'What are those Golden Builders doing?' asked William Blake in 1818, and went on to ask further might there be some showing of Jerusalem 'near Tyburn's fatal tree? Is that/Mild Zion's hill's most ancient promontory, near mournful/Ever-weeping Paddington?' The great private visionary in our literature, Blake was given, as we know, to finding eternity in a grain of sand, so more likely than anybody then and now to find the heavenly Jerusalem in the enduring ordinariness of Paddington.
Peter Steele's great friend and mentor, Vincent Buckley wandered purposively around the streets of Parkville and Carlton in the early 1970s asking the same question of our immediate locality — 'names of their lordships./Cardigan, Elgin, Lygon: Shall I find here my Lord's grave?' ['Golden Builders', I, page 46]. By the end of the 27 poems of the sequence 'Golden Builders', though certainly finding mournful ever-weeping Carlton, and for all the notated moments of his intense longing, Buckley heads out of town Romsey-wards, his birthplace up country, with that key question unanswered.
And what of Peter himself, another long-term denizen of these parts? Here he is, as early as 1972, out of bed one misty morning in time for 'Matins':
Out there in darkest Parkville it's a kind____of animal country. Morning displays —I thought it was the gardener — someone trotting____hale and compulsive, barely attachedto four maleficent greyhounds, sleek and dumb.____He's Bogart or Camus, a bigboned ghosteasing himself and his charges around the block;____they move as sweetly and as bloody-mindedas if their talent were for treachery,____not coursing and the would-be kill.We've traded words on form in wetter days,____sodden together into comradeship,but not this morning. I'm praying in his trail,____a sort of christian and a sort of man,watching him get between us the police____the park the children's hospitalthe bolted shelter for old derelicts____and the zoo, that other eden, wheresome cruciform and prestidigious monkeys____hang in the sunlight, and the sombre bearsrove their concrete to sweat out the duration.
Among the half a dozen new poems in his latest book, Braiding the Voices: Essays in Poetry, 'Monday' tells us that Steele is still on the alert for signs, easily mistaken for something else, often cruciform:
Monday is Day Oncology, where the darkBurses arrive by courier, and we're gladTo see them stripped for action, hooked in the