Tell me a story, Pew.

What story, child?

One that begins again.

That’s the story of life

But is it the story of my life?

Only if you tell it.

(Jeanette Winterson: Lighthousekeeping)

I’m a bit late starting to write this morning. The garden was full of pigeon feathers. Our cat has the unpleasant habit of attacking birds, making a mess, and then getting bored and leaving them. Sometimes it doesn’t bother killing them. So I found a pigeon with its shoulder muscle torn out, wandering about and helpless. I’m not good with stuff like this, but caught it in a sheet, and made a bad fist of breaking its neck, and then buried it. It should be easy, and I suppose it is if you know what you’re doing. And I’m always astonished by the tenacity with which an injured bird or animal will hang on to life. As it happens, this is not altogether irrelevant to today’s post, in which we get to hear more poems from Ann Gray, and to have our lives enriched.

If you missed Part One in the previous post, you might like to have a quick look, and read the poem she wrote about having to identify the body of her partner who had been killed in a traffic accident. I said I didn’t want to write any kind of commentary on it then, but there are a couple of things worth saying before I crack on with this week’s poems.

I said that her poem ‘unnerves and confronts’; I think I should qualify that. It’s not confrontational, it doesn’t insist. What Ann Gray does is to look unwaveringingly at her own trauma. There are three key verbs. I wanted. I was afraid. I watched. While she stands by the body of the man she loves the morgue attendant watched me through the window. He’s separated from the human story by glass, and by his bureaucratic routine that demands she uses the official, distancing, dehumanising formula

“He said take as long as you want, but he watched me

through a window and everything I wanted seemed

undignified and hopeless”

Meanwhile, what she ‘wants’ is to touch, and to touch passionately, but she’s afraid to hurt this man who can never hurt again. He’s gone, essentially, and separate. It makes me think of the agony of the dead miner’s wife in Lawrence’s ‘Odor of crysanthemums’. It’s this absolute honesty that told me I want to read and hear more and more of Ann Gray. So we will.

And I’ve just realised I’ve still not introduced her properly; let me put that right! 

Ann Gray says she always knew she wanted to write poetry:

 “I felt I was able to say more. There was a space inside the poem                                                                                     which I rarely found in prose.”

She has a Creative writing MA from the University of Plymouth. Her most recent collection was At The Gate (Headland, 2008) 

Her poems have been selected for the Forward Prize Anthology, commended for the National Poetry Competition, won the Ballymaloe poetry prize and shortlisted for the Forward prizes best single poem in 2015.

In 2013 she was Poet in residence at Cambridge University Botanic Gardens for the Thresholds University Museums Project, curated by the Poet Laureate.

A winner of the Poetry Business Pamphlet competition in 2018, she is co-director of the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival, now in its 9th year

She lives in Cornwall where she cares for people with dementia.

Her studies for her MA led to her collection of poems about the sudden loss of her partner, At The Gate(Headland, 2008). The next poem,‘My Blue Hen’ is one of many written since that publication, which, she says, “prove” she was not finished with those poems.

She describes it as “a love song and a spell” and was inspired by the experience of moving her poultry to a safer place after a fox attack: “Although I was weeping with fatigue from walking up and down the hill, I found myself singing to console her, to console myself.”

How do we deal with unbearable loss? Who do we tell our grief to? Who will listen to its wildness? Who will be our confessor? Someone or something we trust not to judge, I suppose. Like this.

MY BLUE HEN

I sing to my blue hen. I fold her wings 

against my body. The fox has had her lover, 

stealing through the rough grass,

the washed sky. I tell her, I am the blue heron

the hyacinth macaw. We have 

a whispered conversation in French. I tell her 

the horse, the ox, the lion, are all in the stars

at different times in our lives. I tell her there are

things even the sea can’t do, like come in when 

it’s going out. I tell her my heart is a kayak 

on wild water, a coffin, and a ship in full sail. 

I tell her there is no present time, 

an entire field of dandelions will give her

a thousand different answers. I tell her 

a dog can be a lighthouse, a zebra finch can 

dream its song, vibrate its throat while sleeping. 

