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Stanza 29, June 2005
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Editorial:
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Sally Festing
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Articles / Reviews:
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Ken Berry, Alice Beer, Anne Kind, Norman Harrington, M M Henderson,
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Steve Morgan, D A Prince, Pam Thompson
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Poems:
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Anne Kind, Huw Watkins, Marilyn Ricci, D A Prince,
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Norman Harrington, Pam Thompson, Stuart Snowden
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Sally Festing, Alice Beer
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Poets & Critics Reviewed
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Andrew Duncan, Jenny Swann, Sue Dymoke, Martin Crucefix, Chris Jones, Sally Festing, Jeremy Grant, Mark Mawson
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Anne Kind
Ted
Your funeral didn’t touch me:
I thought I’d cry but
was denied tears.
Language came between us
and my feelings, not understanding
Polish nor the Roman Catholic
order of things.
Two swats with a fly whisk
and you were gone.
Communion, wine and wafer
and chanting in a foreign tongue.
The ark, part of the Jewish heritage
covered like a parrot’s cage
uncovered, unlocked, locked again
and the congregation standing, sitting, standing
Is it true the more you pay the more you get?
There wasn’t much of an organ playing,
no choir to speak of, except the mourners
and they were out of tune.
As soon as they’d carried you out
the lights went too.
Economic reasons? Pay as you go?
I could see you smile Ted, hear you swear.
Pyrotechnist
He was a determined leader
crawling under floorboards
to mend fuses,
kids followed, carrying the torch.
An adventure covered in dust
and spiders’ webs;
picked up the odd
flattened wood louse
and memories.
Kids didn’t have to ask
“what did you do in the war, dad?”.
His stories were legion,
how he defused
unexploded bombs
with minute delicate fingers
meant for surgery;
to be carried home,
butterfly, anti-personnel,
kept under the marital bed,
memorabilia.
When he died
young kids and old kids cried.
They remembered Guy Fawkes night
home-made fireworks,
cases dried out in the airing cupboard.
He, with his pale skin
red hair, couldn’t bear
to sit in the sun,
lit his own fires.
Envoi March 2005
Ken Berry
What Don said (see Stanza 28)
Obviously Don Paterson is a very good poet who has a perfect right to his point of view and there may be much truth in what he says in his lecture 'The Dark Art of Poetry'. However, I would like to make a case for the more catholic view that all poetry - whether Pam Ayres' doggerel, William McGonagal's clanging rhymes, Patience Strong's exhortations to virtue or even TS Eliot's criticism of Shelley for his 'confused' mismatching of 18th century rationalism with 'cloudy' Platonist abstractions, has a right to be read and heard.
There may be the occasional nugget of gold or gritty pearl, to use a mixed metaphor, in the '100 pps of hand-written drivel' of an 'occasional poet' or 'beer-swilling bard'. While Paterson may be right to talk of the amateur scene with its 'nonsensical talk of show-not-tell', he might remember that the early Wittgenstein dismissed all metaphysical utterances as 'nonsensical' till AJ Ayer pointed out that they may include flights of valid poetic imagination.
Every poetic statement may also be 'art' of some kind. Think again, Don!
Huw Watkins
Eating Out
I leave half my fish,
wrap it in a serviette
then handkerchief,
slip it into a pocket
hoping the grease
will not seep through
into a stain outside.
That night put it out,
knowing fox will come.
This I will do until
it becomes impossible,
when fox, looking
for his supper,
will not find it.
How long
he will keep coming,
I will not know;
know, only,
there is something
in each of us
to do with persistence.
Something, too,
neither of us
can do anything about.
I know it's there,
but have no idea
if fox does
Poetry Nottingham, Spring 2005
Editorial
To what high capital? (I misquote Shelley in Adonais). The line is central to all our poetry, 'a basic act of isolation, of focus, of pause, of the part asserting its equality to the whole.' says Craig Raine. 'In poetry there is overall effect, but there are local decisions of equal importance - without which there is no overall effect.'
At Wells' Poetry-next-the-Sea, I noticed the three main readers (two of whom have read to LPS) use capitals to begin each line. A few years ago this would have seemed standoffish. Is there a reversion? Katrina Porteous wants 'to preserve the integrity of the line'. I've tried using capitals, but they don't feel right; one by one, they get crossed out.
