Month: June 2018

Fathers’ Day

My favourite picture of my Dad with Michael) 1969-ish

Here he is, late 1960s with his first grandson. My Dad could have been so many things. He’d played trumpet and cornet in the Salvation Army. He sang in the Chapel choir. He was a gifted photographer; he won scholarships to Grammar School and to Art School. There wasn’t the money for him to use either, so he worked in a mill as a woollen-spinner for 50 years. A great walker, a bird-watcher. He loved Jussi Bjorling of all the great tenors. He didn’t talk a lot. Here’s three poems for him on Fathers’ Day.

Maestro

 

His hands cross-hatched as a chopping board

from breaking yarn- a million creels.

I think he dreamed moors and opera in the mill.

His nails were horny, blue with old dark blood,

caught by flying shuttles in the humming  sleet

of shivering threads. Miming in the din,

the racket of machinery, the deafening beat

of spinning-mules, close air thick with lanolin.

Chapel  choir –  his tenor voice came reedy-light.

Round and ringing if he thought he was alone

with Jussi Bjorling on the gramophone,

the gathering wave of None shall sleep;

a duet to bring a dreamed La Scala to its feet,

his voice like a moorland wind, and rich as night.

spinning

 

Trespassers

 

Drawn to Mam Tor, to Kinder Downfall,

Simon’s Seat, Grass Woods, The Strid;

they came by steam train, on the bus,

away from mill and pit and forge,

an England dark with smoke;

they passed by crumbled slums, grand

neo-classic terraces, iron-railinged

parks, until the cities petered out

on the edges of high moors, big skies;

 

they came to the quiet of neat fields,

of drystone walls. They walked miles,

wore caps or trilbies, belted macs,

flapping turn-up trousers, ordinary shoes.

They knew the habitats of birds and flowers;

they knew shortcuts and hidden waterfalls,

would pull aside wired gates,

push over ‘Private: Keep Out’ boards,

would not be kept from bluebell woods.

 

At school we had to pray they’d be forgiven,

those trespassers, who rambled viking fells,

ghylls and cloughs,  sour gritstone moors

and green lanes cropped by mourning sheep.

They knew the land they walked should not be owned,

wished it was theirs; coveted the cottages

of the small stone villages, their tidy gardens.

Those men like my father the woollen spinner,

namer of birds;  presser of wild flowers

dales

According to their cloth

 

I knew one man made a forced march in a column,

full pack and rifle; heat and scrub, humidity, thick dust;

forty miles in a single day and never knew a battle plan.

 

One man who fell from a plane

in a night full of parachutes,

the wind white silk ; the dark sound of planes

dwindling up into the night and him falling into fiasco;

who taught history, who clung to Communism

like a Tudor martyr to a relic.

 

Another who drove his jeep into something

that men might make, experimenting

in a slovenly way with making up an idea of hell;

into a camp made out of rust and rot,

of wire and sweet black smoke and rags and sweat;

No one came to liberate him;

no one to take his eyes from the dark,

no-one to bring him back from the dead.

 

The one I loved most spun yarn

for uniforms and army blankets.

Reserved occupation.Conchie.

All the same to him. Nobody tried to kill me.

He cut his coat according to his cloth.

Took his suit lengths into Leeds,

to Jewish tailors, emigrés

in small dark shops in narrow streets.

 

You don’t choose where you are in history.

You cut your coat

and wear it.

Tailor Sewing a Jacket

 

[“According to their cloth”   published in Much Possessed [smith|doorstop 2016]

 

 

 

So there. Or, so what?

so 9

So when did it actually take hold. I mean, the business of answering a question by starting the answer with ‘SO’? As on quiz shows, for instance.

What do you do for living, then, Kevin? 

Pause.

So, ‘Zander, I put the eyes in Cabbage Patch Dolls

Or in news links going live to reporter on the ground:

What’s the reaction of the community this morning?

Significant satellite delay pause.

So, Sophie, temperatures seem to have cooled, but there’s still a significant police presence, as you can see behind me.

When did I become aware of it? When did I become so annoyed by it? Why? Why do I care? (don’t answer that in case you start with “So”). I was perfectly comfortable with certain usages for years and years. Mothers did it when you came home inexcusably late.

So where’ve you been?

