The Mystery of Brigit: A Video Poem

The Old Year

The Old Year

by John Clare

The Old Year's gone away      To nothingness and night: We cannot find him all the day      Nor hear him in the night: He left no footstep, mark or place      In either shade or sun: The last year he'd a neighbour's face,      In this he's known by none. All nothing everywhere:      Mists we on mornings see Have more of substance when they're here      And more of form than he. He was a friend by every fire,      In every cot and hall-- A guest to every heart's desire,      And now he's nought at all. Old papers thrown away,      Old garments cast aside, The talk of yesterday,      Are things identified; But time once torn away      No voices can recall: The eve of New Year's Day      Left the Old Year lost to all. John Clare's poem describes the old year as a neighbour and friend and suggests that we have lost something as we discard papers, garments and yesterday's conversations. It's true that there's something refreshing about a change of digit as we move firmly into 2012; an opportunity offered to wipe the slate clean and renounce old damaging habits, move forward with plans and projects and become the people we should like to become... But time is not as linear as it appears. We move in spirals, this new year touching the last one and the one before and the one before that... Rather than completely turning our backs on the old year, the familiar, let's take a moment to think about what it brought that was good and wholesome, what lessons we learnt from it, what aspects of it we should like to bring with us as we step into this new year. And what problems it brought which have still to be solved - does a fresh perspective help? Whatever your situation I wish you well in 2012 as you journey forward.

November and a Poem for the Ancestors



The Verses of the Months

The month of November, the fool grumbles,

The wethers are fat, the woods are half-bare…

Mis Tachwedd, tuchan merydd,

bras llydnod, llednoeth koydydd…

Welsh, circa 15th c

For the Ancestors at Nos Galan Gaeaf

Photo: Janet Fikar

As life’s hours tick beyond autumn

and winter shadows the far hill,

bats gather where once swallows played
and the birch lets fall her golden leaves.

I sit with you, silent ones, to share this meal,
however harsh our words once were,

however discrete our lives,

our worlds leach now one into the other – a gentle confluence -

and like blood the dark ale carries your spirit

to rest, in this small circle of light

where united we gather strength to nurture

whatever future may be born.

Outside the marigolds glare down the approaching dark

While beyond the river, the crane is flying with my wings.





Collected Poems by Frances Horovitz

"Celtic Gods Celtic Goddesses" by R.J.Stewart, artwork Miranda Gray. Copyright worldwide

An Old Man Remembers

‘…and Gwydion and Math made for Lleu Llaw Gyffes a wife out of the flowers of the oak, the broom and the meadowsweet and her name was Blodeuedd. And when she betrayed her husband with Gronw Bebyr, Lord of Penllyn, for punishment she was turned into an owl…’
from THE MABINOGION

in this valley she walked
I remember
a woman with the smell of wind in her hands
walking at nightfall in the floating dusk
veiled in the petals of an early spring

they say she was made of flowers
flowers yellow and white
of spring and summer
and drifted away on wind and water
when the shape spell dissolved

certain she was a flower in our valley
her breasts were flowers red and white
and her eyes and the scent of her
and certain there was never a warm child in her arms

but she lay in her lord's bed and was loved
she bore him his cup and his meat
gold was given her, white linen
and many songs by the firelight
of longing and pride

the valley contained us
a flower for a queen
lust swelled our harp strings
we grew fat on our dream

now I remember
her shadow swims clear
there was blood in the valley
a stranger
blood in the bowl and the spring
red sullied white
two lives destroyed
and white petals scattered
in a cold racing wind

some say of that frail woman of flowers
her love turned her to owl's wings
and lonely now in the valley
with foxes and ravens she rules

and certain at nightfall
when the owls cry out
I think I see her clear
a white shape on the hill
-but this is an old man's longing
a shadow, a dream
a memory of harp-song and flowers
and a fair woman walking in the spring

from Frances Horovitz, Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1985)

* * *

This rather haunting poem brings us to a new relationship with the Blodeuedd story, giving an eye-witness account which brings the events a little closer while looking at them from a new perspective.

