Poetry October (and into November)

There's been a few poetry  happenings lately. My copy of the mental health poetry anthology 'Night Sweats of the Spirit', from Maitri Poetry, arrived from America, with my poem in it. It's the first time I've had a poem published over the ocean, I think, and in a chapbook, rather than a pamphlet. (I'm liking the nomenclature.)

I also received my contributor's copy of 'Obsessed with Pipework', stuffed full of interesting poems.

Elsewhere, I belatedly discovered another of my poems had been shortlisted for a poetry competition, the original notification having never reached me. This involved a mad scramble to video the poem for the prize-giving, which was on a work day rather than its usual Sunday, and which, with only a few days to spare, caused much kerfuffle. Then ... renewed radio silence, and that was that. All things considered, I would have preferred just to get a telephone call saying your poem was shortlisted but didn't win a prize. I'm yet to be convinced that the injection of suspense into announcing the results of poetry competitions is a useful thing. They aren't  the same as TV talent shows, and the whole experience made me long for the year I won the main prize in this particular competition, a long time ago now, when I got that phone call telling me the good news and descended on the literature festival, held in a small city in Somerset, to collect my award. A much more pleasant experience all round.

I can't post the video recording of the poem here as that would count as publication and it has yet to find its place in the world. Nevertheless, a short-listing to add to the two long-listings and the second prize my new set of poems have garnered this year is encouraging, and makes the dreary terror of submitting a little more palatable. 

And right now the boot is on the other foot, as I'm currently judging poems that were entered in Indigo Dreams Autumn Poetry Competition. I'm looking forward to finding out who the writer of the winning poem is, once they've all been read and reread and given a suitable measure of consideration. 

The thing about book launches - at least this is what happens at mine - is that they tend to go unrecorded, as I'm so focussed on the reading, I don't think to take any photos, or ask anyone else to. So I always try to photograph other people's, in case they're like me.  I had the honour of reading at the launch of Hannah Linden's insightful and compelling pamphlet (or chapbook) 'A beautiful open sky' last night, and took a few pictures for the record. It was organised by Satellite of Love, and held in their new venue, the Lightship Theatre on the The John Sebastian in Bathurst Basin, a marvellously atmospheric setting. 

MC and guest poet, Helen Sheppard

Guest poet Tom Sastry

Guest poet me - I didn't take this photo, Rachael Clyne did

The celestial audience of All Saints Night

Hannah Linden getting ready to read  her first set

Hazel and Andi

Guest poet Melanie Branton

Helen guest-poetting

Hannah

The journey into town from my home - all eight miles of it - had taken an hour and forty minutes, thanks to the foul weather, roadworks on several key routes, and specifically the closure of Redcliffe bridge for repairs, which was longer than the trip I made to read in Exeter at the end of September. Afterwards, walking back across the new cut in torrential rain to where I'd parked my car left me literally soaked to the skin. But it's a measure of how lovely an evening it was that I just didn't care. 

O brave new world

There's a whole new world for puppies to explore, but it's not as easy as it might be in the middle of winter and the dead of a pandemic. Still, we're doing our best, and now Cwtch has had all her vaccinations, we'll be able to visit the park and encounter other dogs a bit more.  

We were loaned a puppy carrier for the time before she could walk outdoors, which I was really pleased about, but she never managed to settle in it comfortably. 

So it was back to the original plan of carrying her around. 

We've had to avoid dogs till now, but there's been lots of other places to explore and people to meet and experiences to get one's teeth into. 

One of these experiences was a Zoom poetry launch, at which my publishers, Ronnie and Dawn, were launching their fantastic joint collection, 'Forest Moor or Less'. From Cwtch's point of view, however, it wasn't an unqualified success. Our previous collie, Ted, was an old paw at this sort of thing. His protests never extended beyond the occasional theatrical sigh when yet another poet asked 'How much time have I got?' accompanied by a crash as he dropped to the floor, as if someone had cut his strings. 

The newbie didn't last as long. After posing momentarily for a screenshot, she started chewing my jacket and spent the rest of the event maurauding and looking for trouble. She'll learn. 

There have also been very important people to meet, and a lot of learning about support bubbles and the like. 

Busy roads, rain and the perfidy of glass. Not so keen on any of that. 