Friends said it when you hadn’t seen them for ages.

So how are you doing?

And colleagues, when they’d just pitched an idea about how things could be changed

So what do you think, then?

And that was perfectly fine. You’ll notice there’s no pause after “so”. Whereas in current usage there is. What’s that about. There was a period after that (probably not yet finished) when things became  so (or emphatically SO) this that or the the other. Fashions became so last year. It was making noun phrases do the work of adjectives. I have no rooted objection to that. It’s what we can do in English. Shakespeare did it all the time, pushing the limits of what could be done. But it still irritated me in a low-level way. And now the latest, passing (it will pass; things do) usage. It annoys me that I can’t actually explain the basic grammatical function of ‘so’ any more. So happy, or so cross…I get that . It’s an intensifier. And in the first examples, it’s a rhetorical device. I can live with that. Still; I think I’m becoming rooted in the role of grumpy old man.

 

So, I thought, tongue in cheek, I’d post a poem which for some reason I called

So I’m thinking

 

– of Ted Hughes’ gritstone house,

of that tunnel of a yard, its slippery flags,

of that valley of unsmoking chimneys,

an old abandoned artillery

knee-deep in brown leaf-litter,

firing blanks at a Pennine moon,

 

– of the abrasions of passing time,

the world wearing down till it’s bland as an egg,

to the soundtrack of seconds, a long, drawn

cello note, circling these cloughs

 

– of defunct mills and breweries –

Hammonds, Duttons, Websters, thin and bitter,

and of my Methodist uncle,Leonard,

and of the Pledge he signed, aged six,

 

– of this film I saw, in Japanese,

at the Essoldo, where the whole of an army was killed

down to the very last one, the cannibal,

shot through the smoke by the farmers

burning stubble, clearing the last of war

that ended when I was two

and still isn’t over, seventy years on,

 

which is not to be laid at Ted Hughes’ door,

any more than the orphans

walled in the sides of the valley

in the shadow of lums and sycamores

 

I’ve never sent it anywhere, as far as I can remember. It’s a sort of tribute to the times I’ve spent at Lumb Bank, to the stories of the orphanage in the valley, to the smokeless chimneys, to that dark back yard. Which turns up in one that was published (in Much Possessed)..this one started life in a workshop which invited us to think of two writers and then to put them in a landscape. There’s minimal invention in it.

Banked up

 

Brittle as a mirror

worrying at little lines

exquisite as ants or wasps

half-aware of an open window

banging somewhere in this long dark house

in a clenched valley

of cold chimneys and black walls

cemented with orphans’ bones

balsam flattened by the weight of wind

of trees flogging themselves to death

she cramps herself small, and smaller

dreams of dwindling

into the fastness of a shell

of lying under a full moon

in a sky of no wind

 

Somewhere out in the yard, a bucket has blown over

rackets about the cobbles like a big man in a rage

like a man who’d smash his fist into a gritstone wall

and sing about the blood.

so 12

 

So. There you are. Have a nice Friday.

 

Passing the time with Mr Causley

(Preamble: there’s a phrase that’s been stuck in my mind ever since I first read it in the 70’s, quoted in an article by Geoff Fox in ‘Children’s Literature in Education’. I keep writing about it, one way or another. A 13 year old girl describes what it is for her to be a reader of stories.

It’s as if I’m a sort of dark watcher, who is there at the scene, but none of the characters pays any attention to me. I’m like a power, as if everything is happening because I’m there.                                                    Claire, 3rd year, secondary modern

[Dark watchers: young readers and their fiction)

I think all the poets who matter are dark watchers, none more so than Charles Causley, who once said: If I didn’t write poetry I think I’d explode.)

I’ll start with a rambling introduction. It’s the kind of thing you can’t ignore in a face-to-face conversation, but can cheerfully skim when you’re reading, without any fear of giving offence. I’ve spent most of last week setting up three launch events for my new pamphlet Advice to a traveller [Indigo Dreams] and after many small frustrations we’re now good to go with readings in Halifax (with Gaia Holmes and Vicky Gatehouse), in Leeds (with Alicia Fernandez, Tom Weir and Ian Harker) and in Wakefield (Ian Parks and Laura Potts)

[** should you be interested in finding more about them they’ve all been guests on the cobweb. The links to their posts appear at the end.]

