.

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.

A key theme that runs through Ruth Valentine’s latest collection is the idea of the shadow line, the one between the living and the dead, and between sea and sky, that utterly notional ‘horizon’ . I’ll come to the business of the sea later, but given the story of death and resurrection and the way this Grunewald altarpiece contains both like a conjuring trick, it’ll be nice to start with this tour de force .

.

Grünewald

To make water flow wherever it’s told, you need

a wooden box with four divining-rods,

a compass, several men with boots and shovels,

a pump to shift it by its own volition,

and me, Meister Mathis, hydraulic engineer,

clerk-of-works, model maker, stonemason,

.

also painter of many-hinged altar-pieces,

so men and women with St Anthony’s

sacred fire charring their blood and skin

stare and are healed.  I work in tempera

I mix myself, with just a little oil

so the colour goes on clear, like a held note

.

on an angel’s trumpet: here it’s cinnabar,

red mercury.  Jesus dies,

his whole weight hanging from his nailed-up hands,

blood from his head wounds; but when the fathers turn

the panels outward on feast-days, his linen shroud

flames in the up-draught of his resurrection.

.

I observe where I am, and paint: the leering faces,

green skin, festering lesions, how the sinful

imagine their souls.  For the Last Supper,

I sit the ungainly tired apostles round

an oval table, in twos and threes, arguing,

and Christ the least of them, or the least human,

.

already half disincarnate.  At the far end,

fingertips pressed together in explanation,

is my namesake, Mathis, Matthew the tax collector,

a clever man, used to working out the cost,

already glimpsing the next afternoon

when the sky will darken and the saints’ graves open. 

It’s a poem that stopped me in my tracks, in much the same way as UAFanthorpe’s ‘Tyndale in Darkness’, because of its easy familiarity with the world of the drainage engineer/visionary painter, and also with his imagined dreams in what feels like a wholly authentic voice. Stunning.

You can read an earlier post about Ruth from 2017 via this link

.

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2017/10/01/a-grenfell-alphabet-and-and-a-polished-gem-ruth-valentine/

Or you can jump straight in with this introduction:

Ruth Valentine has worked as an undertaker and as a celebrant at secular funerals. In Downpour she draws on her experiences to compose an extended meditation on dying and death, its emotional grammar and its painful but necessary rituals. Bleak and brave, serious and sad, Downpour is an unflinching study of the physical realities of dying

Ruth  grew up in Sussex, but has lived most of her adult life in London. She has been a teacher, advice worker, voluntary sector manager and consultant. Currently, as well as writing, she conducts secular funerals. She began writing seriously at the age of forty. ……. In 2000, looking for a new direction in her writing, she enrolled on the MA Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Her novel, The Jeweller’s Skin, was the somewhat unexpected result.

In her website (http://ruthvalentine.co.uk/index.php/about/) she writes. “I write poetry, novels and short stories, and non-fiction. You can find details here of my published work, and sample poems and extracts.  Go to the poetry page for details of my latest books, Downpour and Rubaiyat for the Martyrs of Two Wars. 

To this we can add A Grenfell Alphabet [2017]., and now If you want thunder [Smokestack 2021]

And it’s this latest collection that I’ll be celebrating today.

.

The Smokestack publisher’s blurb will you that:

“Ruth Valentine’s tenth collection encompasses the tragedies of the public world – civil-wars in Syria and Sudan, knife crime in North London, the Iraq-Iran war – and our private griefs. At the heart of the book is an extraordinary alphabetical sequence about the Grenfell Tower dead and the society that allowed them to die. It’s a book about the morality of politics and the mortality of us all, a study in remembrance and forgetting, about the indifferent sea with its soft lullabies and cold temptations, time spreading its blankness over everything, and ‘busy humanity with its suitcases and phones, its sudden weeping…”

I enthused about and shared several of the Grenfell poems in my 2017 post, as well as a wonderful poem about Tolstoy and railway stations (which reappears in the latest collection). I want to concentrate, though, on the business of mortality which is never far away in this collection.

You’ll search Google in vain for detailed reviews of Ruth’s work….a fact which is both astonishing and inexplicable…..but I picked up a couple of  comments that resonated in this portmanteau review via Happenstance. Here’s the link

https://www.sphinxreview.co.uk/index.php/sphinx-2009/220-the-announced-ruth-valentine

and here, the comments which I wish I’d thought of first:

“Valentine is a very gifted poet. She has mastered the craft of starting a poem in a low key, almost conversational style, describing a past event, quietly dropping a single disconcerting word into the lines which unsettles but you’re not sure why. So you read on, and there are further hints, subtle, understated, but always pulling you towards an exploration of something you realise has universal importance—but by being brought there as a travelling companion of the poet, you discover it in parallel with the poem. It’s almost as if you’re walking around in the poem itself, seeing the whole landscape of it.”

and

“Ruth Valentine is able to reach across from the living to the dead, bridging that great divide in tender ordinary words.” 

It’s the business of the living and the dead, and also of the divide between them which, in this new collection, seems to me to be symbolised by the transition from land to sea, and the sea in all its multifarious and drowning shapes. 

In August I wrote in a post:

“I read a long time ago, that the Victorians (officially) couldn’t write about sex but wrote with amazing freedom about death, whereas, since the late 60s exactly the opposite has been the case. 

I was brought up to distrust generalisations, but there’s an element of truth in there, isn’t there? I have a sense that we are much more uncomfortable with the physical facts of death and dying than much contemporary poetry acknowledges. It may be, of course, because we know so little about it. When each of my parents died, I wasn’t there, in the house, in the room, and both had been neatly removed before I was told, the whole business being managed and sanitised by the funeral business. That would have been unthinkable in a Victorian household. I have only seen two dead people. One was my son, coffined in a Funeral Director’s nicely lit room. The other was in a morgue where I went with my partner to identify another body. I’ve never been able to write about either moment, not properly. “

Which is why, I suppose, I’m so grateful for poets like  Ruth Valentine, who can write about ‘these moments’, about living with the dying and considering the business of setting out to die. And who, I should add, can do it via utterly memorable/unfogettable moments that draw you in, like these

.

a poem, slipping in mildly off the broad

inarticulate river

.

cobalt:   goes into the furnace a black powder

and comes out radiant, butterfly, dragon, dolphin

.

