Marcus Cumberlege
Globe-trotting poet whose work was suffused with spirituality
MARCUS CUMBERLEGE, who has died aged 80, was a poet whose work was both sophisticated and spiritual. The spirituality became especially clear after 2000, when he was initiated into Buddhism, receiving the name of “Ji-shin” – Expresser of Truth – at a ceremony in Düsseldorf.
His work could be frank and angry as well as intimate. There was a note of prophecy in his poetry, which at times had the clarity of Bob Dylan: “A plague on you, bachelors of arts, / Public speakers, all you who raise your voice. / In the kingdom of silence you shall be our clowns.”
Simplicity was a central principle. In responding to the master of the haiku, Basho, he wrote: “Hard but simple is the life of the man / Whose two concerns are Love and Art.”
It was in Bruges that Cumberlege’s poetry found its most faithful audience. He moved there in 1972 and was soon translating tourist literature and producing bilingual editions of his work in collaboration with Dutch poets. He later became the translator for the English Poetry Festival at Louvain. He was also awarded the title of “Poet Laureate of Bruges”.
Throughout this time, he was drawn to esoteric studies, while he overcame alcoholism and managed his depression.
Marcus Crossley Cumberlege was born in Antibes on December 23 1938. His mother, Nancy (née Wooley) was Canadian; his father, Mike, was a seaman who escaped from Antibes to London as the Nazis attacked France. Once in England he joined the British Special Services, and he worked with the Resistance in Greece; captured and interned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he was shot dead two days before the camp was liberated.
Young Marcus received his father’s two DSOS from George VI and attended a naval boarding school, but was ill at ease with institutions. A scholar at Sherborne, he won prizes for both poetry and boxing, edited The Shirburnian and entered into correspondence with TS Eliot.
He won a scholarship to read English and French at St John’s, Oxford, but was reluctant to take the place up, especially after travel to Peru and Argentina; when he arrived at Oxford, he did little work, but boxed and shot for the university. He left, he said, “with a third class degree … and an emotional hangover”.
During that time, he wrote almost no poetry except for translations, for which he had a gift: his versions of poets such as Lorca and Vallejo are exemplary. Ill health cut short his work with the British Council in Peru, and he worked for three years at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather in London.
In 1967 he won the Eric Gregory Award for promising poets under 30; Ted Hughes chaired the panel that selected him. His first collection, Oases, appeared in 1968.
In 1965 he had married Ava Paranjoti; they had a daughter, Eunice, but separated in 1969. Cumberlege then went to live in the Latin Quarter of Paris. He travelled and took varied jobs including language teaching, moving furniture in an auction house and working in a window factory.
In 1969 he met Maria Lefever. The couple moved to her native Belgium in 1972, where they struggled financially. Still, his daughter was educated in Bruges, and in 1983 Cumberlege was successfully treated for his alcohol problem.
He became more prolific, writing poems that were by turns fun and confessional: “Mister Booze went on a cruise / With his skull-andcrossboned flask / To the sunny Andalooze, / But a lift I did not ask.”
Cumberlege’s poetry was received with growing recognition; it is perhaps best represented in his Selected Poems 1963-2009, published in Bruges.
He is survived by his wife, Maria, and by his daughter.
Marcus Cumberlege, born December 23 1938, died December 31 2018