In and amongst, I’ve been trying to do some real writing, when not distracting myself with comfort-blanket novels. I’ve not read novels for ages, and it’s remarkably soothing to be able to do it again. Anyway, I’m struggling to get grips with a sequence based on a local mining disaster in the 70’s. I’ve had a tutorial workshop with Kim Moore who suggests one element could be short ‘interlude’ poems about other disasters…Senghenydd, Aberfan, Markham, Hartley…and I have the idea that they should be short 4-line stanza ballads. I haul out Charles Causley: Collected Poems , because there’s a man who could make 4-line rhyming stanza do just about anything. Two sunny days later, I’ve read the whole book, which now bristles with post-its. I really thought I knew his stuff…in the way I thought I knew U A Fanthorpe. Couldn’t have been more wrong.

It reminds me that I once met Charles Causley, and I was sure I remembered what he looked like. I was convinced I remembered, along with the deceptively mild demeanour (think Alan Bennett) that he had a cap of soft white hair . Wrong. Like all of us he has had lots of physical selves and lives. And all of them sing in his poems. But no head of soft white hair.

Mr causley's chronology

Still. I’ll tell you a story.

One August, long ago and far away, I drove from Dawlish, where I was on a family camping holiday, to Oxford to start a week’s tutoring for an NYU course for American teachers of English. I’d walked up from the beach (where the seawall fell down in 2014), got changed, packed the car and drove to Oxford. I guess that added to the dreamlike quality of arriving on a warm, golden summer evening, to be greeted by ( I think) Maurice from Chicago….if it was Maurice, who was frighteningly correct, and always immaculately dressed in a blindingly white shirt and discreet tie.

Because it was a Sunday evening, he apologised, many of our course members would not be with us. (They were in the habit of flying off to Rome or Florence or Paris or Amsterdam at the weekends. That taught me how small Europe is, and that Americans have a different scale of distances.) However, said Maurice (if it was Maurice) a few of us had stayed behind to show some hospitality to a guest who’d been invited by the course director. If you like poetry, you may care to join us, said Maurice. Are you familiar with a Charles Cowsly?

And so it was that a bit later on I joined six or seven dutiful stay-behinds in what would have been the Rector’s study, all leather chairs and glazed bookcases and ticking clocks and buckram-bound works of biblical exegisis and there was:

causley 16

..Mr Charles Cowsly, who read to us for an hour, and told us stories, and generally entranced me. Just to be clear, this was 30 years ago. What I knew about poetry (apart from university and sixth form teaching) didn’t amount to much. As I wrote in an earlier post, I got my poetry from school anthologies. but that meant, thanks to Geoffrey Summerfield and ‘Voices’,  I certainly knew Vernon Scannell, and even more, like generations of the children I taught, I knew (or thought I knew) Charles Causley. Which mainly meant I knew ‘A jolly hunter’, ‘What has happened to Lulu?’, ‘Timothy Winters’, ‘The ballad of the bread man’ and ‘Charlotte Dyment’. The first four were sure fire winners with any class I taught, and the last one fitted in with the poetry I read as social history…broadsheet ballads; the poetry of the working classes. Oral poetry. Causley’s ‘Figgie Hobbin’ was the only single poet collection we had a full class set of, until Gareth Owen’s ‘Song of the city‘ was published.

So that was Causley for me, memorable and accessible, but not up there on set text lists with Heaney and Hughes and Larkin. Maybe that was because he was tagged as a children’s poet? I hadn’t tuned in to the craft, the elegance, the misleading simplicity of his work. One hour in a room in a house on the Banbury Road changed that for good, and for the better.

First there was the physical presence; comfortable, unassuming, a man at ease with himself. And then there was the voice. Some poets have an unfair advantage, their voices at one with the rhythm and music of their poetry. Heaney had it and so did Hughes. Tony Harrison has it, and so does Liz Lochhead. Young contemporary poets I know have it. Clare Shaw. Kim Moore. Instantly recognisable. You can make your own lists of people who haven’t got it, folk whose poetry is terrific but whose readings don’t match it. Charles Causley had it, Cornish and unemphatic but with a quiet authority and a lovely rhythm. And then the sense of place. Some poets live their whole lives in one place, a place where they are deep rooted and enriched, which is never parochial, and which they simultaneously transcend. George Mackay Brown is one, and Causley another.

causley 22

I started to get the glimmerings of it as he talked about his village, his mother and father, the house where he lived all his life, and this illuminated one of my favourite poems of his: ‘Reservoir Street’. Here, in ‘hallmark’ 4-line rhyming stanzas he recalls being sent as a child to stay with Auntie, who

‘…stood strong as the Eddystone Lighthouse.