But a little light shopping in Pets At Home went down well ... 

... and best of all, late night trips up the churchyard. 

I sniff dead people

Project Boast, and a poem for International Women's Day 2018

'These poems disturb the peace with a loudness hard won from centuries of humility'

If you're into poetry, you're usually spoilt for choice for readings on International Women's Day. Last night I went to the launch in Bristol of Project Boast, which was dreamed up by Doctors Rachel Bentham and Alyson Hallett, inspired by the Victorian engineer and inventor, Sarah Guppy. 

Amongst other things, Sarah, who lived in Bristol, came up with a samovar that made tea, cooked eggs and kept toast warm; a method for preventing barnacles from clinging to a ship’s hull; and an exercise bed for women to use at home (since exercising in public was deemed inappropriate for them). Her patented design for making safe piling for bridges was used by Thomas Telford (free of charge), and as a friend of the Brunel family, she was involved in the Great Western Railway project. However, there are no statues erected to Sarah Guppy, and her achievements have been all but dismissed. She herself once said 'It is unpleasant to speak of oneself – it may seem boastful particularly in a woman.' 

It was this quote that prompted the good doctors mentioned above to 'seek out contemporary women poets who are speaking out and who are making a fresh mark, registering the straitacket they have had to wear and celebrating the emerging possibility of real change'. And this, in turn, led to the book, the proceeds of which will go to the Malala Fund.

Last night women of all ages travelled from all over the West Country to read at the celebratory launch ...

... with Penelope Shuttle headlining  a packed venue.  












One of my poems included in the anthology was written especially for it. It's a period piece (of sorts), which takes as its starting point assertions by Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia on the subject of menstruation: namely, if a menstruating woman walks barefoot through fields at sunrise, with her hair dishevelled and her girdle loose, the crop will wither and dry up. Her glance at this time will dim the brightness of mirrors and dull the edge of steel.

Blooded

Then let’s blind this tyranny of mirrors

blunt the blades of our bright pink plastic razors

Let’s not be neat, compact, discreet

hide who we are in the palms of our hands or up our sleeves

We’ll smear our foreheads, noses, cheeks

not with the blood of hunted creatures, stain of killing sprees

but with our blood, this ferrous musk

fecund, nurturing, the russet of red fox

vixen-masked, in long soot gloves

we’ll blaze our clamorous ways through scrub

burn ash paths through suburbs, towns

singe the edge of meadows, commons, forests, downs

scratching sparks from burnt-out stars

chasing flames that leap from heart to heart

©Deborah Harvey 2018 

Project Boast is available to buy from the Triarchy website and usual outlets. A Kindle version will be available from April. It is hoped to raise enough money via crowdfunding to equip every school in Bristol - or the West Country - or the entire country - with a copy.

Readings Past and Presently ...

Ben Banyard, with whom I'm sharing a launch of our respective publications, Communing and Breadcrumbs, on Friday 10th June, has posted an interesting account of a recent reading we did with fellow Indigo Dreams Publishing poets, Chrys Salt and Anna Saunders, at Cheltenham Poetry Festival.  This is his photo of the pub it was held in, the Frog and Fiddle ... 

... but to read about the rest of our brilliant evening,  you'll have to click here.

Meanwhile, I'm guest poet at Bristol's very own Can Openers this Friday coming, from midday at Steam Cafe Bar. Do come along and bring a poem of your own for the open mic. 

If you don't know where Steam Cafe Bar is, it's on Union Gate, just along from the old Bridewell.  The same rank of shops where Pitt and Hudson the jewellers used to be, where I first got my ears pierced, and that pet shop where I used to get sawdust for my rabbit, Ziggy Stardust, and Bananas where you could buy the most ridiculously baggy jeans - oh, those were the days. 

Bristol Poetry Festival 2014

So that was Bristol Poetry Festival 2014 and one of the very best I've been to so far.  It seems invidious to highlight a few moments out of so many, though in any treasury, there will always be random sparkles that catch your eye.

The Bristol Poetry Slam jam-packed. My strawberries were three relative newcomers.  Melanie Branton - a star is born!  A bit more experience and first prize will be hers for the taking.  I also hope to see more of Abi Newman and Hannah Teasdale in particular in future.  
(Above is a photo of Melanie I pinched from Poetry Slam's Facebook page.)