LPS have always been a receptive audience and attendances this year (between 24 and 35) have been slightly up. One visitor especially enjoyed Brummer, Hartley Williams and Crucefix, a trio to which I, personally, would add from the double-readers, Guy Russell with his disarmingly unpompous presentation of a new, genuine and unorthodox voice. Despite scholarly insight, the GF Lecture was for the second year, disappointing. I leave comments to our reviewer but for me, Paddy Fraser's pertinent insider comments saved the occasion. In future, we will do our best to choose someone better able to communicate with an audience.
Leicester CC have offered to fund two outside readers in the next season. We want to try and broaden our audience by holding these readings away from home and hope you will note Jack Mapanje on Nov 11 at De Montfort, where one workshop will also be held. The six other events will be in LAEC's Small Hall, which is, to me at least, an inestimable improvement over the old room. Two of these will be Members' Readings
Sally Festing
Jenny Swann - 11 February 2005
In February, Sue Dymoke and Jenny Swann gave a most enjoyable reading. They have quite a lot in common. Their poems - very accomplished and intelligent - made us laugh and think. At Question Time they both revealed they had written their first poems at 7 years old, solemn little rhyming efforts, both about night and the moon; which they recited to great applause.
Jenny Swann studied English Literature and History of Art. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies and been broadcast on the radio. She was awarded a writers' Bursary by North West Arts and has three published collections to her credit.
Many of her poems deal with works of art. In the background of her different poems we can detect a great capacity for love and sympathy with the subjects, as, for instance, in 'The Finishing Touches', about ironing a shirt, the antics of her children and boys at a concert, and the imprint of her mother on the sofa. Even when she tells us about an elderly woman buying a special hat that should not clash with her auburn hair - which is grey - she does not just want to ridicule her. Also in ‘Beatus Vir’ for the monk Michael, as he fights his boredom at illuminating pages at Lindisfarne, giving expressions to his quite irreverent ideas. In 'Like Mama Used To Make' she reminds us of her Jewish background with tenderness. She re-read us the amusing 'Poetry Reading' which she had done on a previous visit, and once again, we laughed.
Alice Beer
Sue Dymoke - 11 February 2005
Sue Dymoke is obviously a good teacher and the fact that some of her students were in the audience spoke for itself.
Her first poem “Reading Matters” is as subtle as its ambiguous title, teasing us with what she tells us and what she leaves out about her friend.
Clearly she didn’t like swimming lessons and it didn't help that her teacher wore white stiletto shoes. “Threats”, written for Jackie Kaye, was about bullying and the details were more informative of the cruelty of children than any social worker could tell us.
“Assignation” was my favourite poem. One in which her aunt and her aunt's lover, the green-grocer, were particularly evocative. “Frilled in Laura Ashley lace” told me all I needed to know about time and place.
“in his car, ..faint odour of cabbages, peaches on the turn”… “afterwards….smile knowingly at all my experiences….” The lovers' experiences were hidden from the poet child although she was beginning to guess. I enjoyed Sue’s sense of humour, her love of life and the people who shine through every poem. Unsentimental, they remain full of emotion.
Both poets finished off by reading their own first poems.
Anne Kind
Marilyn Ricci
Losing Our Place
On mum's lap, lights out,
coals fading to ash, watching
the tele in my winceyette.
Head on her shoulder, her smoky
breath, the ins and outs of mum.
We see tired miners crashing from
cages, looking straight ahead.
Men, we are told, in crisp BBC, who
may have no place in the nuclear age.
I look up at her. My star of a mum,
my would-not-run-off-with-the-milkman mum,
my warm, moody, unpredictable mum,
might-threaten-to-eat-her-young mum,
my never-got-used-to-the-South mam.
No worries about boys, no monthly blood
to separate us, just me and mum and
the black and white, learning about
the nuclear age and losing our place.
Clearing Out
The magpie screeches on the bedstead.
Black bib, white chest, long tail
and the face of her husband, Philip.
'You still haven't cleared out the loft,'
it says, the snap in its voice
like the crack of a twig.
She shakes her head to re-focus.
On its face a familiar hurt:
'You've let me down. Again.'
'Got...distracted. Busy, you know...'
The bird turns sideways, stretches
its neck, hops onto the duvet.
'That loft, Amy, is like our marriage,
a neglected space of broken promises
and sheer laziness on your part...'
It spreads its wings, smacks its beak:
'No wonder we've never had kids...'
Her blood rises, her book slides off
the bed. Her feet, though, float
light as dust
to the cluttered floor.
She reaches out, slips her finger
under its claws. Dry and cold.
Let's go up there, now,' she says.
The metal solid under her toes:
'Lofts are places where family
secrets lie silent.'
