About 20 years ago I gave my copy of M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating to a couple of friends employed by a university in DeKalb, Illinois, which as everyone knows is the Barbed Wire Capital of the World. The book had been prized, but what else could you do for people in such straits? More recently, another couple took my measure, and when I celebrated their wedding they gave me a later edition of that work. Not everyone would think this an innocent action, but I choose to see it so.
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Gwen Harwood, as wise as she was good, produced late in life a buoyant poem ‘In Praise of Food’, in which as usual she was flying the flag of an enthusiasm. In it she writes, ‘Preserve us from indifferent cooking/by those who have no love of food,/who never spend a moment looking/with firm desire, in solitude,/at the great marvels earth produces,/its grains and nuts and oils and juices,/its fowls, its fish, its eggs, its meat,/reflecting that the food we eat/is what we will be: living tissue/that paints and chisels, writes and sings/the splendour of substantial things/and immaterial thoughts that issue/as if from some angelic birth/but are in fact the fruits of earth.’
Writing like this, Harwood is of course singing ‘the splendour of substantial things’, and in so doing is joining in the concert audible when one reads a multitude of writers, in prose and in verse, over the centuries.
The present American Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, for instance, has a poem called ‘Osso Buco’ which begins, ‘I love the sound of the bone against the plate/and the fortress-like look of it/lying before me in a moat of risotto,/the meat soft as the leg of an angel/who has lived a purely airborne existence./And best of all, the secret marrow,/the invaded privacy of the animal/prized out with a knife and swallowed down/with cold, exhilarating wine.’
I know that thousands of advertisements for foods which we have all encountered dilate, on the one hand, on the sensuous reality of their products, and on the other on the supposedly visionary
virtues of the confections: but it needs a certain deftness of touch—comical or not—really to give the senses and the mind the run they would both like. Collins the fantasist is also Collins the listening, watching, tool-wielding creature, and as such he is too a standard-bearer for others. Glad to be for a