It’s a great pleasure to introduce my guest poet Judith Wilkinson. Judith and I are both members of the Groningen Stanza. It had been meeting through Zoom for over a year, and in March I went up to meet her and the other members in person.

Judith Wilkinson is a British poet and award-winning translator, living in Groningen, the Netherlands. She has published three collections of her own poetry with Shoestring Press: Tightrope Dancer (2010), Canyon Journey (2016) and In Desert (2021). Some of the poems in Tightrope Dancer have been performed by the London dance-theatre company The Kosh.

Wilkinson is also a translator of Dutch and Flemish poetry, including Toon Tellegen’s Raptors (Carcanet Press 2011), which was awarded the Popescu Prize for European poetry in translation. Other awards include the Brockway Prize and the David Reid Translation Prize.

The poems in this selection are from In Desert, which explores various desert experiences, solitary journeys in which people are thrown back on their own resources. ‘The Risks You Take’ and ‘The Tuareg’s Journey’ form part of a longer sequence inspired by a Dutch expedition through the Sahara.

IMAGINING GEORGIA O’KEEFFE AT HER GHOST RANCH

‘My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.’
(Georgia O’Keeffe)

I will never tire of the desert,
its severe hillsides, punctuated with mesquite,
its unsentimental trees, shrouded in dust.

Now that he has left me for another,
a few owls and a mourning dove are all that splinter the silence
spreading before me like a horizon.

I don’t need more mourning, I want to
walk across the bristly desert floor
that the ocean turned into,
arrange some black stones in my yard
into a cordate shape I’ll call My Heart.

I was shipwrecked here a few times in my life
and found restoration
under a pitiless sky.
Having let all the waters pour away,
the desert unwrapped me, and my flint faith,
bound to the Badlands rolling from my door.

I set my easel in plains of cinnabar and flax
so I can explore the palette of solitude,
capture mandarin-dusted mountains, staggered against sky,
cliffs isolated in space, rising from the plateaux
in banana and persimmon and cream,
undulating mounds striated with celadon
and a lavender mist coating the distance.

Every day I scour the ground for fossil seashells,
little definite ghost-houses,
air-havens I could live in.

I’m free to gather the bleached bones of the desert:
deer horn, horse’s pelvis, ram’s skull,
splaying them open like butterflies,
dipping them in bouquets of wildflowers,
suspending them above the ever-looming Pedernal.

This morning I trekked far into the Black Place
because I could, because it was difficult,
because fear and pain were expecting me.

When I got back
I grabbed the ladder by the shed
and leaned it against the evening sky.
It needed nothing.

THE RISKS YOU TAKE

‘The true contemplative is he who has risked his mind in the desert.’ (Thomas Merton, Letter to Dom Francis Decroix)

Can I extract myself from you?
Someone called you
a few degrees short of bipolar,
always urgent, pouncing on life,
difficult not to love.

When depression settles on you,
you travel beyond reach, going far out
to some rocky, arid place, peopled by spectres
and you stay there, stubbornly
studying them, letting them haunt you,
before coming back to tell the tale
that restores you to your life.

There is so much of you,
that you crowd out my patch of wilderness,
that space where I too risk my mind
for the sake of the inexplicable.

After months of turbulence
I’m regaining some composure,
breathing in what the desert offers –
although I’m not sure I want all my prayers to go
to the gods of serenity.

Absorbing this swathe of wilderness,
I wonder if this is what I want for myself,
the wide, wild courage to leave you,
your tempests, your risks

THE TUAREG’S JOURNEY

Lost, not lost, in the ténéré, desert of loneliness,
where the Kel Essuf
spook us till we’re adrift
on the empty side of home,
as time sifts, dunes lapse.

Without GPS, without coordinates,
we measure grass blades, we focus without a compass.
With an infinite politeness to the desert
we can tell a reliable groove in the sand
from a wind-distorted one,
extract logic from a shrub,
tell the lie of the land by a bloom’s impermanence,
take our direction from sun and moon and all the stars
constellated in our heads.

We will never find Gewas, the Lost Oasis,
we will always find Gewas
in the middle of the trackless ténéré.

Lost and not lost,
so lost that we’re at home

Note: Kel Essuf: anthropomorphic spirits; Ténéré: Tuareg word for desert, wilderness; Gewas: the Lost Oasis that figures in many Tuareg legends.

THE WHOLE MOSAIC – A DAY IN THE ATACAMA DESERT

‘Why are there archaeologists and astronomers in one place? Because in the Atacama the past is more accessible than elsewhere.’ Patricio Guzmán, Nostalgia for the Light (film documentary)

At the observatory an astronomer
scans the sky for treasure:
clusters of stars, nebulas, planets,
comets like those that watered the earth,
or the death throes of a supernova,
hatching our atoms.
Here the Chilean sky is so translucent
he can almost finger the stars, pull them down
to eye-height, unravel the energy prizing them apart,
as if the story, from start to finish,
was his birthright.

In this salt-steeped land an archaeologist
studies strata of sand and rock
underpinned by meteorites
distorting the direction of his compass.
Tenacity got him this far, leading him
to rock face carved by pre-Columbian shepherds,
whose mummified remains he gathers up,
tracing each part to its origin.
He finds a petrified lake, fish frozen in time,
and an ancient trade route from the high plains to the sea,
where caravans of llamas once found their way.

Near the ruins of a concentration camp, women
sift through the desert, decade after decade,
in search of loved ones.
Stumbling on Pinochet’s mass graves,
they piece together splinters worlds apart,
bleached by the calcinating sun.
‘I found a piece of my brother there
and spent a morning with his foot,
stroking it, though it smelled of decay,
hoping to find the whole mosaic
that was my brother.’