The leather of the trunk feels damp,
the lock clunks into place.
In the clean blue light of the bedroom
she snuggles down, to rest
under the covers.
Both poems appeared in Obsessed With Pipework, Spring 2005 Extra Issue.
Martin Crucefix , 11 March, 2005
We were a small gathering in the large hall (called small). It was a quiet evening with the likeable poet paying a second visit after several years. He has a pleasant relaxed manner and his poetry matched his persona: accessible, no straining after effect and no badge wearing artiness.
Poetry can be assessed just on the reading but it needs to be also read in print to make an in depth judgement. In Memory of Jeremy Round was a brilliant character celebration of a friend, even more appreciated when I read it. It was in four sections but the essence of the man was probably encapsulated in two phrases: “Endlessly unbuttoned” and “a rack of pleasure”. The poem burst into rhyme in the final section like a celestial choir in a symphony.
Drowned Shelley rhymed throughout with unobtrusive ease like a group unanimously deciding to visit Shelley’s memorial. The thought and imagination behind the poetry produced originality and a fine choice of words:
'obstreperous sea.'
' Floating face down
as if intent on the sea’s remotor world',
the waves 'bear you shorewards and once there
nudge you as if in encouragement to wake.’'
The poet read Her Dream at Christmas after an inquiry from the audience about humour. This poem was as near as he could aspire.
The poem has a tipsy rhyming pattern as though devised after finishing off all the communion wine.
In introducing his poems he spoke interestingly about his life and poetry. His reading led me to the printed page and a fuller appreciation of his writing.
Norman Harrington
D A Prince
Swans
We took to feeding the swans for good luck
after chain store orders dried up, shackling the machines.
Something to do, with our hands; not used
to idleness, Sharon said
twisting her rings, tearing damp bread into strips,
like the lint Ron used oiling the overlooker.
It helps. Takes your mind off. Gives you something.
Only two at first, drifting past as if
they hadn't meant to be there. Perhaps they wanted
a lake hung with willows, honeysuckle, a distant cuckoo.
Calendar land. Not our canal -
our coffee-coloured swillage, downside waste
of beer bottles, coke cans, smudging papers
dissolving half-afloat beside the tow path.
Mick said they were lost. But didn't look it.
Missionaries, Neema said. Their whiteness.
And laughed into her cigarette. It was Sharon
threw them the bread, liking their hose necks
nuzzling for it. Afterwards, she said,
she felt lighter, like flying, some
of their clean-ness rubbing off. Flew,
with a pocketful of bright ideas.
Then two more. Annie shared her lunch,
collected their down, made a wedding-cape,
and a christening shawl with the remnants.
Ron picked a feather, quilled words into a book
best-selling the world. Lee brought them seed,
copied their nests, built himself a farm.
Every day more and more. The canal
was light with them; we cleared the condoms,
lottery tickets, pizza vouchers; planted grasses, deodars,
a magnolia tall as a church. Anita sang
her childhood, spun it as a golden disc.
The financial pages asked us for tips, listened
when we said nothing they'd heard before.
Dave took down their histories, their water ways;
created a School within the University.
A bishop came for blessing. Swamis, seers,
shuffled in barefoot lines to stroke their presence.
A stammer, smoothed like a mirror, spoke of healing,
and a severed hand re-joined its mourning nerves.
Sheila made icons, gave them to the sick,
and someone whispered miracles.
We'd our hands full, stitching this together.
The machines sang overtime - sheets, saris,
sixty styles of shirt, a train sewn with embroidered snowdrops.
The silky scarf of swan's breath we sent to Sharon,
for every day, drawing her back,
needing her strong hands: to read our luck's small print,
to feed the swans,
to understand.
Runner-up York Open Poetry Competition, 2003
Published in Seam 21, September 2004
Chris Jones - 8 April, 2005
Despite success in real terms, Chris is a modest young man. He has a published book of poems to his credit as well as others accepted in various prestigious publications. He was a winner in the Poetry Book and Pamphlet competition 2002 and also in one of our own Society’s recent competitions.
A feeling for the countryside pervades his poems, in particular Sorrel, a sonnet with the memorable line, “The speckle of thrush song pouched in your ear”. Again he talks of the language of hills and model villages.
He was for five years writer-in-residence in Nottingham prison, giving him a fine insight into life inside. In another sonnet, he marks the contrast between the lives of regimented inmates and his own, free to phone, to feel the wind and rain, to be transported to his life outside. In Home, written just as his time was finishing, he writes with sensitivity about a young girl whose disappearance has hit the headlines. Later he cannot easily shake off the prison dust and still finds “slow grey men lumbering through his sleep and whispering spite.” Now free himself, he manages to construct for her a satisfactory ending. “She lifts the latch of her voice - It’s me. I’m home."
