Tag: poetry

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

Categories
Poetry

Back to being a poet!

I am working on bringing together my next collection of poems for publication in a few months time. I had made an initial selection some time ago but coming back to them ‘cold’ after a few months when I had not looked at or thought about them made me begin to doubt, to wonder if the selection and ordering was quite right! Some of them no longer seemed worthy of publication! From the vantage point of these few months, the collection looked almost random!

A few days on and about ten percent of the original poems have been removed from the collection and I am in the process of re-ordering the remainder so that the newly emerging themes are cohesive – at least to my mind! And then – mostly yet to come – is the consideration of whether to add other poems. Have I any new poems that fit those themes? I have at least one in mind! Can I add another theme – probably not!

And all of that means that I need a new title.

But I am back to writing poetry again after a couple of months with little inspiration! I have written about eight shortish poems this year so far and have the beginnings of a longer project in mind!

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
Essay Poetry

Memories

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.

But as I said in a earlier post, Some would argue that no genre is more fictitious than a biography,

…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.

Coyle, Derek (2022) Those Christmas Mornings.
Poetry Salzburg Review 38 (Spring 2022) pp.158-9.

Categories
Ceredigion Arts and Craft Trail

Calling All Poets in Ceredigion!

The Ceredigion Art and Craft Trail – of which I am a member – is a not-for-profit body running exhibitions and Open Studio Weeks throughout the county throughout the year. The most recent was at the Bandstand in Aberystwyth in the run up to Christmas. Artists, Writers and Crafters join together to promote their work with shared events and exhibitions throughout Ceredigion. Membership includes an entry in our popular online directory and in the annual printed directory, the possibility of selling your works from the website, feature articles in our Art Trail e-Magazine, and many other opportunities. The website can be visited at https://ceredigionarttrail.org.uk/

Individual membership is just £55 for 2023.

Adding writers and poets to our membership was a recent innovation and at present I am the sole representative of our craft. I am hoping that I may tempt more writers and poets to join. We are hoping to host some book/reading events if enough of you join.

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

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
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.