The serpent's shiver

 

THE SERPENT'S SHIVER

“Suddenly something came out of the land, some cool shiver of Spring” (Neil Gunn, The serpent)

Reading, I think of

how we come to look back on

a spring with words like

"the optimistic first half

of" some past year, sigh implied.

Reading on, I see

Tom and Janet would never

speak so between them.

February morning tea.

The story darkens its coils.

You read this poem

after I've finished the book.

England and Scotland

another tale uncoiling.

England gambles on its past.

The Scottish novelist Neil Gunn lived from 1891 to 1973. The serpent was published in the 1940s, and you'll have to read it to find out who Tom and Janet are.

The poem was my entry in the 2019 Neil Gunn Writing Competition, run by the Neil Gunn Trust and High Life Highland. It has now found publication in issue 109 of the poetry magazine Acumen.

Final places of poetry

I put thirteen poems on the Places of Poetry map, and have so far blogged ten of them. Here are the remaining three.


LOOKING BACK

Centuries to keep
this castle state-of-the-art
that saw no action
till a Civil War slighting
felled its walls into the ground.

Our visit didn't
find the same guidebook as mine
nineteen years before,
but we both together thought
ruins of Cair Paravel.

I liked that guidebook's
leading me through room by time
then on to ramparts
for a vista of the whole.
That was in a work-bad year.


The castle in question is Helmsley Castle in North Yorkshire, and the guidebook that had so pleased me on an earlier visit is by Glyn Coppack.  

The poem was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  The prompt, in a chapter contributed by Helen Mort, was for a poem about a significant place out of doors.


MICHAEL DRAYTON AND I

(on reading Michael Drayton revisited by Jean Brink)

They tell us now that Polesworth never was
remembered village to the poet Drayton.
Move just a little, read him cause by cause,
and see the Goodere idyll first unstraighten,
then vanish like cloud-streets. I spurned the good
in my remembered village at first dare,
age five or six: replanned it new Nutwood,
gave people roles round me as Rupert Bear,
and told them so. But nobody enjoyed
co-option in this way by such a lad.
My parents were embarrassed and annoyed.
I had some explanation from my Dad.
Patrons miscast in myth and golden age;
Drayton did that, older than I, little more sage.


Polesworth is the Warwickshire village where Michael Drayton (1563-1631) may or may not have grown up. In 1580, he was in service to Thomas Goodere at Collingham in Nottinghamshire. Nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars, on the basis of scattered allusions, in his poems and dedications, to Polesworth and its River Anker, conjectured that he might have been intimate with the Polesworth branch of Goodere's family. Jean Brink's book, published in 1990, casts doubt on those speculations.

The poem was written in 2008, my entry in a competition for work to be included in the Polesworth Poets' Trail. Entering a poem on doubts about the basis for that enterprise wasn't really a good idea.

The third poem is a piece of reporting, written in 2004. 

AN ACCOUNT ON A TRAIN

The boys quizzed him about his family:
his sister, twenty-one, brother in prison
for murder, fifteen years, somehow missed thirty,
for a debt of around five hundred pounds –
a gang from Milton Keynes, and gypsies. Who owed whom?
which was which? "Gypsies, they're hard," the boys said.
That on my left, across the carriage. Rightwards,
window, and tracks, and other tracks disused,
with gantries over them, hanging no cables,
then trees between the gantries, then big trees.
Welcome to Northampton, home of the Saints.

An anti-Adlestrop! OK,
I know it happens every day,
but commonly when I'm not there;

excuse my noting it as rare.


I imagine I would irritate readers if I included explanations of Cair Paravel, Rupert Bear, and Adlestrop.  If you're reading this online, you can look them up there.

Choice of words

CHOICE OF WORDS

‘Working’ is shorter,

saves syllables, characters.

‘Working’ as gerund/

participle/adjective

does ‘profession’ plus most things.

Is ‘professional’

training? taking payment? class?

viring between those?

Oh, the viring. Slippery.

Weasel word, professional.

I plan to retire

and be a working poet.

Working works, say I.

Mind, that’s aspirational.

I am not talking class here.

The above poem made it to the 'Highly commended' list in the 2019 Hastings Litfest competition.

I hope to blog more frequently over the next few weeks, having posted several works to the 'Places of poetry' online map and thus made them ineligible for further entry in competitions.  Watch this space.

Four haiku and a tanka

GLUM HAIKU 

Doubly sad to see
long-buried hatchets dug up
with such clumsy haste.

LIBRARY GRIEF 

Sno-pake whites out "Ice"
in the index to one class
of the Bliss schedule.