The goddess of forgetting

is pale and very old, with long stained teeth

.

     and, of course the constant reminders of the the sea and its mutability

.

What use to the world is water that thinks it’s stone

.

…sun covers the sea in silver-leaf

and the Icarus wind falls into the water

.

…sea…snatching a child of a cliff, and twirling him

in swaddling clothes of spindrift

.

As I said, I’ve chosen to concentrate on poems that place themselves where the sky is enormous and isolating and where the landscape inevitably ends in a shadow line like the numinous dividing ‘lines’ in Rothkos great canvasses.The collection is in six sections, or chapters, and each one contains a tidal river, or a sea shore, or saltings or estuaries reedbed and marsh and the dangerous unstable effulgent light off such places. As though you find yourself in a Turner that’s suddenly become live and cold and dangerous. This first poem is the opening poem of the first section, and and contains whole millennia of refugees

.

Jettisoned

on the passage between the islands the boat was clutched

in the hands of drowned farmers, who pulled it down

into the wave’s ploughed furrows, bellowing

my carrots fresh from the earth? where are my oxen?

in the hands of drowned merchants with topaz rings,

fingers of fishermen clawing through the traps

of their lobster-pots  

                                                the wild boat shook them off

and headed out to the plain of cormorants

folding themselves like paper, plunging down

to the wrecks and the jetsam, all the jettisoned,

whoever steps awkwardly away from land,

unborn children venturing on an ocean

though grandmothers weep and the soldiers shrug and yawn

.

I found it next to impossible to clear my mind of the appalling image of the fleeing being dragged down by all that had gone before, drowned by the clawing hands of history. Who can tell if they escaped in that wild boat, or who may plunge down with the cormorants ‘folding themselves like paper‘ into the detritus of the jettisoned and abandoned and wrecked.

I’ll stay with the business of water and of drowning in the three poem sequence that ends Section 2. I’ll remind myself of what one reviewer wrote about the way that

Ruth Valentine has mastered the craft of starting a poem in a low key, almost conversational style, describing a past event, quietly dropping a single disconcerting word into the lines which unsettles but you’re not sure why. So you read on.

.

The Inshore Waters

i

all water inland     silent     do not disturb

the shoremen at their hedging and ditching dreams

you could drown in this stuff     lingeringly     a dancer

past the leap of his youth     your port-de-bras superb

.

the staithe then the river     channels across the marsh

basalt    molten but cold     all unmet depth

paralysed motion     weedless     no pulse no splash

.

as if it were flowing backward     as if the waves

might thicken and surge between the reeds     upstream

the low pale sun catch a silky flash of green

on the throat of a breaker before it broke     you’ve seen

just such a choker glint at a beach and gone

ii

What use to the world is water that thinks it’s stone?

When you choose to drown

you’ll have to get into a rowing-boat and make

oar-scars on the polished surface.  You’re facing back

to the staithe you left, willows and reeds.  It’s miles

to the sea from here.  You’re flagging.  You pull the sculls

across your thighs, rest, float; but the water wants

to haul you in to the bank.  Far off, in front

(if you turn your head) there’s a bit of sheen in the sky,

a taste of salt to the cloudscape, so you try

again for the open ocean.  A starting swell

rocks your coffin-cradle.  Keep going.  You’ll do well

to reach the sea before sunset, but the dark’s

just as good to drown in.  That isn’t a meadow-lark

or a seagull crying, it’s you as you smell the tide,

as you hear the scrape of the shingle.  Now, decide:

do you sit in your boat till it’s toppled, or pull in

to the riverbank, step out to the sea wind

and the sky, the breakwaters, the flying spindrift – 

if it ever was stone – fire-opal and amethyst.

A breaker rises and roars at you.  Safe at last,

you pour down its throat.

iii

You won’t do it of course, walk into the sea and drown.

More likely a bout of asthma, a derailed train.

Though if one day it comes to it, the cancer back,

some antibiotic-resistant inward muck,

you’d do something to finish, you hope. Not a rowing-boat:

you’ve never learned to row anyway.  No note

to whoever was going to find you in your bed

or more likely, sprawled on the kitchen floor.  So you could

buy a one-way ticket down to some drab resort,

walk into the waves.  Get a tide-table first,

you don’t want to be striding out across the sand,

the water knee-high for miles; you might change your mind,

which isn’t the point.  Or is it?  But are you brave,

could you keep on walking deeper until the waves

felled you and held you under?  You’d hold your breath

as it spun you below the surface.  It seems that death

may not come when you call.  Or you have to yell

again, at the top of your lungs, before they fill.

.

What I like so much about this sequence, apart from the unnerving way the three poems address the unthinkable, is their versatility. The first announces itself very frankly as a poem, happily parading its technique in much the same way a a wave breaks over a rock and runs back on itself and reforms. DHLawrence wrote a praise poem for that, didn’t he. But the next two seem so easily conversational, unnervingly, apparently prosaically and rationally discussing (or advising on) the likelihood of attempted suicide by water going right or wrong, that it’s easy to overlook the craft of it all. It’s so easy to not notice that they are both sequences of rhyming couplets. When you do and go back, the music of full and half rhymes seems obvious. I love it.

.

I did say that I’d concentrate on the shadow line poems. There’s so much more (not least, the Grenfell Alphabet in full, as well as a remarkable poem sequence Cobalt, about the dying of a friend) but you’ll need to go and buy the book. I really think you should. For a taste of the range you can expect, though, I’ll finish with one that’s darkly, wickedly funny. The Notes at the end explain that for Valentine’s (Who else?) Day 2016 Bic relaunched its pink ballpoint pen ” designed specially to fit the hands of the ladies”.

