Going out -- The ark among the flags -- Ripon: April 1918 -- Tongues -- The walking mad -- History lesson -- Annunciation -- Memories -- Night thought revisited -- At Orford Ness -- Accismus -- Libya -- Lustration -- Elegy -- Rising -- Waiting in -- On Tharston bridge -- Moon again -- Words of comfort from a bed of pain -- Credo -- Prologue to an unfinished posthumous poem -- And where -- Out of tune -- Creation myth -- i.m. Peter Reading, 1946-2011 -- To Peter Porter in Balmain, N.S.W., from Anthony Thwaite in Cardoso, Provinzia di Lucca, Tuscany -- Runes for Peter -- Vita somnium breve (pt. 2) -- For Peter Porter -- A word of advice (for Peter Scupham at 70) -- Skeltonics for Hugo Williams at Seventy -- The life and death of the pine processionary -- Jubiliee lines -- Six senile senryu -- Remembering George Barker: 2013 -- Revisited (a memory of my mother) -- Inscrutable (a memory of China, 1980) -- The colours of London (after Yoshio Markino, 1911) -- String quartet, New Buckenham Castle -- Signs -- Questions -- The Seventh age -- In the vicinity of the crank-house -- Fernando Lobo -- The line -- Classical text -- Time to go.
Summary:
Now that he is eighty-four, Anthony Thwaite says that Going Out is likely to be the last book of poems he publishes in his lifetime, and that the title is apt. But the words are wistful, even playful, and that is true of some of the book's contents. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends (especially the poet Peter Porter), and draw on memories, hard-won faith, self-questioning. As Michael Frayn has put it, Thwaite 'writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things, the complexity and unceasingness of the world, the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present - and the heroic persistence of our efforts to fix some trace of all this.' -- from back cover.
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