LOCATING THE NEST

                      One of Lizzie Farey's nests in the grounds of Gracefield Arts Centre

What is it about nests?  We marvel that with only a beak and a clawed foot a bird can construct a nest which varies from something that looks like a heap of kindling to an intricately woven sphere lined with moss and fluff.  The swallows and house martins are back, busily renovating and new-building their amazing mud dwellings under our roofs.  Did you know it is good fortune to have a swallow nesting in your loft?  Forget the mess – it’s worth it for the luck.

Perhaps it’s the combination of safety and fragility, seclusion and vulnerability.  We even use “nest” as a metaphor for our own homes – youngsters fly the nest, parents suffer from empty nest syndrome.

Today I visited Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries for the “Locating the Nest” exhibition – a collaboration between print-maker Hugh Bryden, craft-artist Lizzie Farey and poet Tom Pow.  The exhibition is prefaced with a quotation from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: “When we examine a nest we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world”.

Tom Pow’s meditations on nests are direct and moving -

            “In time of war, birds build nests”

            “Absence makes a nest: heartless”

The poem on the Crossbill’s nest has an immediate impact in the last few lines –

            “You don’t need ...        overoiuu uuuuuuuu uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu uu uuu

              ... to have felt the wind or smelled the pine, nnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

              to know what’s precious in your life.”

Hugh Bryden’s linocuts of nests set up a triologue with the sculptures and words.  Their strong clear lines enclose eggs of different colours and are set off beautifully by being displayed in groups of four.

Lizzie Farey’s nest forms are wonderfully tactile, made of woven twigs.  They vary from the semi-abstract - “Rooks” - to the delightfully inhabitable - one “Nest Form” is constructed of willow, moss, grass, heather, birch, bog myrtle, larch, honeysuckle, rush and a tiny twig of gold leaf (a reminder of the Corvids’ habit of incorporating shiny objects in their nests).  A bird could move in tomorrow.

My eye moves from sculpture to prints to words and back again.  It’s a brilliantly curated exhibition and well worth seeing.  Locate the Nest before it closes on 17 May and be inspired.

www.locatingthenest.com

WORKING THE FURROWS

Cullivoe Harbour, Isle of Yell, Shetland – I watched a large flock of seabirds approaching.  At first they were just a white cloud on the horizon, but as they came nearer I could see the outline of the fishing trawler they were pursuing, gorging on discards. 

Recently I was reminded of that holiday memory when I saw a flock of gulls following a tractor which was ploughing the field opposite my house.  The birds were constantly on the move, swooping and wheeling in flight, their tails white vanes against the sun.  Often I see one or two or at most half a dozen flying over but where had all the extras come from?  How did they know to come here?  Where would they commute back to in the evening?

I thought of Philip Gross’s “Betweenland VI” poem in The Water Table where he describes “The gulls going home from the city, / from a day’s work at the landfill”.  The word gull also means to trick and the poem has its own trick at the end – a pun on home and holm. 

Gulls are not the most poetic of birds.  It’s the smaller birds that vie for the top of the lyrical charts – skylarks, nightingales, blackbirds.  Norman MacCaig, an enthusiastic author of bird poems, wrote “Gulls on a hill loch” in which he describes disturbing a colony which reacts in mad, defiant “Gothic scritches and yells”.   Kathleen Jamie’s “sea maws” are Scottish too: in “The Whale-Watcher” the poet envisages spending a cold summer holed up in a battered caravan at the end of the road where there is nothing but “harsh grass, sea-maws, / lichen encrusted bedrock”.  Then there is the solitary bird trying to fly against the gale in Ted Hughes’ early masterpiece “Wind”:

“ ... a black-

back gull bent like an iron bar slowly”.  

A perfect line break re-inforces the sense of the words.

But none of these gulls are linked with ploughing.  I thought of two famous plough poems, Edward Thomas’s “As the Team’s Head-Brass” and Paul Muldoon’s “Why Brownlee Left”.  No gulls - but neither of these is really about ploughing.  Thomas’s is about war, time, loss and love.  Muldoon’s is a mystery but you would expect that Mrs Brownlee (assuming there was one) might have noticed the absence of gulls a few hours after Brownlee abandoned the rig.   

