Saturday, 31 August 2013

Landscape and poetry: 'an anthology open in the sun'

I seem to be increasingly immersing myself in sounds and words that my younger, more culturally timid self, would have eschewed. It strikes me that getting older allows you to choose, perhaps unconsciously, between one of two paths: either slowly turning full circle and elegaically retreading old familiar ways (music collection mummified in yer 20s; a narrowing of the ways, living a life of incrementally reduced wonder) or striking out for new ground, ascending unfamiliar heights to see whats over the horizon, giddy and expectant. No contest I would have thought. And following the latter trail is liberating, shedding the constraints of earlier years and conservative youth (perhaps those who strike out on a more bohemian course too early end up having nowhere to go but right-wards; the opposite direction of travel, from left field free-thinkers to Boden-wearing Telegraph supplement readers). 

One manifestation of this period of enlightenment is tuning on to Radio 3 and classical music in general (OK, maybe not exactly the cutting edge, which was long ago blunted anyway, but more radical territory than the re-formers, landfill indie or safe singer-songwriter fodder that targets my demographic, like a stultifying smog); on surveying a rack of second hand records (for there is no magic or mystery in the grim and colourless efficiency of iTunes, Spotify et al) I'm now as likely to go for Bach as Black Sabbath, the Byrds or Burial. But the more unexpected meander has been into the world of poetry, previously subconsciously dismissed as the pretentious stuff of studied dilettantism. More specifically, and less surprisingly, I have been drawn to the carefully hewn and richly crafted words of poets who use landscape, place, nature and the elements - however tangentially - as their theme or motif.
    
As with classical music, my starting point for poetry has been an almost laughable level of ignorance; but this year zero baseline of knowledge and exposure has meant that the last few years have been a joyous drift into new territory. Yes, I was lazily aware of Burns, Ted Hughes and Wordsworth, but only hazily familiar with John Clare and Edward Thomas, the two titans of poetry that is rooted in a sense of place (but in no way safely and sentimentally so). As with music, discovery of one artist leads on to another and before long a labyrinth has been entered, with a lifetime of exploration exposed. So, I gorge on the Oxfam bookshop's selections of archaic texts, classics and the works of pioneers: Beowulf  (the sadly recently deceased Seamus Heaney's excellent 1999 translation), Sir Garwain and the Green Knight, Piers the Ploughman, Dante, Poly-Olbion, Milton, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Housman's A Shropshire Lad and on and on


Treasures all, but there is also a vibrant contemporary strain of poetry - perhaps echoing the outpouring of prose writing on themes of place, the natural world and our relationship to it in recent years. Much of this output feels radical and non-conformist, in the best traditions of the poetry of the past that has weathered well. For instance, new poetry figures large in EarthLines magazine, the journal Terrain and the Dark Mountain network of 'writers, artists and thinkers in search of new stories for troubled times'. The web and new media have also opened up opportunities for poets to share their work more easily. Collectives such as Longbarrow Press ('poetry from the edgelands') utilise on-line audio channels like SoundCloud  to give voice to their output; neat symmetry with the oral traditions of poetry, which is generally best appreciated aloud.


Now that I have belatedly 'found' John Clare and Edward Thomas, their work is a touchstone that I keep going back to; recently given further depth by the excellent Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis, which documents how Thomas, through the seasons leading up to his death at Arras on the Western Front in 1917, realised the latent poetry that had been in his prose writing all along.

There are many works that I have found thought-provoking or just a joy to read but here are extracts from a few that have particularly seared themselves into my imagination; all, in some way, topographical or concerned with the interplay between humanity and environment. 

Cock-Crows, Ted Hughes 
I stood on a dark summit, amongst dark summits -
Tidal dawn was splitting heaven from earth.
The oyster
Opening to taste gold.

And I heard the cock-crows kindling in the valley
Under the mist - 
They were sleepy,
Bubbling deep in the valley cauldron...

Dart, Alice Oswald
...Dartmeet - a mob of waters
where East Dart smashes into West Dart

two wills gnarling and recoiling
and finally knuckling into balance...

Kidland, Paul Kingsnorth
He came when the summer was high
to the dark false forest of the Kidland
where light does not go and people do not go
and trees are without branches because it suits us
that they should go naked...

Solnhofen, W.G. Sebald
...Overtaken by ruin
a Wilhelmine artisan mill
reflects the breadlessness
of the passing trains

Deposited between layers
lie the winged
vertebrates
of prehistory.

Speak of the North, Charlotte Bronte

Speak of the North! A lonely moor
Silent and dark and trackless swells,
The waves of some wild streamlet pour
Hurriedly through its ferny dells...

The Combe, Edward Thomas
The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper...

