Visitors to the home of Herbert Lomas's home in Aldeburgh, with its undisturbed gull's-eye view of the sea, might enjoy their host's vividly humorous, playful and profound conversation as redolent of his mercurial poetry as of the seascape's shifting lights and movement beyond.
Born into a 1920s close Pennine community where his parents owned the local pub, Bertie, as he was known, was to celebrate these formative relationships and landscapes in his collection The Vale of Todmorden (2002), in which his fresh child's-eye narration combines simplicity, human sympathy, mental acuity and visionary perception. This gift informed his prolific output even as his horizons broadened through war service, London academia and an exceptionally esteemed long residence in Finland.
Other than his 10 books of verse collected in A Casual Knack of Living (Arc 2009) and several books of contemporary Finnish poetry in translation, he is most closely associated with The London Magazine as a main contributor of poetry and criticism from its renaissance under the editorship of Alan Ross, who became a lifelong friend, to the present day. In the same capacity he contributed to Ambit, and further afield, in the hyperactive small press and poetry-reading scene of the 1960s and '70s, being a frequent reader of his own verse at events in and around the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden.
Lomas had served as an infantryman from 1943-46, with a two-year posting to the Garhawal Rifles stationed on the North-West frontier of India. Typically modest and self-deprecating regarding his own war – his father and two uncles had served on the Somme – he none the less captured the experiences of the ordinary young soldier caught up in extraordinary events in his collection A Useless Passion (1998).
He subsequently worked in education for most of his life. With a reputation as an enthralling and entertaining lecturer in English, he was eventually appointed Senior Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. His Finnish years found him translating many contemporary Finnish poets and experiencing success as a staged dramatist, alongside his teaching and writing poetry. He was awarded the Finnish Order of the White Rose: Knight, First Class, in recognition to his services to Finnish literature.
Just as his earlier poetry had received recognition from WH Auden and Robert Graves, so his later work continued to garner literary awards and praise from, among others, the laureate Ted Hughes, who, while finding the poet's element of humour "vital and congenial", went on to admire the "marvellous prismatic, penetrating, visionary talismans" his poems presented to the reader. In a handwritten dedication in a book Hughes gave to Lomas he observed, "we got out of the valley but it didn't get out of us". Lomas's own linguistic northern roots emerge in poems where a terse or sardonic tone is shot with sudden unguarded tenderness and transparency – and the humour that he regarded as both divine and as a secular survival skill.
Friendships with other poets, notably Alan Ross and Father Murray Bodo, were greatly valued, sometimes especially so as turning points in his thought. This contained an undercurrent of spiritual search and concern for social justice. Lomas's rigorous address of modern man's religious predicament in the 52-poem sequence Letters in the Dark (1986) would emerge, through his subsequent and difficult experiences including bereavement, into the haiku-like observance and acceptance notable in the poems of Nightlights (2009). A deeply religious man for many years, he became a Roman Catholic late in life. On the material side, his critical and satirical examination of fundamentalist capitalism, Who needs money?, a Marxist analysis, might now call for a timely reprint.
Lomas married three times. His third wife, Mary Marshall Phelps (1940-94), died suddenly after a day's riding. The sequence Death of a Horsewoman is dedicated to her. His elegiac love poems convey the waking dream state and sudden, relentless clarities of loss as few others have managed.
Lomas is survived by a son and a daughter from his third marriage and a son from a previous relationship.
BERNARD SAINT
Herbert Lomas, poet: born Todmorden 7 February 1924; married firstly (one son), secondly, thirdly 1968 Mary Marshall Phelps (died 1994; one son, one daughter); died 9 September 2011.
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