Posted in Uncategorized, tagged abstracted, Autumn, cyclic, justifications, mused., Poetry, reality, records, reviews, rewrites, tyrrany of certitude on September 17, 2013| 4 Comments »
HISTORIES
This slight remove,
This passion,
This sliver.
A slide towards,
( but not quite ),
Certainty.
A tumbling
Of eventualities
Concentred,
Piled up.
A manufacture
Of futures.
Debris chelated,
Polished, honoured.
A beginning,
A middle, an end.
Bound leaves,
Fragile and
Shattered.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, landscape, Poetry, Portree, Scotland, Skye, weather on September 16, 2013| 7 Comments »
FIRST SIGNS
The last few days autumn has come with sweeping winds and towering skies. Cold rains between radiant brightness. The birches are yellowing, the hawthorns reddening, the elders turn gold and purple, the swallows have all slipped away. Because it was my habit, a long time ago, to be in the North at the start of autumn, I have felt the pull of the clear cold, the descent of the year, bracken and heather, valley melancholy.
With this sudden,
Southern cold
I would be, again,
In Portree
On a bright morning
Watching the light
Push the small boats
Tethered to the tide
And the gulls
In the upper town calling
From the hills of roofs,
Naming them all :
The clouds and storms
Of coming winter
And with the smell of baking
And the smell of woodsmoke
And the roar of Time,
Shored up by thick walls
And a gathering of smiles.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dawn, Haiku-ish, landscape, moments, Poetry, sunrise, time on September 6, 2013| 7 Comments »
DAWN PAINTS TURNER
Eloquence of moments,
Tuned, fascinated.
Time when time
Turns visible.
Unfold the dawn:
A wooded hilltop
Crowned with
Swaying light.
A tentative colour
Of cloud,
An increase.
A commitment
To form,
A dance.
A fugue
Of entities,
A cascade
Of certainty.
Quiet
In the windless valley,
Soundless,
But for birdsong.
Spacious and vast
This becoming
Is.
Gaze
On the face
Of delight.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark moon, deep consciousness, dreams, fires, Haiku-ish, moon, night, Poetry, symbolism on September 6, 2013| 2 Comments »
DREAM WORKS
Dark moon
Ripples through
The world.
Strong winds
Along the coast,
Fires pushed fast.
The buried stir,
The sleek hoarders
Of wisdom, stir.
Next to nothing
Is the answer.
A satin edge,
A mighty stillness
Witholding breath,
Inner heat.
Abiding
In emptiness,
The dragons of formation.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, design, hardback, new book, Poetry, publishing on September 5, 2013| 18 Comments »
Just got a small pile of hardback volumes of my long poem, “The House of Trees”. Quite pleased with how they have come out. After a few false starts, I went with Blurb. Having a solid book with paper pages is a joy. Not aiming for any mass market ( wherever that is ), particularly with poetry!
If anyone is interested, a few copies are available from http://www.greenmanshop.co.uk so please go and have a look.
Each spread has an image page facing the text pages, derived from photographs I took in Skye last autumn.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, juggling, Orientation, Poetry, priorities, readjustment, roots, scattered, season's end, seedfall, support structures on September 3, 2013| 9 Comments »
A priority of needs,
a hanging garden,
weed words, never planned, disgracing the symmetry, a scurried rush for sunlight before seed fall, a flap of wingtips, the world delighting improvisation.
Failure as a new song,
simmer, ferment, brew.
Rime, surf, time and space foam.
Somehow we know too fast, act too slow. The heart can hold almost everything when it lets go. I, or this voice of I, have breath,
have oracular,
ocular, awkward,
backward walking.
Weed words,
green and flourishing,
through cracks and voids,
softening lines, wishing well, careless though careful. I grope, so to say, a tease of groundsel, a sturdy vowel of plantain. Self-heal and teasel, both mop purple from blue sky ( now the knapweed is hard and dry, a shell bone scatter). Us poets, us weed dreamers, taken up (now the swallows shake apart the dream summer) ripening appled,
though bitter
still delightful
with the turn of things,
the edge of autumn, a juggle of suns, a whisper of moons, a world re-webbed for dew of fallen stars, a cascade of frost. To keep the hearth, to gather in. See breath, turquoise, misted. As long as there is laughter, all is not lost.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged a concept, a new evolution, a percept, a prayer, a sane madness, art, deep ecology, eaten by plants, expansion, green finger, green minds, perception, Plant consciousness, plant people, plant spirit, plant spirit keys, plant talking, plant wisdom, Poetry, power plants, print, shamanic worldview, world consciousness on September 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Located during long overdue clearing out, this work from 1998, that I knew was lying around somewhere. Esoteric, but to those who chew.
