David Morley on M R Peacocke Peterloo Poets ... has been championing both the barely visible and the established poet for nearly 30 years. For half that time MR Peacocke has been a gold standard for readers of its list (another of its luminaries is UA Fanthorpe). Peacocke's Marginal Land (1988) and Selves (1995) were fine collections, distinguished by the fact that nearly all the poems had been worked to such a degree that every piece held up, many poems were memorable, and some were terrifying in their honesty. This was healthy poetry, not that interested in reception, but necessary because its severe honesty was rather avant-garde in contrast to the post-modern/urban poetry pouring down at that time. MR Peacocke's Speaking of the Dead is also entirely convincing, and even more thorough in its determination to be honest. Her work is emblematic of contemporary British poetry and its publishing, not least because the excellence of her work is coupled with a neglect of her reputation outside poetry circles. Peacocke lives on a hill farm among those beautiful but wild fells you will have seen flanking the M6 in Cumbria. She runs the place as a smallholding. As such she has a powerful feel not only for beasts ("an old dog was waving / his shadow tail and barking a raspy / rundown bark") and natural history ("Worms that lay out in a soft dusk / are block-cold this morning. Frost / has burned them") but also for the briefness of everything perceived in our lifetimes. Life and time are hard-won glimpses to be valued and held in writing, yet knowing this work will also disappear: "to tread our names in blemished / brilliant drifts; because the time we have / is shrinking away like snow". Of course, many writers have been on this terminal moraine before; but I know few contemporary British poets other than Peacocke who can write with such perception of the under-dramatised ordinariness of mortality. Nature kills without value; we choose to impose a sometimes shallow value on that process through our need for sentiment or our needless terror of death. Peacocke, instead, writes with what Osip Mandelstam called "the science of saying goodbye": The moment when you say, Not many more. Without pain or anger, something gives, like a wrapping of ancient linen or leather that is spent; and your eye can gaze into a lost eye and feel no rancour, because now it comprehends how the first subtle binding was made. Your freed hands stretch, unswaddled limbs, and you laugh, learning the air and rain. For a while these dead may search, fumbling after lost authority. Dismiss them? They fade of themselves, carrying no weight, their language of command obsolescent. Peacocke's language is shriven, precise and terribly open to the dead, to absence. What alerts the poet, and what fascinates me in her poetry, are those moments of change in which things die into one another without loss of essential energy or force. It's a question of perception. In "Late Snow" she writes of: An end. Or a beginning. Snow had fallen again and covered the old dredge and blackened mush with a gleaming pelt; but high up there in the sycamore top, Thaw Thaw, the rooks cried, sentinel by ruined nests. This is Larkin's trees crying to "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh" and Shakespeare's "bare, ruin'd choirs". It also calls to our need for a concise vocabulary for the merits of being alive. Peacocke shares this precision of language with the late American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Both have a bristly perceptive clarity for minutiae, and for the wry double-take on detail that can be deadly as well as funny. Writing of an unidentified seaside town where "you can glimpse Scotland when the cloud lifts": ... someone's troubled to work on the notice until it advises Please die carefully ... Two dogs with experienced grey muzzles are laughing over something ... This is a place for men and miniature men, for talk of tides catches records goals. The women sit. Older sitters have good big teeth ... Meg Peacocke was born in 1930. One imagines she doesn't do a lot of sitting about on her high-contoured farm. Maybe you have to live long and work as hard to write this well and as clearly. Maybe a smallholding high on the fell is the place to create these self-sufficient, alert combinations of words "that quest, voice, check, run / like hounds hunting alone". Her control of feeling is superb, and the plain knowledge that lies behind these poems, most of it simply unspoken, is a mark of her respect for the reader. I predict her reputation, like that of Elizabeth Bishop, is likely to increase greatly with time, and I trust that it happens within her lifetime. It's discrimination and boldness that allow presses such as Peterloo to hold a poet of Peacocke's talent to the light. With others, it has broken the snow for new poetry presses that already show immense promise such as Heaventree, Worple and Arrowhead. We should show the same respect to small and specialist publishers as we do to the best regional theatres, galleries or orchestras. They are also proud starvelings; they operate on a fare of energy and belief. Feed them by buying their books, beginning with this one. http://books.guardian.co.uk Steven Waling on M R Peacocke “I had an interesting weekend. I discovered a poet I've taken no notice of before, for two reasons. One, she's a Peterloo poet, and they tend to be rather pedestrian, anecdotal and dull, frankly. Second was the name: Meg Peacocke. Stupid prejudice no doubt, but it did give a picture of a rather dowdy middle-class middle-aged lady poet who wrote about cats. Well, I give myself a slap on the wrist. She's not only better than that, but she's actually rather fine. Her latest collection - under the "more serious sounding" name of MR Peacocke (or lower-case m r peacocke as it has it on the cover) - is called Speaking of the Dead. And yes, there is a strong vein of elegy through the poems I've read so far; but not nostalgia, which is a kind of arthritis of the soul a lot of writers suffer from. Instead, there's a concision that's almost condensare and a metaphysical depth, wrapped up in the same ordinary language that for so many poets is a limitation. The language is simple but the poems aren't. I can't quote from her yet, because I only read a few of her poems in the bookshop. But I might well go back and buy. This, of course, brings up all kinds of issues about those old divisions between avant-garde and mainstream. There's a comment on the back by Stephen Knight to the effect that even when she's being experimental, she's still down-to-earth; but I suspect the reverse is also true.â€� Brando’s Hat, http://stevenwaling.blogspot.com M R Peacocke on M R Peacocke Born 1930; to Budleigh at the outbreak of war; to boarding school (Cheltenham Ladies' College, for my sins!) 1942. St. Anne's College, Oxford, 1948; I read English, but spent more time on music, mostly singing in small choirs. Played oboe (and later, French horn) rather badly. Some teaching, and then I took off to Ankara, Turkey, where I taught English; met my husband (Gerald Peacocke) there. We went on to the Sudan for three years and then back to England - Canterbury, rural Kent, and eventually Cambridge. We had two sons and two daughters. (There are eight grandchildren now.) 1980 I trained in Birmingham as a counsellor. Worked in the children's cancer unit at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, 1981 - 84. Then I left everything to live alone on a small hill farm in Cumbria, which I worked as a smallholding till 2001. I still live there: walk a lot, grow trees, write, tutor in poetry and do a bit of counselling. I had written poetry on and off all my life, encouraged as a child by my father, but didn't allow myself to take it seriously till I came to Cumbria. Then I won a few good prizes and found a publisher (Peterloo Poets, Cornwall) who have brought out three collections. Review by Mark Mawson and interview with the poet by Sally Festing in The Stanza 32