SIX! featured six poets with connections to the South-West: Dikra Ridha, Kate Firth, Victoria Field, Lucy Lepchani, Shagufta Iqbal and Alyson Hallett.  I knew beforehand, either from reading their work or by reputation, that each was a fine poet with her own distinctive voice; what I wasn't prepared for was the way the poems themselves interacted with each other, sharing themes, images and experiences despite a world of difference in the personal histories of each poet.  From a  moonlit walk around a quaintly named quarry to the unbearable tension of a horse race upon which a family's grocery budget for the week is riding to a discourse on Clark's shoes, I was hooked.  An especial mention here for Dikra, who wrote so simply and movingly about her family and their life in Baghdad during wartime.  The epitome of grace under (for me) unimaginable pressure.  

I was reminded of Dikra's work while listening to Mir Mahfuz Ali read his poems alongside Fleur Adcock, Robert Minhinnick and Vidyan Rabinthiran.  'Midnight, Dhaka' chronicles his experiences growing up in Bangladesh in the 1970s, from cyclone to civil war.  Much of what he describes is horrifying and yet the poems' evocative detail - indeed, their very existence and the voice in which they are read - is a celebration of human resilience and renewal.  

A very different struggle at the Tobacco Factory a week later:  Bite-Sized by Fiona Hamilton is the story, told in poetry and dance, of a mother whose daughter is hospitalised with anorexia, which was by turns harrowing, enlightening and amusing.  It was billed as 'in progress' so it will be interesting to see where Fiona takes it next.

As usual there was also a beautifully stitched and decidedly luxuriant fringe of events.  Highlights for me were the Spoke on Spike with Bob Walton, Lizzie Parker, Paul Deaton and Poetry Slam's Claire Williamson, Can Openers with one of my favourite local poets, Lloyd Fletcher, as guest, and the last ever Acoustic Night at Halo Cafe Bar, guest starring Matt Harvey and the wonderful Lou Bell.  This was a bit of a gutter, as Acoustic Night has long provided a warm welcome and empathetic ear to new poets stepping up to the mic, myself included. But as Dru Marland said, it was a fine swan song if swans have to sing. 

Then there were events with which I was involved: the IsamBards' guided poetry walks on the Suspension Bridge which were more or less fully booked in advance and exposed people who might otherwise have missed it to some fairly light-hearted poetry and the Festival itself; and my own book launch for Map Reading for Beginners, which again was well attended and had people saying nice things.  Thank you so very much if you came along, and if you didn't make it, here's a link to my special guest, Lou Bell's Soundcloud, so you can pretend you did.    

Finally, there was Claire Trévien's show, The Shipwrecked House, at the Cube last night which looked and sounded gorgeous and tasted quite definitely of salt, as a result of which I've ordered her collection of poems upon which the show was based to read at my leisure.

I have to wonder whether any of the people from Bristol City Council who decided to stop funding Poetry Can  back in the summer attended any of the above events to see for themselves the triumph that is Bristol Poetry Festival year after year, and how mistaken their decision is.  My guess is no.  Meanwhile new initiatives will be launched over the coming weeks to inform poetry lovers everywhere of how they can support Poetry Can so that the festivals, and all the other invaluable work in the fields of education and lifelong learning, can continue.  Please look out for them on the relevant Facebook pages here and here, and on the Poetry Can website.

Oh and finally finally, I'm reading more - and different - poems from Map Reading For Beginers at  Can Openers this Friday 3rd October, 12.30pm onwards, at Foyles, Bristol.  Hope to see you there.  

A Poem For Scotland

The old stories are often the best and by the best I mean the scariest. One of the most terrifying creatures of Celtic folklore is the Kelpie or Water Horse.  It comes trotting up to you, all My Little Pony, tossing its long mane and floppy forelock – however! Should you be so foolish as to mount it, its eyes flame, you find you are stuck to its back with no escape, and it leaps into the nearest stretch of water where it will eat you.

This is a true story told to me by a friend who lived for a time on Skye. 

Cailpeach

The horse is white, not grey. Not

a runaway from a field. Nobody here or hereabouts

owns a white horse.

What’s more, your dog, the Kerry Blue,

is doing what dogs do when they chance

on the uncanny,

standing motionless and staring

at the shore where Saint Columba

made his landing.

