A bit of nonsense...

...inspired by honest man's pic here

The second photograph is of me
taking a photograph
of me taking a photograph.
The second photograph
is a photograph of me,
I’m taking the photograph
and the photograph is taking
a photograph of me.

I'm not quite sure what this is supposed to be, just playing around with some thoughts and things here!


Memory

The fog furnishes bare branches
with droplets like glass berries. Static
they do not tremble since
there is no breeze, no not even
a whisper from your lips.

Forgetfulness

A tree wrenched from the earth
is spilling across the walkway.
I gather sticks like thoughts
of you and toss them
into the nearest river.

Blindness

The moon slides in then out of view.
A stutter of milk light soaks
the pavement for a moment
then eclipses, like hands clasped
in front my eyes.

Discipline

A barge drifts up the Firth.
The pram to my left bears its sleeping cargo.
I’ve memorised your breathing:
a steady lilt, rising with dreams
of cups, cars, and the word ‘no’.

Ignorance

Through railing shadows I step.
Under a crescent moon
crossing the arc of night
a plane heads for the continent,
in my sleep I speak your tongue.

Poetry Reading Habits!

Reading rob's post at surroundings about his poetry reading habits made me think about my own. Similar to rob, I also have my poetry books seperated into three piles:
the first pile is my essential book reading that I read to death on a regular basis and are what I call my 'muse' books. They are and always will hold prime place for me -

Sylvia Plath's Collected poems
Miroslav Holub's Poems Before and After
Anna Akhmatova The Complete Poems tr. by Judith Hemschemeyer

My second pile of books are a mixture between current reading that I know I want to, and will go back to on a regular basis and some dearly loved older books that I pick up fairly regularly to read the odd poem from -

Kathleen Jamie's Jizzen
Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife
Edwin Morgan's Selected (1952-1983)
Rob A MacKenzie's The Clown of Natural Sorrow
Jane Holland's Boudicca & Co
Meg Bateman's Soirbheas
James Sheard's Scattering Eva
Attila Jozsef's Winter Night (selected poems)
Ted Hughes' Selected Poems by Simon Armitage and Selected Poems (1957-1981)
T.S. Eliot's Collected (1909-1962) and The Wasteland and other poems
Hopkins' The Mystic Poets
Paul Celan's Selected tr. Michael Hamburger

So this list is still fairly exclusive but open to expansion as I widen my (particularly current) poetry reading horizons.
The third pile make up the highest and lower shelves of my poetry bookcase and I generally have to take a specific notion to drag out any of the books. I should say there is an inbetween pile that haven't been relegated to the heights or depths of my bookcase and neither have I mentioned them in the above lists though they may at times sneak in and out of pile number two, however the ones listed above as pile number two I don't think will ever sneak out of it!

Another pile of books I keep alongside my main poetry books are a few prose books about poetry and poets that are immensely important to me, these are -

Strong Words, Modern Poets on Modern Poetry ed. W.N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis
The Government of the Tongue, Selected prose by Seamus heaney
The Epic Poise, A Celebration of Ted Hughes ed. Nick Gammage
Winter Pollen, Occasional Prose by Ted Hughes
Poetry in the Making by Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet by Elaine Feinstein
Letters Home and Journals of Sylvia Plath

Valentine Triolet

I am your canoe

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Poem reworked into this: -

Dreamscape

The land beyond the Firth is gone
waves wane into white smirr instead

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Removing some poems to work on!

Under Beech Trees

James Sheard mentions in his blog his two-line problem of whether the following lines that he came up with sound like the opening, close or otherwise of a poem -

When next you pass through beeches, think:
These are old lovers; this how I left them.

So swiss suggested using Sheard's lines to come up with our own poems. Though I feel that the lines definitely constitute a poem's ending I found it really hard getting into the 'voice' of Sheard's lines so I decided to use them as an epigraph to my poem instead (hope you don't think this is cheating, swiss!).

A taste of 'Scattering Eva'

I seem to be experiencing a windfall in great poetry books at the moment. I recently ordered James Sheard's Scattering Eva which is a breath-taking collection of poems.
The blurb on the sleeve says -

"...James Sheard takes on the subject of the individual in European history...the speakers of his poems brag, explain, confess, resign, but are always human in their concerns. What emerges is a series of poems like skeletal mechanisms, set ticking at those moments when his characters connect, however briefly or tangentially, with the forces that surround them".

This is poetry as I love it best: thick with imagery, and every line pared down to the minimum so every word used is necessary and intensly loaded.

