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Alan Marshfield (b.1933) has written poetry, novels, short stories and verse translations for over fifty years now. He believes that poetry and commentary belong together and that the two together form an essence, a potential to influence, which changes over time as new rules in the game of reading and interpretation come into play. Central to his themes is the universal human interest in the nature of things. He is on the side of those who hold that, deep down, the world cannot, in principle, be understood. Science, religion and art must concern themselves with appearance. Nature, his word for all there is, the seen and the unseen, must be entirely physical: there is no disembodied mind in it. His vision is two-fold: unconsoling yet celebratory; nihilistic and affirmative at once; in love with energy and the dance of ideas, grim in the face of life’s accidents and cruelty.

He deals in many styles, from simple minimalism to an intricate, evocative neo-baroque, producing an oeuvre which he calls a plum pudding of high and low flavours, of ersatz and bona fide erudition. In his poetry he mythologises a great deal, and even his real-life characters, mainly marginalised detritus invented for his ‘infernal fictions’, are on the brink of legendary. The poems in The Nature of Things display such obtrusive corporeality as suburban snow seen as a ‘white poultice sewn / with crow’s-foot stitch onto the lawn’ and a car driver ‘watching the lights ahead nose down, and on / dim stalks grow out of the coiled pitch beneath / of road gouged round the Devil’s Bowl’. This occurs alongside the capricious surreality of his antibourgeois Dragonfly, which ‘zooms in like an ancient biplane laden with bombs to accrete like stately vol-au-vents in the leprous drawing rooms, in the concentrations of death’, and of the sexy pulp poetry of Wych Hazel, who arrives to copulate some sense into Planet Terror where, after a biological Armageddon, ‘the nubile daughters lie groaning on their backs as their milky skins give vent to the soft plosives of Rocky Mountain Fever’. The poetry is ablaze with arcana both odd and revealing, reflections of a mind that first came to life amid piles of comics in dusty bookshops and continues to see the world filtered through smudged maps and contradictory texts.

His notes to his poems (in the Kindle ebook) are a revealing adjunct to them. He says, ‘I was voicing an idea which I’d read somewhere, that perhaps the only end which the laws of the universe implied was self-extinction. The arrow of entropy ... is towards increasing disorder; and life, far from providing local pools or order that momentarily runs counter to the ultimate journey into night, actually assists the disintegrative “purpose” by helping to use up energy faster. Complexity self-destructs.’

Some of his novels are near-parodies of popular niche genres: Heliodora (historical fiction), Khufu’s Curse (a horror story), Murder at Monk Wimborne (a murder mystery), whereas others are more ‘mainstream’: Rake’s Crater, House Wrecker, That Father Lost. His three collections of short stories (Nude Descending a Staircase, Long Con Monopoly and Foreign Bodies) are strong on character and strangeness, occasionally veering into the surreal. He is fascinated by the predatory, and by the determination of people to make their mark.

He has also written textbooks on computing and computer programming, and in a bottom drawer has a book on Blake’s prophetic works and another, over a 100 pages long, on how to follow the proof of Euler’s most famous equation, 1 + eⁱ^p = 0.

He was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1933, son of a bricklayer, soldier and riveter; had one brother, William Brian (Bill), 1934– 1995, who was a an artist and thinker by inclination and a naval engineer working on submarine stabilisers by trade. In their teens Bill developed a love of literature and Alan caught it from him.

They and their mother were evacuated in World War Two to Bishop's Waltham, a village in Hampshire, where their father, William senior, a survivor from Dunkirk, was also billeted. The two boys enjoyed this first taste of the countryside, but their mother did not enjoy the two successive lodgings they found. They returned to Portsmouth before the blitz was over and air-raid shelters replaced village war games.

In those early days the family lived in more than half a dozen houses and rooms and the boys attended nearly as many schools before finishing their secondary education at the age of sixteen in the Portsmouth Technical School, where they both received good final examination results in what was then called the School Certificate.

From sixteen to nineteen Alan worked as a cartographer at the Ordnance Survey in Southampton. His early hobbies included reading, mathematics, country rambles, cross-country running, rowing, ballroom dancing and girls.

From nineteen to twenty-one he did National Service in the Royal Engineers as a clerical private (‘sapper’), took an interest in Buddhism and Esperanto, taught himself Latin, started to write poetry, and began a lifelong correspondence with a pen friend, Jim Donalson, in Florida, who in 1972 had two copies of Alan’s poetry bound in hard covers, an act of dedication to the friendship.

