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).

Bitter Drinking Poets

Ooh look, bitter drinking poets - I mean Inking Bittern poets - at Halo Cafe Bar Monday last, courtesy Acoustic Night Bristol.  

John Terry

                                           Alana Farrell

Alan Summers

                                           Cathy Wilson

Colin Brown

                                                                me

and Dru Marland, who made it all happen












Come along to Can Openers at Foyles later today (Friday, 12pm) for a reprise!


'Inking Bitterns' - a book of poems and pictures for wild places, illustrated by Dru Marland - is published in association with Poetry Can and available from Gert Macky books and good independent bookshops - in Bristol, this means Durdham Down Bookshop, Standfords, and Foyles, price £5. 

Poetry in Motion ...

... all over the place!  

The weekend before last it was off to Bath for a Poetry Café writing day on the Saturday, which was run by the indefatigable Sue Boyle with assistance from Lesley Saunders, and in the evening I helped to run the bookstall at the Acumen Poetry evening at which the winners of the competition I'd helped to judge were announced.  On the Sunday, the judges were invited to lunch at Sue's lovely home in the company of Patricia Oxley, the general editor of Acumen Magazine, and her husband, poet and philosopher William Oxley, and an interesting time was had. 

 That would have been enough adornment for any week, but this was just the start. Monday night I read at Acoustic Night Bristol at Halo Cafe Bar, which is just about the best, friendliest and most varied open mic you can imagine. 

Thursday it was off to Bradford-on-Avon to celebrate the summer solstice at Words and Ears in the cellar bar of the Swan Hotel, an open mic at which I was the guest reader. Despite the monsoon I had a wonderful evening, sold a few books and had some very kind feedback from organiser, Dawn Gorman.

Better still, while we were puddling disconsolately around town in the afternoon, we encountered a handfasting taking place on the grass outside Bradford-on-Avon Tithe Barn. It was just wonderful to watch, and I felt no need to rattle my chains, as is normally the case at weddings. I loved the invoking of Aphrodite and Ganesh, the priest summoning the Old Ones ... at which point we duly arrived. Pameli Benham and I had a sip of Buck's Fizz from the Loving Cup and gave the clearly ecstatic couple a copy of our respective poetry collections, at which they looked slightly alarmed.  Maybe they thought we were Jehovah's Witnesses. 

  Then on Friday I read in Chipping Sodbury town hall, having come second in the Chipping Sodbury Festival poetry competition this year with 'The Poet and the Boatman'. I've been asked to judge it next year, so took the opportunity to tell those present that I shall be open to bribery.

Saturday saw me reading in Halo again, at a Ladyfest Fundraiser which also featured Rose Flint, whose work I like very much. There were some other great contributors also, including the wonderful Lou Bell, whose voice and songs I adore. And the equally wonderful Rebecca Cant, whose song Fisherwoman Blues from her Songs in the Shed session can be heard here. 

This might seem like enough but I'm off to Bath again tomorrow to attend the launch of the new art exhibition, faces [Bath], with which I and lots of other local poets are collaborating. 

Can't begin to say how much better my new life is than my old one. What price freedom and poetry? 

'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