European history becomes richly exotic where 'Old money smells of civet' and 'Its women oil pearls at nut-meg throats'. The astonishing impact Sheard attains in a single line reminds me of Plath. In his poem At Konstanz Sheard writes 'In the lock of land and heat / my thoughts drone slow as Zeppelins'.

It's taking me a while to read through the collection simply because each line of a poem sets my mind adrift into unfamiliar, rich landscapes.

Some more tasters from the poems - from Heading for Port Bou, 1939 'Behind us, Barcelona had broken open / like an egg, leaking poisons and rumour'. From The No-Sayer "the ward's flowerbruised brightness, / the slow blossoms /of hurt'. From Writing History 'Old towns laid with herringbone / drag our feet onwards, back'.

And finally from the poem Duet which is part of the Scattering Eva sequence which takes up the second half of the collection -

'Sometimes you would weave me
in crossing spotlight.
I would crawl in webbing,
in uptorn shrubs.

Later, I'd watch your ribs
rise and fall - sandbars
in a sloping tide.'

I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone and so would Sean O'Brien, recent winner of the T.S. Eliot prize, who wrote a raving review of it on the back cover.

First Impressions of Soirbheas

Thanks to swiss for tempting me with a couple of postings of poems by Meg Bateman I'm now the delightfully happy owner of her latest collection Soirbheas (Fair Wind).
Never more than now do I regret that my mother never taught me Gaelic (because my father can't speak it). These poems are at once image-packed, dreamy, personal, passionate, very highland Scottish with a sharp and modern edge but I'm left wondering what's been lost in translation.
I only bought the book this morning and couldn't put it down (much to my one year old's annoyance). The intensity and weaving of grand themes with commonplace imagery reminds me a little of Ahkmatova's early collections. Though where I feel a surreal edge is gained through the translation of Ahkmatova's works I have a niggling feeling that something is being lost in the translation of these poems. Anyhow these are just first impressions from a mad rush read through the book. I'm immensely proud of their highland and island Scottishness and imagery so familiar to me in poems so beautiful, passionate and well written (though I wasn't raised there I was born in Stornoway and spent every long summer of my childhood on Lewis).
This book of poems will be glued to my hands for the near future!

Yippee I'm going to StAnza, a Scottish poetry festival! Well for a day and a half of it anyway!
Some of the speakers I hope to hear are Janice Galloway, Michael Schmidt, Alison Brackenbury and Kenneth White so I'm very much looking forward to it!

My first effort at writing Tanka poems. I've not kept to the 5-7-5-7-7 line syllable structure but tried instead to aim for the spirit of the form.

They weren't written with this pic in mind but do you think they work together?

Geisha Girl by George Henry

Haystacks: Snow Effect (Monet)

poem deleted and entered into competition

My first attempt at a Villanelle - a traditional poetic form. For honest man inspired by this photo on his blog!

An Aberlady Sunset

What is sky and what is river

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The Rest and Be Thankful

On The Rest we lie

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Mousetrap

We set three then jumped ship.
Little scuttles, flesh and blood

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Removing some poems to work on!

Mobile

From the corner it watches her.
No song, no flashing lights

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Turn the Engine on

and take me anywhere but home.
Drive on to where the street lights end

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Short Book Review

Boudicca & Co by Jane Holland

I recently ordered Jane Holland's book of poems Boudicca & Co after reading one of the poems from it that she had published on her blog Raw Light. I managed to steal a bit of quiet time over the last few days to read it and I thoroughly enjoyed it, will definitely find myself going back to the poems time and time again as you do with good poetry.

The book is packed with 58 poems and split into 4 sections. What struck me immediately was the density of imagery and choice language that prevails through every line and the overwhelming sense of completeness with every single poem so that each one could stand alone independant of the sequence they inhabit.
There is a rich variety of subject matter - from Love Song for a Gargoyle (which has 'rough hoof' and 'tongue' in the same line and makes my mouth feel all funny every time I read it) to In Praise of Cannabis!
The poems are full of great images, I particulary like "A black rain of hand-grenades, / men down like dominoes " (First Assault) and "They lift you out through your necklace / of cord, slippery and indignant" (Twins).
The poems are engaging, thoroughly enjoyable, some serious and some full of fun but the poems of the final Boudicca sequence beg to be read - each poem throws you onto the next one which, like an exciting novel, you can't put down until you've read to the end.
So definitely a worthwhile read.

Sylvia Plath Reads Ariel

I just love youtube, it's great being able to hear poets reading their own work. I like this video, the voice is Plath's.

The Tracker

The Tracker

He dreams of fields of deer tracks,
hoof prints, rut marks on tree backs;

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