Winters Breath: A Short Story and Collection of Poetry
Contents:
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Winter Poems
Breath growing short Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain Of energy, but thought and sight remain:. When did you ever see So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls On that small tree And saturates your brick back garden walls, So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls? Ever more lavish as the dusk descends This glistening illuminates the air.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there, Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
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Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame. What I must do Is live to see that. That will end the game For me, though life continues all the same:. Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes, A final flood of colours will live on As my mind dies, Burned by my vision of a world that shone So brightly at the last, and then was gone. When their time comes they fall without wind, without rain. Daily the low sun warms them in a late love that is sweeter than summer. In bed at night we hear heartbeat of fruitfall. The secretive slugs crawl home to the burst honeys, are found in the morning mouth on mouth, inseparable.
- See a Problem?;
- Winter's Breath.
- Playing the Wind.
- 'Poems that tell a story'.
We spread patchwork counterpanes for a clean catch. This morning the red sun is opening like a rose on our white wall, prints there the fishbone shadow of a fern. The early blackbirds fly guilty from a dawn haul of fallen fruit. We too breakfast on sweetnesses.
Their black angles will tear the snow. This a compelling inscape poem. The hawk's power comes across in terse, mostly monosyllabic phrases, handled with dramatic immediacy: Note the skillful use of short lines, and the chilling suspense conveyed through enjambment: Up till the line "Glass is deceitful" the reader is held by the physical presence of the bird, but thereafter the perspective shifts onto the speaker's state of mind. The poem puzzles with its erotic implications, and the effect is enigmatic, disturbing. I am reminded of the poems of Hughes and Plath.
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I don't quite like "in pane" is a pun intended? If so it distracts, , but otherwise this is impressive writing, tightly controlled. You must use the body - its curves, its hollows, the spring of the sound, which brings back what is absent, what has been and is now gone, fading. Cat-gut, fret, the busy machinery of longing, which takes its strength from the presence of absence, the body's darkness, the wood carved out, thinned and made to flex.
There is a pain at the source of it - so easily broken, this tree without a heart, the sap dried to amber patina. Only in the sound can you hear it move, the veins in the blood of the body that is no more. The bow pulled along the taut strings, a pitch that is all but unbearable.
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A violin does not itself 'move', but is moved by the player, and it also 'moves' those who listen to it. The poem plays implicitly on several connotations of movement - "Only in the sound can you hear it move"- and makes us indirectly aware of the parallel between playing an instrument and making a poem. The poet has very exactly caught the feel of mellowed wood - "carved out, thinned and made to flex". Some of the line-endings are a little weak: Otherwise I like everything here, except "the presence of absence", where the violin as a physical object gets lost in abstract nouns.
Earth-sweat, sea-breath, hangs about, cold-shouldering street corners, disconsolate, untouchable, smothers horizons, pockets whole villages, sprays dirty thumb-smudge graffiti on city walls, in ditches, spits chill onto the woollen scarves of citizens, who shrink into their coats, avert their gaze until the cloud-fall sighs and heaves itself away - a slow unfathomable fade - to hide in low valleys and the shadows of churches, waiting to muster when the day's back is turned.
It is difficult to write about the movement of fog without thinking either of the opening of Dickens's Bleak House, or the fog-cat in Eliot's 'The Love-song of J. But this simple, line description is remarkably free of those particular influences. It begins with two arresting spondees, "Earth-sweat, sea-breath" - compound nouns, reminiscent of Hopkins.
Then it unfolds slowly in a single sentence of free verse, spreading across the page in longer and longer lines, to mimic the engulfing gloom. The verbs are well-chosen to convey the active, versatile movement of the fog - "smothers", "pockets", "sprays", "spits", "heaves".
Ten Autumn poems
Each morning, strobed in the flicker of the kitchen light It speeds a steep slalom up the wall above the sink, This fir-cone fat one dislodges dust and air and Its firm tail flails a hectic pulse to its lair behind the fridge. Then once, deep in a bag of biscuits that I ate without a plate I saw it seeing me. Its defiant, guiltless, Sugar-sated eyes are dry; fearless, but unblinking still.
