.

Today’s (returning) guest is someone I first met about eight years ago at the Monday night workshops of The Albert Poets in Huddersfield. Like another poet at these workshops, the much-missed Mark Hinchcliffe, she has a unique voice, and one that I didn’t quite tune into until I heard her do a full guest reading a year or so later. You may have had moments like this, when you suddenly hear what you’ve been missing, when you hear the tune that brings the meaning and the passion along with it. She’s a poet who has the quality of what Keats called negative capability, that ability to en-chant a place or a moment that bypasses the writer’s personality. It’s a voice that takes you on walks into, along and out of the imbricated valleys of the West Yorkshire Pennine, and along moorland tops; on walks at the edge of things by seashores and dunescapes; on walks through the thin places of the world, across thresholds. It’s the kind of quality that’s hinted at by the layered, ambiguous title of her latest cornucopia of a collection On the way to Jerusalem Farm.

When I last wrote about our guest, I said 

“there are those who I can only think of as poets, albeit some may have been priests or librarians, or hospital receptionists or teachers. It seems they were always poets first and the other things were incidental. Men and women with astonishing imaginative/empathic reach allied to the (apparently effortless) control of words, of the capabilities of language, syntax, rhythm, form. Men and women who are artists with verbal language in the way that, say, Hockney, lays down a mark, or Picasso makes a pure line. They seem to have been born that way, regardless of the phenomenal effort they put into assembling their craft.

I think, if I’m lucky, that might happen to me once or twice before I die, but I can see the same quality of ‘not being able to help yourself’ flare up in the contemporary poems that have excited me..ones by Christy Ducker, by Fiona Benson, by Pascale Petit, Kim Moore, Steve Ely. Ones who do it often enough for me to think of them as poets rather than people who write poems. Forget the hierarchies, the rankings, the ‘who’s better than who’ nonsense. Some have done more than others, and some have had more success in terms of public recognition than others, but whatever it is, they have it, and they are poets. They are passionately moved by what they see and feel around then..it’s a quiet passion, but passion it undoubtedly is.”

So, let’s welcome again Carola Luther.  Let’s start with what pretentious restaurants call amuses bouches , like this taste of the way she she can pin down the texture , the physical reality of things encountered on those walks, the business (or busy-ness) of the world out there :

.

The woodpecker grinds open its gate and the evening rituals begin:

the deer lips the earth, the mallard dips, birds call and chunter

 .

as if before doorways of shops, squirrels running along branches

doing chores like the branches are streets

                      from Theft  (from Herd. Wordsworth Trust 2012)

.

and then this which stops you short as you realise you have walked through one of the thin places into a different but flatly unignorable reality

.

The man who thought he was alone in my tree

croons a song of comfort. A tenor.

He sings to the beasts in a tongue I don’t know

but it could be Hebrew. Perhaps he’s a cantor.

 .

He reminds me of my mother so I join in quietly

in Levantine Arabic, her home language.

I’m godless and tone-deaf but harmonise

as well as I can.

                                                 From The Rising (first publ. The Compass Review 2016)

The Carcanet blurb for On the way to Jerusalem Farm gives you a clear sense of the the range of landscapes and narratives you can expect in its hugely generous 150 pages:

Carola Luther’s new book On the Way to Jerusalem Farm explores the complexities of living in a damaged world. How, it asks, does such a world live in us, and we in it?

At the centre of the collection are three sequences, ‘Letters to Rasool’, ‘Birthday at Emily Court’ and ‘The Escape’. On the Way to Jerusalem Farm moves through the world, seeking and finding not answers, but sometimes, a means of continuing. The speaker in ‘Letters to Rasool’ travels onward through scarred and depleted landscapes, and searches for a lost beloved. The ageing residents of Emily Court celebrate a birthday and dance. Spring of a kind still comes. And in ‘The Escape’ there are colours to be found in the distant sea: ‘A whole translucent geology, / cross-sections of light and water’.

Poetry for Luther is a way of finding a way, of making connections and sharing our complex lives in an interdependent present. The roles of lover and beloved become – almost – interchangeable in these richly visualised poems.