A terrible light shone out of her head.’

who rules her five prime – beef boys with a fierce discipline. The days are hot, the sun comes up like a killer; at night, motor- car tyres rubbed out the dark, and next day:

‘Down in the reservoir I saw a man drowning’.

The child escapes back to his home, and on the train, says the poet:

‘I thought of my brother who slept beside me,

four walls round us pure as cloam.

 

When I got to my house my head was thunder.

The bed lay open as a shell.

Sweet was my brother’s kiss, and sweeter

the innocent water from the well.’

 

It’s a poem with not a wasted word, its release like the breaking of a storm after oppressive heat, and the cool of after. It’s as true and frightening and real as a folk tale. It was told, rather than read, and then he told us about the white painted bedroom he shared. He didn’t need to explain anything.  I’ve thought since that what enchanted me was its tenderness. What do I mean by that? I mean the tenderness of Rembrandt’s portraits of his wife and unwavering eye of his self-portrait, the loving honesty. Not a shred of sentimentality. That tenderness was in his reading At the grave of John Clare. I had not known that a poet could talk to a dead poet like that.

‘O Clare! Your poetry clear, translucent / as your lovely name’.

I had not known it was possible to use the word ‘lovely’ so frankly and simply. The only other poem I remember from that reading was Death of a poet. I’m still not sure that, despite its total accessibility, I understand it yet, but this last stanza  stays and stays.

‘Over the church a bell broke like a wave upended.

The hearse left for winter with a lingering hiss.

I looked in the wet sky for a sign, but no bird descended.

I went across the road to the pub; wrote this.’

One of the things about Causley’s poems is that you can learn them by heart more readily than anyone else’s I know. I also learned I needed to see beyond Figgie Hobbin to this unnerving quiet craftsman and maker of great and grown-up poems. A couple of weeks later, I bought ‘Secret destinations’. It wasn’t what I expected, and it took me a long, long time to just let it work. Many of the poems were written while he was a writer-in residence at the University of Western Australia, and it’s as though the unfamiliar landscape jolted him into what Tribune called ‘the arena of truly major poets’. I can’t imagine that sort of league-table labelling would have suited the quiet man I heard read, but I see what it was getting at when I read

Kite, poisoned by dingo bait

‘A kite, as motionless as clay,

plumping its feather against death

like northern birds against the frost

it gripped the noon, its eye of stone

blinded as by a pentecost’

and also, this, from Greek Orthodox, Melbourne, where,

in a scent

of drooling wax a priest hurls in,

suddenly pitches his black tent

scolds God in Greek.

There’s a heightening of sensation in these poems…that was the unexpectedness. I needed to grow, not out of, but beyond simple expectations of ballads, or lyrical reminders of

‘This is the house where I was born:

sepulchre-white, the unsleeping stream

washing the wall by my child bed’.

 

Well, it took days of reading last week to find that I’d not scratched the surface of what he could do, and with what passion he could write. I’d forgotten that he was, early on, a “Poet of WW2”. If he’d died in the war, he’d be remembered for that more than he is.I’d not taken in that he could write, with equal ease, blank verse, free verse, sonnets, couplets, and hymns (if asked); I’d not realised just how much myth, autobiography, fable and folk tale bleed into each other, nor just how far he ranged, geographically. I learned again how technically accomplished he was, and how apparently simple and accessible, and how he could make, unerringly, solid, breathing landscapes and seascapes. He made then, like his  crunching sea, with great economy.  Like this;

the cool quilt of the filtering moon

or this

the stiff waves propped against the classroom window

or this

beyond those pale disturbances of sky

another year assembles its vast floe

And his instinct was religious. It’s not just that angels and Christ walk familiarly in the streets of his imagination. For him, as for Blake, everything that lives is holy.  And he could be drily funny, too. Let me share two small discoveries before I finish.