The Land of Dreams, William Blake

...Oh what Land is the Land of Dreams?
What are its Mountains and what are its Streams?

...Father, oh father! what do we here

In this Land of unbelief & fear?
The Land of Dreams is better far,
Above the light of the Morning Star.

The Mores, John Clare
...Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept inbetween
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the horizon's edge surrounds...

The Reader Looks Up, Arthur Freeman

See now how the English landscape lies
like an anthology open in the sun - 
a rock-bound book, of even leaves
thumbed and unthumbed, of parts begun

and left undone, uncut, unread...

The Ruin, Anonymous
Wondrous is the stone-wall, wrecked by fate;
the city-buildings crumble, the works of the giants decay.
Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed,
barred gates are broken, hoar frost clings to mortar,
houses are gaping, tottering and fallen,
undermined by age. The earth's embrace,
its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen;
they are perished and gone...

V, Tony Harrison
...This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill's
the place I may well rest if there's a spot
under the rose roots and the daffodils
by which dad dignified the family plot.

If buried ashes saw then I'd survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week...

Welsh Landscape, R.S. Thomas
To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went to the making of the wild sky.
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses,
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And hum of the machine
Of strife in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sprung arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.

You can't keep an inveterate list-maker down, and there is a wider selection of the poems and collections that I have journeyed through as, in the words of Edward Thomas, 'I passed the horizon ridge to a new country' (Over the Hills) in the Reading the Landscape pages of this blog. 

As a footnote, it is not just the poetry of landscape that I find fascinating, but also the landscape of poetry; the morphology of the word-hoard itself. The subject matter and imagery may well be the starting point to draw in your interest but, in a way that prose cannot match, a poem makes you consider every word and often uses words, phrases and syntax in surprising and unusual ways. There is something about the sparse and elastic structure of poetry that encourages the reader to linger and reflect, to allow the type on the page to take flight. Even the lexicon of terms to describe the form and structure of poetry has a lyrical quality: cadence, coda, metre, stanza, timbre etc; though the technical terminology can still baffle me somewhat: blank verse (verse that does not employ a rhyme scheme, though not the same as free verse); iambic pentameter (a line of poetry comprising of five metrical 'feet', with an end stressed two syllable foot?); and I'm still not entirely sure what characterises a Haiku (the aim, apparently, is to create something greater than the sum of the parts).

The Murder of Maria Marten - Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band






Tuesday, 13 August 2013

Saltmarsh, Ile de Noirmoutier


A circling plain, bleached flat in wide-screen by sun and overcoming sky;
lonely home to hunting heron, bird-call and clearing thoughts.
Hum of wind-washed grasses, bent in rhythm, amplifying the calm.

An old channel, guided by memories of flow, glistens its approach; 
drifting a lazy course,
now one with my own.
Two rabbits disturb this marsh stupor:
fen-land exile from beach-side camp.

Latent yet elemental, this low place - Marais Salants - exists for salt: sluice gates alone keep out the sea's patient intent; and for these short hours, a care-less hideaway is found here.
Ile de Noirmoutier, Vendee, France








Monday, 29 July 2013

Voices from the well

The Church of Merthyr Issui at Patricio (now Partrishow) inhabits its location high up on the western slope of the Grwyne Fawr valley in the Black Mountains as only an ancient country church can do; nestled stone, standing in calm defiance of time. Seeking shade on a day of broiling heat, the dank emptiness inside was a welcome pause from the summer uniformity of the past few weeks. Looking up and around, the glory of the archaic architecture and iconography met my gaze; a spiritual, though - for this heathen - not a religious, leap back into the Middle Ages.

The church has occupied this site since at least the eleventh century and is named for a Christian hermit, Issui, who lived in a cell in the dingle below, next to the fast flow of Nant Mair ('St Mary's stream') and a Holy Well that probably predates the church as a place of worship and pilgrimage. Springs and wells have a deep topographical relationship with places of worship: as Richard Morris points out, 'the basic meaning of the Old English wylla is spring. More than any other type of feature waeterwyllas span the transition from pagan to Christian geography'. Issui was murdered by a passing traveller who had taken rest in his cell (hence Merythr, 'martyr') and this ungrateful act led to the foundation of a church in his name; in the more florid words of P. Thoresby Jones in his 1938 Batsford guide '...to commemorate an unwholesome and officious hermit who rashly rebuked some lusty pagan prince'. 



