Deborah Harvey : The Red Dress of Poetry ...

Friday, 27 September 2013

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.)

Friday, 13 September 2013

Bristol Poetry Festival Is Nigh!

Over the last week, as well as my day job at the school for deaf children and working with my autistic son (which involved driving him to Norwich and back on the weekend), and rehearsing for three imminent poetry readings, I've been delivering brochures for the forthcoming Bristol Poetry Festival. And I have to say that though it's been really tiring and at times wet - not just rain, I slipped and fell into one of the gutters in Wells High Street! - I feel heartened by how many shopkeepers were pleased to accept them (although I suppose they might have thrown them in the bin once my back was turned) and how many independent cafes seem to be keeping afloat despite the relentless onslaught of Costa Coffee. Not so the independent bookshop, sadly, but that's another blog.

So, in five days, I scattered brochures over north, south and central Bristol, Thornbury, Clevedon, Weston-Super-Mare, Wells, Frome, Keynsham, Bath, Bradford on Avon, Corsham, and probably some other places I've forgotten. And I took some photos along the way. Here's a few of them.

Bristol Museum

Bristol City Centre

M Shed and Prince Street Bridge from the Mud Dock Café

Milsom Street, Bath

Union Passage, Bath

St Bartholomew's, Corsham

The Cellar, Clevedon - now a bistro, it used to be a chemists - at least I hope that's why these drawers are there ...

Clevedon Pier

The Royal Oak, which belonged to my ancestors and was where my grandparents honeymooned. They married on 11th November 1918 and my grandfather had an extra day's leave from the army because of the Armistice.

Bristol Poetry Festival runs from 28th September to 6th October. Participants this autumn include Louis De Bernières, Prunella Scales, Sir Andrew Motion, Martin Figura, Helen Ivory, Rachael Boast, David Briggs, The IsamBards, and me. And if I didn't reach you with a papery brochure, here's a virtual one.

Wednesday, 11 September 2013

The Biggening Skies

With Son the Elder deposited at the seond day of Robot Wars events, my partner and I set out for the Norfolk coast. After all, if you are this close to the edge of the country, you might as well continue until you can go no further. 'Anyhow, I've heard East Cromer is really nice,' said my partner. A little later on, however, he decided that he might be thinking of East Coker. 'Well, my mate Steve definitely said Cromer's worth a visit,' he persisted.

First, though, there were a couple of churches I wanted to stop at, although things didn't go quite to plan, as when tasked with directing us to Little Witchingham, the sat nav dropped us in the middle of nowhere - in fact, I began to wonder if the witches had bewitched the village away. In the end I had to resort to reading a signpost. Crikey.

Then there it was - St Faith's - no longer in regular use (owing to a lack of same?) and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. And open!

And what a church, covered in wall paintings dating from the middle of the 14th century. And to think they were almost lost for ever, having been discovered only in the 1970s when the church was in a ruinous state and earmarked for demolition.

Not all of the South Wall appears to have been painted, but Eve Baker, the art historian who discovered the murals, believes that it had been prepared for painting and that something had intervened to stop it happening, almost certainly the Black Death of 1348.

Outside I was still keeping an eye out for one of those bigenning skies and I wasn't going to go home till I saw one. This at least was a start ...

and this not a bad continuation ...

BUT there was something wrong with the qualitative flatness of the place. I'd been expecting somewhere like the Somerset Levels, where the roads are raised and called causeways, and every winter the land remembers the implications of its name and floods. But Norfolk - or at least this part of it - is quite bumpy, with hillocks and rises. Not really flat at all.

Then I realised what was bothering me. In Somerset your eye runs over the terrain until it hits a range of hills - the Mendips, the Poldens, the Quantocks, the Brendons, the Blackdowns - which accentuate the flatness of the low-lying land, whilst in Norfolk there are no ranges of hills. It is a different sort of flat, and therein, I'd wager, lie the bigenning skies.

Relieved, I drove on to Thurgarton, our next stop which boasts a towerless thatched church. All Saints did once have a tower which fell in the 1880s. The church was eventually abandoned altogether and only rescued in the 1980s, again thanks to the Churches Conservation Trust.

Outside there was a pleasingly chubby cherub flanked by two toothsome skulls ...

and inside a series of carved mediaeval bench ends. Here's a man (a huntsman or wild man?) creeping up on two dogs fighting ...

... a liony creature and a man playing the bagpipe, though the bag bit has been lost ...

... a creature - possibly a gryphon? - holding a man's head in his paws and a dragon ...

... a rather more convincing elephant and castle, than the one I saw in the Choir at Chester Cathedral ...

There were also some fragmentary Elizabethan texts on the walls. (Not everyone was impressed by the litany that is the Ten Commandments.)

My favourite things were the sense of space you get - always a feature of Conservation Trust Churches which are stripped of all clutter - and the amazing hammerbeam chancel roof, which put me in mind of the final section of Seamus Heaney's sequence, Lightenings.

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

Outside big skies were filled with sea gulls as a tractor ploughed the stubble. We headed on to Cromer.

Apparently the artist Algernon Swinburne visited Cromer in 1880 and said that it was 'an esplanady sort of place' ...

... and in 1892 Oscar Wilde claimed he found Cromer 'excellent for writing, golf better'. We struggled to find a decent pub.

The colours, however, were gorgeous ...

... and the skies, yes, the skies were very big indeed.

Monday, 9 September 2013

Cold Plum Porridge

I've always seen East Anglia as a sort of giant Forest of Dean - somewhere you have to plan to visit as it's too far out of the way to pass on the off-chance - and as this weekend was the first opportunity I'd had of going, I was very excited -in fact, I think I was expecting it to come straight out of a fable. As soon as we'd passed the turn off to Cambridge I started keeping an eye out for its famous flatness and enormous skies, and got quite carried away by the signpost to Swaffham (even if I couldn't quite remember the story of the pedlar in its entirety), but in fact, the small partI saw turned out to be more pleasant and attractive that anything else ... and a long bloody drive away!

Anyhow, here are some photos of Norwich.