Poetry review – THE MAGIC THEATRE: Tim Murphy follows James Harpur through poetic reminiscences of student life
The Magic Theatre
James Harpur
Two Rivers Press, 2025
ISBN 978-1-915048-23-3
£11.99
One of several epigraphs in Irish poet James Harpur’s new collection confirms that the eponymous magic theatre is that portrayed in Hermann Hesse’s 1927 novel, Steppenwolf, where it roughly denotes an atmosphere of ‘magic possibilities’ available to those living ‘outside of the bourgeoisie’. In The Magic Theatre Harpur portrays his time during the 1970s studying first Classics and then English at Trinity College, Cambridge. This might not seem very non-bourgeois, but Hesse was marked deeply by his experiences of elite education and central to Steppenwolf is the theme of dual or multiple identities or roles. Identity formation and ‘all the world’s a stage’ are dominant motifs in The Magic Theatre, which includes a Prologue; three “Acts” each covering an undergraduate year at Cambridge; and even two short “Intermission” poems set elsewhere.
The book opens with “Auditioner”, which describes the poet’s visit to Cambridge for an interview in 1974: ‘My shirt unbuttoned at the top / To show the world I do not give a toss.’ There is admiration for the ‘unsuspected and glorious’ architectural beauty of the colleges; acknowledgement of how the interviewer ‘wills me on like a horse / Along the final hill at Cheltenham’; and observation of how ‘the river / Slides on and punters iron out / The sheet-light of the water’ — the constricted ‘slide’ of the ‘ironed out’ Cam contrasts with the liberated ‘glide’ in a subsequent aside that proves to have prescient appeal:
Beyond the farther bank a bevy
Of extras playing students glide
Out of the Summer of Love
In sandals and bleached flares –
They look so happy-go-lucky
With their flowing stripy scarves
And beards of scholar-gypsies
They tip me back to Tartarus –
The tantalizing vision
Across the stream – so near so far –
Figures moving in sunshine
Sound of playful laughter
Elysium, the Blesséd Ones.
Harpur possesses a seemingly effortless lyricism and this is put to work effectively in the service of his relentlessly narrative approach, which is in turn quite detailed. “Initiate”, one of many poems that are divided into titled parts, describes the poet’s relief when his father leaves after dropping him off at Trinity, ‘yet sorry / He’s taking off my last scrap / Of homeliness . . . familiarity.’ At the college, where initially he hears ‘more Latin than English’, his unconscious fears about his school’s status vis-à-vis the likes of Eton are stoked up, especially when being scrutinized by a friend of a friend’s ‘scholar-cronies / A yawn or two from being full professors’.
Harpur’s parents’ separation and the subsequent sale of the family home are part of the background to the poet’s first year at Trinity. In “Mourner”, the third part of “Initiate”, his mother’s explanatory letter about the house sale is ‘as cold / as a bored solicitor’s’, and another poem, “Christmas, 1976”, expresses the poet’s pain:
Now strangers are discovering the summer house
In winter, the monkey puzzle tree,
The silver-birches Dad designed as goal posts.
“The Active Voice” recounts the pressures of studying Greek at school (‘Go on, one more my yawn’s a silent bellow / For help, the senses are a labyrinth’), and in “Classicist” the poet delivers a ‘Brutus stab’ to his visiting Cranleigh schoolteachers by declaring he has switched courses from Classics to English. The theme resurfaces more reflectively in “Eleusinian” when a senior scholar tells the poet his big regret was neglecting Classics for English — after laughing together when Harpur tells of his switch:
We fall silent, like old initiates
Remembering the mysteries of Eleusis
And how it felt to live in Otherness
And how it feels to live in loss.
But these poems range well beyond the young poet’s familial and scholarly identities. ”Heffers University: Zen” describes the appeal of the eponymous ‘carpeted and warm’ Cambridge bookshop as both practical, because outside there is a ‘squall of sleet [pouring] slush’, and spiritual, because of the ‘hippy books – / like Castenada, The White Goddess, / Siddhartha, Gormenghast, / And . . . The Way of Zen’.
“The Oxford Bus” describes feeling ‘like a Confederate spy’ when visiting a girlfriend at Oxford, and “Concert Goer” recounts a first date at a performance of Brahms’ Requiem on Remembrance Day 1976. Perhaps the poet’s date is ‘wondering like me, / If Fate is working through a Requiem’; while the choir’s intoned vibration has an effect in tune with the ‘hippy books’ that have begun to win Harpur over:
Dissolving every shred of I –
And everything evaporates beyond
A world of mere appearances –
A stumbling into the holy –
The Urgrund – the fountain of being,
The great tuning of the soul . . .
“Drama Student” charts the author’s growing awareness that he is not cut out for stage acting with an account of his attempts at an audition to sell his jacket to a passerby using cockney patter.
Invisible pedestrians ignore me
Until I growl like the Artful Dodger:
‘’Ere you go my lovely – fancy a jacket?”
‘’Ere you go my lovely – fancy a jacket?”
I sound like a parrot with Tourette’s
Then morph into ‘pirate’ with a tilt –
‘’Eeer ye go moy luvverly – fancy a jacket?”
I’m in some hell I can’t get out of . . .
The appropriately theatrical association of parrots as a familiar accessory of pirates is a neat element in the rhythymic irregularity preceding the steady iambic of the closing line, when the poet seems to realizes acting is not for him. Yet he persists, until in “Death of a Thespian”, after performing in a ‘dashing jackal mask’, the ‘laconic cool Camila’, seems to offer ‘Woof! Woof!’ as ‘the epitaph / of my career in acting’.
It is poetry that ultimately captures the young Harpur’s creative heart, and “Scholar” recounts the poet’s first encounter with TS Eliot’s Collected Poems:
A stirring, deep down, or in the dark –
Like our tortoise in the spring, in attic straw,
Or a wren flickering on a hawthorn branch,
Is this what I’ve been waiting for?
I dare to pick another random page
“Orpheus” describes a delayed gallery reading in 1978 by another famous poet — ‘Big Ted’ — who is ‘hauled’ into the venue by three women like ‘a slab of Yorkshire granite – / A mop of floppy hair, big sideburns, / Down-turned eyes’; and ‘Poet’ reflects on Harpur’s own early experiences of writing poetry:
The unpredicted mini raptures –
A shifting to another universe
In which laws and language seemed to alter
Each time I blinked, remembering
To wait and let the words re-cast themselves
Until they stepped into the fullness of their being.
After Harpur’s fourth collection, The Dark Age, was published in 2007, another Irish poet, Patrick Cotter, wrote on the Poetry International website that Harpur is ‘essentially an interior poet’ whose main themes are ‘the human condition, the nature of the psyche, [and] the yearning for spiritual meaning’. The Magic Theatre confirms that these remain Harpur’s preoccupations, although his approach is now framed by the same chronologically autobiographical orientation as found in his 2021 collection, The Examined Life, which portrayed his experiences of Cranleigh boarding school in England.
Harpur is an extremely accomplished poet, and throughout this volume there is strong evidence of his grounding in both English literature and the classics. But the poems retain a strong universal appeal because the rites of passage described in The Magic Theatre — which also include May Ball adventures and an awkward-sounding 21st birthday dinner — are presented in engaging, imaginative, and often humorous fashion. In this book’s concluding poem, “The Magical Universe”, the poet almost inadvertently sets himself up with a teaching post in the Aegean, and readers will hope that The Magic Theatre is to be followed by poetry inspired by that next formative stage of Harpur’s life.
*
Mar 15 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – James Harpur
Poetry review – THE MAGIC THEATRE: Tim Murphy follows James Harpur through poetic reminiscences of student life
One of several epigraphs in Irish poet James Harpur’s new collection confirms that the eponymous magic theatre is that portrayed in Hermann Hesse’s 1927 novel, Steppenwolf, where it roughly denotes an atmosphere of ‘magic possibilities’ available to those living ‘outside of the bourgeoisie’. In The Magic Theatre Harpur portrays his time during the 1970s studying first Classics and then English at Trinity College, Cambridge. This might not seem very non-bourgeois, but Hesse was marked deeply by his experiences of elite education and central to Steppenwolf is the theme of dual or multiple identities or roles. Identity formation and ‘all the world’s a stage’ are dominant motifs in The Magic Theatre, which includes a Prologue; three “Acts” each covering an undergraduate year at Cambridge; and even two short “Intermission” poems set elsewhere.