I’m pretty sure that the last bit is Ruth’s take on it, which is whyI’ve put it in inverted commas.

.

Sonnet Written With a Pink Pen

My tiny hand is frozen, having cleaned

mould out of the fridge.  I’ve scoured the loo,

made chicken soup, altered a pair of jeans,

addressed a meeting.  It’s what women do.

.

I’ve dressed a dead man in his football shirt

and laid him in his coffin; known the stench

we all may melt to; comforted the hurt

partners and enemies.  I didn’t flinch,

.

or not in public.  For thirty years I’ve written

poems of death and exile, sex and grief,

Pinochet, Kosovo, London riots, love.

Now that I’ve got this pen, though, I can prove

my feminine vocation: violets, kittens,

cupcakes and curls.  Imagine my relief.

Thank you, Ruth Valentine for sharing so many of your poems. It was a joy to have you back as a guest.

And now, the rest of you will want details of the book you will surely buy before the day be out. Here you are.

Published by Smokestack Books [2021] £7.99

[from Part 2: The Unreturning]

Here we are at last. Thought we’d never get here. Except we haven’t even started, not by a long chalk. I’m thinking of those pioneering Himalayan climbers who took months just to get to the foot of Everest, and essentially they still hadn’t started the job they came to do. Here I am at last, and still scrambling around, looking for a likely line. Daunted. Because Martin Malone’s The Unrerturning is a hefty piece of work, a 

    sequence of merciless hymns to our cultural obsession with the First World War …an effort

   to create meaningful acts of witness for ‘a nation/with so many memorials/but no memory..

   a collection of great ambition and originality [Peter Robinson]

As PW Bridgman says in his London Grip Review 

   it is widespread failures and (inescapably) distortions of historical memory that are Malone’s central concern…..

 with a conjured mythology about war [I would say THIS war, in particular]..a false record that has been cultivated 

 and propagated to serve certain political ends

The more I’ve chewed this over, the more I’ve come to think that I need to put the whole business of assertions  about ‘conjured mythologies’ in some kind of context. Because there are lots of them, and many are mutually exclusive. After all, there were more than 16 million dead — armed forces and civilians. 

Let’s play a game of association, bearing in mind that we’re already primed to be thinking of WW1 poetry and poets. If you think of the First World War, what images come to mind? Would they, perhaps, be like mine.. a silhouette of a procession of gas-blinded men? miles of mud, barbed wire? artillery men trying to drag a floundering horse out of a crater? 

If you had to choose just a single image, would it be a poppy? 

Like this one, for instance, which featured in the Yorkshire Post this week. It’s certified to have been plucked from the battlefield in 1916 by the brother of one killed there in action

“The dried poppy – described as “one of the most poignant symbols of brotherly love ever seen” – was plucked in memory of Private James Henry Lester. It’s up for auction amongst a collection of WW1 memorabilia, and expected to raise in excess of £1000; the family owners hope 

“that a museum may purchase the items and put them on public display, a permanent reminder of the sacrifices made by an entire generation.”

After all, we’re concerned with ‘conjured mythologies’. Which is the concern at the heart of Martin Malone’s collection.

When you’re asked to think of WW1, is your default image one of Flanders Fields? If you like, it’s easy to argue that our collective ‘memory’ has edited the World out of World War.

For instance, if I ask you to think of a battle, I think the odds are that it’ll be The Somme, or Ypres. Something like that. But if you were French, it might be Verdun, or the Ardennes; if you were Italian, it might be Isonzo. For Russians, Tannenberg, for Romanians, Bucharest.

Like I said, Flanders is probably your default …not Macedonia, or Sinai and Palestine, or Egypt, or the Congo, or Mesapotamia/Iraq, or the Dardenelles where Attlee was the penultimate man of the beach in covering the retreat from Suvla Bay.

And if you’re like me, you probably didn’t think of naval warfare at all….Jutland, The Falklands. In truth, there were few naval engagements, which is ironic, especially for those mythologists who still sing Rule Britannia  (Britannia rule the waves). Navies were mainly engaged in blockading enemy ports in an effort to starve them into defeat. And so on.

Our collective memories and myths shrink the world. 

Here’s another thing. If I ask you to name the first bit of WW1 writing that comes to mind what’s the odds that it’ll be a poem? A bit of Wilfred Owen? A bit of Rupert Brooke? Isaac Rosenberg? Edward Thomas? August Stramm? 

How many of you thought first of memoir (Vera Britten? Robert Graves?) 

Or novels…All quiet on the Western Front ? (Eric Remarque’s book was burned by the nazis). Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy ? Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914?

And if we’re thinking of image making, how about film? Paths of Glory ? Oh what a lovely war ? Peter Weir’s Gallipoli.

The scale, both spatial and temporal, is clearly beyond daunting. Martin is quite clear about this in various interviews he’s given about The Unreturning, and about his more recent Selected Poems. A couple of extracts will make the point:

“The Unreturning …… was a subject given/ gifted me on the basis of funding for my Sheffield PhD. My main challenge was to say something new about [the poetry of WW1] from the perspective of its centenary. 

Both academic research and my creative practice did, indeed, look to poets like Thomas and Isaac Rosenberg, however, as well as the even more obvious ones. For the Ghosts of the Vortex sequence, my purpose was to seek out some of the lost, or lesser-known, narratives of the conflict and convey a sense of its global dimensions and legacies: hence poems like ‘Ansky’s Lament’, ‘Legacies’, ‘The 1st Women’s Battalion of Death’, ‘Nostos’ and ‘The Turnip Winter’. German Great War poetry is, in many ways, more interesting than the British stuff – certainly, it often feels more modern and experimental – though it’s an all-but-lost canon. So, I wanted to be a bit more 360° than is often the case with UK writing about the war.”

and

“The complicating factor in a project such as this is the pervasive nature of the Great War’s literary legacy. Already the most poetically memorialized conflict since Troy, its writers provide the urtext to our collective sensibility of much subsequent warfare, while its historical stature as global event represents something of a dragon lying across the threshold to our under- standing of the modern world 

Catherine Reilly’s estimation that, in Britain alone, there were 2225 published poets of the Great War (1978) is a formidable enough legacy, further deepened by the remarkably privileged position enjoyed in UK culture by that small body of poets who have since emerged as representatives of its core canon [my italics]: poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, Laurence Binyon and John McCrae, all of whom are studied widely in schools or habitually appear in Remembrance Day ceremonies. “

.

