London Grip New Poetry – Spring 2013
This issue of London Grip features new poems by:
*Peter Phillips *F.M.Brown *Paul Richards *Frankie McMillan *Clare Crossman
*Teoti Jardine *Ian C Smith *Rosemary Norman *Stephen Bone *Rosie Sandler
*Ruth Valentine *Bruce Christianson *Michael Glover *Derek Adams *Julia Bell
*Jennifer Martin *Michael W Thomas *William Oxley *Sue Wootton
*Siobhan Harvey *Emily Strauss *Geoffrey Heptonstall
Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors
A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry can be obtained at LG New Poetry Spring 2013
Please send submissions for the future issues to poetry@londongrip.co.uk, enclosing no more than three poems and including a brief, 2-3 line, biography
Patrick Heron – Red Garden painting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Heron
Editor’s Introduction
While I was assembling this issue of London Grip New Poetry, Tony Harrison’s angry poem V was performed on Radio 4 – its first broadcast since Channel 4 screened it in 1987. On that occasion it provoked howls of protest from those who counted the f***s and c***s and discounted its meaning. Harrison’s poem responds fiercely to the disfiguring of his parents’ grave by spray-painted graffiti and it tackles not only his personal sense of outrage but also the bigger societal questions of disaffection and disillusion which fuel such vandalism. It is very hard to write with such passion (and undeleted expletives) and yet to stay sufficiently in control to make good poetry. Hence it is unsurprising that the attempt seems rarely to be made. Of course I have read and heard poets engaging effectively with issues like global justice or the assumptions of western capitalism. Often however these poets come from less “comfortable” countries than ours; and, alongside them, it has sometimes struck me that poets from “the west” seem less inclined to apply their craft to such big themes.
This issue of LGNP begins with poems about poetry and ends with a poem about art while the poems in between deal with aging, death, landscape and love (probably unrequited); and I believe such themes would predominate in most British poetry magazines. This is not, however, a call for more “political” submissions to London Grip: I only want poets to send me the poems they want to write. But – while V is still fresh in my mind – I am now asking myself whether I subtly compartmentalize my own poetry by denying it access to the issues that exercise me most strongly in the everyday life I live in prose.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
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Peter Phillips : The Editor Of Vanquished
Sybil, thank you for recommending
my sonnet for the Natasha Cambridge prize.
How could we not? It was masterful.
Was it? I did work on it quite a lot,
for almost a day.
How did you think of the idea –
fusing those images, so evocative of... of...
Everything sort of popped out,
like having a baby.
Oh, you’re such a natural poet.
I mean that in the widest sense
so earth-grounded, you deserve to win.
It would be nice.
You might turn out to be our own Jenny Joseph.
We’d love to make you famous.
The money would come in handy.
There’s no money, the trustees award
a hamper from Harrods –
the real prize is winning.
Of course, it would be the greatest
honour, a hamper sounds scrumptious.
Could they include some truffles
and smoked salmon? Hmm, perhaps
I should have spent another day on it.
Peter Phillips is a London poet. His fifth collection Oscar and I: Confessions of a minor poet (Ward Wood Publishing) will be published in Spring 2013. It charts the ups and downs of the fictional poet, George Meadows.
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F.M. Brown : Gnarling
We were studying a poem last night
and there was some talk
over whether 'gnarled' was a verb
(there was considerable doubt)
when I heard someone say
it sounds a painful process - gnarling.
There was further discussion
about whether there was such a word as gnarling.
There certainly is the word pain
it definitely does proceed
and we all pass through the process.
You can see when you look
at one of those really ancient trees
which remind you of old men
that gnarling would be long and difficult.
You can see it too
when you look at one of the old men
that the trees remind you of.
I wonder when they began gnarling
and when they first knew it.
When did their knuckles first begin to knot?
But do you know something?
I'm gnarling now.
And so are you.
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F.M. Brown : William Carlos pushing meets Vincent pulling
If I must not paint
a wheelbarrow red, may I
look at a blue cart?
