Birdnesting with John Clare

Under the influence: Bird Nesting with John Clare
by Alison Brackenbury

broadcast on Radio 3 in December 2008,
in The Essay series
produced by Julian May



The beanfields’ scent

It is light as winds, without coldness,
Fresh waves of sea without salt,
It blows a sweet honey, uncloying,
It is happiness without fault.

Its flowers’ tongues ask no taxes,
Though their purple is royal; their white
Is pressed by black so pure
That noon is burned by night.

Who buys a scent called “Beanflowers”?
Its glossy blue of leaf
Buckles, to June’s sharp showers.
Best things are free and brief.


This poem of mine was left, freely and briefly, in a pamphlet in a doctor’s waiting room. In return, I received an email from a lady in Swindon, who had always loved the scent of beanflowers, but had never before read a poem in its praise. But of course, I had. It was by John Clare.

‘Black eyed and white, and feathered to one’s feet
How sweet they smell’- Clare wrote, remembering fragrance breathed on ‘battered footpaths’. Searching for the poem again, in my yellowed student copy, I find it in the section marked ‘Asylum’. A few pages later, in the final poem, I glimpse the phrase ‘the sedgy fen’.

Biography is a fen. I will try, without being sucked down, to say why I was drawn to Clare on that summer footpath. Clare’s path is a legend: the farm labourer who read avidly and achieved brief fame as an English working-class poet. His disreputable grandfather was in fact a Scottish schoolteacher. My mother, also from a rather disreputable, partly Welsh family, trained in London as a teacher, but came back to her Lincolnshire village to my father. Rebelling against generations of shepherds, he was first a ploughboy, like Clare, then a farm lorry driver.

So I first heard Clare at a village school, in the pattering of his ‘little trotty wagtail’. (I had spent my earliest years, like Clare, roaming woods, hunting nests.) At a tiny grammar school, I learnt one of his more conventional bird poems. I was shipped off to Oxford, with the highest hopes. But a dark winter followed. The last sight which made me want to live was a glimpse of rough-coated ponies, in a flooded field. Then, briefly, I went over the edge.



I came back, of course. I was lucky. Survival is a duty. I have managed a fair impersonation of it for over thirty years. Clare’s path was wholly different. Over his edge, he was Byron, and his wife a stranger. He was gone, for almost thirty years. Madness, like marriage, is a mystery. Was it syphilis, caught in London? But, on his paths, in his head, he survived. The last poem in my yellowed book has its own light:
‘But warm the sun shines by the little wood
Where the old cow at her leisure chews her cud.’

Oxford finally enlightened me. It gave me Clare. There I read most of his work, including a new book, a collection never published in Clare’s lifetime, which he wanted to call ‘Bird Nesting’. The poem which stayed with me, muttered and cherished, is one which Clare copied out, in one swift unpunctuated flow.

The Cuckoo
(I am only quoting a short extract in this written version of the talk, as I am unsure of the copyright status of this poem. You may wish to Google ‘Clare +The Cuckoo’.)
…..
'Cuck cuck' it cries and mocking boys
Crie 'Cuck' and then it stutters more
Till quick forgot its own sweet voice
It seems to know itself no more

Is there a sadder end to a poem? Yet it is light as dance. Behind it is knowledge we cannot own. Who knows the colour inside a cuckoo’s beak? That world has gone. Behind the shortening lines are the ballads Clare’s parents sang, which Clare wrote down. Is there, too, the lilt of Burns? Clare, I believe, was shocked to discover that Burns’ songs cheerfully purloined ballad lines. But perhaps it emboldened him to do so. The close of this poem makes me bolder to throw the rules of English syntax into the air, and trust they may come down in the rhythm of a poem. When Clare wrote ‘quick forgot its own sweet voice’ he found his own most truly.