The book opens with “Auditioner”, which describes the poet’s visit to Cambridge for an interview in 1974: ‘My shirt unbuttoned at the top / To show the world I do not give a toss.’ There is admiration for the ‘unsuspected and glorious’ architectural beauty of the colleges; acknowledgement of how the interviewer ‘wills me on like a horse / Along the final hill at Cheltenham’; and observation of how ‘the river / Slides on and punters iron out / The sheet-light of the water’ — the constricted ‘slide’ of the ‘ironed out’ Cam contrasts with the liberated ‘glide’ in a subsequent aside that proves to have prescient appeal:
Harpur possesses a seemingly effortless lyricism and this is put to work effectively in the service of his relentlessly narrative approach, which is in turn quite detailed. “Initiate”, one of many poems that are divided into titled parts, describes the poet’s relief when his father leaves after dropping him off at Trinity, ‘yet sorry / He’s taking off my last scrap / Of homeliness . . . familiarity.’ At the college, where initially he hears ‘more Latin than English’, his unconscious fears about his school’s status vis-à-vis the likes of Eton are stoked up, especially when being scrutinized by a friend of a friend’s ‘scholar-cronies / A yawn or two from being full professors’.
Harpur’s parents’ separation and the subsequent sale of the family home are part of the background to the poet’s first year at Trinity. In “Mourner”, the third part of “Initiate”, his mother’s explanatory letter about the house sale is ‘as cold / as a bored solicitor’s’, and another poem, “Christmas, 1976”, expresses the poet’s pain:
“The Active Voice” recounts the pressures of studying Greek at school (‘Go on, one more my yawn’s a silent bellow / For help, the senses are a labyrinth’), and in “Classicist” the poet delivers a ‘Brutus stab’ to his visiting Cranleigh schoolteachers by declaring he has switched courses from Classics to English. The theme resurfaces more reflectively in “Eleusinian” when a senior scholar tells the poet his big regret was neglecting Classics for English — after laughing together when Harpur tells of his switch:
But these poems range well beyond the young poet’s familial and scholarly identities. ”Heffers University: Zen” describes the appeal of the eponymous ‘carpeted and warm’ Cambridge bookshop as both practical, because outside there is a ‘squall of sleet [pouring] slush’, and spiritual, because of the ‘hippy books – / like Castenada, The White Goddess, / Siddhartha, Gormenghast, / And . . . The Way of Zen’.
“The Oxford Bus” describes feeling ‘like a Confederate spy’ when visiting a girlfriend at Oxford, and “Concert Goer” recounts a first date at a performance of Brahms’ Requiem on Remembrance Day 1976. Perhaps the poet’s date is ‘wondering like me, / If Fate is working through a Requiem’; while the choir’s intoned vibration has an effect in tune with the ‘hippy books’ that have begun to win Harpur over:
“Drama Student” charts the author’s growing awareness that he is not cut out for stage acting with an account of his attempts at an audition to sell his jacket to a passerby using cockney patter.
The appropriately theatrical association of parrots as a familiar accessory of pirates is a neat element in the rhythymic irregularity preceding the steady iambic of the closing line, when the poet seems to realizes acting is not for him. Yet he persists, until in “Death of a Thespian”, after performing in a ‘dashing jackal mask’, the ‘laconic cool Camila’, seems to offer ‘Woof! Woof!’ as ‘the epitaph / of my career in acting’.
It is poetry that ultimately captures the young Harpur’s creative heart, and “Scholar” recounts the poet’s first encounter with TS Eliot’s Collected Poems:
“Orpheus” describes a delayed gallery reading in 1978 by another famous poet — ‘Big Ted’ — who is ‘hauled’ into the venue by three women like ‘a slab of Yorkshire granite – / A mop of floppy hair, big sideburns, / Down-turned eyes’; and ‘Poet’ reflects on Harpur’s own early experiences of writing poetry:
The unpredicted mini raptures – A shifting to another universe In which laws and language seemed to alter Each time I blinked, remembering To wait and let the words re-cast themselves Until they stepped into the fullness of their being.After Harpur’s fourth collection, The Dark Age, was published in 2007, another Irish poet, Patrick Cotter, wrote on the Poetry International website that Harpur is ‘essentially an interior poet’ whose main themes are ‘the human condition, the nature of the psyche, [and] the yearning for spiritual meaning’. The Magic Theatre confirms that these remain Harpur’s preoccupations, although his approach is now framed by the same chronologically autobiographical orientation as found in his 2021 collection, The Examined Life, which portrayed his experiences of Cranleigh boarding school in England.
Harpur is an extremely accomplished poet, and throughout this volume there is strong evidence of his grounding in both English literature and the classics. But the poems retain a strong universal appeal because the rites of passage described in The Magic Theatre — which also include May Ball adventures and an awkward-sounding 21st birthday dinner — are presented in engaging, imaginative, and often humorous fashion. In this book’s concluding poem, “The Magical Universe”, the poet almost inadvertently sets himself up with a teaching post in the Aegean, and readers will hope that The Magic Theatre is to be followed by poetry inspired by that next formative stage of Harpur’s life.
*