Welcome to
COLIN ROWBOTHAM
The Poet
Relative Sadness & Dissection
Circa 1965
Einstein‘s eyes
were filled with tears
when he heard about Hiroshima.
Mr. Tamihi
had no eyes left
to show his grief.
Dissection
Circa 1965
This rat looks like it is made of marzipan
Soft and neatly packaged in its envelope;
I shake it free.
Fingering the damp, yellow fur, I know
That this first touch is far the worst.
There is a book about it that contains
Everything on a rat, with diagrams
Meticulous, but free from blood
Or all the yellow juices
I will have to pour away.
Now peg it out:
My pins are twisted and the board is hard
But, using force and fracturing its legs,
I manage though
And crucify my rat.
From the crutch to the throat the fur is ripped
Not neatly, not as shown in the diagrams,
But raggedly;
My hacking has revealed the body wall
As a sack that is fat with innards to be torn
By the inquisitive eye
And the hand that strips aside.
Inside this taut, elastic sack is a surprise;
Not the chaos I had thought to find,
No oozing mash; instead of that
A firmly coiled discipline
Of overlapping liver, folded gut;
A neatness that is like a small machine -
And I wonder what it is that has left this rat,
Why a month of probing could not make it go again,
What it is that has disappeared . . .
The bell has gone; it is time to go for lunch.
I fold the rat, replace it in its bag,
Wash from my hands the sweet
Smell of meat and formalin
And go and eat a meat pie afterwards.
So, for four weeks or so, I am told,
I shall continue to dissect this rat;
Like a child
Pulling apart a clock he cannot mend.
Artist
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Biography
This website brings together the poems of Colin Rowbotham, 1949-2000, author of Total Recall, Strange Estates and a posthumous collection, Lost Connections.
Colin is known to many readers for two poems written when he was in his mid-teens, Relative Sadness and Dissection. These have appeared in many collections for school students.
Colin grew up in Manchester, the middle of three sons. He didn’t much like Manchester Grammar School but excelled at both art and literature. He read English at York University, where he discovered LSD and got married for the first time.
His marriage ended; Colin moved to London where he taught Primary School in Hackney, spent a year teaching English in Germany, and moved into teaching English as a foreign language. We married in 1979 and Colin wrote a novel, A Rip in Time, which was never published. After that, he channelled his talent into poetry. He was encouraged and challenged by a poetry circle which included Myra Schneider, Mimi Khalvati and Caroline Price.
Colin adored his kids. We adopted Paula as a baby in 1983. Johnny was born to us in 1986 and died at ten weeks. His story is told in A Year and Others and Lost Connection. Annie was born in 1988.
Always subject to intense mood swings, Colin suffered a psychotic episode in 1996 and had three long hospitalisations for depression before he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in April 2000. Fugue, among his later poems, contains biting accounts of his experience on the psychiatric ward.
The website includes a few of his drawings and paintings and it is hoped EVENTUALLY to include his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Maggie Hindley
Reviews
Myra Schneider
I first met Colin at a poetry workshop in 1981 where I quickly saw that his work was much better anyone else’s and that he was very talented. We both had reservations about the group. After a while we had a chat at a social evening it organized and soon after this we started our own workshop which met monthly in my house. We also exchanged poems separately and wrote comments on each other’s work. Sometimes we discussed poems we had written and poetry in general on the phone.
Colin’s work is highly original and as he was a master of form his writing is wonderfully crafted. He had two collections published during his lifetime: Total Recall and Strange Estates. Early in 2003 John Killick, who published his first collection when he was running Littlewood Press, suggested to me that we co- edited Lost Connections, a new and selected. This book includes the very best of his published and unpublished work.
What is most striking about Colin’s poetry is his precision and utter honesty in conveying painful, complex and ambiguous feelings, also his ability to make rigorous forms support his poems. He knew exactly how to use telling detail. His writing, often ironic, carries a strong emotional undertow. The short poem Christening Gifts is a potent example.
He wrote some striking sequences. Two, in particular, stand out: A Year and Others and Fugue. Each is a tour de force. A Year and Others travels from the September of 1985 to the September of 1986. It makes imaginative use of rhyming and the skilfully controlled poems catch the character of each month as experienced in London and at the same time trace what is happening in Colin’s life. There is a focus on the pregnancy of his wife, Maggie and July is a joyous celebration of his son’s birth. The sequence ends with the second September poem, a poignant elegy, which opens with a heartrending depiction of the baby’s cot-death.
The other sequence, Fugue, is a powerful response to a stay in a mental health ward. The reader is introduced to different characters: doctors, patients including himself and visitors, also practices in the hospital. With its of range of forms and sharp irony this is a stunning poem and also damning indictment of treatment in these units.
Colin was a remarkable poet and his work deserves to endure.
Myra Schneider was a friend to Colin, a great critic and a huge encourager to him. She herself is author of ten poetry collections, the latest of which is Lifting the Sky, published autumn 2018. She has written fiction for young people and three books about personal writing.
