"Stories of moonlight and wildlife in the strange, small wildernesses of the South West."
(Ink, Sweat & Tears).
"Beautifully crafted poems...that sing in the dark of darkness" (Canto Reviews)
My recent run of gigs and readings end on Wednesday 1st December when Andy Brown and I will be reading for Quay Words at The Custom House in Exeter. This is part of Literature South West’s rolling program of author readings and we are honoured to be the headline guests that evening. If you’d like to attend in person please book tickets in advance as they are limited and it will sell out – but it will also be streamed on-line.
Some years ago as a fun exercise I wrote a tongue in cheek sequence of concrete poems telling a generic Wild West story. Think Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood and you’ll get the picture. Well, roll forward a few years and my artist brother Andrew Woodward has created this beautiful animation which is well worth watching for his visual imagination and droll delivery! Enjoy:
I’m honoured to have been asked to be the lead judge for the Parkinson’s Art organisation’s annual Poet of the Year competition on the theme of Empowerment. The competition is open to anyone - not just writers with Parkinson’s Disease - and I hope it succeeds in drawing a big field of entries.
In other news I’m pleased to have had two poems ‘long-listed’ (apparently that’s the top 12%) in this year’s Bridport Prize; and I have a couple of poems included in the next issue of Poetry Salzburg Review, whilst another has recently found a home with Atrium - publication in November.
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After two years of COVID what I’m most excited about is a return to doing some public readings:
Thursday 14th October Andy Brown and I (The SKPs) will be playing and singing at OPOP Restaurant in Ashburton 6.45pm to 8.15pm
Thursday 4th November Andy Brown and I will be doing the headline slot for Fire River Poets in Taunton;
Thursday 11th November AB and I will be doing a headline reading from The Tin Lodes and our new collaboration entitled Grace Notes - and also playing a few songs for Plymouth Language Club, Rockets & Rascals Cafe, The Barbican, Plymouth
Wednesday 1st December AB and I will be the guest readers for Quay Words in Exeter, again reading from The Tin Lodes and Grace Notes, possibly with a little music too. This is a physical audience event but with limited seating so will sell out very quickly. It will also be streamed live.
The Tin Lodes by Andy Brown and Marc Woodward 39 poems, 75 pages Price: £10.00 ISBN: 978-1912876334 Publisher: Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2020. To order: www.indigodreams.co.uk
Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater
Andy Brown is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Exeter University, England, and widely known as a poet and writing tutor. His most recent collections include ‘Casket’ (Shearsman, 2019), ‘Bloodlines’ (Worple, 2018) and ‘Exurbia’ (Worple, 2014).
Marc Woodward’s collections include ‘A Fright of Jays’ (Maquette Press, 2015) and ‘Hide Songs’ (Green Bottle Press, 2018). Woodward is a highly respected musician and an internationally known mandolin player.
‘The Tin Lodes’ is a collaboration between two poets living close to the Teign estuary in South Devon, England. The title alludes not only to tin mining, that rich seam of Cornish industrial heritage, but also to the river and its environs for the word ‘lode’ carries with it several different definitions. In addition to meaning ‘a vein containing a metallic ore’ it can also refer to ‘a reach of water’ and ‘an open ditch’.
I have always been attracted to rivers which is one of the reasons why I wanted to review this book. Another reason was the fact that it was the result of a collaboration between two writers living in close proximity to one another. Collaborations between writers are becoming more common these days and I am always interested to see how they work out in practice. In this particular case, each poem was written in response to the other’s work. They were then redrafted, edited and sequenced collaboratively. All the poems are anonymous and so there is no way of knowing who wrote which one; only the collaboration matters.
The cover design is from an original painting by James Tatum entitled ‘Woods above the River Teign, at Fingle Bridge.’ It is one of those paintings that is best viewed from a distance. Up close, it is easy to get lost in all the detail but if you take a step back everything comes into focus. The same way of viewing things can be applied to this collection because the density of each of the multi-layered poems can be read on several levels and the reader needs to ‘stand back’ to note all the different facets before admiring the result as a single entity in its own right.