What he sets out to do is to provide some sort of perspective on the failures and distortions of historical memory, both about the war itself, about the ‘truth’ or otherwise of its poetry, and what he sees as conjured mythologies, the ‘trench honesties’ occluded by ‘one century/ and the paradigms of myth’. And when you consider the ‘truth’ of the poetry, it’s as well to remember that this war was unprecedented, mechanised, industrialised. There was no language ready made to account for it. Which brings us to Martin Malone’s poems, and particularly at this point, an extract from one about Wilfred Owen at the time of his recuperation after Craiglockhart.

They were dying again at Beaumont Hamel

as you stroll Borage Lane,

three days after your twenty-fifth birthday,

mind yet cobbled with skulls of the lads you left behind…

.

At number seven, you unlatch the gate,

take out a key and stroll up to the white front door.

.

Searching for peace, you retreat to the attic with its tiny skylight,

the shrieks of children playing soldiers down the street.

Here you are Chatterton and Keats,

half in love with death’s idea

while making best use of its dutiful shadow.

.

You write your mother, go over old drafts,

‘defectuosities’, and ‘the inwardness of war’.

.

Briefly, you pause to listen to swallows skirruping their early return,

.

then back to your notes, strike-throughs,

séance and retrospection,

another time-strafed Edwardian

caught out in the open with defective kit…

                                                                        (from “Ripon Work”)

It’s the last two lines I find particularly poignant; Edwardian poetry, with its roots in lyrical Romanticism, simply wasn’t set up to deal with the horrors of trench warfare, particularly if your mind was

                           cobbled with skulls of the lads you left behind…

It’s Martin’s concern with the disjunction between the limits of language at any given time, and the actual experience it’s trying to realise that colours the whole collection, which, as one reviewer pointed out, and as the book’s jacket copy correctly declares, is in effect a “Great War diptych in which the later dissenting voices… parley with [war poetry’s] more traditional elegiac forms.”

So, set this poem from the second part (The Unreturning) against Ripon Work, and you’ll get a sense of the way it works

41. War Poet

Beneath this creeping barrage squats our chap, in his breast pocket the scribbled draft that sets off a vintage look: hapless subaltern, sick with sin, chewing pencil and pity onto notepaper doomed to be found upon a mud-matted corpse. En route to legend, Herr Krupp’s handiwork tears its messy path through temporal, parietal and the red wet thing of a line-break. Let us rest here a while then dig down to the destruction layer where we find change come suddenly and everywhere, and everywhere the final week of this poets’ war: Boudicca’s wrath, shock and awe, the stratified earth of charred words pulling free of decorum.

 “The first half of the diptych (collectively, “Ghosts in the Vortex”) does indeed consist of poems, mostly written in free verse, which are conventionally presented and employ language and diction that beautifully reflects Martin’s own earlier absorption in poets like Edward Thomas, and the landscapes of, say Eric Ravillious. The second half, by contrast, comes to us in prose poetry form and speaks in a conspicuously more modern voice. The prose poems look back at some of the content of the first half, offering an often acerbic, but nevertheless lyrical, commentary on real truths as they have sometimes been refracted though systematically distorted lenses. (PWBridgman in London Grip).

Some of the poems made me consider the disparate backgrounds of those who fought, especially before conscription. There were the Pals Regiments who could not initially be supplied with unforms, and who were subsequently decimated; there were those who were rejected because of the effects of malnutrition. Later, of course, the need for men to fill their places became acute, and thus were formed the Bantam Regiments of men below 5’3”…the Jewish East-ender Isaac Rosenberg was one of them. There were those conflicted, like Owen and Edward Thomas who enlisted later in the war, And there were the enthusiasts, the beautiful, blue-eyed bourgeouis boys like Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell.

Martin’s momentarily unsparing of Julian Grenfell and his “Krupp-made end”.

Warm with late spring, in a field near Ypres,

you were never happier than on this big picnic, 

chatting with the General when that shell struck

                                   [Phoebus Apollo]

He can just as easily borrow some of the acerbity of Sassoon when dealing with others, like Sassoon himself, and Robert Graves, who bought their own superior gear from the Army and Navy stores)

Yes, how we hate you, you cheerful young men
with your tinned kippers and today’s Daily Mail;
the periscope from Harrods, the warm new boots.

                                      [Trench Requisites]

There’s one poem in part two of the diptych that savages the literal business of the memorabilia of wars, and it illustrates for me the to-and-fro of reverberation between the two parts. I like way the distinctively modern dialect throws a light on Sassoon’s use of his demotic. I like the savagery of it.

.

29. Webbing

Buy it now for two-seven-five, condition as shown in photo, too well-made to be repro, the kosher stuff of a lost patrol. As metaphors got real and euphemism ugly, the Aldershot Design lugged its rough rigging onto the dog-tired shoulders of our line. And, if you’re browsing for archetype, for “how it really was”, then scroll no further than this, one belt; two braces; bayonet frog; pouches for ammo; one haversack; valise with two straps and carriers for the head and helve of an E-tool. This was our hyperlink, a one-piece jacket for the universal soldier: Dai’s Greatcoat, Hotspur’s mail, John Ball’s frayed thread for the fucked-up Grail of Mametz Wood. Epic failure/ epic fail

.

