Sutton Park, and ‘Each Year I Forget’
BEFORE YOU READ ABOUTSutton Park, and ‘Each Year I Forget’,
Click here for my BOOK COVER DESIGN CHALLENGE
and give yourself a LAST CHANCE of winning a FREE copy of Paper Lanterns(CLOSING DATE: 31st December)
Anyone who’s visited this site over the last few weeks will have noticed that I’ve not been posting much since I started my Book Cover Design Challenge, not even a ‘Poem of the Week’ - I’ve been too busy responding to everyone who’s entered. I’ve been delighted by the amount of thinking time that people have given to the task of guessing which of the seven covers is my favourite, and/or telling me which they’ve liked best, and why.
I love this clear and sunny frosty weather – it’s one of the things I like about winter in England. I’m not so keen on dank and foggy days, though they can also have charm of their own, especially in the countryside.
In spite of living on the edge of the second largest conurbation in the UK, I don’t think of myself as a ‘townie’, and I’m lucky to have the second largest enclosed park in Europe on my doorstep, where I can roam at will through ancient woods and open heath lands.
These days, large areas of the countryside might look beautiful, but are often inaccessible to walkers. I often think kindly of Henry VIII who apparently gave this land to the people of Sutton Coldfield in perpetuity. (At least, that’s what I’ve been told, but I’ve just come across an excellent website that gives lots more detail of the history and geography of the park, together with pictures of its seven pools.)
This afternoon I went out with my camera, as I wanted to get a picture to illustrate the poem I’ve selected for December. Being a fine day and part of the holiday season, there were more people around than usual, but fortunately, most of them kept to the tarmac (car-free) roads, while I crunched across the frosty beech leaves on the narrow tracks through the woods.
Each Year I Forget
Each year I forget
the shape of twigs and branches
under froth of summer leaves.
October flaunts nostalgia
in scarlet woods
binding with spells of
yellow and orange light.
Don’t go, don’t go.
Each year December
surprises me again
as trunks of beeches
glow with their own green
and twigs crack open sky.
I wrote this several years ago – as you might have guessed, I love each of the four seasons as they come around, and although I’ve experienced several decades of them, I’m always surprised to find that I’d forgotten so much about the details of the pleasures they bring.
Fistula Charity, Dear Alice, and poem of the week (17)
What a lovely afternoon it’s been - even the weather cheered up for my long drive to Leicester on a very special occasion: it was the launch of yet another collection of poems by Alice Beer. I wouldn’t normally draw attention to a writer’s date of birth, but this information on the back is relevant to the content of “Window on the Square” :Alice Beer was born in Vienna in 1912, and moved toEngland in 1937. She lives in a flat in Leicester overlooking De Montfort Square
The other important statement on the back cover is:
ALL PROFIT FROM THE SALE OF THIS PAMPHLET
WILL BE DONATED TO HAMLIN FISTULA UK
If you don’t know about this life-destroying condition, (and even if you do) click here to find out more about this charity, and, for a very brief photo story of one young woman’s path to recovery, and a chance of having a normal life restored, click here.
I met Alice in August 1996 at my first residential poetry course with the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire, and, like many others who have fallen under her spell, have kept in touch ever since. This contact was easier to maintain because of the fortnightly poetry group, Soundswrite, that held its first meeting in 2000, and I was delighted to see that Alice also was joining this wonderful group.
If you’d like to find out more about Window on the Square, and support this very worthwhile charity, this book is available via the link to Alice’s web-page above, and also the link to Soundswrite.
One of the poems that were read this afternoon has helped me to decide which of my own will be Poem of the Week. Alice’s is called Puzzling, and recounts her sighting of a fox on three very different occasions . The most recent of these took place below her window on the square,
‘it trotted off,
not leisurely and not in a hurry, intent
on its own business and left me wondering
why I felt as if the clouds
had lifted on this dark December morning
a gift bestowed on me.’
I, too, am fascinated by the urban fox, and its parallel world –
Shifts
Monochrome foxcubs tumble on the lawn.
Sparrows and finches stir
and test their voices.