So much for the range. As to the voice,Kim Moore wrote in one of her Sunday Poem blogposts that that a lot of Carola’s work has the quality of a ‘a prayer or a benediction’

The Carcanet publicity for another of Carola’s collections  Arguing with Malarchysays something similar, and much better than I’ve managed so far

full of voices: tender, sinister or angry, the glimpsed depths of their stories, the distances they have travelled. Carola Luther’s poems are alert to the ways a life can be briefly snared in the turn of a phrase – or in the moment when language fails. She explores silence, absences, the unspoken communication between animals and human beings, the pauses and boundaries between what is remembered, forgotten or invented, the living and the dead.

Basically, both of these pick out what I think is a numinous quality in Carola’s work…’a prayer or a benediction’; ‘the glimpsed depths’; the way they are alert to ‘the moment when language fails’…and thereby rescues it through language. It’s this quality of being alive to the moment that makes me think of Carola Luther as something more than ‘someone who writes poems’. Let’s meet her.

Carola was born in South Africa, from where she moved in the early 1980s.

Her  first poetry collection, Walking the Animals was published by Carcanet Press in 2004 and shortlisted that year for the Forward Prize for First Collection.

Her second collectionArguing with Malarchywas published by Carcanet Press in 2011.

She was Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust in 2012. Herd, a pamphlet of poems written in that year, was published in by The Wordsworth Trust (2012).

She has also written texts for theatre and mixed media performances including the libretto for Lilith, (composer, Dimitar Bodurov) a piece commissioned and conceived by soprano Claron McFadden. 

Recently she wrote about herself and her new collection for the Carcanet blog about what a friend called her ‘doubled vision’

I suspect ‘a doubled vision’ is something that will be shared by many people who have moved from the country of their birth. I have not experienced the trauma of forced migration so of course I cannot talk to that. But for me, after arriving here in Britain as a willing immigrant and living here for decades, I still see the country through a stranger’s eyes at times, as well as through the eyes of a lucky inhabitant. Perhaps this is what my friend meant – seeing from both close and far. And close sometimes feeling more ‘home’ than far, and far sometimes feeling more ‘home’, than close could ever be.  

My partner and I are currently moving house from the Ryburn valley to the Calder valley. It feels like a big deal, despite the fact that our new place is only seven miles away, and the landscape and communities, not so very different.

Strangely, I had the opposite sense when I first came to the area. Arriving for the first time in the Pennines, I had an unexpected sense of recognition, almost of déjà vu. I felt I ‘knew’ the shape of the landscape somehow – not of any specific place, but rather, its ghost geography, an imaginal sense of the moors, the weathers, the valleys, the creatures. Without knowing why, I felt oddly at home. And so I came back. And I stayed. 

It struck me later with a little sense of shock, that this feeling of recognition may have come from the poems of Ted Hughes.

…

Having grown up in rural South Africa, I think I may also have recognised something else. This was how Hughes seemed to experience the natural world as intrinsically powerful, and bigger than us. His creatures and landscapes were magnificent. Whether calm or violent, his animals and the elements were potent.

So much has changed since then. Ecosystems everywhere feel critically depleted and fragile, and the health of the earth highly dependent on how human beings go forward. This reversal of my childhood understanding may also inform any ‘doubled vision’ in this collection. In some poems I notice bewilderment and hardly-understood sorrow for the natural world around me. But there are also I hope, poems celebrating what remains beautiful and vital – connection, friendship and the small, brave things that help us keep going.

And so to the poems. Acknowledgements and thanks, first to Carcanet for granting permissions to use substantial chunks of the work…if you read the previous post about Carola, you’ll see that that see writes long poems. And that they are packed. That there’s no slack in them. Which makes it hard to choose a selection that does justice to a 150 page collection. 

Too start, I’ve chosen part of the very first poem of hers I heard (and, at first, didn’t quite get) at one of those workshops in The Albert.

deersuddenly

.

deersuddenly

there

.

two / no / three launching 

to get away hsh 

hsh  hsh 

.

leapline interrupted 

by trees beech / no / birch 

between us and light  

stammering 

like shutters / no / film clips  

clp

.

deersuddenly 

stopped  

.

in the pixilation 

and confusion of brush 

they pretend to be memories 

.

images intuited 

in black and white 

passengers on a platform 

silent with suitcases

portmanteaux

valises

no / suitcases and trunks 

there they go / vaulting 

landscape / no / let them be           

landscape / no / 

carriages of trains 

flickering behind landscape / no /

trees / behind trees 

clp

[……………………]

deergone 

.

deergone 

.

nnn 

nnn 

nnn the wind 

its empty coat hung 

in the trees

.

