Posted on by Derek Turner

“The North for greatness”

Barnoldswick and nearby Yorkshire from Weets Hill by Dominic Nelson. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that made the Modern World

Chris Moss, London: Old Street, 2026, hb., 364pps., £25

DEREK TURNER admires a survey of an amazingly inventive and influential county

In his classic 1902-1904 Collecteana, folklorist Vincent Stuckey Lean cites a proverb which has since passed into cliché – “Lancashire thinks today what all England will think tomorrow”. Travel writer Chris Moss’s task in this highly personal book is to show how his home county helped make modern England – and so the wider world.

Until late medieval times, much of the future Red Rose County was remote and sparsely inhabited, its moors and uplands unsuited to agriculture, and too near Scotland for safety. In the Domesday Book, the county was referred to as merely the land “inter Ripam et Mersam” (between Ribble and Mersey), and accounted under Cheshire; it was not named until 1182. But the Dukedom of Lancaster, first created in 1351, became increasingly powerful and was ultimately merged in the Crown in 1413. There was even a folk-tradition that King Arthur had been Lancastrian, Lancashire supposedly a corruption of ‘Lancelotshire’. The combative nature of the inhabitants is suggested by an anonymous fifteenth century poem ‘The Shires’, listing the supposed characteristics of each county, which describes Lancashire as “a fair archer”.

By Tudor times, the county was increasingly integrated into the national mainstream, despite a reputation for Roman Catholic recusancy. The mother of William Camden, author of the nation-shaping 1586 chorography Britannia, came from Poulton. Alexander Nowell of Read was Dean of St Paul’s during Elizabeth’s reign – and the inventor of bottled beer! As Archbishop of Canterbury, Farnworth’s Richard Bancroft oversaw production of the King James Bible.

Michael Drayton hymned Lancashire in his 1612 loco-descriptive poem Poly-Olbion for its cattle, the “deepest mouth’d” of hunting hounds, silvery rivers, and women “who beare away the Bell” for beauty. There were seventeenth-century sayings alluding to regional power – “The North for greatness” – and cleverness – “He’s too far North for me”. The county was nevertheless rent by the Civil Wars, its north and west for the King, the rest for Parliament. The 1648 battles of Preston and Winwick were the last of the Second Civil War, and Preston would also be the locale of the last battle on English soil, during the 1715 Jacobite rebellion.

But Lancashire’s most important days began with the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was largely a Lancastrian creation. County inventors, speculators and visionaries yoked steam power to an array of new technologies and new thinking that would galvanise the globe, and give rise to vast questions which even now remain unanswered.

The world knows of Liverpool, Manchester, the Pendle witches, Stephenson’s Rocket, Lancashire cotton, St Helens glass, the Peterloo Massacre, Frederick Engels, the footballers of Everton, Liverpool, Manchester City and United, the Beatles and the Smiths. There was, or sometimes still is, also steel at Nelson, paint-making at Burnley, brickmaking at Accrington, wire at Warrington, beer at Blackburn, aerospace at Samlesbury (where Donald Campbell’s Bluebird K7 was constructed), submarine-building at Barrow-in-Furness, and fishing at Fleetwood. Peter Paul Roget compiled his Thesaurus at Manchester’s Portico Library.

Within the UK, Lancashire also conjures images of L. S. Lowry, Blackpool Tower, George Formby, Liverpool’s “Three Graces”, black pudding and pies, Eccles cakes, treacherous but magnificent Morecambe Bay, Coronation Street, Boys from the Blackstuff, Anthony Gormley’s Another Place, Bernard Manning, Les Dawson, Peter Kay, and a host of other bands, from Gerry and the Pacemakers to Joy Division.

It also connotes decline, division, ugliness, motorways (England’s first motorway was the Preston Bypass), harsh weather and a proverbial dourness of temperament. The author acknowledges that the county is often not conventionally beautiful, with exceptions like the Forest of Bowland, but even its least prepossessing locales “engage the mind”.

He is acutely aware of the hardness of life for many Lancastrians both during the Industrial Revolution – famously fictionalised in Hard Times – and in its wake – as documented in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. As he observes, “Lancashire was the first to turn the engines on, and the lights out.” Dickensian-style Gradgrinds, grasping though they were, at least sometimes gave back to their communities, leaving many magnificent public buildings, museums, schools, charitable bequests and a bittersweet memory of gritty civic pride. Later neoliberals merely shuttered still viable industries, hollowed out communities, and filled characterful quarters with soulless glass and steel.

Social suffering accounts for local traditions of radicalism – from seventeenth century Dissenters and Enlightenment intellectuals like Joseph Priestley via the Luddites and Chartists to the beginnings of Mass Observation (in 1930s Bolton), the first meeting of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (in 1971, in Burnley) and contemporary anti-racism. Moss sees radicalism as a key county characteristic, although perhaps not every reader will share his admiration of the decor of Roughlees Clarion House, a country hostelry furnished with photographs of Labour MPs, copies of the Morning Star, and a banner exhorting “Workers of the World Unite”. But unlike some enthusiasts he realises the impossibility of erasing inconvenient facts (like slave-trading legacies) from cultural memory. He is open to all, but never uncritical.

The book is filled with little-known facts – such as that the American Civil War really ended on 6 November 1865, when the sole remaining Confederate Navy vessel, CSS Shenandoah, surrendered at Liverpool Pier Head. He also honours now unjustly forgotten local dialect poets. The Lancashire dialect was the first English dialect to be treated with cultural seriousness, thanks to writers like John Collier (‘Tim Bobbin’) whose 1746 comic tale View of the Lancashire Dialect, by way of Dialogue between Tummus o’ William’s o’ Margit’s o’ Roaf’s and Meary o’ Dick’s o’ Tummus o’ Peggy’s was one of the first books of its kind. Another was “the Lancashire Burns” Edwin Waugh, who sold shoes on Rochdale market and resided in a cellar, but whose 1855 Sketches of Lancashire Life and Localities impelled Thomas Carlyle to pronounce him “a man of decided mark”.

Moss greatly regrets the brutal truncation of 1974, when two-fifths of the historic county was reallocated arbitrarily to Cheshire, ‘Cumbria’, ‘Greater Manchester’ and ‘Merseyside’. The rump became a backwater, notwithstanding a richly suggestive – even sacral – heritage. Gawain sought the Green Knight in nearby Wirral Forest. An early seventeenth century sect called the Grindletonians was sure the Ark of the Covenant was hidden in Grindleton Chapel. George Fox, founder of the Quakers, climbed Pendle Hill in 1652 and was enraptured, writing in his journal: “When I was come to the Top of this Hill, I saw the Sea bordering upon Lancashire: and from the Top of this Hill the Lord let me see, in what places he had a Great People to be gathered”. The 1961 film Whistle Down the Wind, in which children mistake an escaped convict for Jesus, was shot in the Ribble valley. The ghosts of Scottish Royalists killed in 1651 have been ‘seen’ on the M6.