F.M. Brown began writing poems after coming south from Yorkshire. Some of them have appeared in Interpreter’s House, Other Poetry and London Grip
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Paul Richards : Moving
At Bethnal Green overground
Three men
Get off
And march in single file
As if hooked in line by a steel wire
Towards the exit bunker.
The leader,
Torso tilted forwards
Eyes straight ahead
Tall, rangy
Denim blue shirt
White trainers,
Magisterial Balkan stride
Carries under his left arm
A stainless steel sink
The middle guy
Could be the leader’s brother
Same blue shirt
Same white trainers
Wolverine
Hungry for
The beckoning streets
Manhandles along
A sweating black cross
Between a tea chest and a suitcase
Straining with the detritus of half a rooming house
Making up the rear
A man of paler hue
Black v-neck shirt
With bristling handlebar moustache
The spitting image of a talking head
From my favourite documentary
About the SAS
His eyes
The polar opposite of asleep
Murderously intent on Saturday glory
Wheels along
An industrial luggage trolley
Bearing a mammoth green case
Bursting with what can only be hoped
Is the last of it
Paul Richards reached his half-century this year, and – apart from writing poetry (and playing the piano) – runs his own computer support business. Although very much a North London homeboy he now finds himself residing in South-West London and is loving it, particularly the green and posh bits. His first “proper” poem, written at the age of 9, was a rendition of the nativity in Tim Rice style pop lyrics.
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Frankie McMillan: Roof Doctor and Co.
I found two men on my roof
one had eyes the colour of the sea
they were looking for a leak
that had so far fooled the neighbourhood
the leak was responsible for a chimney
caving in, white mould forming
on the inside of the sky, they hoped
to surprise a nail or two which
had somehow escaped detection
they hoped to record
the time between when rain
fell on the tin roof
to when a spreading stain
the shape of Africa appeared
theirs was a constabulary approach
they understood the wily ways of water
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Frankie McMillan: On the Titanic even the dogs were glamorous
The French bulldog has a title
the steerage can’t pronounce
Gamon de Pycombe
He strains to hear
a simple command
amongst the deafening boom
something easy like heel or come
Frou Frou, left in the cabin
tries to stop her owner leaving
grips the hem of her frock
until the seam tears
as lifeboat three is lowered
a sailor performs hand signals
to stitch up the dark
Frankie McMillan is a short story writer and poet from New Zealand. She is the author of The Bag Lady’s Picnic and other stories and a poetry collection, Dressing for the Cannibals. Recent poetry has appeared in Turbine, Sport, Jaam, Snorkel, Trout, The Cincinnati Review and Shenandoah.
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Clare Crossman : Poem for the Night
When I can’t sleep, I get up and listen to the night.
Outside, the plum trees clump like black umbrellas,
the ash tree is a spear, a goods train arrows past.
The sky above the neon lights is lost to orange shadow.
The house switched off and shut, stars comma
above the ink -spilled lawn.
A few streets away,
there is a lamp; someone else blurted out of sleep,
the day behind them stopped, tomorrow getting closer.
As the dawn comes in, a solitary plane turns west,
headlights catch the pond, the world returns enough light
to see by. Rooms are inscribed with breathing, cars pull
into the traffic.
Being awake is better than not dreaming,
anything can be imagined in the golden square of the door,
everything begins somewhere in the dark.
Clare Crossman won the Redbeck Prize in 1996. Recently she wrote and performed Fen Song A Ballad of the Fen with two musicians. A collection of her poems The Shape of Us was published by Shoestring Press 2010. She was recently was a prizewinner in the Second Light Competition 2012 and lives near Cambridge.
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Teoti Jardine : Sunday Afternoon In Invercargill
I’m living in the house where the Queen
came for afternoon tea, in 1954.
Earlier that same day I had waved to her.
I was ten years old, and I’m sure she looked
right into my eyes and smiled.
Today the Opera on Sunday is ‘Die Walkure’,
broadcast directly from the Michael Fowler.