As day noses up behind next-door’s
privet hedge and sycamore
the cool earth yawns and calls.
Wet grass springs back after each footfall.
A tunnel strokes damp fur as cubs creep down
into their solid sleep.
Their dreams dissolve above them
and this house, a block of shadow
is rubbed out.
“Cracking On” and Poem of the Week (16)
In my latest post, I was talking about re-writing in general, and I mentioned a poetry blog site, How a Poem Happens, that had inspired and impressed me, and I’d intended to write in more detail about this today – But this has been a great week for poetry and that’s now going to have to wait a day or two, as I’m too excited about a package that was delivered by Royal Mail on Friday: I received my own ‘contributor’s’ copy of a wonderful anthology, ‘Cracking On’, in which I’m immensely privileged to have two of my own poems.
It’s edited by Joy Howard, of Grey Hen Press, and this short extract (below) from the Foreword by Guardian writer, Michele Hanson, will give you some idea of why you might want to take a look inside!
“ Outrage is easier for me, but that is here too, particularly in Mind the Gap, which challenges the young head on, rather than fading out quietly and letting them, and everyone else, continue to believe that youth is everything and old age is nothing much at all. Unrepentant, unapologetic, brave, confident and beautiful, these poems show that we older women deserve to live as full and rich a life as any other generation. And the nearer we get to the end, through Sick and Tired, Nearly There and into the Departure Lounge, the braver we get. Or at least these poets do. For those of us who are scared stiff, then these poems can help us through it.”
I’ve not yet had time to do more than dip into a few of these, and what struck me at once was how fresh and unusual these poems are, and how rarely I’ve come across any poems that deal with aging at all, let alone ones which, as Penelope Shuttle is quoted as saying, are ‘Electric, formidable, challenging, witty, sombre, enduring, heart-felt, tender, reflective, valedictory poems.’
No wonder I feel privileged to be among this company! One of mine, (Legacy)has already appeared in a previous post, so this Poem of the Week is the other one from Cracking On.
First Born
For my mother
My other dead are setting out to greet me,
their sprawling years
weighing them down like clay
but your compacted life, each heartbeat
counted, speeds towards me
light as a bird.
When my time comes, I’ll skim across the waves,
follow the scent of that girl pacing the deck,
Suez, Gulf of Arabia, Indian Ocean.
I’ll be that self once more under the peepul tree
as I lick the tip of thread for the needle’s eye,
stitch the final daisy on your gown.
I won’t know, yet, the cataclysm of
that love, the danger of giving
too much too soon.
My hands will cup the tautened belly, catch
the undulations of your limbs
against my palms.
I’ll mould my lips into the secret smile,
recover that sense of wonder - the key
to heaven. They’ll let me in.
This might seem a bit confusing to some readers if they don’t realise that the ‘I’ of the poem is my mother, and the ‘you’ is her first born child, the one referred to towards the end of ‘Legacy’ as ‘our long-dead brother’.
The journey through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean in this poem was made by my mother as a young woman, travelling out to India to marry my father, who was in the army out there during the war. Throughout our childhood,our oldest brother, who only lived for about three days, was regularly mentioned in night-time prayers.
It was only when I became a mother myself, that I started to realise what a tragedy that baby’s death would have been.
Mothers, Daughters, Dublin and Poem of the week (13)
It’s a funny thing, looking back at poems I’ve written several years ago. The poem of this week is one I wrote for my daughter, and now reading it again I find that it’s the secondary theme of this poem that strikes me first.
Both my ‘children’ now live in London, and I always look forward to their visits home. This weekend, it was my daughter who came with her boyfriend. There were a couple of things on their itinerary which we managed to achieve on Saturday – the first was a guided tour of her dad’s allotment.
It was several months since I’d been down there and I was overwhelmed by the amount of vegetables still thriving and demanding to be harvested. Of course, I knew about these, as he’d been bringing samples of them home for supper week after week.
The other was on the request of daughter and boyfriend: a trip to Imran’s in Birmingham’s Balti Belt. It was getting on for two years since we’d been there and it was even better than we’d remembered. I was glad that the honour of Brum was upheld!
