I’m spending a lot of time at Allen Banks these days – stepping out of the garden into the wild. It’s the site for my current PhD research at Newcastle University and I’m looking at its history as well as its ecology towards writing a book-length sequence of poems.
As part of my endeavour to consider it as a collective site, it seemed natural to invite a group of folk to participate in a walking renga at the end of the summer, on the brink of my starting my second year of study. We walked on the East side of the river, up through Moralee Woods to the tarn, stopping along the way to write and share our verses.
Here is the renga we made together:
The Landscape, Ourselves
Today’s truth –
the seventh month is our ninth
white river brown
a startled heron
wingbeat of silence
what is that sumptuous smell?
she only knows it
as ‘country’
a choice is made
to keep to the middle way
uphill
tripping on roots
my breathing quickens
through the ghost of a window
we gaze over the valley
mirror tarnished
by pondweed
waterlily
layer upon layer
memories settle
my companions are painting light
collecting earth
gathering pollen
by the water
a stack of wooden bones
and so we lean
into the landscape
ourselves
picture the moonlight
shadowing these branches
in a wild grove
between two fields
with all that’s unspoken
Allen
muttering, meandering.
A 14-verse Renga at Allen Banks,
Morralee Wood,
on 6th September 2017.
Participants:
Jo Aris
Matilda Bevan
Holly Clay
Martin Eccles
Linda France
Malcolm Green
Sharon Higginson
Alex Reed
Eileen Ridley
Christine Taylor
Sound artist and fellow PhD student, Martin Eccles recorded the day and you can read his own renga here. As well as writing our collaborative version, this time I encouraged everyone to keep all their verses and make their own individual renga, imagining them all as parallel shadows of our shared experience.
Botanical 