Like ripples in a river, the range of this collection radiates from local beginnings to quickly embrace the wider world both in terms of time and place with an impressive amount of subject matter taking in Celtic and Roman mythology, archaeology, industry, wildlife and local history.
Reading this collection I was struck by the way the framework of certain poems had been structured in innovative ways. For example, in ‘Toll Road’ each stanza takes as its starting point signs setting out the fares payable for different types of transportation (‘Coach and horses – 1 Shilling; One score of oxen or cattle – 10d, etc.,) and in ‘Sea Primer’ each stanza takes as its starting point the different time periods for religious observance (Matins, Lauds, Prime, etc.,). Smaller sequences divide their content according to other equally original criteria. In ‘Pulse’ for example, each section is headed ‘Time’, ‘Rhythm’ and ‘Repeat’ while ‘Equinox’ divides itself into two constituent parts: ‘Autumn’ and ‘Vernal’.’ . The employment of local words, particularly in the section headed ‘Tributaries’ adds variety and colour to the vocabulary. A useful glossary is included at the end of the book. The first poem in ‘Tributaries’ is a list poem whose varied and descriptive place-names gives it a musical quality all of its own.
Neat descriptive turns of phrase catch the eye and ear of the reader: herons are ‘crepuscular anglers’ a meal from a bar in a seaside town is ‘a cardiac of cod and chips,’ oyster shells are ‘Neptune’s castanets’ and, in ‘Two Water Nymphs’, ‘a smirr of mist’ describes Coventina, the Queen of the Celtic river goddesses ‘as a secret / ocean; a yearning reservoir; a desert / quenched by unrelenting rain.’ The magical opening stanza of ‘The Szygy Line’ with its judicious use of alliteration caught my attention as well:
Slow beach Sundays spent lying in the paper arms of hot afternoons.
In it, we feel the weightless fragility of a tinderbox summer that is ready to burst into flames at any moment.
‘The Tin Lodes’ sequence stretches the catchment to the ruined tin mines on the nearby Cornish coast. It centres on the Graeco-French character Pytheas of Massalia, the first trader to come to Britain and annex the mines for the Roman Empire. A kestrel mines its prey where labourers once mined for tin. The deserted workings are likened to the ruins of Mycenae or Herodotus’s Cassiterides. The sequence operates simultaneously within different historical timeframes:
smelting the impure ore of memory into the white metal of Now in a place that resonates with far away.
Concern for the environment is registered in poems such as ‘Beach Trove’ and ‘Fish and Stone’. Awe and reverence for the natural world is also present in ‘Light on the Lake, Alberta’ and ‘The Light at Cape Cod’ – two instances where those ripples I wrote about earlier have radiated out into the wider world.
The collection comes full circle at the close with ‘My River’ which is mostly defined in terms of what it is not. Here are the opening and closing lines:
A river flowed into my township last night. It wasn’t Alice Oswald’s Dart, or Wordsworth’s Thames, or Raymond Carver’s river that he loved the way some men love horses or glamorous women. And it wasn’t John Milton’s stream at the foot of Paradise with Satan cloaked in rising mist…
…..
It was just a river. A river that had run here, seemingly forever, through the valley, over the mudflats round the curving oxbow of the harbour and out of my life.
There are many memorable poems and lines in this collection. ‘Beach Huts’ is one of the standouts in this respect. I call it ‘the sonnet with the built-in shock element’. It begins benignly enough:
April means unlocking, sweeping off spiders and sand, putting out to air the rug, stripy beach towels and faded sun-loungers.
but there is a change of mood at the start of the second stanza:
When they opened Springtide they found Alice, still as a waxwork, in a garden chair, dry as blown sand, her dress nibbled by mice. They’d never thought to look for her in there.
This is a very fine collection, a closely observed and well-researched piece of work that succeeds in operating on several different levels at once. The collaboration is seamless and a testament to the way these two writers have worked so well together on this project. Fully recommended.
I’m honoured to have my poem The Ribbon included in the 100th anniversary edition of Acumen Literary Journal, in the company of many great and well known poets. My thanks and best wishes to the retiring editor and founder Patricia Oxley.
Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question brings the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields. (“Days,” Philip Larkin)
I stopped near the house of my dead parents, down a thin lane pinned by the wind to vegetable fields, where unwalked footpaths, like a map of memory loss, searched for settlements long ploughed over.
They retired to Devon for their last years together, filling the bird-feeder, bending to the garden, stretching laundry across the wind.
It was a spring weekend, days whistle-brisk and bright as this one, rain always around the corner of the sky, when we went to clear out their cottage, sorting, remembering, facing their pasts, and closer, our own.
At the five bar gate where my father leaned to watch his dog run itself across tumbled furrows, I wondered what he used to think about. Was it that I didn’t call enough? My mother would always tell me to call him more but looking back it was probably her I should’ve rung.
I could talk to you about impermanence but it’d be nothing you don’t already know. For Christ’s sake: seize the day and shake it! Shake it upside down till all its bright coins fall around your feet. Gather them and buy a slow ticking watch, a suit of conversation, a hat of laughter wear them every day until you hear those dark clothed felons running over the fields so sure of their Gladstone and their bible.
An appropriate poem for the first of March - being the month named after Mars.
This poem was started on the 23rd of February 2021 - the 200th anniversary of the death of Keats, and the day NASA released audio of the wind on Mars from the Perseverance mission.
Also the news that Lawrence Ferlinghetti the great Beat poet, publisher, activist and City Lights Bookshop owner had died the day before.
Both Keats and Ferlinghetti believed in the importance of imagination - when writing about ‘Paradiso’ in Coney Island of the Mind no.13’ Ferlinghetti hoped that any afterlife would have no ‘burning hell holes’ and ‘nor any alters in the sky except fountains of imagination’.
In a letter to Benjamin Bailey in 1817 Keats wrote:
“The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream: he awoke and found it truth. I am the more zealous in this affair because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning.”
And surely imagination is what drives all exploration?
The excerpt from NASA in my video starts with the phrase “I invite you now to just close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting on the surface of Mars...”
When Keats died in Rome aged 25 he considered himself to be a failure - he’d published just three volumes of poetry to mixed reviews, sales of which were probably no more than 200 copies.
Aware he was dying in 1820 he wrote in a letter:
“I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd”.
He had his tombstone inscribed not with his name but with the words ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’.
Little did he know...
His poem Endymion famously begins ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’
It’s based on the Greek myth of the young eponymous shepherd who, depending on the version, was either so loved for his beauty by the goddess Selene she asked Zeus to put him in an eternal sleep so his beauty might never fade; or, faced with alternative punishments from Zeus, he choose to sleep forever retaining his youth and beauty.
The parallel with Keats is clear.
The form I’ve used here is a villanelle albeit an unrhymed one - in tune with the circular and repetitive nature of circumstance and endeavour.
Finally, the title: Life & Mars. Yeah, it’s a nod to Bowie, that C20th imagineer, but mainly because NASA’s mission is fundamentally to look for signs of past life. And what is more crucial to human life than imagination?
I wrote this while writer-in-residence at The Wellstone Center in Santa Cruz, CA. a couple of years ago. I’d driven there from San Francisco down Highway 1 - part of which is the Cabrillo Highway.
I’ve been a fan of Peter Rowan’s music for many years, from back when I used to play a lot of Bluegrass mandolin. I actually had the honour of playing in his pick-up band when he was touring in the UK in the early 2000s, a great experience. This time he was just coming out of my radio...
I’m very pleased to have been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing award and published in their annual anthology for this cheery poem. It - or a slightly different earlier version - was also commended for the Acumen prize and first published in that journal.
In 2019 West Country film maker Danny Cooke held a competition for poems to accompany his fantastic video of the ancient tradition of the running of burning tar barrels round Ottery St. Mary on November 5th each year.
The resultant two videos, one by Jason Butler and one by me were released in 2019 and 2020. I was pleased to see mine included on Moving Poems - a website devoted to the best video-poems on the web. You can find more of Danny’s excellent films by visiting his website: https://www.dannycooke.co.uk/
Meantime if you need a reminder of what a crowd of people in close proximity to one another and a non-COVID hazard looks like, well here it is:
