Cyclopean Mistress

In this book’s title-piece, the Cyclopean Mistress is a teacher with a single eye in the middle of her forehead, someone with ‘unified vision’. The book too has unified vision: its short fictions and prose poems aren’t separate forms but merge into each other like the continuous spectrum of colours in a rainbow. Redgrove begins with short fictions, but gradually withdraws the narrative scaffolding, asking the reader to respond instead to an alternative and possibly more dramatic pattern of imagery, where a narrative exists but is unspoken: ‘It is like waking from a deep sleep and seeing the world new, but stripped of its procedures.’ At the end of the rainbow, Redgrove’s all-seeing eye penetrates the Esplumeor, Merlin’s prison, variously interpreted as a bewitched bed, a house of glass, an observatory with 84 windows, a place where falcons moult or where the magician with sexual laughter puts off his accustomed forms, or a place where a person uses his plume or pen. His prose-poems here are about Cornwall, where he lives, ‘and where it is not easy to tell whether one is in a dungeon or a paradise, as it depends on the way the wind is blowing’.