Tag: Mostly Welsh

Categories
Fiction Poetry

My covers and the sea

By now some readers will probably have noticed that there is a theme linking all of my covers: the sea, that “watery part of the world”(Moby Dick) that for some ten or so years was both the foreground and the background to my life as I served as a Navigating (or Deck) Officer in the New Zealand Shipping Company and Overseas Containers Limited, travelling mostly to New Zealand and Australia. Before that, my love of the sea was confined to teenage years of swimming, fishing and surfing on the Gower in South Wales. It was a good start!

Many of my poems (such as The Voyage in Mostly Welsh) deal explicitly with my time at sea while others in that collection simply use the sea as a metaphor (for example, Ocean and Lost). Even in Book of the Spirit, a poetry pamphlet focussing very closely on words, writing and love, the sea – and the horizon, another recurring them – find a way in. The first poem ends:

for a future, a new future, a better future, aware of time only in our memory 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 –
we understand the futility of the search, we understand each splash of destiny

And there will be – of course – sea poems in my next collection too. Heatherslade, previewed here, is specific to those Gower years while others – Tides, Shell, The Estuary and Thálassa, Thálassa are of other seas, other coasts, other horizons. The most recent poem published here – Life Tercets – brings together my life as a poet, memory, and my life at sea.

During Covid lockdown, my writing moved on to fiction and to The Dark Trilogy, which is autobiographical fiction: much of Book I is concerned with sea voyages and Book II is a play for voices covering my early years at sea as a Deck Cadet and young officer, from joining my first ship – an experience, like the first few trips, that was  quite unnerving to someone who had never left home before (see Innocence. posted here last November) – and ending when I left the sea forever.  

And then there is my recent short story collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry Here there are a total of seven short stories set in the merchant navy: three short snapshots and four longer pieces: The Beginning, Cargo, The Sailing Board and Such Sweet Sorrow. I may speak a little more about these in a future post.

So I hope that  you will begin to understand the inevitability of my covers – they could only reflect my innate connection with the sea! Even Braiding Brexit is a deep sea blue! For the rest, there are waves, the vastness of the sea and the horizon!

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
Event

Art Trail Magazine

The Ceredigion Art & Craft Trail (CACT) were kind enough to feature me in the Autumn/Winter edition of art trail magazine which can be read online here. CACT was formed to raise the profile of artists and craftspeople in Ceredigion, which it does through their website and through a number of exhibition-sales throughout the year. The next will take place at The Bandstand in Aberystwyth from Thursday 15th – Saturday 17th December. It is advertised on Facebook as a fantastic opportunity to buy unique, locally-made Christmas presents direct from the artists and makers.

I shall be there!

Categories
Poetry

Zen Reflexions

To discern 
           our place 
To commune 
To see 
           beyond our close shadow of death 
To focus 
           my poet mind 
I need direction 
           a qibla 
Or some beads to tell 
           to take refuge from my life: 
A candle flame 
Only the candle 
Flame 
Flickering 
A journey into quietude 
            begins 
Into that silence 
             comes tranquillity 
And the absence of words 
Serenity beyond words: 
              I become sentient - 
              conscious of only this moment in the flame of a grain of sand 
                           Of the sun shining through golden autumn trees 
                          Of the clearing mists 
                          dissolving in the valley and above the hills 
                          giving way to rain that fills the sky 
                         so that the branches droop, dripping 
                         as the wind rustles the upper boughs 
                         and drops spatter on the window glass. 
                        Of love 
Peace 
Perhaps, now, I am no longer physical 
              But have become a spiritual being 
              having a human experience 
Writing 
              And in the writing 
                                the words return

Originally published in Mostly Welsh (Y Lolfa 2019, pp.51-52)

Notes

  • Moliere: “Without knowledge life is no more than a shadow of death”
  • qibla: Spiritual direction  (the direction of Mecca)
  • Zen Master, Hung Chih, writes of serene reflection in which one forgets all words and realizes – is aware only of – Essence.
  • c.f. Blake: Auguries of Innocence: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand…”
  • “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but…” Generally attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, a French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest
Categories
Poetry

An Unpublished Poem

There are about a dozen poems quoted in The Dark Trilogy that are not published in Mostly Welsh. Here is one of them!

The Interface

Books make visible the writer’s soul
Which bleeds its angst by pen:  
Spread thin across life’s whited bowl  
A thin red stain of madeleine

Books may offer us an author’s eye
That ensnares the reader within its brail
Or should writers light the reader’s sky
And tear apart the shadowy veil?

Books will hold the writer’s thought
And bridge the gap twixt pen and readers
A mystic link so carefully wrought
To blazon unicorns among the cedars

The writer’s flame burns bright with drama
As ashes from a tortured mind combust
For in the writing there must be karma:
Finding peace in a little heap of livid dust

With thanks to Proust, Baudelaire, Auden and di Lampedusa
Categories
Essay Fiction

Some would argue that no genre is more fictitious than a biography

So said Carlos Ruiz Zafon – it is the lead quotation at the beginning of Book I. In an interview recently published in Poetry Wales, the poet Tim Relf says: “I don’t believe any of us are reliable narrators of events, even to ourselves. My latest collection Same Difference returns to that idea in various forms: how our life is what the novelist Julian Barnes refers to as ‘the story we have told ourselves’.”

I have tried, in The Dark Trilogy, to blend the story that I have told myself about myself, about my life, with an older history that might have been mine. Once. I have dived into the depths of one of my poems and surfaced with far more than I had dreamt was in the lines. ‘Retrospective’ – the poem in Mostly Welsh (Y Lolfa, 2019) that became ‘Dark Ashes’ – was avowedly autobiographical of a part of my life but I never wrote a second, older, life into those lines. Or so I thought! In taking on the role of my own editor and critic in Books I and III of The Trilogy, I allowed the possibility of there being more behind the 326 lines of the poem than I had been conscious of. A second story. A second – older – life. So there are two biographies in Book I. And at least one of them – the one to which Book II adds – is true.

But 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.

In The Lady in the Van, Alan Bennett wrote “You don’t put yourself into what you write; you find yourself there.”