I tell her how the Mayan midwife sings each child 

into its own safe song. The moon holds back the dark.

I snag my hair on the plum trees. I tell her I could’ve 

been a tree, if you’d held me here long enough.

I stroke her neck. She makes a bubbling sound,

her song of eggs and feathers. I tell her you were 

a high note, a summer lightning storm of a man.

In Maya society, it is believed that midwives receive their calling from God in a series of dreams. The midwife is the first to see the infant, and before a mother can bond with her baby the midwife is expected to carefully interpret the signs that the child bears, and she alone will interpret what profession the child is destined for..

When Ann read this poem in St Ives, she explained that each time a baby is born, the Mayan midwife makes up a song for that baby and sings it every time she visits the mother before the baby is born. As the mother goes into labour the midwife sings the baby out into its own song, one that will make it feel safe as it has heard it for 9 months inside the womb. The other mothers sing the beat of the mother’s pulse and all the women of the village breast feed the baby so that it knows it belongs to the whole community and is safe there.

It’s a dream poem, this, isn’t it. Rousseau should have painted it. I love it.

As she says, with her partner she now cares for people with dementia, as she cared for her mother who she celebrates in her winning pamphlet I wish I had more mothers. The poems she writes about living with dementia have the same unflinching honesty as the ones about the death of her husband, but they’re laced with with a wry humour, too. I love the form, the voice of these one-way conversations, their assured ease with a relaxed, conversational blank verse. They speak for themselves.

Is it in your diary, Dear?

Every year they’d go to Heffers, shop for diaries,

not the Academic year, but the straightforward

blue black covered January to December, laid out

in weeks of empty days, waiting for engagements.

His records pills taken, the death of mice, the day

the gardener visits to set the traps, which coloured

bin goes out beyond the gate, when more oil is due.

Hers has been traversed by a spider, possibly drunk.

Odd words here and there could be meaningful, 

but it’s very hard to say. A right word could appear

on a wrong day. Though every day could be wrong.

She licks her thumb to turn the tissue of scribbled 

pages and readjusts the navy string of ribbon to hold

her weeks apart. Did you say they’ll be here for lunch

on the twentieth and who was that, I’m not sure what

this says here, have you got it in your diary, dear?

In her bag, there’s a small hardback journal bravely

titled ‘things to remember’, each page entirely blank. 

She still likes to keep a blue biro handy in case 

writing is required, but this will mean he shouts

and then it’s really difficult to take it down.  Just jot 

it down has such a jaunty sound to it. Jot what down

where, what is jot, a jot of what, where did she leave it.

Think where you last were, maybe in the kitchen, not a

jot in there, all sorts of stuff in cupboards she should

sort out, move about into their proper places. Can you

get your diary, he’s shouting now, can you get it from

the table beside your chair. She brings him a napkin,

tries a piece of cake, then tries a newspaper discarded 

on the floor. Your diary. Oh God, I give up, he shouts.

She sits down, folds a blanket on her knees and sleeps.

He uses the remote to tilt his chair, lift his legs, weeps.

Without Us

I am washing up a saucepan she thinks she’s using to boil 

milk. I am an intruder in her kitchen unnecessarily cleaning 

everything that’s sticky or has left a rusty stencil of itself 

inside the pull-out drawer. Her voice is rising to a shout,

Get out! I want to bite you!  You can, I say softly, and it’s 

forgotten. We return to chocolate in two faded cups, to 

cutting cake, to finding forks and saucers. So much shorter 

now, she peers into my face, are you, she hesitates, Ann?

I say, I am. I’m your eldest daughter. Of course, she says 

with a little laugh. Neither of us believe I’ve convinced her.

She wants to watch the washing machine and has dragged

a chair there. The constant movement must be soothing

as she’s happiest waiting for the green light beeping under

Open Door, even though that instruction can be baffling

on a bad day, and there are more. Sometimes she’ll whirl

about the house causing mayhem, on other days we’ll find

her upstairs, in a room she says her mother left her when 

she died, turning pages of her Bible, talking softly to herself

while she watches tops of trees move against the window.

