Corrections and Additions to
Collected Poems of Mervyn Peake
edited by R. W. Maslen

and published by Carcanet in 2008

As Rob Maslen does not have a site of his own, he suggested that Peake STUDIES might host a page for corrections and additions to the volume of Peake’s Collected Poems which he edited for Carcanet in 2008. So here it is!

Corrections

Page 149: The title and first line of ‘This field is dim with sheaves’ should read ‘This field is dun with sheaves’.

Page 174: The first line of ‘Love , I Had Thought It Rocklike’ should read quite simply, ‘I had thought it rocklike’.

Additions

Had he known of them, Rob would have quoted (in the Notes, p.243) Peake’s comments that appeared on the dustwrapper of the first edition of The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb:

 ‘Whilst its central characters, the sailor and the child, are symbolic, this was not consciously thought out (as Mr Peake has confirmed). Asked if he could give a meaning to the poem he has stated that it shows “man’s continuing hopefulness in adversity,” and in this way he is as a child, being ever re-born. “Water, fire and air are elements of this poem, and I have endeavoured to use them as being an integral part of the War. Apart from the brutality of war, there is the tenderness in the unexpected circumstances, and this I have tried to express in the sailor’s attitude to the child.”’

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