Clare has haunted my work, the most welcome of ghosts. In my twenties, I wrote sad love poems which owed much to the green grass and lost girls of his many songs. My second book had a long poem about Clare called ‘Breaking Ground’. I now guess this gave more to me than the reader, apart from one tumbling ballad where Clare dreams of himself as a famous dead boxer, as the villagers cast flowers on his bare coffin:

marigolds of sun and flame
light stocks as sweet as women’s love
briar roses, frail as wrists of girls,
with every thorn plucked off-

Then, Clare, like the best of influences, sank out of sight in my work for almost twenty years. Now, with his music, he has resurfaced in my new book, ‘Singing in the Dark’, which has a poem about his violin. But the poem I offer, most tentatively after ‘The Cuckoo’, is a poem about the buzzard. Clare wrote about this bird, but with its dialect name, ‘puddock’, and of its capture as a garden pet. I have moved gratefully into the vacant territory of the skies.

Myfanwy, Edward Thomas’ daughter, wrote kindly about this poem. Perhaps my thinned Welsh blood did flow into its long vowels. I could write it because, to my family’s despair, I had not become rich or famous. I spent much of my limited funds on rough-coated ponies, not unlike those my grandfather drove in his shepherding cart. I took a manual job in the family business. So I was up on the Gloucestershire hills three or four days a week, scraping mud from horses, watching birds. I had plenty to write about; if, unlike my father, and, probably, Clare, I could stay awake in the warm kitchen at night. I occasionally solved the problem, as in this poem, by composing out of doors; not on foot, like Clare, but on horseback.



High notes


Over the ridge, flooded tracks snarl with ice.
February shifts through its angles of wind,
North to the bare ash, east to the numbed hand.
Above the torn pasture, the buzzard’s voice.

The buzzard is many birds. Dropped to the road
It rips the soft rabbit with eagle’s hard glare.
As kite, it circles through ceilings of air.
It sleeps in the ash like a ruffled brown toad.

Its voices are many, a mewing prattle,
A languorous whistle over the wood.
Once, when the lambs tottered banks, it could
Draw from its throat a machine gun’s rattle.

Now its voice has changed, though the night is bringing
The sun’s red disc, the moon’s white eye.
Its call swoops and breaks. Its mate hovers by.
To frozen acres the buzzard is singing.


But on the ground, animals are more vulnerable. Savagery against them is a rejected part of my country past. I saw a little of it, but nothing like the badger-baiting Clare trapped in ferocious couplets:

He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd agen
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles groans and dies.

Clare knew an outspoken ballad about the ‘Wantley Dragon’, which, in a final line still unrepeatable on radio, ‘groans’ and ‘dies’. I was less startled by the language than by the feeding of the ballad into his work, and by the realisation that the couplets I had always thought he drew from his reading were everywhere in the ballad tradition. I had emerged from school writing staccato free verse; from university, briefly seduced by ambiguity and alternative endings. It took me a long time to rediscover, fully, rhyme, story, ballad. Poetry can do many things, but it is necessary for some writers to keep strong traditional forms alive, if only so they can be reworked, played against, rejected. I make no apology for trying to be one of those writers. If I have had any success at all, it is mainly due to Clare.

In my experience, working class country people are often, like Clare, surprisingly radical. I think rhyme works well in political poetry. I found myself breaking back to it, instinctively, in a book called ‘Bricks and Ballads’, which opened with a poem from September 2001.

Trust me, it was a time when we would start
At dusked skin of a wrist, at a plane’s drone.
I could predict, unsleeping, their success.
The war was theirs. The terror was our own.

I have always admired Clare’s passionate interweaving of description and comment on enclosure or land claims; which occasionally, fatally, his publisher unpicked in his ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’.

One of the traditions this poem celebrates is the Christmas play. After finding a scrap of a mummers’ play in a family notebook, I wrote my own for regional radio– in rough couplets- complete with the East European workers who have partly replaced Clare’s gypsies, and a child who is “one in three”, poor in a (then) booming country. Has my town progressed beyond Clare’s Northamptonshire? I fear that today Clare, a heavy drinker, might be out of his head on drugs in a council flat (if he could get one), never having written a word; although I see signs that slams and performance poetry may be appealing successors to the ballads Clare’s father recited in the pub.

