Season's Greetings

Another year rolls round. They say it's a sign of ageing if time starts speeding up. Everything is relative, I suppose.

This year has been bonkers: the government has gone mad and we are heading to be the country which shoots itself in the foot.

So, to banish, for a week, all scary thoughts of the coming food shortages and riots, and being controlled by those 3,500 troops who have been mobilised to 'help out', here's my seasonal poem for this year that was given a honourable mention in the Seren Christmas poem competition.

Happy whatever you celebrate. I won't say Happy New Year, as I doubt it's going to be anything that could be so described.

Christmas on the Beacons

This year I want to walk the hills
to a fresh dark –

a summit where I can wonder
on distant coastal towns
in their cliché necklaces
strung bright,

the Blues and Scarlets 
switched on weeks ago to vie
with constant sodium.

And then I’ll turn
to something darker –

the Sky Park is the only
beacon I wish for,
where far away points of light
have a chance to shine.

Years since I came here
for Hale Bopp; my compulsion
westwards behind a star.

Reviewing poetry books - a new thing

My first foray into this kind of thing is out now in esteemed poetry magazine, The North, issue 60.

Here you will find my thoughts on recent books from Ahren Warner (Hello, your promise has been extracted), Rory Waterman (Sarajevo Roses), and Menna Elfyn (Bondo).

Poem for Armistice 2014

My family is like almost every other in the UK.

Just ask a British friend and they will be able to tell you who of their kin was killed in the First World War.

My paternal great uncle, died of pneumonia during basic training before he even stepped foot in France. Private Howells shivered to death in an army tent in Yorkshire, far away from the home fires of South Wales.

My maternal great great uncle found his way to France but never returned. All we have is a photograph of him in uniform and his geology book.

A hundred years later and after a lot of searching, my aunt and uncle have located his grave.  We are planning a trip to go and say hello.

His name was John Lewis. This poem is for him.

Shrapnel

Autumn, his plough folds the land

flattens mounds, fills trenches, yet

the lines are indelible.

In winter thin ponds form

in summer the clay shrinks

from boards and props.

Some years he doubles back

to level the fields, new steel

just turns up the old, not gull food

inedible scraps, no magpie

glitter in bullet cases

snips of barbed wire, bits of shells.

History’s not erased by work

still he tries to ditch the ghosts.

It’s hard not to see them

from the corner of his eyes.

There, the white plot fenced by firs
daily sight of that great loss.

Poetry News

Starting your Christmas shopping?

Well look no further, I've got you covered with a super poetry book, featuring a lot of famous people (dead and alive), and me.

I am super proud to be in this and rather astonished that Carol Ann Duffy found my poem.

Dylan Thomas for St. David’s Day

Actually, this poem has nothing whatsoever to do with St. David’s Day other than the fact that I am writing about it today. So whilst the nation is busy sporting daffodils, anthem singing, dressing up in national costume of dodgy provenance and being rightly proud of itself (Wales 27, France 6, just to remind you), I am sitting in rainy Paris, reading.

The force that through the green fuse (pg. 13) deals with the big issues life, love and death which haunt most of Dylan’s poetry. The force, and yes, you can think Star Wars here if it helps, seems to be the notion of universal energy. It is both life giving and life taking as the poem is packed with these opposites from the natural and human world, every stanza has this.

The poem starts with a repetition of the title in the opening line. It’s striking these days how archaic this structure seems to be. It’s unnecessarily repetitive and something most current poets try to avoid. That said, what of this mysterious ‘green fuse’? Young spark I think we might say more clunkily, but it’s arresting and functions to call the readers’ attention from the start – you are going to have to read this one carefully.

As well as the pattern of opposites, the poem focuses on the poet being silenced – the word ‘dumb’ is used in each stanza, but, of course, this is an irony as the poem is anything but silent on its topic. Perhaps it is better to think of this less as silence and more as an inability to articulate fully.