LIFE-PROCESSING BUGS 

Wrong ends, touchiness,
perverse mutability,
and amnesia.

MUSICAL ALLUSION 

"Those farewell chords are
from Strauss' Alpine symphony"
 -- your note, twelve years back.

COUNTING BATS

Dusk in the garden;
the house like a photograph
of murders or ghosts.
Dimly grouped amid midges
we murmur, thirty-three, -four...

Today, according to the hashtag, is Haiku Poetry Day.  The haiku above were written in an access of them in the autumn of 1995, and published in Cou-cous 10.  Follow the label for others from the same batch.

The "farewell chords" referred to are the mountain theme of Richard Strauss' Alpine symphony. What I, synaesthetically, see through them is a red sun, probably rising not setting, over a very steep city -- Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds -- and a small group of people mourning a visionary who has just died. 

Another hashtag tells me today is Bat Appreciation Day.  The tanka 'Counting bats' is of the same vintage as the haiku.  A kinsman had at that time a great enthusiasm for bats, and gathered a number of us in the garden to count them as they flew out from the roof at nightfall.  Murders and ghosts, I'm happy to say, were completely lacking from this event, and their presence in the tanka is excused solely by poetic licence.  Remembered dusk is two spaces for the imagination.

Street collection

This was my entry in the competition for the 2017 desk diary published by Rhyme and Reason, a fundraising arm of Rennie Grove Hospice Care.  The theme was 'Magic and mystery'.  My contribution is based, with minimal poetic licence, on an encounter my wife Clare had while collecting house-to-house for the charity Christian Aid.

STREET COLLECTION

The street's sunny side --
evens – housed one who opened
an odd-side door.
His reason for not giving
was his distrust of money.

His volunteer work
had ended when volunteers
fundraising called him.
"Data protection", I said.
He'd fit a children's story:

all those oddities, 
and he had a Gandalf beard.
Would you like to try?
Neither copyright nor -left
stops your riffs on an idea.

Money from the street
a magically large sum?
Something's redemption?
His peace with those volunteers?
I don't write for kids myself....

As in previous years, my poem won no prizes, but was among those published in the diary. £5 via this link.

Three queues

Another slightly dated poem, this; the date this time being 1999.

The queues reported in sections (i) and (ii) of the poem were both on 17 November 1998, though on looking again at a contemporary account I see that I may have erred in linking the second queue to the Lolworth fire. The fire broke out at around 11:00, and the report updated 19:00 mentions tailbacks as far as the M11. The tailbacks would have needed to be twice as long, or more, to stretch into Cambridge itself. But the Cambridge gridlock was -- I have just checked my 1998 diary -- definitely on the evening of that same day.

Wikipedia has a page devoted to the "camera somewhere in the Department", which was a famous web landmark in its day.

The poem was published in Perimeter 7, 1999, p. 16, and again in Streetwise 68, Christmas/New Year 2007-2008, p. 19.


THREE QUEUES


(i)

The first queue was for new computer passwords,
two, perhaps three, a minute. The queue stretched
from the counter, through the double doors,
past the lift, down three sides of stairwell, out
into the freezing afternoon. In front
of me a girl read a film history –
Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.
A camera somewhere in the Department
networked news worldwide of how coffee stood.

An outsider had hacked the system, for fun,
or to find traces of their own existence,
or out of naked spite, doing less harm
than spite dressed up, but gratified with that.


(ii)

And the second queue,
evening of that frozen day,
gridlocked the city
road on road. Bikes could not slip
safely round it for the ice.

It was the result
of a crash ten miles away.
A lorry careered
into a petrol station.
Less bad than it might have been:

someone as she fled
remembered to flick a switch,
isolate the tanks.
There was one death, a man locked
in the toilet at the time.


(iii)

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is full.
The stairs lead through the bookcase to the back.
The queue stands long, eerie, improbable.
Hate caused the prison, turned the loving black.

The queue pays its respects, fifty years on,
mixes incomprehension, fear and shame,
where one dead represents six million.
Europe’s other edge smoulders into flame.

Field poems

These three poems were written in 1997 for a competition on the theme of fields.

'The loop' appeared in Streetwise 58, Easter 2005, p. 15. 'Feet and clay' appeared in Streetwise 56, autumn 2004, p. 10. Some readers may know the archaeological memoir to which it refers, and have found themselves, like me, brought up short over the misspelled word. 'Three startles' appeared in Cambridge insider (the predecessor to Local secrets), August 1998.