So long a stranger to his shire, the author ‘finally’ wanders closer to home and his heart – finding his own past amid landscape irreducibility and a septentrional poetry of placenames – Fair Snape, Goosnargh, Hail Storm Hill, Oswaldtwistle, Prickshaw Slack. He closes with conflicting feelings – “Lancashire lets me down, but I can’t compare it with anywhere else”. This is not just an overdue survey, but an unusually enquiring one – an admirable examination of an incomparably important county.

This review first appeared in Country Squire, and is reproduced with permission

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

Vernal verve

Puccini orchestral works, Chandos, CHSA 5385

Strauss and Beethoven, SOMM-Beecham33

Elgar from the Archives, SOMM Ariadne 5046

Vaughan Williams. Albion Records, ALBCD070

STUART MILLSON ranges from Manon Lescaut to Mystical Songs

Sumptuous sound – yet with pin-sharp detail – is the order of the day in the new Chandos issue of orchestral works by Puccini. Scaling the heights of dazzling audio-demonstration-level engineering, the Chandos engineers bring John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London into sharp focus – highlighting the brilliant solo playing of sections and section leaders (musicians all handpicked by the conductor) and the sheer unanimity of a sound that truly gels and sparkles. Puccini is just the right choice of composer for artists who set out to re-create what is, possibly, a lost style of orchestral playing – or at least, that resonant richness associated with the large London ensembles of the 1970s and ‘80s.

Listen out for the immaculate, tenderness of the woodwind at the opening of the Act II Prelude to Manon Lescaut, with graceful violins leading us on to the emotional blaze at the height of the piece. Likewise, a soft breeze from the Italian coast wafts through the Prelude to Act III of Edgar, a Puccini opera we hear very little. An old-world charm, reminiscent of Grieg’s Holberg Suite, is to be found in the Tre Minuetti (from about 1881, revised seven years later). This gem of a sequence started life in string quartet form, but John Wilson saw its potential for larger forces and so duly orchestrated it. From the thrilling, orchestral ‘attack’ in the short Scherzo (18812-83) to the famous, nostalgic, sepia, bittersweet Crisantemi, the Puccini collection will greatly appeal even to those who are not naturally followers of opera, but who nonetheless relish a tug of the heartstrings.

In a different era of recording, yet with an equally striking sound, but finely remastered, is SOMM Records’ Sir Thomas Beecham archive. Sir Thomas was one of a group of great inter- and post-war British conductor-knights, often known for their biting wit and somewhat authoritarian presence on the podium. At one rehearsal with the Royal Philharmonic, the position of the chair and music-stand on the conductor’s rostrum was not to Sir Thomas’s liking, and he became a little irritated by the arrangement. “Do you think I’m Samson?” he remarked, as he tried to adjust the heavy podium apparatus. “Sometimes, we do wonder, sir?” replied a brave member of the orchestra. Beecham saw the funny side, fortunately. Yet the conductor was a musical titan, as can be heard in Richard Strauss’s grand symphonic odyssey and autobiography, Ein Heldenleben.

For Strauss, his music rooted in Wagnerian willpower, the ‘Hero’s Life’ of the title referred not to a sword-wielding Siegfried, but to the German artist himself – fighting battles for recognition, for artistic truth, against sniping and snarling critics (Das Helden Widersacher – The Hero’s Adversaries). Heldenleben is, perhaps, Strauss’s version of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, although the work ends not in exultation, but in the sense of the artist having satisfied many of his desires. Sir Thomas Beecham revels in the almost operatic texture of the music – the grand sound of French horns and martial trumpets; the music striding on as if accompanying both Zarathustra and Don Juan, all in one. Once again with SOMM, Lani Spahr’s audio restoration leaves us in no doubt as to the mission of this record label: to establish for all-time, one of the most remarkable conductors’ and composers’ sound archives to be found anywhere in the catalogue. Also on the CD is Beethoven’s Eighth, a work of beauty, lightness, diversion – a recapitulation of all the good things we find in the Symphony No. 1 – and just the prelude needed before the mighty Ninth, the Choral Symphony. Lovers of vintage records will enjoy the mid-1950s sound, and it is truly enriching for us to be able to reconsider and re-assess the legendary musicians of 70 years ago.

But SOMM’s musical exploration of the past goes even further back in time: their first volume of Elgar from the Archives presenting two recordings from the 1920s of the Enigma Variations – one conducted by the composer himself; the other by the founder-conductor of the Proms, Sir Henry Wood. Given that the recording techniques here involved the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra – and Wood’s own Queen’s Hall Orchestra – performing in front of what looks like a large Trinity House foghorn, the sound quality is remarkably clear. Again, sound-supremo, Lani Spahr has done a wonderful job of “French-polishing” this (English) music, and because of it, we can enjoy the glorious playing of the orchestras’ woodwind and string principals in this most famous symphonic warhorse.

The Elgar disc is completed by delicate and sensitive recordings of the Violin Sonata and String Quartet, both works the products of Elgar’s stay in the woodland of West Sussex at the end of the First World War. For Lady Elgar, the slow movement of the Quartet captured the essence of sunshine; and Sir Edward’s chamber music from this southern sojourn was often generally referred to as showing a mysterious “wood magic”. Marjorie Hayward, violin, and Una Bourne, piano, are the soloists in this 1919 acoustic recording, while the String Quartet in E minor recorded two years later, shows the virtuosity and understated English emotion of the London String Quartet.

Finally, again from our own land, the words and music of Easter, and poet, George Herbert, set by Ralph Vaughan Williams. In Five Mystical Songs we sense the growth of flowers, of the daffodil – the Lent lily – and experience the quiet revelations of resurrection and renewal, although not through the usual choral and orchestral forces associated with the work, but in the composer’s own arrangement for baritone, piano and string quartet. The songs were first performed in Worcester at the 1911 Three Choirs Festival, that gathering so associated with such masters of our musical renascence as Howells, Elgar and ‘RVW’ himself. On a new recording from Albion Records and the Vaughan Williams Society, Roderick Williams, baritone, gives a warm-hearted, clearly-articulated interpretation of the songs, accompanied by the Sacconi Quartet – a performance of intimacy and reflection, reminding the listener a little of the atmosphere of Butterworth’s song-cycle A Shropshire Lad. Here, England at Easter-time lies before us: “Rise heart, thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise without delays, / Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise, / With him may’st rise…”

Posted on by Nicholas Booth

Home Front horrors – and beauties

A Town Destroyed, Poplar 1941, by John Minton. Art.IWM ART 15910

Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art

Imperial War Museum, March 20 – November 1

NICK BOOTH is impressed and moved by images of London under attack

Critics tend to rush by British art of the Second World War: for them there is no contest with the art of the First World War, which was revolutionary and packed with their favoured ‘isms’ – futurism, vorticism, cubism, the aesthetic fallout from Roger Fry’s post-impressionist movement in the years before Western civilisation’s headlong dégringolade to slaughter in 1914.

The art of the 1939-45 war has been judged unambitious and even, in the case of Edward Ardizzone’s work, ‘cosy’. This is unfair. This rather too small exhibition at the Imperial War Museum makes no effort to mount a counter-argument but nonetheless contains many good and affecting things. Probably there wasn’t space to lay out key conversions away from abstractionism and surrealism in the interwar period: that having hymned the world of machinery and progress some artists recoiled from the realisation that technological advances could have very nasty side effects. Thus the world of humans and nature came back into focus.

