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.

Happiness is a Hamlet called Maxine Peake

I don't write about everything I go to see, and this was just a non live screening of a performance recorded at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre last October, but I'll be very lucky if I see a finer, fiercer and more believable Hamlet than Maxine Peake's.  I really hope it will be released on DVD. 

Photograph: Jonathan Keenan

Back To Earth

Eclipses, eh? You wait 16 years for another one to come along and it's still cloudy. Or rather hazy.  

In 1999, during the total eclipse, we sat on Holcombe beach in South Devon and though it was too cloudy to see the sun at all, it turned very dark indeed and all the sea gulls went quiet and settled on the sea.  And a wind arose and it felt somehow like we were on a rollercoaster.

Anything less than 100% totality lacks drama, but even 85% merits some sort of commemoration. Liza, Jennifer and I gathered in Bristol and went up the park.

'Don't stare too long at the sun,' warned Liza's friend. 'It'll think you're creepy.'

Today was always going to be special.  With the eclipse comes a new moon, of course.  And it's the Spring Equinox when I have to try very hard not to think about how the getting lighter part of the year is half over already and embrace the next six months of light instead. So yes, welcome to the light half of the year.  Plus, it's a Friday and I am Friday's child.  And finally, it's Friday the 20th, so it's doubly my day. 

 

Therefore,  I took advantage of all of the above and did something long mooted, symbolic and timely in the company of those who shared the bad times with me.    

Not so much ashes to ashes, dust to dust as back to the mud it came from.  













The eagle-eyed might have noticed names and a date engraved inside my accurst wedding ring. It is my fervent hope that it makes its way down to the earth's molten core to heal a tiny wound there, rather than get swallowed by a fish who is subsequently caught and gutted by a do-gooder who makes it their lifetime mission to get the ring back to its grieving owner, studying marriage registers and calling in documentary film makers, etc, in the process. Because if they do, when they turn up on my doorstep with cameraman in tow, the programme will suddenly become unsuitable to be broadcast before the watershed.

Before you say as if, when I was 11, I threw a message in a bottle into the middle of the North Sea, only for it to wash up years later and for me to get loads of letters from Danish pre-teens.  So I have form.

Review of Map Reading For Beginners in Reach Poetry

Reach Poetry magazine contains a lengthy review by poet Lynn Woollacott of my latest poetry collection, Map Reading For Beginners, which I'm reproducing here.

Map Reading for Beginners is Deborah's second poetry collection and follows Communion, 2011 (Indigo Dreams) and a novel, Dart, 2013 Tamar Books (Indigo Dreams).

I was enchanted by the cover illustration of Map Reading For Beginners.  The image gives us a place to begin, under a blue sky, a river running through hills, deep places with symbolic creatures scuttling around and rooks flying overhead, mystery and surprise mirror imaging the opening poem and title of the collection '... the tunnelling lanes that take you down / to where the stories first began ... '

Cover illustration © Dru Marland 2014

In lyrical contemporary language Deborah's collection takes us on a journey through ghostly land/seascapes, historical stories and poems of a mystical/spiritual nature. For example, 'The Bakestone' in nine couplets and sparse punctuation, Deborah conjures history and mysticism from a simple object.  There are other half-familiar stories, 'Fallen Woman' (1885), whose skirts ballooned and saved her from a suicide attempt when leaping off a bridge, to 'Mr Brunel's Atmospheric Caper' (1848), the railway which ran for eight months.  Other poems drew me in with their intriguing titles, 'William Wyrcestre Dreams Of Brygstowe', for example, a topographer who lived in Deborah's home city of Bristol in 1480 and links in to the book title.

A most beautiful poem is 'The Poet And The Boatman', not surprising the poem came 2nd place in the Chipping Sodbury Poetry Competition, 2012. Here are the beginning stanzas:

Tidal here and salt

the final turn of Teign

before its fretful merging with the sea

creates a harbour in the lee of land,

this curved blood-coloured beach.

Through mist that lifts like linen wraiths

I glimpse the poet stripping off his white

ballooning shirt and britches,

bathing in a manner far from gentlemanly

the water's cold, he'll catch a chill

The story behind the poem is about Keats and his brother's consumption, the emotion comes through, and Deborah later in the poem refers to a boatman (mystical association with carrying the dead across water), and the symbolic colours, blood-coloured beach, linen wraiths, and later in the poem, a red-stained shirt. 