THE LOOP

Vacation work always meant fields: the rows
of beet under the skyline, with the white stick
marking your limit, and the weeds, the fat hen
to hoe or pull, the bales of straw to stack
in eights on sloping ground as the dark lengthened,
potatoes still in earth from the machine
to bag, and strawberries to crouch along,
and always chuntering: some Monty Python,
C.S. Lewis, Pears' Cyclopaedia,
Macaulay latterly, some of my own --
I had aspirations -- the whole loop run
endlessly over those long rows of hoeing,
stacking, bagging, crouching, chuntering.
I noticed very little and remember
the aspirations and the chuntering
with squirms, with squirms. It's half my life ago.
Since then I've had two dozen? lines in print.
Should I go back to fields? I follow paths
through them; still see too little, hear too little.


FEET AND CLAY

(an archaeological memoir)

Field-walking, you write,
the next best thing to digging,
yields stones: arrowheads,
broken pebbles polished smooth
that once held ploughs together,

flint barbs from fish-spears,
jadeite pierced beads and pendants
from igneous rocks.
"The quarry is elusive,"
you write. The reader stumbles

there, as at your claim
to "a rather difficult
time at the rather
decayed grammer school." Eyebrows??
sic. We pick up what we can.


THREE STARTLES

The day she said look
in place of luck.

The day she needed a literature
search on the war in Bosnia
and it came out she'd been there
ferrying aid from Manchester
during the summer.

The day she said she'd left the road
for a (she switched) to relieve herself, behind
a tree, and later found
she'd walked mined ground.

Not history themselves, just quirks of tact
where huge historic force-fields interact.

City poems

Here come three poems from 1996. All of them were written for a competition, organised jointly by the Times literary supplement and Poems on the Underground, for poems with an urban theme. They weren't placed in the competition, but they were accepted for publication within the year -- a pattern from which I drew perhaps too much encouragement.


CITY PLANNERS

Measuring our wants
straight as itemised phone bills
you can predict that
we go for straight streets also --
they show in red on your screen,

while violet means
streets choked by corners and kinks
and crook frightfulness,
those that are least travelled by
and therefore least travelled by.

It's called space syntax,
and, I've no doubt, yields some mileage;
more than from tracking
a friend's, a sister's random
crisscross of Damascus roads.


ELY

Should have been written in dactyls or anapaests,
but here it is at Ely's rubbish tips,
sober trochees of a legend:
ELY CITY SKIPS.

London swings, they used to say
(on a gibbet, someone quips);
AUSTRALIA SUCKS, a spraycan cried
(NEW ZEALAND 3, a wag replied);
but ELY CITY SKIPS.

Jerusalem will come down from heaven,
a bride adorned for her husband; Ely's lips
are pursed, she rises purposively, strides
over the trains, over the river,
years fall away with Bury St Edmunds,
and on the Suffolk coast, at Southwold, ELY CITY SKIPS.


SKYSCAPE

Not the great cloud-gorge that a flying lesson
revealed to two men, and them only, moving;
not the moon's shadow crossing India,
a sight for gods, and millions looked on;
but still a sight -- the A1 in December,
sun-cold, a sky-green-freezing winter day,
we travelled northwards, and we saw the steam
of cooling-towers bunched -- dense golden mounds --
churning themselves intact, and never spreading --
a sight for passengers, a sight, not more,
not metaphor or symbol or instruction,
only the weight of townage, living weight
of townage that requires such clouds and towers
to stand cooling for light and power and warmth;
and, using them, something you'd hardly see.


All of the poems were published in the magazine Orbis: 'City planners' in #121, spring 2002, p. 58; 'Ely' in #106, autumn 1997, p. 59; 'Skyscape' in #106, autumn 1997, p. 14, and again, to my great joy, in #115, winter 1999, being a personal selection by the then editor Mike Shields of poems from the magazine's first 30 years.

For drawing my attention to Ely City Skips, I thank Peter Hocking.

Poems on Radio Teesdale

My sister Sarah co-presents the monthly book programme on Radio Teesdale. I told her when I had come across a reference, in Dorothy Wordsworth's journal (Wordsworth 1960: 213), to the fact that William's poem 'The grasshopper' had been written not far from where Sarah lives. Sarah was delighted to make something of that in a later edition of the programme, and kindly asked if she could read some of my own work on air.

This was in February 2010. Potential themes included February, radio, and love. I was able to send in a poem called 'Utter February' that included a reference to a radio. It had been published in Jared Millar's magazine Perimeter in 2000.


UTTER FEBRUARY

November's cold call
promised a free stereo
radio cassette
for my trial subscription
to the local evening rag.

Embarrassingly,
the paper girl had problems
getting to my flat:
neighbours had to let her in.
I cancelled after a week.

