This week I saw a feature on tv about various adoption schemes here in The Netherlands. One of those, Adopteer een Kerstboom, now has 3,000 people who have adopted a Christmas tree. There is a waiting list: it takes five years for a tree to be tall and big enough for adoption. Each tree carries a metal tag with a number, so that the adopters know it’s their tree. Many people have given their tree a name. They pay a small deposit on collection in November from one of 13 locations, and trees are returned in January when they are planted back in their slot. The fee goes up a little each year the taller the trees get.
I think it’s a great scheme! Season’s Greetings to you all. Thank you for following my blog and for your comments. A short seasonal poem:
I’ve never been to that desert island though the removal firm sends me a bill each month for the books I left there. I’ve never been to Iceland for that green light, nor Lapland for those dogs and sledges, but I have kissed Father Christmas.
Writing Prompt1: a six-line poem that includes, in different lines, an animal, a country, a place in nature, a concrete object (like my book).
Writing Prompt 2: What name would you give your adopted Christmas tree? Write a short ode to Julian or Emily, or ….
This week it is 20 years since the writer W G (Max) Sebald died, aged 57. Propolis, the publishing arm of Norwich-based The Book Hive, published Ariadne’s Thread: In Memory of W G Sebald (2014). This memoir was written by Philippa Comber. She met Sebald in 1981 in Norwich where they both lived. They hit it off and became friends.
Philippa and I met in Manchester late 2004 at a series of poetry workshops and we hit it off too: both practising psychotherapists with several shared interests. I remember Philippa telling me she was planning a visit to the German museum dedicated to Sebald to read the letters that she had sent him over the years.
Sebald died in a road-traffic accident near Norwich. According to the coroner’s report, he had died of a heart attack before colliding with a lorry. Memory, loss of memory, decay, exile are the main themes of his books with their unique blend of fact, recollection, and fiction.
Writing Prompt: My poem is in 14 lines. Yours can be shorter. Do include ‘I do know’ and ‘I don’t know’ at least twice in each stanza.
Knowing and not knowing
I know I mustn’t eat grapefruit as it interferes with the effect of the medication. I don’t need to know the Table of Chemical Elements, though I do know that a few elements have recently been added and Rutherfordium is one of them.
I know and remember the view of the Wash and the silver ribbon of the Broads as the plane turns. I don’t know the names of narrowboats and yachts, but I do know that the beach huts in Wells-next-the-Sea are on stilts.
I know someone who was a good friend of W G Sebald and that her letters to Max are archived in a museum near Stuttgart. I know where I was when I heard on the radio that Sebald had died: the A17 heading for Norwich, just before a round-about.
I am delighted to introduce this month’s poet: Jean Stevens. We have met several times over the last two years on writing workshops – all on Zoom.
Jean Stevens’ poems have been widely published in magazines and newspapers and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. She is a past winner of Leeds Libraries Writing Prize and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2020. Her most recent poetry collections are Speak to the Earth (Naked Eye 2019) and Nothing But Words (Naked Eye 2020). Her forthcoming collection Always Too Many Miles will be published in 1922, also by Naked Eye.
Jean has worked as a professional actress and dramatist and her stand-up comedy script won the Polo Prize at London’s Comedy Store.
The collection Speak to the Earth is in five sections and I have chosen one poem from each.
Night safari
At the Singapore Night Safari, animals roam freely in moonlight in environments replicating their lives in the wild. Visitors and animals are separated only by the slimmest of man-made divides.
I walked the rainforest’s moonlit trail and found myself among leopards.
They were lean, honed by hunting and hunger and, as flesh and muscle ebbed and flowed, I saw down to the beat of blood and the almost liquid bone.
Their skin was a print of their own dark paws walking on sand, their flanks were brandy and treacle, brown ale held to the light.
I knelt by the narrow divide and a leopard lay opposite, mirrored light in his midnight eyes.
He didn’t blink and I was held till he stretched and showed his claws. I turned to the man who stood next to me. We’re nothing he said.
Hefted Hefted : accustomed and attached to an area of upland pasture.
It’s cloistered in the depths of the valley inside this old house, where cellos have left echoes in the stone, poets’ words are carved in the beams, and the bones of cattle lie under slate
but one day I will follow the hefted sheep out of here through clear northern light to climb the far hills and beyond to where there are no buildings, no roads, no noise except the battering of the wind.
