David Constantine

Sometimes we are fortunate enough to encounter, at just the right young and impressionable age, an influential teacher or educator in our lives. If we are unlucky, this person may turn out to be a Miss Jean Brodie. I was lucky. For this mentor in my own life was David Constantine - university lecturer, German scholar, translator and poet. This man transformed the way I thought about texts and felt about literature. Or perhaps he (in the true sense of the word 'educate' - from the Latin 'educare', meaning 'to bring out') awoke and germinated what was already within. His influence remains strongly with me even now, and I will always be grateful for it. His lectures and seminars on Goethe, on Kleist, on Hölderlin, on Büchner, on Keats, on Romantic poetry, were a revelation. Perhaps many of us have a similar story?

Among poetry circles Constantine is now very well known. He's a mainstay of the Bloodaxe poetry catalogue, and is currently working on a translation of Faust Part Two for Penguin Books (Part One was published in 2004 and is definitive). I've recently read his superb translation of another work by Goethe, Elective Affinities, that startlingly cynical early 19th century novel about order and chaos, fate and free will. Bloodaxe published his Collected Poems in 2004 and this is one of my many favourite poems from it. You can easily trace his homage to Wordsworth's Prelude in this wonderful poem.

Estuarine

Big river giving up what made it

It. No fighting visible

But all the colossal loss of self

Flat silent under a hemisphere

Of stillness. Then I'd only been

Three or four years on the dry land

Still wrapped in native wonder. I recall

This much: a level the lowest possible above

The sea and it

Was greening gold, sheep safely grazed, the lark

And curlew signed it differently, water

Holed and threaded it so that it blinked between

More dry than wet, more wet than dry,

An earth dissolving into steppingtufts and mud, the water

Salting. How I loved

My game of pondering a route

Dryfoot and intricate to the farthest out. I thought myself

Out there where the wavering decided on

The sea, the river,

Biggest imaginable, lapsed without any trace

And on the brink of guessing at a place

Of nowhere, nothing, no one evermore

I reached up for love's

Always waiting to be reached for hand.

I would also strongly recommend Constantine's book of short stories Under The Dam (2005).