It’s R S Thomas who captures the combination of birds and plough with a beautiful economy of words in “The Dark Well”.  He describes

                “A poor farmer with no name,

                  Ploughing cloudward, sowing the wind

                  With squalls of gulls at the day’s end”.

THE BIG SUBJECT

“Don’t write poems about big subjects” (advice to students on a creative writing MA course). 

I heard this repeated last week at a poetry workshop – quoted by someone who had been on the course and had just read out a poem on – a big subject (the Holocaust).  But she approached the subject obliquely through a conversation between two people during a chance meeting on a journey.

Poetry’s way-in to big subjects is often through individuals and details – I think of that tender and poignant passage in the Iliad when Hector, saying farewell to Andromache and his baby son, takes off his plumed helmet because the child is frightened by it.  Frances Cornford did a moving four-line version of this episode updated to the Second World War and Euston waiting-room.  It’s “Parting in War-Time” (in Travelling Home) with a pen and ink illustration by Christopher Cornford.  It was one of the Poems for Peace on the Underground.    

Patricia McCarthy writes about the First World War in her fine poem “Clothes that escaped the Great War”.  She focuses on the horse and cart which took the young men off to war.  The poem is based on her mother’s childhood memory.

It won the National Poetry Competition recently and it’s brilliant.  Congratulations, Patricia.  You can read the poem here http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/npc/npc2012winners

Meanwhile the afterlife of the Mirehouse Prize continues – follow the link to hear a reading of “Beech Trees” complete with a photo montage.  Digital credits and thanks due to Mike Smith and James Fryer-Spedding.   

http://www.mirehouse.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=36

It is also on You Tube at http://youtu.be/pHgxU86Q-dc

WORDS AND PICTURES

A hundred years since the birth of the poet R S Thomas.  The actual anniversary is on 29 March which just happens to be Good Friday this year – a felicitous coincidence for one of the twentieth century’s most important religious poets.

There’s plenty to get excited about.  Professor M Wynn Thomas has been working on a new biography.  I’ve never been satisfied by previous biographies so I’m hoping this will be the definitive life of the poet.

This month sees the publication of Uncollected poems (I like that – how else can you follow Collected Poems, Collected Later Poems and Residues?).  I’ve read that it includes poems found on scraps of paper RS left all over the place, including in his car.  The poems are edited by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies.  I've ordered my copy.

When I first encountered R S Thomas’s work in Six Modern Poets (edited by J R Osgerby) I was a volunteer gardener for the Keating sisters at Plas yn Rhiw on the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales.  Through Honora Keating I met R S Thomas.  After a Sunday afternoon’s gardening, a quick wash and afternoon tea (paper-thin Hovis, Dairylea cheese, Battenburg cake) we would get a lift in R S Thomas’s car to St Aelrhiw’s church for a bilingual service with a sermon I couldn’t understand even in an English summary.  At 17 I was a groupie – I just wanted to be in the presence of a writer, hoping I could absorb that intangible quality of writerliness. 

For years I continued to meet R S occasionally  – exchanging a few words while walking in Plas woods above Sarn Cottage, where he lived for several years, or pulling in to the side of a narrow high-banked lane to let him pass in his white Ford Fiesta.  Now when I read R S Thomas’s poems I’m taken back to Llŷn - to the wide sweep of the bay where the poet watched for a rare bird or the field where he placed his hand in a grassy hollow to find it still warm from the body of a sleeping hare.   

One day Honor showed me a bird picture painted by R S Thomas’s wife, Mildred Elsi Eldridge.  I’d picked up the fact that Elsi was an artist but I had never met her.  “She’s rather reclusive”, said Honor.  I have a vague memory of glimpsing Elsi one summer afternoon in the garden of Sarn Cottage. 

RS was a master of the short lyric and one of the most beautiful and moving poems he wrote for Elsi was “A Marriage” in Mass for Hard Times.  Appropriately for an artist who painted several pictures of birds the poem opens

                 “We met

                        under a shower

                   of bird-notes”.