Deborah explains in footnotes on the historical poems to fill the facts. I didn't read them until after I'd read the poems, which made me re-read them, which is always a good thing, and though I understood the poems without footnotes there were moments of clarification.

Shipwrecks and land/seascapes feature: 'Cailpeach', a mysterious white horse at the shore, 'The Wreck of the Nornen' full of imagery, and there are contemporary ghosts, 'The Dream-Catcher' ... 'He's attached a discarded dream-catcher / to his trolley, now it is state-of-the-art; // the same sky above him swabbed of beauty / by an always falling rain that shines / a universe of gum on wet black tarmac', lines that leave an after-glow of images and sounds.

Couplets, triplets, sonnets abound, and occasional techniques such as anaphora, which propels the poem 'Winterset' forward, 'Between dark and dawn, the sleep-smudged sun / between sun and moon, the scavenger flood ... '  Other poems have a subtle rhyme, never forced because beautiful words are appreciated in the collection.

For me the contemporary poem, 'The Seventh Sign', sums up the links: snakes, corvids, coast/water, history, churchyard, love and the number seven. There are so many poems I'd like to have shown you, so please visit Deborah's Indigo Dreams book page and see some examples referred to here and others.

I leave this review with two stanzas from another favourite poem, 'An Approximation': 

... late autumn days

out on the Levels

mistletoed trees in orchards flutter

star-scattered wings

and as countless cacophonous voices fly

I might dream

an approximation of angels 

on Peckham Rye.' 

Reach Poetry is available from Indigo Dreams.

The Romantic Poets and Bristol: A New 'Lyrical Ballads'

Since I broke my leg, I've only got out of bed - or at least off the settee - for poetry.  A marathon 12 hours yesterday at Bath Poetry Cafe's annual event, Voices In The City, was preceded the night before by a remarkable gathering of poets at @Bristol, under the auspices of the Festival of Ideas.  

Both Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth had links with Bristol, and so to celebrate Bristol's year as European Green Capital, 23 of the UK's most prominent poets were invited to respond to poems from Lyrical Ballads, for this reading and a two-part Radio 4 documentary.  

The evening began with a series of introductions including one from Mayor George Ferguson, who spoke about how the evening would celebrate Bristol and the richness of its urban wildlife.  He also mentioned the city's commitment to promoting and developing poetry, especially for children.   Then it was the turn of the poets, the great majority of whom had been able to travel in person, to read their particular poem, each introduced by honey-tongued Ian McMillan, who also read a poem of his own.  

Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, remarked that it had been a long time since she had taken an entire reading from her pocket, and indeed it was odd to see such luminaries as Makar Liz Lochead, Sir Andrew Motion, Don Paterson, Alice Oswald, John Burnside, Paul Farley, Fleur Adcock, Jean Sprackland, Ruth Padel and Sean O'Brien shuffle on and off the stage as if they were at school assembly.  As much as I was delighted by the opportunity to hear so many of our best contemporary poets, I wished the event had been divided into several throughout the year, so that the poets had a chance to introduce us to some of their other work, to give these new poems some context.  My guess is that it was done like this partly to create a one-night extravaganza and partly to facilitate recording, but after a while I began to feel slightly sick, as if I'd opened a big tin of Quality Street and eaten all the orange and strawberry creams, one after the other.

My favourite poem was Alice Oswald's elegiac description of a dead swan, which she'd passed on her daily walk for a month earlier this winter, as a counterpart to the rotting albatross strung around the neck of the Ancient Mariner.  It was a beautiful, startling piece and I am in awe of her fearless nose.

Other quibbles - no, actually, these are complaints - include the description of the evening as a celebration of Bristol and its urban wildlife.  In fact, the city was largely overlooked, and when it was mentioned, it was in reference to the natives' 'somnolence' or as being a place where its inhabitants 'slur their words like drunks'.  Of all the poets present, none were born in the city and only one lives locally.  As for Thomas Chatterton, our own Romantic poet, Wordsworth's 'marvellous boy', he was completely ignored.

Finally, that far from promoting poetry, as the Mayor claimed in his introduction, the city council has this year ceased its funding for Poetry Can, the lone poetry development agency for Bristol and the south-west, thus jeopardising not only its programmes of work with school children and resident, council tax-paying poets, but also the biannual poetry festivals and the agency's very existence.  I saw quite a few seething local poets exit the reading, their faces almost as red as Mr Ferguson's infamous trousers.  

  Bristol urban wildlife

Photo montage © Dru Marland