Key words, because they are repeated, are water, blood, love, hang, force, crooked and wind; the basic elements of life and death, if you will. This writing is again in contrast to contemporary practice where we tend to eschew non-patterned word repetition, but we are forgiving readers and can luxuriate otherwise in the imagery.

The antecedent poem that this brings to mind, and which Dylan acknowledged, is Blake’s Sick Rose, with its invisible worm, both of which Dylan makes crooked here:

O rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy.
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

I once went to a lecture by Germane Greer, who talked for over an hour about these eight lines of Blake’s, so Good Luck trying to explain that in one short blog post. Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus.

 

Dylan Thomas - Childhood, Religion and Countryside

Yes, probably Dylan's most beloved poem, Fern Hill, (pg 134)  and read here by Richard Burton, has all these elements. It is both hymn of praise and love song to a rural upbringing 'Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs.'

Apple tree related images are just one of a number of motifs that repeat themselves throughout the poem, as does the colour green, green also in the sense of innocence in this paradise, emphasised, as if that were necessary, by his mention of 'Adam and maiden' and indeed the apple tree itself.

Other religious imagery also appears in every stanza ('his eyes,' 'the mercy of his means,' 'blessed,' 'fields of praise,' 'follow him out of grace,' 'lamb white days' and so on).

But the poem changes tack in the last stanza with the lack of foreknowledge that 'time would take me' out of innocence and to the final couplet: 'Time held me green and dying/though I sang in my chains like the sea.' What exactly does Dylan mean? It seems to me that this is the adult reflection of the illusion of childhood as not as idyllic as we might remember, green but a kind of death to the will perhaps, and happy enough to ellicit song, but still be enslaved. Perhaps that's why he called it a 'poem for evenings and tears.'

Things to be enthralled by in this poem are, as always, the lush and beautiful imagery. Who doesn't wish that they had thought of 'the sabbath rang slowly/ in the pebbles of the holy streams,' or describing a farm on a winter morning as 'like a wanderer white/with dew?' Lovely.

Dylan Thomas - On Childhood

Dylan is famous for many things, one of which is his fond, tender and playful writings about childhood, especially his own, or more specifically boyhood, since girls are those other creatures with whom snowball throwing boys waiting for cats to appear on the garden fence have little to do. See the stories in Quite Early on Morning, for example.

Dylan's memorial Stone in Cwmdonkin Park

The Hunchback in the Park (pg.93), does what it says on the tin. Here I want simply to point out the imaginative, original and arresting nature of Dylan's descriptive powers:

- in stanza one, the notion that the unlocking of the gates 'lets the trees and water in'

- in stanza two, the accuracy of observation 'the chained cup that the children filled with gravel'

- in stanza three, the simile 'like the water he sat down'

- in stanza four, the image of the park  as a 'loud zoo'

- in stanza five, the brilliance of 'the boys among willows/made tigers jump out of their eyes'

 - in stanza six, the simile 'straight as a young elm'

 - in stanza seven, the simile 'the wild boys innocent as strawberries.'

A fellow poet advised me once that all you need for a really good poem is one astonishing image, metaphor or simile. I am glad to say that this is otiose here.

Read the poem too quickly, blink, and you will miss Dylan's sparkle and might be in danger of dismissing this poem as a piece of over-sentimental froth. Not so, I say, not so.

Dylan Thomas - On Writing

In my craft or sullen art (pg. 106) Dylan expostulates on writing. He explains the thankless nature of his solitary, nocturnal labours (alone being one of the meanings of 'sullen' here), with what has to be his tongue firmly in his cheek, that is not for 'ambition or bread,' of ' the strut and trade of charms/ on the ivory stages,' but the 'common wages' of lovers' hearts. It is on the one hand a piece of unreliable autobiography and wishful thinking if ever I read one, yet the fear of going unremarked surely haunts all writers, especially the egotists amongst us.

Laugharne Castle

Structurally I find this poem interesting in that it has the feel of a palindrome. This is not precise in any sense of course, but is by way of inventive repetition in the phrases, objects and images; a working over and around of the limited palette: moon, lovers, griefs, arms, wages whereby form aligns with argument; as well as the rhyme scheme, which although irregular, is approximately similar between the two stanzas, and the opening and closing lines being very close. Note the word sullen disappears at the end.