Lost there, she’s 4 years old, without her father. She weeps,

searching for his clothes, his shoes, his overcoat, his hat.

He will need them when he goes out on his visits. It’s so 

little, what we can do to be there, where she is without us.

We’ll finish with a poem of love, and hope, and a celebration of the fact that life goes on, that we endure or go under. Ann Gray is not one for going under, we understand.

Seven Years

I’m on the bed with Beth, fresh from Zumba.

Her socks stink. She’s promising to shout

for me, when I get old. It’s seven years since

we were left to watch at weddings, Christmas

after Christmas. I search for words, move

my tongue around my mouth,

I’ve met someone. She tips forwards.

I take her tears with my thumb. She asks me,

Does he know, and is he gentle?And I’m buried

in her clothes, her curling hair, her jumbled bed,

her guitar where her boyfriend’s propped it.

When I leave, it’s dark along the river,

the moon’s not quite full, breaking through the trees.

There’s no-one on the road and as I pull up the hill, 

I flick off the wipers, realiseit’s me; it’s not raining.

Thank you, so much, Ann Gray. Thank you for sharing the poems. Thank you for writing them.

I’ll let another writer have the last word because she says it better than I ever could.

“Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence. And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns. Words are part of the silence that can be spoken.”

[Lighthousekeeping.   Jeanette Winterson.  Harper Perennial 2004]

ps.Ann says that if you want to get hold of your own copy of At the gate it can be hard to source but she’s happy to sell you a copy direct. Let me know via the comment section, and I’ll put you in touch. No such problem with I wish I had more motherswhich you can order direct from The Poetry Business : http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/contact-us

“ If only I could say 

   a new thing, a thing 

   I’ve never said before.

  Something as small as a spoon

   or as big as a landscape:

  as new as a baby.”

      [Hope: Norman MacCaig]

Some weeks I despair of knowing how, and where to start. First line nerves kick in, particularly when I worry that I won’t do justice to the guest poet. It’s felt particularly acute this last few days. So if I seem especially incoherent, bear with me, and we’ll find out together whether justice has been done.

I wrote the following last week, feeling a bit low. But everything turned out well in the end. So I’m republishing this, slightly edited from the version that appeared on the Write Out Loud site in my other blog, The wider web. 

Hope you like Ann Gray’s work as much as I do. There’s be more of her work in a follow-up post very soon.

I didn’t know anything about Ann Gray except that her pamphlet I wish I had more mothers was one of the winners of the 2018 Poetry Business Pamphlet competition, which was judged by Liz Berry and (there’s synergy) David Constantine. I had no idea what to expect when she was the guest reader at a residential course I was on in St Ives earlier this year. I pricked my ears up when, in her introduction, Kim Moore announced that John Foggin is going to like thisbecause he’s a big fan of Clive James, and Clive James is a big fan of Ann Gray’s poetry. It turned out that he’d written an enthusiastic endorsement of one of her collections. Now I know why.

But even that’s not what really reeled me in. There are moments when you hear a poem for the first time, and you know that it’s the real deal, when the hair on the back of your neck stands up, when your heart gives a lurch. Here’s the poem, of which she says

I thought the most difficult collection I put together was after my partner was killed in a road accident. I used 44 of the poems as my final MA dissertation and read every poem or prose that I could lay my hands on that dealt with loss.

Your body

I identified your face

and when he said is this,and gave your full name,

it wasn’t enough to say, yes, he said I had to say,

this is, and give your full name.

It seemed to be all about names, but I only saw your face.

I wanted to rip back the sheets and say, yes this his chest,

his belly, these are his ballsand this is the curve of his buttock. 

I could have identified your feet, the moons on your nails,

the perfect squash ball of a bruise on your back,

the soft curl of your penis when its sleeps against your thigh.

I wanted to lay my head against you’re your chest, to take your hands,

hold them to your face, but I was afraid your broken arm was hurting.

My fingers fumbled at your shirt, the makeshift sling had trapped it.

Your shirt, your crisp white shirt. The shirt I’d ironed on Friday.

The shirt that grazed my face when you leaned across our bed

to say goodbye. I watched the place where your neck

joinsthe power of your chest and thought about my head there.