I move the radio to the front room, open the windows,
and sit on the verandah listening in the sun,
circling on Wagner’s updraft.
Tui are crackling in the trees
and the pale blue sky speaks of frost tonight.
My dog Amie is playing with a soccer ball on the lawn.
The man who built the house in 1918
is standing next to me, he enjoys the opera too,
and he smiles as he surveys his wool scouring plant.
Teoti Jardine, was born in Queenstown New Zealand, of Maori, Irish and Scottish descent . His Maori tribal affiliations are Waitaha, Kati Mamoe and Kai Tahu. He has been writing poetry off and on most of his life. His poems have appeared in previous issues of London Grip New Poetry and also in Te Panui Runaka, the Burwood Hospital News Letter and the Christchurch Press Poetry section.
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Ian C Smith : He wishes
Urging his sons to see where he once lived
not far from their student lodgings
he knows they lack interest, knows
this interest waits far in their future.
Gentle rain misty as soft kisses,
his boys talking over each other,
tagging along, oblivious, ignoring him
where his old street straddles the railway.
But for the sooty bricks’ graffiti
he could step through earlier rain;
a taxi stops by this kerb, a girl he knows
winds the window down to flirt.
He feels like the last Arctic wolf in winter,
gives up on describing his youth
as a squall insists on here and now,
whipping them back to the car.
Windscreen foggy, he thinks of the young Yeats
spreading his dreams under his love’s feet,
tenderly asking her to tread softly
as they U-turn and swish away.
Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in Axon:Creative Explorations,The Best Australian Poetry,Chiron Review, Island, Southerly,& Westerly. His fifth book is Contains Language, Ginninderra Press (Adelaide). He lives in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, Australia.
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Rosemary Norman: Smoker
Smoke goes up
in a loose diagonal
of greys. His chair
is high backed -
nothing to see
of him except
the skies he
looks out at till
he strolls, smoke
over one shoulder,
into their dazzle
where a branch
at head height
and a particular
leaf distract him.
Then he strolls
back to inhabit
smoke and ash.
Rosemary Norman’s second collection Italics was published by Shoestring Press in Autumn 2010. Her work with video artist Stuart Pound is at www.stuartpound.info
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Stephen Bone : Ash
In extreme age
a girl would come
to cut his hair-
wisps that grew
like spun sugar
on a head otherwise
smooth and pink
as on his birth day.
A towel around his
shoulders; her scissors
flashing like a heliograph
he would sit by the open fire;
watch logs bubble resin,
listen to their spit
and whine -
white hair
falling from him
like ash.
Stephen Bone’s work has been published in various magazines including Seam, Smiths Knoll, The Interpreter’s House and The Rialto.
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Rosie Sandler : Patient
Day after day his tell-tale
face turned to the wall,
the brown flowers
blooming on the sheet.
Day after day
playing the bars of his chest
like a xylophone
while he shrinks
in the bathwater.
Day after day slipping
clothes over this stickman
whose body still ticks
– like a bomb in a cartoon,
counting down the minutes.
Day after day
waking to
his shrivelled-walnut eyes;
going to sleep in time
to the squeezebox
of his lungs.
He’s leaving me
with every rib-caged breath
and day after day
all I can feel
is relief.
Rosie Sandler’s poems and short stories have appeared in print and online including the anthology Bugged, and (shortly) The Rialto. Her young adult novel, Rare Sight, can be read at http://www.movellas.com/en/book/read/201211052234423573 and she is currently looking for an agent for her novel for adults, James Fitzpatrick as Himself – a tale of love, poetry and cross-dressing. She blogs at: http://rosiesandler.wordpress.com/
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Ruth Valentine : Impersonations
with thanks to David Harsent for the titles
i Death the Locksmith
So here you are, standing out in the street
in the dark between the lamp-posts, half-laughing, watching
the gestures of shadow-puppets on the curtains,
the white cat on the windowsill looking out
for nightingales. It was a great evening.
