What I looked at, what I saw

I was returning home from Dublin to Galway, on the bus that links cities from east to west. I was so busy reading about poetry that I didn’t see the lines calling out to me as head bent I whizzed by them. The book told me about watching and listening, yet I didn’t see the stanzas of fields that had no stones and so they planted trees for boundaries, girded them with alder and hawthorn, or sometimes staked with sheep wire, to keep the animals in.

I must have missed a dozen poems on that journey while busily turning another page: The rook that preened his fan of wing so close, only a pane of glass between us; the rush of grass in a meadow; the wave of a sycamore by a rusted gate, elderflower fruiting. I failed to see the crone of beech across a ditch, all gnarled and withered, bent over, leaning into futility.

There were trees sawn back, holding their amputated arms to the sky in surrender, cows sitting, waiting for the rain. So engrossed was I in the rudiments of verse making, I failed to notice the lean fragments of stone emerge somewhere between Athlone and Ballinasloe, then home beginning to form in the build up of its dry stone walls.

I lost them all, while the book I was reading ‘on freeing the writer within’ told me that the question was: not what I looked at, but what I saw.

 

Stanzaberry

When I first visited my friend Lisa C.Taylor in Connecticut some years ago, it was October and Mulberry Road was a paint box of the richest colours. There was one tree outside her front door that caught my attention every morning. No one could tell me what it was called so I wrote the following poem in order to name it.

STANZABERRY

for Lisa and Russ

You bribed the leaves to hang on till I came

so I could read them in the way

they have come to shape you,

otherwise you would have to climb each tree

stitch them back up there,

match each leaflet and lobe to its own.

But they clung on for me to see butter melt,

claret spill onto branches just above my head,

persimmon leaves flaunt their brilliance

all along the Fenton river, the Grist Mill,

Horse Barn Hill, where I heard Canada geese

spearhead their going in a startle of blue.

Here I learned the argument of squirrel

that tight-roped its way across the limb of tree,

malachite lichen on the house-side of trunk,

autumn rushing ahead of me on the road, while

each morning in the warm nest of my room

I woke to the New World,

carrying dawn to my window

in a rose glow, blush, uplift of light,

− a shrub that you had no name for −,

but I have crossed an ocean to see it, so

I call it giftberry, carnaberry, stanzaberry.

Now thanks to Marc Kronisch, I have this beautiful photograph and an identification. Garden lovers will recognise it as Euonymus alata. It's common name is  Burning Bush.  It's poet name: Stanzaberry. Thank you Marc.  It is published in The Other Side of Longing (Arlen House, 2011) my collaboration with Lisa.

INSTAR

           Instar

Before your daughter gets to the stage,

where she is the nothing between egg and bird,

take her to the edge of the mountain

light a fire, daub her skin with charcoal,

feed her bitter berries, the milk of dandelion.

Teach her the lore of the fox,

the wisdom of weather. Wish for her:

a spare button for her jacket,

loose change in her purse,

the taste of moon on her tongue,

a lake to mirror her eyes,

St Jude when things seem hopeless,

St Anthony when she is lost,

St Cecilia when she needs to sing,

to keep from missing

the sure heart rhythm of the womb.

Scorned as Timber Beloved of the Sky

  

This photo taken near our home by Peter Moore reminds me of the  work of the great Canadian artist, Emily Carr.

“Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky” is one of my favourite oil paintings by her. This little old lady ‘on the edge of nowhere’ as she called herself, started her life painting people, first nations villages and totems. She ended up expressing on canvas the great forests and vast skies of her beloved British Columbia where she was born in 1871.

‘Scorned as Timber’ was painted after a visit to a great forest in 1935.  The canvas is dominated by a tall spindly pine tree. It is one of the badly shaped trees rejected by the woodcutter in favour of the pencil straight trunks that had long since been turned into telephone poles, houses, churches. This useless tree is surrounded by trees stumps, that Carr referred to as ‘screamers’.  These ‘screamers’ to her were the cry of the tree’s heart before it gave that sway and dreadful groan of falling.

This lone pine sends its branches up out of the forest. It reaches towards the heavens with a corona of bright light radiating from it and filling the canvas like a great symbol of hope.

In many ways this ‘scorned one’ is a portrait of Carr herself. Like the lone tree she made her way as an unconventional artist, struggling against adverse criticism. She always strove for what was above with no one to support or encourage her. Her unfailing belief in her own art meant that by the time she came to paint the tree with its bright circle of hope, she was widely recognised as one of Canada’s most significant artists.

 Search her out.

Shoreline Arts Festival

SHORELINES ARTS FESTIVAL
PORTUMNA Sept 20^th-23rd

BOOK BRUNCH

Saturday Sept 22^nd

Upstairs @ Dysons Restaurant Portumna

11.30-1.30pm

€10 (including brunch)

A call to all you book worms, book thieves, library lizards, book eaters, secret kindlers……

Share a Book You Want the World to read:

You have a 5 minute window of brunch time to convince those around the table that YOUR choice of book MUST be read!

