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Category:Poetry
Post about a poem or the writing or publication of poems
I seem to have books in most rooms of my house that I pick up, read, and put down at different times of the day. The cache in the lounge is probably the most interesting (and mixed). I started reading short stories – a format I had for years shunned in favour of lengthier, meatier books – a few years ago when I was given Paul Auster’s Collected Prose – a collection that I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone, as indeed I would his wife’s collection that I came to next – The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis – although I see that I have not quite finished the final story! Or perhaps I did finish it and have just left a tantalising bookmark behind! I am still working my way through the prose writings of Seamus Heaney – Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 which is a more difficult read: essays such as ‘The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh’ or ‘Yeats as an Example?’ demand slower, more thoughtful study and are perhaps less late-afternoon-lounge than writing-room. I think I shall move the book! Recently I received Tess Slessinger’s Time: The Present – Selected Short Stories – all written, and very much of the age, in the 1930s, they are a fascinating look at the political and, perhaps more to the point, the cultural scene in New York at the time. They are beautifully written in her very identifiable style. As yet untouched and at the bottom of the lounge pile, Alun Lewis Collected Stories is a natural successor to his Collected Poems, which I have in the writing room. The final lounge book – floating at the top of the pile by reason of the subject matter and the ease of reading that makes it easy to dip in and out in spare five minute gaps – is Mo Gawdat’s Scary Smart, which deals with the advance of artificial intelligence into our lives. His style does tend to talk down to his readers and repeat facts to ensure you have grasped them as he emphasises them for the third time – a style seemingly enhanced by the generous line spacing and the comic-book inserts of mid-text comments. But it IS a very interesting book!
There are often – well always – poetry books in the lounge pile and I am currently reading a few poems a day from both Ruth Bidgood’s New and Selected Poems and – only just acquired – Dominic Fisher’s A Customised Selection of Fireworks. Sometimes these make their way up to the writing room, where they join a library of other poets. Apart from Alun Lewis and the Library of Wales Poetry 1900-2000 near my desk you can find Jeremy Hooker – like Dominic Fisher, a one-time Aberystwyth poet – R S Thomas, Idris Davis, Vernon Watkins (encountered again in another lounge book, Iain Sinclair’s wonderful Black Apples of Gower) and a plethora of Anglo-Welsh poets as well as many American beat poets, Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Cohen, Ella Frears, August Kleinzahler and Samantha Walton. A friend once gave me Adonis’ If Only The Sea Could Sleep: Love Poems – a little book to which I often return (I wish that was my title!) and – in the same vein – I have added Attar and Rumi to my library.
Other books that have crept through the lounge over the past few years include James Lovelock’s Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, followed – not too long after – by Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None; Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets and (by the same publisher, Penned in the Margins, since, sadly closed down) Tom Chivers and Martin Kratz’s Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City. Having planted apple trees, it was interesting to read Raymond Blanc’s The Lost Orchard and, for a similar reason, Maoko Abe’s ‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms – currently unfinishedand moving from room to room!
The dining room has fewer books – more actually, if you include the bookshelves themselves – but fewer current or recently current books! And they are a more mixed collection: a book about Leonard Cohen: Harry Freedman’s Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius and Cohen’s own A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories; Karen Armstrong’s Buddha and Nancy Wilson Ross’ The World of Zen and last, but certainly not least because of the subject’s connection with the farm on which I live, Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869-1894, edited by William Evans and its companion by Bethan Phillips, Pity the Swagman.
Oh! And there will always be a thriller or novel of some sort on my Kindle that I read as I fall asleep! The latest was the first part of Elena Ferranti’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend, which so immersed me in the life of its characters that I frequently found myself still reading an hour after I had lain down!
Catching up on some unfinished reading from last year, I came across a poem by Derek Coyle in the Spring issue of Poetry Salzburg Review. I am guessing from the descriptions of a childhood Christmas that he must be around the same age as I am! More to the point the final lines chimed so closely with comments I have made in this blog about memory that I thought it worthwhile making the link. There was a longish post here: Who is Trystan Lewis? Who am I? starting with another blogger’s apparent desire to erase some of his past (!) I rhapsodised on the importance of preserving our memories, our histories of our past selves to pass on to children and grandchildren, bringing in the poet, Helen May Williams’ blog where she wondered whether the person she was last year was the same as the person she was now, and whether that person would be the same in a year’s time. I finished by suggesting that writers should spare a thought for the generations to follow who may wonder why Grandad had a… or what Grandad did… and what he was like when he was younger… was he the same man then as the man they came to know? Helen May Williams commented:
Memory is selective. An individual may go mad if they have a photographic memory that erases nothing from the record. A culture might die under the burden of excessive memorialization, and it might expire when the archives are totally destroyed. In all things we cultural curators must make choices and critical selections.
…memory is a curious thing! As some past event is recounted for the first time a small fact – the colour of a dress or the positioning of a piece of furniture in a grandparent’s house – might be added, perhaps hesitantly, doubtingly, in error… but in the very act of speaking about the event that erroneous image is cemented into the memory – fixed to the extent that on subsequent retellings the blue dress is there, in the picture, as your mother stood in front of her parent’s sideboard. And now there is no question in your mind that you are describing things as they really were! An autobiography is the curated sum of our imagined memories.
The ‘curating’ may be unintentional rather than ‘critical selections’! But back to Derek Coyle’s Christmas! “Dad sits shoeless by the table / the first tea of the day in his hand” while “mother, she is busy about the Brussel sprouts”. So true! Later he catches a younger me:
and me in brown square patterned slacks before jeans or corduroy.