In its throat a muddy vein throbs through watery skin, As it gulps and grips and sets to squirm. Its unwitting trespass sickens me, makes me take tongs And lift, still bagged, the lumbering live-ness. Feel it clutch and heave and fight. Does it howl as I toboggan it, Bag and biscuits all, down the long garbage slide? This is a terrific poem, written by someone with sharp powers of observation, who has either an affinity with DH Lawrence and Ted Hughes, or an acquaintance with their poems about animals.
I once spent a day trying to write about a lizard, and got nowhere near the accuracy of this inscape, which focuses on physical details, seen close-up: I love the sound-patterns in the poem: There is no spelling-out of the speaker's guilt, as there is in 'Snake'. But the phrase "lumbering live-ness" and the question "Does it howl? This poem is well shaped around a temporal hiatus, turning on the ageing of a youthful, energetic runner into an old man. Does it concern a father-son relationship? The not-quite-spelled-out clues give subtlety: Even things the speaker "doesn't have to guess" leave us guessing.
The old man's mysterious calm is captured in his "steady eyes" with their "patience of coral". The un-rhyming couplets are well-managed, and the enjambed line endings make the poem flow. There is nothing showy in this poem, full of careful observation, which gets a little patchy and prosaic in the middle but builds to a strong ending. I was surprised and delighted to read this lovely staircase poem. Whoever heard of a staircase breathing? And yet that verb is exactly right for the airy dance this poem takes us on, teasing us with its delicate artistry, much as the staircase leads the eye upwards in "interlacing steps".
The un-rhyming couplets are perfect for the subject matter: I would have liked the whole poem to be along the lines of the first three couplets. You remember how the lens squeezed unimportant details into stillness: Your startled hands compressed the shutter when you realized: The title of this poem gives us a foretaste of ambiguity: The poet takes a double snapshot, as one person's heart stops and the other's continues. The subject matter is handled with skill and a tight control over feeling.
And at lines we have a sequence of carefully constructed phrases, grouped so as to echo each other - "the silent fall of morphine", "the soft gasp of the nurse", the "slow thud of your heart". The cold lucidity of the writing works to stunning effect. It is as though the mind is replaying this moment again and again in slow motion: He's full of promise and love's sore oath Oh he's pink-tipped to the lip with it.
He bargains with sailboats, plans voyages. He's Zephyrus hoping for Flora And pussy eared. When I am away He takes his daytime dance Upon my kitchen floor, trailing soil, flirting With sunlight and always searching for wind In the arid desert heat, trapped by double glazing.
The panda is one of the cactus species, and is quite commonly kept as a house-plant. I nearly wrote 'house-pet', because the familiar name for the plant is 'pussy ears', and the poem plays beautifully with the name and with the animal associations. I am not sure this is an inscape - who would recognize that the thing described is a cactus, without the title? I like the bold opening, making comically inflated claims for the powers of this small stationary plant; and I like the sense that 'pussy ears' is pent-up behind double glazing, restless and frisky.
The poem is interesting formally, with its opening and closing lines so strongly marked out, framing the panda as if on the window-sill. This is lively, experimental writing, ingenious in its linguistic playfulness. This is poetry of spectacle. There is a real attempt to grapple with sheer energy and momentum, as well as with the mind-boggling idea of motion through space.
The poem is most successful in the two lines beginning "pure fission It was a bold move to use end-rhyme, and to include so many feminine line endings: I looked for a regular rhyme-scheme but could not find it.
16 Winter Poems - Spectacular Poems for the Winter Season
Phrases I found weak were "gradually revealing" and "climbing imperceptibly". I am not clear what the poet gains by omitting capital letters, since the sentences are punctuated. Nor am I entirely sure if the caesura before the final word in each line is intended, or an accident in formatting. Fortuitous or otherwise, it highlights the falling rhythm of each line.