Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer
Christmas
The alchemy of myth –
the stars and angels, the earth’s
return to light, green ivy,
the quickening sap in the tree’s
deep heart, the cattle
kneeling in frosty fields,
the robin’s song at midnight –
all refined to the bare particular
fact of a birth –
that night, that inn, that boy.
Here we are, Cora Greenhill and me, just after the reading at the Writers in the Bath event Cora organises every month in the Bath Hotel in Sheffield. The room is small ( but some of the best events are in small rooms – the bookshop in Callander, and Platform Poetry in Ladybank spring to mind), and the audience was warm and friendly – and full of talented poets.
This is Claire Carter, who may not be so well known as a poet, but who will certainly soon be very well-known as a film-maker, as her debut film, Operation Moffat received a Special Jury Mention at the Banff Mountain Film Competition. Her poetry is highly finished, complex, allusive and visual, and based in landscape, because she is a cyclist as well as a mountain climber. It seems unbelievable that she is as yet unpublished.
Here are poets from Derbyshire Stanza, (from left to right) Linda Gould, Cora Greenhill and Alison Riley, about to read from their anthology, A Place of Wonder, (published by Templar Poetry). The group has spent two years writing poems based in the twelve distinct areas of Derbyshire and has produced a book that will be cherished by anyone who knows and loves the county.
This is Sally Goldsmith, a singer-songwriter and broadcaster, who writes songs and poems and radio pieces about the history and people of the Peak District.
It was a delight to be in such company and to find that the English poetry scene has room for the diversity and the groundedness in local areas and communities I take for granted here in Scotland. By this I don’t mean simply ‘accessibility’ (for which many people read, disparagingly, ‘amateur’) or ‘folk’ poetry (for which people may also read ‘nostalgia’), but a high-quality, living and versatile response to the life of a region, beyond the merely local history and dialect, that resolutely demands more from poetry than can be reached by the more academic works of the mainstream publishers.
I should not have been so surprised, however, since I heard Liz Berry read from her outstanding Black Country at the end of October (published by Chatto and Windus, and, quite rightly, garnering a whole raft of awards). Poetry does seem to be alive and well, and finding new ways and places to grow.
Thank you to everyone who was at the Bath last week, the poets and listeners, the lovely people who bought books, and especially to Cora, who fills the room with her warmth and enthusiasm.
I went to the launch of this pamphlet on Sunday, in the Word Power Bookshop in Edinburgh. I love that shop – it has so many of the books you can’t find anywhere else, and they put on an awful lot of poetry events so I feel very much at home there. And they host the Radical Book Fair in the Out of the Blue Drill Hall in Leith, which has events like the launch of Kathleen Jamie’s new collection The Bonniest Companie, talks by Jay Griffiths and Andy Wightman, films and writing workshops. An event not to miss!
However, I really want to say something about Paula Jennings work. For several years she has worked with people suffering from dementia and become interested in the surprising insights and creative communication that can arise out of it. In particular she worked alongside a woman named as Jean, who seemed to have lost most of her language skills, and, on the surface, to be quite incoherent. And yet, with deeper acquaintance, Paula Jennings found strong ideas and opinions, and this pamphlet is a way she has found to make Jean’s words more accessible to a wider readership.
I was intrigued by this, and also ready to be upset, as my mother has vascular dementia, and her losses of skills, knowledge and continuous memory are considerable. I recognised what Paula Jennings had to say about the conflation of past and present, and about the strange connections between widely different subjects – the sort of leaps and connections we make in dreams, or between sleep and waking – and the way Jean seems to hold down her fugitive ideas like a tent in a gale, with any rocks of words she can lay her hands on (in my poem Away with the Fairies, which is inspired by, but not about, my mother, the woman uses the phrase ‘the whole concern’ in the same way).
So far, so worthy. But the poems do not feel ‘worthy’. Paula Jennings has worked with Jean’s words just enough to give them structure and build up resonances. She does not over-interpret, or explain, or impose a poet’s or carer’s viewpoint. Jean’s personality, her humour, her affections and her priorities are allowed to make their own way in what emerge as powerful, insightful and moving poems.Some of the poems are addressed to a toy dog, which Jean spoke to in order to express ideas which might have proved difficult to articulate directly:
Yes, you’ve got to speak to ladies very nicely.
Yes, you’ve got to eat.
No, you’ve got to drink.
We’ve got to get your nose wiped
but we don’t know whether you’re there
or who you are.
There are memories of hill-walking and observations about birds and animals seen from the garden. There are occasional moments of self-awareness or recognition. This pamphlet, which is published by Happenstance might be a difficult read, but its integrity and sensitivity give its subject a dignity that is much needed.
I was delighted to hear that Under a Spell Place is to form part of the research material used in developing care for dementia sufferers in Scotland.
