Categories
Fiction Short Stories

The Den

G. had no idea what had woken him, what had brought him alert and fully awake to the bedroom window in his grandfather’s house in the middle of the night. The gibbous moon lit the garden a little from behind the drifting clouds and a summer breeze ruffled the hedgerow, but apart from that it was completely still and quiet. Now that he had moved to the window—quietly so as not to wake his brother—he felt wide awake and on this hot and stuffy night had no wish to return to his bed. He wondered what it was that he had heard. Had he heard something? He did not remember the sound but that seemed to be the thought in his mind as he found himself gazing out. He must have heard something or he would still be asleep—he didn’t usually wake up in the middle of the night. Despite the heat he shivered! Yesterday they had explored the farm again and he now felt that he knew every tree, gate, shed and path—particularly in the little garden that surrounded the cottage. A plan began to form in his mind and he looked out the window carefully examining every part of the garden he could see. Nothing moved. Carefully—very aware of the creaking stair—he crept out of the room, past his grandfather’s room with its open door, the door that would never close again because sometime years ago the old house had flexed its muscles before subsiding back to sleep and the door—or the frame—had warped. He remembered laughing when he had been told—Taid, houses don’t move—and his grandfather had just smiled that quiet smile of his. He reached the top of the stairs. Carefully, one step at a time, keeping his bare feet to the side of each step, he crept down, pushed open the stair door just as much as he had to and arrived in the kitchen. Despite the warm night the stone floor was cold and he tiptoed the few paces to the run of rush matting that led to the garden door. He was surprised at how rough it felt to his bare feet. Whatever had woken him, whatever the house felt now about stretching or yawning, everything was still and quiet. He opened the door quietly and slipped out.

So begins the first short story in my recent collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry: Selected Short Stories. Just one story among 30 – some very short and some quite long… but like the others, I would suggest, (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) worth investigating, worth a further read! The book is available on Amazon.

Categories
Poetry

The Door

Unknown reader, be glad that I have opened the door and let out
the dust of my verse for you to see an age after the words first found form on the screen, or
perhaps I have let in your imagination so, turning, you can see a single almond
blossom, pink amongst its pale russet leaves, to tempt your words out

Unknown traveller, on this day, stay, venture out
and, before they fade, gather memories of your Spring in fragrant vases around the room, so
your thoughts today can grace some future verses you may set out

Do not press and dry the blooms

Categories
Event Poetry

Publication Announcement!

… and it’s published! Much excitement at being able to announce the availability (Amazon or here) of my latest collection of poems, Lost Time.

Lost Time brings together a collection of poems written during the last two to three years. There are poems that relate to Place, the Sea (always a strong theme for me), Writing, Memories and Time… and a few poems brought about by Covid and lockdown found their way in at the beginning.

Brought together, the poems are (I suppose) exactly as described in the first of the 17 Life Tercets:

A story about
an old poet
and his cottage

Categories
Poetry

Proofs

We are at the proof-reading stage! Unusually, this has thrown up a couple of minor emendations which – in once case – are easily dealt with. The other is going to take a couple of attempts! The spine – on which would normally appear the author’s name and the title of the book is slim enough that only a small font will fit… so we are experimenting to try and get it as large as possible!

THEN… we will publish!

Nearly there! Really, really, nearly there!

Categories
Poetry

Coming Soon!

Contents

Chorus

Chorus Chorus

Corona Sutra

The First Winter

Longing

Ystrad Fflur: Dusk  

Uchtryd’s Summer Place

Evening Light

Autumn Rain

Legacy

Seeing Starlings with Will

Town

Seaside

The Estuary

Tides

Heatherslade

Innocence

Life Tercets

Sea Story

Shell

Thálassa, Thálassa

Et le feu s’éteignit sur la mer…

Dark Seas Dawning

Ex Libris

The Interface

A Memory of Night

Evening Poem

If Only the Sky Could Dream

Song of Summer

Winter Love

Winter White

A Report on the Memories Held in Rooms

After Leaving Another Adelstrop

Augury

Killing Time

The Elegies of Time

Unredeemable Time

Creation

The Departed

Categories
Essay Poetry

The themes of Lost Time

Cover design to follow!