My own journey with Clare is not over. I have just read a version of ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’, published by Carcanet, in a fuller, unpunctuated form, as sent by Clare to his editor. I have never understood so clearly what Clare is doing in this poem: it is the rush of his consciousness, rich as his world. His endings, which his publisher re-wrote, hang on the air like song. I have spent decades wrestling with punctuation, trying to catch the mind’s flow, the thick warmth of life. I am fired to continue.

I see, too, that editing often destroyed the detail on which the poem depends, such as the February bee, which ‘strokes its legs upon its wing’. I looked at my summer’s poems recently and noticed how many were about insects; tiny, vital in a damaged world. Unlike Clare’s villagers, dispossessed by enclosure, many of us own small plots of land: gardens, which have increasingly been paved, tarmaced and built on. The enclosers were Clare’s destroyers. We have done our own destroying. I drive to my pony on the hills. Clare would have seen, with eyes sharp as a buzzard, the smallest signs of the disaster we are courting.

Clare knew that the great depends on the small. At the end of ‘February’, in his Shepherd’s Calendar, he has an exact, minute account of a hedgehog before his great storm scene. His editor replaced it by some vapid stuff about sunbeams. How wrong he was!
At last, we can hear Clare’s version, where the small sweeps into the great, icicles become comets and we, like the shepherd, are left ‘croodling’, hunched beneath the fury of the weather. Here is the end of ‘February’, from ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’, by John Clare.






The hedgehog from its hollow root
Sees the wood moss clear of snow
And hunts each hedge for fallen fruit
Crab hip and winter bitten sloe
And oft when checked by sudden fears
As shepherd dog his haunt espies
He rolls up in a ball of spears
And all his barking rage defies

Thus nature of the spring will dream
While south winds thaw but soon again
Frost breathes upon the stiffening stream
And numbs it into ice – the plain
Soon wears its mourning garb of white
And icicles that fret at noon
Will eke their icy tails at night
Beneath the chilly stars and moon

Nature soon sickens of her joys
And all is sad and dumb again
Save merry shouts of sliding boys
About the frozen furrowed plain
The foddering boy forgets his song
And silent goes wi folded arms
And croodling shepherds bend along
Crouching to the whizzing storms

The moon over China

Prologue
‘Hello, Book, you’re back! What have you there?’

‘Good news,’ says Book. ‘The three Poetries are in.’

‘You sound like a carol.’

‘It was you,’ yawns Book, ‘who named me “Singing in the Dark”- Here you are!’

I unfold the smudged sheet under the lamp.

‘Poetry Review: “Mellifluous art”. Poetry Wales: “Unabashed world-wonder.” Poetry London: “Grace and authenticity”.’

‘That’s very good, Book! Are you sure you haven’t left out any words? Like “not”?’

‘I leave that to you,’ says Book. Then, more sternly, ‘Have you read anything while I’ve been away?’

‘Oh yes,’ I say, trying to banish glimpses of books propped on supermarket café tables, or slipping from my hands in the kitchen at 1 a.m. ‘Chinese poetry.’

‘Good,’ says Book, settling on the shelf in the wardrobe, where I keep my work, into the sleep of books, which is like cats’: deep as history, wakeful at a touch. ‘Why not write about it?’

Moons
Book has gone; and the moon. It is very dark. If you have read, or know much, about Chinese poetry, then feel free to leave too, for sleep, or your books. If Chinese poems are still a closed book to you, then forgive my clumsy introduction; but, for the poetry’s sake, read on.

Ezra Pound’s “Cathay” is a good place to begin. Pound is still mired in controversy, and it is still controversial to call these lucid poems translations. But their power to move is immediate, beyond controversy:

At fifteen I stopped scowling.
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.

(Li Po: The River Merchant’s Wife)

Li Po, whose name is often now rendered as Li Bai, is one of the two best-known poets of the T’ang dynasty. He lived and wrote in the eighth century, and, according to legend, drowned drunkenly, falling from a boat as he tried to embrace the reflected moon. In the poems of his great contemporary Tu Fu (also now called Du Fu), I am particularly drawn to the reflections of Tu Fu’s own life, such as his longing for his wife

Tonight at Fu-chou, this moon she watches
Alone in our room.