The poems in the collection could be said in general to show us a connected world whether they portray human relationships – a lover, a husband, a son; the natural world of leaf and bird, of bone and stream; the dead; the ancient sacred places such as West Kennet Long Barrow and the Uffington White Horse or the myths that are part of human culture. All are evoked with an imaginative intensity which dissolves time and distance and is never sentimental or trite.

I first came across Frances Horovitz in an anthology of love poems from the sixties. Her poems stood out as being more subtle and sometimes thought-provoking than many of the others which often had a certain exuberance and crudity perhaps typical of the subject at that time. In Loving You, reprinted in this collection, the poet moves “as soft as old silk” in the room where her lover is, but an elongated line almost mid-way through the poem, standing out starkly in contrast to the rest, startles us when the poet declares: ‘I could mark you through to the bone’ before retreating and deciding to walk gently “soft as silk/loving you”.

I like the edginess, the feeling of danger that pervades many of the poems. Humans have the power to hurt each other, even if they will do none. Nature too is as cruel and as kind as humans are. There is an honesty here which doesn’t avoid these realities but offers us a richness of experience and an elemental beauty as compensation.

More often than not the landscape holds some kind of threat; in Crow the bird is ‘a dark spy in the land’, in Journey ‘the leaves are black/ and grab at my face’ while in Winter Woods “our warm blood stills/ the sun is livid in exile/ we have encroached -/ this is not yet our land”. But sometimes too the natural world offers solace as when soapwort and figwort act ‘as torch and talisman against the coming dark’ in Flowers or when ‘Bird-song and water bear away grief’ in Old Song. And among the last poems Frances wrote before her early death at 45, is the beautiful Evening where, as she waits for the ‘lessons of grief and light’ she sees the luminous hills and knows there will be the holly tree, the hawthorn, mistletoe and the thronging foxgloves, sees also the bluebells ‘heaped in a pot/ still hold their blue against the dark’.

One of my favourites in the Collection is the Poem Found at Chesters Museum, Hadrian’s Wall. I have visited this museum with my son and particularly noted the inscriptions which the poet has so skilfully heard and made into a poem here: the invocation of the gods and goddesses, the catalogues of tools, like incantations, identifying the roles of men and women and finally the faltering of the inscriptions as the past fades and moves beyond our reach. You can hear Frances Horovitz read it herself here on the Bloodaxe web site, along with four other of her poems, including Flowers, mentioned above. She was renowned for her reading of poetry, possessing, as her publisher Bloodaxe says, “a rare ability to hear a poem and become its voice”. In her reading of this poem, its true power is beautifully revealed. [The new edition of her Collected Poems, 2011, comes with a CD.]

The other thing I think special about this collection is the voice of the mother and her young son glimpsed through several of the poems – a relationship not often sustained in poetry collections. The Letter to My Son written not long before her death, is heart-breakingly poignant and the final resolve is wise advice to any parent on letting go of their child:

“- and this, your early body, soul and mind,
hold me to myself
when all else falls apart.
These memories are mine:
The rest of you I let go free,
my child who will be a man.

So many of the things I find most important in life are here, the intricacies of our relationship with landscape and the natural world, other human beings, the past and present, our own myths. And more than that – it is a rare collection because it lets us follow the poet to a place where few poetry collections go – almost to the last moments of life. Her husband, the poet Roger Garfitt, has bravely and judiciously included her last poems in a section entitled Unfinished Poems and Fragments. Wilson Ward sparsely describes a fellow inmate of the hospital, the aptly named Mrs Rivers, who floats out of the world, leaving everything behind as we all must do; the final poem, Orcop Haiku, leaves us with a brief glimpse of the view from her September window as she lay, confined to bed, but still engaging with the landscape beyond.

The images are spare but rich, sometimes haiku-like, evoking the beauty and precariousness of life, and there is wisdom here too. As James Wood commented in The Times, “One is reminded, gratefully, of John Updike’s appreciation of Wallace Stevens: “What a good use of life, to leave behind one beautiful book."