Images that especially appeal are 'singing light' as I could certainly do with one of those when I am working; 'spindrift pages' because it is an interesting one - the idea that pages are either waves or snow being blown by the wind, either way they are white and unfilled with ink; and I enjoy the side swipe at his predecessors: 'the towering dead with their nightingales (Keats, presumably) and psalms.'

Dylan Thomas - On Immortality

Find yourself the Everyman edition of Dylan's Collected Poems (ed. Davies and Maud), which collects the poems he chose to keep and publish in 1952. I am using the 1993 edition if you are trying to follow my page references. And Death Shall Have No Dominion (pg. 56) was Dylan's first published poem (at the tender age of 18), although he edited it heavily later in the version we now have.

It varies a well known bible verse from (St. Paul's Epistle to the) Romans 6:9 as the repeating phrase at the opening and closing of each of the three stanzas. This repetition and the insistent rhythm gives the poem its power as a meditation on immortality. If you're going to say something more than once, make it something worth hearing.

Boats at Laugharne

Most of the lines elaborating the theme are end-stopped, so it's interesting to focus on those that are not as they break that pattern and draw attention. There are three enjambed lines, one in each stanza:

'Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon.'

'Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily.'

'Where blew a flower may a flower no more
lift its head to the blows of rain.'

In each of these there is yet more repetition (man/man, winding/windily and flower, repeated even on the same line). Is this lazy writing? Perhaps the last one as the object is the same, but not the others I think as these add to the circular effect of the poem turning over its ideas on themselves.

I am curious as to the nature of the man in the wind and the west moon. We know of the man in the moon, but not in the wind, so that seems a playful variant. But the man in the west moon? What does he mean by the west moon. Literally there is no such thing, we only have one moon. The moon over Wales i.e. in the west perhaps? But why? As illustration of the poem's panthesism is one suggested explanation.

As to windings/windily, this jars for me rather badly and if it were my poem, I'd have edited that out. The flower line on the other hand is interesting, or rather the blows of rain are a clever conjuring of the wind and its punches and is imagery extended in the next to lines: 'dead as nails' and 'hammer'. Dead as nails seems again to be Dylan invention, we know deaf as a post or thick as a board, but not this.

The mention of the unicorn myth and its abilities to dispel evil in stanza two is rather suspect and undermines the poem from within, even more so as this is the only line in which the syntax is tortured. I am inclined to smirk at this image, and that's me being unkind and reading it eighty years after it was written, but it does give the poem a risible register. This is a pity, but yet, classic Dylan imagery is at work here: moon, sea, stars, bones, all busily resisting death.

Poetry News

Three new poems of mine appeared today on this lovely quality blog. Do visit and enjoy!

Presiding Spirit 2013: Sylvia Plath

It’s a doldrum day at the slow turning of the year. It’s pouring with rain again and I am not talking the dog out in a gale. Instead I lift a slim volume of verse from my shelves. It’s one of my most precious books: a first edition of Ariel by Sylvia Plath: red hard back, simple gold lettering, edges slightly browned, pages dark cream, forty poems dedicated to her children, Frieda and Nicholas. I bought it more than twenty years ago. It doesn’t have a dust jacket and so it’s monetary value, a knowledgeable poetry bookseller told me recently, is less than it would be if it had, but I don’t care.

Its worth is inside, in those marvelous poems she left on her desk in February 1963 and which Faber published in 1965, after some reshuffling of the order by Ted Hughes. A restored edition was published in 2007 and makes for fascinating comparison. Fifty years after her death, I am reading her again for the umpteenth time. It’s a little pilgrimage. It’s disturbing, but comfortably familiar. That’s why she’s my this year’s  Presiding Spirit.

Over the coming twelve months you will find articles, essays and readings on this page on Plath. Please check back often and leave a comment on the writings you find here. If you would like to contribute to this project, you are most welcome.