(Tu Fu: Moonlit Night)

But my favourite T’ang poet is the prolific and thoughtful Po-Chü-i. As an adviser to Emperors, he tried to improve life for China’s poor (and used poems, in a traditional, popular form, to publicise his cause). Through disillusion and disfavour, he spent many years in reclusive exile:

As I grieve over falling leaves, bright
moons in the courtyard grow countless.

(Po-Chü-i : Cold Night in the Courtyard)

The T’ang poets wrote under the shadows of war, rebellion and invasion. In ‘The Journey North’ Tu Fu, ‘fallen also amongst the Mongol’ describes his trek back to his family, where his hungry daughters fell upon the cosmetics he had brought for their mother: ‘Soon rouge is plastered everywhere’-

Classical Chinese poetry is haunting in its alternation of great events and private oases: the bedroom, the courtyard. It dramatises our human need both for Taoist mysticism, Li Po’s moon, and the practical, civic Confucianism which is more apparent in Tu Fu, or in Po-Chü-i, who ‘served in four different departments’, and raged against the extravagance of officials in ‘The Crimson-Weave Carpet’ : ‘Floors don’t feel the cold – people do.’ But, old and sick, Po-Chü-I sat alone in courtyards, drinking his wine, mourning his small daughter, Golden Bells, and watching the moon.

The techniques of this poetry, as described by their translators, sound almost impossible: continuous use of a single rhyme, elaborate use of parallel words, fixed, brief, line lengths. I have heard the occasional poem read in Chinese, with its swoops of pitch, a swift intense music. We lose all this. Yet we keep much. Though translations cannot embody strict Chinese form, I think they can summon the ghost of that music. David Hinton’s translations come to mind here, and again, Pound’s, whose own work becomes haunted by subtle shift and echo:

Petals on a wet black bough.

Classical Chinese poems seem to me exemplary in their brevity, their spare use of detail and their capacity, across centuries, to strike to the heart. Often written at moments of national and personal tragedy, they rise as proof of poetry’s lasting value, clear as the moon. Although Po-Chü-i’s last poems were lost, because he entrusted them to Buddhist monasteries, which later rulers burnt, his surviving work kept the mainstream tradition of Chinese poetry alive. A good anthology will lead you to many Chinese poems, from many periods, which may linger in your mind. It includes some fine work by women.

There are Chinese poets today whose work lives compellingly in translation. Bei Dao’s work draws the details of his world and his own longings into a subtle net, which hold me as a reader, and which, like a spider’s web, I am reluctant to break into fragments. These are poems of a new Chinese exile:

assassin and moon
walk toward a foreign land

(Bei Dao: Seeing Double)

the cat leaps into endless night
the dream’s tail flashing once

(Bei Dao: Insomnia)

The work of Yang Lian, also in political exile, is wilder and darker, but keeps, in translation, final lines as fierce and memorable as those of Pound’s ‘Cathay’:

you’ve already died so you’re not afraid to love

(Yang Lian: Requiem, or river running back)

After my alien blunderings, the last words on Chinese poetry should come from China, from Lu Chi, executed as the result of plotting by his jealous enemies, who wrote in the third century, in his ‘Coda: The Use of Poetry’

‘ It breathes through flutes and strings and is new always’.



Coda
From moon to mouse: the practical Confucian in me would like to point any interested reader to the Penguin editions of Chinese poetry, and to the marvellous collection of Chinese poets, old and new, singly and in anthologies, available through Anvil Press.

Finally, a poem which comes from a far less courtly tradition, although it begins with a command which the great Chinese poet-bureaucrats would, in a different form, have known well:


Your signature is required

Oh reading wills I mourn them:
my father’s upright hand,
careful from the village school.
So his father wrote, his mother
shaped child’s letters, crimped like pastry,
pinched, like the cowslip’s petal.
Who will write like that again?
And then, her zeros,
more trouble than a pleasure,
lawyer’s chill trick, a second will,
the day my mother slept.

But the tax is saved. I sign
in my slanted dashing hand.
I walk the broad path, common,
to the hill we do not own.
The bramble’s flowers raise storms,
palest golds, rough creams and browns,
the gatekeepers, the butterflies
of hottest harsh July.

