Amongst
the soggy rotting leaves
or between
the bowed grass blades
thrust
the tips of snowdrop
leaves
Categories
Annual, again
Tag: Chris Armstrong
What will the next cover be?
We are pleased to announce that our new title, When I am not Writing Poetry will be available at the end of February. This collection of short stories – some very short and one almost the length of a novella – was written during the latter half of 2020… my only excuse being that I was stuck in front of my computer during the Covid lockdown! And there are only so many poems I can write! I needed a change!
Several of the stories make oblique reference to the Covid ‘plague’ but other tales are a reflection of my earlier life, a half-dozen of them going all the way back to my time at sea! Regular readers – of both my poems and my fiction – may notice a tendency to link themes to the sea! And if not the sea, then the horizon!
The sea is always there!
Don’t forget you can buy the latest titles directly from here!
Chris Armstrong
Categories
The Absent Sailor
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
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
Gorillas, Children and Reading
One of the charities that I support is Nkuringo Education & Community Support (NECS) which was set up to support the school and villages of Nkuringo in Uganda – who hosted a group of us when we visited in 2014 to see the mountain gorillas of Bwindi ‘The Impenetrable Forest’. The charity – through its ever increasing membership has supported many, many children through primary and secondary school (which involves providing clothes, shoes, school books, bunk beds, desks and mattresses as well as paying for their education) and has gone on to support the building of further classrooms, a teachers’ block, and water tanks as well as providing medical aid and small loans for villagers to get a business started. There is always more to do! Following Covid-19 when money was terribly short in the village the school buildings have fallen into disrepair as the little money available had to be used for food. It seems endless. And there are always more children wanting to start school!
The page images above are from the group’s newsletter – a bumper issue following the first visit back by the Trustees to assess needs and progress. You can follow the group on Facebook as GO UGANDA NECS where you can read the entire Newsletter (Recent Media in the right hand column).
And please – if you feel the least tempted to buy a copy of The Dark Trilogy, remember that half of the royalties are going to the NECS charity.
Categories
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.
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 pleasureSun 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 givesmy body wave born to where she stands
Much of The Dark Trilogy deals with my past. A while ago I read, and felt that I had to respond to, a blog post – Clearing Out – by Andrew Green, one-time National Librarian of Wales. He had written:
I’ve been clearing out. Clearing cupboards in the front room, full of books, files, magazines, papers, photos, games, maps and other detritus. Many of them have been there since the cupboards and the bookshelves above them were built some thirty years ago…
The cupboards have yielded plenty of surprises. Some things I’d entirely forgotten I’d kept. Funeral services of long-dead aunts and godmothers… Some things have been easy enough to discard… But between the can-go’s and the must keep’s there’s another class of object I worry about, the borderline cases. Take this newspaper article with an image of me and other hopeful cyclists about to set off from Cardiff City Hall to Aberystwyth to raise money for Nicaragua. If it goes, so does all evidence of me as I was then. But that raises a serious problem – a problem, you might say, in the philosophy of time, or of consciousness. Who was I then? And I am the same person now as I was then?
By chance, almost exactly a year earlier, the poet and writer Helen May Williams had written in her blog:
“When I was seven years old, I remember writing an essay about ‘Who am I?’ In it, I pondered whether the person I was last year was the same as the person I was now, and whether that person would be the same a year hence. I still don’t have the answer to that question.”
My response to Andrew Green – I think I thought that it doesn’t matter whether you are a different person (better/worse!) now to the person you were then: both histories of you are equally important and go to making up your life – was:
I am the last person to talk about de-cluttering… I keep everything!
But there is another side to your archive. I have had so many conversations with relatives – my sister, my sisters-in-law, etc – wishing that they (and I) had paid more attention to the stories that our/their parents told during the years when they were alive. So many attempts to identify people in photographs! So much history lost! To the extent that I am currently working on an annotated and illustrated timeline starting with my grandparents to pass on to my grandsons… who may or may not be interested. Now, or ever! I had thought it near finished. But, alas! Your piece suggests a further annotation: ‘Objects’ [in my cottage] – the pair of china figures, the pewter… much of which came from my grandfather’s house… or the fake fur coat I bought in Liverpool in the sixties!
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?
Categories
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
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.