The opening poem of Ariel is Morning Song, a poem of a mother’s anxiety at night, listening to her sleeping child waiting for the sound that requires her response:

‘One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.’

But it is much more than this as it starts and ends with the child claiming its voice: ‘The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry/Took its place among the elements.’; ‘And now you try/Your handful of notes;/The clear vowels rise like balloons.’ The skill of Plath here is to have at one and the same time an ordinary register of language, the matter of factness of the mid-wife’s action and the child’s vocalisation, coupled with the extraordinary in idea of our voices joining the elements and the strange simile of vowels rising like balloons. The image of the breast-feeding mother as ‘cow-heavy’ has stayed with me. I think it was one of the first things I’d found for myself that alerted me to the exciting possibilities of language and its physicality when I was a teenager. It’s simple, all the best ideas are.

In the tradition of reading the first and last poems in a book in order to decide whether it is any good; a habit which many people have and might be borne in mind when ordering a collection for publication, let’s look at the final poem, Words. It’s short, but full of complex imagery that begins with a startling one word line ‘Axes’ and goes on to celebrate the felling of a tree for the sound of the wood ringing and echoing ‘off from the centre like horses’, another thought-provoking simile; and for the sap that wells up like water ‘striving/To re-establish its mirror/Over the rock'. Mirrors are a frequent Plath image and I have already written about that in an earlier post - scroll down. Words then become ‘hoof-taps’ echoing the earlier horse image, but in the end ‘dry and riderless’, while the finality of the poem’s last lines is a depressing expression of pre-determinism: ‘From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars/ Govern a life.’

In between these two poems you will find some of her most famous work such as Lady Lazarus, Tulips and Daddy. To finish this first introductory piece, just a short note, again by way of welcome, to the four bee poems, as this is a current topic in certainly British poetry with a least two collections having been published on it in the last year (Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees and Sean Borrowdale’s Bee Journal).

The Bee Meeting is a longer narrative poem on the opening of hives to locate and remove newly-hatched queens, where Plath’s existential position is as questioning outsider, at first improperly dressed: ‘I am nude as a chicken neck’ and perplexed as to what is going on: ‘Is it some operation that is taking place?’, but never comfortable, even down to the final lines: ‘Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.’

The Arrival of the Bee Box is more than an empty super: ‘...the coffin of a midget/Or a square baby’, as it is locked, dangerous and swarming with bees. This time properly attired (she is learning) in her ‘moon suit and funeral veil’ she considers whether to open the box. A kind of modern day Pandora, she hopes they will ignore her as she is ‘no source of honey’ and resolves the dilemma of action in the poem: ‘Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free. / The box is only temporary.’ Again control over life and death is worked though in this piece as Plath describes herself as both god and Caesar.

Stings is for me a very powerful poem, set at honey harvest and involving the scraping of the frames for extraction. The stand-out sentiment is contained in these adamant lines:

‘I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.’

and the elision of the poet with the queen bee at the poem’s close: ‘...I/Have a self to recover, a queen.’

In Wintering extracted honey is perfectly described as ‘six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar’, an otherwise forbidding place of blackness and decay for Plath that echoes the danger the all female bees are in as regards their survival, living as they have to on replacement honey (sugar) ‘the refined snow’. It ends on a positive note: ‘The bees are flying. They taste the spring.’ Thus the year turns. Have a very happy 2013.

Spoken Word - 5 March

At the risk of being very arrogant (surely not!) and reviewing my own gig, it was lovely to be the featured reader at Spoken Word last night. I gave a first outing to my South African poems from what I hope will be my next, next book, Quagga (sometime, maybe). I worried about just how much explanation to give, but some of the poems do need a bit of introduction. I usually err on the side of less is more in these matters, but not yesterday. I hope I got the balance right. Great evening and even I sold some books, which is always a pleasure.

http://spokenwordparis.blogspot.com/ for  a report

Poems during Lent

I am taking part in a poem a day challenge for Lent. My poems will be posted on the Work - Lent 2012 page.