So I know that they are safe,
so, forgetting them, I pass
a C of moon so tender
she must not be glimpsed through glass.








(Published online in ‘The Chimaera’)


http://www.the-chimaera.com/May2008/index.html

Guest appearance by Fiona Robyn

I’m delighted to welcome a guest, Fiona Robyn, as part of her innovative blogs tour. I greatly enjoyed her book, “small stones”. Over to Fiona!

But is it poetry?
Alison has kindly agreed for me to appear on her blog today as a part of the 'blog tour' for my latest book, 'small stones: a year of moments'. I'm Fiona - good to meet you!

I've been writing a daily blog at www.asmallstone.com for more than three years now. These small chunks of writing have been described as 'bite-sized truffles of poetry', 'simple words', and (Alison's thoughts) 'all the bits which should go into poems, and don't, and are probably more important than what did go in'. I call them small stones. So are they poetry?

I don't really care about the labels, but I write small stones for different reasons than when I write poetry. A poem can be a complicated affair. Transmuting the first scribbled notes into a final version I'm satisfied with can take months or even years.

Writing small stones allows me to notice something, write it down, and move on. It might take forty seconds to find exactly the right word, but once it's written down I don't linger. Remembering to find a small stone is just as important as writing it down. If I hadn't looked closely, I might not have noticed that wren's tail wagging like a puppy's. If I hadn't lingered over my coffee cup, I might not have really enjoyed that aroma.

Writing small stones helps me to engage more fully with my world. I forget to pause and do this, over and over again throughout the day. I think most of us do. By committing to write down one thing, at least I pause once. And I hope that if you read my book, it will be your first step to remembering too.

Fiona Robyn is a blogger and writer living happily in Hampshire with her partner, cats and vegetable patch. Read extracts and reviews of her latest book 'small stones: a year of moments' at www.fionarobyn.com/smallstones.htm. The blog continues at www.smallstone.com.





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www.fionarobyn.com
www.asmallstone.com

Does royalty rhyme?

I find politics inescapable, whether through hope things can be improved, or through grim determination that they should not be made worse. So I have leafleted for the Liberals, emailed for Oxfam, and, with immense help, run local campaigns with varying success (one Victorian school lost, one pedestrian crossing built).

Packing up the leaflets, slowing for the red lights of the children’s crossing, I have probably paid less attention than I should to the smaller world of poetry. But sometimes the two worlds meet, as in the recent debates about the Laureateship.

I wrote, in a letter published in The Independent, that I thought we should have a one year Laureateship. This would give more poets a chance to plunge into this hectic job. It would also give readers and listeners at large a chance to encounter a far wider variety of poets, and their poems. Having fired off my letter, I was struck by another aspect of the debate: the recurring comments, by excellent poets, that they could not contemplate taking on a job which involved dashing off poems to members of the Royal Family.

I am absolutely clear where I stand on this. Child of the Fifties, with its Coronation mugs and Royal scrapbooks, I am a republican. Why? First, I think modern royalty is a form of slavery. Without even an opt-out clause at twenty-one, it is especially cruel to those at the centre of the gilded cage. Who is likely to be happier, Zara Philips, with no title or likelihood of succession, amongst her horses, or William, heir to the throne, hiding from photographers? If an evil fairy wished to make someone thoroughly miserable, they could try a) a massive lottery win or b) arrival, by birth, in the House of Windsor.

But this family, often unhappy itself, is profoundly bad for the rest of Britain. Why should I, or anyone, curtsey to another human being because his (or her) ancestor managed to win a particularly vicious battle in the late fifteenth century? The curtsey offends that most vital principle: that, at a level almost too deep for our understanding, each person in this world is of equal worth. Forget that, and we are doomed.

The institution of monarchy does not forget this principle. It tramples upon it. We should release the Windsors into private life, to be happy or unhappy in their own way. I would suggest that, as a souvenir of centuries of rule, we should keep the Royal Picture Collection, with its glowing, rarely seen Stubbs. George IV, by the way, failed and abandoned Stubbs, to his impoverished and unproductive old age. So much for patronage.