He offered me your clothes. I refused to take your clothes.

Days later I wanted all your clothes.I didn’t know what I wanted,

standing there beside you, asking if I could touch you,

my hands on your cheek. He offered me a lock of your hair.

I took the scissors. I had my fingers in your hair.

I could taste the blacken silken hair of your sex.

I wanted to wail all the Songs of Solomon.

I wanted to throw myself against the length of you and wail.

I wanted to lay my face against your cheek.

I wanted to take the blood from your temple with my tongue,

I wanted to stay beside you till you woke.

I wanted to gather you up in some impossible way

to take you from this white and sterile place to somewhere

where we could lie and talk of love.

I wanted to tear of my clothes, hold myself against you.

He said take as long as you want, but he watched me

through a window and everything I wanted seemed

undignified and hopeless, so I told him we could go,

we could leave, and I left you

lying on the narrow bed, your arm tied in its sling,

purple deepening the sockets of your eyes.

[from At the gate. 2008]

This poem confronts and unnerves because, unlike the Victorians, we have removed ourselves from physical contact with the dead. Some of their customs persisted into the 1950s. As a child I was shocked when a classmate of mine in Primary School, Geoffrey Brooke, died of meningitis (none of us knew what that was; just that it was frightening, that it could visit any of us). More shocked when his mother invited us, his 8 and 9 year old classmates, to come and see him laid out in his coffin in the single downstairs room of their terrace house. When it came to it, I stayed outside. Some of my friends went in, and when they came out they would say nothing about it. Not then, and not later.

When my dad died, and years later, my mother, they were whisked away before I coud see them. They vanished. 

I wonder what I ever made of Sassoon’s line from The Dugout

You are too young to fall asleep forever;

And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

It was just an idea, a notion. I think we too often persuade ourselves we understand. Unlike Hamlet, we are happy to conflate sleep and death and leave it there.

Which is why I need poems like Your body. One of my sons committed suicide by jumping from a high rise block of flats. The police told me that I wouldn’t want to see him, and I was too stunned to argue. I have no idea who identified him, or how, but it wasn’t his mother, or me. We couldn’t have a funeral until a long-postponed inquest was over, and his body was released. In his coffin, only his face was visible. His face was like the death mask of a beautiful stranger. It was unmarked, and he really did seem unnaturally asleep. I kissed him, but he didn’t wake.

Years later I had to go with my partner to identify the body of her ex-husband in the morgue in Wakefield. It was so bizarre, so unreal, like a piece of theatrical still life. I thought I would never find words for it and maybe I shouldn’t try. Now I know I was wrong in that, as in so many things, because of this lovely, tender, terrible, astonishing poem. 

I’ve made all sorts of notes about the way it barely contains its emotional pressure; it seems to me today that they’re irrelevant. If you need to have it explained you weren’t listening. But also today, by chance, the poet Jane Clarke posted this on her Facebook page, and I knew that it said what I couldn’t.

“That must be among the strangest of poetry’s many paradoxes: that we are driven to write by fire and then must distance ourselves to a cool dispassion in order to make those flames burn for anyone else. That is not a heartless thing, or an opportunistic one, to turn your experience into art. Your life is not diminished—nor changed—by having been the basis for a poem. But poetry does ask the writer to be inside a life and outside it at once, standing in the center and also looking in, through the shaping (and distorting) aperture of a lens.” 

 Mark Doty in ‘Can Poetry Console a grieving Public?’

I’m not sure about the ‘cool dispassion’. But the visceral need, the fire, to find the words that will tell you the meaning of the inchoate thing that just wrecked your life….that fire. Yes. Yes, that.

I don’t think I’ve ever done a single poem post for a guest before. But it feels right to end here, for the moment. We’ll be back with Ann Gray next week, when I’ll tell you more about her, and share more of her poems about things that matter. I’ll leave you with this

     “Tell me a story, Pew.

 What kind of story, child?

      A story with a happy ending.

There’s no such thing in all the world

     As a happy ending?

As an ending.”

         [Lighthousekeping: Jeanette Winterson]