Back then I was stalled by the look of the poem on the page, not sure what to make of the elisions/compressions/slashes/pnonic invention. Later I learned to hear it. It’s a script for a performance of what could be an optical illusion, a trick of the light, the flickerbook images seen through trainwindows. What I hear now is the heartlift of catching sight of what may be deer, and the letdown of their vanishing. I think it’s lovely

Form the deer I’m moving to a character, Rasool, who’s never fully explained and haunts a sequence of poems that are almost, but never explicitly, set in the uprooted landscapes of the disposessed and displaced, the victims of war and poverty.

On Finding the way

.

Now I’ve turned the corner

I can see her Rasool  

            the architect of sands gazing at her small city

            It looks Moroccan 

            and not just because it’s the colour of lions

.

This beach might be my longing 

or yours      but this morning I woke on it  

face down                          

            The tide had receded 

            and the sand beneath me was cold and hard 

.

Standing        I saw no dog         no bird         

            no woman or man                           

and from the flat sea which could have been mercury                   

nothing breached

            no rock or whale-spout or hoop 

            of dolphin           not even a fibreglass boat

.

I recalled no-one had seen fish for decades

.

I miss you Rasool 

[…..]

And I remembered how shorebirds 

used to run between waves

            and on their way in 

            and on their way out 

the waves did not always 

wash away imprints

.

three wire toes                arrow 

            after arrow                   pointing 

to where the bird had run from

                        where I should go

.

Who would not weep Rasool

.           

I followed directions and turned back            walked east               

     around the headlands

            And now I can see her             

            her white shirt flapping 

            in the crook of the bay 

.

She is crouching down     

brown hands at work on her next suburb

            I imagine small arched windows 

            walls bleached pale 

                        almost pink        

                                    like shells

                         or salt-pan camels

.

Is it a dream, this apocalyptic shorescape? It certainly has the precise physical detail of dreams and also their disjunct narratives. All I know is the way it’s anchored by that image of

                                 the architect of sands gazing at her small city

That moment that draws you in, and holds you, along with the narrator’s unassuageable sadness. Magic.

.

The next extract works the same kind of spell, though in a landscape that’s ostensibly closer, geographically to the ‘home’ of West Yorkshire moorlands. It’s a poem that understand that skylines and and the shift from night to day are thin placesin which anything may happen, and when we see things as if for the first time.

.

Dawn on Nab Scar

I wait in the dark, as if on one foot, tense with the balance of almost

falling, other foot held above the ground. In the minutes before dawn

.

we are always waiting, stretched between two momentous things. Interminable,

and never arriving, the weight of proof has suddenly come, and I realise

.

I have missed the moment of change – there’s already more powder of light

than darkness in the air. Dawn hauls its pale mirror

.

up through Rydal Water; there are clouds today so I watch the clouds

whitening the lake’s surface. Mist in tufts rises like grasses.

.

Below the house on the farm, a pinkness used to stain the morning mist

above the Broederstroom. Tall grasses in the muddy dam.

.

On this day, years ago, sixty-nine people murdered at Sharpeville.

Was I implicated? No, yes, where does it begin, and end? 

[……] 

                                                                         Above me, a whole town

wakes: the woodpecker begins its morning routine, opening and closing

.

the door to its castle, creak, creak, again and again; the little birds whistle

in their swept-clean market place as if no more conflict can ever come,

.

no bombs, no divided Jerusalem; just there in the distance, spring brightening

the greygreen, green, maroon trees reflected in the water. Two narrow deer

.

see me and stand, as if they too are reflections of trees with their mossy horns

and legs like the limbs of birches, and they stare, and I stare,

.

and we slip in and swim, we are lake-ideas, our eyes 

pools of brightening water: there is the past and also the future,

.

something oracular about eyes and water, and if I close my deer-touched eyes,

this road below me could be the road to Woodbush, not a lane on Nab Scar

.

between White Moss and Grasmere, a lane I’ll walk down when I return

for breakfast, and hear on the radio news of another massacre, this time in Syria.

