It’s a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Matthew Stewart, with three poems from his collection Whatever you do, justdon’t. It was published by HappenStance Press to their usual high standards in 2023. The background of the jacket is an old map of Extremadura, Spain. The poem Gostrey Meadow was published in Stand. See below the poems for Matthew’s biography. I admire the attention to detail, precision, and economy of his poems: so much between the lines…
Banana
Come to think of it, she didn’t tell us who’d got hold of the banana, or how, and we forgot to ask, stunned by the news that at ten years old she’d never seen one.
She was still proud her class had raffled it for the war effort, still slightly mournful at it turning black on her teacher’s desk long before they drew the winning ticket.
She wouldn’t talk about gas masks, the Blitz, the doodlebugs (how they changed to V2s) — but she always recalled her fury at the waste of bloody good food.
Wendsday
Halfway through the word and the week, my pen used to pause and stumble, tripped up by my eight-year-old tongue
and even now I still delight in having learned at last to swap the n and d and add the e.
I stumbled, too, after coming to Spain. Shook off routines and rules. Let a new language soak through me.
Two more hassle-packed, tensed-up days till vino tinto y queso instead of cod and chips.
Gostrey Meadow
Showing my son round, I notice a father taking a picture of his wife and son who’s melted half an ice cream on his fingers and the other half on his face.
It’s a copy of a photo in our album. Same river. Same heat-laden sky. Same roles. Same spot on the bank. Same pose. Our trees were ten feet shorter.
Biography
Matthew Stewart lives between Extremadura in Spain and West Sussex in the South of England. He works in the Spanish wine trade as a blender and exporter. His blog site ‘Rogue Strands’ is a respected source for poetry lovers, and he reviews widely for a range of publications. His first full collection was The Knives of Villalejo (Eyewear, 2017). Before that, there were two pamphlets from HappenStance: Tasting Notes (2012) and Inventing Truth (2011).
It’s a great pleasure introducing this month’s guest poet: Rod Whitworth. We first met, probably, a good decade or so ago. His poems have been widely published and successful in competitions. One of these, the poignant Demobbed was featured here on 30 May, 2021. Rod recently launched his first full collection My family and otherbirds. I’ve chosen a selection of poems on the themes of family and birds and, of course, jazz.
Tandem in Holland
On that day, your smile hung like a sunrise over the polders.
And on that day, your voice greeted me like blackbirds singing to claim and to yield.
And on that day, your touch thrilled like a breeze from the pine trees.
And that day brought the knowledge of itself and knew that it was this day.
Portrait of my grandfather, accompanied
The daft smile, wide as a spiv, tells us Sunday afternoon, after a slow left-arm morning and Chester’s Best in the Cotton Tree. You’re sitting in the sun on the donkey-stoned front step of Number 51 in undone waistcoat, collarless shirt, felt slippers, a Capstan Full Strength drooped from a trailing hand. This is happiness: transported from your brother Llewelyn who never left the Somme, from crying all the way home after delivering jam and marmalade to shops in Coventry the day after it was blitzed.
On your right knee: me, plump as a queen’s cushion, wide-eyed, in Auntie-Louie-knitted rompers, not knowing any of this.
Names you know, names
It was Rod, the other one, the one who listened to American radio on his Communist dad’s short wave, who, one bright April morning between the 53 bus stop and school, said You’ve got to listen to this bloke, a pianist, Thelonious Monk. He’s something else. Another world. I told him no-one could be called Thelonious Monk. It took me two years to find out he was right, on both counts. What he didn’t know though was that Monk’s middle name was Sphere. By the time I knew that, the car Rod was travelling in had crashed into the lamp post.
One for…
He was walking away when I noticed the wings.
Furled they were, but still visible against the dark blue
hoodie. I don’t believe in angels but it does make you think.
I called him back, asked him to intercede. You’re asking a lot from a magpie
he croaked, then flew off. Made me feel sorrowful.
I wished he’d had a friend.
Biography
Rod Whitworth was born in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1943, and has done a number of jobs, including teaching maths (for 33 years) and working in traffic censuses (the job that kept him on the streets). He currently works as a medical rôle-player. Rod has been writing poetry for a few years and has had work published in a number of journals and anthologies. His first collection, My family and other birds, was published by Vole Books in 2024. He now lives in Oldham and is still tyrannised by commas.
This month’s guest slot is for poems from To Live Here, an anthology of haiku published by The Wee Sparrow Press. The Press was founded by Claire Thom. 100% of the proceeds of their anthologies are given to charity.
