From the classic Tin Cup.
Due to a combination of ill-health, over-work and a general desire to sunbathe rather than spend time on my computer, I have decided to temporarily suspend blogging on Raw Light.
Normal service should resume after the summer. Unless I have some really important news to blog about, which is unlikely.
Have a great summer, and I'll see you all later!
Jane x
I just found a groovy short review of my Heaventree-published pamphlet translation of the Anglo-Saxon classic, The Wanderer, on the Happenstance website.
Thanks to Matt Merritt for that. Not sure how long it's been there, but it's a great review and much appreciated. All those rather painful months of work on The Wanderer ... and now I can be sure at least one person enjoyed it!
P.S: Yet More Reviews, Summer 2009
There's also a charming review of Camper Van Blues (reviewed by Sarah Maskill) and a highly complimentary review of The Lament of the Wanderer (reviewed by David Morley) both in this quarter's issue of Poetry Review, which is entitled "Cosmopolis" and can be bought online or via most good bookshops.
But he is not silent for long.
The dream recedes.
Back in the light,
just-recalled-where-he-is, a nip
to the air, and a cry in the still-dark corridors
of Hautdesert
Loved, and shining with it, tin cup champion,
you step out, stand hard
in winter gleam, sunshine. Armed
with your lance, ice-tipped,
you’ll drive forth
along the motorways of Britain, Coldplay
cast on for company,
the blow that awaits you hidden;
still loved, unlost,
a lily.
Ought to flag this new development up in between poems from the Gawain sequence. Feminists, and proto-feminists, follow this link. Anti-feminists, best not to.
As if I didn't have enough to do these days ...
Poetic Justice
The scaly dragon, surprised,
seizing one metal-gold thigh in his teeth ...
Sorry, folks, but a few hours after posting this poem, I received an email reminding me that it was about to be published in Trespass Magazine. I had somehow forgotten to note that acceptance down in my files, and thought the poem was okay to post up. Apologies to Trespass, I've removed it now.
Ho-hum. I'll find a replacement once I'm back from the dentist. Assuming I ever come back from the dentist, that is.
There was a violent mind in the mud
knee-high, thigh-high
and his horse sank to the flanks
jewelled with gorse-seed
sinew and bone, raw
under the downpour.
Sithen the sege and the assaut
was sesed at Troye
– that city
a heap of half-burnt timbers and ashes, smoking still –
My exams are finally over and I can return to writing the historical novel that I was entangled with before revision began in earnest. This summer will be given over, by and large, to writing prose. The thought gives me pause, and no little emotional anguish. I'm beginning to realise that I simply can't afford to write poetry. It doesn't pay well enough - if anything at all, in the majority of cases - and with the economic downturn, I don't have the luxury of being able to work without at least the potential prospect of payment.
I've spent the past two decades without a regular income: first, as a semi-pro snooker player, then as a full-time poet. The handful of novels I've published in the past ten years have been genre, written under a pen-name, low-paid, as my numerous attempts at mainstream fiction since Kissing the Pink (Sceptre, 1999) have proved impossible to place. Yet I seem reasonably talented at writing the shorter, genre novel. Which is just as well, frankly. Since my Gregory Award in 1996, I've published five collections of poetry - three long, two short; the money I've received from sales of all five poetry collections would not even amount to the money garnered from one genre novel.
I enjoy writing prose. It can be a rich and highly entertaining canvas to work on, even in the relatively narrow field of genre fiction. But poetry is - and always has been, since I was a young child - my vocation. I had hoped that the next few years would see me working more fruitfully in poetry. But a recent application for a poetry 'job' for which I was more than qualified, and which would have secured me enough money over the next two years to continue writing without fear of eviction, was turned down out of hand. In the meantime, like many people at the moment, I've reached a critical point cash-wise and can't ignore my financial problems any longer.
So, as I mentioned earlier, I'm going to post up the unpublished Gawain sequence poems I've written so far - removing a few of them later, as I may yet send some of them out to magazines - and then make a stab at actually writing some new ones, which I will then post up as drafts whenever they appear in my notebook. Two of the early Gawain poems have already been posted here, and a few have been accepted for publication elsewhere, but the rest are fair game.
I'll start either tomorrow at at the weekend, then post up one Gawain poem every other day, until I run out of poems. And what will happen then?
Sorry about the sidebar overlap. Just click PLAY and the sidebar will be covered.
"Please go to www.saltpublishing.com and buy ONE BOOK today. Because we don't want to say goodbye to SALT PUBLISHING forever."
My own publishers, Salt Publishing, as some of you may know, has hit some very hard times recently, due in part to discontinued grants from the Arts Council. This has happened to a number of publishers, both small and large, across the Uk, and probably worldwide too.
Earlier today Salt Publishing announced that all their forthcoming 2009 titles were to be axed, and only backlist titles would be available via Print on Demand. I was aware of the situation beforehand, and thought all was lost. I have since heard, however, that they are trying to save the 2009 list by a combination of methods. One substantial method is by encouraging people to buy books from Salt.
If you would like to help save the 2009 list, and possibly keep Salt Publishing financially viable into next year as well, please follow the suggestions below:
Here's how you can help us to save Salt.
JUST ONE BOOK
1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.
UK and International
Salt Shop
USA
Salt Shop USA
2. Share this note on your Facebook and MySpace profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember, it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.
Okay, found a poem to while away the hours.
Brighton Pilgrimage is a longish poem about someone I used to know, whom I admired very much and whose early life fascinated me. And that's all I have to say about that.
The most interesting thing about this particular poem for me is that I am the pilgrim of the title, I am the one driving the car at the opening of the poem, and yet the narratorial voice gradually shifts into hers, or an imaginary amalgam of hers and mine, although at the end I do seem to come back to myself somewhat. I suppose much of that is about smoke and mirrors, especially where some of the many puns, double-entendres and significant images are concerned.
There is much I like about my earlier self as a poet, and much that I wish I could recapture: freshness, confidence, lyrical and imaginative strength, plus a startling lack of inhibition, probably due to an amusing misunderstanding of how poems are read. But there's also a naivety and an awkwardness of phrasing and line-breaking that I wouldn't want to return to.
And the last stanza needs to be rewritten.
Brighton Pilgrimage was among my earliest longer poems - having cut my teeth on the standard sub-40, moving beyond a page in length was a bit of an exciting departure for me - and was first published in The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman (Bloodaxe, 1997).
Brighton Pilgrimage
She drives down through the dawn:
Brighton streets, traffic-lights, railings,
the Indian summer of the Pavilion,
white-washed terraced houses,
green lawns dotted with sprinklers,
surrounded by wallflowers, roses.
A long police patrol car on its beat.
Coming out onto the promenade,
sea becomes a flicker in the mirror,
a long incessant flash of silver
at her shoulder, indicating left
and casting off along the coast.
Not stopping to read the signs,
the place-names, green arrows,
but following the drift of the wind,
due west. She adjusts the mirror;
fumbles, eyes straight ahead, for
her sunglasses on the dashboard.
It was like a dream she once had,
a landscape of the mind, useless
as a now unbeaten track, stopped
like a clock, tickless, unchiming,
not even the second hand moving.
She has driven all night. It is
morning, late spring or summer,
birds drifting out over driftwood
on the long line of the beach,
a man in shirt-sleeves, staring.
The end of the promenade is
a safety-marker, warning-buoy.
Then a cafe, open for business -
a woman out on the step, sweeping.
The sign says: 'All Day Breakfast'.
Two black dogs lie at the roadside
like strange bookends, motionless.
This is the place it started from:
an oak tree root, it winds out
from its origins like a snake,
moving in all directions at once.
She cannot resist, cannot stop.
She is the figure on the beach,
too distant to contact, a dot
halfway between the tidewall
and the tide. The water turns.
It does not have indolence
of stars, the sophistication
of a satellite in sling-shot orbit,
but in the shallows, the slow
brackish water of the rockpool,
it is the enemy of time, still
unchanged, forever turning.
This mirrored millpond sea,
this copper-coloured coast,
the strangle-hold of estuary,
have stood stock still for years
in ebb and flow monotony.
The villages have grown to towns
of course, with schools, shops,
penny arcades, the sprawl
of make-shift modern bungalows.
But not this view, the estuary
pulled into rhythm by the sea -
nothing here has changed.
Deserted factories, each window
broken by a different stone
along the jagged water's edge.
House-boats moored uneasily,
up to their shoulders in silt,
their painted timbers peeling
from the frame, water-logged.
No other sign of life,
no welcome for a woman
who takes that winding road
along the waterside, looks
out to sea and sees herself
beside an ancient traffic-light
still turning green to red,
stopping an invisible flow
of traffic from the right.
She waits, conditioned to
instruction without cause.
This peace, this timeless blue,
evaded her for thirty years
like sleep; its dark circles
are bruising her eyes.
She wants to stop the car
beside the blanket of the sea,
walk into its white folds
like a child, but the lights
ahead are turning green;
she keeps on driving.
This is the picket fence,
the gate, the garden wall,
a small green square of lawn
where she bent her head
back in the lap of the daisies,
first looked up at the sun
and was made fierce by it.
Like a tall ship in a bottle,
she had to learn to fold herself
into the rigid glass of home,
although the sea had always
beckoned, running beside her
like a shadow on water,
ship-thrown, spray-blown.
Here in this narrow street,
she first perfected cuckoo-
calls, dubbed the briar patch
the wild dog-rose and called
herself by different names -
but none would ever fit
until she found her own.
With the engine running,
she sits, watches the curtain
twitch, lets the sun bounce
back off the dark windows.
She wakes, shakes herself
like a dog out of water,
and fumbles for first gear.
She turns and takes the inland
road. Where does the line
begin, drawn through the time
of the journey, the stopping-in,
the moving-out, the destination?
In the slant of her rear-view mirror,
the sea always a blur, beginning.
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