you’ve still got that jazzed-up folksong on the brain,
along with the taste of the South American wine
and the joke somebody told, but now you’re losing
the punch-line, out here on your own. You’re getting cold,
you could do with a loo, and though you keep on ringing
no-one comes down to let you in. Way past
one a.m., the locksmith happens along
in his van with the big red phone-numbers. He slows
to where you’re sitting hunched on the kerb, and smiles.
ii: Death as technical support
wants the first and third letters, your date of birth,
your postcode, so he can find you on the system
and tell you when you’ll next use your Oyster card,
where you’ll be off to, which shoes you’ll be wearing
and why. He won’t, of course. He’s too discreet,
enquiring, So, Ruth, what can I help you with?
(though surely he knows already). You list:
the touch-pad, the cursor, all your emails gone
no doubt to Mars or some thirteenth dimension;
though you don’t say that, mustn’t give the impression
you’re deluded, senile, never been online
before you picked up the phone. You have to trust him.
You click on remote access and watch the icons
vanishing one by one from the blue screen.
iii: Death the Dreamer
Out in the garden on a sun-lounger
between the false acacia and silver birch
you planted soon after you moved into the house
all those years ago, when the children
were fair-haired and ran in circles round the pond,
and you stopped off after work for a game of squash
then sat with a gin and tonic in just the spot
where he’s waiting, reading
Keats, or Shelley on Keats – He has outsoared –
but looks up as you come down the garden steps,
one shaking hand on the rail, the other clutching
your daughter’s arm, afraid that Death might run
and snatch you up in his sunburnt arms, and swing
away to his still dark lake through the leaf shadows.
Ruth Valentine’s latest collection is On the Saltmarsh (Smokestack Books). She lives in Tottenham.
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Bruce Christianson : Death in the Family
death holds the baby
while her mother adjusts
the carseat
at these big reunions
you don't know everyone
but death seems familiar
death is used to babies
& they can tell
this one smiles
& goes cross-eyed
as death's fingertip
touches her nose
her mum takes her back
death waves bye bye
for now
Bruce Christianson is a mathematician from Whangarei, New Zealand, who moved to Hertfordshire twenty-five years ago. He and death are currently having a trial separation.
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Michael Glover : Casual People
Casual people striking apples
Down from someone’s apple tree…
Someone gave them sticks to strike with,
Someone out of love with me.
Apples, always pendent apples,
Apples hanging from the tree,
That is how I always like them,
Not upon the ground, in heaps.
Someone gave me a red apple
From the tree. She’d struck it down,
A casual person, with an apple,
Staring at me. I stared down.
Apples must be pendent apples.
Apples must not leave the tree.
If the tree one day should drop them,
Strike that tree until it bleeds.
Michael Glover is a Sheffield-born, London-based poet, art critic and editor. His last two books are Only So Much (2011) and Headlong into Pennilessness, a memoir of growing up in Sheffield.
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Derek Adams : So Long, My Sweet
Down by the pier head,
the light of an oncoming ferry
stabs through the fog.
Everything is gun-metal grey, grainy.
She clutches her handbag automatically.
Says ‘I still love you’.
I slap her, hard, explain the plot.
Soft focus tears reflect
the flashing lights
of an arriving squad car.
The siren still receding in my head
as I reach out for her.
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Derek Adams : The Road to Les Verrières
February 1871
Hunger, a new gravity, drags on muscle.
Instinct and momentum wrench
one foot after the other from snow
packed solid by rag shod feet.
In either direction, blue jackets,
further than the eye can allow.
From one day into the next
the human train passes.
To stop, to rest, is not an option:
Prussians, frostbite, wolves, exhaustion,
crows that circle in a black screech
against a gunmetal sky; each
more certain than the lead shot
flattened against Bourbaki’s skull,
as he thrashed in his blood
cursing his pistol and Versailles.