The Violet Jacob poem Norland Wind (set so hauntingly to music by the singer Jim Reid in 1984) has been on my mind for the last three days, since the wonderful event I went to in the Edinburgh Book Festival. It was called Innu Poetry from the Canadian Tundra, and featured three Innu poets Josephine Bacon, Nataha Kanapé Fontaine and Naomi Fontaine reading from their work, with responses from Scottish poets Anna Crowe, JL Williams and Rachel McCrum. It was profound and thoughtful poetry, but I want to make special mention of Rachel McCrum’s poem Do Not Alight Here Again ( the title-poem of her latest pamphlet from Stewed Rhubarb), dealing with the pressure on Irish children to leave home:
Get out.
Leave while you can—Wander far
Be better than us.Do not alight here again
and Josephine Bacon’s Someone Seems to be Calling Me where the northland laments the loss of its inhabitants
It’s been so long
Since I heard
the sound of the drum
he seems to be saying.Where have the Innu gone?
I have responded to the Irish Diaspora myself in several poems in Wherever We Live Now, and what surprised me most about that experience was that the longing for the homeland does seem to be mutual. When I tried to find my ancestors in Waterford, the staff in the library suggested that they might find long-lost cousins who would like to meet me, and at the Dunbrody, the famine ship in the harbour at New Ross, there is a record of every emigrant who left from every port, The Irish Emigration Database, between 1846 and 1890. I did get the eerie feeling that Ireland itself was asking ‘Where are the children? What happened to them? Do they remember me?’
Violet Jacob’s poem reminds me that Scotland feels this too. It is not just a historical perspective. Naomi Fontaine writes in her poetic novel about white farmers who buy land, exclude the Innu from it and develop it for money. We have Donald Trump, building a golf course that excludes his neighbours from their own beach.
So far so easy. But there is a twist in this tale. I’m working on a new poem – not got far, it’s still a bit raw and diagrammatic, and maybe it is too big and complicated a subject for a single poem anyway:
Forbidden to own land,
forbidden to teach our children,
even to speak our own language,
what else could we do but flee?And in that new place,
we took what we wanted.
No-one to hunt us or stop us.
We did to the others
what had been done to us.
Our guilt is the greater.But I am thinking that the problem of our disconnection from nature, our longing for wildness, has many layers, and not all of them comfortable.
While the English are still in the middle of their summer holidays, our school-children are going back to school today. Disappointing as this is, when the weather has only just improved, there does seem to be an appropriate feel to it. The blue tits are back in the garden, there’s a grey squirrel pinching the last of the strawberries, there are goosanders on the river again, and the sound of geese in the sky at night. These are not the winter migrants, I am told, but the resident ones dispersing after the breeding season, but you know there’s change afoot when you hear them calling. The very young black-headed gulls have their winter plumage, and the rowans are red, even on our tree which is usually the last. The colours are autumn-bright, the mullein is in flower and the first japanese anemone is out. And there are feathers on the grass. Some of these are from the moult which most birds go through at this time of year – the sparrows are looking particularly ragged just now – but sometimes they are not. Sometimes you get a scatter of feathers in one place, and you know that the sparrowhawk is back. It’s a turning point in the year.
The garden has done surprisingly well, all things considered. So many of my herbs come with the warning – needs good drainage, likes sun, hates sitting in cold wet soil. And this summer in Scotland has been cold – seldom over 15 degrees, and extremely wet. And yet, most things have flourished. The chervil hasn’t – it seems to have disappeared altogether, and the seed coriander has been a disaster. There are rushes growing in the pot! I think one of the neighbourhood cats chose that particular spot for territory marking – it certainly didn’t smell like coriander!
It has to be said that the garden hasn’t had much love form me lately. That has mostly gone to the NHS, where, thankfully, answers have been found and diagnoses made, and solutions are on their way. But poetry has come back from its holidays too. The proofs of The Territory of Rain have been signed off, and I’ve had a first look at the cover. And I will be reading tonight at the StAnza showcase as part of the Just Festival in Edinburgh. It’s a weird time to start a new year, but I’m ready.
The new header image on the blog is taken from this view across Flanders Moss, a place I find myself increasingly drawn to.
Later that day a heavy shower came roaring over the empty space, flattening everything. It was such a spectacle that we were almost caught in it, rushing for shelter at the very last minute.