The anthology is edited by Giorgia Di Pancrazio & Katherine E Winnick. The lovely cover and illustrations are by Scottish artist Colin Thom.
To Live Here is “A collection of haiku on the theme of home, which explores the many facets of human experience, from the mundane to the sublime. Featuring the work of talented poets from around the world, this anthology invites readers to reflect on the beauty and complexity of the world we inhabit.”
Salford Loaves and Fishes, a charity supporting the homeless, has already received over £600. The anthology is available through Amazon – ISBN 9788409528165. I’m grateful to Francis Attard and Julie Mellor for permission to share their haiku.
sandy beach turtles lay clutches of eggs off-shore breeze
Francis Attard, Malta
three cornered field the generations who farmed here
It’s a great pleasure to feature four poems from our guest poet Jane McKie. Her collection Carnation Lily Lily Rose was published by Blue Diode earlier this year. The title and title poem are after John Singer Sargent’s painting of the same name. Each word is also the heading of the four sections of the book.
The collection includes a range of poetic forms and shapes: prose poems, a concrete poem, long and thin poems. We meet couplets and triplets, striking titles: Cairn to a Dead Biker, X-Ray of a Deer’s Skull. The poems crackle with energy and vitality. The book is ‘a hymn to all the different kinds of connective tissue that lightly, but firmly, weave us into the fabric of our own and others’ lives’. (David Kinloch).
Lord, Make Me an Instrument
Here the clouds outrun land: greyer, fleeter, casting their shadows on the estuary and making mud move at their speed, blown rather than fixed, flexing with light / dark / light / dark, sea-blite at the edges to catch the odd discarded fag butt. Sea pea, clover, yellow vetch.
Further out, the flattened eelgrass – a trammelled thatch without the tide; with it, upstanding, like proud speech. Into this landscape creeps a man following redshank, black-tailed godwits; watch him huddle – glimmer of a struck match. Winged souls call to the crackle of his breath.
Sand
Tonight, I’m in an arbour designed by an artist who moonlights as a gardener.
Our host’s aesthetic sixth sense is spot on: look how the roses jostle the frame, how the lattice pins them like pretty moths. A drink in one’s hand is compulsory.
And we guests are laughing, playing up a hunger that may be on the wane, but holds us, tonight, as snug as palms around glasses. It is brilliant, this garden, and familiar, as if it is not a garden at all but a gateway, and we are not guests at a middle-aged party but school-leavers on a promised, delicious brink.
Tonight, if you sliced me open, you would find a swirl of glitter: all the shades of the sand at Alum bay squeezed into one miniature glass lighthouse.
Antigravity
They hover along pavements, barelegged, on Mini Micro scooters, a flock of them –
the best of us. Hovering in shirtsleeves, hearts and mouths open before guile sets in.
Don’t they feel the cold? Hovering to class like motes in light.
On this unbearable, ordinary day, we mothers can’t stop them lifting off the ground,
their small hands to their mouths as they giggle, spitting out milk teeth,
growing too quickly. Catch onto their waistbands and don’t let go.
Harness
I think of the invisible harness that hitches us, one to the other, how it signifies both baggage and provision;
how, in the past, I have slipped the harness and tested freedom, finding it overrated;
how mood is a harness, like gravity, pitching our orbits a little off-kilter;
how sometimes the harness pinches and we are inclined to worry it, fidgeting, even to tear at it;
how we trust the harness to repair itself like skin.
Biography
Jane McKie works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her first collection, Morocco Rococo (Cinnamon Press) was awarded the 2008 Sundial/Scottish Arts Council prize for best first book of 2007. Recent collections include Quiet Woman Stay (Cinnamon Press, 2020) and Jawbreaker (2021) which won the Wigtown Poetry Festival’s Alastair Reid’s Pamphlet Prize 2021.
Jane, as a member of the Edinburgh-based Shore Poets, facilitates poetry readings and music. She is interested in collaboration across forms, writes with 12, a collective of women writers, and with Edinburgh’s genre spoken word group Writers’ Bloc.
A lively and intriguing title for a poem sequence by our guest poet Lydia Harris. Her work has featured here before (March 2019). This sequence is from her new collection Objects for Private Devotion, beautifully produced by Pindrop Press, published last year. Lydia lives in the Orkney island of Westray. Many of the poem sequences in her new book focus on local culture, people, nature, objects – such as the prayer nut which provides the cover image.
The sequence about the fieldfare is inspired by the great Serbian poet Vasco Popa. The Blackbird’s Field is also a sequence, from Popa’s Collected Poems, close on 400 pages – drawing on folk tale, surrealist fable, personal anecdote, and tribal myth.