A returning shadow-like dream
longer than echoing yesterday,
to reach the border
traverse its event horizon,
hand-over names and epaulets,
pile sabres and rifles
in a towering mass of defeat,
bodies collapsing under its weight
Derek Adams is a professional photographer who writes poetry because he has to! He has published 3 collections of poetry; the most recent unconcerned, but not indifferent is a poetry portrait of the surrealist artist Man Ray. He is currently studying for an M.A. in creative writing at Goldsmiths.
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Julia Bell : Lot’s Wife
after Wislawa Szymborska
So we left it, burning, escaped, only just,
as the timbers fell behind us across the threshold.
You know the sort of scene, you saw it on TV:
Apocalypse, Armageddon, the kind of thing
beloved of teenage boys because of all the cool
explosions and grotesque decapitations
and because no one you like ever really dies.
I could feel the heat of it against my back
all the way up the mountain, a long climb and
difficult in the dark with the children clinging
to my ankles, the dead weight of all of our possessions.
I suppose I looked because I wanted to be amazed
at how quickly my old life could be turned to ruin,
to catch my breath, take a sip of water, but he had already run
on ahead. I was made slow with all that I was carrying
Perhaps I was frozen, too, by the size of the disaster.
A whole city burning, turning the sky into a late Monet,
the blind man’s lurid colours, beautiful in the way that
transformations have of provoking wonder.
At first I thought it was the tears that I could taste, or sweat,
dehydration from all the running, but then my legs began to go.
Salt is a funny thing: why not stone, or gold, or Malachite?
So here I am, traveller, watch and learn,
disaster stalks the unwary at every turn,
the trick is to keep moving forward while you still can.
Julia Bell is a writer & academic. She works at Birkbeck, teaching on the MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of two novels for Young Adults – Massive and Dirty Work – both published in the UK by Macmillan – and is the editor of the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook which she wrote while teaching at UEA. She is the founder and director of the Writers Hub website and is currently working on several projects including a memoir in verse called Hymnal and a new novel for Young Adults.
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Jennifer Martin: Blind Lions
Cold day in November, outstretched arms
barely visible in the fog. We took a walk
across the bronzed floor of the countryside,
the flanks of the woodland dark and grainy
as silent film; red berries startling as sudden blood.
The walk led us to the manor house –
grounds open to the public in winter.
Nobody else was around. We wandered zodiac
sundials; towers with blue clocks, gold hands;
stone lions rooted in the purgatory of a roar.
I removed a glove touch one, the face of it worn
unrecognisable as the dedications on old graves.
I touched its dull teeth; eyes rough cavities
pitted by starving blackbirds.
We found the dark earth below cedars waiting for bluebells,
a marble bathtub, a wooden bridge across a stream, statues of Venus
rising from the ivy. On every corner, a blind lion roaring.
I recognised it. We’d come
to the place that looked like the feeling:
I tried to tell you I loved you, and both of us were silent.
We looked out at the tiers of hills, dark winter green
blackening beneath the low mist, the last leaves on the trees
were lanterns. We talked about the future at its most vague,
polite as Catholic Edwardians desperate to live passionately,
but with no idea where to find the clitoris, or how to ask.
Jennifer Martin has previously had poetry published in The Rialto, The Warwick Review, Orbis, Ambit, Poetry Cornwall, South, Obsessed with Pipework and Monkey Kettle.
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Michael W Thomas : Tintagel
I want to rise in steam
from the leafy thrust
of hot public gardens
and anchor in the skies above Tintagel
where the postmistress
and the lading-clerk,
loveless through years of cargo,
of letters insulted by boot-heel and rain,
fall at last in each other’s way.
I shall be the promenade
that opens blue
between her corsage and his gravy stains
the engine of an evening’s walk
idling
the something that aligns her daring toes
with his better-days leather.
I shall, a moment on,
be the pinch-gap
of thumb and finger
lifting ill-chosen pie from his breath
and a lifetime’s disabling catch
from hers
so words come
so a murmur outcrooks his elbow
so another hinges her resinous fingers
within it
just so
henceforward.