For once my interest was focused on the interior of the building rather than the landscape setting. Likely due to its remote location, the church did not suffer the same state-sanctioned vandalism as most during the Reformation and therefore retains much of its late medieval features and ambiance (P Thoresby Jones again: 'the Puritan iconoclasts failed to find it'). From my last visit I had remembered the 'doom' mural on the west wall of the Nave: the figure of 'Time' represented by a skeleton holding a scythe, hourglass and spade; presumably a subtle reminder to the parishioners as they left the service that this earthly life, and therefore time to repent for their sins, is limited. As shafts of sunlight streamed through the window above, the outstretched arms of the looming figure seemed to widen; rib bones and skull standing out in sharp relief to the white washed wall.


The church also retains a rare surviving rood loft, or gallery, and screen; its intricately crafted carvings, including a dragon - representing evil - consuming a vine - representing good, a common motif in the Welsh Marches. As is so often the case, the name of the highly skilled artisan who has left us this everyday masterpiece will never be known; was it the work of a local craftsman or imported skilled labour from Italy or Flanders?

I will choose less sultry weather for my next visit and explore the wider landscape surrounding the church further: the aforementioned Holy Well in the dell below, decorated with niches which once held sacred images and relics; the nearby stone bearing an incised Maltese Cross used as a waymarker for pilgrims; and the ancient bridge across the river Grwyne known as Pont Esgob (the 'Bishop's Bridge'), over which Archbishop Baldwin is said to have travelled on his way to preach at the church in 1188, on a tour of Wales to gather support for the Third Crusade (as recorded in Giraldus Cambrensis' famous Journey Through Wales).

Edward Thomas, an Anglo-Welsh son of such a landscape, captures the elegaic sense of a place seemingly now left adrift from its history in his poem The Mountain Chapel:

'Chapel and gravestone old and few
Are shrounded by a mountain fold
From sound and view
Of life. The loss of the brook's voice
Falls like a shadow. All they hear is the eternal noise
Of wind whistling in grass more shrill...
...Under the sun. When gods were young
This wind was old.'

So much to learn from the temporal repository of compelling lives and deeds behind the decoy of sleepy backwaterness; 'voices from the well'.





References

Baker, Kenneth (Ed.), 2000. The Faber Book of Landscape Poetry. London: Faber.

Gerald of Wales (trans. Thorpe, Lewis), 1978. The Journey Through Wales/ The Description of Wales. London: Penguin.

Mason, Edmund, 1975. Portrait of the Brecon Beacons. London: Robert Hale.

Morris, Richard, 1989. Churches in the Landscape. London: Dent.

Reed, Canon Arthur, 2010 .The Church of Merthyr Issui at Patricio. Leaflet.

Thoresby Jones, P, 1938. Welsh Border Country. London: Batsford.

Monday, 22 July 2013

Relief from the Heat of Noon




The summer rolls on remorselessly, harsh heat overcoming wasted shade; at such times reading becomes a relief from the unwavering sun, especially lines that reflect the season: midsummer leaching from the page. Here's a glimmer of John Clare, each word offering some cool respite. 



There lies a sultry lusciousness around

The far-stretched pomp of summer which the eye

Views with a dazzled gaze - and gladly bounds

Its propects to some pastoral spots that lie

Nestling among the hedge, confining grounds

Where in some nook the haystacks newly made

Scents the smooth level meadow-land around

Whilst underneath the woodland's hazley hedge

The crowding oxen make their swaily beds

And in the dry dyke thronged with rush and sedge

The restless sheep rush in to hide their heads

From the unlost and ever haunting flie

And under every tree's projecting shade

Places as battered as the road is made


The Heat of Noon


Tuesday, 2 July 2013

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene

"I thought of walks in the English countryside, where people start shouting at you as soon as you stray from the footpath".  

A statement by George Monbiot from his thought-provoking new work Feral that, like the book as a whole and the concept - rewilding - that it advocates, both resonates and slightly infuriates at the same time. 

'Rewilding' is certainly trending in environmental circles at the moment. However, its not so much the prospect of the return of the wolf, lynx, beaver and other predators and large herbivores to the uplands and wilder parts of the British Isles and Europe that is in my thoughts (though I do have some practical and intellectual problems with this idea that may be explored at another time). The above quote struck a chord with me because it also hints at a more basic, anthropocene concern when considering the future of landscapes and ecosystems; namely, perhaps before we rush headlong into facilitating the theoretical 're-introduction' of the straight-tusked elephant that roamed European forests and plains 40,000 years ago, we should address the more fundamental concern of land ownership, access and control. 

To be fair to Monbiot, rewilding is a useful and imaginative stalking horse for stimulating debate on this issue and future direction in the wider policy fields of agriculture, conservation, energy, housing, transport and land-use. My own ruminations on the bizarre situation that we in these islands find ourselves - an increasing population, in many ways more autonomous than ever before, excluded from living and working (or even visiting) the larger part of the land mass on which we dwell - have cooked up a righteous soup of thoughts around community food production, noble, peaceful trespass and the hidden history of the tyranny of enclosure. How can it be right that '...nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line' (Simon Fairlie)?