Drama school
Drama schools are fond of sending students to the zoo to study the behaviour of beasts. It’s what people laugh at when they speak about the ‘luvvies’: be a cat, be a dog, be a bloody giraffe.
But look, Lear’s on his knees and clawing Cordelia. His hands are paws and he’s mauling her body round the stage, frantic to revive her.
He’s done the mad scene in the storm railed against every roof cried: Never, never, never, never, never.
Now he makes us see what we all are at heart: animals learning to grieve.
Gagudju man Remembering Bill Neidjie (‘I’m telling you this while you’ve got time’)
This was the man who shared the long-held secrets of his world. I met him in Alice Springs, sat with him in the aboriginal silence, knowing his closeness to every living thing.
He felt trees in his body, their trunks and leaves pumping water as human hearts pump blood, thought that no matter what kind – kangaroo, eagle, echidna – animals pulse in our flesh,
said, if you harm what is sacred, you might get a cyclone or flood, or kill someone in another place, told us we must hang on to the land, the trees, the soil, because of the day when we become the earth.
Waking
I wake to bed linen strewn around like manic laundry and can’t get out of my head the creatures I dreamt of who eat only fruit and leaves
and gaze at the beings who hack down trees, ravage land, sea and air, blast their kind off the earth, and bring silence, the silence of the animals.
On my way to meet the morning I’m desperate to hear the bleating of sheep, the trill of blackbirds, a dog barking after a stick, but nothing moves, nothing speaks.
Tomorrow will be his birthday. Traditionally, children were allowed to put a shoe (with a carrot for the horse) by the fire on the night of the 5th. Over time, it has become tradition to celebrate the evening of the 5th. And over time, children put out their shoe earlier and earlier …
Somewhere in a photo album there is a small black-and-white picture, somewhere in a box in storage. Here is the poem, anyway, from my debut collection Another life, Oversteps Books Ltd, 2016.
St Nikolaas, 5 December 1957
We’re crowded in our dining room. Grandmother has closed her face. There’s me in pyjamas, smiling. I’m next to my father’s father. His heart will give out soon. I’ve just been given a book: animal stories with illustrations.
My brother too smiles, because our mother isn’t there. She may be in the kitchen or upstairs, ill, thinking about walking out on us. My father has taken this photo. He too will have closed his face.
It’s a great pleasure introducing this month’s poet: Rachel Davies. We met through poetry workshops in Manchester many years ago.
Rachel Davies has had several jobs including nurse, teacher and head-teacher. She thinks retirement is the best job she’s ever had because it gave her time to pursue her poetry. She is widely published in journals and anthologies and has been a prize-winner in several poetry competitions.
Her debut pamphlet, Every Day I Promise Myself, was published by 4Word Press in December 2020 and she is currently seeking a home for her second pamphlet, Mole. Rachel is co-ordinator of the Poetry Society Stanza for East Manchester and Tameside. She has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in contemporary poetry, both from Manchester Metropolitan University. Originally from the Cambridgeshire fens, she now lives in Saddleworth with her partner and two cats.
I hope you enjoy my selection of four poems from the pamphlet.
Alternative Mother #4 Jean
For fun, you push me round the lounge on the Ewbank till I beg you to stop, teach me hula hoop, two-ball, how it’s good to laugh.
You soothe my knees with Germolene, say a hug helps, say it’s alright to cry. You know the healing power of a biscuit.
You hand-sew my wedding dress, stitch into a secret seam a blue satin ribbon, a lock of your own hair, all the love it takes.
You take my daughter out, keep her for bedtime stories, forget to bring her home so I worry she’s followed the rabbit down the hole.
You make me dance, even on those days when the music died in me. You teach me the euphoria of champagne.
You bake scones so light they float down to your granddaughters like hot-air balloons.
Alternative Mother #8 Ted
Sometimes dreams can be nightmares.
You wanted most of yourself to be buried, to become an enrichment of the fenland soil you loved so much, your heart and lungs to be thrown into Whittlesey Wash to feed the eels you knitted your nets for.
Oh, you were generous. You gave me some peonies once, dug up from your garden. You shook the soil off though— that soil’s worth three thousand pounds an acre you said. I looked for the smile but there wasn’t one.
One night your skeleton grew out of the earth like a myth.
Breaking the Line
The blood red sky sheds tears. Fresh milk curdles. Now I know
my heartbroken father left the house with chisel, mallet — after dark
he’s out there hammering like a minor god. Grief begins to surface from the cold stone.
