“A quiet night preludes the festivities” nods to the classic “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
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Twitter: @BeadedQuill
Facebook: BeadedQuill
Books:
In the Ocean: a year of poetry
Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys
Shining in Brightness: Selected Poems, 1999 – 2012
The dark encroaches earlier and the temperatures drop. September heralds autumnal change. This time last year I was already battening down by spending more evenings in with the creaking heating, baking and feeling the quiet life.
I will be 80 this year here in my flat only a mile and a half from where I was born. I have tried to lead by example, by plunging my narrow balcony into the principality of hanging gardens. Concrete is brutal. It needs softening. Plants should have dominion. We breakfast amidst the crisp verdure and watch a nesting bird, fledgling wrens, butterflies and such wild visitors. The flat faces of the daisies, pansies and geraniums accrue the afternoon and evening sun. Most years – A wren nests somewhere blanketed by the ivy leaves. Her fledglings zing past while we’re eating. They’ll even call on us at table. In warm summers, the clouded yellow butterfly may join us from abroad.
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Sometimes some quirky combination of words and images will capture my imagination. This time last year it was a comment in a Gudrun Sjödén catalogue about a Senegalese artist who sculpted birds from flotsam-and-jetsam.
Sunday last, the Guardian Weekend’s column “How does your garden grow?” hooked me. William Howard’s evocative interview about his balcony garden in the Barbican (London) – and the fantastic photograph of him in from of his verdant kingdom – had me enthralled. (Read the interview from the 28th June 2014 Guardian Weekend here.). “This garden,” explains Howard, “is about memories, sharing and reminding people to look – really look.”
Perhaps being a poet is in some respects like being a gardener.
(P.S. One of the most affecting books I read during my young adolescence was Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, in which a scrabble of children try to grow a garden and learn how to look – really look.)
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Twitter: @BeadedQuill
Facebook: BeadedQuill
Books:
In the Ocean: a year of poetry
Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys
Shining in Brightness: Selected Poems, 1999 – 2012
Bye, bye, people. I’ll call you later. Are you going home now? To all the dusty rented rooms, nasty pine furniture with walls on other people’s flushing toilets, Skype calls and rhythmic thuds they try to obscure with loud beats of an album on repeat. Another aeroplane. A train. We reside near transport under a flight-path. 8/1/14
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Yesterday’s poem, “Would you ever live in Heather Green?”, introduced the subject matter of London’s rented rooms. According to the dates ascribed in my notes to each poem, the starting drafts for each are separated by nearly a year. With this information in mind, I have tried to assess whether the poetic narrator’s point of view or tone differs between the two vignettes. While “Molten Hour” is endowed the evocative title, it is filled with the invasive noises of close living. “Heather Green” turns to irony by its conclusion, but outlines an attempt at staged domesticity by including home-ware objects and comforting rituals (making tea, lighting candles). Even the references to unnecessary lawn moving and the absent heather posit the presence of both in the reader’s mind.
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P.S. It is not without resonance that these poems commence this month of intensive posting. I am seeking alternative rented accommodation in London, on a poet’s oilcloth and erratic self-employment (as a copyeditor). If you happen to know of a waterproof garden folly… please send word via Twitter or Facebook.
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Twitter: @BeadedQuill
Facebook: BeadedQuill
Collected poems in book form, available for preview and purchase:
Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys
Shining in Brightness
Would you ever live
in Heather Green
with a lamp missing a tassle
from its shade?
Lit tealights in the glass holders on
the rented windowsill
occasionally Assam from
loose leaves in a pot.
Would that be a life
to live?
Where there’s no need
to mow lawns on a Saturday
because you own no lawn
in Heather Green.
Where there is little heather, too.
But Green there is
in eco-consciousness and Budgens
I imagine
it must be so.
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I know someone who moved seventeen times during one calendar year from one rented room to another in London. The opening question, “Would you ever live in Heather Green?” probably derives from an eavesdropped conversation on the bus about a London lodging search. This poem sparked some thoughts about rented room circumstances. Tomorrow’s poem, London’s Molten Hour, will continue the theme.
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Twitter: @BeadedQuill
Facebook: BeadedQuill
Preview verse from my two books of poetry by clicking on the titles:
