Elder Mother

From mother to mother, this is the bargain:

Old Woman, Old Woman,

            Give me your wood

And when I am dead

                        I will give you mine.

                                    Steep black berries in whiskey,

                                    kindle elderfire, stay warm all winter.

            Indoors, a stick tucked in your kist,

            keeps your clothes sweet and the devil away.

If you cut it, friend to witches, it will bleed –

ask before you steal berry, bloom or branch:

Old Woman, Old Woman,

            Give me your wood

And when I am dead

                        I will give you mine.

                        The healingest tree that on earth do grow,

                                    the whole plant hath a narcotic smell. 

            It is not well to sleep under its shade –

you may never wake up again.

                                                Playground for fairies – one, the faun

                        Phynodderree, will bring good luck, 

                                    lend a hand in the garden, protect 

your house against lightning.  

Spin it thrice, this is the bargain:

Old Woman, Old Woman,

            Give me your wood

And when I am dead

                        I will give you mine.

Giving Ourselves Away

‘striped and golden for her own glory…’

Self-Protection  When science starts to be interpretive It is more unscientific even than mysticism.  To make self-preservation and self-protection the first law of existence Is about as scientific as making suicide the first law of existence, And amounts to very much the same thing.  A nightingale singing at the top of his voice Is neither hiding himself nor preserving himself nor propagating his species; He is giving himself away in every sense of the word; And obviously, it is the culminating point of his existence.  A tiger is striped and golden for his own glory. He would certainly be much more invisible if he were grey-green. And I don’t suppose the ichthyosaurus sparkled like the humming-bird, No doubt he was khaki-coloured with muddy protective colouration, So why didn’t he survive?  As a matter of fact, the only creatures that seem to survive Are those that give themselves away in flash and sparkle And gay flicker of joyful life; Those that go glittering abroad With a bit of splendour.  Even mice play quite beautifully at shadows, And some of them are brilliantly piebald.  I expect the dodo looked like a clod, A drab and dingy bird.    D.H. Lawrence

thanks to the poet Mark Nepo for pointing me in the direction of this poem

with his concept of ‘exquisite risk’

Writing Lichen

There are still a few places left on my Writing Workshop – out in the field and at the Sill – next Saturday 10th August – looking at lichen.  Bring botanical lenses and magnifying glasses!  And cross fingers for fine weather.

Iain’s photographs are stunning.  They beautifully capture these strange life forms that do so well in Northumberland – a testament to our clean air and fresh elements.  We’ll be moving between the real thing and samples of his images to write our own poems and short pieces in appreciation of lichen.  Even the word itself is mysterious and exciting – whichever way you say it – lichen!

The Gate

Five bars of rusting iron hold nothing in,

apart from flattened brown bracken

before the mountain and its quick green rise.

 

You have to love a gate that keeps nothing out,

untethered by fence or railing,

jettisoning even the protocol of posts;

 

its sudden mystery – leading nowhere,

space and more space, with passing places,

a strong westerly, Loch Voil wild with breakers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Knowing Our Place

I had no idea that the Barbican had a Conservatory  – or a Library until a few weeks ago when I found myself there, reading at a launch of Issue 18 of Long Poem Magazine.  It was a friendly affair, surprising and happily sprawling like the unsung long poems and sequences the magazine does a wonderful job in drawing attention to.  We were tucked away in the Music Section, a niche of hidden delights.

I particularly enjoyed hearing Katharine Pierpoint read her poem Camelopard, trying (and succeeding) to catch the giraffeness of the giraffe and Anna Reckin’s graceful evocation of various emanations of Jade.  Also Alex Bell’s epistolary Dearest, lurking in the shadows of Victoriana, as did my own contribution – A Hundred Ways to Know Our Place.

When I was younger and a touch adrift I often read self-help books to check my bearings.  Most of them have migrated from my shelves now (apart from a few classics like Dorothy Rowe on depression and Buddhist angles on anxiety) but I was interested to trace a clear line of connection between those and the beginnings of the genre in the 19^th century.

A Hundred Ways to Know Our Place is part of new work I’m writing for my PhD, an overture to a book-length piece.  If you’re interested in reading it and other longer poems and sequences, I’d point you in the direction of Long Poem Magazine, edited with passion and insight by Linda Black and Rose Hamilton.

Etiquette books also fascinate me.  It’s hard not to be braced by their arbitrary sharpness, like eating a particularly arcane olive.  Possibly after a long soak in a dirty martini.  Some Russian visitors I had once called that sort of snifter a ‘walking stick’, to be taken before leaving the house for any reason.  And in the right quantity (although this is hard to gauge) it can rinse the senses wonderfully.  Isn’t that what we want reading a poem to feel like?  To ‘take reality by surprise’, in Francoise Sagan’s phrase.

And so back to music (always)…My senses didn’t know what had hit them watching and listening to Ukrainian ensemble Dhaka Brakha perform at the Sage last week.   And it was a performance, highly choreographed and styled with stunning costumes riffing on traditional styles, as did the music that playfully transforms folk songs from their beleaguered motherland into something almost miraculous.  I was transported, utterly enchanted, and continue to be so listening to their latest CD the road.  Dhaka Brakha ‘know their place’ and invite us to spend some time there.  Foolish to refuse.

