Winter Market

My longtime collaborator Birtley Aris and I are delighted to have finished work on a new publication Dwelling Place, set at the National Trust site Allen Banks in Northumberland.  It features four poems and pen and ink drawings prompted by work I did for my PhD looking at Susan Davidson, a Victorian descendant of the Bowes Lyon family, who landscaped the grounds of Ridley Hall where she lived after her marriage to John Davidson, extending into the gorge and woodland at Allen Banks after his death in 1842.  As part of her vision, she created the tarn in Moralee Wood, bridges across the river, a network of footpaths and various summerhouses across her estate.  The Cedar Hut above Raven’s Crag on the cover is a modern reconstruction of one of these.

All of the poems in Dwelling Place are sparked by ideas of home and belonging, what we do to create spaces of shelter and sanctuary.  Birtley and I started work on it long before the pandemic but it seems to have accrued new layers of meaning in the light of this past year.

As we can’t launch the pamphlet in real life, we’re offering it here for sale at £8 (£10 including p + p).  Hopefully there’ll be an opportunity to gather together for a reading in Hexham and Newcastle at some point next year.  There are many things I’m missing at the moment but poetry events are among the top of my list.

Taking stock of The Bookshop under the Bed, there are also some copies of other pamphlets and books – some quite old and rare – that I can also send in the post for anyone who’s interested or looking for an unusual Christmas present.  The best thing, if you’d like any of these or Dwelling Place (or want to enquire about any other of my books), would be to email me at linda.france@cooptel.net, send me your postal address and we can sort out how you’d like to pay.

Acts of Love (Echo Room Press, 1990)  

Aerogramme (Talking Pen, 2004) 

Heartwork (Playspace Publications  2012)

Through the Garden Gate (NCLA 2011)

Border Song (Hareshaw Press, 2012)

another wild (Hareshaw Press, 2014)

All of the above are £6 each (+ £2 UK p+p) or any 3 copies for £20 (inclusive of UK p+p). I can look into international postage costs, if necessary.

I have unearthed one remaining copy of Acknowledged Land (Northumberland County Libraries, 1993) – an early collaboration with Birtley Aris, now extremely rare and much sought after – and am happy to consider offers.

I am offering these books as part of the Artist Support Pledge, where if I make £1000 (unlikely I know, but these are unprecedented straitened times…), I pledge to buy another artist’s work for £200.

Stay warm and well.

L

X

Neither Lion nor Lamb

March

 

what light there is

filtered through the fan

of their feathers

 

the spine, pale and articulate,

of a fox or a hare

 

punctuated equilibrium –

how earth evolves

in sudden ruptures

 

the sputnik graphic

alarmingly crimson

 

someone gets there

before me – liberating

the abandoned bicycle

 

in the open field of the day

plovers calling

 

the room full

of winter

it’s never been as warm

 

neat white flowers

of the barren strawberry

 

if a thousand people

look at the moon

there are a thousand moons

 

what I tell the bees

is between me and the bees

 

everyone stockpiling

against worst-case-scenario pain:

paracetamol, ibuprofen, codeine

 

the colour of persimmons

a new charity shop jumper

 

bags packed

last minute change of plan

staying put

 

the swift narrow rowboat

Truant Muse in cursive script

 

half going one way, half another,

trying to give myself away

to inexactitude

 

stay in touch

she says, not touching

 

bringing home snowdrops

a small handful

of lingering hope

 

a woman in a mask comes

to measure my per cubic foot energy

 

wild garlic tart

as much for the soothe of making

as the savour of eating

 

Spring Equinox: I am a tilting cup

a tremulous star

 

warcabinetspeak

lockdown, self-isolation

linguistic distancing

 

never has a daffodil

looked more beautiful

 

the pilgrimage

of these days

becoming the path

 

two long-tailed tits

among the apple buds

 

my son comes home

we dance around each other

nothing is familiar

 

clapping the NHS

under a canopy of stars

 

a hedgehog emerges

from hibernation

leaves its traces

 

our prayer flags unfurl

as the chill wind blows

 

two pine logs and a plank

a new bench

for absent friends

 

in my sleep I steal back

yesterday’s lost hour

 

star of Bethlehem

hiding its pale light

among what the flood washed up

 

 

The first image is a gogotte – a natural rock formation from the Paris Basin, 33 – 28 million years old (Natural History Museum).  The second, ancient and new, frogspawn in our pond.

City of light and shade

Sofia is a city of dramatic contrasts, history and geography under pressure from all quarters.  It is sometimes confounding, sometimes beguiling.  Now I’m back here after my time away on the coast, it’s strange to see how much it feels like ‘home’.

‘A city called Wisdom should float on clouds…

…Reality is never clear.  It’s never final. You can always change it or see it in a different way.’

From ‘Solo’ by Rana Dasgupta

 

ANOTHER WILD

Writing Myself Home

I’ve been ‘home’ for a couple of weeks now and still not quite settled.  Hard to tell if this is an ongoing state of ‘homelessness’ or a reaction against the cold spring and my weatherworn fell, still nowhere near green.

One of my new Sydney friends, Katie, gave me an exquisite pair of curtains she’d made, incorporating screenprints of the patterns on Scribbly Gums.  I hung them at my sitting room window last week so now my view (of a landscape so unlike anything I’ve seen in the past three months I sometimes think it must all have been a dream – or this is…) is framed by a reminder of those wonderful trees on the other side of the world.

The Scribbly Gum Moth lays its eggs in the layers between the old and new bark and, when they hatch, the larvae tunnel their way along, eating the wood as they go.  They loop back the way they came before falling to the ground to pupate.  When the old bark drops off, their tracks are revealed, with the scribbly appearance that gives both moth and tree their name.

Native to New South Wales, the Scribbly Gum is just one of over 700 species of Eucalypt.  Many of them are hard to identify but its distinctive markings make it easy to spot.  The sense that something is written there – a secret, in code, some mysterious script – is tantalizing.  So much of my journey seemed to involve making translations from the world of nature, reading what wasn’t written.  Strange now to be back at my desk and starting a process of making translations of my own translations, tunnelling between the old and the new – even my curtains asking to be deciphered!

Scribbly-Gum  

The cold spring falls from the stone.


I passed and heard


the mountain, palm and fern


spoken in one strange word.


The gum-tree stands by the spring.


I peeled its splitting bark 


and found the written track


of a life I could not read.

Judith Wright