Fieldfare, blown off course, early spring
After Vasco Popa
My Fieldfare
He’s made of bone pins. He’s a book inside a box with a beak-shaped lid. A snapped-shut lock.
He Makes Landfall
at Hagock where the Scollays ploughed in patches, wore tracks with their boots, gulped spring water, built their house.
Body
His muscles hurtle from rump to neb.
First Song
The sky is my eye, earth my egg. From Noup to the Ness in the turn of my head.
How I know him
His underwing flashes, he wheels before settling on plough or pasture.
His Manners
When the tide is asleep he swallows it. His wings are granite with a hundred eyes.
Second Song
Bone grinds skin, stone splits grain.
His Passion
Flames again. He thinks he is clay. The sea wrought him like a mace head, speckled, banded, half-way done. Bird before he was bird.
Third Song
Snapped flint, water-worn sea pebble.
His Dress Code
He squints through an eye mask, lifts his mottled back through west winds, across north winds.
A Flagstone in the Wall Speaks to Him
Grapple with my grain. My night surfaces. Tap the lichen from my face. Draw silver from my base.
Lament
I’ve lost my folk, my night ships, my dear blood, thick then thin, night bird, stray bird.
Tongue
A whip of liver-coloured flesh sheathed in the coffin of his beak.
His Heart
Its flicker forms ice, his own padlocked air. His map of the wind stiff with frost in the skirts of an old storm.
He Takes His Leave
Fooled by the moon. He’s lost his bearings, like the night boat. We need to talk on the edge of sight.
Biography: Lydia Harris lives in the Orkney island of Westray. Her first pamphlet Glad not to be the corpse was published by Smiths Knoll in 2012. In 2017 she held a Scottish Book Trust New Writers’ Award. Her pamphlet A Small Space was placed first in the Paper Swans competition 2020.
The day before my birthday storm Poly (Beaufort 11) raged at speeds of 140 kms an hour: overhead lines and trees came down. The day after my birthday the Dutch government fell.
On my birthday I treated family to lunch. It was a joyous occasion. My uncle (born 17 years after my mother) turned 85 in June. He has only recently given up playing volleyball: too much for his shoulders. He’s taken up Jeu de Boules instead.
Here are two verses from an extended sequence titled Briefly a small brown eye.
Primary school demolished, protestant church a community centre. Our old house extended. Forty years on no reason to visit this town other than the old uncle.
Lunchtime, my aunt brings out the special table cloth. She has embroidered signatures, some in Arabic, some in Cyrillic. I’m looking for mine.
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.
I’ve just renewed my annual Museum pass. With a typical entry fee of 15 Euros, it’s well worth it: over 400 Dutch museums take part. There is usually a top-up fee for major exhibitions. I wrote the prose poem on a recent workshop.
Exhibitions
You can’t just wake up and decide to visit an exhibition. Not a major show. You must book a ticket online beforehand and choose a time slot. I managed to get one, Saturday lunchtime, for the Manhattan Masters. Rembrandt, aged 52, poster boy.
I was way too early (I’d gone with Astrid to collect her prize from the Xmas competition and have our photo taken) so I ended up buying books in all three bookshops near the Mauritshuis. Manhattan Masters, ten paintings over from New York while the Frick is being refurbished. The Fricks went to Europe to buy, do the grand tour. They were booked to travel back on the Titanic. She sprained her ankle and they postponed.
I won’t even tell you about the Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum, the coloured lines on the floor, everyone taking photos, the horse-tooth woman who needed to be in the photo with the painting. I gave up after 30 minutes. I think it’s well-known that the exhibitions of prehistoric art take place in replica caves with fake bones and spotlights on those red hand prints and bison on the walls. I’ll give it a miss. I’ll order the catalogue and a pack of six postcards from the museum shop online.
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.’
Nuri Rosegg had seen publicity about my online reading for Writers in the Bath, Sheffield. This led them to my website. Nuri loves the UK and, pre-Brexit, used to visit often. Nuri’s website can be found below her poem. There are also three poems on the Visual Verse website.
Below is Nuri’s poem, inspired by my poem Britain, from the Anthology Welcome to Britain.
BRITAIN
Britain is a fedora hat, opera- And theatre-tried. In this modern era Dramas turn into comedies.
This country is a glass of ginger wine: Tangy wetness without a spine. Alas, the love for self-harm is mega-big.
Britain is a decaying cherry tree Turning its back on the sea. The City, such a cold-hearted cherry pit.
Acacia Publications 