A bit of out and aboutery

My dog, Ted, got me over my complete lack of confidence when it came to driving, by insisting in the early days that we went out at least once a week to visit new places, so I've decided to keep trying to get out as often as I can in his honour, even though it's hard right now, not just for reasons of grief but also Covid-19. 

Arnos Vale is somewhere I wanted to get to before it closes again. The IsamBards did a poetry walk there in early spring and we had another planned for Midsummer's Day but ... well, you know the rest. 

I missed wandering there through the summer, and now it's definitely autumn. 

It's also a bit more overgrown than usual. It took Will and I a while to find my grandparents' and infant great-uncles' grave, even though I'd committed its whereabouts to memory. More or less. 

Must get over there with some shears, we said, even though the grave is sinking between the roots of an ash tree. 

In some places the cemetery's like a painting by  Henri Rousseau.

Tyger! Tyger! 

I love this wild patch in the heart of Bristol. 

I also love Clevedon, so we popped down there too. First stop was Clevedon Craft Centre, which I last visited 12 years ago.

Then on to the beach, where we sat in the sand and scrabbled for sea glass, which was mostly too new and sharp-edged to be worth collecting. 

It was a lovely interlude, though ... 

... on a windless day. 

Out on the pier, I could see Church Hill, St Andrew's and Wain Hill, where we'd been on our last jaunt with Ted, when all had seemed well. Impossible to think that visit had been less than two weeks earlier.

There's somewhere else I've needed to go badly all year and that's Dartmoor. I didn't want to risk letting a whole year go by without setting foot on it. 

I didn't want to go without Ted either. 

In the end the Northerner and I decided to have a short walk and film my three Dartmoor-based poems from The Shadow Factory, as it doesn't look like we'll be having a proper, in-person launch any time soon. 

Except that when we arrived it was clear the conditions were against us.

And walking up steep Cox Tor in the teeth of the wind was attrition.

I staggered as far as the first outcrop of rock on its summit and howled and howled for my dog.

But I still had to get to the cairn with its trig point, a short distance that looked as wide as an ocean, rippled with waves from the Ice Age. 

It was so windy, even the landscape seemed to be coming unhinged. 

We made it as far as the big cairn to the north. 

There were amazing views in all directions, here over to Brent Tor, with West Devon beyond.

There were some very steep sections on our descent to the car.

Coming in the opposite direction was a man with two border collies. One had classic black and white markings, like Ted; the other as dark as a shadow. There's no way of knowing what went through their collie minds, but the dark one headed for Colin and the other for me, and they licked our hands, and swapped about, and they were just beautiful and so gentle. 

It was a slightly strange and special moment. If there's a message there, it's a loving one. It was always all about love. 

 

It is this day

Today - Shakespeare Day - was going to be the launch of my fourth poetry collection, The Shadow Factory. 










I'd delayed it because it was published in the depths of winter, and I don't do well with things that require A Rising To The Occasion  in the dark half of the year, and I still think I was right to do so because Hours Space in my native city of Bristol on an evening like this, with the windows open, and free wine, and good company ... it would have been perfect. 

I suppose I could do something swishy and Zoomy to replicate a launch from home, but I don't do that well with High Tech Thingies either. At any time of year. So here's a low tech impression of what The Shadow Factory's launch would have been like. 

There would have been a reading of wonderfully witty and sometimes surreal poetry by Dominic Weston, who is seen here actually reading at Hours (but not at my launch, obvs). 

There would have been FREE wine from Isla Negra, home of Pablo Neruda, in  choice of colours, and nibbles in the form of cheesy biscuits made by my friend, Chris Lindop.  

And there would have been me, reading. Here I am, looking serious in Frome, in a photo by David Goodman.

I'm now going to attempt to convey how the evening might have felt to a member of the audience, through the words of Dorothy Porter, in a poem from her marvellous thriller-in-verse, The Monkey's Mask, which you can read here.

As for The Shadow Factory, I'm determined it will get its launch once we're allowed to reconvene. In the meantime, we're all kind of living in it anyway, this sleepwalking half-life those of us who aren't frontline workers inhabit. 