Forbidden fruits,
says Miss Eve, ( missive),
forbidden by whom?
She says. Foolishness and Wisdom? To risk what for a world? To lose a world what would you not risk? Elastic minds dance. The rigidity of denied souls, the refusal to blur lines. Common sense, a weedkiller on the path to the orchard (where she waits, ready to offer more than everything). Nonsense, nonsense. Defining madness by your turgid, proscribing fears a little unwise, do you not think? Somnambulism, catatonia, walking backwards towards the abyss. Some things are too simple for words. Some words are too short, some too long. Orchestrate, sound values. Tongue shaped like a leaf. Leaf, a light-savouring tongue. Tuned. Resonance. Morphic. Shapely. What a nerve. ” I praise the many-functioned plants, Mothers of Mankind.”
The First and Last is a seed.
Mind, the compost.
Shimmer, cascade,
the arrows of light.
Our Lord is a tree.
Our Lady, an orchard,
a forest.
Our blanket is green.
Our air, our breath, a benison from roots…..
WAY OF SALT
Salvia Vocabulary.
Vocabulary
Vocabulaire
Words in air
The word is, was, is
Salvia
The Way of Salt,
The Room of Life,
Our Lady of Origami,
Queen of Convolution.
Man eats plant,
Plant eats man.
Slain by a salad –
Seen, sane, slowed,
Honey-slurried, shifted,
Slid, shaped and stopped.
The word is: listen.
A steady wave of silence
Approaching the ear
From both sides. I do
Not, never, merely object
To subjective. What else
Is there? Me and my leaves:
A thousand shivering whispers,
Divine veins, snakes, circles, whisps,
Whispers: from behind the curtain
A prompt, a curtain-raiser, or
The diva Herself. A scurry
Of scivvies.
Human to humus, plant to
Planet, words to worms. Slapped
Sharp against that bitter green wall.
The fizz – utter excitation of electrons,
The physical forgets form, form turns
Flow, flow turns vast;
Vortex: ex thought, ex libris,
Ex calibre. The Way that can
Be named is not the true Way.
Awareness: a well. Whither
Whatever whispers? Upon
What input, impulse, can
Thought flap like a fish,
Beached, lipped?
Stranded upon silence,
Salvia space, zephyrs
Sough the room, see
Sound, seed significance.
So, She says: ” Either
Servants of the planet
Or Masters of nothing”.
No choice. Plant voice,
Rooted human. Who?
Who cares? Who cares?
Homo viridis.
Homo vegetalis.
Homo salviensis.
Plant people,
One and all.
People plants, percept of
Perfection, confection of
Creation. Extraction of
Ex-stasis; bodiless buddies;
Hand in leaf with Lady of Life.
The word is, was, is
Salvia,
Saviour and salve.
Words in air
Vocabulaire
Vocabulary?
I wouldn’t like to say.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, memory, Poetry, poets, Seamus Heaney on August 30, 2013| 10 Comments »
They do not die,
these poets,
they are absorbed,
slowly by the year,
feeding the tongue’s root,
weighing the worth of hearts,
swinging from page to page,
a rustle of birdsong in the morning,
a glimmer of twilit truth,
always gold,
not tarnished,
never fading.
Gone
In days
Muttering of war.
The postures
Of the scrubbed,
Dead eyed ones,
Once more decrying
Alternatives to destruction.
Their squealing slavering
Shall be spittle
In the breeze
On sea cliffs
Where your
Insistent gentle roar
Will bring wheels
Of gulls
And bees to drift
On warming slopes,
The sound of waves,
God breathing
As He too,
Rolls those lines
To and fro.
Once carved
And carried,
A pomander
Of sweet eyed
Clarity, a sword,
A vinegar, to cut
The fickle fat
Of lazy habit.
A new recognition,
A reconstruction
Of heaven
Where we stand.