Equally, Martin Malone can write with a deft lyricism that conjures the literary/poetic world of the age.

MIDSUMMER

As though nothing happens

our hemisphere shoulders the sun,

.

the hill asleep on its trove of peat,

the sea is soaked in light.

.

In the days before Johnsmas

we bear fuel to the sgùrr,

our own brief blaze stoked

in its hours and seasons

.

by the darkness and the light.

.

I love the completeness of this, its precision (its echoes of MacCaig, too), and not least for the way it sits alongside much bleaker, more deliberately disturbing poems, like the one about the artist Kokoscha, shot in the head and wounded in the lung, left for dead on the Russian front, and later declared insane by his hospital doctor.

KNIGHT ERRANT, 1915

.

A spitted dragoon 

prone in pike-grey, 

Oskar Kokoschka considers his fate

and wonders if you can paint a premonition

or, in the war of endless coincidence,

is this just another incident

bereft of the brush 

to anoint its meaning?

.

As March canvass turns 

August into wounds, 

his lung swabs blood 

from the jag of Russian bayonet

and things begin to swim, 

heading out towards allegory

and revenant self-portrait:

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? 

.

He floats above himself as seraphim,

notes a passing influence of Grünewald 

and the Northern Renaissance, 

while Mahler’s widow looks on,

sphinx-like, close attendant

to his ever-present grief

and the narrow horizontal

of a stricken son of man.

.

I like the way that this reminds me that painters were way ahead of poets when it came to the profound disorientations of this war (and possibly everything else throught history). I like the way it takes the reader away from the provincialism of English war poetry, I like the widening perspective. And I realise, belatedly that it chimes with an image(the pikelhaube snout) in one of the prose poems from the second half of the diptych (The Unreturning).

10. School Run

If you’ve a minute, tweet this: the car-struck badger you’ve driven past these last two weeks, pikelhaube snout irate in death, body bloating with fetid air, hind-legs rigid in surrender. Kamerad, emptied of essence, this is the boy from your home village; that snotty kid with a terrier whose Dad liked a drink, the one who pissed himself when Miss Manning caught him with a rat in his desk. Him: always the last to put up his hand, always unlucky in love. His losing streak continued over here and now that’s him rotting away to your left, hung on the brambles of a B-Road: a passing stain in no man’s land, fuel for the coming spring. He’ll walk no more on Cotswold.

.

(Thus, Ivor Gurney. I’d forgotten that I shared this early prosepoem in a post in which Martin was my guest poet. You can check it out via this link. https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2015/11/01/labours-of-love-and-a-polished-gem-12-martin-malone/)

I realised a long long time ago I’d not do justice to the complexities and variety of this collection– lyrical, satitirical, rhetorical, polemical, extensively researched, and technically accomplished. Put all that together and you realise that it doesn’t add up to something you might recognize as currently fashionable. But do go and buy it. You’ll not be disappointed and you’ll certainly be educated. And you can dream that Michael Gove and his satraps could be forced to learn this poem by heart.

DEAR REVISIONIST

Thank you for your neo-concern

that we grasp the full facts

of this complicated matter;

for sending out, once again,

the officer class to explain 

the subtle difference between

Blackadder and the nation’s history,

the one being truth the other comedy;

for pointing out our parents’ mistake

in taking Oh What A Lovely War!

to be anything but a sixties musical 

and not how it really was. Thank you

for assuming our poetry stops at Owen;

for sending out the privately-educated

to explain that confusion in the ranks

between your national story

and literature’s false history,

as if, not royal families, but poetry

tips men into war graves.

Saxe-Coburg, be advised, your poppy

is not mine.

.

I’m grateful to you for letting me hear

Paxman attempt the phrase wor canny bairns.

And I do appreciate your engagement

with those events which legitimise

the contemporary state of affairs,

or, as you put it on a recent visit

to a sink school, make pride cool again. 

I appreciate, as you say, the need 

to understand the popular thinking

of the day; how words you are trying

to re-claim meant something real

to my grandfather right up to that morning

the Liverpool Regiment came unstuck

at Hermies, on the road to Cambrai. 

As if history can make some

long term sense of the losses 

and every lesson to be learned

is, once more, yours.

Martin Malone, thanks for your patience, and for your generous sharing of so many poems from The Unreturning. 

ps. I’ll finish with one last thought. I’ve read a lot of reviews of the book and transcripts of interviews that Martin has given as well as articles he’s written. Sometimes, Google sends you down unexpected pathways. I came across the deeply depressing world of Poetry Notes and Analyses….the virtual world’s Cole’s Notes. Amongst other things I learned that there is no kind of filter. You’d be astonished to find that it’s commonly assumed by all sorts of writers, and even some reviewers, that Wilfred Owen’s poem The unreturning is a War Poem. The first two stanzas certainly sound as if they may be

In fact, it was written between 1912 and 1913, and it’s about a crisis of theological and doctrinal doubt. It has more affinity with the Dark Sonnets of GM Hopkins than with war poetry. There you go.

Bibliography/biography

Martin Malone lives in north-east Scotland. 

He has published 3 poetry collections: The Waiting Hillside (Templar, 2011), 

                                                                       Cur (Shoestring, 2015) 

                                                                       and 

                                                                    The Unreturning (Shoestring 2019). 

Larksong Static: Selected Poems 2005-2020 was published by Hedgehog Poetry in December 2020. 

In addition, he has published 4 pamphlets: 17 Landscapes (Bluegate Books), Prodigals (The Black Light Engine Room), Mr. Willett’s Summertime* (Poetry Salzburg), Shetland Lyrics (Hedgehog). Poems from these and his other work have been published in a wide variety of magazines & journals. 

He reviews for  Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales and Poetry Salzburg Review. 

An editor at Poetry Salzburg and  Honorary Research Fellow in Creative Writing at Aberdeen University, he has a PhD in poetry from Sheffield University. Currently,  Martin is a Poetry Ambassador for the Scottish Poetry Library.