Is the end of monarchy unimaginable in Britain? But who keeps scrapbooks now? My parents’ generation had a special reverence for the Queen, because of her (immediate) family’s conduct in “the War”. To my daughter’s generation, William is just another celebrity, mentally filed between Victoria Beckham and Chris Martin. Sometimes I hope that William’s horror of the paparazzi will propel him into sensible retirement. But the Royal Family safeguarded itself for two generations by drafting in the iron nerves and charm of the Queen Mother (who, reputedly, wanted to marry someone else). Is Kate Middleton her far keener successor?

Meanwhile, besides their covert lobbying for bloodsports, the Royal Family are fatally entwined with the British honours system. It is good to honour heroes, and hard-working postmen (the two categories overlap). But our present system, still haunted by an Empire which crumbled in my childhood, offers honours which many cannot take. Benjamin Zephaniah’s principled refusal was admirably public. It has become clear that many people working in the arts have privately refused these tainted honours. But it would be good to reward merit, and poetry could do with its column inches, and its own heroes and heroines.

If the ship of monarchy is not yet sunk, at least perhaps the laureateship can be steered clear of it: a small boat heading for open water.

I think of all water very differently since last summer, when a daylong deluge in July led to a near-complete failure of services, (mains water gone; electricity just saved), then, close at hand, to several deaths. The poem below is from a series called “Flood”.


Mitchell


Yes, I can see him. He is just nineteen,
As we were nineteen. Ducking out the bar,

Bravo, he lights a cigarette. The gleam
Warms his untouched cheeks, as to a mother,

The tender hollows of his collarbone.
Floods murmur everywhere. He tells the others

He knows the field paths, he is walking home.
What do they hear in dark ? A branch’s crack,

A child’s cry. “I don’t know how to swim”.
They have no lights, no rope to haul on slack,

The hidden stream pulls stronger than a horse.
Dark sweeps him on. Day cannot bring him back.

Ten miles downstream, I hack at storm’s stunned flowers,
Brush down one whole but thin-stemmed rose, toss it

Into a pail, so I may lose no hours
Of its small breaths, honey and apricot.

Buoyed on the loose soft rainwater, it swirls.
Radio’s tides wash over my calm bucket.

“A body found in Tewkesbury in fields
Has not yet been identified.” But far

In Stroud, in Slad, in Gloucester’s cloud, young girls,
The old men name you, see you as you are

Never again. Rose ash falls from your fingers,
The wet door clicks. You walk into the bar.


Published in “Poetry Wales”.

Summer is the death of poetry

While I was still travelling on trains, I met a man who told me “Somerset is the graveyard of ambition”. It had impossibly fertile gardens, he said, where the strawberries were eaten, not by slugs, but badgers. Once you lived there, you never wished to move anywhere else, ever again.

Summer is the Somerset of the seasons. A small sparrow tumbles out of the blue-green thicket of the honeysuckle, and has to be watched, for hours, in case the cats crawl out of their private paradise of sun and the cedar wind of the neighbour’s hedge. The China rose swarms with pink cups, darkening by the hour, which must be snipped off in every dusk. For, if you work by day, summer is dusk, the endless nights of June, when the birds pause and the light hangs behind railway cuttings, with the planets, stars and bats in waiting, as if for ever.

Where does poetry fit with this? Not at all. Leaves crowd it out. It is not written. The rambler rose opens its vast heads of apricot and snow. The poems lie in dusty heaps. They are not revised. I have always been fatally clear on one point. Life, especially in June, is better than poetry.

But June leaves, sudden as a child, and summer shows its discontents. Horseflies saw through your skin on the shadeless hills. The neighbours, the ones you do not like, crowd the airless dusk with their outdoor parties. By day, as you rush to work, they are out, the mysterious other people with their long legs, their sunglasses thrust in their hair, their tiny shorts. They are always on holiday. You fret with a sense of things missed. But you do not want to burn on beaches. People are restless animals. Pleasure does not content us. As the August nights shorten and the small winds tug, we remember work. And, in my case, work is poetry.

