Susan Watson

The Time of the Angels Susan Watson

'The Time of the Angels' is a sequence of poems in which a young woman reads and re-reads Sir Thomas Malory's 'Morte D'Arthur' during the winter and spring of 1979. She is researching and writing an undergraduate dissertation, but her encounter with Malory is also a highly personal one; she perceives the centrality of 'chances, choices, prophecies, destinies, past and future time' and responds to an atmosphere of 'loss soaking backwards through the pages like a tide receding'. And there is Malory's voice: 'a plain voice, threading beads'. Time, like the weather, seems frozen. The 'winter of discontent' with its strife and strikes is only a faint hum in the background, as is the approaching General Election. Time is also a long corridor in which a reader can walk briskly back and forth, knowing and still not knowing what will happen, experiencing events as accidental rather than inevitable. During the reading and re-reading, while the narrative continues, the reign of Arthur feels eternal and everlasting, but it must end, and badly.