gravestone.
Mark Heidenstam
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