*Mr. Willett’s Summertime comprises 25 poems that were the early nucleus of The Unreturning

Spoiler alert. If you follow the cobweb regularly you’ll be aware that I’m very slow at getting over a course of chemo that ended in April. One of the side effects of coming off the steroids that accompany the chemotherapy is increased joint pain due to inflammation. Pretty well everything hurts in varying degrees and in different places during the day. It’s not severe, but it’s debilitating, and at the moment, my hands are particularly arthritic. My keyboard skills have never amounted to much, but I’m more clumsy than usual, and there are likely to be more typos that usual. I religiously proofread before I publish, but invariably miss stuff. So, apologies in advance.

So. Here we go. Over the last few months I’ve become addicted to the TV series The Repair Shop. In a world that appears committed to trashing anything that works, including language itself, here’s a programme that celebrates a group of men and women who patiently mend and restore anything that’s brought to them…defunct harmoniums and accordions, broken porcelain and earthen ware, desiccated leather purses, saddles, torn and sagging easy chairs, clocks, watches, bicycles, gas lamps, vintage calculators, telescopes……for every job there’s an expertise, an arcane array of tools, and beyond all that, patience, attention to detail, imagination and love. All this quiet work of regeneration and resurrection goes in an ancient brick-floored barn, in a thatched lean-to, in an ancient smithy, and all of it cradled in a downland valley where patient Clydesdales crop the greenest grass, clouds of gulls follow a tractor, and small birds perch photogenically . It’s William Morris’s utopian vision of a might-be England. It’s down-to earth and idyllic in equal measure, in the way of Our Yorkshire Farm. And also, I realise, of at least one element of the work of today’s guest. Because while The Repair Shop mends things, Di Slaney’s animal sanctuary…I’m tempted to say ‘hospice’…mends damaged creatures. Since 2005, she has been filling her ancient Nottinghamshire farmhouse and its land with more livestock than is sensible: Manor Farm Charitable Trust is home to over 170 animals at the last count, many of them with special physical or behavioural needs. 

Some of them are celebrated in the opening cluster of poems in Herd Queen , but this isn’t a collection of poems about animals, damaged or otherwise. It’s more like an anthology of poems that all happen to be written by a single author. A rumbustiously, whole-hearted rattle bag of technically varied and accomplished poems. When Di Slaney was a last a guest of the cobweb I wrote of her collection

.

“Let me tell you what I like about Reward for winter. One thing surprised me; I’m not an animal lover, or, I’m not someone who is comfortable around animals, apart from cats, who don’t give a toss anyway. But I’m drawn in by Di Slaney’s poems about animals because of their knowledgeableness, like Ted Hughes’ poems in What is the truth . 

.

I like poems that grow out of absorbed research. I love the way the language of research seeps into the fabric of the poetry and fast-dyes it 

.

What else? I like writing that grows out of specific, realised places. I think that it probably started with Akenfield, to stories that evolve through generations lived in a single place. The Rainbow,and Alan Garner’s wonderful Stone Book Quartet.

.

Apart from all this, Di Slaney writes what Jonathan Edwards has described as ‘sophisticated and dexterous poems…..beautifully crafted and very moving’.There are terza rimas,  every conceivable variant on the sonnet (and faux-sonnet) with crafty and elegant rhyme schemes. The poems have a sure-footedness that lets you know just where you are, and how to hear them; there’s a precise ear for line breaks, for diction, for rhythm, and so much richness of rhyme; slant rhymes, internal rhymes. So much music.”

[you might like to catch up on the rest of this 2016 post. Here’s the link. https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2016/05/14/knowing-your-place-di-slaneys-reward-for-winter/%5D

Every one who has reviewed or endorsed Herd Queen seems to say much the same sort of things, as Di acknowledges when she brought me up to date on what she’s been doing since 2016. I asked:

.

“…..if you could write me a bit about what’s happened since May 2016, not least how you came to to put “Herd Queen’ together. I suppose I’m partly asking, because Herd Queen bucks the trend (it seems to me) of the thematically organised collection. What I like about yours is that chunks of it could be freestanding pamphlets, and in any case it’s wide-ranging in its range of characters, voices, forms, moods, landscapes…..it is, in fact, refreshing, as most endorsers and reviewers seem to agree. And I bet it’s the only collection I’ve read to be briefly reviewed in The Countryman!“

A few big ‘life stage’ things have happened to me since May 2016 – I became sole owner of Candlestick Press in that year, then in 2017 our private animal sanctuary here on the smallholding became a registered charity specialising in disabled and special needs livestock – see www.manorfarmcharitabletrust.org. And then in June 2019 I was diagnosed with a brain tumour.  The latter two events definitely fed into the development of Herd Queen – understanding the real focus of our animal care work and what a difference we can make to the welfare of those creatures in our care, and then finding strength in their situation for my own health issues. These experiences have surprisingly made me more light-hearted and joyful as a writer, and more determined to share light and shade in my writing – there are some dark pieces in Herd Queen but I wanted there to be humour and solace as well, from unexpected sources.  Life throws us these curve balls but it’s up to us what we make of them – if we’re adaptive and resourceful like the animals, then we carry on living for the day and making the best of what we have, or at least try to.

And you’re very right to comment on the thematically miscellaneous nature of the collection!  It was pieced together out of several wholes – where there was a short sequence of work in one particular direction at one time – but what I’ve tried to do is unite it all under one concept, that of the vigorous and challenging caprine Herd Queen who will zig and zag all over the hillside to protect her territory and her companions, covering plenty of ground in the process.  Someone once said that my writing is muscular in style and I took that as a compliment (maybe it wasn’t intended that way!) so these different forms and voices and moods are flexes of those muscles.  I do hope it isn’t a messy read, and that it doesn’t cause too much head-scratching for the reader – the first section is intended to be an extension of the land and animals themes of Reward for Winter, the second section an exploration of human and family relationships from a variety of sources and then the third is the naughty section… 

It does mean of course that the book can pop up in unexpected places like Knitting or Yours magazine or The Countryman, as well as reviewed in literary journals like London Grip or Raceme. “

Paula Meehan wrote that

“All that is animate has Di Slaney’s attention…….. Her poems are robust and earthy, subtle and direct by turn, her insight often witty and sometimes wicked. …..She covers an impressive amount of ground in these warm, well-crafted poems, and she does it with considerable energy and style.”

