Tag: The Dark Trilogy

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
Fiction

The characters behind the characters!

If you have read The Dark Trilogy you may remember three minor characters – Jan, Simon and Neal – friends with whom I walked some of the way home when I left prep school each day. They only get brief, passing mentions – adding some detail from life that serves to add to the picture which hopefully also make the story more real.

I remember that we both used to try to walk some of our way home from preparatory school with the lovely Jan although she turned off our route almost as soon as we reached the end of the school grounds…

and, again,

the pretty and petite Jan with whom – along with Simon and sometimes Neil – we made sure to walk the few hundred yards to her aunt’s bungalow as we left school…

…but in soon-to-be-published When I Am Not Writing Poetry I have created back stories for all three of my friends which gradually build their relationships to me in their adult lives. Of course – although all three children existed (I have not used their real names!) – I do not know their adult lives as well as I pretend.

I wonder if any of them will recognise themselves!

… or the blazer badge!

Categories
Fiction

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
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
Essay Fiction

Who is Trystan Lewis? Who Am I?

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
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
Fiction

Anabasis: The Dark Trilogy

https://youtu.be/aq1lnwBvUuI
Categories
Fiction

Reality and Writing

Laurence Durrell once wrote, “Reality is too old-fashioned nowadays for the writer’s use. We must count upon art to revive it and bring it up to date” (Monsieur. The Avignon Quintet, 1974). Much of my writing – this is true of The Dark Trilogy and the poem at the heart of the novel, as well as of many of my other poems and, as you may discover when they are eventually published next year, also of many of my short stories – is based on (or around) my life.

Which may lead you to wonder if this is suggestive of a lack of imagination, or an unhealthy focus on myself (George Orwell noted that “Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about” is one reason that people write. (George Orwell: ‘Why I Write’ Gangrel  4 (Summer 1946))… but I think perhaps it is just that writing for me – and perhaps for many others – is a cathartic exercise: such autobiographical writings simply offer their authors – if I may borrow Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s words  – “the chance to look at themselves in the mirror of memory and for a moment believe they’ll live forever.” (The Labyrinth of the Spirit. 2018). I have to remember though that, more prosaically and perhaps rather more negatively, Evelyn Waugh wrote, “Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography” (A Little Learning: An Autobiography (Vol.1), 1990). Jonathan Swift noted “there is in most people a reluctance and unwillingness to be forgotten… [and] if it be founded in our nature, as an incitement to virtue, it ought not to be ridiculed.” (Charles Peake quoted this in his 1971 essay, “The Coherence of Gulliver’s Travels.” In Claude Rawson (ed.) Swift. London: Sphere Books). But I hope at least that I remain curious about the future!

Meanwhile, like Durrell, I feel the need to revive my life, to embellish the boring facts and to bring them up to date! As Carlos Ruiz Zafon said “no genre is more fictitious than a biography”! Those who know me may recognise autobiographical fact amongst the fiction… perhaps, others will just read a fable!

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
Fiction

The Scholar Critic

The device that I have used in The Dark Trilogy is one also used by Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire – that of using an imaginary second person – a scholar – to discuss and explain a poem, thereby narrating the story.

Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote wrote that his friend’s poem was a “sudden flourish of magic” and it will become  evident that my scholar feels similarly about the poem of his friend. He too would of course suggest that his commentary should be read both first and during a reading of the poem as a reference and, like Kinbote, feels that the:

“… reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, [is] a reality that only my notes can provide. “

The literary persona of my scholar-critic – a friend of the poet since their school days – is unduly proud of his scholarship and of his writing skills. He is also very much in the habit of writing scholarly papers, so his introduction, his commentary on the poem and even his biographical notes are peppered with footnotes which serve to demonstrate his own knowledge and skill as much as they help the reader!  He also, with some justification, feels that he should be the one to write at length and in some depth about his friend.

Perhaps you will feel that the scholar is writing as much to serve and promote his own aims – a major publication, association with a great poet, evidence of his research skills, and so on – as to respond to the poet’s request:

… You must know that my health is failing and that these days I rarely leave my home on the South Downs, valuing the peace of the rolling countryside and the view of the distant sea above companionship and travel; so when my publishers asked me to work on a new version of ‘Retrospective’ my first thought was to refuse. That was until I re-read the poem and was once again transported back to my early lives and loves. I DO believe that the poem deserves another outing! And what I believe would enhance its brevity are the stories behind it, but I have no longer the energy. I should like to see a commentary to the poem which opens up the histories which underpin my lines. Christo, having known me for most of my life I know that you will be able to unravel the often difficult themes and thinking lying behind the lines of the work I am now calling ‘Dark Ashes’ …

Or perhaps you will see a colleague determined to bring his good friend’s poem to the wider audience it deserves.