Inspiration : Map Reading For Beginners

One of the reasons why I keep this blog is as a Commonplace Book.  Writing posts about my jaunts with photos helps me to remember in detail where I've been, and if I'm lucky enough to come home with the promise of a poem in my pocket, it's a  useful tool for the writing of it, especially since a fair bit of time can elapse before the poem is ready to be written.  

With this in mind, I thought I might occasionally post finished poems with their associated photos, and a brief description about how they came about. 

 Map Reading For Beginners


 The bulk of the title poem of my second collection, Map Reading for Beginners, was inspired in the first instance by this picture of the remote Church of St Ishow at Partrishow, high on a hill above the Grwyne Fawr valley in Powys.  As soon as I saw it, in January 2013, I asked the artist, Dru Marland, if we could go there and she agreed we could.  

I came back from our jaunt that day knowing I had to write about the place.  My starting point was a pair of ravens we'd heard chatting in the empty sky a fair while before we'd seen them rolling overhead - a happy encounter for me as they also inspired a sequence of three poems called Speaking Raven (also the same collection).  Before long the fox and hare from Dru's picture had made their way in too, as did the holy well below the Church, which has miraculous tales of healing attached to it.  


But then images from other places which evoke similar feelings in me came crowding in.  The sat nav relegated to the boot is a  reference to a trip I made from Taunton with another friend, back in 2008, following our noses with no idea of where we were headed until we ran out of land at Porlock, and drove along the coast to Watchet.   The tunnelling lanes are therefore those of Somerset, and also Devon, both my ancestral home 'where the story first began'. 

The snake is also from Devon, the pregnant she-adder I encountered on Meldon Hill on Dartmoor in 2009, who also inspired a poem (Ophidiophobia) in the same collection ... 

... or maybe it was the snakelet I spotted with my partner near Scorhill Stone Circle, on our first trip to the moor together in 2013, which turns up in yet another poem, The Seventh Sign.

Meanwhile, the fractal dreams carved by beetles date from another, earlier jaunt, this one in my home city, Bristol. I'd gone up to the Downs, again with Dru, for an afternoon stroll and a glimpse of the newly installed goats in the Avon Gorge, only to find myself clambering down the steep side to the Portway at the bottom in her wake ... and surviving!

All these elements were drawn together into the poem and subsequently the cover of the collection, drawn by Dru.  As in the poem, the buried Saint Ishow has become a poet with wild strawberries (a nod to the poem of the same name) and primroses growing from her hair.  Best of all, the flowering garlic in the shape of The Plough. Just gorgeous. 

Here's the poem:

 

Map Reading For Beginners

Put the sat nav in the boot
Follow your own arterial route

the tunnelling lanes that take you down
to where the stories first began,

where fox and hare listen in bracken,
ravens chat across the silence of the sky.

In the moss-dark holy well
a nadder bites its stripy tail,

completes the circle.
Your turquoise tracery of veins

espaliered branches
mapping skin,

a buried poet
with a fruit tree growing through her,

whose fractal dreams are carved
by beetles under bark.

©Deborah Harvey 2014

Map Reading for Beginners is published by Indigo Dreams and available from their website (and Amazon and good independent bookshops).

How to Read Maps and Navigate in Thick Dartmoor Fog

In the midst of poetry festivals, woodland walks and helping with filial house moves, and all the to-ing and fro-ing from Bristol to various stops along the Kennet & Avon and back, and from Bristol to North Yorkshire and back, but not from Bristol to Devon and back because I still haven't managed to get there yet this spring, I have been working on - and have now submitted - the manuscript for my next poetry collection to the redoubtable Dawn and Ronnie of Indigo Dreams Publishing.  

It's going to be called Map Reading For Beginners, which is the title of a poem I wrote after a visit to Partrishow in the Black Mountains the winter before last.  This is, of course, a metaphorical reading, but if some hapless navigators buy it by mistake, in the hope of finding out how to negotiate bogs and/or orientate themselves in thick Dartmoor fog*, well, they might still  learn something, even if it wasn't what they were expecting.  

Map Reading For Beginners is scheduled for publication this coming autumn, with a Bristol launch around the time of the Bristol Poetry Festival towards the end of September, and I'm already excited about it. 

And here is its cover, drawn by the aforementioned Kennet & Avon-dwelling Dru Marland.  I am so proud of it that I'm not going to apologise for posting a picture of it again.  I just have to make sure that the poems do it justice.


*You listen for the sound of running water and make your way to the nearest river, following it downstream until you reach a road, where, with a bit of luck, you might eventually reach civilisation. 

'Grwyne Fawr' - Another Poem from Inking Bitterns

This is me reading the first part of my three-part poem, 'Speaking Raven'. It was inspired by a visit to Patrishow in the Black Mountains last January, when my fellow-travellers and I saw two ravens flying high overhead.  Their conversation carried all the way down to us on the still, cold air.    



'Grwyne Fawr' was recently published in Dru Marland's illustrated anthology, 'Inking Bitterns' - a book of poems and pictures for wild places, published in association with Poetry Can, and available from Gert Macky books and good independent bookshops, price £5.  It will also appear with its constituent parts in my forthcoming collection, 'Map Reading for Beginners', which is due to be published by Indigo Dreams later this year.  

Illustration of Patrishow by Dru Marland

The 2013 Gloucestershire Poetry Prize

A suspicious sales-type phone call yesterday evening turned out to be nothing of the sort - instead, I learnt that my sequence, Speaking Raven, has won the 2013 Gloucestershire Poetry Prize (for residents of the ancestral county of Gloucestershire), courtesy Buzzwords, and so takes a final lap of honour here.    

The first part is about watching a pair of ravens flying over the Grwyne Fawr valley in the Black Mountains; the second is in the voice of the raven who, in North American mythology, created the World; and the third is a bit of one-upmanship between the Norse God Odin’s two ravens, whose names translate as Thought and Memory. 

Speaking Raven

I Grwyne Fawr

Sheep have spread their shrunken 

woollens on barbed wire fences,

wisps bleached white by winter sun

imitating lichen hung on blackthorn

twigs to dry.

Delighted by pattern

the wind sends a pair of ravens overhead. 

It thinks they sound like frogs

but to me it’s clear that they are

deep in conversation

their topic a worsening in the weather,

the move of the livestock market

from Abergavenny to Raglan.

Or so I imagine, 

not speaking raven.

II   Light-Bringer

Black with repentance?  Me?

Everything you see I created –  

these hills and rivers, those distant clouds

that might be mountains

I circled the world,

my feathers shed forests

With my beak I mined diamonds 

gritted the slippery sky

While you were blindfolded

and stumbling

I shoved the sun up the chimney

giving birth to Day

My dirt-dark laugh

regurgitates morning

Nights, I spread my wings, my iris

the tireless moon

III  Thought and Memory

Once there were gods

and we served them.  Now we are 

masters of four winds

Feathers and bone, we are the fearless,

tumbling funambulists

stepping on air

There’s more than one darkness.

We are the dark of the shortest day

falling through spring

Mornings

our wings make sooty marks

across the camber of the sky

In our feathers all things are mingled.

We have four and sixty

changings of the voice.

We love to bark like happy dogs

rolling in cloud

waggling our tails

We’re not the souls of fallen soldiers.

We don’t act as omens,

foretellers of doom

Flapping rags and blackened paper,

we are debris at the edges

of the storm

Thanks to judge, David Morley, and all at Buzzwords. 

(There is a raven in the above photo, honest, it's soaring, wings outstretched, over the Dart gorge.)

Ravens over the Grwyne Fawr Valley

A visit to Partishow back at the turn of the year has proved particularly fruitful, spawning a poem in three parts entitled Speaking Raven and now this picture by Dru Marland, for a possible poetry anthology project in the future.  Vive les jaunts!

A New Year Jaunt Part II: Mountains and Molehills

Stepping back out of St Ishow's Church into the churchyard, you are again swept up in the magnificence of the Grwyne Fawr valley.  It hasn't changed while you've been inside, it's just that you were so beguiled by the artifice of human beings, you forgot Nature's genius. 

Here's a reminder.

I loved this sheep with a black spot on its bum. 

The Churchyard was stuffed full of interesting gravestones.  I particularly liked this fallen angel with molehill ...

... and this spelling mistake, spotted by Dru.  

Oh, and this headstone also: A Man is born to dye

One thing that struck me was the number of plain yet beautifully lettered graves which resembled those in Mells in north-east Somerset.  It's almost as if the churchyards are twinned ... 

Robin Truelove, Partrishow                      Siegfried Sassoon, Mells

        gravestone, Mells                              gravestone, Partrishow

... or maybe both villages tend to attract well-heeled arty corpses.

