About Me

About Me

Gardener, Writer

A former English teacher and bookseller, I now work as a self-employed gardener (National Certificate in Horticulture) and write poetry, plays and essays. My writing credits can be viewed here. I have had two poetry books and two poetry pamphlets published by various publishers. I was a co-translator of Alain-Fournier:Poems (Carcanet). I commissioned and edited Four American Poets (The High Window Press) and was a co-editor at The High Window (2016-2018). My essays can be read at the Fortnightly Review. I enjoy cycling, fell-running, sea swimming, dog-walking, jazz, travel, reading, horticulture and garden design.

26.10.19

Rilke & Mahler


(from Picture, Mirror, World, a collection of ten poems inhabiting and interpreting Rilke's Duino Elegies and Mahler's ten symphonies - to be published in November, 2019 by Calder Valley Poetry)


The Fourths

O trees of life when does your winter come?
We are left standing, 
                              non-migrators, we wither
& flower each year, conflict constant 
as appearance & reality, life in death, 
death in life, world as eternal present.
All the World’s a Stage––Rilke & Mahler players, 
Rilke with his puppets as superior to human beings, 
Mahler's Once Upon a Time … 
sleigh-bells, the hunting boy’s magic horn.
Look, that puppet on a string is Freund Hein,
a skeleton leading the danse macabre
playing solo violin (behind us) in the mirror;
Rilke craving angels to become players,
breathe life into stuffed dolls, good riddance 
to half-empty masks—Mahler’s welcome adagio 
transports our souls across the Jahrhundertwende …
more than the past but not the future …
Mahler states when man, now full of wonder,
asks what all this means, the child is the answer … 
Das Himmlische Leben’, a weightless world  
children are the nearest to, Mahler’s response 
to Rilke’s who shows children for what they are 
is a child’s sunny, saintly, feastly heaven.

Anthony Costello

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