Then the war cut off Britain from the Continent, and her artists inevitably fell back towards an English tradition for the particular and the romantic. Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art settles for paintings as record, sometimes almost as journalism – but many of the works operate on a much higher level. The show is worked up from Suzanne Bardgett’s excellent Wartime London in Paintings, which came out a few years ago and which is worth getting hold of if you are interested in this subject.

Two beautiful John Minton ink drawings appear early, A Town Destroyed, Poplar, and Looking Down on a Bombed Building by the Thames, Poplar 1941, are small and dreamlike, taking blitzed London and turning it into an inner landscape of melancholy emotion, a sort of visual analogue to Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime stories such as Mysterious Kôr, in which wrecked London ‘is drenched in moonlight’ and looks like ‘the moon’s capital, shallow, cratered, extinct’, and The Demon Lover, in which the evil ghost of a soldier – symbolic stand-in for the malign spirit of war visiting twice in a life – terrorises a woman in her closed-up London home.

A Concert in a Shelter, St. Pancras Borough (1941) by Olga Lehmann. Art.IWM ART LD 1900
A Shelter in Camden Town under a Brewery: Christmas Eve, 1940 by Olga Lehmann. Art.IWM ART LD 1899

Two ink-and-wash paintings by Olga Lehmann portray the subterranean experience of sheltering from air raids. In the swift, brilliantly realised A Concert in a Shelter, St Pancras Borough (1941), the distant stage is a flash of colour in dark, overcrowded cellar. You can almost hear the ‘shelter cough’. Lehmann’s A Shelter in Camden Town under a Brewery: Christmas Eve, 1940, evokes the dingy grimness and looming terror endured under the streets.

Incendiaries in a Suburb (1941) by Henry Carr. Art.IWM ART LD 1518

The prolific, technically brilliant and now largely forgotten Henry Carr gets a good showing.  St Clement Dane’s Church on Fire after being Bombed crackles away – Carr lights up the Aldwych with the eerie glow of a big blaze. The newspaper publisher Cecil King saw the church burning on the night of May 10, 1941, and said the flames and sparks shooting from its spire was “an odd and rather beautiful spectacle”. Familiar Silhouettes shows squaddies lighting up fags in Piccadilly Tube; A Railway Terminus, a tour de force rendering of St Pancras Station vast and dimmed for the blackout, is blown up to wall size; and Incendiaries in a Suburb conveys the horrific surrealism of war without recourse to actual surrealism. There are the silent, blacked-out, deeply usual London homes but the horizon is orange with a demonic inferno, a searchlight roams the sky in which snarls AA fire, a church and its crucifix stands in silhouette, and piercingly bright alien incendiaries land in gardens, the UFOs of 1941. Humans scramble in the gloom. It is more strange and affecting than Magritte’s Empire of Light.

Priscilla Thorneycroft’s tiny ink drawing from the London Underground, Soldier with Child in the Tube (1940-1941), shows the weariness and strain of the Blitz in the soldier’s face. Kenneth Rowntree’s CEMA Canteen Concert, Isle of Dogs, London, E14 (1941), memorably records the tea-and-sandwiches collectivism of wartime entertainment. Graham Sutherland’s The City: A Fallen Lift Shaft (1941) is more fascinating in the flesh than it ever is on the page. When he saw the broken shaft in a ruin near St Paul’s Cathedral Sutherland said it “suggested a wounded tiger in a painting by Delacroix”.

With a collection as large as the IWM’s it seems strange the show is quite modestly sized. Space should have been found for Charles Mozley’s vivid The Thames Embankment (1940) a favourite of mine. Through misty blue winter London light, we see the view from the Savoy above Embankment Gardens with the National Liberal Club and Parliament in the distance underneath insect-like barrage balloons. A tram whirrs up the road, in the gardens below another barrage balloon is tethered, and to the right looms the ghostly dome of the National Gallery. This was London at the start of her agonies. The pre-war city would take many terrible blows and sustain heavy losses in every sense of the word. Mozley’s ‘monument to a moment’ in time, to use the great David Bomberg’s phrase, is the beginning of the end of the old capital, the city that was so brilliantly brought to life in Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony. The absence of Mozley’s painting is a glaring omission. You can see it here: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/19851

Ardizzone’s large Shelter Scenes, Tilbury, is on show but a few of his pictures from blitzed Silvertown, in the East End, would not have gone amiss. You can see them here: https://www.iwm.org.uk/search/global?query=Ardizzone+Silvertown

The Haberdashers Hall, 8th May 1945, by C. Eliot Hodgkin. Art.IWM ART LD 5311

Eliot Hodgkin’s wonderful The Haberdashers’ Hall, 8th May 1945, appears, though not at the end of the exhibition where logically it should be. This quiet, almost ironic view of the ruins of the hall with the lantern of St Paul’s rising behind is a sort of understated companion to Paul Nash’s 1918 We Are Making a New World. In Hodgkin’s painting here is the end of the European war, the last day; overgrown with weeds and littered with rubble and bent iron; huge and terrible things have happened; nothing will ever be the same again; meanwhile there is silence save for, perhaps, the faint merry singing of VE Day celebrants in the distance. The future will be along in due course.

On that point it’s a shame the IWM does not possess Carl Giles’s prophetic cartoon from the Sunday Express, August 5, 1945, (the uranium atom bomb ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima the next morning) called It’s Quicker By Rail showing the first appearance of his soon-to-be-famous Family trudging towards or back from their first peacetime holiday along a trainless railway track. https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/specialcollections/files/2020/08/ga5447.jpg The British were moving out of the ruins and into new challenges.

Posted on by Lawrence Freiesleben · 1 Comment

Blackheath

LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN takes a psychogeographic trip through south London

Nobody wanted proper light they want to be in the dark, they liked it, they liked

the little cupboards.  To live a story written in invisible ink, painted in

abstract arcs, but atmospheric, poignant, calm, devastating . . .  Perhaps this

could never happen except in some strange half-apprehension inside?

Hurtling the elevated course[i]

viaducts arching forwards

headlong,

cable-ducting streaming a frantic pulse

while gantries blink at signals vanishing 

gaps before speech

no time to question

twelve tracks in unison, dividing, merging,

aimed reckless

– a geometric exaltation –

at the sharp radius, weed-ragged triangle

of Borough Market Junction

(slow thunder amongst the attics),

braking will have its moment, but now is not it,

now is acceleration,

exploding through the jumbled visual inundation

of miraculous panoramas vaunting the compass

to praise and shun

from slum to gentrification’s skyward balconies

skewed bridges over stalled clutter

horns accusing each other  

St. James’ Bermondsey[ii] – foregrounded – is granted time,

Tower Bridge Road is not.

Scaling steel and dazzle of glass, mirror and kaleidoscope

the solid eras from which they took insolent flight,

splintering visions into the grey-green river’s tidal swell.