So where does Dublin come in to this? It’s not even mentioned in the poem below. Daughter and boyfriend have been together for two years now, and the poem dates from about six years ago. This is a mother and daughter poem, so yes, it is about her, but it has a more general significance, in that it’s about the state of being in love. She looked so glowing with happiness when she arrived that it brought it all back to me (but not, I hasten to add, the previous cause of her joy) .
Take a look at the poem now, and if I tell you that I was at Trinity College in Dublin, and met my husband there, you might get the Dublin connection.
That Place
She’s a sunlamp! Her voice on the phone
emits a radiance that fills the hollow space
behind my breastbone, filters down
to where she used to prod and ripple
under my skin, strange little engine,
humming and growing.
Now, if I should touch the screen
when I download her emails
they’d scorch my hand.
I go to meet her at the station
and people step aside to let her pass
as if she’s ringed with flame.
My headlights seem redundant -
it’s her eyes triggering
the cats’ eyes on the road.
Her words are morsels of joy that she
feeds me like crystallized ginger
or Turkish Delight.
She’s reached that place I visited
so long ago I’d quite forgotten
how I used to tuck my left hand
in the small, back left-hand pocket of his
Levi’s as we trod the air
an inch above the pavement
and my heart, a supernova,
flaunted itself on my face with such dazzle
that passers-by would flinch and shield their eyes.
Unlike some of my other poems, there’s nothing in this one that I’d want to change. It’s also a good one to read aloud and I find that most people who hear it seem to be moved by it.(It’s funny how little things like a back pockets of a pair of Levis can be forgotten for years, and then make such an impact when they suddenly surface.) Ah, youth!
Making Changes and Poem of the Week (12)
Like most things in my life, I only get round to making a major change when I’m more or less forced into it by some outside intervention. In this case, it was having double-glazing installed in my lovely little writing room – not just the door and the big window overlooking the garden but also the French windows that we’d never opened in the twenty years since having this room added to the back of the house.
So most of today and all yesterday, I’ve been rearranging everything in this room. It opens onto the garden and is full of light on sunny days, so, with the doors and windows open it almost felt like being outside.
I hadn’t realised quite how long this would take me, and once I’d piled up all my books from the three bookcases onto the floor and every other available surface, I had to carry on. And it wasn’t just the books. The knee-hole desk I’m sitting at now has nine small drawers, and the tiny table I was using as a desk , also has a drawer, and then I’ve got a large carved camphor wood chest, and all these were crammed with accumulated papers and other odds and ends that had to be sifted and sorted.
I feel very pleased with myself now that it’s all finished, but I do regret not being able to catch up on other things I wanted to do, such as writing a post about R.J.Ellory’s inspiring talk to Bookcrossers on Friday night at Hudson’s – but that will have to wait.
Meanwhile, here’s my poem of the week:
Preservation
His mother’s fur coat sleeps under their bed.
Each night she listens as another stitch
that binds those skins together snaps.
There’s barely room to navigate the back-log
of newsprint, stacked on the carpet
like dry-stone walls.
Beneath a camouflage of photo frames
and bric-a-brac, the clenched piano
chokes on silent chords.
One winter, on the edge of Lovers’ Leap
He’d lectured her on limestone crags,
fossils of crinoids from aeons ago.
To her delight, she’s found them on the net,
sea-lilies, feather stars, swaying
and feeding in tropical seas.
Now sun slants in between the blinds
jostles motes of dust, and something
like a boulder is worked loose.
This is a poem that I first wrote at least seven years ago and was published in my small collection, Single Travellers. In spite of it also winning a place in the Ragged Raven Anthology, Writing on Water, (2005) I’d never been quite satisfied by that version (see below) so I’ve spent the last hour chopping and changing it. At the moment, I think this version is more effective, but when I read it again tomorrow,
I’m very likely to want to make other changes. (I’ve just read it again, and am not sure what I think now!)
I’d be very interested in your comments about these two versions.