In the amusingly unresentful poem Baby Burglars, he describes being victim of an unsophisticated robbery. Of all the stolen trivia, the most outstanding article is the pink umbrella and for its fate he imagines various scenarios.
Often he writes in a loose iambic pentameter and uses rhyme a great deal, though this is accomplished subtly and unobtrusively. His robust language made an excellent contrast to the other poet, Christine Coleman. [No review, I regret. Ed.]
M.M. Henderson
Norman Harrington
Watching Graveney
Graveney was graceful even in his waiting strokes
Like cool blue campanula low where border bends.
Patiently assessing, fore-runner of taller plants.
Ball further up to him - he seized his chance
The straight down curve of his drive unfurling
Following through into full flowering.
Cherry spinning over grass with amazing speed
From such an easy lordly swinging.
No need to shout when your replies are winning.
Relaxing, leant elegantly on his bat
Then pulled his cap’s peak out even further.
Bent again - no dreamy savouring of warm applause,
The next hurled threat could uproot the flowers,
Dismiss him from this scene of opportunity,
Leave in mind only a yard of border bloom.
He cuts like a musician plays a note,
Timing of striking sweet sounding.
I plant this innings next to Delius
In the garden of my memory.
Nutshell, October 1992
Balmy Evening in Leicester
Members’ Reading – Sally Festing, Jeremy Grant and Mark Mawson
On the evening of the hottest May day for 52 years, a good attendance on the cusp of a Bank Holiday weekend was treated to readings from three very different and accomplished poets.
Mark Mawson initiated proceedings. He was billed as a nature poet and his concerns certainly covered natural history and the environment, but also encompassed memory and politics, such as the alliterative ‘Field Guide to the Birds of Palestine’. In another vein, I enjoyed a moving tribute to the late Holy Father, the poetic John Paul II.
His laconic presentation offered verse that was often terse, but reflective, sensuous and accessible. Syllabics were pointedly used in a poem about modern Cuba, the phrases suggestively creating resonances in the mind.
Jeremy (Jes) Grant is, like Hardy, a Dorset poet with a formal elegance, and a precision of imagery within his tight rhythmic structures. I found his poems often evocative of his childhood Dorset in musical verse, alive with internal and assonantal rhymes.
His filmic imagination was at its strongest in the effective juxtaposition of memories and personal experiences, often located in childhood. I was profoundly moved by a meditation on ageing, ‘Bifocal’, which provided a reflective elegy for his grandmother.
His is an accessible poetry of affirmation in a world of negativity and a culture of death. He ended with ‘The Trees’ and their ‘magic trick’ of growth and renewal. With a wry sense of humour, he even has the imagination to create a positive poetic experience about men urinating outside a Polish Vodka Factory!
After an interval, we had a change in tone to the feminine and pictorial sensibility of Sally Festing. To our initial surprise she commenced her reading with a visual display of a range of paintings by Goya who, with the Puerto del Sol in Madrid, had inspired a marvellous sequence of poems, ‘Rain in Madrid’.
Her poetry was more allusive and oblique than her two predecessors, but her spare, precise language and tight rhythms created a moving intensity in her well-observed verse. Personal experience, whether in Spain or the Indian sub-continent, is interconnected with socio-political concerns.
It seemed as though she read fewer poems than the other two poets, but this augmented a truly intense experience in a confident performance.
After a reprise and a few questions to each of the poets, I wandered into the balmy Leicester air, leaving Sally
standing on the edge
of dark, wanting to know
everything.
Steve Morgan
Pam Thompson
Storm Warnings
Whenever a storm came, the tips
of my fingers tingled and my head ached
until it started to rain.
Once, before the ache began I saw flashes
of blue and green, a vicious red.
My sight went and I was standing
in a fog, half the world gone. Mama put me
in a dark room, pulled down the blinds
so tight, she sealed out all the usual
sounds - kids’ shrieks after school, on/off
whirr of the harvester, but not her hymns,
‘O will the circle be unbroken …’
and our cabin rocked in the wind, didn’t fall.
Mama said there was weather in my body.
But outside our lands had started to rot.
The cattle floated in the fields bellies up.
Mama ran off with the first hick who asked her.
I grew some and never got wed at all.