Michael W. Thomas’s poetry and fiction has been published in Europe, the US and Australia, in such magazines as Stand, Other Poetry, Etchings, Irish University Review, the Antioch Review and The London Magazine, for which he also reviews. His latest novel, Pilgrims at the White Horizon, and poetry collection, The Girl from Midfoxfields, will be published in 2013. http://www.michaelwthomas.co.uk/
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William Oxley : View
From the green undulation
that is the Plains of Abraham
beyond the solid bastion
that is the Citadel, you can
view a distant mountain sunset
bloodied as a raw steak
but far more beautiful than that:
an enskyed red lake
palpitating this and that, this and that
in the uplifted heart of Quebec.
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William Oxley : Not Interpreting
The low sun bends upon the lake
and rushes stir in the wind:
fat-syllabled breath of the north
indicates winter is close behind.
It’s an austere natural world,
I find, full of thought –
all I ever thought of Canada
is changed: I am being re-taught.
Country of work and hard play,
it seems ‘kinda lonely’
like a landscape forever bathed
in moonlight is lonely.
Walking through trees by water
it is a wilderness of feeling
I am seeing, I am hearing
but not, somehow, interpreting.
William Oxley lives in Devon, and in April 2013 is publishing a collection of his Exeter-based poems with photographs by Barry Davidson. Later this year, too, his translations of the Persian poet Hafiz (co-translator Parvin Loloi) will appear; and in 2014 his Collected Poems and New Poems is due from Rockingham Press.
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Sue Wootton : Unspooling
You think from now on you’ll cast each line farther into the river,
perhaps as far as the slow pool under the opposite bank where surely
the granddaddy trout swims in place. You think you’ll dimple the fly
to the dark water and let it drift at the insistence of the current, that dark
insistence, its indifference to your appreciation of its insistence.
But though you think you’ll drop the fly just so, you’ve failed to factor in
the snags, the weeping willow or the droop-wired fence, and furthermore
your arm is weak, your aim is poor. Three days you spend
at the river, tangles and knots and nothing netted. So now you think
you’ll try a new tack, string and a hot-glue gun to make a diamond
kite from newsprint on a balsa frame; and over lunch you read
your sky-bound horoscope which predicts difficulties in all spheres
due to the planets pointing directly at you, so you crack
the calcified head of an egg and eat soldiers spread
with marmite and dipped in yolk (alas, you think, poor Yorick)
and fill in the Code Cracker while a storm wind buffets
the house until the headlines on the kite get jumpy, at which point
you think you’ll don a woolly hat and wrap up warm and let the wind
do the unwinding and all you’ll have to do is brace your feet
into the ground and hold the stick round which you’ve wound
a string to touch the moon, and this you do: full of wound-up
Yet (let’s face it) wounded hope, you liberate your kite
into the gull-slip sky – it’s taken up, it’s flying! Then
it’s not
and you wonder if unspooling is, will ever be, your forte,
a question you will never answer since it never ends, this asking,
this tasking, this casting your line on gale and water
this dropping it or lifting it, this suffering it
to collect snagweed, downdraft, to accumulate
its rat-nest knots and fractures, to accept the catch of absence
to reel reel reel
.
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Sue Wootton : Cross
This is not the ABC of destiny, nor
is it the 1,2,3 of fate. This is neither
sequence nor formula. Not the The.
It’s fractional. It’s where to spell
ordinary. It’s a trail of crumbs
on the bench that shows you home.
It’s the fridge, the sink, the dirty
laundry. The cutlery drawer, the bed:
the spoons. This is where the lovers
actually live. Things repeat and this is
neither formula nor sequence. There is
an ellipsis of stepping stones
for crossing a misted lake. Or beads
strung on an abacus none of us can see.
Who can tell? Only embark. Only
count on it. It adds up somehow.