Down in London, I can sometimes feel like a bit of a country cousin.  Walking from the Tube station to the Barbican, I was very excited to see a plant breaking up the clean lines of the long tunnel of the Bridgewater Highwalk.  It wasn’t going to be told where it could grow and where it couldn’t, what freedom means.

Knowing our place is no easy matter – fierce, transgressive, and extremely quiet, it must take the risk of being there, doing it for ourselves.

 

 

Ways in Which Studying Moss is Like Making a Poem

At the beginning you are advised to ignore those mosses growing on trees or stone for they ask something different

A moss should behave a certain way but doesn’t always

Thuidium tamariscinum

You realise that adjectives like ‘straight’ and ‘curved’ are not reliable, just a matter of perspective

Mosses have a very thin cuticle, are absorbent on all surfaces

Hypnum cupressiforme

You can observe a species with the naked eye, look more closely with a handlens or at

the level of cells through a microscope – ever deepening attention

Some mosses have a nerve

Campylopus introflexus

Their names are tongue twisters – all hail teachers of Latin!

Mosses lend themselves to metaphor – imaginative ways to describe and remember them (for example, overheard: Denis Healey’s eyebrows, teddy bears’ arms, Catherine wheels)

Desiccated moss can be brought back to life by immersing in liquid

Dicranum majus

Looking at mosses for a long time transports you to another world – one where scale is nothing if not elastic

The fascinations endless, the discoveries universe-expanding

Moss sometimes grows on exposed bones

When you look at a landscape and say there’s nothing there, there will be mosses

You will lose all track of time 

Hard to know where to start trying to give an account of this week’s wonderful Mosses & Liverworts field study course, run by Northumberland Wildlife Trust and led by John O’Reilly. We were based at Knarsdale Village Hall near Alston and went out to sites at Lambley Viaduct and Williamston Nature Reserve. After two days we were able to identify around twenty or so common bryophyte species – out of the 800 mosses and 300 liverworts found in the UK. If flowers are often overlooked, bryophytes are seriously neglected. It was deeply satisfying taking the time to learn how to see them.  I am already planning regular moss walks to make sure that I keep practising this new language.

 

 

 

 

November

On Thursday we gathered at the Queen’s Hall in Hexham to launch another wild – a new edition of a pamphlet published ten years ago under the title wild.  There was a mix-up between the publishers and the printers so it came back with much thinner paper and cover than expected but the small print run quickly sold out.  We always hoped we might work on another edition and now, with a beautiful new re-design by Melanie Ashby, here it is…

In 2002, the artist Birtley Aris and I sought out a wild flower each month in different places around the north-east of England.  This is from the original introduction:

We were interested in ordinary, less well-known spots as well as more obvious landmarks; the surprising uncontained spaces in towns and cities as well as the rural environment.

Inspired by the reverberations of wild, we wanted to seek out and celebrate that particular quality of North – an autonomous identity, the open spaces, resilient flora and fauna, unfolding seasons, relatively sparse population and unequivocal weather.

From the start we envisaged setting the large-scale context of landscape alongside the miniature world of wild flowers. Some months we had an idea of the flower we were looking for; others we left it to chance, waiting to see what was growing.

For the new version we have included eight more poems that pick up the themes of wild and take them somewhere else – looking at light, energy, memory and belonging.  They are introduced by this wonderful quotation from Pico Iyer:

Love is a wildness that has been falsely domesticated.

We were very lucky to have Morag Brown playing the violin for us, her wild northern tunes creating just the right atmosphere and bringing us all together in a celebration of place and this new work in print.

If you missed it, there’ll be another chance to hear some of the poems and buy the book at the Lit & Phil in Newcastle on Thursday 4th December, 7pm.  No need to book – all welcome.

Mugwort

 

Who could say exactly where a river

shifts shape into sea? Where current collides

with tide? On the pier’s stone slopes, mugwort

grows in spite of the salt and the weather:

who could say where its black becomes brown

becomes silver-grey? Today everything

is edgeless and strange. Even the spray

from the waves battering the southern jetty

bursts in the air like fireworks: a negative

framed by the window of the Bungalow Café.

Dirty glass catches the blur of what

could be a man, crouching to make a sketch

of mugwort fronds, like alchemical wands,

chancing their silver. Although, who could say?

 

Artemisia vulgaris

Roker Pier, Sunderland

November

 

 

ANOTHER WILD

Wild at Heart

Love is a wildness that has been falsely domesticated.

Pico Iyer

I thought of the bypass patient’s chest being closed, the message being: You can’t see this wild place again, you can’t witness this beauty. But the moon was hidden in there, and the sun, and neither of these would rise or set, and the birds that flew up out of it were planets and constellations because the chest was really an aviary, too full of fluttering, and when it was closed no avian life would be seen again.

 The thoracic cavity must have been the place where human music began, the first rhythm was the beat of the heart, and after that initial thump, waltzes and nocturnes, preludes and tangos rang out, straight through flesh and capillary, nerve ganglion and epidermal layer, resonating in sternum bone: it wasn’t light that created the world but sound. And the sewing up of the man’s chest was like the closing in of a house with a roof and walls: where would passion erupt? How could the spirit fly free?

Extract from Gretel Ehrlich’s ‘A Match to the Heart’ (Penguin 1994)

Photos from Cragside, Northumberland

On the Footpath to Hope