I have just finished curating a selection of my poems into my next collection – Lost Time, and am now pondering the idea of writing a short introduction. Maybe this will be its first draft! The poems are arranged through six themes:

Covid – Place – Sea – Writing – Memories – Time

although it would be fair to say, and intentional, that the edges to the themes are blurred. To the extent that during the process I have once or twice moved a poem from one section to another. It is also fair to say that the distant shadows of lost love and passing time hang over the entire collection – lightly, I hope.

Time has always fascinated me.  Aristotle said that Time is the measurement of change and the idea that, as Professor Carlo Rovelli wrote (The Order of Time, Penguin, 2019) of Einstein’s fourth dimension, “time is memory” and again “time is ignorance” or even, somewhat philosophically, “we are time” was at least in part what underlies the long Elegies of Time which comes near the end of the book. But I will write more about that poem after the book has been published.

If you have been with me over a period of time that is long enough for you to have at least dipped into my other writings, you will have come across my ‘fixation’ with the horizon, a fixation which I have always ascribed to my time at sea. Interestingly, I learn that Heidegger identifies the internal consciousness of time as the horizon of being itself. I like that: in a simplistic way I have seen myself as standing at the horizon (I know, I know – you cannot stand at the horizon as – like an understanding of time – as you move towards it, it remains distant from you)… seen myself as standing at that magical line that does not exist, with my future flowing towards me and my past dropping away behind me over the horizon.

So, Lost Time: a few angry or resigned poems about Covid. Then, moving into the collection, place – mostly Wales but not entirely so – gives way to the largest group – poems about or reflecting the sea. Beyond their horizon (horizons?), you come to poems about writing and about memories, which seem to lead – at least in my mind – to poems on time. The light-hearted Killing Time (which is prefixed, appropriately enough, with a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies: “For staying is nowhere”) is about waiting to go into the auditorium from a theatre cafe, and leads into the long five-part Elegies of Time. Unredeemable Time picks up the theme and the short Creation combines time with earlier themes: memory and writing. The Departed makes a fitting end to both the theme and the collection.

Categories
Poetry

Creation

As I write, each line reaches for memories
lost, fallen beyond the edge of the world:
kamarupa dwelling in infinity, fading

when my lines do not find them
and my words fail passion and desire.

Eons, lost pasts. Which of them
could dream my frail dream of this
verse? Which, thrown

across the fabric of time, could make
nothing everything?

Categories
Short Stories

The Poetry Reading

I have never really liked giving readings of my poetry. I am not sure why. Perhaps it is partly that I sense that my speaking voice is not the mellifluous voice I hear in my head, does not have the timbre that the poems deserve—that it does not—in my humble opinion, as they say—present them well. I am not a natural performer! Or perhaps it is that I seem to possess a skill, which surely must be unique to any wordsmith: I have the ability to read aloud a line that I have read hundreds of times before, a line which I wrote, for goodness sake, and probably spent some time over—agonising over the perfect word and word order for the sound of the line—for my poems are certainly written for the sound as much as the words on the page—and misspeak the one word on which the line hinges!

Sorry I’ll read that again, I did not mean to say dead, it should be dread!

So begins one of the shorter short stories in When I Am Not Writing Poetry. It finishes – and this was what made me post it here – with a short poem by Malcolm Lowry that seemed to pretty much express the same problem: somehow using the wrong word:

Strange Type

I wrote: in the dark caverns of our birth.
The printer had it tavern, which seems better:
But herein lies the subject of our mirth,
Since on the next page death appears as dearth.
So it may be that God’s word was distraction,
Which to our strange type appears destruction,
Which is bitter.

Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry. Pocket Poets Series Number 17.
City Lights Books, 1962. p.79.

I should add, that all my books – the short stories as well as both of my poetry collections – are available on Amazon as well as from this website.

Categories
Essay Poetry

The Welsh Swagman

I have been working on a poem about a farm. Or perhaps it is about its tenant for some fifty years from July 1848.

In ten years Joseph Jenkins created a farm that was judged to be the best in the county. He had learned everything there was to know about farming from his father and put that knowledge to good use, becoming prosperous and well liked in the community. He had little formal schooling – apart from some early learning he spent only a couple of terms at a school some five miles from his parent’s farm run by the minister of the church – but he learned to write… and so began a lifetime as a diarist.

Despite his initial successes, life on a Welsh farm was hard in the 1800s – he regularly rose before dawn to walk the fields and hedgerows and, although they employed house staff and farm workers both he and his wife worked from dawn until dusk. His successes brought him into contact with the local squirearchy and this in turn led to time away from the farm. Too much time away, particularly as much of it was spent in local hostelries. He repeatedly signed The Pledge but seemed unable to free himself of his liking for drink. Life on the farm became harder… to the extent that on several occasions his wife left him and returned to her father’s farm, sometimes some of the children went too. This seemed entirely wrong to Joseph who felt that he was no longer master in his own house and when, on another occasion, his wife searched his pockets for money from the sale of stock, his pride took a further blow.

Despite his adventures in local inns, he remained someone of note and lent his support and his voice in support of The Milford Haven and Manchester Line – the M&M Line – which would connect the deep water port in South Wales to the English industrial manufacturing centre. He understood the advantages that the line would bring to agriculture and to the rural economy and gave his full support to the project, often delivering speeches and canvassing for support. He was even invited to address a House of Commons committee on the line’s benefit for rural agriculture. Then, when work began on the line it passed through his farm and the work caused chaos in his fields and ruined his carefully laid hedges.

And so, one December night, some 20 years after he took over the tenancy, he packed two bags and, without a word, walked out of the yard, over the bridge near the entrance to the farm and onto the railway line, walking north to the nearest station. He travelled to Liverpool and took ship to Australia. His diaries for the 25 years he spent there have been published as Diary of a Welsh Swagman. Bethan Phillips’ book, Pity the Swagman, provides the back story and commentary – the image above is taken from its cover.

And then, it seems, he returned expecting to take over the running the farm from his son, almost as if he had never left. Understandably, especially when his old habits returned, the past arguments between husband and wife resurfaced, and life on the farm must have become well nigh impossible for everyone. Within four years the swagman was dead.

My poem, Trecefel, will not see the light of day yet. I am sure further proof readings will generate some editing! Maybe I am not quite satisfied yet!

Joseph Jenkins. Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869-1894.
Edited by William Evans. Macmillan Australia, 1977
Bethan Phillips. Pity the Swagman: The Australian Odyssey
of a Victorian Diarist. Cymdeithas Lyfrau Ceredigian, 2002

Categories
Poetry

Consequences

Because I have seen
such small glory as heaven found
Lit translucent in the wing of a dragonfly serene above the dark pond depths
Lit gold in the sunlit pelt of that one white cat still beneath the tree
Lit in Spring’s faint skeleton of Winter’s fallen leaf
Lit in the fractal eternity of each flake that floats snow down
and know the pain each angel hears
Held in a single seadrop soft splashed on some high rock above the surf
Held in that single grain of sand that shapes the sloping beach or curving dune
Held in the horizon haze that surrounds my coast
Held in that seed on which all life is scribed
Held in the single tear squeezed from the duct
Held in each word locked behind my pen,
know that I shall probably pray that time dreams me more
and in that moment thirst for this man’s illusion and that man’s vision
for I can no longer sleep to sleep
to dream to write
of the mountain or of the desert or of the sea, for the world holds
no words again