But it is at the end of the poem that he reflects on tricksy memory! He remembers his father’s mother with her curly hair and spectacles, always smiling, as I suppose grandmothers always do.
But maybe I am lying
and these are all just memories robbed from photographs I’ll steal later.
Dirt! We were held between the tangled roots of the tall grasses and the fragrant herbs and, amongst those pale veins that gave them life, teased by the whispering white threads of the mycelia, pushed aside by the harsher muscular cords that gave succour to the bright pomegranate and the fragrant cinnabar, we were stretched and broken as roots grew and gained power yet we held their tubers softly in place and felt the rhizomes spread through our mire. Water fell and we accommodated it briefly as it gave succour to our burden, drained, and left us, dust blown in the winds or muddied clay, sod that found brief form, as the waters gathered and flowed, servant to some greater force, to tumble in rill and stream, to join mighty rivers, seeking their genesis. We were the loam left. An afterthought. Dust! We were the stuff of clay, without form beneath so much life: above us we knew verdant vine, meadowland and forest flourished in the mists as we—slumbering, nascent among their umbilicals, feeding their growth, were diminished by the day’s fierce heat to mere loess, mere powder from dirt’s dust destined for desert or steppe—knew only the mighty winds that reduced our substance until at a dawn the brume returned and held the gusts at bay and we were one, at peace between the green grasses and the purple thyme. Then there came one great exhalation and in that breath power came to our ylem soul.
Those love letters from the seventies I could not bear to read again and could not bear to throw
Those airmail forms those tortured lonely twelve page laments that I read and read so many times in my cabin off Cape Town, in Melbourne and Sydney: So many words So much love
But in the end They were just ash And I scattered them
Ashes to her ashes
First published in Mostly Welsh 2019 (Y Lolfa) p.92
For those who have a copy of Book of the Spirit, it may be helpful to look at the notes and annotations that I have recently made available. The short collection of poems merges the secular with the theistic, while the language borrows from religions and there are references drawn from religious works. The notes may help with an understanding of sources and references. The pdf files can be downloaded from the Resources page.
The sea is ever present in my writing – both in my prose and in many of my poems. I spent ten years of my life at sea and, both before and after that time, the draw of swimming or surfing continued to take me to beaches. I was lucky to have spent most of my childhood on the Gower in South Wales so had ready access to wonderful beaches. Perhaps that explains – to some extent – the sea’s tidal pull.
Much of the story… much of the two stories in The Dark Trilogy is governed by the sea and my times on it: Book II is a play for voices that covers my first years at sea, particularly the three years when I was learning my trade. And the sea is also present in a number of the short stories that will be published early next years, perhaps nowhere more than in ‘The Endless Horizon’, but other stories too tell of ships in, or between, ports.
I am just completing my second full-length work of fiction – Trystan, which should be published sometime next year, and here, too, although I have set the action in a small town, the sea is very much a focus – always there in the background of the story.
And although the poems in my recently-published chapbook – Book of the Spirit – have another focus, lines in the first poem at least, do not escape the ocean:
…the future becomes nothing but a sunlit ripple in the dark eternal wash of the sea …
…until – watching the sun sink below the horizon, time’s illusory rim, and the vast sea that is the circle of our future existence wash its unknown waves to our feet
And the second poem picks up the theme:
And we are drops left on the shingle Until the sea reclaims us for its own
I also have a longer collection of poems being published in 2023. Looking through the selection, I find that nearly 25% of the poems have some link with, lines about, the sea… including ‘Heatherslade’ – of which you may have an early sighting here:
Heatherslade
Where lies my blinding country of youth, that cloudless demi-dream of some easy time innocent of the weary world dark, time fresh born beech bud green, time joyous as the cuckoo echo across the fields, as the eternal sea sparkle of the bay, as I was eternal for a time?
And then was freedom in my world, and time was mine in that sun lit sea wet summer and the waves were mine, and the sands golden at my feet as I plunging had the surf roll at my will, and the slow day was a time long pebble pooled in the rocks where the sea and deep were bounteous for my pleasure
Sun hot days stretched time and heaven was the blue eternal sea as the hazed horizon conjured wave on wave to the shore to foam and darken the tide line gold to darker amber, the swell the surge that gives renewal to the ever changing sands, that gives new life to the creatures it strands, that gives me joy as I poise board in hands, that gives
There are only seventeen poems and 27 printed pages; but there are also four sections in Book of the Spirit!
An Introit is something sung at the beginning of a religious service – the section sets the scene, placing reader and writer alike within a world, reminding them of their insignificance, as drops in the grand scheme of things – in the ocean – as they try to understand, and in the case of the writer, try to express the beauty of communication, and thereby of destiny, fate and truth in mere words.
While I have made no attempt – it was never my intention – to produce a religious or quasi-religious service or order of service in the central section, the Sunyata, the poems do fall within the canon of a service. They do not form a liturgy but rather are a collection of the elements often found in religious services.
The three poems in Satori, are perhaps the most conventionally religious, and readers will probably recognise the themes/stories referenced. Perhaps this section might be thought of as equivalent to a sermon, moving the work towards a conclusion by exploring themes in ways that leave the congregation, the readers with something – perhaps enlightenment (which is what Satori means) – to ponder on their way home.
The final section – Apocrypha – contains two poems that are not truly a part of the book of praise but which seemed, to me, to follow on from it – to fit in with the general ethos.