There are some small poems towards the back of the Collected Poems. One records the time Ted Hughes came to his classroom….to read and tell stories, I imagine. (Wouldn’t you have liked Charles Causley to teach you?)

In a junior school 

“When I asked

what the poet did, a girl said,

Make up true stories

of people and animals

in his head.

 

When I told them

he was also a farmer,

they said they thought

farmers didn’t have time to write

stories and poems

…………………………………………….

Once, I said, he took home

a wounded badger.

Nursed it, then set it free.

All the children smiled;

clapped their hands very loudly

 

and then there are three or four that I could easily have passed over. I think they must have come unmediated from a notebook. The sequence is called Embryos. This is my favourite

1.

Emily Dickinson

called last night.

You are a poor cook,

she said. And look,

these windows

need cleaning.

As for your poems

listen to me

for a moment

 

Just one thing more; I have an abiding affection for ‘Jack the treacle eater’ with its gorgeous Charles Keeping illustrations. I think Keeping was created to be an illustrator of the work of poets, and especially of Causley.

causley 20

So, there we are. A happy accident. I’m not sure what American teachers of English, attuned to free verse, made of Charles Cowsly, but I’m pretty sure that an early evening in a house in Oxford is the reason  I spend part of most Sundays writing about poetry and poets. Thank you Charles Causley.

 

** To say thank you to all the poets who volunteered to guest at the three launches in June and July, and to introduce you to them if you’ve not already met them, here are the links to the posts when I’ve tried to say how much I like their work:

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2016/11/06/the-young-ones-and-an-undiscovered-gem-laura-potts/

 

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2018/02/04/them-and-uz-or-just-us-and-a-polished-gem-ian-parks/

 

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2017/05/14/found-in-translation-an-undiscovered-gem-alicia-fernandez-gallego-casilda/

 

 

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2016/07/17/alchemies-and-islands-and-a-gem-revisited-gaia-holmes/

 

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2017/01/15/poetry-readings-and-a-polished-gem-ian-harker/

 

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/?s=Vicky+Gatehouse

 

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2016/02/28/the-young-ones-and-polished-gem-16-tom-weir/

The company you keep. An [un]discovered gem: Regina Weinert

Regina 7

I realise I’ve used this ‘company you keep’ tagline before without explaining why. So, in a minute or so, I’ll put this to rights. But first, I should explain why there was no post last Sunday. Basically, I’ve been too busy, one way or another. The Friday before I drove up to Kendal to read with the inspirational Kim Moore, and with Jean Harrison at The Brewery Poets. I’d been looking forward to it for months. They only have two poetry nights a year and if you miss your window of opportunity, you have to wait a long time till another opens.

It’s not that long a drive from Ossett to Kendal; according to the AA, whether you take the shorter direct route through the Dales or the longer motorway route, it should take about two hours. Either way, and I’ve tried both, on a Friday at the start of Whit. it takes over three and a half. With the company of Terry Pratchett audiobooks, it doesn’t matter that much, but you do get tired. And if you’re incautious, you may need to stop at the Lancaster services on the M6. It is probably the ugliest, worst designed, motorway stop in Britain, if not the world. I mention this in passing, should you think it a good idea to try it. And Kendal has one of the trickier one-way systems; I always think I have the hang of it. But I haven’t. The Brewery Arts Centre, on the other hand, is lovely, and the cafe that hosts the readings is a delight of a space, furnished with big leather sofas, and hung with genuinely good art work. I loved it, and listening to Kim, whose current project All the men I never married just keeps better and better and better, as she shifts it into a more emotionally and intellectually challenging exploration of gender politics and its personal dimensions. Like I say, she’s an inspiration. (And she’s also one of the judges of the National Poetry Competition this year; get in for that).