Tonight it's come up,
my free radio cassette:
smaller than I thought,
feeble, few stations, darkness.
It feels very right, somehow.


Not much love in that one. For Radio Teesdale's remaining theme, then, I sent another poem dating from 1997. It's a respectful parody of Yeats' poem 'To be carved on a stone at Thoor Ballylee'.


A LONG WAY AFTER YEATS

My wife, the physicist Dr Clare
Sansom, by quantities of email
for automatic writing, share
of her Goodmans midi hi-fi tower,
sound of her beating heart, and power
of love, restored this shattered male;
and may her memory remain
when I am ruin once again.


Yes, 1997: actually written a year or so before we got married. I remember reading it to my mother over the phone, and she said, "You want to hang on to that one, Aidan. It'll improve with keeping." It has.

Wordsworth, D. (ed. Clark, C.). 1960. Home at Grasmere: extracts from the journal of Dorothy Wordsworth (written between 1800 and 1803) and from the poems of William Wordsworth. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Departures

A poem sequence of mine from 2001. Published in Keeping faith, the anthology from the 2003 Spire Trust competition.
DEPARTURES

(i) Godwin's Law

By Godwin’s Law, you lost at your first mention
of Hitler. Should certain acts be held as sins?
Whichever, calling the Bishops' Conference
a Nazi rally has to unconvince.
Here on, it's automatic: like machines,
we trade what's triggered, empty of what means.

And you, of all men -- you who wrote
(I paraphrase, I do not quote),
if we must choose truth or choose God, choose truth,
so you said once, for when truth wins, God wins.

(ii) Gravity

Spring Harvest -- anxious as the happiness that astonished the stars.
The speakers told us tales, by way of illustration,
from driving, parking, losing, crashing, being driven in cars.
The Riding Lights play made the car central to its narration.

A woman with a stick brought one speaker a note, tight-lipped.
The expert on time management turned up at the end of his session.
The long-wed couple departed badly from their script
that should have led us through married communication.

So many times the mechanism slipped!
Yet for each one, our race seemed all
the more driven by gravity, mechanical.

(iii) The Tallis Fantasia

G major opens --
a dawn chord through five octaves:
the stars sang for joy,
we marvelled at new shadows,
saw the notched stone and skyline.

G major concludes --
bright, compact, and working hard.
Solar-powered watch,
calculator, hot water,
spring sun drives the radio.

G is for the departed glory.
G is for the goodness of the day.

Twenty-first century kids

I don't know much about twenty-first century kids, but I've occasionally, in poems, used the figure of supposing that this or that commonplace thing is one that C21 kids know not to exist.

Here are three such poems. All have had prior appearances in Streetwise, which from 1990 to 2007 was the magazine of St Matthew's church, Cambridge.

The first takes its inspiration from an article I saw in another parish magazine.


DUMMIES

(a Yorkshire tale, with due acknowledgement to Maurice Ransome’s article in the Pickering Beacon)
Seen from a ladder,
right next to the high window
in daylight, it’s fine:
a glove-stand in the window,
and a dressmaker’s dummy.

Seen from street-level
at night, matter for a dare:
walk past the high house,
past the window with the hand
and dim figure, not look up.

Seen for the first time,
the hand-window must have lit
mainly puzzlement;
needed rumours, darkness, dare,
to drive terror through the blood.

The high house came down yonks ago.
More modest dwellings fill the site.
The garden wall still stands.
The street I see is stone and light.
Twenty-first-century kids know
there’s no such thing as hands.


For the second -- well, there's been a royal wedding today. That led me to think of blogging this brief squib from 2001, and that led me to think of blogging all these three.


HENRY VIII: A POLITICALLY CORRECT VIEW

Women today don’t need to pay
for kings’ frustrations with their lives:
twenty-first-century kids know
there’s no such thing as wives.


Finally, here is a poem that had had adventures before its appearance in the church magazine. 'Types of advocacy' won a merit award in the 2004 Nottingham Poetry Competition, and a subsequent appearance in Poetry Nottingham (now Assent).


TYPES OF ADVOCACY

Type one plays inside-out with guilt:
I beat my face in and it's all your fault.
Type two finds footing on a raft:
I beat my face in as a human right.
Type three is pride, drum-banging through
a badge: I beat my face in, why don't you?
(sometimes with scripture in its praise:
I beat my face in to obtain the prize).
Type four’s political correctness,
the trick that only naming conjures:
twenty-first-century kids know
there's no such thing as faces now.

I’ll look for more, but it’s amazing
you’ve had that lot and still not started bruising.