Poems About Wife Being Thevman in the Family
T hirty years ago, "just for a laugh", actor Peter Gordon wrote a poem for his wife Alison, and left it under her pillow. She liked it, and and so he carried on, every twenty-four hours for 25 years. To this day, Gordon continues to add together to the thousands of poems he had written for Alison, fifty-fifty after her death four years agone.
"She was quite amused past it, both charmed and flattered, as I had hoped, and I went on from there to turning it into piddling rhymes and so the rhymes got bigger and bigger and I started doing it every day. Then it became a custom," says Gordon, at present 87, from lockdown at his dwelling house in Sunbury, where he lives with one of his daughters. "I was out of work sometimes, or hanging about in the dressing room, so it was something for me to do, and something I felt I wished to express quite deeply."
Gordon met Alison King in 1971, when they were in a play together. They were cast alongside each other again in 1973, and married a year afterward, having their daughters Cassie and Anna in the late 70s. He dabbled with poesy in the 80s, but it was in the early on 90s that he began writing daily verses, often tracing his feelings at beingness separated from his family on tour.
Alison, who began directing and teaching acting at drama schools in the 90s, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2014. In 2015, in between cycles of chemotherapy, she performed with Gordon in the play Love Letters, directed by their girl Anna Jordan, a theatre writer and managing director. Alison died in 2016.
Later on her death, Gordon began sorting through the thousands of poems left behind, from one written in 1983 that opens "Coming domicile in the pelting / To my dwelling house once again / My kids, my wife. / The heart of my life," to 2017's Spring Without You. The latter begins: "No, it could never be the same – / And still the cherry tree two doors downward / Exploded in pinkish as if to drown / Our wintertime dejection and put to shame / Sometime tears."
"I realised that I had thousands of these pages knocking about in a large wooden box in a shed at the bottom of the garden, and I ought to sort them out, see if they were any skilful," says Gordon. "I was quite exercised to find out if they were any good. If I was going to do anything vis-a-vis my wife to show my love, my regret that she'd died, I wanted it to be good, so I was going through them with a fine-molar rummage. I felt that some of them might be considered reasonably skilful. That was what kept me going."
Effectually 300 of the poems now class the basis of the website A Love in Verse, which has been collated by the couple's daughters, Cassie Davis and Anna Jordan, with assist from family friend Lia Burge. It is drawing increasing attending, with friends and actors including Pearl Mackie and Julie Hesmondhalgh recording performances of some of the poems, with the latter taking on The Last I Wrote While She Was Still Alive, in which Gordon ponders on his feelings for his wife on a rainy afternoon: "Who minds getting wet when you've got a Rose / A treasure, a pleasance by all dreaming?"
Jordan says the matter she loved nigh nearly the poems was "the hope in them … Even those written after my mum's death – and some of them are really quite devastating – are lifted by the aforementioned message: love redeems, even after expiry. We had to do something with them, to share them with people, and this has been part of the grieving procedure. I think she'd be very proud of him."
Gordon is thrilled by the attention the website is receiving. "At my age, suddenly, this has caused a slight stir and information technology's very nice," he says. "I e'er wanted to be a writer. That was my ambition. I never really got around to information technology, but I find looking dorsum that I had a trend to write poetry almost willy nilly – information technology was almost unintentional, it used to get squeezed out of me similar a pip."
He continues to write for Alison, but no longer every day. "Simply once every so often. Quite frankly information technology's hard, considering it's quite painful, her loss is even so very dandy," he says. "Although at that place is lots of hurting involved, A Love in Poesy is ultimately a joyful matter – that I committed all of those hours, all those years, to evidence my love for her. That expresses it most aptly, I recall."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/21/a-love-in-verse-peter-gordon-alison-king-poetry
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