I like to drive into the desert
in my old T-Ford and look out for storms
but my head’s clear now and I rarely come across them.
Mslexia No 11 Autumn/Winter 2001
The Boatman’s Love Song
For all the ale and porter, anvils, bacon, brimstone,
bricks and bones we carried early that year
from Coventry down the Soar, for all the coffee, coke
and cordage, curry-combs, cheese and earthenware;
and all the fly-runs day and night, the speed
of steam, for all the flannels, fire-irons,
flints and frying-pans, gun-barrels, gates and grease;
for all the brushing-boats; the ebbing banks;
all the soot and fumes; the threat
of suffocation; for all the herrings, hides and hinges,
all the fires and fogs; layers of lime; for the best
time through the Blisworth Tunnel; for all the shells, sand,
saltpetre; nothing’s worth more than the weight of your hair, freed
from its pins, falling safe into the hold of my hands.
Poetry Nottingham, Spring 2005
Merit in Nottingham Open Competition
Stuart Snowden
The Green Man
Organic is his favourite word
And gardening his idea of fun.
His garden has a wild space,
A bee hive and a chicken run.
He hires allotments near to home,
Where his organic food is grown.
His surplus goes to health food stores
To reap the cash that he has sown.
His home is also a green shrine,
He shuns all artificial light.
When bread is baked and wind is made,
A candle sees him through the night.
Lamp Newsletter, Summer 2004
G S Fraser lecture - Friday 13 May 2005
Andrew Duncan's lecture - What is the object-machine? A journey to the New Romantic landscape - presented us with a group of poets writing throughout the 1940s, who are, in his view, unjustly neglected. Poets and the 'literary commissars' of the 1950s (The Movement) had, he claimed, risen to prominence by destroying the careers of the 1940s poets, and that only in the last ten years have these poets been re-discovered.
Who were the New Romantics? GS Fraser was associated with them throughout the decade, and Duncan began by quoting from Dunstan Thompson, George Barker, J F Hendry and Peter Yates. (I was very grateful to have a copy of the lecture so that I can include the other poets listed early in the lecture - Francis Berry, Hubert Nicholson, Jack Beeching, Eithne Wilkins, Glyn Jones, Lynette Roberts, Nigel Heseltine, Roland Mathias, Davies Aberpennar, Patrick Anderson, Hamish Henderson, WS Graham, Joseph Macleod, David Jones and Ruth Pitter - many of whom were unfamiliar.)
The features of their verse that Duncan identified were subjective feelings, rendered through myth and symbol, and a love of the small scale and of privately valued objects; they replaced 'mediated knowledge' with the direct experiences from their senses and intuition. All this was in opposition to the object-machine - a term from JF Hendry's introduction to New Apocalpyse - which encapsulates the threats to poetry from the state, or from systems, or from rationalism. It covered the army, as a war-machine. In their poetry, hard organised objective knowledge was replaced by subjective, intuitive response; this was their resistance to the media (BBC radio) and how it defined the war. The poets revived archaic knowledge, which they saw as authenticity, and strived to remove 'cold' matter - allowing poetry to concentrate around the 'hot', the personal. By closing down the part of the brain that deals with mediated and abstracted experience the poets could revive their mythic/poetic faculties. New Romanticism can be seen as a response to the excess of information, and to the composition-by-committee approach demanded by the BBC and documentary film companies.
The object-machine would have been understood outside the community of poets; social theorists wrote about the threat of machines, city-based living, chemical fertilisers, world-wide trade.
New Romanticism, which had dominated the 1940s, did not survive into the next decade: Fraser's anthology, Poetry Now, moved in new directions, and Kenneth Allott's Penguin anthology, Contemporary Verse, ignored them. The Movement, and the academics who wrote the history of modern poetry, ensured they were forgotten.
I hope this is a fair summary of the main thrust of Duncan's argument - and I have been able to check quotations. However, most of the audience did not have access to the printed page - and should a lecture really require so much written support to make its argument clear? It was difficult to find the 'landscape' of the title among the complex abstract theory - perhaps more poetry and less theory would have helped us judge for ourselves the achievements of these poets
I was disappointed that Duncan decided against responding to Paddy's reply to his lecture, and her account of how Tom Scott, Nicholas Moore and GS Fraser moved on, leaving the Apocalypse behind - "a crossroads through which we passed." Here the decade was illuminated, in context, from personal memory and knowledge.
Yet the lecture set other questions reverberating. How do the pendulum swings of critical acclaim affect how we read poetry? How useful are labels for groups and movements? How can poetry survive in information-laden societies? A week after the lecture I heard a radio discussion on war and artistic creativity - and I listened more carefully because of this lecture.