Join in A Bookish Quiz and be in for a stack of prizes.

Share the obsession! Be with other people who love books too.

Booking Recommended

Call Ruth @ 086 339 2810

www.shorelinesartsfestival.com

Andreas Nossmann

Memories of a Residency

‘This afternoon has gone mad with figs and heated sounds,’ the poet Lorca wrote and so it has. This blast of Irish heat over the last few days reminds me of my first international residency, Fundación Valparaiso, in Mojacar in the southeast of Andalucia that I had the great fortune to experience some eighteen months ago. It provides food and board and a working space to artists every month for ten months of the year. 

 I was given the room named after Lorca, with sleeping area, workspace and balcony that looked up towards the pueblo with its white, cubed houses stacked high on the side of the mountain. Sebastian was in the garden, cutting down the almond trees. Their blackened trunks, destroyed in  the previous year’s fire were being reduced to logs of almond fuel. His chainsaw whined in the hot, Spanish air. Blue fell through my open window.

There were eight of us, six visual artists, one composer and me, the only writer. People  travelled from as far apart as the Ural Mountains in Russia to Vancouver Island in Canada and many countries in between. We met up for pre-dinner tapas and took the first tentative steps towards fellowship. We were served cockles and mussels and squid, its ink dark enough to write with.  We broke bread together, pan, brot, chleb. A gecko took the last rays of heat from the wall. I could hear the crickets singing each to each.

Morning came, gilding the tiles of my floor, and from across the balcony, Iris the Slovak composer had already started the first notes of her new composition.  I headed out into the world of figs ripening, red peppers drying on the path. On the dusty walkways around the residency I saw the devastation of the fire of the summer before that swept down from Holy Mountain and consumed the valley.  The pomegranate tree held up charred arms still bearing its exploded wine apples, their claret jewels turned to ash. The branches of an almond tree clutched onto their last, sooty harvest. I cracked one impermeable shell; the nut still firm though held an aftertaste of conflagration.  At a neighbouring house, a scorched, skeleton cactus tried to make good its escape, by pushing its only green prickly shoot through the iron bars of the gate.  I walked back to my room and wrote.

In studios opening onto the arid landscape I got a glimpse of how this terrain informed my companions’ paintings that they pinned to the walls of  their studios, dogs, stones, scorpions.  Searching for a common language, we worked with whatever words we had in common as our minds became alive to the possibilities, the difficulties of communication.  How did I get across what I wanted to say: please, bitte, por favor.  Thank you, danke schön, spasiba. The wind came up at midday, shutters slammed shut.  Ideas blew away; I ran after them and tried to tie them down in my room that looked out on the mountain with its rich Moorish past.  Hungry for stories, for images, the words came, eating up the blank screen. They crept out of shadows or flew in on the wing of an egret to drop temptation at my hands. With the urgency of fire I wrote as I had never written before. I set alight an idea across that arid landscape of page, and watched the white swallow it up. ‘This is no small gift,’ I said to myself, ‘this space that I have been given.’

Frost Heave

Frost Heave which was a winner in the Willesden Short Story Competition earlier this year and included in the anthology New Short Stories 6 is now available in its Kindle edition from Amazon

Here is the opening extract from the story:

Frost Heave

Night and the bitterness so much in his mouth that Folan could taste his own liver. The moon full, full over the stone walls, the fields, silvering all it shone on; air frost killing the hedge around him as he sat crouched in the back of the hen house. He held his shotgun close, cold biting into his hands until he had to squeeze them under his oxters to keep the feeling alive in them. That morning he had come out, cats scratching at the door for their breakfast, and found six of his hens scattered across the dirt-floor of their coop, heads lolling to one side, the blood sucked out of them. Killing for sport, killing just to taste death. He blew on his hands again, his breath chilled before it ever got to them. He was tired of things being taken from him. He hadn’t seen it coming. He hadn’t seen it at all.

He had filled himself with the dinner before he came out. At times like this it helped to have a full belly, though he was beginning to get tired of the meat that stuffed his freezer. Still, too good to be wasted. A couple of weeks earlier, out hunting, he had come across the stag lying in the ditch. Beautiful beast. Struck by a carload of lads coming back from the pub; left lying there. Folan had taken the gun from his shoulder, pulled off his jacket and covered its indigo marble eye, glassy with pain. The import of the shot rang through the woods and was muffled by the trees as the upper body shuddered. The hind quarters, already broken, never moved. Eyes flickered out and Folan stretched over to close them.

It was a bitch to get the animal into the trailer but he did and drove it back, pulled it into the yard with its powerful antlers all rutted out. He winched it up into the roof of the barn with a pulley. Bled it, grallocked it. Threw the guts into a barrel in the corner. The ease with which the pelt came away, the animal still warm, like it had just slipped off its coat in an overheated room.

Ireland falling into the ice age and the carcass froze right through to the ribs. No choice the next morning but to take the chainsaw to it and carve it up as best he could, the meat all jag-damaged at the edges as he piled it already frozen into the freezer. It would take him a lifetime to eat so much flesh on his own. Now.