Conjurors

A Telegraph Book of the Year 2024

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.'

The editor of PN Review said, 'It's hard to imagine the middle of the twentieth century now without Julian Orde.' Carcanet's recovery of her work – thanks to the patient archaeology of James Keery and V. Beatson – proves that the past, even the relatively recent past, is at least as rich in resource and surprise as the present.