Category: Poetry

Post about a poem or the writing or publication of poems

Categories
Poetry

Genesis

Of the Dust of the Ground

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.

Categories
Poetry

Annual, again

Amongst
the soggy rotting leaves
or between
the bowed grass blades
thrust
the tips of snowdrop
leaves

Categories
Poetry

The Absent Sailor

Sunset

Letters

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

Categories
Poetry

A Winter Poem

Winter White

Winter white. The cold wind across the fields

spoke only of snow and wearied him

prisoner in the cottage where his impatience yields

no words on the cold and barren purity of the snow

white paper, no words longing for their page longing

.

for their precise moment to mark the dreadful whiteness

that had come with winter’s snow and the ice that followed it,

their precise moment when reality’s niveous brightness

might be dispelled by their generous rush of verse, of

words spilling sliding rhyming across the paper’s snowy prospect

.

A poem partially inspired by the final word in the final volume – Quinx or The Ripper’s Tale – of The Avignon Quintet by Lawrence Durrell.

Categories
Poetry

Notes for Book of the Spirit

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.

Categories
Fiction Poetry

The Sea

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

my body wave born to where she stands

Categories
Poetry

Structure of a Book

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.

Categories
Poetry

Another day, another book launch!

This post launches my new collection of poems – Book of the Spirit – which was published this week. Further details and a link to buy a copy can be found on the Books page.

In developing this small collection – it was always destined to be a small collection, a chapbook – I wanted to celebrate – to write in praise of – writing, particularly the writing of poetry and love poetry especially, by creating a work in which the medium itself was the message, and by raising that message, that medium, on high. I suppose that I came to see in this venture a similarity with other celebrations. Particularly, in some ways, I could see parallels with that older and special celebration of praise, found in devotional traditions that glorify one incomparable certainty, one supreme entity, and that find their outlet, their medium, in a religious service. Eventually, that comparison shaped both the language and the structure.

Thus, perhaps inevitably, many of the poems merge the secular with the theistic – the word with the Word, as it were – so the language borrows from religions and there are references drawn from religious works.

The seventeen poems are divided into four sections, of which the second, longest part has works which fall into the canon of a service. I should emphasise that I have not tried to create a service, simply that the works are named for the more formal expressions of praise within a service.

  • As most of the poems reference earlier works – both religious texts and poems, or teachings, and some of the connections may not be obvious I shall be publishing a free set of notes in the Resources section of this site in due course.
Categories
Poetry

Interlude

An interlude is a short piece of writing or acting introduced between parts or acts – initially of miracle or morality plays – or added as a part of surrounding entertainment. When Trystan is published – sometime next year – readers will discover that there are eight interludes that surround and interrupt the main ‘story’ chapters. I will say more about this when the book is published. Meanwhile – between more important posts – here is a poem.

Ashes in a Wilderness

To you, readers, I say
I am no writer –
these words
placed themselves
on my page
to tell a story

To you, writers, I cry
I am no chronicler –
these tales
spun their web
through my mind
to make a memory

To you, poets, I sing
I am no rhymer –
these lines
etched their pattern
on my paper
to form a psalm

To you, who come, I whisper
I am no voice –
these sounds
lift their hymn
from the book
to sing your future

Categories
Fiction Poetry

What Comes Next?

In The Dark Trilogy, I created a literary alter ego – Trystan Lewis – named Trystan as I had a vague idea when I began writing – all those years ago – to link him in some way with the Tristan in The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. I never found a way to make that work but kept the name! Lewis, the surname, after the old nickname I had been given when I first went to sea, Louis (as in Louis Armstrong or Satchmo). A few months ago I was reading an article about James Joyce which reminded me that Stephen Dedalus was Joyce’s literary alter ego and, in turn, that reminded me of my original plan… and I began plotting… planning… and a new book was born! While I have made no attempt to write a modern version of The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, all of the main chapters are named for the chapters in the Romance and each chapter has thematic links and some reference point to the original. Character names are all drawn from the original: for example, Trystan’s good friend George Knight is named for Gorvenal (the word means knight). The story follows Trystan and George through a twenty-four hour period and deals with fate and the downwards spiral of events caused by drink, much in the way of Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend. Although the story is centred in a small Welsh town, as with much of my writing the sea is central to, and surrounds, the story and among many, often hidden, literary allusions, Moby Dick is referenced at both the beginning (Trystan “sailed about a little [on] the watery part of the world”) and the end (“the great shroud of the sea rolled on”) of the story.

So Trystan lives on! 

I do like the idea of extending story lines so, as well as Trystan, several other characters from The Dark Trilogy also appear in, and indeed are the subject of, some of my short stories.

I have a publishing programme planned and expect to publish a poetry chapbook very soon, before – early next year – the short story collection. Trystan and a further collection of poems should follow soon after that. [Order of publication may be subject to change!]

Watch this space!