After a good fossick around the churchyard, it was time to return to the well, the site (so the story has it) of St Ishow's martyrdom in (it is believed) the 6th or 7th century.  It's a peaceful spot nowadays.

Of course, springs were sacred long before the Christians came, as were yews.  I took a small chunk of wood from the yew stump up in the churchyard to lay with all the other votive offerings.

This is the well itself, with a pannikin hanging on one side and niches for offerings.    

Heading for Crickhowell, we stopped to see if we could capture a photo that replicated the vision of Dru's picture.  By scrambling over a barbed wire fence, Dru just about managed it.  Meanwhile, a pair of ravens chatted to each other over head.  Perfect.

A New Year Jaunt Part I: Church of Saint Ishow, Partrishow

The first jaunt of the New Year began with a fabulous picture painted by Dru Marland, of the Church of Saint Ishow (or Issui) at Partrishow in Powys, Wales.  

I fell in love with it at first sight and emailed a jpeg to my publisher, Ronnie Goodyer of Indigo Dreams. He replied that he used to live near there last century and often walked his dogs (seven border collies, if memory serves) in the valley.  He also sent a couple of verses of a poem he'd written about the church with its miraculously surviving rood screen.  The next day at Bristol Can Openers in its new venue of Foyle's, our guest, Graham Harthill, mentioned that he lived in the same area of Wales so I showed him the picture and he revealed that he had written several poems about this place I'd never heard of until a day or two earlier. 

All this synchronicity led me to deduce that the picture is, in fact, a map, and so a date for a jaunt was set with Dru and Bristol poet John Terry*.  Before I went, I even wrote a poem, which is strange because usually I like to dabble my toes in the waters of a place before turning my mind to writing.  I called the poem 'Map Reading for Beginners'.  

We had the most beautiful winter day for our journey, underlined by the sight of mist filling the Usk valley at Abergavenny.  We parked near the holy well and climbed the last steep part of the hill, as seemed appropriate for a pilgrimage.  The views across the valley were at once majestic and homely, with sheep having left their washing on the line.

Our first stop was the eglwys-y-bedd - or Church of the Grave - now a shrine to the Martyr Ishaw who is said to have been murdered by an ungrateful traveller at the Holy Well. Its considerable age is indicated by the most marvellously wonky window.  I also loved the graveslab of Elizabeth, the daughter of Thomas Sanders, who died the 9th day of December 1770 aged 28, because the smily angel at the foot is holding its wings in the shape of a heart. 

There are so many surviving treasures in the Church itself that it is almost impossible to know where to start. Yes, I could see the astonishingly beautiful rood screen, but there in the corner, shouting his head off, was mediaeval Death (or Doom), appropriately brandishing a scythe and egg-timer, and also a rather splendid shovel.  So he got my attention first.

Ah, but the rood screen ... so intricately carved yet so plain in its unvarnished, unpainted simplicity!  Being 16th century, it would have been modern when King Henry VIII destroyed the monasteries and his son's vandals carried out their Cultural Revolution, yet it survived both of them.  It survived the zealotry of the Roundheads.  It survived the depredations of Victorian 'restoration'.  I hope it can even survive my rubbish photography so you can get some idea of just how astounding it is.   Some of the ivy that had decorated the church over Christmas was still in place, giving the impression that to step through the opening was to enter a fairy-tale forest or Narnia. There were even dragons there.  

Beyond, a simple, light-filled chancel, with 18th century memorials featuring blowsy angels which could have been designed by Beryl Cook and a small print of William Holman Hunt's 'Light of the World', which echoed the Edwardian lantern atop the shaft of the mediaeval cross outside in the churchyard.  

There is so much here to delight that I could write reams. Already I'm going to have to divide the trip into several blogs.  So I'll just concentrate on the treasures which delighted me most and if I miss out something spectacular, like the rare 1620 Welsh bible or the plain and perfectly designed pulpit, then I apologise.  

This is the central lock on the parish chest which, unusually, is hollowed out of a tree trunk.







 John and Dru in the nave.

 One of the oldest fonts in Wales with an inscription of c1055.  










John studying the murals in the nave.



















Forgot the cattle, dammit!

 More about Partrishow anon.

*Note to anyone who doesn't know him: this is the John Terry, not the footballer, obviously.