A number of recent readings and 'Twitter-leads' have helped to stimulate this well-spring. The most striking being Gerry Conley's blog post on The right to roam land and shore, 'but for the sky, no fences facing'which eruditely brings together many of the touch-stones of this subject: Norman land grabbing, eighteenth and nineteenth century Parliamentary Inclosure, John Clare, the Diggers of St George's Hill, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, Marion Shoard, Right to Roam legislation, corporate land ownership and the creeping privatisation of public space. These themes have also been essayed in articles by Peter Lazenby and, again, George Monbiot. 

The Diggers, a radical group of proto-socialists who occupied St George's Hill in Surrey in 1649 are fascinatingly chronicled in the 1975 film, Winstanley. In many ways, this doomed five month attempt to establish the concept of the 'Common Treasury' of the land for all, ruthlessly quashed by the reassertion of the primacy of private capital and ownership, occured during a pivotal period in history for the English landscape and society; a course was being set for the processes of enclosure and 'improvement' of the land, of successive agricultural, industrial and post-industrial revolutions that sculptured the environments and socio-economic realities of subsequent generations, and still resonate today: 'Winstanley had a dream of a wonderful, gentler, more just and happy world; a dream that came again to other people in succeeding centuries, but for whose realisation we are still waiting' (David Gardiner).  

The arc of this story is well rehearsed, and well written, ground that I am not going to retread. Instead, I am leaving the path, plunging into the undergrowth; exploring the concepts of access, private ownership and enclosure, and maybe rewilding of the self, head on and with the 'muddy boots' of empiricism. Taking, in Richard Mabey's words, '...the opportunity to experience it (nature) face to face, with its qualities of wildness and renewal intact'. So, rather than using an Ordnance Survey map to pleasingly link up the anarchic network of dashed lines indicating public rights of way, hill tracks and unmetalled lanes, I have devised a mildly subversive circuit through hill and dale that studiously avoids legally prescribed routeways: a Trespass Way. 

Monday, 1 July 2013

Reliquiae Volume One


Reliquiæ is an annual journal of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, translations and visual art, edited by Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton. Each issue collects together both old and new work from a diverse range of writers and artists with common interests spanning landscape, ecology, folklore, esoteric philosophy and animism.
Full print contents:

Two strange tales from Mark Valentine, including a new work, "For She Will Have Her Harvest", about the graveyard poet Henry Kirke White. Noor de Winter on birch trees, music and the "artist-as-listener" in the work of of German expressionist writer and instrument-builder, Hans Henny Jahnn. Two poem sequences by Richard Harms - "Salt", an 18th-century sea-voyage in five parts; and "Wing", a naturalist's minutely observed depictions of Australian bird-life. Autumn Richardson's translations of a quartet of Inuit songs collected by Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen. John Hutchinson on the "imaginal world" of Sufi mysticism. Richard Skelton's elegy for the now-extinct grey fell fox. Mark Brennan's oil paintings of the Canadian wilderness. 

In addition to these there are Knud Rasmussen's account of Simigaq, an Inuit woman from Greenland, and the songs she shared with him; a Finnish legend from R. Eivind; Richard Jefferies on the miracle of hawks gliding; Wazha'zhe & Meskwaki myths; poetry by Francis Ledwidge; a selection of Manx folktales from Sophia Morrison; poetry by Christina Georgina Rossetti; a Greenlandic Inuit creation myth and two stories from W.B. Yeats.


Further information at: http://www.corbelstonepress.com/reliquiae-1.htm

Sunday, 16 June 2013

'I see a new earth': Herzog v Machen




Opening scene of Heart of Glass; directed by Werner Herzog, soundtrack by Popol Vuh, 1976

'After years of labour, after years of toiling and groping in the dark, after days and nights of disappointment and sometimes of despair, in which I used now and then to tremble and grow cold with the thought that perhaps there were others seeking for what I sought, at last, after so long, a pang of sudden joy thrilled my soul, and I knew the long journey was at an end. By what seemed then and still seems a chance, the suggestion of a moment's idle thought followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred times already, the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath'.

The Great God Pan; written by Arthur Machen, 1894  

Tuesday, 28 May 2013

Monday, 27 May 2013

'Yon pure waters, from their aery heights'

Mountain pool, Offa's Dyke footpath, Hatterrall ridge - Black Mountains

"When hope presented some far-distant good,
That seemed from heaven descending, like the flood
Of yon pure waters, from their aery height"

Tributary Stream, William Wordsworth (Poems of Wordsworth, Oxford University Press, 1919)