But not yet. The roses are tumbling. Water the ferns, pour seed into the sparrows’ feeder, put out the plate of special food for the hedgehogs who were snuffling wildly under the honeysuckle two nights ago. Here is a poem for summer; although, like summer, it ticks with time.


Rosie



You block the slope, chestnut and truculent.
When you came, a gangling two year old,
you spotted me at once.
My muddy coat was rich with mints;
heart, with foolish love of horses.

My own horse hated you,
since you were turned out with the foal,
her foster-child. You were her distant cousin.
At twenty-two, she spotted her young rival,
without her fine socks; with a pale blonde mane
which, grazing, combed moon daisies, effortless.

How the old hate the young. How the young pine.
Once you pawed the wire fence, hooked your front shoe,
yet hurtled over, unhurt, my true cob.
I should have bobbed through April’s woods on you,
have bolted in the blurring stubble field,
sweated, cursed, forgot. Horses are love,

but love is for the young and I am old
the right hip’s stabbing held at bay by pills
the ruined shoulder subtle as a bruise.
My old mare, curled beside the water trough,
sleeps, like a warm dog. How did you make
scuffs on your polished forehead? Still half-broken,
you have been advertised. You are for sale.
This is your chance.

We smell the mints’ perfume
blow from my pocket. The tiny crescent moon
rides on your shoulder. The deer stir in the woods,
the swifts surge higher. But I take my course
down the rough grasses, in the heat’s last haze.
You are not my horse.

Legs and literature (and lapwings)

Legs and literature (and lapwings)

Dear computer users, this is a cautionary tale. I am shuffling around with a Dickensian bandage on my right ankle and it is (partly) Facebook’s fault.

All stupidity is unique. I don’t suppose that you stand up for most of the working day battling with metal finishing (thanks to the capacity for panic of Rolls-Royce subcontractors, and our failure to clear low tables in our family business’ small, overcrowded workshop). Nor do I imagine that you sit up for most of the night. Kind recipients of my emails have asked if my computer’s clock is wrong. Unfortunately, no.

People who knew the clock was right – especially my husband – did point out my folly. What was I doing? Well, certainly not writing. The Muse clocks off at midnight. Sometimes I was typing poems, but nocturnal word processing is erratic. Once, during a conservation campaign, I sent the Highways Department a formal objection to the dangers of parked cats.

No, in the years following the Millennium, my fiftieth birthday and the deaths of my parents, I had, unfortunately acquired a mission. I decided that I had failed my poems. I had managed to write them, and steadfastly published them, but I had not tried hard enough to find them a wider audience in the great spaces Out There.

Living apart from other writers, and busy all day, my gateway to There was the computer screen, with a wealth of online magazines, the free fields of MySpace, and finally, and most fatally, Facebook. I think this dark beavering may indeed have helped the poetry. But it did not help my right leg.

Now, the cautionary tale. You do not have to be as stupid as I am to damage your circulation by sitting at a computer. Tesco’s Healthclub magazine, my preferred alternative to NHS Direct, warns that sitting at a computer without moving for 4 hours or more, as many office workers now do, can cause as much damage to veins as a long distance flight. Nettie the Nurse, the experienced and kindly sister at my busy GPs’ practice, tells me that sitting too long at computers is now a major cause of circulation problems. She recommends raising the legs slightly if possible. I need hardly point out that writers can be far more obsessive computer-users than officer workers. I fear that my activities would be easily matched by a novelist on the home run.

So: no cycling for two months, and no riding, although the pony is graciously accepting her buckets before wandering off to her field. I have written a little more. Mysteriously, I’ve read very little. But my new collection, “Singing in the Dark”, was published in February by Carcanet and has done its best to console me. It had an appreciative review in The Guardian on 8th March (available online at Guardian Unlimited; if you’d like to glance at it, please go to

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

and search for Alison Brackenbury).


Poems from “Singing in the Dark” have indeed gone Out There, into The Guardian and The Financial Times (poetry in the FT? excellent; hope that’s not why the stockmarket slumped). My moles poem also burrowed into the Glasgow Herald, who, I realise, have a daily poem online, which I recommend. It is at

http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/poetryblog

Do read it. Then get up, and go for a walk.