Not far away is my favourite destination in the annual Forth Valley Open Studios event – West Moss-Side Farm. It is a working organic farm, with yurts for holidays, but also houses a gallery and studio space where craft courses and exhibitions are held. Itis a beautiful building and the studio space is full of light and the view over the moss. Please do go and look at the website, which features the range of activities and talents on offer, but for the moment I want to focus on Kate Sankey, who makes wonderful baskets from the plants grown on the farm, and artist Charmian Pollok. She produces a lot of beautiful cross-media works from local materials under the title of the Ghost Croft archive, and her work was a great inspiration to me in working on the Territory of Rain poems. In particular there are some stark and evocative black and white photographs of an abandoned croft which really spoke to me. I had the great opportunity to meet and talk to both Kate and Charmian on this year’s visit, and share some of my poems, and I am really grateful to Kate for organising the event.
On the poetry front, two new books have come my way. Maurice Riordan’s anthology of early Irish poetry The Finest Music, is a luxurous hardback. It has a mixture of poems, from the very familiar Pangur’s Cat (though the translation by Paul Muldoon is new to me), to the small gem The Bee (translated by Patrick Crotty) which I’d never come across, and the introductory essay by Riordan is invaluable.
The second is a ‘tryptych’ by Vagabond Voices, Our Real Red Selves, which comprises three sequences of poems by Harry Giles, Marion McCready and JL Williams. Harry Giles’ work imagines a military drone as a sentient human being, which allows him to comment about the nature of human life and work in our over-technicalised society (is that a word? I guess it is now!). Marion McCready writes about the objectification of women during the event of childbirth, reclaiming in a very powerful way the personal perspective on a part of women’s history which was almost surrendered to medical science and manipulation. JL Williams writes about war in a way that many have found contentious, as she does not advert to the individual experience of those who have actually participated, and yet I did not feel on reading it that she had misappropriated or exploited their histories. It is as if she is the universal human watching the televised replaying of any military action anywhere in the world, recording the core psychological responses we might all feel in seeing what is done, without judgement or partiality. The whole thing adds up to a many-sided enquiry into the mechanics of dehumanisation of our society. A magnificent achievement.
The subtitle of this short book of essays is A Field-Guide to Mind and Landscape, and it was written by the man who published the translations of Classical Chinese poetry which I wrote about in a post called Wilderness Poetry. Hunger Mountain is a study of Chinese poetics, closely bound up with Taoist and Zen philosophy, It is concerned with the transience and mutability of ‘the hundred thousand things’ comprising the universe, and rejects the idea of a separate with-held observing self. We are the universe, and there is no actual distinction between human, animal, mountain, bird, sky.
This is a point of view made very familiar in Kenneth White’s concept of geo-poetics – that a poet should write as if the universe was writing, as if earth, river, trees were simply earth, river and trees and not extended metaphors (or stage settings) for what is going on in the human mind and heart. I like this a lot – in fact, most of The Territory of Rain was written under the influence of this kind of thinking. We need the sense and knowledge of our environmental context as much as an understanding of psychology or politics and economics. But I’m finding a few reservations as I go deeper into the poetics of the next book.
Kenneth White has often been accused of a lack of interest, even of contempt for the human mind and heart, which he denies, pointing out that writing itself implies the presence of a mind in the landscape. David Hinton makes it obvious that what humans think and feel is related to what happpens in the world around us, given the enormously destructive impact of our industrial utilitarian philosophy on the other species on this planet.This is a vital redressing of the balance when politics and market forces combine to see the environment as a romantic consolation, a resource to be exploited, or (worst of all) a treasure or a treat for the elite to keep for themselves. But if so, what we think and feel is as much part of the universe and its continual transformation as autumn or the phases of the moon. If we are the universe writing, are we not the universe grieving, loving, building, fighting, forgiving?
Poetry has to be more than redressing a balance, more than drawing overlooked insights to a flagging attention. What poetry needs is to provide a way of negotiating the dialogue of consciousness and the environment, a transforming deep and intimate relationship rather than a dissolution into an undifferentiated cosmic morass.
One interesting sideline of this book is that David Hinton draws attention to several women poets in the Classical Chinese tradtion. I had not previously realised that women had particpated at all in what has been presented very much as a masculine ethos. But far from it. Some of them were among the most radical and original of the whole period, a quietly pleasing reflection to finish with.
You can pretty much walk across the pond on the rafts of frogspawn there are floating in it. Rabbits are chasing each other like greyhounds around their warren site on the river bank. Geese are heading north and wrens are yelling from every treetop as if it was may. You’d think there was something going on.
Well there is. There are still a few ancillary tweaks and administrative bits and bobs to be added, but the manuscript of The Territory of Rain is finished, and almost ready to be submitted. Here is the introduction I’ve written to go on the cover:
Elizabeth Rimmer was born in Liverpool of Irish heritage and moved to Scotland in 1977, where she has grown herbs, brought up a family and studied for a MLitt on Medieval Romances. She has been active in eco-literary movements such as the Dark Mountain project and the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, and her poetry has been widely published in magazines and on-line. Her first poetry collection Wherever We Live Now was published by Red Squirrel Press in 2011.