Cannon Street or Charing cross . . . default to London Bridge:

this sublime chaos has been overripe for a century,

between the essence of specific words

changing with the hour

the light, the region of Europa, the confident stairways.

Did the bombing try to neaten things or only add another density?

Followed by two or three decades of hopefulness[iii]

(in retrospect overstated, deluded),

soon came the point where things went subtly

yet more incurably wrong. 

More than anything, landscape had always given him freedom. Uninsistent.

It had no care for the human world.

All that dialogue, phrasing, signature, soundwave, all that need and frustration:

it made no impression. It missed almost everything.

Censor the didactic rant to puzzle on the outpourings of runic graffiti

ipton’s Tea, the finest the world produces

disrupting or expanding Deptford Broadway

bloated Arabian Nights or a portal to secret cults

conspiracy conflations overrunning all others

horror sunflowers with erotic intent

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik[iv] is not the genre

nor boombox cars racing their decibels

no wardrobes or courtyards conceal the past

for the hangars of wire are all a-rattle with nothing 

nothing visible

and the indulgence expanding from self-control,

intensifying experience to give a purpose,

rings artificial,

yet undoubtably the ancient and the medieval

exhale through every area of wood or raven black

and transitory 21st century towers alike suggest demise and the diagonal

upon which the air itself will carry their dust

their stone tapes[v] into the clouds and colours

as though history is more than dead structures and the fabrications of books

is rather the ether itself (as some claim love is truth and truth is love)

behind and above all terminal, worn out, buzzing industry

this daily to and fro of mindlessness

the impatient global death-wish.

Take Courage at the Amersham Arms by the double red lines:

I did and I didn’t – no alcohol passed my lips

chalk on the wet wood around the shadow of alphabets

all of these corrections

and all of these failings[vi]

echo from the mesh fence over New Cross station

expectant platforms freed from rush hour below

looking south to Hastings (theoretically),

taste the wash of the tide and the rush of shingle

briefly fade the queue of danger lights shining on bin bags

the pierce of brakes . . .

what first impressions from a precarious pushchair!

boys will be . . . what we teach them to be[vii],

as this mental brass rubbing, struggles corridors into distances

angles waking from the dormant

tries staves to support a cloven harmony.

Obviously, it wasn’t good to have all this contempt. It wasn’t kind.

Even to wish for a magic wand to wave up another life . . .

the lodge house on a disused drive . . .

Only he would ever open the gates between the trees. High ornate gates that would

symbolically exclude or welcome –

if occasionally he felt expansive towards the outside world.

Roadworks now upon the winding hill

funnel the yellow box junction overlooked

by that endless fight of George and Dragon

good versus evil or more complex alchemy?[viii]

From a smile to the left, other soundscapes flow

reducing plastic vehicles to a whispering haze

mind-manacled time zones intersect and cancel

hint forms, images, prospects

even narrative

from tilted rooms fumed with exhaust

from fenced corridors under bamboo screen and radar dish,

stunted palms and arrowslit windows

from country villas stranded in their rowdy future

dilapidated, behind railing and creeper

preceding 40s flats . . . perhaps? (they have a rectilinear austerity).

The projection may be drab 

but climbing Blackheath Hill toward the grass, drought-widening common 

its balconies are not stale,

filled with town and country,

their musics drift above the heavy traffic

the stop and start of hybrid buses

the slant of dreams and aspirations in many languages . . .

“If you can’t satisfy yourself, how can you satisfy anyone else?” runs the wise phrase,

the target of self-knowledge, bow and arrow, individualist parade.

The only trouble being: who but the ignorant, the arrogant or the lucky, can ever

satisfy themselves?

Higher, as the plateau begins to break,

wooded commons buffer zones of peace

where red shuttered bays remember green wartime garages,

until a siren sounds from 80 years past

loud enough to wake Wat Tyler[ix] from his abysmal mooring

reduced to a road sign,

loud enough to date other more recent subjectivities

garnered from artists, writers and characters who preferred art to living,

half-dead or lost, fascinated perhaps 

and wishing to stay that way –

forgetting that at its most vivid, art is life multiplied

or aware that such a level or spiritual leap[x], is too great a risk or challenge

and prudence often worse than a toxin.

Gestures and beauty gone –

You had your chance

and mine is nearly done

there is never finally any way to turn

but take port duty free on the link span[xi].

Is history the attempt of spirit to conquer matter[xii]

or no more than an accretion of grime?

something we should try to learn from but forget,

the circles through which we overlap or not . . .

our one-way flow with no option but to follow

– or a topological map with infinite directions and choice?

Here, the country church[xiii]

invisible tock upon the bookshelves . . .

red bus through the trees and fences that reach backwards and block

all diagonal pursuit

no sleep ever seems just

only a pause between enigmas

unless you switch off to it all and dream of Wales, or a remote coast

or a vineyard in Chile  

as if the dream were all.

That dream could be the dream of the lodge, off the map, disused, forgotten,

but self-sufficient – as in the end we must all become, unless (or even if) we can

rekindle love. Our own fracture is enough, only the landscape or the lover can heal,

not the peer group or the distant friend.

Once it becomes impossible to tolerate life as it is, there is only the light inside. 

The gates opened into woodland sun and shade.

All human drivel died between the avenues

all ambition drowned on the unspoilt riverbanks which followed.

And through the lines, words, shapes, the movement arose,

becoming tastes and notes and colours.

At New Cross station, Sutherland[xiv] asked “Do you think I’ll ever be an artist?”

This was the late 1920s – before the primeval incursion of Pembrokeshire

shattered his mould,

“Or shall I get my father to find me some other kind of work?”

Do such assumptions, signifying class structure, still remain?

Should I have been a meter reader[xv], musing on life’s paradox as I walked my round . . .

never troubling to scrawl any of it down,

never disturb the peace

for anything beyond style or template originality may be too cruel.

Was post-war optimism also when culture began to slither more generally trivial,

relaxed too far?

or can such impressions be blamed on the inevitable drought,

the scrap to maintain one’s personality in the face of the world? . . .

However –

since the developed temperament and will

can banish or dialectically justify all negative reality,

or dissolve material into metaphysical

today’s dull light is more than enough to make us content

avoiding the fairground and the ever-flashing blue lights

of ambulance and fuzz

as we walk, expecting rain, flippant but uplifted,

crossing the parched August space of

Blackheath.

NOTES

[i]    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_%E2%80%93_Greenwich_Railway_Viaduct

[ii]    Neo-classical. This image seems to exaggerate both the height of the viaducts and the closeness of St. James’ Church to the railway: blackcablondon.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/near-bermondsey-church.jpg

[iii]   From 1945 – 1975: arguably the maximum period of post-war hope – during which (for one example) ecological concerns were fully realised but insufficiently acted upon. During which, global corporations became too powerful and greed became a virtue.

[iv]  Both the music and specifically (in the line above this one), Dorothea Tanning’s painting of 1943: https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/64/

[v] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069316/  1972 British television horror drama film written by Nigel Kneale.

