The day after my birthday I travelled back home and saw St. Agatha’s church from the train. That brought back memories of the poem – a competition winner some years ago.
This too is art
Mondays, washing days. Heaving sheets from one tub through the mangle into another tub on a wooden stand. Hands placing them, spacing them on a plastic line. This is street art where the westerly wind coming in from the beach takes the plumes from the iron works’ chimneys, lets them pass through this small town – a station, hospital, three churches. Tiny spots mounted on white sheets, black dots like bugs, the yellow eggs of unknown insects. This is smoke art, chimney stack art landing on roofs, window sills and the steps of St Agatha.
This coming week it’s my birthday. I’m taking family out to lunch near where I was born: a lovely bistro near the water. Here is a poem that I wrote on an excellent workshop with the poet Kei Miller.
My name
Even in the Netherlands my name is rare. It comes from the Northern provinces, a bleak windy place near the sea, near Germany.
People of the North grow tall to stand up to gales that whistle, across bare fields, into your face. A name so rare it’s not in the book of names.
I inherited this name from a grandmother who was often ill to spite her husband. I heard him shout behind the shop in a town
named after the beaver. Beavers on the façade of the vegetable canning factory, the foundry roof. My name means strong like the teeth of a beaver.
No, it doesn’t. I wish it did. Most children born just after the war had bad teeth because of the hunger winter: eating tulip bulbs to survive.
I wish I was named after the beaver, or the giraffe, an animal strong enough to shatter a lion’s skull with a single blow of its hooves.
In Dutch my name means people, folk or even battle folk. My grandmother died at 55. I’m beyond that age. I am an animal after all.
A poem that has two fathers in it, with a photo of the actual building.
When Sunday is not a day of rest
Two narrow wooden benches form the arena. Both gladiators enter through the main left door. The one with the brown perm has an entourage: three boys (one with red hair), a girl with braces, and the eldest son with glasses, the creepy smile inherited from his father, a businessman with butter in his mouth who happens to be our uncle. As church elder, he’ll collect in the interval, holds out a long wooden pole with black velvet bag. Both gladiators buy at Stoutebeek, the town’s upmarket department store.
Our gladiator has better legs, better posture, a striking hat, which makes up for just three of us. She is a semi-professional singer. Our gladiator chose to marry the controller of church proceedings – the organist. Outside, afterwards, the light ammunition of smiles, air kisses and compliments.
To celebrate my friend Kathleen Kummer’s 94th birthday, here is a poem from her debut collection Living below sea level. Poems from the book have featured on the blog before. The cover image is by Shirley Smith, Society of Wood Engravers.
Kathleen’s father was a coal miner. She went to Cambridge to study Modern Languages. She met and married a Dutchman. For several years Kathleen taught French and German at an International School in The Netherlands.
Happy Birthday, Kathleen: Van harte gefeliciteerd met je verjaardag.
The best years of our lives
Passing under the neo-Gothic redbrick arch, the original bluestockings? Not quite, but close enough to be given the run of the Fellows’ drawing room to sip our pre-prandial sherry, held in hands we remembered curled for warmth round mugs of cocoa. The cold tiles loud with echoes, we followed the murky passage to Hall, the swimming-pool’s proximity still worrying, potent with the imagined smell of bleach. The dinner was, as expected, reassuringly bad; the rooms were bleak, the unfamiliar duvets thin, cot-sized; resilience was needed for the nocturnal trek to the bathroom. But none of this detracted one jot from the utter, heartfelt certainty that those had been the best years of our lives.
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.
Credit: Ondrej Sponiar via Pixabay
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.’
It’s an enormous pleasure to introduce our guest poet. Safia and I met on a Poetry Business workshop a few years ago.
Safia Khan is a newly qualified doctor and poet. Her debut pamphlet (Too Much Mirch, Smith | Doorstop) won the 2021 New Poet’s Prize. Safia’s full biography can be found below her stunning poems.
Dave
Let’s discharge him today. We’re wasting a bed keeping him here, I know a lost cause when I see one.
No need to biopsy, it’s clearly end-stage. Sadly, not much we can do at this point, best to discharge him today.
He’s asked, but don’t bother with a referral to Addiction Services – he won’t engage. Trust me, I know a lost cause when I see one.
Before you book his cab, tell him he needs to break the cycle. Record it, otherwise we can’t discharge him today.
His notes say no fixed abode. He mentioned a daughter. I doubt she’ll take him in this state, that’s a lost cause if I’ve ever seen one.
Social services have called twice now. The daughter asked why she wasn’t contacted. I said they told me to discharge him, they knew a lost cause when they saw one.
On Placement
I donned mask, visor, and apron, washed my hands the right way,
correctly identified an osteophyte at the acromioclavicular joint,
imagined the right diagnosis, asserted the wrong ones,
was humbled like pines after avalanche, inspected behind the curtain,
tried not to register relief when hers looked like mine,
translated incorrectly, blamed my parents for speaking English in the house.
I donned mask, visor, and apron, washed my hands the right way,
noted an antibiotic prescription for a young wife’s sudden death,
and a son’s hanging decades later, ate fish and chips during a discussion
on seven-year old M, presenting with pain down there (by his cousin),
taken into care after being removed for witnessing Mum’s self-immolation.
After, I wiped the mushy peas from my mouth.
I donned mask, visor, and apron, washed my hands the right way,
vaccinated death in a red dressing gown, touched its eggshell, auscultated its yolk.
I have heard ghosts blooming like spring mist through my stethoscope.
River (After Selima Hill)
Other people’s mothers shout at them in public, I cry in the car on the way back from dinner. Other people’s mothers don’t cremate their daughters with a look. My mother opens like the seed of a tree.
I am sorry, she says. You are right. But other people’s mothers had the chance to be daughters. Other people’s mothers were softened by rivers. I had to be bedrock all my life.
I am sorry you can feel silt in my love, but know you are water to me. Wherever you run I’ll run under you, holding the current like no one else can.
But where are you really from?
Clay. A shapeshifting clot of blood. A kernel inside the first shell- breath of God. Primordial soup, reduced to its atoms after being brought to boil. The same place as the stars and birds, where everything that ever existed was wrapped in tin foil and microwaved into being. An iron ballerina, pirouetting round the Sun and sweating out the Oceans. Mountains formed in an ice tray mould. A patch of grass that drifted from elsewhere. A patch of grass still drifting. Like a refugee with amnesia, I cannot recall home, though once in a while, I catch its fragrance on the wind.
Biography:
Safia Khan is a newly qualified doctor and poet. Her debut pamphlet (Too Much Mirch, Smith | Doorstop) won the 2021 New Poet’s Prize. Her work has been published in various journals and anthologies including The North, BATH MAGG, Poetry Wales, Introduction X: The Poetry Business Book of New Poets (New Poets List), We’re All in It Together: Poems for a disUnited Kingdom (Grist), Dear Life (Hive), Surfing the Twilight (Hive).
She has been commissioned to write poetry for the University of Huddersfield and The British Library. Safia has performed her work widely, including as a headliner for Off The Shelf Festival. She has delivered poetry workshops for The Poetry Business, and seminars for the University of Oxford on the role of poetry as patient advocacy. Safia has been invited to deliver a creative writing teaching series with Nottingham Trent University’s WRAP Program, as their featured writer for 2023.
refugee with amnesia, I cannot recall home, though once in a while, I catch its fragrance on the wind.
Contrapasso is the title of the debut collection of Alexandra Fössinger. She is of Italian origin and currently lives in Northern Germany. She writes mostly in English. Many of the poems included have been previously published in the UK and elsewhere, in magazines such as Tears in the Fence, The High Window, The Journal. The cover design – a black bird against a stark white background – is by Daniel Lambert, Art Director of Cephalopress, established in 2018, providing ‘a voice for the marginalised and the voiceless’.
I do not know the author, though I attended her online reading with Q&A. There she explained the background to the poems: her attempt at survival ‘after the imprisonment in the UK of someone dear to me’. This sudden loss may, in part, have coincided with the pandemic and its lockdowns: creating an incarceration for the poet too.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, contrapasso is the punishment of souls by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself. The collection is in two parts, both preceded by a quotation from Dante’s Inferno. Part 1 covers the period of imprisonment, while poems in Part 2 were written after the person’s release.
Birds for someone who cannot hear is the title of the opening poem and birds appear throughout the collection, as messengers, omens, and symbols: the blackbird frozen in shock, the thrushes in hiding, along with magpies, sparrows, sky larks, great tit, kingfishers, herons, seabirds. The second poem is titled Cell, giving us just the bare numbers: 1, 5, 3, 4, 7, 1, and ending: bad luck has brought and kept you here, and whether you’ll walk out or be carried in a coffin is also entirely a matter of chance.
The poems are the author’s response to the sudden loss, despair, darkness, pain. Wehave no life apart from life apart (Sentence); How can I find dreams of oarweed and eelgrass, / bring currents to glide on, as I must, when half / of my body is entangled / on thewrong side of the sea, / how will I know when time says to dive? (Velut luna).
Fössinger has said that she ‘is mostly interested in the spaces between things, the tiny shifts in time, the overlooked, the unsaid.’ Throughout the collection, we find astute observations and statements: la vita assurda: the middle-aged couple / pushing their dog in a pram. (July); that emptiness is best hidden / by a display of tame beauty. (Ambulant).
The strongest poems are those which describe a specific situation, or which have objects as ‘animate scaffold’. The poem Ambulant is in two parts: I The house with the Christmas decoration, and the magnolia tree in bloom, and the blackbird frozen in shock, and an ambulance parked in the front garden, all stand completely still. People walk by, averting their gaze, a stoop hammered into their skin – How many lives will they have lost before, without ever noticing. The orange light is beating on the windows like rain.
Here is Fössinger’s close attention to the overlooked, effective personification, interesting use of language. Not all the poems are so securely grounded, sometimes abstraction obscures their meaning. Other poems would have benefited from being tighter, shorter. The book is a short collection of 31 poems with quite a few blank pages. Some readers might want ‘more poems’ for their ‘pounds’.
While the poems reflect the poet’s emotional and psychological response to loss and separation, she manages to maintain a careful balance: hope is not abandoned. The recurrent bird theme also provides a framework, an underlying structure. This theme returns in the short closing poem, The robin redbreast. The loved one appears in a dream, as tiny as a bird, and:
Then you grew a beak with which to pick and sing and transport worms and roses.
Contrapasso is a confident and authentic debut by a perceptive, astute poet. Her personal tale finds echoes in the reader’s universal story. However long and painful the journey, there can be closure and transformation.
This coming Tuesday it’s Valentine’s Day. Here is an early poem that hasn’t featured on the blog before. It was published in the Tees Valley Writer, Autumn 1995, and Highly Commended in their annual competition.
On the beach
Against the sinking sun gulls ride the waves. Our dogs bark and chase their tails. Try to run with a lone jogger who braves
the east wind whistling. Your son trails in your wake, attempts big steps. Laughter peals: a scene lifted straight from some fairy tale.
Heaped grey boulders mimic a colony of seals. Not long before love winters in my heart. I need to tell you how it feels
to be together, yet growing apart. Your craggy face seems so much older clouded in a bluish hue. I brace myself to start
as you place a hand on my shoulder but all I can say is It’s getting colder.
A Christmas Day poem with my best wishes for the day and with my thanks to Matthew Stewart. In his pamphlet Tasting Notes (Happenstance Press) he pairs poems with notes about the Zaleo wines from Extremadura, a region with several UNESCO heritage sites.
Food Match
It glistens on the wooden stand, a black trotter pointed upwards as if offering a hoofprint. Now cut a slice so thin that steel is visible below the meat.
Place it across your tongue and wait for the marbled fat to melt. Sip un vino tinto. The tannin grips, hugging the ham — both of them start, suddenly, to magnify.
Credit: GerardBarcelona, on Pixabay
Biography:
Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex. His second full collection is due from HappenStance Press in November 2023.
There are a few copies left of Tasting Notes. Contact Matthew direct via social media.
It is a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Tania Hershman. I met Tania a few years ago when I attended a series of workshops she gave on flash fiction. She is a generous, inspiring tutor. I have chosen four different poems from her new collection.
Tania Hershman’s second poetry collection, Still Life with Octopus, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2022, and her debut novel, Go On, a hybrid “fictional-memoir-in-collage” will be published by Broken Sleep Books on 17 November 2022. Her poetry pamphlet,How High Did She Fly, was joint winner of Live Canon’s 2019 Poetry Pamphlet Competition and her hybrid particle-physics-inspired book ‘and what if we were all allowed to disappear’ was published by Guillemot Press in March 2020.
Tania is also the author of a poetry collection, a poetry chapbook and three short story collections, and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is co-creator of the @OnThisDayShe Twitter account, co-author of the On This Day She book (John Blake, 2021), and has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics. As writer-in-residence for Arvon for Autumn 22-Winter 23, Tania has curated a programme of readings, workshops and talks, both online and in person. Find out more at http://www.taniahershman.com
Still Life With Octopus (II)
I only asked her once to climb inside a jar for me. (Before we met, I’d watched all the videos of those experiments.) She sighed but did it, said I could screw the lid, released herself easily. You could become any shape you want, I said. She said nothing. One arm sent itself out to switch the kettle on. While she made us tea, I put the jar back in the cupboard, feeling that slight ache from too much sitting in my hip bones, my lower back, where fixed part meets fixed part of me.
Standardized Patient*
Today I am your lower back pain. Listen, I have all the details, will not veer
from the script. Tomorrow I will be your cancer of the kidneys. Next week,
I may be your one-legged skier (I know, I know). Whose pain is this?
*Standardized patient simulation lets medical students practice on people trained to play patients.
And then God
sends someone else’s Jewish grandmother to stop me
with a question about birds I can’t answer. She says – as if this is her river – I’ve never
seen you here before, then presses for my exact address. Instead
of the usual, Such a nice girl, no husband?, she asks, No dog? I don’t know why
I tell her then that I’m a poet, but the gleam in her eyes
warns me this is the point to leave, the unasked
dancing on the path between us: Will you make a poem out of me?
Middle of the Night
Night asks me to wake up. What? I say. Night whispers darkly, something about cats coming in and out, a baby five doors down. You want company? I ask. Night nods. I get up
and we make tea. Too early, the cat mutters as we pass. Night and I get back into bed. I’m fine now, Night says.
Cover design: Ben Rothery
Note: Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (William Collins, 2017).
Acacia Publications 