To St Ives, a Love Poem Halloween 2014
Even though November is a black dog sitting at your feet and your beaches lay crushed under the weight of mist
and your shoreline roars at the passing of summer and your white horses rise on their hind legs
till your fishing boats get seasick; even though your trees shed tears like baubles and your shops drip gifts like rain
and your cobbled streets and narrow alleys wind around me like a clock and your posters announce
Fair Wednesday as if all other days are cheats and your bistros display fish with eyes wide as heaven,
scared as hell, and your railway bridge yells do what makes you happy and it feels like a tall order;
even though your choughs are impatient for pilchard your huers won’t see today from the Baulking House
still you open your arms and kiss my cheeks in welcome.
This week I’ve been going through my files and folders with poems, deleting old ones that aren’t going anywhere, finding forgotten ones, losing others because I changed the title but not the filename – you get my drift.
Prompt: Here’s a sort-of-abecedarian list poem. What would be in your alphabet?
On the bright side, there’s always:
avocados and the alphabet, a bridge over troubled water and chocolate, Fairtrade or not, days which travel at their own pace into evening and other favourite places like Venice, beaches, the glorious counter tenor voice of Andreas Scholl, hairdressers who waited for us, ink to waste, as the poet has it, jazz, all that jazz, kilograms to worry about, lessons that return until learned, maria, martini, marina, nautical miles and naughty but nice. Oh, let’s stop, there is a picnic bench with a view, think of questions, the certainty of death, taxes, rescuers in anoraks, accompanied by sniffer dogs, so we’re fit again to tango, show us a leg or two, uniformed bouncers taking them off, victory which will be ours and whiskey or gin, double measures, that xtra mile we will go. Y, the fork in the road and Frost. ZZZ, a comfy bed for a rest.
A parcel arrived this week. Friends in Manchester sent on poetry magazines and books. Among them was my copy of Lighting Out,poems to answer the dark. In the words of the editor, Rebecca Bilkau:
‘We won’t speak about the dark times we’ve had, or the dark times that might come. This little anthology is about reclaiming the stage for the bright stuff … resilience, hope, spidery optimism, pardonable puns, rare and shameless clarity. Think of it as a route map, made by 80-odd poets, to Light Out of the blues, the shadows, the virus, the storm and binge TV. Shine along, oh do.’
Lighting Out is the tenth publication in the Beautiful Dragons Collaboration: ISBN: 978-68564-902-9. A year ago I started learning Swedish on Duolingo, just for the hell of it. I got to a 292-day streak with the encouragement of that little green owl …
Flying with the little green owl – my 95-day streak with Duolingo (Svenska)
Vintern är den vita årstiden. Winter is the white season. Keep going! Practice makes perfect. Författaren skriver på ett papper. The author writes on a sheet of paper. Good effort! Barnen har många leksaker. The children have many toys. Don’t give up. På lordagar tittar jag alltid på tv. On Saturdays I always watch tv. Great work! Let’s make this a bit harder. Vi går ofta till museum. We often go to the museum. I believe in you. Hur många personer är det på stranden? How many people are there on the beach? Awesome! You’re working hard and learning new words. Jag lär mig långsamt. I am learning slowly. I’m so proud of you.
This week my friend Valerie celebrated her birthday. We met 30 years ago on a residential week in Spain. To celebrate our friendship, here is a short poem in which we’re together. Bowler’s is a very large indoor and outdoor carboot sale location in Manchester.
That Generation Game is a tv game show in which teams of two family members, but from a different generation compete. The winners see a conveyor belt with goodies wobble past. No worries: if they can’t remember them all, the studio audience will shout to help …
Table 64
We carried the plastic crates and cardboard boxes into Bowlers at bloody six o’clock. The locusts, proper traders, picked items from the piles we carried, threw us pound coins and a few fivers.
The early flurry was good and then it was like the Generation Game in reverse: suitcases went, a pile of books, glasses, a wok, costume jewellery, some cuddly toys. We sat back in our folding chairs like regulars, holding off sleep.
Writing Prompt: Did you do a car boot sale with a friend? Were you a market trader (for real or in your dreams)? Did you go to an auction of lost property? What is the object that you lost or found?
