HESKETH, Phoebe

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Nationality: British. Born: Phoebe Rayner in Preston, Lancashire, 29 January 1909. Education: Preston High School, 1914–16; Dagfield Birkdale School, 1918–24; Cheltenham Ladies' College, Gloucestershire, 1924–26. Family: Married William Aubrey Martin Hesketh in 1931; two sons and one daughter. Career: Woman's Page editor, Bolton Evening News, 1942–45; lecturer, Bolton Women's College, 1967–69; teacher of creative writing, Bolton School, 1976–78. Member, Arts Council Poets Reading Poems and Writers in the Schools panels. Awards: Poetry Society Greenwood prize, 1947, 1966; Arts Council grant, 1965. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1971. Address: 10 The Green, Heath Charnock, Chorley, Lancashire PR6 9JH, England.

Publications

Poetry

Poems. Manchester, Sherratt and Hughes, 1939.

Lean Forward, Spring! London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1948.

No Time for Cowards. London, Heinemann, 1952.

Out of the Dark: New Poems, edited by Richard Church. London, Heinemann, 1954.

Between Wheels and Stars. London, Heinemann, 1956.

The Buttercup Children. London, Hart Davis, 1958.

Prayer for Sun. London, Hart Davis, 1966.

A Song of Sunlight (for children). London, Chatto and Windus, 1974.

Preparing to Leave. London, Enitharmon Press, 1977.

The Eighth Day: Selected Poems 1948–1978. London, Enitharmon Press, 1980.

A Ring of Leaves. Birmingham, Hayloft, 1985.

Over the Brook. Leicester, Taxus Press, 1986.

Netting the Sun: New and Collected Poems. Petersfield, Hampshire, Enitharmon Press, 1989.

Sundowner. London, Enitharmon Press, 1992.

The Leave Train: New and Selected Poems. London, Enitharmon Press, 1994.

A Box of Silver Birch. London, Enitharmon Press, 1997.

Plays

Radio: many documentaries, and the plays One Pair of Eyes and What

Can the Matter Be?, 1979.

Other

My Aunt Edith (biography of Edith Rigby). London, Davies, 1966.

Rivington: The Story of a Village. London, Davies, 1972.

What Can the Matter Be? (autobiography). Penzance, Cornwall, United Writers, 1985.

Rivington: Village of the Mountain Ash. Chorley, Lancashire, Countryside, 1990.

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Manuscript Collection: Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York, Buffalo.

Phoebe Hesketh comments:

I've never belonged to any literary circle and was amazed when Sidgwick and Jackson's poetry reader said they'd like to publish a collection (1948). After the early influences of border ballads, R.L. Stevenson, and de la Mare, I fell, in my teens, under the spell of the romantics, which undoubtedly colored my first published work. Gradually, through rare strokes of fortune and the common blows of fate, I began to cast off the lyrical, romantic garments for sparser, bleaker material. Writing for me now is the process of stripping to the bone—with rare bursts of lyricism. I never seem able to write the poem I want to write: when I get the germ of an idea—as soon as it takes form—the poem gets hold of me and takes me where it wills, not where I will. I never know how a poem is to end. There are longer and longer periods between poems when I'm certain I'll never write again. I can't sustain a poem from "the top half of the brain"; it comes, unbidden, from a deeper level. It is the poem, not I, that achieves the initial creation. The hard labor comes in the next stages of actual composition and revision. I feel with Robert Frost, "A poem may be labored over once it is in being; it may not be labored into being."

(1995) Though I am essentially a lyric poet, influenced by the romantics and, later, the Georgians and poets of the thirties, I have, as critics say, developed in tune with the present age, writing poems that are "stripped to the bone," witnessed by the many magazines in which I appear and my fourteenth collection, published in 1994.

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Some of British poet Phoebe Hesketh's most effective imagery springs from her native northern landscape of "heather-shouldered fells," "grey thin-fingered wind," and "stormy solitudes … where reluctant spring /Retards the leaf." As she says in "Northern Stone,"

   Sap of the sullen moor is blood of my blood.
   The whale-back ridge and whiplash of the wind
   Stripping the branches in a rocking wood—
   All these are of my life-stream, scoured and thinned.

Hesketh's moors are Brontëan. So too is the visionary quest "to find the Unknown through the known," as expressed in many other evocations of this stark and stubborn country, including "Bleasdale: On Fairsnape," "Mountain Top," and "Winter Journey," with its symbolism of a solitary search bereft of consoling certainties. Her depiction of nature is never merely descriptive; its moods and seasons serve always as metaphor to communicate the experience of the human spirit and a pervasive apprehension of "what is hidden and yet near /And intimate as breath." Emily Brontë is again irresistibly recalled in poems like "Revelation," "In Praise of Darkness," and "Vision": "The air grows luminous and light takes hold /Of darkness till my searching eyes are filled, /I see, beyond the Seen, new worlds unfold."

Yet Hesketh also delights in the world of sense: the "beer-bubble stream," the winter sun "muffled in a wool of sullen cloud," the autumn hill where the wind "with iron-fisted blows /Hammers the colours bleeding to the ground." Like Edward Thomas she celebrates the everyday simplicities of rural sights and pursuits—plowing or gathering sticks, coltsfoot on a slag heap, midsummer smoke "pale blue as lupin spires." Animals and birds—the pent-up rage of the solitary bull, the melancholy chestnut mare "with drooping underlip … /Tail-in to the wind," the alertly quivering fox "the colour of last year's beech-leaves," the mallard and her brood surprised by a stoat, the heron "with elegiac wings"—are captured with sharp and vivid immediacy.

The same loving precision informs Hesketh's portraits of country people: village children tumbling out of school, their days "wide open as a daisy to the sun," the classroom dunce grown wise in his hedgerow truancies, an old man "withered as a gaunt sun-wrinkled tree." It is characteristic that several of these human cameos should explore the theme of spiritual riches implicit in physical deprivation. For the blind not only the other senses but also inward vision is miraculously heightened; the cripple's intuition of the intense life in flowers, rooted like himself, enables him "to travel though I may not rise and go." A similar paradox of liberation through captivity is expressed in "Rescue" in the image of the bird finally returning to the falconer: "Thus chained and hooded, I am free at last."

Hesketh's deeply felt conviction that modern man, his life "caged with steel" and "moulded into rods by the machine," has betrayed and desecrated his natural heritage is conveyed with telling impact through poems like "Born between the Wheels," "The Invading Spring," and "No Pause for Death," and her bleak vision of the future in "The Dark Side of the Moon." On all sides she sees "devastation in the unsacred name /Of science mock the cratered human heart." Yet however fiercely "stoned with doubt," her faith ultimately reasserts itself. Walking in the city, she discovers in "one weak spire" of grass in a broken paving stone "strength enough to break /The angled world of concrete."

Seldom unconscious of "the ache of living—beauty spiked with pain" or that "even upon a peak of joy the flint comes piercing through," Hesketh has continued to affirm her hard-won belief in the attainment of inward growth through such griefs as bereavement, love renounced, and loneliness. Her poems depict both the sadness of old age and the spectacle of childhood's unsuspecting innocence over-shadowed by the future. As she declares in "Reflection," "Through temporal loss of light we learn to find /The substance of a Sun that makes no shadow." In later works such as the symbolically titled Preparing to Leave, she has largely forsaken her earlier lyrical cadences and romantic imagery for a spare austerity that echoes her prevailing mood of "wintering in the dark."

—Margaret Willy