Perfect
As it is,
Sweet sufferer,
But not of fools.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged animate eye, animate object, aquatint etchings, arts, atmospheres, black and white, book projects, illustration, Isle of Skye, land and sea, landscape, match made in heaven, memory, metaphysics, moods, photography, Poetry, printmaking, rocks, Scotland, seeing, skyscapes, tree forms, work in progress on August 26, 2013| 6 Comments »
The last week or so I have found time and space to push on with a few art-book projects I have been wanting to complete. One is a printed paper copy of “The House of Trees”. It is quite a long poem, but even so a little short for a stand-alone book – at least one that feels like a real book rather than a parish church guidebook! So I have been working out how to interleaf the text pages with image pages. Originally I was thinking of one image page facing each new section of the poem, but practically, because of the varying lengths of the sections, this did not work so well. So I have decided to greatly increase the number of images so that each spread has one image page facing the text page. This has the advantage of consistency, and also of increasing the number of pages to about eighty or ninety – quite a nice thickness! Luckily, I had taken quite a few photographs on the Isle of Skye, upon which the poem is based. On of the most interesting things on Skye was the number of high quality artist’s galleries. I was particularly attracted by several woodcut artists. Woodcut and print are a match made in heaven, so I tried to see if I could get that jewel-like light and dark richness by working with my images.
I have used quite simple techniques (complexity is beyond my computer skills), mainly playing around with contrast and gradients. The end result depends quite a lot on the original colour photos, but I have managed to get some rich, deep tones that remind me of wood engravings, and others that more resemble aquatint etchings. Here are a few that I like. Most of the images I am happy to present as near abstracts, suggestions of landscapes, textures and grains of wood and stone. As they are complementing, rather than illustrating, the text, I want them to set an atmosphere as much as anything else.
You may remember some of the photographs that I used to accompany “The House Of Trees” as I was writing it and posting it here earlier in the year. I have used some of the same images but made many of them more graphic.
I expect I will try printing some of these out for myself on etching -type archive paper, to see haow they fare as objects in their own right.
I hope the juxtaposition of panoramic spaces with close up textural detail will keep the interest of the eye as it moves from page to page.
Somehow the tonal reversals suit the nostalgic, Otherworldly flavour, where mirroring and transformations are a common motif. Also somehow fits in with the eye of memory and metaphysical meditations also….
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged a mused, absence, art, black and white, consciousness, continuity, dream stream, ink, Inspired, mind, not there, Poetry, presence, print, shared awarenesses, space, there, time, white noise on August 22, 2013| 4 Comments »
BLINK
(for Nathan)
How is it some patterning of the familiar, some phrase turned this way, that way turns more than echo, enlarges, exponents, fractures into its own chaos pattern?
We blink and the world disappears. We sleep and the universe unravels. We talk to the distance, converse with the invisible, as if our thoughts had pulses. And then there is that silence, in that forest, where that tree falls, unhindered, unremarked, unwitnessed. And the question marks the doubt.
What will be missed?
Slowly turning, slow breezes of distant breath,
We are enwebbed,
Weightless, waiting our turn.
A sweep, a cascade,
A clamour, a whisper,
A yes, an and but,
A slight widening of eye,
A lick of tongue to lip,
A spark, a cinder reseeded.
Upon an ash of dull vocabulary, a sudden dust devil dancing, acrobatic heretic, acrostic cross-stitch. And there it is, temporal flux. Gravity well. A siphon, a vortex, a cascade of neurons inventing new species. A bloom of bacteria basking in the bright futures of near-death.
Nothing is further from the truth, it never crossed my mind, a creature of habit, transfixed in the headlamps. A tumble of the banal: our raw matter to tease out, to squeeze.
I am winged yet
And spinning,
Woven somewhere,
Laced, enbroidered,
Pricked out,
Sketched.
Not quite becoming,
Hesitant.
You were and are a mirror of sorts, silvered, distant. A moon sailing through cloud. There, intimated, expressed, uncovered. A lapse in time. Time-lapse. Shutter speed. Blink. Blink. Forgetting,
Remembering,
Forgetting.
To whom belongs the face in the mirror?( Always looking a little surprised, a little disappointed). Of all the voices in my head, strange rainforest bouquet, there was, is, will be, one more calm, one more complex, a careful equation. News from Nowhere.
” Matter
is merely
mind
deadened
by the development of habit
to the point
where the breaking up
of these habits
is very difficult.”
Stubborn, fixed. It is alchemical. I, alembic, a host of raven wings and a lost crown of kings.
Here, it grows late. There: later or earlier. Those who watch, watch over the sleepers. Those who sleep, dream the waking world. Blink. It begins. Blink. It ends. The mirror remains a mirror reflecting upon what it is not. Blink. Turn away, it ceases. Turn back, it re-appears.
As if never gone away. As if never gone by. As if never gone.
Even, even, they say,
In a complete vacuum,
In a complete darkness,
No matter how dark,
No matter how hard they try,
They say,
There always, always, seems to be
Half a photon
Somehow
Remaining.
Light
Persisting.
(Just
A
Thought.)
—–