[vi] https://genius.com/Songs-ohia-travels-in-constants-lyrics  (paraphrased) lyrics written and performed by Jason Molina: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTcNpD1YyoI&list=RDbTcNpD1YyoI&start_radio=1  at 12.46 – 13.39

[vii] Slogan on a screen or billboard?  [visible but small in the top right of the roadworks photo –21st August 2025]

[viii] From https://brill.com/view/journals/rt/13/2/article-p195_4.xml  :

“It is the purpose of this paper to interpret the legend of St. George and the Dragon in terms of alchemical symbolism. While the victory of the Christian hero over the Dragon is traditionally interpreted as symbolic of the triumph of good over evil, it is argued that both combatants represent the four alchemical elements: air, water, earth and fire. Instead of a duel of opposites their combat transmutes the coiled-up energy of the dragon into solar light, which manifests as the beautiful princess of the myth. The conclusion is drawn that there is a dialectical movement of force in the battle between St. George and the dragon. The hero releases the antithetical power of the dense, dark matter symbolised by the dragon so that the elements of a polarity do not remain contrasted but are resolved creatively.”

[ix] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Tyler

[x] Søren Kierkegaard et al

[xi] Link Span, BTF film of 1956, directed by Michael Clarke. See: www.imdb.com/title/tt1754135/  “This documentary from British Transport Films, follows 24 hours in the life of three British Railways Channel ferry services.”

[xii]  Colin Wilson paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee in Religion and the Rebel (1957) reprinted by Aristeia Press in 2017, page 130.

[xiii] Charlton village is the one here of many.

[xiv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Sutherland  While Sutherland’s Pembrokeshire landscapes may not be “realistic”, personally, I wouldn’t think of them generally as “surreal” – which word to me indicates an element of attitude, even a degree of literary willing, more evident in (for example), Paul Nash’s gently surrealist, Landscape from a Dream, or in Dorothea Tanning’s, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/tanning-eine-kleine-nachtmusik-t07346

Sutherland’s best Pembrokeshire work celebrates the mystery and reveals the hidden power and primeval qualities of the landscape. However, I can see how, given that his landscapes are often ‘more real than reality’, this can easily be associated with surrealism, and at times he does utilize a more surreal approach. In fact, it could be argued that the most relevant aspect of surrealism, is not the exaggerated drama of melting watches and so on, but simply an ability or a moment in which one sees and notices things more vividly. Walking through a suburb of Heysham yesterday, gradually moving into a heightened sense of seeing, I was reminded how ‘surreal’ so many houses and gardens can look in bright daylight, the layout of shrubs and pots, the window surrounds and porches etc – all those aspects of daily life it is so easy to take for granted or disregard. Down on the prom, I was reminded of Paul Nash’s short essay Swanage, or Seaside Surrealism published in The Architectural Review (Volume LXXIX, April 1936, pp. 161-4). Nash himself distinguished between the work of artists belonging to a Surrealist group, distinguishing their work by a capital ‘S’, and “artworks, situations, objects or locations that have a dreamlike character or incongruous settings that evoke disquiet or the uncanny. These, he describes, as surreal with a small ‘s’.” See: www.paulnashdorset.co.uk/timeline/1936#

[xv] https://internationaltimes.it/?s=meter-reader  Obituary for my father, 2024.

Posted on by Reagan Upshaw

Two poems by Reagan Upshaw

REAGAN UPSHAW’s selected poems In the Panhandle was published by Kelsay Books in 2024. He makes his living as an art appraiser in the Hudson Valley of New York, where he also gardens and keeps bees.

Selfies

The Louvre announced that it will build

a new extension made to house

the Mona Lisa only. This

should handle all the milling crowds

lifting their smartphones to attempt

a selfie with the famous face.

The Prado or the Vatican,

or any other well-known place

is filled today with tourists taking

selfies with a culture’s flower

as if a feigned proximity

could somehow let them share its power.

Expect to find them on return

scrolling though photographs to see

not art by Michelangelo,

but Michelangelo and me!

Perhaps a moving sidewalk is

on order for the Louvre to speed

the crowds effectively along

while meeting this insistent need.

So they will stand, facing away,

lost in themselves.  All they will save        

are images unreal as shadows

on the back wall of Plato’s cave.

The Facebook Dead

Today’s the birthday of your childhood friend,

Facebook proclaims, as if inviting cheers

for the birthday boy, completely unaware

the friend depicted has been dead for years.

Algorithms cannot be embarrassed

by such a contretemps. They do as told                                       

and do not know the dear, departed friend

will age no more while you are growing old.

Some people do not wince at the faux pas,

writing to Facebook, “Please remove this name!”

but use the prompt as opportunity

to send their friend good wishes all the same.

Like birthday flowers left upon a grave,

these sad, one-sided offerings are but

attempts to deal with loss, a birthday gift

the dead cannot accept. That gate is shut.

Posted on by Hilary Layne

Three poems by Hilary Layne

HILARY LAYNE writes fiction and nonfiction and also publishes long form video essays on Youtube on the subjects of storytelling and the cultural decay of fiction. Her channel is called The Second Story. Her website is here.

IT IS NOT ALWAYS THE HUNTER WHO CONSUMES

My beloved Hunter,

pursuit throws silk across my path

which I run barefoot and already

blood and honey-soaked.

And you, half-wild with hunger.

White clay from my soft belly

clings to brambles and tells you

how to find me. My oil blood

waits like a whispered dare

for the spark of your blade.

My beloved Hunter

where is the tender violence of

your metal when I most need it?

I flee not to escape you but

to feel the warmth of your pursuit

on the back of my neck,

to feel my hair comb through

your grasping fingers; to hear

the air tremble with the

violence of your pounding heart.

And, on the banks of the uncrossable river,

when the hunt bleeds its last pleasure,

I will stop and turn, eager to feel

at last the sharp release

of your victory.

HOW TO FEED A SLEEPING FOREST

The cottage, I have said, is your heart.

What is your heart if not the gilded chamber

of the bound soul? Bound, I have said, by the forest.

Look: much of the sky is a distant memory,

a song sung in faraway light by lonely stars

aching for one another across unsurpassable voids.

What do we do with their songs? What can we do

but be silent and listen? How much of our existence

can be described as this? this obligation to witness.

(The forest, I have said, is a witness.)

There is a box in your chest. A knot of bark,

woven with sinew and nerves. It is there

you must put these things, not in your heart.

The forest of trees is witness, guardian

To your heart which is the cottage in which you live

in which the soul is housed in her gilded chamber.

(The box, I have said, is a fire.)

Into this fire you will cast the pain that is

essential. Grief, for example, and small parcels of regret

bound in ribbons of guilt. These things you must

burn in the fire. Then you may look out through

the windows of your cottage and see

how the glow of that fire lights the forest.

By no other light could the forest

count the branches on its trees or the birds

nested there. By no other light could the forest

see the cottage all aglow and the soul resting there.

(The soul, I have said, is you.)

FALLEN

I was woken by a whisper of snow

which defied the pearlescent sun and

the warmth of the earlier week and

touched the honeyed earth. A kiss.

But with the wetness of tears.

Poetry was read in the white light of it.

Tragic verse, blood-dipped, laced with love.

At night I slept with words I had written

on the edges of my mind and they bled

into my dreams, made them strange and

beautiful and unbearably unfamiliar.