This horse is whiter than any dove,

so bright it stings your eyes

like salt,

sears itself into your mind,

drags your hesitant feet

towards the brooding Sound,

as it surges over shingle, rocky skerries,

vanishing behind sheer cliffs,

reappearing.

When you reach the tideline

the beast will be gone.

You’ll see no hoof prints in the sand

and you’ll question the memory of a horse,

dreamt from spindrift,

beating its ancient bounds,

even as your dog 

explores and sniffs, barks for you

to throw her sticks.

© Deborah Harvey 2014 

This poem is from my new collection, Map Reading for Beginners, which is published tomorrow by Indigo Dreams and available from them, Amazon if you must, and all good independent bookshops ... or from me personally at the launch in Bristol on 26th September. It would be good to see you there!

Darts of Love

Photo by Nicola Stantiford

The launch of 'Dart' on Friday night at the Halo Cafe Bar in Bristol went pretty well: apart from a rather wobbly lectern, there were no hitches, the audience was attentive and appreciative, and I sold enough copies of the tome to off-set costs, which, of course, is what a launch is all about.  

Or is it?  I'll remember the evening for other, more special reasons.

First, the sight of two of my colleagues from the school for deaf children where I work signing my words, and Reg Meuross's songs, so that a third, who is deaf, could be part of the evening.    To see 'Dart''s first translation into a different language in process was beautiful, moving and exciting.  I must have the best colleagues in the western hemisphere.

Hearing the voices of my characters, which for years resounded only in my  head, somehow cross the 665 years between them and me was just brilliant.  And that some of them were read by my son, Samuel, who has autism and learning difficulties but who performed with confidence and aplomb, was miraculous. 

The last hour before the launch started, when the room filled up with people I love from all eras and areas of my life, was so warm and sustaining that I'll keep the memory in my pocket and take it whenever I need it.  

Photo by Maxine Fone

I'd like to say a few thank yous:

to my troupe of readers, Pameli Benham, Ruth Boston, Maxine Fone, Samuel Grashoff and John Terry (who has also taken my lectern home to fix); 

to my mediaeval troubadour, Reg Meuross, whose songs dovetailed so well with the themes of the night (except, maybe, for 'It's Me or Elvis' although, as Reg pointed out, the King of Rock and Roll is dead,  much like most victims of the plague); 

to Hazel Hammond for being a warm and capable MC and for bringing three turnips along to add to my collection of root vegetable lanterns gurning from the sides of the room;  

to Andi Langford-Woods for the loan of her PA and her reassuring expertise; 

to Jenny, my daughter, who filmed it;

to the wonderful writer for young adults, Julie Hearn, for providing me with a quote for the back cover, becoming a dear friend and fellow-jaunter, and travelling down from Abingdon to be there on the night;

to my cousin Sandra who made a blizzard-defying flight across the Atlantic from New Jersey;

to my friend, Jill, for providing late night curry, champagne and company,

and to everyone else who attended.  You have all made my inner seven year old, who always wanted to be a writer but whom I ignored for far too long, very happy indeed.   

Illustration by Dru Marland

Warm Earth

So ... erm ... before I was so rudely interrupted by the arrival of 'Dart' (a relief really, seeing as how the launch is only a week away), I was talking about my local wood and how spring is beginning to shoulder its way out into the open.  Here's a poem I wrote about the wood at the cusp of winter and spring three years ago.   

Warm Earth

Before celandines

fasten their buttons

before anemones

embroider themselves

the scent of warm earth

and a charge of wild garlic

shocks the woodland

from its trance

fires the sap in limbs still

callipered by winter

©Deborah Harvey 2010, 2013

'Communion' reviewed in Bristol Review of Books

Sensuous Energy

New Work by Deborah Harvey

It’s always good to stumble on a surprise – in this case a hidden pulse of activity that has been just under my nose but I didn’t notice. A stone’s throw from me, the Halo Bar on the Gloucester Road hosts the Bristol Acoustic Nights – a fine mix of music and poetry, along with various related events including, the other week, the warmly communal launch of Bristol poet Deborah Harvey’s first book of poems, Communion. Interspersed with lyrical, intelligent songs from singer/guitarist Reg Meuross – a wonderfully calm, humorous and engaging performer – Deborah and friends read her sensuous yet precise poems.