Preservation
There’s barely room to navigate the decades of newsprint,
calcified narratives stacked on the carpet like
dry-stone walls. Does he believe
they can shore up the present? Beneath accretions of
photos and bric-a-brac, the clenched piano
is choking back old tunes.
Her mother-in-law’s fur coat sleeps under their bed.
At night, lying above those stitched-together
skins, she feels them stir.
Years back, on the edge of Lovers’ Leap, he
told her about limestone crags, billions of
fossils from aeons ago.
Now she’s found them on the net, sea-lilies,
feather stars, swaying and feeding in tropical seas.
All that life!
Sun edges in through smears of condensation,
its slanting shafts jostled with motes of…dust, is it?
or particles of
something more ingrained, intangible,
worked loose at last
from the boulder in her throat
Planting Words, Fuchsias, & Poem of the Week, 10
In recent years, the sheltered patio in my south-facing back garden has been dominated by large terracotta pots of leafy fuchsia plants. As with onions, my gardening husband has a tendency towards excessive zeal when it comes to growing things.Unfortunately, it’s usually September before the flowers show themselves in their full glory – by which time, I’m back at work.
In spite of my return to work last week, I’ve still made time to browse through more book/writing-blogs. I particularly liked the title of Fiona Robyn’s writer-and-reader’s blog for the way it connects writing to gardening – it’s also interesting in its own right.
As this is the time of year I tend to associate with the delicate drooping heads of red, pink, and mauve, I didn’t have to think too hard about my selection of the Poem of the Week. 
THE VISITORS
The Head, who is not fond children,
has chosen for his office the small round room
at the top of the tower, where he cannot hear
the shrill recitations of tables or psalms or
into the valley of death rode the six-hundred.
He has no time for fairy tales and never wonders
about Rapunzel or the Lady of Shallott.
Few people know that he was married once.
His passion is fuchsias.
Not the wild Cuchulain’s Blood
that flaunts its riots of scarlet tassels
by the winding roads of Galway,
the simple flowers his wife had craved
in memory of home. The ones he cultivates
are petticoated mauve, or pink and lilac,
veined in purple – plants that he
can grow in pots and regulate
by pinching out their early shoots.
He’ll tell you that he never dreams at night.
The closest that he lets his own mind drift
into that shifting region at the back of the north wind,
is when, after the final bell, his room in the tower
is the only one in the echoing school with a living soul,
and he fills his head with pictures of his hothouse
crammed with cuttings from his favourites, his darlings.
When he sees the first faint lines on his curved white wall
he thinks they’re cobwebs, tries to wipe them off
but they grow bolder. Scrawl themselves in tendrils,
stems, leaves, petals, calling out their names:
Fairy Cheeses, Cluckweed, Boneset, Larkspur,
Tetterwort, Clockdindle, Ripple Grass.
Rooted to the rug, he blocks his ears against the chanting:
Beggars Button, Cushy Cow, Rags and Tatters,
Foxes Cloat. Then colour emerges, and texture
and the smell of waste ground and damp woods.
Bad Man’s Oatmeal, Eldrum, Devil’s Milk.
As earth begins to fill his shoes
he shakes them off and stumbles to the door.
Kathleen, Kathleen, Kathleen
I wrote this a few years ago (2005?) when I and a few other local poets* were invited to take part in a project at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. We went round the different art exhibitions, absorbing the pictures and the atmospheres they created.
*I can’t lay my hand right now on the names of some of the other poets and artists, so instead of leaving anyone unmentioned, I’ll include them all in a later post.
The picture shows the exterior of the Ikon Gallery itself. I was intrigued to learn that it had started life as a school for deprived children, and that the room at the top of the tower was actually the Headmaster’s office.
Inside this small room with its rounded walls, there were raised beds of earth, filled with samples of weeds and wild flowers, while in a different part of the building, there was a complete data base of all the common names for these plants.
I couldn’t resist those wonderful names – and the mini-story-poem took shape.