The Territory of Rain, set in the village in the Forth Valley where she has lived for the last thirty-two years, is her second collection, and deals with the different ways humans make their homes in a particular landscape – their observations and interactions with it, the structures they build or abandon within it, the myths they create about it, and the way they shape and are shaped by it through what happens to them there.
All being well, it should come out at the beginning of September.
Today the sun is shining, and the light is beginning to fade. The children at the school are excited – I think they are expecting anything from werewolves to a zombie apocalypse! But sixteen years ago I happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Before the eclipse, stalls selling tinfoil glasses.
After it, ice-cream and t-shirts,
and in between, the shifting sky, and shouting –
Go on! Go on! as if the clouds could hear us.
A man’s voice behind us, thick with drink,
Cajoles it in a buttery lover’s croon –
Let’s all think of flowers, and good things!
A silver fire swam in a sea of cloud.
The black moon bit a chunk of sun.
Gulls screamed, dogs barked,
the sea faded, the headland wore a shroud,
maroons wailed in the vampire light,
and we waited for it to be cold.
The clouds thinned and we saw
the diamond ring, corona, Baily’s beads.
Light sprayed out from behind the black circle –
the moon’s lid on a jar too full.
When the sun pushed it aside,
the headland breathed in colour
breathed out cheering and souvenirs.
Everyone told a story of that day,
that summer, ten years or more ago,
and the world has grown warmer, not wiser.
In the new eclipse we hide, expecting
apocalyptic horsemen, not good things.
I have never since heard anyone
talk like a lover to the sun.
I’ve been thinking a lot about duende lately. It’s been on the edges of my consciousness since I started thinking about folk music while writing the Eurydice Rising Sequence (which seems a long time ago now). I was looking at traditional forms, the sean nos of Ireland, and the ‘traditional style’ of Scots Gaelic, and the most interesting thing I discovered is that there is almost nothing written down about it. Even the Mods, where the judging is exact and technical, don’t seem to have any defined criteria. There is slightly more discussion about sean nos, because there has been a significant style shift, from a melody heavily ornamented with grace notes to something much more simple, but again, no definition. The best I can find is ‘it’s got to have soul’. I can recognise it when I hear it, though.
Sean Nos
The stillness of the old musicians,
singing at the bar’s end, eyes closed,
is a thing you wouldn’t notice, unless
you sing yourself. The skill doesn’t show
in dynamics and drama, it’s rubbed hard
down into the song’s grain till the voice
glides silky and free and nothing comes
between mind and melody. Sean nos
is of the soul, a music gathered,
in-dwelling, sung from the quick of the heart.
If you want to hear the real thing, the best sean nos singer I have ever heard is Iarla Ó Lionaird from The Gloaming. Check out especially the track Necklace of Wrens, which is the setting from a poem by Michael Hartnett.
While I was thinking about ‘soul’ however, the word duende kept cropping up, and I’ve been reading Lorca’s In Search of Duende. Lorca describes the duende as an earth spirit, possibly related to the Scandinavian trolls, or the British boggart, someone to keep on side if you want to live in places it has chosen for its own. More northern creatures are mostly seen as mischievous and unruly, although Halldor Laxness writes about a truly destructive demon called Kollumkilli (possibly a distortion of Columcille, because the demon lives near Celtic monastic ruins which the first Icelanders found when they settled the country) in his novel Independent People. The Spanish duende, on the other hand, is downright inimical. Peasant life in Spain is a fight to the death with the thing.
And it’s a particular kind of fight, a bit like tai chi. I only had one tai chi lesson, and I’m so dyspraxic I couldn’t follow the instructions, but I did grasp the concept. In most fighting styles, you attack and recover, you are concerned with self-defence and holding a little energy in reserve, but in tai chi you commit totally to one mighty move, pouring all your energy into the most effective blow you can. A fight with duende is like that, and the art forms with duende, particularly the canto jondo, have that distinctive sound. I imagine that blues does too. Music is a powerful weapon against the thrawn-ness of adversity.
We are experiencing adversity on a global scale and there is no doubt about it, even in the comfortable bits of the first world, and music and arts of all kinds are responding to it. The Dark Mountain project is one that I have been involved with, but everywhere you look, something is happening as people are trying to articulate the meaning of what is happening. But there are other patterns of behaviour too – spiritual renewals on a parallel with the Ghost dancing movement of the First Nations, or the development of monasticism in post imperial Europe; a return to nature as in the rivers and mountains movement in Classical Chinese poetry or pastoral poetry in Latin; an engagement with the ancestors and tribal traditions, radical politics and a fascination with magic.
And here my thinking comes back to its origins. Because wherever these changes and upheaval and renewals happen, herbs become iconic. The shape of the herb poems I’m going to work on is beginning to come into view.
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