Dream Anatomies: The Obscured Labyrinth of Peter Redgrove
Among the whispering corridors of 20th-century British verse, the name Peter Redgrove resounds faintly like footsteps echoing in a fenside chapel—distant, tremorous, oddly amphibious. To call Redgrove obscure might be misleading; he was decorated with numerous honors, including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1996. Yet for all his output—over thirty collections of poetry—his work swims beneath the tidy surface of British literary consciousness, more encountered in the misty margins of anthologies than in mainstream syllabi.
Redgrove was born in Kingston upon Thames in 1932, and educated at Taunton School before gaining admission to Queen’s College, Cambridge. It was here he first mingled with the likes of Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, bucolic electrics vibrating across common room tables. But where Hughes would roam into pagan brutalisms and Gunn into metrical transgressions, Redgrove charted subtler, inner geographies, his concerns metaphysical rather than mythic, alchemical rather than academic.
Much of Redgrove’s lifelong poetic preoccupation lies in the interstice of science and magic, emotion and transformation. He shared an enduring interest in Jungian psychoanalysis and the nature of the feminine—not in service of trendy abstraction, but in pursuit of an almost devotional attunement to hidden biological rhythms. His interest in menstruation, waters, and the uterus earned his work both ridicule and radical praise. Notably, his collection “The Moon Disposes” (1987) like much of his oeuvre, performs an obstetric excavation of language—a gnostic birthing through syllabary[1].
Consider the lines from “The Force and the Scythe”:
_“There lies the garden where the fruit hangs low,
Not by gravity, but by aching.”_
This peculiar blend of botanical sensuality and metaphysical inquiry recurs across Redgrove’s corpus. In later years, he would co-author psychological and feminist texts (notably with Penelope Shuttle, his wife and fellow poet), such as “The Wise Wound” (1978), which explores menstruation as both a spiritual and biological portal. To the modern literary technician, these entwining of science and mysticism may seem unpalatable, but there remains an utter sincerity in Redgrove’s explorations—a man working not to modernise the poetic vessel, but to cauldronize it.
His poetic logic is not governed by narratives but by metamorphoses. Stan Smith notes that Redgrove approaches language as an “alembic to transmute the actual into the dream-real”[2], never being content to represent the world, but rather desirous to re-operate its metaphysical machinery. For example, in “Doctor Faust’s Sea-Spiral Spirit” (1972), Redgrove writes:
_“Language is the key-hole through which I see
the rooms of the abandoned body…
Its seaweed-choked fireplace, its moth-eaten sheets.”_
Each image operates both materially and metaphorically—as if the language feels its way through a body already half-inhabited by ocean and echo. There is seldom conventional progression; instead, we receive a succession of internal weather patterns. The poem becomes a set of organs, each one humming with delirious function.
Perhaps no entry into Redgrove’s labyrinth is more apt than his poem “The Hermaphrodite Album,” from his 1993 collection, “The Harper”:
_“Now I dream I am each of my lovers, dream I am
the bright muscle sliding glasswards
in the female mirror, the genital like an ear
listening to the whole body’s sea.”_
What emerges here is not merely a queering of perspective, but a radical empathy, a bodily synthesis, collapsing binaries at the level of perception. In this moment, the poem no longer attempts to represent a self, but to diagram an organism in metamorphosis—a poetic embodiment of what Gilles Deleuze might term “becoming-woman”, where identity melds with environment[3].
These are not simply metaphors. Redgrove believed in poetry’s literal power to become what it names. The dynamic acts within his language—the verbal enchantment of sprouting, resurfacing, unfurling—work on the reader like a psycho-botanical rite. To read Redgrove is to place oneself within the hermetic chamber of an ancient dreammaker.
In a world tilting increasingly toward metrics and binaries, those incantatory evocations of hormonal cycles and dreaming teeth provide unsettling clarity. Redgrove does not permit the cerebral interference of categorization. He teaches us – perhaps more than most moderns – that poetry can become a para-biology, an alternate anatomy through which feeling and thinking are not discrete operations, but tessellating modes of existence.
To reflect on Redgrove is also to acknowledge our diminishing preparedness to encounter the cosmos internally. To quote from “Assembling a Ghost” (1976):
_“I built her from my bleeding.
Not from flesh, but from the rhythm in the flesh.”_
What is the rhythm in the flesh? What did Redgrove mean when he wrote that “poetry is a biochemical process in the imaginative bloodstream”? As readers, this is the question from which a thousand rivulets spring. Consider how the modern mind resists such ideas—it prefers quantifiable machines, or at worst, fashionable sentiments about truth. But Redgrove’s work defies this economy of literalism. His poetics arrive not as ideology, but as act—without pretension, and so more dangerous.
His ultimate philosophical gesture lies in the porosity of matter and spirit; he insists that transformation is intrinsic to being. Not metaphorical transformation as Western poetics typically practice, but ontological transmutation, like the shedding of skin or the fermentation of seed.
As I write this, sitting in a room softened by nocturnal fog and lichen-slick walls, I recall one final fragment, from “A Man of Feeling”:
_“To feel is to be assigned
a new internal continent,
with rivers made not of water but of scent.”_
This, reader, is his legacy—a poetics of scent, sensation, and the luminous grime of embodiment. Redgrove did not merely write about feelings; he rewired what it meant to feel.
And in such rewiring, in such tentative, hormonal chantings, perhaps lies philosophy’s neglected sister: a path not of dialectics, but of fragrance and tide, of “seeing through touch.” Yes, perhaps Peter Redgrove was not writing poetry. Perhaps he was assembling us—ghost by ghost—back into our original dream-language.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, poetic-biochemistry, biology
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[1] Shuttle, Penelope & Redgrove, Peter. “The Wise Wound.” Gollancz, 1978. A pioneering work intertwining myth, medicine, and reproductive psychology.
[2] Smith, Stan. “Redgrove and the Alchemical Word.” Essays in Criticism, Vol. 45, No. 2 (1995): pp. 138–156.
[3] Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” (trans. Brian Massumi), University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Of particular relevance is the concept of “becoming-woman” as a destabilization of dominant subject positions.