It was published in 2006 in The White Car, the eighth anthology of poetry from Ragged Raven Press
Kew Gardens and poem of the week 6
I’ve always loved trees so a visit to Kew Gardens in glorious sunshine this Saturday was real treat for my birthday - even more so as we were able to walk there from our daughter and boyfriend’s new house, just a minute’s walk from the Thames. Better still, our son, who also lives in London, joined us for the weekend.
I’d looked it up on the website beforehand and was very excited to see that there was a tree-top walkway, over eighteen metres high.
I was surprised by how low the river was on our walk towards Kew, with a ‘beach’ of grey mud and stones. On our return, the water had been splashing over the path, and the whole atmosphere had changed.
This morning I went for a jog along the river before the others had woken, and the warm air was full of jasmine and buddleia.
This was the cue for selecting my Poem of the Week:
Lady of Shalott
I can forget the mirror sometimes
pretend I’m out there
strolling in the meadow by the river
Not looking straight at things is bad enough
not touching’s worse
I close my eyes and use my sense of smell
to measure seasons
Clods of mud release hints of
earthworm slither
fat white roots of grass and scarlet dreams
of dormant poppy seeds
I play the rain’s aroma like a scale
to harmonise with notes of mistletoe
fungus, moss and winter apple trees
When I catch the tremulous warm
breath of hibernating dormice
I leave my needle with its crimson thread
dangling from a ray of setting sun
in yet another landscape
curl up against the cushions and
adjust my breathing to that slow rhythm
but when summer’s sticky fragrance spills
into my rounded room
honeysuckle, lilies, buddleia
juice of cut grass, ripe corn, all
cling in my throat. It’s then
I quicken clammy fingertips
across the mirror’s face
I wrote this poem about seven years ago. I’m usually very visual in my use of images when writing poetry, and this time I was experimenting with using a different sense. I remember that I enjoyed ‘getting into’ the character of someone who can only experience the world from a distance , and I enjoyed focussing on all the different seasons, particularly summer.
Reading it now after all those years, I think that it expressed what I was trying to say then, but I don’t rate it very highly as a poem in its own right and I now find it a bit sentimental. I wouldn’t want to change any of it though - it exists as a part of my past.
At Athens Airport: Poem of the week (2)
Sunday is now my day for posting one of my poems. As I said last week, I might not feel the same about some of my poems as I did when I wrote them, but they’re part of my writing history.
Here’s this week’s offering - a poem from 2002: (I’ll explain below a little about what inspired it, and what I think about it now.)
AT ATHENS AIRPORT
White has a different meaning
underground. More so in that hollow time
before thin hours swell to daybreak.
If this mile-long corridor held stores of words
blank walls would be awash with abstracts -
detachment, dislocation, distance.
Single travellers seem to cast no shadow -
landing, they’ll brace themselves,
not against the jolt of wheels on tarmac,
but the delicate reintegration of self to self.
******
A wall of plate-glass holds the heat at bay.
Light waves stream through, skid to a halt
on marble tiles. The floor’s a lake, the way
it draws down smudged blue lines from strip-lights
and dark Aegean blue of check-in counters,
sky-blue monitors floating below them.
I’m trying to label blue I’ve left behind.
Shutters opening on white walls are easy
but sea defeats me – flash of kingfisher,
a peacock’s eye, can’t catch that shade between
taste of spearmint and smell of eucalyptus.
Blue fades so fast. How will I keep it?
******
Voices. Man and wife, an awkward wall
around their son. Squat wheels skew out
under luggage. In the marble lake
a creature stirs. The boy treads ice,
hand on his father’s arm until bare calves
make contact with my bench.
Eyeballs swivel like a startled horse.
See nothing. The mother’s words
like fingers on his face, We won’t be long.
You sure you’ll be all right?
Does he know there’s someone beside him?
He’s fumbling a remembered blanket
rocking his body like a metronome. My hands
lie clammy on my lap, veins like blue worms.
The usual offering won’t help me now, the smile,
the nod, that gives me haven in eyes of strangers.
Blue’s just a name for certain waves of light.
*********************************
It’s a strange experience to re-read some of my own poems that were written several years ago. A bit like suddenly coming across a photo of my younger self, and realising that I’ve moved on since then - that not only do I look different, but that I think about, and understand, the world from a different vantage point.
