The moment of conception (and his own in particular) is a mytheme to which Redgrove’s poetry frequently circles back. His penultimate posthumous collection, A Speaker For the Silver Goddess, features one of these in “Mystery Tale”:
Within the mother
and the child
of awesome parents
Like possibilities unplumbed; She told me
the vision she attended as I was conceived –
it was a feeling
That was all fragrance that was
a lion with wings beating
the world’s trade winds.
Born in Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey, England, Redgrove was the first of two sons. His younger brother died in early youth and is the subject of one of the elegies in Redgrove’s debut collection The Collector. This “accident-killed brother” appears intermittently throughout Redgrove’s work, as do, in a much...
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Citation: Martiny, Erik. "Peter Redgrove". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 April 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3727, accessed 09 June 2026.]