New Zealander Sue Wootton is the author of three collections of poetry, an illustrated children’s book, and the short story collection The Happiest Music on Earth (Rosa Mira Books 2012) Further information is available on her website suewootton.co.nz
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Siobhan Harvey : The Gifted Ideologist is Placed in a Naughty Circle
On day one, he sits in a chiton of white tape
reading Republic. You’re naughty, his new teacher snaps.
He challenges with boys who swear and a girl who steals
lollies from teacher’s desk. Such disrespect, teacher says.
On day two, the gifted ideologist returns to his prison.
Within its houppelande of white tape, he reads The Prince.
He reflects upon just resistance, weltpolitik,
and the liberation of the oppressed.
On day three, in white-taped ruff, he’s locked indoors
at break, endures heavy heat and contemplates Leviathan.
Its fiery rhetoric dreams him a new world
of social contracts and equitable rule.
At day’s close, the gifted ideologist rises, vanishes.
Hey presto! The naughty circle explodes like a star.
His wonder is so great, he forget politics is illusion.
Night comes. A black hole chasms the classroom.
At the edges, an inferno devours floors, desks, walls,
pencils, books, pictures, computers, leaving nothing
but the suggestion of school – the child, the idea.
Siobhan Harvey is the author of the poetry collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts NZ, 2011) and a book of literary interviews, Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010). She is also editor of Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House NZ, 2009). Her poems have appeared in such magazines as Asheville Poetry Review (US), Evergreen Review (US), Five Poem Journal (Ned), Landfall, Meanjin (Aus),Poetry New Zealand, Structo (UK) and Tuesday Poem (NZ/ US). She is Poetry Editor of Takahe and Coordinator of National Poetry Day (NZ). In 2011, she was runner up in the Landfall Essay Prize (NZ) and Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems (NZ), and nominated for the Pushcart Prize (US). As part of the 25 New Zealand Poets Project, her Poet’s Page was recently launched on The Poetry Archive (UK).
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Emily Strauss : Tabula Rasa
Thales thought everything boiled down to Water, which he seems to have seen as an inherently divine material substance with no agency in nature; his immediate successors posited their own monist principles, including Air, Fire, and the Infinite.
Their first question: is water the ultimate
explanation of reality?
We find water everywhere, rising
as mist from the sea, falling as
rain, like the mother-womb
of all things, a notion without
a fable, a unifying entity
or maybe the root substance
is boundless, deathless air,
the breath that animates every bird
and pushes the winter leaves
into rotten piles, the ultimate
source of the cosmos we exhale.
Their second question: are we simply
a blank slate?
An emptiness on which air and water
stream equally, and by their paths
crossing we create what we see,
what we know and feel, like tiny
footprints of new-found lizards
that appear in the sand without
explanation in the morning's light.
Their final question: is the world
not material but only imagined?
Presupposed, created within us
and projected onto the black
sphere around us until we believe
in sunsets and spider webs, feel
their tremulous vibrations deep
inside and become wise, knowing
we are not alone, that color follows
night and we must act accordingly.
Emily Strauss is an American, retired teacher, and life-long writer of poetry. She has around 70 poems in public, online and in anthologies in several countries. She often focuses on my natural world of the American West because she finds it more interesting than many people’s activities.
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Geoffrey Heptonstall : DAYNIGHT
Patrick Heron’s Art
Moon (silence) (Thoughts) sleeping
and and
(Pale) dawning Words (dreaming)
and and
Sun (rising) (Life) waking
and and
(Light) moving Colour (changing)
and and
Blue (setting) (Time) going
time dawning and pale words and blue thoughts and moving silence and setting
moon and waking light and risen colour and dreaming sun and sleeping life
SUN MOON
LIGHT COLOUR
WORDS THOUGHTS
TIME LIFE
BLUE PALE
Geoffrey Heptonstall’s play Providence was performed at The Britannia, East London in January. He also helped devise a masque, Emperors for Tea, at The Savoy, to raise money for young East Londoners.
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28/03/2013 @ 15:35
Thankyou. Some wonderful poems and how good to read reviews by Carole Woddis…she’s a terrific reviewer.