            These often unerringly home in on things close to home – families, relationships – 

though also often getting there via historical or mythological themes which erupt suddenly and compellingly into the present. The poems are most successful when this happens – when Harvey manages to strike a kind of bright, resonant

overtone of personal meaning from the old iron of    

historical context. Such meaning is frequently just hinted at, present between the lines as much as in them – but you know it’s there by the charge of energy.

             The title poem, for instance, subverts the 'warning against lust' of a mural in St. Winifred's Church, Devon, by describing in the most sensuous language the 'communion' (itself a clever subversion of a Christian term) of the lustful couple, who 'partake of each other...in sanctuary, chapter house and chantry'. A rampant paganism, oblivious of, or perhaps feeding on ecclesiastical suppression of sexuality, comes alight in the poem.  Even the 'thrust' of the devil's spear in the couple's sides is appropriated by a charged eroticism.

               Poems often work through such tension or juxtaposition – two or more disparate elements playing against each other to create something alive and resonant.  A more overtly personal but similarly sensuous poem, 'Nettle Rash', starts from the straightforward and, one might have thought, unpromising process of making junket, to lift into a Proustian moment of sensuous memory in which the sting of nettles strangely enhances the immediacy of a sexual tryst:

   

Nettle Rash

Every now and then

I get out the milk pan

to make junket,

warming the milk and the rennet

to the temperature of blood,

then letting it thicken and cool.

Barely set and freckled with nutmeg,

its taste conjures

moon daisies, drowsy peonies,

a windfall of laughter and stories

in apple-deep shadows,

licking fingers,

sticky with raspberries

and bottled cream,

and the memory of you,

tracing the nettle rash

staining the milkiness of my skin,

in the treacherous depths

of our thicket bed,

our lips stung with kisses,

our quickening breath.

After the first six, factual lines – essential for rooting the subsequent memory in the mundane, against which it is juxtaposed – the poem raises its ghosts in a single, increasingly breathless sentence (just one small quibble: a few unnecessary commas slightly impede the flow). The last, highly charged verse takes your breath away with its auditory culmination: ‘the treacherous depths / of our thicket bed’ with those thick, close-packed consonants – aptly conveying close, dark confines – suddenly kindles through the three bright i sounds of ‘thicket’, ‘lips’ and ‘kisses’ into a blaze of surprise in the word ‘stung’. Robert Frost said, ‘No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader’ – and it is moments like this that convey a truth that no logic can quite account for.

            The best poems in this collection have a honed economy and complex simplicity. In ‘Duplicity’, starting from the mythological figure of Janus, who looks both ways – back to what is old and dead and forward to the new – Harvey again conjures the involuntary resurgence of a relentless sensuality. Note here too the highly sexual ‘sliding’ of the key in the lock and the way the shock of that single line compellingly changes the whole tenor of the poem:

Duplicity

Janus is dead.

She has eclipsed his eyes with pennies.

She has zipped his bloodless flesh in a bag and buried it.

She has painted her walls white.

Now his key slides in the lock.

He is as dangerous as buttercups

gilding their bane

at the turn of the stairs.

At times, some of the historical themes don’t quite find the personal resonance that gives life to a poem. For instance, one dedicated to William Morris, despite genuine feeling and a sensitive meditation on the relic of his overcoat, ends up a little lamely, telling us what to think rather than really conjuring meaning in us. But elsewhere, especially perhaps in her sense of generations of unsung women, Harvey shows historical awareness that invokes the past without merely enlisting it.

In ‘This Healing Hour’, about a grandmother to whom the whole collection is dedicated, she connects her own, dishwasher-aided life vividly with a very different and tougher past, and her own poems with the scribbled, pencilled verses on greaseproof paper of a woman who could only make time for writing by, for brief moments, ‘shouldering back’ her innumerable tasks. In her first collection, Harvey has, one senses, also shouldered away some of the difficulties of her own past – a number of poems hint strongly at the ending of an unrewarding relationship – to kindle some vivid poems in a new hearth of her own making.

Communion

Deborah Harvey

Indigo Dreams, £6.99

www.indigodreams.co.uk


Review written by Matthew Barton