Jonathan Edwards says that

“as a poet, she can do everything, from intricate sestina to energetic monologue, from musical lyric to vibrant prose poem. But even more important are the ends to which she employs her technical gifts……. Slaney’s animal poems remind us of Hughes and of Liz Berry in their forging of a new language to describe that experience…… her poems about people give us everything from a cobbler great grandfather to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ‘tongue and spittle snogs’ to Shirley Bassey. “

All this only reminds me of the difficulty I’ve had in deciding how to present my ideas about Herd Queen , its clusters of poems about wounded animals, about family photographs, about Saudi evacuees , about forgotten histories from meticulously researched local histories. Add to that the range of form and structure..ballads, prose poems, sonnets, dramatic monologues (in stanzas), lots of complex rhyme schemes…including the absurdly complicated Welsh gwawdodyn (no, I’d not come across it, either). How will I do it all justice? The answer’s simple enough. I can’t. I’ll simply share some of my favourites . Off we go.

.

Meeting Geraldine

‘Big goat left to die in snow’ was all that I 

was told, and that she was old, so promised

I would go along to meet her, see how her

ordeal had left her and if there were no 

major complications, nothing more

they could do, I’d bring her here. Fear

.

penned her nosefirst in that stable corner, fear

so strong the reek of it sank me to my knees. I 

softtouched her coat and bones, promised

I would do the best I could, would give her

all the food she needed to be well. She made no 

sound, didn’t move or flinch, had more

.

sorespots than I’d first noticed, more

dirt than grey in thinwhitecoat. The fear

kept her silent that first week when all I 

did was strawsit with her, promising

she could have a friend, that her

hollowrumen hungeraches would end, no 

.

one would hurt her here. There was no 

clue she’d heard or understood, it was more

that she put up with me. Yearslearnt fear

still flickered in her eyes each time I 

tugged the stable door, the promise

I’d be back offering no comfort, her

.

nostrils alarmwide with whiff of me. But her

appetite was good and she had no 

trouble eating, brokenmouthed with more

teeth missing than remained. One day, fear

seemed to hover above the haypile and I 

breathstopped while she cudded, promising

.

myself patience would pay, promising

her the moon if only she’d respond. Then her

blackovals set in gold met startledmine, no 

hesitation now with ears uppricked, more

curious with nose cleanpink and wet. Fear

evaporated like milkspurt on warm grass and I 

.

kept my word every day after, although we only had

her for a year. She died in May whitesunshine while

I stroked her beard, promised her no more fear. 

.

There’s a lot to like in this poem, not least the way it treads carefully around the edges of sentimentality without actually falling in; I’m thinking of what Di said about the possibilities of reciprocal healing, the:

difference we can make to the welfare of those creatures in our care, and then finding strength in their situation for my own health issues.

I like the way the opening stanza is very close to prose-with-line-breaks; the poem begins with a business-like transaction, the voice that says, ‘well, I’ll come round and have a look, but I’m making no promises’. retrospectively, you realise that a lot of rhymes and pararhymes have been set up, and that they’re sustained right through. They’re all monosyllabic, from linked stanza to stanza. There’s an edginess about them, which has to work alongside the strongly textured reality of the animal, and its fear that requires new-minted kennings for its description. I didn’t expect to like this poem, and then found that I did, not least because of the turning point that depends on two different kinds of eyes making a connection.

blackovals set in gold met startledmine

Texture is especially what you notice in the next poem, which is self-evidently written by someone who knows a thing or two about wool. (The first time I met Di Slaney was at an Interpreter’s House launch in Leeds; it was also the first time I met a poet who brought wool from her own sheep to sell as well as books.) A handy note in the collection explains that

Witches cannot resist wool, & this Mazey Ball from The Museum of Witchcraft in #Cornwall is so filled. It was believed “no witch could cast an evil eye on the owner until she had counted every bit of wool in the house.”  Aberdeen Press & Journal, 17th Nov 1932. 

.

Mazey ball

She watched him gather tufts from fences 

along the field, as he’d watched her finger wool 

in the village yarn shop, her gaze low and dark, small 

brown hands lingering over skeins still fresh

from early shearing. That night he switched off all 

the lights and kept squat candles burning on the hearth, 

.

their flicker pointing beams and cracks in ancient brickwork.

His thickweave cushions, driftwood hangings and peg

loom rugs brought the flock indoors, while by the fire 

raw fleece sacks breathed their sweetness across

the room towards the porch. Single storeyed, the cottage

eased itself to darkness as he doused his mug goodnight

.

and padded to the bed, cablesocks three quarters high 

on tanned and knotted calves, tired legs. The ball twined 

above the kitchen stove where a skillet used to drop, 

anchored by aran ply to a thumbed black squab.

Candlelight caught cream, a flash of white, then grey 

as the ball twisted first this way, then that. He lay on one

.

hundred quilted crochet squares, felt each deadwifestitch 

pressing into skin like penance, but resolute he still listened; 

breathsure, heartloose. When the front latch snagged at two, 

he smiled and reached beneath the bed, shepherded silence 

along the flags to find her backwards in the shadows, ball in hand, 

bloodblack hair flowing down a feltstiff gown above her knees. 

.

Skin glistened, and she seemed to halo pale fawn fibre 

that curled towards him, her bare feet pointed in two cleaves 

of hoof, and soft noise escaped her lips like new lambs bleating 

in barn sunlight. She never shifted from the ball, kept 

mumblecounting little threads, so he gently snaked his crook 

around her neck like every ewe he’d ever landed, and snared his witch.

