Conjurors: Poems

In Conjurors, a major poet is revealed for the first time. Julian Orde (1917- 74) published only in magazines during her lifetime. A friend of Stevie Smith and an intimate of Dylan Thomas and W.S. Graham, she was one of those ’peripheral figures’ who turns out to be a centre in her own right. Her evolving worlds and changing landscapes as a writer come alive in these substantial, unexpected poems. Her lyrical surrealism is prophetic and retains its charge: The speckled water rippled into minnows, Of worms and turf smelt all the fish pale morning, Earth pushed up its smell of worms through grass and wet, Through sodden leaf, mushroom and winking frog. I, on the bank, lived quick as breathing frog, Its lungs and mine puffed out September’s thin Morning, sallow and silver, fish-filled, the sky in a river. Wherever I go in the guilty years there still Goes my innocence with me [...] William Empson celebrated her. ’Wonder at nature, wonder at all experience, is her note, and she gets a great deal of variety into it; also she has a beautiful ear, and a supply of unforced humour.’

James Keery lives in Culcheth with his wife Julie and teaches English in Wigan. He has published a collection of poems, That Stranger, The Blues, and edited Carcanet’s Apocalypse, an anthology of mid-century visionary modernist poetry, as well as the Collected Poems of the Scottish poet Burns Singer. Julian Orde (1917- 74) was a granddaughter of the 4th Duke of Wellington, raised in London and Paris, and presented at court as a debutante. She rebelled. She achieved distinction and professional success as a poet, a writer of short stories, an actor, a playwright, a screenwriter and a copywriter. She published around twenty poems in the forties, but no more in her lifetime. Greville Press published a pamphlet edition of her classic long poem, Conjurors, in 1988.