In the 1950s he was also introduced to Thomas Harri (T.H.) Jones, the Welsh poet then living and working in Portsmouth, who was his first poetic mentor. They spent many evenings drinking in Harri’s local and reading poetry to each other. An account of the life and work of T.H.Jones can be found in T.H.Jones, Poet of Exile (UWP) by Don Dale-Jones and Bernard Jones.

After National Service he attended the Portsmouth Technical College for one year, acquiring A-levels in Latin, French and English. His friendship with an old school chum, David Orton, flourished too, until Dave disappeared to Canada to become, eventually, an academic sociologist and 'deep ecologist'. They were in their young days rowing and dance-hall buddies.

For three year, taking him to the age of twenty-five, Alan Marshfield was a student at King’s College, London, where he acquired a degree in English Language and Literature. For holiday jobs he worked in a pea storage facility, in an ice-cream factory, and as a demonstrator of yo-yos at the seaside in Southsea. He edited the college literary magazine (Lucifer) for two years, made the acquaintance of fellow writers B.S.Johnson and Maureen Duffy, and met his first wife, Rochelle Gelman.

He married Rochelle on leaving college. The marriage lasted eighteen months, during which time they lived first in Wilton, near Salisbury, and then in Raynes Park, S.W. London. He started his career as a secondary school teacher.

He lived with a French assistante, Aline Eschénasy for about a year in Radlett, Herts. Then he took a flat in Kensington, taught at Holland Park School, and made the acquaintance of Martin Bell, the poet, who introduced him to The Group, which was then chaired by Edward Lucie-Smith in Chelsea.

He was beginning to get his work published in literary magazines (see acknowledgments) and in the 1970s published three slim volumes.

Important to him at one time or another among his poetic friends have been Fleur Adcock, Martin Bell, Alan Brownjohn, Peter Jay (editor of The Anvil Press), B.S.Johnson, T.H.Jones, George MacBeth, Farida Majid, Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove and Ian Robinson (Editor of Oasis Books).

To many teachers, but paramountly to ‘Gus’ Gates, who taught him to love mathematics and the countryside, and his French teacher Mr Sinnet, he is also grateful.

His most cherished friend was the witty and clever historian Lewis Winstock, author of Songs and Music of the Redcoats.

In 1961 he met his second wife, Lise Otava, from Finland. They married in 1962. Here is a list of poems which would not have been written without her.
               All Dead But                           Angharad
               Anniversary                            Centaurs
               children of the new forest       Christmas Eve
               Elektra                                    Eros
               For Lady Moon                       Grandmother and Child
               Her Answer                              La Belle Lectrice
               Mother’s Day                           port isaac
               Queen Tiy                                Thanatos
               The Birth of Venus                   The Cliff House
               The Conservative                     The Kiss
               The Pain of Helena Nagel       Wych Hazel

He and Lise have two children, Undine (born 1964 in Crawley), and Crispin (born 1967 in Edgware. In 2000 Undine went to New Zealand with her partner Michael Wrenn and their then two-year-old son Max. Undine, now in Sydney, Australia, has worked largely in Arts PR. After six years in Germany designing for Volkswagen, Crispin is now working as a car designer for Bentley at Crewe, where he designed the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Bentley. He was married for a time to a Czech girl, Katerina Svitorkova, from whom he is now divorced. His present partner is Amanda Easton, nee Parker, with whom he has a daughter, Annabelle, born in 2010.

When Alan Marshfield was first married to Lise, they lived for a short time in Notting Hill, then for three years in Crawley, then for longer in Burnt Oak, Edgware, and since 1977 in the Copthall region of Mill Hill, NW London. All this time, until 1997, he taught English, first in grammar schools, then in comprehensives. He became Head of English, then Head of Computing, and was for over twenty years a Senior (Management) Teacher.

For most of his last twenty years as a teacher, before retiring at the age of 64, he wrote novels and a few educational works, the latter published by Glentop and Blackie, the former now appearing as Kindle ebooks.

For his published verse see Acknowledgments and Abraxas Press. On retiring from work he privately published his complete poems (with notes and essays) privately in twenty-three 56-page booklets, with four books of indexes. These were given to friends and libraries. He then produced a single volume of collected poems entitled The Nature of Things. For a quick idea of what he thinks his writing and this site are about, see about the site and flavours.

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