Crows spotted white-frosted fields.

They paced stoically, as if – I think,

still wrapped in the fabric of the poem –

keeping watch over sacred goings-on

which have been hidden from me by

the sudden burst of cold. As if

some great thing has suffered an

unexpected injury and the world

was devoting all its energy

to saving it.

I searched the cottage for him, to ask him

what has happened, to explain to me

the feeling of serene dread which has

pressed upon my chest. But he was not there.

So I sat with a cup of black coffee

on the bench by the kitchen window.

The crows went on pacing, ever vigilant.

The threadbare blanket of gray

stretched across the sky

battled the sun.

I sat and I waited

for him to return.

I waited.

I wait.

Posted on by Ian C. Smith

England’s North Sea Coast

IAN C SMITH’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island 

Arriving back in England after so many years I first visit my birthplace near London where even the smells have me reminiscing.  From here the plan is to travel south along the Thames Estuary, then north along the coast.

 As we were freed from Sunday school we all heard the short screech of brakes.  A boy who lived near me was known for scaring drivers by sauntering saucily in front of them.  I think I disliked him because he was bolder than me.  I feared being run over after seeing a stricken dog’s blank eye bulging from its stilled face in the gutter.  The jam factory closed until Monday, its usual burnt sugar smell diminished, my parents chose to potter in our miniature garden while our roast dinner bubbled in the oven, contributing to the neighbourhood olfactory menu change, rather than cleansing their sins.  Our junior scripture, wasted on us, was their chance for a break.  My mother had no idea of my commitment to her.

Riding his luck, that silly boy had also ridden a car’s grille.  We both had sensible older sisters.  I had already crashed my sister’s bike, breaking my arm.  His travelled to the hospital in the ambulance, comforting him.  He wasn’t badly hurt.  The rest of us rocketed home with our dramatic news.  My mad dash was impeded by a stitch from clutching my collar.  My sister, perhaps not always so sensible, had instilled in me the belief that when you see an ambulance you must hold your collar until you see a dog, lest your mother died.  Like some of us, the American T-shirt had yet to emigrate.  Due to regular unwanted sightings of ambulances, often from buses, and dogs, although numerous, hiding when I needed them most, I only disproved my sister’s morbid dictum much later, a tardy laxness ending with guilty relief.

My family emigrated to Australia where that boy’s family also headed, where he became a policeman.  An early school leaver, like him, I also found employment in an asteroid belt of hazards, a welding shop, where I fantasised about travelling.  Sparks arced from steel melted by heat in that flashy crackling ghetto, shadows pulsing where men toiled to make ends meet.  Tension simmered beneath crude camaraderie like a live nerve, with me Rilke’s panther trapped in a cage.  I kept quiet there about my burgeoning reading solace.  In that acrid netherworld of freckled light immigrants padded their vocabularies.  That masquerade of spectral figures with shields and wands wearing identical overalls, who could have been space warriors, or prisoners, did little for the immigrants’ language education.  Morale was weary, likewise, morality.

A newly-wed German listened to, asked, and copied us, occasionally with odd results.  He managed to explain about an impending weekend visit to his English aunt, another immigrant, but, unlike us, well-to-do.  Grasping a finger-printed mug of sweet black tea I tried to help with advice he sought regarding manners, etiquette, while others competed to hector us with vulgar suggestions.  On the Monday after his social call the German raged in pent-up, back-to-front mispronounced oaths that doubled up the blue-flashed denizens of our Tartarus, the molten metal mob, in guffaws.  The posh aunt had cut him like an oxy-acetylene torch in front of his bride, felling him with outraged scorn when, uncomfortable in his pressed suit, the German lad had suggested: ‘Would you please shift your slack arse to pass the fucking jam, Auntie?’  Or words to that effect.

Overcoming my velleities, bridges burned, finally educated but love still elusive, I feel so alive back where I started with my boyhood imagination.  Driving through England looking hard at everything, I wonder about all I have missed while away, their shadows and echoes, now, in this cliché, my supposed mid-life crisis, albeit early.  Anxious, I, now we, move on, never stopping long in my ancestral land of ancient sorrow.  In Norfolk, an argument east of The Wash, ours no larksong at break of day arising, we approach an old man wearing a cloth cap with a horse, both their noses whiskery in grey light.  A man, a horse, a cart, a sign.  Should be a palindrome.  Yes, my argumentative partner, her Australian accent rapid, twangier than mine, wants to take the ride, but with the reins in her experienced hands.  English caution irritates her.  The old man hears us out before agreeing to a test drive.  He watches, worried.  But I understand the need for money.  Scavenging gulls also scrutinise her merry-go-rounding Wells-next-the-sea’s otherwise empty carpark.  Sticking close to the old man, deferential, I talk her up as if sharing secret knowledge.  You’d think she was Clancy of the Overflow’s direct descendant.

Our high seat a magic carpet, carriage erect, pert bottom sticking out like Chaucer’s Alisoun’s, her impatience with the Brits is ever-present.  The morning air, still, with few cars, brings to mind Eliot’s certain half-deserted streets, and regular glimpses of the North Sea captivate me, horseshoes echoing on tarmac.  That horse taking over, I ask my abrasive Queen Boudicca – East Anglia’s own – how she knows where to navigate her chariot.  ‘The horse does,’ she says.  ‘We’re just along for the ride,’ a fair description of our relationship.  Early shoppers like figures in a Lowry painting stop, stare at the strangers with the familiar horse, its pace increasing.  I wave to them languidly.  ‘We must be heading back,’ my woman says.  Wanting to believe her compelling logic, concerned, I ask if she is in control.  ‘Hardly,’ she says. ‘Stop waving like the queen, you show-off.’  She does seem happier.  In her element, I suppose.  Beyond the horizon I picture Europe, geography as reality, mind fizzing only with travel’s romance, not the errancy of our ways.  Then the old man looking lonely.  Flushed with success, she is kind to him.  Relief in his tone, he says he knew we would be all right, his demeanour a wavering lighthouse beam of warning we might well heed.

Posted on by E J Hutchinson

Three poems by E. J. Hutchinson

E.J. HUTCHINSON is Associate Professor of Classics and Director of the Collegiate Scholars Program at Hillsdale College (Hillsdale, Mich.). His poems and translations have appeared in First Things, New Verse Review, National Review, and elsewhere.

“Mars Hill”

The nearer sun beats down upon the bare

And desiccated Areopagus.

The mind on this unfeeling polished tomb

Refuses—will not feel that ever here

The Furies hunted Agamemnon’s son.

What ghost from underground could bear such light

Unshadowed by a mediating god?
It beggars all belief that these would come

Exposed to drink Orestes’ guilty blood.

But suddenly a breath of clammy wind,

A passing cloud that blunts the sun, a wisp

Of cigarette smoke floating past, and all

Is changed, the cry of blood to blood seems near,

Seems almost audible.

                                     But it is just

A momentary alteration in

The air, and it is gone.

                                     Returns Apollo,

The nearer, bloody sun, and with a groan

Beneath the earth flees justice to await

Some other deity, some other sun.