I can't post you any free wine - we've drunk it - but if you'd like to read The Shadow Factory sooner rather than whenever, message me on Facebook or Twitter or through the comments on this blog. They are £10 each with free P&P and a free bookmark, unless you are a poetry reviewer who would like to review it, in which case you can have a papery or an electronic copy for free.   

Already published reviews can be read here and here. 

A Poem for World Poetry Day 2020

Poets are natural hoarders. They understand the importance of memories to the process of writing, and stockpile them for when a future poem might demand, say. the inclusion of a complicit glance, an unexpected gift, or the fall of sunlight through a woodland glade thirty years earlier. 

The restrictions placed upon outdoor activity by COVID-19 means that everyone will now be ransacking their reserves, falling back on memories of loved ones, favourite walks and landscapes, past holidays in distant places, to get through these lean times.

And once we've exhausted the highlights, it will be the mundane that sustains us. The memory of a bottle of glue in a Christmas stocking, the luxury of using it for sticking pictures in your scrapbook. Carefully stabbing open the slit on the red rubber top with the sharp point of a pair of scissors. Turning it upside down and dabbing it hard on a bit of paper to get the glue flowing. And when it was all used up, the disappointment of going back to the gloop of your mother's homemade flour and water paste - its squidginess between the stuck down picture and the page, the inevitable damp wrinkles, the speed with which it congealed in its jam jar. 

Those of us who are able to make are lucky. If we are feeling strong enough, we have the wherewithal to get through this time. It starts between our ears. It turns into words on a page, a drawing filling a blank piece of paper, the rise and fall of notes on suddenly cleaner, quieter air. We at least can make something of this situation. 

A Perfect Circle is from my fourth poetry collection, The Shadow Factory, more of which can be read here on the Indigo Dreams website. 

The Shadow Factory

My fourth collection of poetry, The Shadow Factory, is published today. It also turns out it's Buy Nothing Day ... GAH!

But ... both my publishers, Ronnie and Dawn of Indigo Dreams, and I aren't corporate nasties. We pay our taxes, we don't exploit workers, we hate hunting and love border collies. And as my poems travel through time rather than across continents to be written, they have a relatively modest carbon footprint. 

So if you get an itchy clicking finger and need to buy some poems today (or any other day), here's the link to the Indigo Dreams shop. Thank you. 

A Poem for National Writing Day 2019 ... or put a tiger in your tanka

It's National Writing Day today, so I decided to post a poem about writing. It's also a poem about the nature of the tiger's roar, which I learnt about recently.

What I find especially fascinating is that the power it has to cause its prey - including people - to freeze is believed to come not from the loud roariness of it, but from the part which is pitched too low for us to hear, but which we can sense or feel. Researchers have discovered that this infrasound can travel huge distances, permeating buildings and cutting through dense forests and even mountain ranges.

I've decided that poetry probably roars too, and this is why those who can hear it are compelled to read and write the stuff. It also explains why the stuff some people insist will transform your life feels like so much flummery. Who wants to rearrange cushions or sort their books according to the colour of their spines when their tiger is summoning them? 

'Try Yoga' is from my forthcoming collection, The Shadow Factory', which will be published by Indigo Dreams later this year. 

A Poem for World Poetry Day 2019

Every day is World Poetry Day in our house. I love the fact that poetry is such a big, comforting, startling thing in our lives. But today is the official World Poetry Day that only comes once a year ...

... and to mark it, I'm posting my poem 'Oystercatchers', which recently won the 2018 Plough Prize Short Poem Competition. (Still haven't quite integrated that information into my life.)

And also some photos of Uphill Slipway in Somerset, which is the landscape I had in my head when I wrote it. 

Uphill is where, according to local folklore, the boy Jesus landed with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, en route for Glastonbury. For me it has a deeply creative, rather more pagan resonance that feels just as divine.  

