WH Auden? Good job his name wasn't Smith

There is a long interview with Virginia Astley here. I am trying to make up my mind as to whether it is worth getting the remastered version of From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. I have a Japanese import, which has lots of extra tracks from the 12” singles, but a remaster of that epic exercise in pastoral weirdness is very tempting. I used to listen to this over and over when I was cramming. I can remember the exact position I was in when I found the vinyl version. It swept away the city I was in and took me back home. God! How your presence shapes me.

It starts on this line, the power that shapes us. A poem spills out like so much water from the mouth of a decrepit fountain. I am a fish, freshwater food for the people who never managed to reach across to this time. Beatrice Dalle with her eye up to the sky, blind I think. Oh that old spirit, how daybreak takes us to and over the edge. Syllepsis defined is no syllepsis at all and all these tracks will fade out in the middle of a verse. It is as if we had ingested some unseen chemical poured into the water supply as source until the whole world slept at the feet of the warriors responsible. They are soldiers they say but they do not go after soldiers; they cheer the death of children and the innocent. My revenge, is rethink, rebuild, redo, remake them. We could engineer the twisty guitars until the strings became their downfall, the noose we use to hang them all. This is the same knot and further than this I can make no comment. It means nothing, for nothing we say can ever make anyone return. I repudiate. A sentence complete without ellipsis. There's a novelty. There's posh.

It rains. The air fills up with water and I wheeze and shake, fall to the floor unhelped and helpless. I think of haircuts and architecture where it means something. The shallow men, the hollow men, all the great men they pay to make the world look like it does; they've died and gone to heaven by ladder, by taxi, by anti-missile missile. Look! See them clinging to the point as they streak upwards with the Patriot, Polaris, Sidewinders, Phoenix. At fifty miles up they detonate and we see dust shake out into the orbits that can only bring them back to us. Sid floats around an airport. We think it's what he would have wanted. See the oceanographer, the diver, foul-mouthed and likeable. We like him. Blake knew him. His angels have no defined gender. Poet and illusionist.