We moved into wintertime last night. A good time for a poem that mentions clocks. For over 12 years three friends and I met monthly at each other’s houses to write, taking turns to host and find sample poems. This came from one of those sessions. It’s published in the pamphlet A Stolen Hour, Grey Hen Press, 2020. The poem was also Highly Commended in the 2016 Manchester Cathedral poetry competition. It was a privilege to read it during the prize-giving at the cathedral.
A la Hafiz
For just one minute of the day open all the windows. Let your mind run alone, like a foal that has never known fields without fences.
For just one minute of the day let your body rest in a place where other people run past, so that they have the permission they need to go and play.
For just one minute of the day go and sit within sight of a large clock. Remember how the three hands are always trying to catch up with each other. Feel your compassion grow. Be still.
With all the rest of your time make bread, make beds, make love. Do what is needed and then close the windows. You are already looking upon yourself more as God does.
It is my pleasure to introduce this month’s poet: Ken Evans. Ken and I met some years ago at writing workshops in Manchester. I hope you enjoy these new poems.
Ken longlisted in the National Poetry Competition this year, and in 2015, while doing a Poetry Master’s in Manchester. In 2018, Ken won the Kent & Sussex competition. His poems feature in Magma, 14, Under the Radar, Envoi, The Lighthouse Literary Journal, The High Window, Obsessed with Pipework, and The Interpreter’s House.
In 2016, Ken won the Battered Moons Competition and was runner-up in Poets & Players. A first pamphlet, ‘The Opposite of Defeat’ appeared in 2016. Ken’s first collection, ‘True Forensics’ in 2018. He’s thinking he may be close to finishing a second collection…
A Mirroring
A tiny hop on one leg when you see me, a straightening to rise and bob, then a small correction, mid-
air, as you pivot yourself to steady, like a dust-devil swaying over tarmac after days of brown desert.
Your black leather jacket and red blouse, a grey plait across one shoulder, all thought through before, but for a moment,
I glimpse the girl in a classroom drawing, a pink tongue seeming to swing your attentive, cross-hatching pencil-hand from side
to side: the fleshy dark mirror of your jacket. Supple and barely touching, we hug and pull back with comradely smiles, but you catch
my thought as it forms, like a cloud in a cleaned window, before looking up, to see the thing itself.
Forever, the Light from Sirius Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, whose light takes 9 years to reach Earth
Earth, I left a voicemail, my umpty-eighth. Must I really draw a picture, me that loves you, as the flip-side of your silver coin? I am not who set out, nine years ago. I am not the me I left behind, and you are not the you I came to talk to then, but you can see my same light now, crystalline, falling.
Tracks
A tendency to see the deceased’s room as empty is a control mechanism, when it’s no more void than
a December garden at four-twenty, the light running out of the day’s green bottle faster than
drips down a window, though in fact, calls thread the blackening sky and hedges: an owl more than
clearing its throat for the nightshift, or the longer than usual high call of a wren, louder even than
the distant, reverse warning alarm on a lorry at the steel factory, red lights more piercing than
crows commenting from the chimney pots. The room itself is bare, a white-out, rather than
featureless. A glass door throws what light there is on the carpet, naked and pinker where divots
from what was chair legs puncture the fibres, the hollows suggesting how she faced one way
so many unfurling days, the pile threadbare where her slippers marked the apex of a star
in front of her, tracks now damped by towels and steamed with an iron to raise back the flush,
though not all obey. Lines left by a Welsh dresser still bear her weight, the not-yet-gone of her,
the thoroughfare of a ruined city where I am an unguided tourist greeted ceremonially
at the eastern gate by a roaring lion with a nose lost to weathering, running due west in a straight line
to the red sunset, only the weeds in the mortar noting the location, the sub-divisions of the hours.
The Final Invoice from the Co-Op A part-found poem
for bringing the deceased into our care in working hours; for private use of the Chapel of Rest; for care and preparation of the deceased before the funeral; for provision of a hearse and three personnel for the service; for choice of a Simple coffin; a Minister’s and a Doctor’s fee; for a non-witnessed scattering of the ashes in the Garden of Remembrance. Note: none of the above subject to VAT.
It’s false then that, ‘nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,’ Benjamin Franklin or Daniel Defoe, whoever it was wrote that. What we remember of our lost may yet be false: a conservator before it was a cause or fashion, she dunked tea bags twice, marked the coffee on a jar with the stub of an HB pencil, and saved her hearing-aid batteries for birdsong. She’d dance with one hand on her stick, for such a deal – ‘Look, no VAT on dying, a saving of 20% – Bingo!’
Acacia Publications 