Callanish Haibun

Photo: Mr Tattie Heid

The Callanish Stones: a haibun by Noragh Jones

On the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides an old woman tells me tales of the Callanish Stones dancing on Midsummer Eve. In the white nights of the far north the great circle of stone beings awakes and honours the ancestors entombed in these red moss bogs. As midnight nears, the giant stones shift and stir for one short night of celebration. Before dawn they are back in their ancient places, for on Midsummer Day they guide the rising sun down their stone road to light up the innermost heart of the stone circle.

watched by mild-eyed cows
the lurching stones
do their highland fling


* * *

A fine drizzle is falling. In the midsummer glow that is neither sunlight nor moonlight I enter the stone circle and walk around aimlessly, wondering where to take my place and wait for the witching hour. I watch myself keeping to the edge and avoiding the tall centre stone. Tribal memories of human sacrifice? In the end I prop myself against what I hope is an unassuming stone outside the main circle. I drink coffee from my Thermos flask. I take deep breaths and try to meditate, but the pull of the awakening stones is too strong. I look skywards. A lively south westerly has risen and is chasing the clouds across the darkened moon.

shifting shadows
stone beings hunkered
on the black bog

Five minutes to midnight. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling. Soon I’m shivering all over. The stone ones don’t want me here on this night of all nights. And I don’t want to be here either. If I will myself to stay I’ll be a madwoman by dawn? Well, maybe only the hair turning white overnight? Who knows?

Fingers numb, I pack my rucksack and make for the road. My feet sink in the gripping bog. The wind tears at me, forcing me back with every step forward. The light that is neither day nor night deceives me. Are the stones really dancing there across the red moss? And what if I joined them? Teeth chattering, I drag my puny self away from the power of the circle, till I am more or less an ordinary human being again.

Such loss, such gain…

When I look back from the safety of the tarmac the familiar moor has already gone. And in its place?

reeling planets

the dancing stones
are juggling sun and moon

From Stone Circles: Haiku and Haiku Prose by Noragh Jones

Night at Rhosybeddau

I was afraid of the night
as of an enemy,
but first was the moon
shining on his dark face
and as he drew near
I saw the birds of dawn
lay sleeping in his wild black hair.

“Don't be afraid”, he said,
"for the golden flame of the sun
has touched your heart,
and there I may not enter.”

I wonder now,
if that glow should ever fail,
would the birds of dawn
sleep in my hair?
Would the moon
illuminate my face?

Imagine a woman

Imagine a Woman

Imagine a woman who believes it is right and good she is a woman,
A woman who honours her experiences and tells her stories,
Who refuses to carry the sins of others within her body and her life.

Imagine a woman who believes she is good,
A woman who trusts and respects herself,
Who listens to her needs and desires, and meets them
With tenderness and grace.

Imagine a woman who has acknowledged the past's influence on the present,
A woman who has walked through her past,
Who has healed into the present.

Imagine a woman who authors her own life,
A woman who exerts, initiates and moves on her own behalf,
Who refuses to surrender except to her truest self and to her wisest voice.

Imagine a woman who names her own gods,
A woman who imagines the divine in her image and likeness,
Who designs her own spirituality and allows it to inform her daily life.

Imagine a woman who is in love with her own body,
A woman who believes her body is enough, just as it is,
Who celebrates her body and its rhythms and cycles as an exquisite resource.

Imagine a woman who honours the face of the Goddess in her changing face,
A woman who celebrates the accumulation of her years and her wisdom,
Who refuses to use precious energy disguising the changes in her body and life.

Imagine a woman who values the women in her life,
A woman who sits in circles of women,
Who is reminded of the truth about herself when she forgets.

Imagine you are this woman...

© Patricia Lynn Reilly, 1995


Here is a poem for International Women’s Day. This one is a spell, in my opinion, a little piece of word-magic; read it and feel yourself expand into places you didn’t know were uninhabited.

Even in the West where women, more or less, have equal rights, there’s still a kind of colonisation of women’s minds by the masculine. The default view of the world is still a men's view and women’s experience is marginalized even though it is fundamental to the human species.

Poetry, for instance, has been dominated by male poets for centuries. The poet Kate Clanchy says: “ Poets must read before they write and for the woman poet this means reading mostly male poets. A woman poet inherits the corpus of poetry equally, in theory, just as she now has equal rights under the law. But, just as women are still actively carving out real equality under the law, so women poets must work to inscribe themselves on poetry. It is harder for the women poet to find echoes of her own experience in the corpus of poetry, harder to hear something which sounds like her own voice. Of course this affects the way women write.”

Love poetry is littered with references to the beloved: her golden tresses, her breasts, her thighs, her lips, her soft voice, the way she moves. How do women describe the physical and mental attributes of men –and other women - that they find attractive? It is not easy to think of any poems that do this. And just as the portrayal of women in films influences how we see ourselves today, the images of women in poetry must also have influenced the way women see themselves.

Kate Clanchy states that the female experience of love and passion has been a taboo in poetry and that “women poets have responded either by omission or subversion. Emily Dickinson wrote of love deferred, permanently impossibly, ‘on the shelf’; Elizabeth Barrett Browning pretended her poems were translated ‘From the Portuguese’; Elizabeth Bishop avoided the topic; Stevie Smith preferred cats. It takes until the last half of the 20th Century, until Sylvia Plath and the great Anne Sexton really began to write about female desire in all it glory and enormity.”

The subject of motherhood has also been lacking in the canon. Even recently Kate’s collection Newborn was met by reviewers with comments on the unsuitability of the topic: “either because it was too conservative, or too happy, or, mostly, because it involved me talking about myself. It still offends, it seems, for a mother to talk about her love, or even more to talk about her lack of love – though when it comes to men in love talking about themselves it’s considered a classic poem.” 1

I remember being moved reading a poem by Frances Horovitz, For Adam, nearly twelve, in which she describes an incident similar to one I had had myself: “Driving home/ a lorry tailed too closely/ down a hill./From my rear mirror/ it seemed huge cab/ and tyres one inch away/ from you, asleep./ I drew in./ Trembling at the wheel/ I wept and swore/ at all machines and men/ that threatened you..” 2 And I was struck by how unusual it was to read in a poem something that described in such a particular way the fears and fierce love of motherhood. It made me feel – what? Strengthened, added to, in some indefinable way. The experience being not ‘just’ something to be shared within the subculture of other mothers but the subject of published poetry and in the public domain.

So, women’s experience is marginalized and yet is fundamental to the human species. A paradox. But there is power at the heart of every paradox.

Recite this poem to yourself and, wherever you are, feel yourself expand like the sails of a ship energised by the wind. Where do you want to go? Whatever we are restricted by, there are no restrictions to the imagination. So, imagine a woman… a woman who honours her experiences and tells her stories...


1 All quotes by Kate Clanchy from Dividing Lines, Mslexia 24, (2005), 20-23
2 Frances Horovitz, Collected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, 1985

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To coincide with International Women’s Day, ActionAid are releasing a unique haiku poetry book. See me, Hear me, Read me brings together the voices of internationally-celebrated women (including Dame Judi Dench, Julie Waters, Yoko Ono, Carol Ann Duffy and Bonnie Greer) and inspiring women they work with around the world.

Voices for change

This collection of poems is a celebration of the resilience, humour and hope of women everywhere, but it also highlights the struggles they face on a daily basis.
Alongside the haikus are portraits of women they work with and facts to put the poems in context.
See me, Hear me, Read me will be available to buy on International Women's Day (8 March) priced at £15. You can order your copy here.

I Thought The Tree Was Rather Ordinary Until Yesterday..