Nevertheless, I had to jump in the car and drive home (2 hours!), get to bed and get up about 7.00 to drive to Sheffield for a Poetry Business Writing Day, where I had promises to keep…particularly to keep Louisa Campbell company on her first Sheffield writing day. I really must ask her to be a guest poet. In the meantime, I can tell you that her poetry has appeared in Acumen 87, Prole 22, Obsessed with Pipework 78, and The Interpreter’s House 65, she’s made the Bridport Prize shortlist in 2016, and right now she has a new book out. The ward. [Paper Swans]. Check it out.

the ward

It was a very nice day, and pretty productive. I think I think more clearly when Im tired. I think. I didn’t think very clearly that night at our lovely next door neighbour’s 50th birthday party. Dress code: golf-club posh – sort of blazer/Pringle pink sweater/air hostess scarf/cocktail frock; vast quantities of Prosecco and casual right wing politics. Alarmed and intrigued by a stocky woman in a canary-yellow blazer who told my partner Flo, at great length, what an admirable and inspirational woman Treeza May is. Fortunately, I’ve not had a drink in over five years, and understand that sobriety is the only defence against this stuff, and left before 11.00 to sleep the sleep of the virtuously knackered.

Sunday was prize giving and readings for the Red Shed Poetry Comp, in Wakefield. Wouldn’t have missed it for anything, especially to listen to judge Maria Isakova Bennett read her own poems and introduce the winners and commended poets. It goes from strength to strength, this competition, now in its 10th year and this year attracting over 350 entries from all over the country…and one from New Zealand (or was it New South Wales? a long way away, in any event). All credit to John Clarke and Jimmy Andrex who started it up from nowhere and made it a significant event.

And since then I’ve spent an unconscionable amount of time trying to organise three launch events for my new pamphlet Advice to a traveller (sales pitch: you can buy it via PayPal ..see the My Books page). I’ve been trying to juggle the availabilities of 7 guest poets against those of four or five possible venues. It’s like herding cats and knitting fog. I’m in open-mouthed admiration of anyone who manages to run a poetry festival. How are they sane afterwards? Right now I’ve not managed to book a single venue. At this rate I’ll be putting it off till September. We shall see.

And in and amongst all that, I’ve been doing a lot of reading for the first time in ages. Comfort blanket books (early John le Carre, and also A S Byatt) and The Loch of the Green Corrie. that gentle tribute to Norman MacCaig. I want to share couple of bits I bookmarked. Not to explain or discuss. Just to say: this sticks in my mind. This seems right and true.

“Climbers, fishers – we are players and sole audience.  A bit like writing poetry…..The absence of audience, the tiny readership…guarantees it is written for its own sake. We trust poetry because it’s not trying to sell us anything.

MacCaig referred to himself as an Edinburgh schoolteacher who sometimes writes poetry. The idea of ‘being a poet’ as though that were a different and higher form of life was abhorrent to him”

[At the Loch of the Green Corrie: Andrew Greig]

So that’s why there wasn’t a post. I’m making sure today, by writing it on a Saturday, taking advantage of a dull damp day when I don’t mind being indoors. So. As it seems you are required to say these days before starting a sentence. So. The company you keep. In particular the poetry company you keep…the readings you go to, the books you choose, the courses you go on, and, particularly, the small group you can come to rely on (as did MacCaig, and Sorley McLean and the other Edinburgh poets who would meet in the pub) because you trust their criticism and charge your batteries on their support and talent. In my case it’s The Albert Poets in Huddersfield, and their regular Monday night workshop, which used to be in The Albert, and is now in a curtained-off room in The Sportsman’s…a place where I meet lots of talented people including today’s guest, Regina Weinert. High time to let her introduce herself.

“I’ve lived roughly a third of my life in each Hamburg, Edinburgh and Sheffield and have spent most of my career researching and teaching linguistics and language. Over the last few years I made more time to write and started to read more contemporary poetry, which I’d liked for a while. I’d written for pleasure or to reduce stress, including a few poems, then had a lightbulb moment while looking through some short prose pieces that weren’t turning into longer stories. It seemed a good idea to get a reality check at an early stage and very much thanks to the gentle feedback and encouragement of Sharon Black and to Bill Greenwell’s Poetry Clinic, I kept writing poems. Through the generous support of the “Clinic” I learnt an enormous amount in a short time. (See links below).