“The Arrival of Dionysus” (Euripides, Bacchae 1-63)

I come, a child of god, to Theban lands:

Dionysus, whom Semele once bore,

Induced betimes by lightning-bearing fire;

Now giving up the god for mortal form,

I’m present at my native riverside.

I see my mother’s smoldering cenotaph,

The smoking ruins of her bridal hall

Nearby, the vital flame of Zeus’s fire,

The fruit of Hera’s outrage, undying.

But Cadmus makes this precinct sacrosanct:

For this, my praise. And I myself, with greenery of vine,

Have hidden all around this haunted place.

I’ve left behind the many-gilded lands

Of Lydians and Phrygians, the sun-

Baked plains of Persia, passed through Bactria,

Perilous Media, Arabia

The spice-rich; Asia, too, which lies beside

The salted sea, demesne of cities whose

High-towered walls embrace barbarians

With Greeks. At last I’ve come to Greece, and first

To Thebes—those foreign climes now dance for me—

To manifest myself a god to men.

Yes, first of this Greek land it’s Thebes I’ve raised

With cries, donning the fawnskin on my shoulders,

Taking the thyrsus, ivy spear, in hand,

Because my aunts, who should’ve had more sense,

Denied that Dionysus sprang from Zeus.

They said that Semele, pregnant from some affair,

Pawned off on Zeus her sordid bedroom sin—

Cadmean sophistries—and due to this

Alleged deceit about her mate, Zeus killed her.

Therefore, I’ve spurred these women, mad, from home;

They dwell, now witless, on the mountainside.

I’ve forced them to put on the vestments of

My rites. The rest of Thebes’s female seed

I’ve driven mad from their homes, too.

Mixed indiscriminately with the daughters

Of Cadmus, under trees they sit on roofless

Rocks. For this stubborn city spurns my rites

And has to learn its lesson. Semele,

My mother, I’ll defend (I must), made plain

To mortals as the god she bore to Zeus.

Cadmus, then, gives honor and right of rule

To Pentheus, born of my daughter; he

Starts war with heaven over me and drives

Me from libations, me remembers not

In prayer. For these slights I’ll reveal myself

A god to him and Thebes. Hence to another

Land I’ll go, having set things in good order,

Revealing myself. But if Thebes attempts,

Impassioned, armed, to drive my Bacchants from

The mountain, I will lead a Maenad army

In holy war. I’ve taken on man’s shape,

Therefore: his nature in exchange for mine.

So, then, O women, you who’ve left behind

Mount Tmolus, Lydian stronghold, my sacred

Barbaric band, my hand-picked ministers

And friends, take up your native Phrygian drums,

Inventions of mother Rhea and me.

Then, come and stand around this royal house

Of Pentheus; thunder so all the city

Of Cadmus sees; but I will come to where

My Bacchants are—Cithaeron’s glens—to dance.

“When You Shall See Me in the Toils of Time”

After Thomas Hardy

When you shall see me in the toils of time,

The snares of meter reinforced by rhyme,

Staring at a page too shy to yield

And blankly fallow like an unplowed field,

One I can set no fruitful furrow in

To order my mistakes and what has been,

Be not amazed. Such aporia holds

The mirror up to nature. Do not scold,

Therefore. As observation’s lowly wife,

My art is only imitating life.

Posted on by Tim Miller · 1 Comment

A Severed Head

TIM MILLER’s latest book of poetry, Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, was just published by S4N Books. His poetry has appeared in Crannóg, Southword, Londongrip, Forgotten Ground Regained, and others across the US and UK. He is online at wordandsilence.com and can be heard on the poetry podcast Human Voices Wake Us.

The Great Year takes place a few centuries from now as a handful of people journey from eastern Europe to Iceland after the world has been decimated by war and environmental collapse. As they go, and in the manner of a post-apocalyptic Canterbury Tales, the survivors take turns telling stories. One of these survivors is a severed and magically-preserved head named John who occasionally recites poetry of his own. His first two songs are gnomic and ecstatic and don’t need any context.  The third narrates how he met another survivor, a man named Smith (also his occupation). The fourth song, coming near the end of the book, describes John’s affection for his friends that he has traveled with for so long. 

A Severed Head’s First Song

See what my eyes see –

   why do I need a body?

I see a man’s head

   placed in a hazel tree

and the poisoned blood it drips

   rips the tree in three –

why do I need a body?

I see a saint beheaded

   and watch milk instead of blood

flow with white ferocity –

   why do I need a body?

I see a warrior

   fishing for the serpent

that surrounds the world,

   and the line that he unfurled

(this tendency is innate)

is hooked with an ox’s head for bait –

   what high comedy! –

why do I need a body?

I see a mother in her ecstasy  

   mistake her son for a lion

and tear him completely apart:

   and with her mind utterly beyond

she put his head on a thyrsus wand

   for the sake of deepest Mystery –

why do I need a body?

I have ridden with the cavalry

   I have participated in atrocity

I have clogged the flesh-clogged axletree

   with the debris of my enemy,

and I have offloaded it all

   into the waters and soured the sea –

why do I need a body?

I have seen heads on platters

   and heads in pictures

painted in plaster upon the wall:

   they have been called omens and prodigies

and their poetry is a poverty,

   a malady and endless litany,

damned without a body

   to only see and see and see –

why do I need a body?

I have seen the great loom

   set up in the crowded room

and I saw the loom get going –

   and the weights on that loom

that were in the great room

   were the heads of women and men,

and mine was among them.

   There are only visions,

endless echo and revelation,

   and I cannot flee –

why do I need a body?

A Severed Head’s Second Song

I dreamt of two reeds growing

   two stalks blowing

that I wanted to keep from harm –

   but a strong arm

tore them from the ground

   and from their roots I found

that blood would not stop dripping,

   even when they were put on a plate –

and I was told to eat and celebrate.

I dreamt that two hawks flew from my hand

   and finding no food they flew to the land

of Hel to ask for meat from the dead –

   but somehow a table was spread

and I ate those hawks’ hearts dipped in honey,

   blood and bee’s treasure an awful money.

I dreamt of a ring wrapped in wolf’s hair

   and when I wore it I was well,

because I went home, home to Hel,

   where the graves open and the dripping dead tell

what has not happened yet –

   the god in the net, the lover not met,

the grudge and blood born of debt –

   Hel an ink-well where the ink is mead

and where all need has died, and the need for greed,

   only strong drink and the Book to read.

I dreamt of an old woman –

   but don’t we all –

and she said to burn the chickweed

   growing round the hall.

And the old woman pestered me

   all summer long

saying the hall would burn with it,

   an awful double song.

I didn’t listen to the old woman –

   but none of us ever do –

and when the grey horses came

   the man stopped there and threw

flames everywhere and all:

   and he lit it first in that weed

until the hall was gone

   and its ashes like black seed.