Yesterday I went for a quick excursion up to the top of the garden in my lunch break to breathe in the fresh February air and look out over the hills. On my way back I was suddenly arrested by this bush, shining out from amongst the dark soil and general dullness of the afternoon. There was no frost or snow to make it gleam so and I stared at in wonder for some time, uplifted by it. When I moved closer I saw that there were tiny, almost invisible buds of the same colour shooting from the ends of the branches. It seemed to me then it was glowing with the creative energy of spring.

The line of a poem by Brian Patten sprang into my mind and coming back to the house I looked it up. It wasn't at all like my rather ethereal vision but a more embodied experience of the coming of spring, written by the poet as a young man. Here are the first two stanzas:

Spring Song

I thought the tree was rather ordinary until yesterday
when seven girls in orange swim-wear climbed into its branches.
Laughing and giggling they unstrapped each other,
letting their breasts fall out,
running fourteen nipples along the branches.
I sat at my window watching.
'Hey', I said, 'what are yous doing up there?'
'We are coaxing out the small buds earlier than usual',
said the first.
Then the second slid down the tree - amazing how brown the body was -
and naked she lay on the dead clumpy soil for an hour or more.
On rising there was a brilliant green shape of grass
and the beginning of daisies.

'Are you Spring?' I asked.
'Yes', she replied. 'And the others also, they are Spring.'
I should have guessed.
What other season permits such nakedness?

from The Irrelevant Song by Brian Patten

The rest of the poem goes on to describe the nymphs of spring coming into the house and the poet's world bringing renewal and joy: "they'll take our hearts to the laundry/and there'll be but joy in whatever rooms we wake". Yea to that!

The mind, it seems, is associative; it seeks to re-mind and re-member. I wasn't consciously thinking that the bush had looked ordinary before and certainly not in words; I was simply struck by its beauty. But my subconscious mind looked for some previous experience to equate with this one and, searching the archive of the brain, came up with this: someone else's description of an extraordinary tree I had read and liked decades ago.

I wonder what it was filed under?

Another Skin Bites The Dust

It was my 60th birthday last week. My friend Kate embroidered a cushion cover for me, inspired by a poem I wrote some time after my parents died. It's about shedding a skin, about transformations and how we often move through them in a slow way, even if it is a sudden event that catapults us into them. After my parents died it felt as if my brain was being reprogrammed to take in new information I hadn't encountered before: the vacuum death creates, the absence of people who had been always there. It took time.

This birthday watershed is different; obviously I knew it was coming. I think I have been moving slowly into it for a few years and have now arrived at a gateway I am prepared to step through cleanly. It feels like an exciting time. This stage of my life is less mapped out than those that went before: the insistent rhythms of school, university, job and childcare are absent. There are many experiences to be gathered in, a second flowering feels possible..

Reading through my snake poem again it seems in tune with my New Year perception of gradual but persistent change:

If I Were A Snake

If I were a snake I could shed my skin easily,
No, not easily perhaps, but quickly,
It would be like taking off a tight coat
In a small space
And being revealed in my smartest clothes,
Freshly-purchased, cool and colourful,
Ready to introduce myself again,
A re-invention.

If I were a snake, I’d think little of it,
I’d have been born with an instinct for change,
A talent for it, I’d have moved swiftly
Through all manner of deaths and entrances,

But being human my skin sheds differently;
It scales, exfoliates, delicately
In its own time, as soft and silent in its falling
As flakes of snow.
Long before death, parts of my body
Have become dust, hovering and settling around me,
Particles of the past.

Being human, shedding my whole skin
Would be violent - unviable. Imagine
Uncovering the dark and secret throbbing of the heart,
The lungs’ bloody, tidal rhythm,
The fat and frantic traffic of the gut.
How could I survive without a barrier of skin,
Of soft and subtle hide?

I choose then the human way,
To move towards this new beginning,
With gossamer steps, an unfurling so gradual
That time itself seems frozen.
As gently and silently as drifting snow,
I move out of my old skin, discard the past,
Let it hover, then disperse,
Lightly dusting the future.

© 2004