.

Why am I thinking of T S Eliot’s ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning’. I think this poem might just enact something like it’s opposite, as we begin on tenterhooks, barely balanced, straining. The magic happens, and somehow we’ve missed it. I chose this poem, I think, not just for its numinous quality, but also for the element of autobiography, the authentic voice of the poet as opposed to a persona. It’s a shock, that connection between an old home (which contains massacres) and a new one which shows you plainly that there are massacres wherever you go. It’s a poems that brings so many themes together. And the elusiveness of deer, too.

.

Two more…just a short extract from one:

I chose this because as I heard Carola read it in The Albert pub, I ‘heard’ her voice properly for the first time. I loved the glee of this visions of moorland pylons metaphormosing into vengeful witches flying widdershins over unsuspecting Halifax.

Midnight, Beltane, Soyland Moor 

Ruche after ruche night is gathering, cloud piled 

over the moor, dim scone

for a moon, flat pallor lidding Huddersfield, Halifax 

Manchester. 

.

Up here it’s cold. Dead sheep, winter –

keeps dragging back 

to unfinished December

out of kilter. On the skyline, pylons. Skeletal    

goddesses they hum 

as if a sun-surge has come and gone 

or something huge and clandestine is passing down lines 

and they listen in 

O soldiers of ruins make preparation 

                                                       Beltane, 

and fields remain empty. Where do we go? 

The sea-starved sea. These days, screens 

are our lamps, yet tonight I want oceans, 

oracles stinking of goats 

in the dark, ribald women 

who fly. 

.

On the skyline, pylons. Tension

a kind of desire. Ambiguous 

as they are, for a moment I imagine 

they could show us how: Elbow. Knee. Elbow. Hah! 

Akimbo sisters! 

Give birth. Show your steel 

farthingales, Hoist skirts. Pant. Point

your six arms downwards, 

wake the earth. Hoist! 

Hoist! 

Cavort! 

.

Let’s finish with one complete poem that I first met when the Monday Workshops became virtual, and we became inured to seeing ourselves in celebrity squares. This one I choose because of the way it shows Carola at her job of rescuing the significant and magical from the wasteful flow of minute by minute and the rush of things moving on. It’s a poem that challenges the notion that the world is completely reliable. Tractors and ploughland furrows seem resolutely solid, and smiles and waves reassure us of out connection,

but here the physical world is tilt and slivery and fluid. The tractor becomes a foundered boat, and it’s driver has vanished. Crows flock in their hundreds, in this short unnerving film of a poem.

.

Balance

.

Walking away from the town, 

I passed a half-ploughed field, 

furrows turning inside out and black 

behind a new tractor. The driver smiled, 

waved, and I waved back 

.

watching him tilt 

the balance of light. In the unharrowed part

sun rilled between bleached-out oat-stalks, 

its silvery influx running like water. 

Crows were landing to feed there. 

.

On the way back from my walk, 

the tractor was stuck on the field’s far side, 

marooned in the dusk. As if it had foundered, 

was a wrecked boat leaning

under the weight of birds 

.

hundreds of them now, 

crows mostly, flowing over

the tractor’s cabin, or hovering above it 

waiting to land, occupying the green 

metal wheel-guards 

.

while other birds ransacked 

islands of unploughed ground. 

I called out. I couldn’t see the driver 

anywhere. Calm yourself I thought. 

Home-time, that’s all. 

.

So I too made my way home, and left the crows 

trawling for seeds in their ragged lines, 

while smaller birds bobbed 

between the great, sunk wheels, 

shrieking Corvus! Corvus!

.

What can I say? There’s no way I can do justice to 150 pages of poems, all as good as each other. It’s a bargain at £11.99, direct from Caracanet. 

Go to their website at https://www.carcanet.co.uk/

…think about it. That’s at least four pamphlets!

While you’re waiting for it to arrive you can also hear Carola talking about the collection via this link

Thank you, Carola Luther being being our guest; thank you, Caracanet, for letting me share these poems; and finally, thank all of you for turning up. See you next week.