Oystercatchers

‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte’

                           ‘L’étranger’, Albert Camus                                                                

One day

the day she’s been waiting for will come

and she’ll take these words with her to the sea

unzip her coat, pull open her ribcage

let them fly as purposely

as oystercatchers

pulling the strings of the sky

and tide

lifting the weight from each blood cell

giving her permission      

©Deborah Harvey 2019 

'Oystercatchers' is from my forthcoming collection, The Shadow Factory, which will be published by Indigo Dreams Publishing later this summer.  

'Armed with Madness': A sequence of poems after Leonora Carrington

It was my visit to Tate Liverpool in 2015 to see the comprehensive exhibition of art across several media by the celebrated surrealist Leonora Carrington that made me want to write a sequence of poems about her.  

I set about reading a lot of her stories and autobiographical pieces, as well as the novel based on her life by Elena Poniatowska, and the more I learnt about her resilience and her drive to be true to herself, the more I saw in paintings I'd thought I already knew quite well. Eventually I wrote a sequence of four ekphrastic poems exploring aspects of her extraordinary life through four portraits she painted at key points:

Self-Portrait: Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937-38), painted at the time of her elopement to Paris with Max Ernst, when she left behind her family's suffocating expectations of her.

Bird Superior: Portrait of Max Ernst (1939), painted while the couple were living in the South of France, prior to Ernst's periods of internment at the hands of the French authorities, and then the invading Germans.

The Artist Travelling Incognito (1949), painted after her escape to Mexico, following a brutal stay in a mental hospital in Spain and her parents' attempt to force her back to England (by sending her nanny in a submarine to abduct her!)

The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (c1947-50), which I construed as a mythical depiction of her arrival in Mexico, where she was to live out the rest of her long and fascinating life. 

These poems have now been published in issue 18 of the fabulous journal of creative arts Riggwelter, and can be read here, but if you'd like to see the poems alongside the paintings, they're also below. (But do visit Riggwelter, because there's great stuff in it.) 

‘Armed with madness for a long voyage’ *

After four paintings by Leonora Carrington

I   Self-Portrait: Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937-38)

It’s lost its mane and tail

but she’s set that old rocking horse rocking

so hard it is lifting, hovering in the air

as if it might follow its living self

the one that has leapt through the frame

and is cantering into freedom.

And yes, it’s a dawning

Leonora, seated on a satin tongue

her demon hyena at her feet,

will soon be gone

as desire materialises beside her

casts a shadow, erases lines

that would confine her.

II   Bird Superior: Portrait of Max Ernst (1939)

Far away

in a gilded country

where the forests are deep and dark

she paints maestro Max

all flounced out in feathers and fish tail,

his stinging stripy socks,

Leonora’s shaman.

He paints her

tangled in briars and vines

she paints herself

frozen in the background

              watching him walking out of shot

                             helpless to stop him.

Even before war is declared

she knows

                      he’s leaving

taking her light

trapped in his lantern,

the egg he will hide in the ice

of this barren lifeless mountain. 

   

III   The Artist Travelling Incognito (1949)

Why so paranoid?

asks the Spanish psychiatrist

She straightens the citadel on her head,

rearranges the extra eyes she’s borrowed

from her cat’s remaining lives

They’re coming to get me, she explains

In a submarine

Lord Candlestick with his strictures

Mother painting biscuit tins

punishing nuns, suitors, the spies of the Gestapo

entitled artists who would use me

as their muse

I’m sticking my necks out

my real head’s the decoy

                                      it will parrot

what you expect   I’ve kept

my umbrella in case it rains

                     I don’t know why

I’m in disguise

         none of them see me.

IV   The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (c1947-50)

No foam-born Venus blown ashore on a shell

She crawled straight from the mouth

of the whale

turned her back on the map of her journey

freed the geese that led her

to her unknown home.

As for the terror

that overwhelmed her

she’s put it behind her

so let waves rise, mound themselves into hillocks

miniscule men fight monsters

saplings sputter flame.

She is brooding mysteries in her head,

her unhatched visions sprout strange

feathers in their egg.

© Deborah Harvey 2019

* Paraphrased by Leonora Carrington from the inscription in Mary Butt’s novel, ‘Armed with Madness’

This sequence of poems will also be published in my poetry collection, The Shadow Factory, due to be published by Indigo Dreams later this year.