Wishing all kind readers of this blog a happy Solstice, a merry Christmas – and all warm wishes for a peaceful, kinder, saner 2019!
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Twelve Poems about Chickens – Candlestick Press
I’m so delighted to have a poem from my pamphlet, ‘The Henkeeper’s Almanac’ picked up by Candlestick Press, for their beautiful new book ‘Twelve Poems about Chickens’. Here are poems which celebrate the quirks and curiosities of chickens. Sentiments range from Sir Charles Sedley’s 17th century complaint at an early wakening:
Thou Cursed Cock, with thy perpetual Noise,
May’st thou be Capon made, and lose thy Voice
to a meditation by Kay Ryan on a chick breaking out of the egg:
It can’t afford doubt. Who can?
Doubt uses albumen
at twice the rate of work.
‘Those dabbing hens I ferociously love’ – how I do love Norman McCaig’s poem ‘Cock before dawn’.
The West and the East are measured from me…
It’s time I crowed. The sun will be waiting.
I’ve had cockerels with just this megalomaniac streak, rigid on a wallhead in the morning, crowing insanely at all they can see.
I contributed a little poem about a black Araucana hen I used to keep in Scotland, drinking from the pond in a blowy March.
Her feathers blow backwards
but she hops out
onto a stone and sips
pondwater. Frogspawn
ripples in the gusts.
She tips up her head.
Her bright comb’s
a first flower.
In which I have a poem on Radio 4
I’m on Radio 4! This is truly thrilling for me!
I was very lucky, alongside excellent poet Elisabeth Charis, to be part of a Writing West Midlands-brokered commission to write a poem for Radio 4’s ethical and religious discussion programme Something Understood.
The programme’s theme was ‘Bread’, and it went out on Sunday 23 August, and if you’re so minded you can listen to it for the next 29 days (and counting). The link is here, and you can hear me reading my poem Bread Generations about 6 minutes in.
Here’s the poem.
Bread Generations
The grandmothers said, it’s an art like fire –
They said this
is the very nature
of leaven.
Snare in a white bowl
your kitchen’s tiny alchemy
of airborne spores.
Observe them strengthen
through a pale brown week of bubbles,
then raise like a thin,
elastic ghost,
yeast’s reek.
For unleavened bread
has no past.
The grandmothers said, keep some starter
back in your dish
to be fed like a kitten
and watched
like a fire.
They said, think ahead, provide
for the ones that follow.
Call them in.
Break bread
together.
Re-make
a bakers’ rising.
How we returned the wheelbarrow #LittleMuseumofLudlow
All good things must come to an end: Kate Morgan-Clare and I packed up the last of The Little Museum of Ludlow yesterday, returning lent objects to their owners, and gathering into the fabulous wheelbarrow (I love that wheelbarrow, unacquisitively) a selection of our found objects to return them to the town…
And then we pushed it back across Ludlow, from Ludlow Library, along Tower Street, across the Bull Ring, up King Street, and back to the derelict garden where the wheelbarrow has rested for decades. In the hot sun, kneeling on weeds turned crackly with drought, Kate slowly placed the objects we’d brought at the foot of a crumbling old wall.
I wrote a poem.
Returning the Wheelbarrow Behind the Gate
You will crashsqueak on dry earth. Lurch
this weedy, sudden garden to the space
the barrow had.
Put down your burden. Breathe.
Kneel in dry leaves.
Be slow.
Place a bone to an ivy root.
Lay
a paper flower pinkly by the wall.
Thread a tattered feather
past a root-loop.
A labelled rip of rubber spun
off a tyre on Old Street leans
on a twig not native to this place.
Slip
a luckless scratchcard
to a knuckle bone sucked dry by dogs.
Hear rook-caw.
Rain
reverent confetti. Rain its petals
on the footings
of this limey, head-high wall.
Let ring
a rolling quarter-chime of church bells.
Labels dangle. Stir. Feather
quivers in a swell of air.
Wheelbarrow Tag No. 9891
has gone
to rest among the nettles.