Five decades later death came –

                 “ ... And she

                        who in life

                 had done everything

                        with a bird’s grace,

                 opened her bill now

                        for the shedding

                 of one sigh no

                        heavier than a feather”.

Damian Walford Davies has edited R S Thomas: Poems to Elsi and it is due out this month.

Elsi’s striking pencil drawing of R S Thomas appeared on the front cover of Ysbrydoliaeth/Inspiration, the book accompanying an exhibition in June 1995 of different painters’ responses to the poet’s work.  The exhibition was held at the wonderful Oriel Plas Glyn y Weddw in Llanbedrog.  Now the same gallery is exhibiting Elsi’s work until 28 April as part of Femina/Cymru .  At last Elsi’s art is getting some recognition.  Look on the gallery website and you can see some of the pictures http://www.oriel.org.uk/en/whats-on/details/46-Elsi%20Eldridge%20Retrospective 

If you want to find out more about the R S Thomas centenary go to http://rsthomas2013.org

MIREHOUSE POETRY PRIZE

I was delighted and honoured to be awarded the Mirehouse Poetry prize this year.  It was a very strong shortlist and I felt any one of us could have won.  Here I am with judge Blake Morrison and two of the highly commendeds, fellow Cumbrian poet Chris Pilling (who looks rather fierce in this picture but was actually trying to get away for his lift home) and Stephen Logan (who came all the way from Cambridge for the awards event last Saturday).  I did try to dress in appropriate Bloomsbury style to suit my poem but no one noticed.  Here is my winning poem below.  For the full set - runner up and highly commendeds go to
http://www.mirehouse.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=35
or even better visit the beautiful Mirehouse and read the poems which are displayed on the poetry walk.  The prize continues the poetic link with Mirehouse which goes back to the Romantic poets and Tennyson.

Beech trees

They remind me         

of those women

who had been to Girton

or the Slade,

who painted and cut off the heads

of scented roses to float

in a shallow bowl. 

I remember one

who always wore brown tweed skirts

whatever the weather,

and in spring

a green silk blouse fastened

with a cameo at the throat

and she looped her long grey hair                 

in a knot at the nape of her neck.

Those women knew French and Italian, listened

to Russian music.

    They could design gardens

and walk for miles

across heather moors

in men’s hob-nailed boots.  

They were tall and thin

and leaned forward as they walked

with a stick or a long-legged dog.  They

ate wholemeal bread and Battenberg cake

and drank Earl Grey tea. 

   They owned

land and cottages with no

running water and gave them

to artists and poets who

had nowhere to go.

It’s the way the trees are curious

shapes and look down from the hill

and do not think about themselves.

Mary Robinson

PUSHING THE LITERARY BOAT OUT

1 March was St David's Day, daffodils, and the start of Words by the Water, the annual literary festival held at the Theatre by the Lake at Keswick.  Here are my personal highlights for the coming week.

Monday 4 March The Fire Crane and The Dark Mountain: I will be reading an extract from my prose contribution to The Fire Crane #02 (which is imminent).  I will have to be quick - there are 15 contributors down to read within an hour.

Tuesday 5 March is my day for chairing: Miriam Darlington Otter Country: in search of the wild otter and Simon Garfield On the Map: why the world looks the way it does.  Two immensely enjoyable and interesting books.

Friday 8 March I'm sitting back in my theatre seat and listening to the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, talk about Arab uprisings.  There might be time for a quick cup of tea before the Cockermouth Poets anthology (see my post of 27 Jan) and hopefully a bite to eat before poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and musician John Sampson take over the theatre's main house for the evening slot.  A crumhorn is promised.

Saturday 9 March I will be reading "Beech Trees" at the Mirehouse Poetry Competition event in the afternoon.  Good to see two fellow Cumbrian Poets on the list - Chris Pilling and Angela Locke.  I will enjoy the tranquillity of Mirehouse near the shore of Bassenthwaite Lake - a special end to my part in Words by the Water this year.