Jon Silkin's first book of poems was The Peaceable Kingdom, and, five years after his death, the title of his last announces a constitutional shift: Making a Republic. The great event of Making a Republic is Silkin's finding new love late in life, but this is far from an innocently celebratory book. It probes constantly at the theme of inheritance, particularly British Jewish inheritance.
Frail monoxides from retorts of coke haze
to chambers, and gas. As two men
uncoupling a shield
from a spy-glass watch these lives, who see
themselves watched,
as they gas.
Silkin's best-known poem will always be 'Death of a Son', with its grave closing cadence: "He turned over as if he could be sorry for this /And out of his eyes two great tears rolled, like stones, /And he died". There is grief in Making a Republic too, most memorably in 'Permission to Weep', and even an echo of 'Death of a Son' in a poem about putting a cat to sleep ( " 'Cease killing me.' She looks, and then she dies."). He sees mortality in the mechanics of writing: as he writes in 'Printer', "In what phase of this will I be dying into your creation?" Yet somehow affirmation manages to win out. When Silkin started Stand he tried to sell copies to people in cinema queues. Somewhere in the ideal poetic republic there is a queue round the block to buy this book.
It would not be any injustice to Peter Redgrove to say that he has vaginas on the brain. Auden had his abandoned lead mines, and, as the title of his new collection proclaims, Redgrove has his caverns. He sees caverns everywhere, and where he sees caverns he usually sees vaginas too. A boy in the title poem emerges from the "Yoni" of a rock fissure, a swimmer in 'Tsunami' "dives into one/ of those vaginas", meaning a whirlpool, and in 'Buzz' the boy Redgrove has a deliquescent vision of female sexuality ("cunni-waters") when a woman falls into a puddle. In Anna Livia Plurabelle Joyce wrote of calling "a spate a spate", and throughout The Virgil Caverns Redgrove writes with a headlong, rushing energy. His choice of verse form too, indented free verse tercets, adds to the sense of movement. Redgrove has always been an unabashedly visionary writer, and summons up the past with commanding authority in poems like 'Arrivals', 'Father in Mirror' and 'Mementoes'.
Silkin's cat was a creature of 'indelible grace', but in 'Electricities of the Cat' Redgrove writes with Lawrentian vividness of the lightning speed and thunderous violence lurking beneath that graceful façade ("a kind of blip in the air, /the cat an electrical fit, black spark'). The spider in 'Arrivals', too, highlights Redgrove's gift for describing animals as little parcels of energy and secretive intent. The energies of the natural world are transformative, helping Redgrove to shake the past into the present, the dead world into the living, as he does in so many of these poems. Its uniform style makes The Virgil Caverns less a series of discrete short lyrics than a single long sequence, and it is as such that it demands to be read. Redgrove is 70 this year but this is a youthful and invigorating book.
• David Wheatley is a poet and critic
Making a Republic. By Jon Silkin. Carcanet/Northern House, 84pp.
£6.95 sterling