The Little Museum of Ludlow: wheelbarrow & wood bust
For a fortnight The Little Museum of Ludlow (part of Ludlow Fringe) has welcomed in a strange and marvellous collection of objects, lent to us by the public, and scavenged from around the town by artists from London-based Paradox of Order and more locally, from Hereford College of Art, plus poets Martin Evans and myself.
Here’s my poem about the hardwood bust, lent by a Ludlow resident.
Head & shoulders, in hardwood
so much heavier than you think & smooth
as the hand you long to hold
(It’s what she held when she was tiring)
age & gender don’t seem to matter much,
though this must be about a kind of youth or essence
of who we are at heart
head slightly turned to the left and tilted, just
a hint of question; the lips stay softly closed.
(It’s what I hold in my hands to remember her hands)
ears only an indication, eyes are blanks
or eyelids: this is all about
the power of touch on our mortality
& only the one small blemish
underneath to say
it’s human
And a poem I wrote for a scavenged, hard-worked wheelbarrow.
Found:
a barrow that’s gone to ground, front tyre worn
to cloth, almost, & weaves
when pushed & shrieks & cries,
draws Broad Street to the Buttercross
in its labour
this hard-used metal pocked with rust
& caked cement & folded, what is more,
this barrow is upcycled,
someone has kept
the frame & fashioned it a fresh bed
from sheet metal, cut straight
as cloth but bent to shape,
wrapped round perhaps the worn original
to get it right, then pinned
spot-welded on the metal band
that holds it still
wheelbarrow carries its haul of ivy
dried to a frill of veinous brown,
its fading elderflower confetti,
some pigeon’s lost white feather
& a long-dead stick, light as a shell
& faint
with crumples of grey lichen
& from someone’s house, bright chips
of royal blue paint
‘Eglwyseg Day’ published on The Clearing
I’m hugely pleased to have my poem ‘Eglwyseg Day’ published on The Clearing. The Clearing is an online magazine published by Little Toller Books that offers writers and artists a dedicated space in which to explore and celebrate the landscapes we live in. I’m very proud to be in the company of writers and poets like Katrina Porteous, Tim Dee, Paul Kingsnorth, Nick Groom, Ken Worpole, Lucy Wood, Robert Crawford, Philip Gross, Neil Ansell, and Eleanor Rees.
[11.09 am]
path up through windclipped gorse, wind in the eye
& such yellow splashes through the heather
sheep-cropped mounds & sink-holes of the mines
all smooth as china cups & saucers stacked up
at the table edge
& shelved up there, the purple hills,
here, bilberries & our purple fingers.
[12.23pm]
share coffee from the Thermos. Perch
on springy bones of heather root & watch
across the gorge, a nursery
of dark firs gathered quiet
& good by the cliff’s white knee
we listen to the shush
of a sheep through whinberries
& hum of a bee-line into warm air.
for the rest of the poem, please click the link here.
They lie, crowned, with their hands crossed/ The Kings and Queens of Aragon
I’ve been making a book from a poem. The poem is about the royal tombs of the Kings and Queens of Aragon, from the 12th to the 15th century. Their huge stone tombs are in the nave of the Abbey church in the Monastery of Poblet, in Catalonia. I saw them twenty years ago while travelling through Spain by bicycle. It was a bitter winter day and we were the only visitors. Poblet was threadbare, austere and echoing.
The book is made using thin card, modrock, gesso, pastels and indian inks. It was all very experimental, not helped by our 9 month-old cat, Orlando, who sat on it, and kicked things off the table. The binding is made with a short piece of hazel cut from our town garden hedge, and a length of leather thong. I wanted to create a weathered surface, like very worn parchments, abraded by time and damp.
‘this netted house’: a bit of an experiment
My artist friend Emily Wilkinson told me about a derelict cottage she’d found on Lewis that was entirely covered in fishing nets. She showed me a short film she’d taken of it. The wind rose out of the film, and the house seemed hauled ashore.
I wrote a poem, and delightfully, marvellous Earthlines magazine has published my poem and Emily’s still.
We also experimented, in a rather low-tech way, and managed to make a short film-poem. Thank you very much to online magazine Island Review, who published it. You can view it here on Emily Wilkinson’s website.