D A Prince
Sally Festing
Rook
From Old French roc(k) or the Arab rukk
(original sense uncertain.)
A crock and certainly
uncertain, a peripatetic crumble,
age-encrusted and baroque. No oblique shifts
or diagonal vision. From home, in the corner
I, a ragged man, limp past, scratching snails
at the foot of a withered hedge.
Teal and goldeneye fly quacking overhead,
frogs and toads sing in the marshland.
A road of shifting sand lost
in fields of salicornia and whitish salt-flats
is lined by tamarisk covered
with pink blossom.
Fool
Sweetheart, may you be full as an egg, wholesome as bread,
wise as salt and straight as a matchstick. (Provencal rhyme)
Mother you would weep if you could see me
pending hip replacements, the pathos of my hump,
my poor cow vision - one pink eye one green,
my back a huge red fireball, a dipping sun
on the horizon. That life is short I no longer regret,
it's how the body takes its transformations.
Every fool will be muddling; maimed,
I follow my natural bends - squares of the same
colour to the challenge, hide beneath my campanulate hat,
blazon my white bobbed tail - A hop-along Cassidy
cowboy, more than the sum of my art; such is the plight
of the troubadour and I scuff their hearts.
Poetry Review, Winter 2004/5
These poems are from a sequence, Chessmen,
based on the last work of the artist Germaine Richier (1902-1959)
The Poetry Business Writing School
Since last July, every couple of months, I’ve been up early on Saturday mornings to drive up the M1 to Huddersfield to take part in the Poetry Business’s Writing School, run by Peter Sansom and Janet Fisher.
This is the second Writing School. Selection took place between January and April 2004. You had to send a letter saying why you’d like to attend and a selection of work. The School is for published poets who want direction in moving on in the next stage of their writing careers. There are 10 places and 9 sessions, one every 2 months. The main selection criterion seems to be quality of work. There is also a fee of about £250. I don’t know how many applications there were in the end but I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to attend.
Writing School days are intense. Like the Poetry Business workshops they run from 10-4 and comprise several writing exercises. Another important element of the course is reading and discussing this reading. The main group comprises excellent poets. This is a real strength of the course, meeting like-minded people, sharing work, ideas and, of course, gossip. We are put into sub-groups for e-mail correspondence and discussion of pre 20th century and contemporary poets. The set text is the Norton Anthology of Poetry but we can borrow as many books as we like from the Poetry Business stock.
We are encouraged to send off work to magazines, always a hard task, and to write mini-reviews on magazines to guide others in the same process. An important emphasis of the approach to the poems fostered is that this is not a lit. crit. one but one where you would read and comment on poems as a fellow practitioner, finding the contemporary in the older works, and trawling these for contemporary resonances.
I began with an in-depth look at Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson, which proved formative for everything I have done since. I wouldn’t have read closely such writers as Tomas Transtromer, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Dorothy Nimmo, Ken Smith and many more, but for this course. Nor shared poetic fellowship with so many good people.
We all take a turn in leading on a workshop exercise and will have individual sessions with Peter about our work. Other tutors this year are Ann Sansom, Jane Routh and Cliff Yates. Peter and Janet ply us with tea, coffee and biscuits throughout! I reckon the next one will be advertised around January 2006. Look out for it!
Pam Thompson
Alice Beer
Walking Home
Do you remember
after all those years
the evening you walked me home
because my boyfriend
had to finish work for his course?
And the street lights reflected,
all shiny and distorted in the puddles
the rain had left?
Do you remember feeling like me
we should see more of each other
and how my boyfriend became
just one of the crowd -
how we met again and again
and then went away together
on my birthday?
I do not think you do
wherever you are now,
after all those years.
Or do the dead remember
like the living?
Poetry Monthly, January 2005
This Morning
we were there, in our walled back garden,
and you, my love, picked a few Coxes off the tree
which puzzled me because we never had an apple tree
and even as I thought this you were gone, so I
went through the back door into the kitchen
with its red quarry-tiled floor and
the blue and white check curtains, the sink
under the window, the saucepans upside down
on the shelf opposite, the mug tree
with its blue and white mugs on the cupboard
near the draining board as usual so I wondered
what the young man, reminding me of you
was doing in my kitchen with his arms
round a laughing young woman, when I woke
up and remembered it was more than 18 years
since I moved to my sunny little flat
overlooking the square...
Brittle Star, Spring 2005
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