And what is the rest of the world doing on the Web? Here is my computer magazine’s introduction to a new game: “Guide the rocket through the cheese to help the lunar mice escape…” Best of luck, mice. Look out for your legs!

P.S. I had a marvellous time reading at the StAnza Poetry Festival at St Andrews. Do go, as reader or listener, if you ever have the chance. St Andrews has ice cream, kittiwakes and the warmest of welcomes. The poetry is pretty good too.

Finally, here is an almost-spring poem.

Lapwings


They were everywhere. No. Just God or smoke
Is that. They were the backdrop to the road,

My parents’ home, the heavy winter fields
From which they flashed and kindled and uprode

The air in dozens. I ignored them all.
“What are they?” “Oh – peewits – “ Then a hare flowed,

Bounded the furrows. Marriage. Child. I roamed
Round other farms. I only knew them gone

When, out of a sad winter, one returned.
I heard the high mocked cry “Pee – wit , “ so long

Cut dead. I watched it buckle from vast air
To lure hawks from its chicks. That time had gone.

Gravely, the parents bobbed their strip of stubble.
How had I let this green and purple pass?

Fringed, plumed heads (full name, the crested plover)
Fluttered. So crowned cranes stalk Kenyan grass.

Then their one child, their anxious care, came running,
Squeaked along each furrow, dauntless, daft.

Did I once know the story of their lives?
Do they migrate from Spain? Or coasts’ cold run?

And I forgot their massive arcs of wing.
When their raw cries swept over, my head spun

With all the brilliance of their black and white
As though you cracked the dark and found the sun.


Alison Brackenbury

(Published in Poetry London and in
Pendulum: The Poetry of Dreams
Ed. Deborah Gaye, Avalanche Books, 2007.
ISBN 978 1 874392 42 2)

Singing in Scotland

Singing in Scotland

“Singing in the Dark”, my new collection, is out on February 27th, and on March 15th, thanks to very kind timetabling by the StAnza festival organisers, I hope to do a reading in St Andrews.

Anyone studying the defects of British public transport could start by planning a journey from the West of England to Scotland in a limited time. Alas, I’m flying. In the last twelve years I have only made one other flight, which was to my daughter’s wedding. I am afraid this had more to do with income than principle, but I trust the planet’s chemistry won’t notice the difference.

So, March 15. 5 a m. Wake on daughter’s sofa in Bristol next to guinea pigs, Bubble and Squeak, slumbering in cage. Daughter (not a morning person) has loyally promised to abandon husband, guinea pigs and sleep to drive me to the airport. Plane from Bristol to Edinburgh (sorry, planet). Bus from Edinburgh to Inverkeithing. (Is there coffee still in Inverkeithing?) Train from Inverkeithing to Leuchars, (“the scenic route”). Taxi from Leuchars to St Andrews. 5 p m, do reading. Has a poet ever fallen asleep during their own reading? No, there’s always adrenalin. And caffeine.

I am reading with Michael Schmidt, so, in addition to having published my poems for 25 years, he can throw things at me if I sway too much while reading them. The Muse is never just. Michael, who I don’t think has ever kept a cat, has recently written one of the best cat poems I know. I hope he’ll read that.

The following poem is not based on my plans for the evening of March 15th at St Andrews.


Night out


Brahms? Yes, the story. While he was drinking
The door was kicked open, a girl crashed in
A man on her arm, a brooch on her shawl.

The first drink drained, she turned, in a rush,
Wheedled, “Herr Doktor, play something for us!”
It seemed, said the diarist, she knew Brahms quite well-

Flushed, Brahms bent to the untuned piano.
Notes flew in flocks, soft as doves, quick as sparrow,
While the girl swept the stranger through dance after dance.

How long would she last? A winter? A year?
Brahms had his honours, his pupils, his dear
Untouchable Clara, too heavy to dance.

Symphonies, lullabies, songs filled his days,
A whisper his nights. Give all to one glance,
Pound the dust’s dark piano, whirl dance after dance.


(First published in Stand; to be published in February in my seventh collection, Singing in the Dark, Carcanet.)