I feel in my element with short poems and was very pleased to be shortlisted in that category of the Plough Prize 2017. I also enjoy writing narrative poems – although holding their shape and scale is somewhat alarming. I’ve had poems published inThe Northand Poetry Salzburg Review.

www.abricreativewriting.com

http://abricreativewriting.com/poetryclinic/poetryclinic.html

 

Two key things;  Regina researches language and linguistics; she writes ‘short’ poems. Put them together and you have the economy and precision that I’ve come to admire in her work. And also to envy it. My own writing sprawls. I don’t do short, especially ones built out of crafted couplets, and I’m fascinated by poets who can and do. She’s sent me four to share, and it’ll be a pleasure.

Regina 1

 

Mistake, sister

 

Neither of us paid much attention to birds,

we never chased pigeons,

 

noticed gulls only as a threat

to our picnic or to our Sunday skirts.

 

If I remember rightly, your interest

was limited to a duck’s sense of timing,

 

how it pretended to study the grass

before snatching  the bacon from dad’s plate.

 

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long.

It’s all in the movement, the way you swoop

 

and dive in and out of your daily doings, yes,

you’re some kind of low flyer.

 

What always struck me was the lack

of doubt. Now I see the hesitation

 

I took for nonchalance, all that chaperoning,

how pristine you keep your wings.

( first published in  Somewhere to keep the rain, [Winchester Poetry Festival 2017, Sarsen Press])

What has always struck me in Regina’s writing is the way she understands line breaks. Look at the work that’s done by the big space between  swoop    /    and dive, all the expanse of air it implies. Or the space between lack  /  of doubt. Lovely. I like the way that apparent conversational tone, the unselfconsciousness of the voice, works with the accurate, careful diction; that’s where that immersion in language and linguistics pay off. It’s expressive and tight at the same time, like a confident etching. Here’s another.

regina 10

 

Timing

 

I haven’t swept under the bed,

the stairs are garlanded

 

with the abandoned efforts

of long-legged spiders

 

on their way up or down,

never mind which, because

 

the fridge flashes by, cradling

mustard, beetroot, milk

 

and I’ve remembered

the crinkled parchment of jeans

 

blouse, cotton vest on the arm

of the spine-tingling settee

 

and it’s too late to beat the coir mat

into shedding a shovelful of grit,

 

too late to bin the pink rose, its bloom

hard to retract, once assumptions

 

are speed-budding, as they will be, since

I’ve opened the door to you.

 

I like the slightly harassed (or is it?  it’s beautifully ambiguous) voice, the way it starts in the middle of something, that sounds like anxiety, or a diffuse kind of small guiltiness, that opens out into the beginning of a moments surrender (which an age of prudence will never retract). Another thing: I like the moments/images that stick. The juxtaposition of mustard, beetroot, milk;  the crinkled parchment of jeans. I like the economy with which a real environment, a real place and lifestyle is constructed, and a real character inhabits it…one that I’m involved with and hope for.

The next poem, not in couplets as it happens, demonstrates Regina’s eye for the shape and texture of the moment that makes the image significant.

regina 2

Concentration

 

She dangles in her sleep

like the last bramley

from a winter-brittled branch

 

she’s tired as peat

with its memory of plants

her dreams are coal seams

 

(First published in The North, Issue 57.)

If I could only keep one moment from all her poems, I think it would be

she’s tired as peat

It’s the inchoate tiredness of tedium, of a long long process of small accumulations that grow inert and heavy. And eventually offer the hard brilliance and the promise of fire in coal seams.Beautiful. I love the way that it moves in a short space from the laxness of ‘dangles’ to the solidity of ‘coal seams’. Just one more, then, and minimal commentary. Just enjoy its clarity and quiet. Like a Rothko. Less is more.

regina 4

No question

 

The foghorn intones all night,

like a well-adjusted contrabass,

 

mooring my sleep with perfect pitch

and phrasing. In the morning

 

I’m drawn to its silence. Everything

hasbeen wiped to a polish –

 

the lapis vein of the water line

below a pale-blue cloche,

 

the sheer air, enamelling my neck

and sending a jet of birdcall

 

skidding along the shore, as if this sky

has lost its grip on the clouds.

 

So, a week late, but thank you so much, Reginert, for being our guest poet on a Saturday afternoon when the sun has suddenly come out.

Next week I’m hoping for another guest poet from the Albert Workshops. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, enjoy the sun, and wish me luck in trying to book three venues on dates that work for everyone. See you soon, and thank you for being here.