NEW BOOK COMING!

I’m delighted to announce my new collection will be published by Sea Crow Press from Cape Cod in spring ‘22. Follow the link for more info. 

https://seacrowpress.com/2021/09/11/introducing-author-marc-woodward/ 

The Tin Lodes - Reviews

Delighted to see this lovely review on the US site Quill & Parchment.

http://quillandparchment.com/archives/August2021/book2.html

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.

The Ribbon

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. 

  

Carpe Diem

Honoured to have this poem published as the featured Front Page work at Open Arts Forum https://openartsforum.com/carpe-diem/

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.

The End of New Orleans

 I was pleased to see this poem published in The Crank literary webzine back earlier this year.

The Wood Conductor

There was no sign of a woodcutter 

in the tin shack raised from the red earth,

the black wood of an archived forest.

Dismembered trees haunted the air,

ghosts in the pungency of cut pine. 

A tepid cup sat by a soiled plate

and a radio murmured, low music 

both there and not, a particle of time.

The businessman walked on rutted mulch:

sawdust, wood chips, a chainsaw’s rainbow.

A great stack of trunks lay seasoning,

patient for the weather to do its work,

sap congealing, slow as a slug’s largo.

Below a tarp shelter a wheel of teeth

stood idle by a pyramid of logs.

A robin hopped and sang, leading him

to the buzz-cut limit of the yard 

where chestnuts murmured their faith 

in the promise of approaching summer 

and two magpies rattled like maracas.

His black Oxfords were crusted with mud 

and a spurt of the timber-yard’s filth 

wrote a warning  up his pin-striped leg: 

Leave. Leave now!  

He loosened his tie, removed his jacket,

rolled his thick shoulders as if wriggling 

from a chrysalis, detaching his spine.

The robin was still singing loudly,

music not written in ink on a stave,

but in the helix of the bird’s DNA.

He stepped onto a flat topped stump

and with a thin wand began conducting

the sounds, a fugue concealed in the tune

from the cutter’s radio, the bird’s song, 

all the wild woodwind of the forest.

First published in text form 2/21 at Open Arts Forum ‘Front Page’ 

and in video form 1/21 at Ink, Sweat and Tears.

Viol Da Gamba

Pleased to have this poem published in the March ‘21 edition of Allegro Poetry Journal. 

And here’s a picture of me wrestling with the beast...

 

Life & Mars

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?

Cabrillo Highway

 Published in Prole Magazine, Feb 2021. 

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...

Leaving Switzerland

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. 

Ottery Dragons

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:

The Rewilding of Stonelands Farm

 Riptide Journal, the Exeter Uni literary magazine, has themed their 2020 edition around Climate Matters to tie in with a series of seminars taking place virtually this year. I’m honoured they’ve chosen to include my poem The Rewilding of Stonelands Farm in the publication. They also asked if I’d make a video reading to accompany it and to be shown during one of the seminars — so I put this together using photos taken locally in Devon. For some years I’ve taken to photographing fly-tipped sofas and images of rural decay, well a man has to have a hobby doesn’t he? 

See this: 

a red flatbed marooned in slurry.

A perished tyre up on top 

of a rusted Peugeot raised on blocks.

A green trailer laden with sodden logs.

Last night’s storm has passed 

and everything steams 

as if the world is being poached.

A squirrel shuffles hazels, 

clanging the galvanised tin 

of a purposeless shed.

At the island end 

of a waterlogged paddock 

five black heifers wait 

for nothing they can name.

Mystery machinery 

corrodes against stone,

caught by surprise 

when the iron plague came.

On a yellow skip throne 

a one horned quad bike 

rules this junk and rubble kingdom.

Behind a high fence, 

something happened 

the Planners wouldn't like.

A snapped sign says: 

    Private Kee

Nothing moves. I wait 

and nothing moves again.

The Earth is readying itself 

to accept a death, the slow 

disassembly of molecules.

See this: empty pubs, silent schools.