'Withdrawn' - Luke Jerram - Leigh Woods

And so to Leigh Woods, high above Avon Gorge, to see 'Withdrawn', Luke Jerram's latest installation of five fishing boats, run aground in a glade a few minutes' walk from the car park.  Inspired by the floods on the Somerset Levels last year, it's associated with Bristol's status as European Green Capital, and is intended to provoke discussion about climate change, tidal surge, the collapse of our fishing industry and other ways in which we impact our environment.   Which is all very important and worthy, but actually I mainly wanted to see it for its surreal impact.

And it is extraordinary and strangely beautiful.

 

Is it likely to make people think about our personal impact on the environment and what we can do to reverse climate change?  Maybe ... but not as much as seeing photographs of rusting ships anchored on what was once the Aral Sea, formerly one of the four largest lakes in the world and now known as the Aralkum Desert, following the implementation of Soviet irrigation programmes.  These truly are shocking.

I was disappointed to see from Jerram's website that the boats will only be in their present setting until early September, because I get the feeling this is somewhere I'd go back to again and again as the seasons change.  We'll get to see it in the green lagoon light of high summer, but I'd love to see it also in the low-lying mist of early autumnal mornings, or thick with hoar frost, or even snow.  And in years to come, as nature gradually enters into a collaboration with the artist, like this trailer I spotted some years ago in a field near Kington Langley, Wiltshire ... 

... or more relevantly, perhaps, the abandoned barges protecting the bank of the River Severn from erosion at Purton.  I love the way they now appear to be diving beneath or emerging from a wash of grass seeds, as if they are now semi-submarines.  I do hope Bristol City Council will have a rethink.

Hmm, surface-underwater ships ...  what is it I'm thinking of?  The Dawn Treader? The Lady of the Lake? ... Nah, it's Marine Boy!

  

Sand Point Bleak

My favourite sort of landscape is bleak.  Not shopping centre car park or industrial estate bleak, though. My kind of bleak generally involves trees that look like this.

This specimen is to be found at Sand Point, just north of Weston-Super-Mare, where I went for a bit of a hobble on Saturday, sun and blue skies belying the chill, prevailing wind.  

Sand Bay itself boasted a set of warnings that wouldn't disgrace an Australian beach ... 

... while the Point had a rather more charming notice.

Ah look, there they are.  

There were cowslips, bugle and birdsfoot trefoil as well.  And seals.

'Look at the seals!' a couple cried as they accosted us on the ridge.  'Have you got binoculars?  There are hundreds of seals down there, coming in on the tide. We've been watching them for the last half an hour!'

I squinted in the sun. I could see what looked like very black bits of shadow on the water. I supposed they could be seals ... maybe?  'Er, thanks,' I said.

We descended from the top of the Point to a path running above the shore.  'Nah, not seals,' we'd agree, and then, as a black shape curved and lifted with a wave, 'ooh, hang on, though ... '

Back up on the ridge there were wide-ranging views over to Cardiff and Newport and upstream to Clevedon and the Severn Bridges ... 

... and in the opposite direction, and altogether closer at hand, Sand Bay itself ...

... Worlebury Hill and Birnbeck Pier ... 

... the island of Steep Holm ... 

... and Flat Holm up ahead, where Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first wireless signals over open sea to the Welsh mainland. 

I was finding the rough terrain very challenging in places with my less than reliable ankle, so we decided to head back to the car park via a pleasant earthen path that wound around the side of the Point.

This worked really well for me until it petered out and I was confronted with a large expanse of very steep, smooth rock.  There was nothing for it but to slide down very carefully to the beach below. (This is what it looked like at the bottom.)

I wonder who lives in a house like this?

Heading back home, there were  none of the expected queues of traffic between Weston and Bristol and we were in good time for our meal out with friends.  But not before I'd opened some of my photos in Paint.  Definitely no seals.  Probably bits of black sea weed lifting with the waves, and made sharper and darker by the sun.

Come to think of it, the pain in my ankle was sharper and darker too, but a small price to pay for all that mud and salt and bleak.  

Romeo and Juliet : Shakespeare At The Tobacco Factory

Here's a review I wrote for the local rag of Shakespeare At The Tobacco Factory's recent production of 'Romeo and Juliet'.

Photo collage by Craig Fuller and Farrows Creative

Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare At The Tobacco Factory

A broken ankle meant that we deferred our tickets for 'Romeo and Juliet' at the Tobacco Factory to the final night, by which time I hoped to be fit enough to venture as far as south Bristol.  Much of our city south of the Avon is as alien to me, a North Bristolian, as Birmingham, but if nothing else, Shakespeare's most famous tragedy teaches us that we should abandon our prejudices and leave our comfort zones, and this I did.

'Romeo and Juliet' can seem over-familiar at times, forcing directors to come up with ways of making their vision fresh.  The most recent production I'd seen prior to this was Bristol Old Vic's 'Juliet and Her Romeo' in 2010, starring Siân Philips and Michael Byrne as the eponymous lovers, with Verona transmuted into a nursing home.  Shakespeare At The Tobacco Factory's offering, set, nominally at least, in Paris, 1968, couldn't have been more different in tempo and atmosphere.

From the start of this production, the audience is plunged into frenetic action, symbolised by a playground roundabout centre stage, which sees service as a meeting place, the barricades, the literal social whirl of the party at the Capulets' house, the lovers' bed, and a bier.  Each scene gallops past, the fight scenes so explosive that the actors playing Mercutio and Tybalt gasp for breath after their supposed demise in a quite uncorpselike fashion.

For me the pivotal scene is the one in which Romeo meets Juliet at the party where she is supposed to fall for Paris, her parents' preferred suitor.  You have to believe in the star-crossed couple's onslaught of passion for the rest of the play to work.  This scene is done superbly well in Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film, a similarly exuberant and modern take on the play, as the lovers gaze at each other through an aquarium and the rest of the world seems to fall away.  In this production, under Polina Kalinina's direction, there's barely a break and nothing to convince us that Juliet is any more important to Romeo than Rosalind, the love she supersedes, that deep, life-or-death connection lost, along with much of the dialogue, in a whirlwind of action.

Cabbage and Tripe

When I decided I wouldn't be going to Devon this Easter, I didn't know that I would actually have to visit, not for a lovely long walk over Dartmoor or along the coast path, but to attend the funeral of a family friend at St Gregory the Great, in Dawlish.  It was a beautiful day for it, and I'm glad if this made it a little more bearable for his family, for he was a good man and his going is untimely.

So I did get to see some Devon primroses after all, nestling between gravestones. 

There were a few familiar names in the churchyard. 

Harry Percy on this bench: 'the theme of honour's tongue, Amongst a grove the very straightest plant, Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride' Shakespeare says of an earlier lord by that name.  Did this Harry live up to his namesake? 

And then there were Babbages - lots and lots of them, which is quite exciting as Dawlish lies only three and a bit miles north-east of Teignmouth, where Charles Babbage, inventor of the-first-mechanical-computer-that-eventually-led-to-more-complex-designs, settled with his family in 1808.

What d'you mean, tenuous?  They've got to be connected, right?

But then I found myself wishing that they'd been Cabbages instead, to go with all the Tripes buried there.

After the funeral, there was just time to celebrate my aunt's birthday back at the biscuit tin by the sea in Holcombe, my cousin and her partner having driven her up from Cornwall.  

There was the haziest of views of Rippon Tor, Saddle Tor and Haytor Rocks as we drove over Little Haldon Moor on the way back to Bristol, but it was enough to make me hope we'll be back down there soon under happier circumstances.  

An Uphill Walk From Winter

As soon as I broke my leg back in January, putting back the sale of my house by two months, it was clear that a week in Devon at Easter was off the cards - there would be too much to do at home.  So these beautiful April days are passing in a whirlwind of garage and shed clearing and keeping the house as tidy as possible.  And, it being the appropriate time of year, Bristol Spring Poetry Festival publicity distribution.  

Tuesday was earmarked for drops at Thornbury and Weston-Super-Mare libraries, so we took Ted with us and had a little hobble (in my case) along the beach from Uphill Slipway. 

My first sort-of jaunt since 2nd January when I voyaged from Bath to Bradford on Dru Marland's NB Eve and saw my first kingfisher.   

Although more than three months have passed since then, in some respects it still seemed quite wintry, with Steepholm almost completely lost in mist and Brean Down lowery.

However, we followed the direction of hoof prints towards bluer skies.  It was like the film 'Into The West' (except we were headed more northish). 

Ted couldn't believe his luck to be somewhere different and exciting, having spent so much time in the park of late, and when he wasn't chasing his ball down, he left his tag on almost every post he encountered ...

... all the way up to the tea shack, then back to Uphill Slipway. 

Making my own way back was rather more laborious, but the sunny skies were spreading and it felt more springlike with every limp.  Hopefully it won't be too long before I can start doing some proper walking again.

Inspiration : Winterset

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 a potential poem in my pocket, it's an invaluable tool for the writing of it, especially since a fair bit of time can elapse before the poem is ready to be shaped.  

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.

One of my favourite beaches is Berrow, on the Somerset coast.  Park near the church at the west end of the village, cross the churchyard, wind your way through the dunes and you'll soon reach the fantastic beach.  A large part of its appeal for me is that it's dog-friendly all year round.  It's also less frequented than the neighbouring beaches of Burnham, Brean and Weston-super-Mare, and it even has a shipwreck.  Of course, this being the Bristol Channel, it also has the world's third highest tidal rise and fall, so you can miss seeing the sea altogether, but the light reflecting off the mud has its own beauty.   

I last visited Berrow on Boxing Day 2013.  It was the brightest of days, made more so by the knowledge that the dark would start seeping up from the ground as early as 2pm and by 4pm the light would be all but gone.  I came home with a series of photographs that were  - to my eye, at least - quite startling in their brilliance.

 

Back at home, the following photo interested me the most.  It was taken through an ancient plain glass window in the church, and it was like seeing all the colours and shapes of nature outside refracted through water.  It made me want to write a poem that refracted the landscape I'd seen, within the parameters of the (almost) shortest day.

So I started to think about how I could achieve this, and it was immediately clear that I had to adopt a different approach from usual.  The majority of my poems are about more than their ostensible subject, but this one needed to be simple - a straightforward record rather than a piece of writing filtered through something else.  This meant form would be important, as it would compensate for possible lack of depth.  

Because it is out of routine, the time between Christmas and New Year feels somehow out of time to me, and I wanted to reflect this in my poem.  I also wanted my poem to mirror the length of days by being short, and by beginning with daybreak and ending with night.  A circular poem, then, and that needs a circular shape. I started to think about poems that begin and end with the same image, and remembered Ted Hughes' 'Amulet'.  This beautiful piece of writing makes use of 'anaphora' - a type of parallel structure generated by the repetition of certain words or groups of words at the beginning of each line.  This is an ancient technique which is used in both religious and folk poetry and which creates the effect of a litany.  

By now, the word 'between' was becoming an obsession. Mentally, I went back to the landscape - between land and sea, between sky and mud - and the notion of 'time between' - between one great feast and another, between sunrise and sunset.  The whole experience became suspended in my mind like a brilliant bauble. It could have happened thirty years earlier, not just a few days - in fact, I wasn't sure I could remember a time before it was part of my experience.  Which meant I needed to write something that could have been written at any time, that was timeless - something that could even be part of our folk tradition.

Next, I made a list of images including:

sun and sand dunes 

the wreck of SS Nornen

worm casts and shells 

ripples  

sand trees and sea flowers  

a treeful of magpies

Then, the hard work. It's a truism that the most artless poems are the ones most effort has gone into to make them appear that way.  My main problem was that I had one or two beautiful images I badly wanted to use that were too complex to fit the rhythm of my poem - because when you're relying on form and repetition to create an effect, you can't then cram in something that doesn't fit.  So they were duly put to the sword (or rather, set aside for possible use in the future).

I walked the poem for the best part of a month.  I was sure it fitted together. I left it for a month.  I found it didn't fit as well as I thought it did. I tweaked a little more.  Finally it was done.

The last thing I had to do was find a title. In the end, I settled on 'Winterset' - a pun on the location of the poem, which harks back to mediaeval tradition and suits the feeling of timelessness I'd tried to engender. 


Winterset

Between dark and dawn, the sleep-smudged sun
Between sun and moon, the scavenger flood
Between flood and flux, the blackening wreck
Between wreck and sky, the covetous mud
Between mud and sand, the glyph of worms
Between worm and beak, the runes of gulls
Between gull and pebble, the butterfly shell
Between shell and ripple, the ebb-tide flower
Between flower and scrub, the crouching dune
Between dune and reeds, the glancing marsh
Between marsh and tower, the magpie's eye
Between eye and blink, the plummeting dark


© Deborah Harvey 2014

There - all over in a blink!

'Winterset' is published in my 2014 collection, Map Reading for Beginners, published by Indigo Dreams and available from their website. (Or from Amazon if you must, but remember that they sell this sort of stuff as well as books.)  

Poem for World Autism Acceptance Day 2015

It's World Autism Accepantance Day today, and on a day when there are reports of a 10-year-old pupil with autism being kept in a cage in a Canberra classroom, I want to say how thankful I am to the autists in my life - for their courage in being themselves in a society bent on conformity, and for showing me every day that difference is to be embraced and nurtured.

Here's a poem about autism I prepared earlier.