A Severed Head’s Third Song

It was me,

   like a nest of bees

covered in a hood –

   and suddenly this blasphemy

revealed on the table,

   preserved and wrapped in rosemary

My head

   of soliloquy and sorcery and serenity

and my eyes

   for the first time on Smith –

what a myth

   what a tale and a story

to meet with this tapestry

   this effigy of centuries

this mind of masonry

I was only a trick

   to that old soothsayer

and he only won me

   as some curiosity,

not for my ability, no,

   he wanted simplicity, not eternity,

not the ferocity and calamity,

   not the anxiety of true augury,

of seeing beyond, and far between

   of seeing beyond, and far beneath

not one season but them all

   not one shock but every fall

not one height but the constant climb

   not one word but every rhyme

not one season, not the one that’s near,

   but all of them, the great year

and I knew Smith would be with me

   each our own devotee

on land or on sea,

   and through cruelty and atrocity

through the litany of history

   through poverty and glad obscurity,

I knew he would take me with him

   and that’s why I asked to be given away

to be put on a platter, put on a tray,

   to be presented to this friend

whose heart I could perhaps mend,

   poetry and prophecy the cure

for the heartache that will not end,

   the two of us one strange tree

tending to our shared roots and mysteries.

A Severed Head’s Last Song

My head still holds

   its eyes of oak,

and these tired eyes

   have been my yoke

for much too long –

If I could stop –

   stop somewhere

with you four

   and live somewhere

and close the door,

   and put my tools aside –

my boat of words and my loom

   my knot of words

and the timbered room

   where each plank is a song

that only I can sing,

   words given flight

and songs given wings –

   How I would rather cling

to calm and love and rest

   I would rather snip the string

and feel our long calm blessed –

But then I see more melted gold

   then I see more mountains in flame

then I see the new become old

   and all the earth washed in smoke

and like a story told and retold

   in the voice of the multitude

every portent loosens its hold

   and every eye is ringed with flame

and the pillars of smoke topple down

   and the mountain is a torn gown

split down the middle and smoking

   and with every image, I drown.

Posted on by Sharon Hoffmann

Three poems by Sharon Hoffmann

SHARON HOFFMANN is a writer based in Atlantic Beach, Florida. Publications include the Hooghly Review, New York Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives (Harvard University Press), Paddler Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Letters, Wild Roof, Sho Poetry Journal, and other magazines. Awards include fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts and Florida’s Division of Cultural Affairs, three Pushcart nominations and a nomination for Best Spiritual Literature.

The Well-House

 That past week – the tag-end of winter, the first of spring –

we had come across the Forth Bridge on a pilgrimage,

visiting holy wells, points in an ancient geography,

Saint Mungo’s well, St. Margaret’s. We wanted

to share something sacred, something the Reformation

had not reduced to rubble. They’d been able

to cut down sacred groves, lay waste to chapels,

desecrate statues of saints, but water was indestructible.

Water flowed on, and folk went on worshipping it.

Not us, though, not really. We were

just pretenders, not truly pilgrims.

When our guide drove us out into the countryside,

we were disappointed that St. Mungo’s Well survived

only as a shallow basin, dank and stagnant.

We left no offering, not a silver coin, not a bent pin.

We didn’t perambulate three times sunwise.

We certainly didn’t pray. We dipped our fingers in,

but declined to take the slightest sip.

At Roslyn, we skipped Saint Matthew’s Well.

No longer young and fit, we weren’t

inclined to clamber down the gorge just to see

some rivulet seeping downslope to the Esk.

We did intend to drink at Saint Anthony’s,

but once again our age betrayed us. We struggled

halfway up Salisbury Crag, but the saint and his well

stayed out of reach. (Perhaps St. Mungo

had told St. Anthony about our disrespect.)

Staggering back to Holyrood Park, thirsty

and exhausted, we were grateful when our guide

produced an iron key to a massive door.

Behind it were steps that descended

to the well-house underground – Saint Triduana’s Aisle.

In the Dark Ages, fifteen centuries before our time,

a holy virgin had plucked her own eyes out

and sent them to the Pictish prince who’d praised them.

A thousand years on, James III had built a chapel here,

a hexagon with an altar and her relicts up above,

the well-house underneath. Thousands came,

hoping to be cured of blindness and diseases of the eye.

When the Reformation came, this practice was called

idolatry. An edict ordered that the building be utterly destroyed.

But underground, the well remained. Hidden, not gone.

Now in the shadows under the vaulted ceiling,

we saw her broken statue, piles of rubble, fragments

of window tracery, rib-stones from the upper vault.

The cistern slab covering the well had been dislodged,

leaving a narrow opening. We peered down

into the well-hole underneath, the water surface trembling but so far below.

I wanted to fall headlong into that delicious cold

and let it change me. I wanted to believe.

Something spoke to me, saying:

There is a river underneath the earth, only one,

and it rises up in every ancient well.

If you want to touch that river, a silver coin will not suffice.

I would have to lie flat on the stones, lean

my body down into the cistern,

and stretch my hand as deep as it would go.

I did pray then: “Triduana, saint and sister, help me to see.”

I reached for the water, and it rose to me.

Odysseus Three Sticks

After the suitors are dead, Odysseus

wants to uncomplicate himself.

Suppose he leaves Ithaca again,

reprises his voyage to the mainland,

once again a shapely oar on his shoulder.

Suppose he walks inland,

city after city after city until at last

another traveler falls in besides him

and asks why he’s carrying

that winnowing shovel around like that,

especially since the wheat harvest

has already passed. I imagine

he sticks his oar into the soil,

just as Tiresius once told him to,

and makes his sacrifices to Poseidon.

What now?

It’s winter and too cold to travel,

so even though he’s eager to go home

and start the soft old age

Athena promised him,

what’s another passing season

after so many years of wandering?

In the spring there’s a girl

with a wheat bun in the oven,

and then there’s a son.

Twenty more years pass and a grandson –

let’s call him Odysseus Three Sticks.

Eventually, Three Sticks is tired

of the winnowing shovel and his dusty choices:

hard wheat or soft, bearded or unbearded,

smooth or velvet, shocking and stacking,

worrying about winter rust and yields,

when to plant a nurse crop,

whether to leave a portion of the wheat for seed.

Suppose Three Sticks doesn’t want

to be wheat anymore –

he wants to be chaff, something

light enough for the wind to take

anywhere at all. One day

when the fields are nothing

but stubble, he sets out south

with a winnowing shovel on his shoulder.

He walks until the air is heavy with salt,

and another wayfarer joins him, laughing

at what he’s carrying. Captain,

the man says, that’s a funny looking oar

on your shoulder.

Are you looking for a ship?

Yes, says Odysseus, show me the ship.

Show me the wine-dark sea.

Making the Mystery

“It was not much that was wanted. To make no mysteries where nature has made none.”                   — Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

Men,

say women.

What else can you expect?

Expecting no answer,

gesturing silently,

palms flat and empty.

Women,

say men.

Shaking the head twice,

whistling the W

like a blasphemous prayer.

The same lines

bracket our mouths

when we name each other:

all alike, all alike.

I dreamed one night

it was not God

who confounded our language:

satyr, mentor, magus, anima, witchwife, muse.

Together

we make the mystery.

We cannot bear it that our words might mean

what your words mean

and still mean

no.

We cannot bear it

that we might be the same

and still be

alone.