Reading this poem again just now, has reminded me more about the struggle that I had when writing it, than the thoughts and emotions that inspired it, and that I was attempting to convey.
And now I can see that that’s what’s wrong with it! The effort is too apparent - I was trying too hard to pin down with absolute precision my feelings about everything I was experiencing - every sight and sound had to be described in detail, and this, I now realise, has dissipated the emotion in too much ‘thinking’, too many words.
I’m still pleased with several parts of each section, but that’s not enough – by focussing too much on individual ‘trees’ I’ve (at least partly) lost sight of the wood in its entirety.
I’m somtimes asked if I find it difficult to switch from writing a novel to writing poetry, and although at the time I wasn’t aware of it, it could be that I was in ‘novel-writing’ mode when I wrote this poem.
(It wouldn’t be surprising, because I was also spending a lot of my time on The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society)
I don’t really need to give any more background to the poem itself, apart from saying that it came from my experience of spending the night at Athens Airport. I was on my way back from another wonderful writing course at Kithera, in June 2002, this time led by Crysse Morrison – an inspiring tutor, poet, performer and author of two enthralling novels.
Heidi the cat and the first ‘poem of the week’
Our extremely large and heavy tabby cat, Heidi, is curled up on a cushion on my lap, purring like an engine. Without the cushion, I’d be at risk from her long claws – the slightest sound of footsteps in the kitchen, and she’ll be digging her claws through my thin summer skirt as she hurls herself halfway across the floor and out of the door with the speed and agility of a much smaller, lighter creature, determined to greet the real love of her life, my husband.
Now that she’s stopped gazing up at me, asking for her head to be rubbed, and appears to be asleep, I can get on with my Writing Matters. I’ve been finding it strangely helpful to look back on the various stages of my writing ‘career’ over the last 25 years. Reflecting on the pattern of my ‘two-steps-forwards-one-step-back’ journey, confirms for me what I already (partly) knew – persistence is even more essential when times are difficult, and, you never can tell what’s round the corner.
Although at the end of my last post, I said that I’d be talking about novel writing and the events leading up to the publication of my book, I’ve let myself be side-tracked to my other passion: poetry. At Erdington Library last Wednesday, I was being asked lots of questions about my poems, and I’ve just been browsing through some older files on my computer, and my small collection, Single Travellers; Flarestack 2004 –there’s a story behind that, and I’ll come to it sooner or later.
I’ve dabbled in writing poetry since I was a child, but it wasn’t till my Arvon Course at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire that I ‘came out’ as a poet.(see my post: an Arvon Course and a Poetry Prize….)
I think that some of these poems have stood the test of time and ‘work’ on me the way they did when I wrote them – others, are just not ‘me’ anymore. I probably wouldn’t write those poems in that way these days - my circumstances are different, and I’ve developed some different techniques, but they’re part of my writing history.
So I’ve decided to start a new category, ‘Poem of the Week’ where I’ll give an airing to some of my poems, old and new. I’ll aim for doing this every Sunday. I expect this’ll be a fairly random selection, based on something in my day or week that’s triggered a memory of the poem itself, or the experience that led to it, or simply because it seems in keeping with the weather or season.
This is a fairly recent poem, inspired by a wonderful creative writing course, led by Mimi Khalvati in Crete in June last year. I was delighted when it was selected by Penelope Shuttle for inclusion in the second edition of ArtemisPoetry, published this May.
In this hot weather, I’ve thought about that beautiful place, and how grateful I was for the patches of shade on a long walk up the mountain side.
Climbing to Livaniana
I thank the hands
that balanced
these small cairns
at each turn of the track
and the owners
of the olive trees
for their caves of shade
and those who tend
the hairy goats
for ripples of wind-chimes
in this airless heat
not forgetting
the keeper of the bees
that stream from their
white hives
each morning
to graze the purple
cushions of thyme
and I thank the thyme
for its crushed scent
the way it nudges
against something
I can almost
open