.

.

I chose this one because it’s such a beautifully told tale, and one which actually relishes its own narrative tricks. The question of who is watching who, and who will be the catcher and who the caught is set up so deftly in those first two lines, as is the ambiguity of time and place. The title says ‘once upon a time’, but the ‘village wool shop’ says ‘now’, as does his switching off the lights. It’s a very satisfying piece of storytelling ending, too. He ‘snared his witch’. What her nature is and why he should snare her is unresolved. I love it and all its imagery, its filmic moments, the slowly turning ball anchored by aran ply to a thumbed black squab, that satisfying solidity.

I want to share three more poems, but with minimal commentary. The next two are monologues /ventriloqual but could not be more different in tone and style.

The first is Di’s take on a piece of research about her neighbourhood of Bilsthorpe . Dame Elizabeth Broughton was the widow of Sir Brian Broughton who counted Bilsthorpe as part of his estate.  On the 15th April 1727, she defended herself in court against a bill of complaint brought by William Hodgson.  The gist of the matter appears to be that Sir Brian promised an annuity to his mistress Anne Carter, which Dame Elizabeth has defaulted on. During further research, it appeared that Dame Elizabeth had been previously accused of causing the death of Anne Carter in a fire, and her relations are now retrospectively claiming the annuity as it was passed to them after her death. In transcripts of the court record, Dame Elizabeth defends herself vigorously, claiming that she is ‘entirely a stranger’ to all allegations and claims. 

All I’ll say is that you might like to decide whether Dame Elizabeth is as innocent/naive as she appears to make out, or whether she’s being at least disingenuous.

.

Dame Elizabeth Broughton answers the court

15^th April 1727 

Sir, I am entirely a stranger to proceedings here. 

You must forgive a poor widow’s lack of grasp,         

for in all such matters prior, my dear late husband 

Sir Brian Broughton would stand. Since his demise 

. 

all must forgive my widow’s grasp, my lack of

certainty. I have not slept, the thought of how 

Sir Brian would not stand for this and his demise

weighs heavy on my mind, for I am growing more

.

certain, despite not sleeping, that the thought of

Anne Carter and her claims for full annuity would

weigh too heavy on his mind, of this I am more sure.

She was a scandal and a scold, beg pardon the court,

.

the name Anne Carter and her canny claims would

have ruined a lesser man, but not my husband. 

He pardoned her the scandal, I begged and scolded

him to end his visits to her, but he courted disaster

.

like a lesser man, was briefly not at all my husband.

Those boys she had, he hoped them his, would only

end his visits when he saw William Hodgson courted

her, how quickly she came undone, how hot she flushed.

.

Those boys she had were never his, his only hope of

siring heirs lost years before when his horse tipped him,

but the way she flushed and came undone, the heat 

of her convinced him for a time that he had it in him

. 

to sire heirs. I lost our boy when his horse tipped him

and they told me he was crushed, unlike to live.

He convinced me for a time he still had it in him      

to recover, do his duty for the parish, but I knew

.

our hopes were crushed even as I learned to live.

Sir, I wander and you are right to rally me to task.

I am recovered, will state my duty for the parish but

I will not cede on the amount. Her boys have no right

.

to wander into our affairs and rally your support.

When Mistress Carter died in last year’s fire, her

boys amounted to naught and I will not cede my rights.

What, sir, the fire?  I know naught of how it started.

.

Anne Carter died and that’s all I knew of it last year.

In such matters, my late husband would know best.

I had no part in that fire. May the court forgive me

for I feel entirely strange, sir. Proceed without me here.

.

You might like to read the opening three lines and and then the last three, and listen to the echoes, and ask yourself if it’s not that bit too artful, too ‘rehearsed’. For contrast, then, here’s the second poem from the sequence ,The Songs of Saudi , developed in collaboration with composer Omar Shahryar, and based on recorded interviews with his mother, father and brother about their evacuation from Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War of 1990.  The first poem in the sequence ‘Shona’s Song’ became the lyrics to a performance piece for the 2017 Leeds Lieder Festival, with music composed by Omar sung by mezzo-soprano Emily Hodkinson. Side by side, you might think they were the work of two different poets, which is a tribute to the range of what you discover in this unclassifiable collection.

.

Di Slaney can do lushly textured poems and then she can do this stripped back, near abstract, monochrome that is full of the aching distance of separation and disembodiment to the accompaniment of flickering TV screens and mindless electronic noise. It’s heartbreaking. But I wouldn’t leave you with a voice calling out of separation. I’ll finish instead with one from the third section of the book, from the what DI Slaney calls ‘the naughty ones’. If this poem was a painting it would be by Beryl Cooke, a saucy postcard of a poem. It’s in the same world as Pam Ayres’ asking forlornly ‘do you think Bruce Springsteen would fancy me?’

.

Disgraceful

Feather boa, sequins, diamonds and lace,

Nut-brown bare arms and firm upright chassis –

so few wrinkles on that beaming face,

at 73, I want to be Shirley Bassey.

.

No bond can contain her, the dame is forever.

Feisty, fearless, well-sussed and sassy –

she may be a spender, spendthrift never never;

at 73, I have to be Shirley Bassey.

.

Belting voice, smutty laugh, star-spangled life,

diva supreme from a Tiger Bay lassie.

OK, not every man’s ideal wife,

but at 73, I must be Shirley Bassey.

.

Thigh slits, stilettos and festival wellies –

no wheelchair for me, I’ll still wiggle my assy.

Tight-fitting gowns will restrain all my bellies

and at 73, I will be Shirley Bassey.

.

Di Slaney..Thank you for being our guest..It’s taken me ages to finally write this post about Herd Queen. I hope I’ve given the readers a sense of its range and richness, and I hope I’ve persuaded them to go and buy it.

Herd Queen : Valley Press [2020]. 96pp £12.00