William Radice's Green, Red, Gold is a novel in 101 sonnets that oscillates between page-turning realism and haunting poetic symbolism. Charting the genesis, acceleration, fragmentation and resolution of a love-affair with a power and spontaneity rare in the sonnet form, its constantly varying emotions and rhythms range from St Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels to the love of Abelard and Heloise; from Northumberland to London and back; from pantomime to prime numbers; from the trauma of adulterous passion to marriage and parenthood's accumulated love and experience.
Woven into this story are precise symbolic threads: sea and land; forest and home; disguise and nakedness; Ariel and Cordelia; spirit (green) tangling with world (red) to achieve a balance of the two (gold). Connecting also with the wider dangers of basing moral and political decisions on spiritual promptings, the sequence arrives — with a momentum both intimate and symphonic — at the realisation that 'morality's a human matter', inseparable from reason and compassion.
'Stunning' (AN Wilson, The Telegraph, 10 October 2005) who added 'There are marvellous evocations of Lindisfarne and the coastline up there as the romance begins, and hits the rocks. I was really moved by this story. I keep remembering it, and thinking I've read a fat full-length novel. The whole story is ingeniously crammed into 101 short poems.'
'A kind of novel, the story of an illicit love affair told in 101 sonnets, Green, Red, Gold is an ambitious and sustained achievement. Writing one sonnet is difficult enough for most poets. Many of these sonnets are beautifully done, light and musical, moving towards their deft and neat concluding couplets.' (Andy Croft, Morning Star, 13 December 2005)
Green, Red, Gold costs £7.00 and was published in October 2005.
ISBN: 978-1-873226-78-0
Photo by Vivek Das, Kolkata
February 2003
William Radice was born in London in 1951, studied English at Oxford, but then became a specialist in Bengali. Known particularly for his translations of the poems and stories of Rabindranath Tagore, he emerged as a poet in his own right in the 1970s and 1980s with his books Eight Sections, Strivings and Louring Skies.
In 1991 he made Northumberland his main home, and Gifts: Poems 1992–1999 was published in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has contributed regularly to BBC Radio 2's Pause for Thought, and has worked in opera, writing the libretto for Snatched by the Gods by Param Vir and translating Puccini’s Turandot for ENO. He teaches Bengali at SOAS in London, gives lectures worldwide, writes poetry in the North-East.
For more information about William Radice, visit his website: www.williamradice.com
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