Here's a link to the concert performance from October 2022
For a long time, I wrote no poetry. Like, I suppose, many people who have spent far too much time studying it, who still read a lot of it, and, heaven help us, even teach it, I probably felt- well, I don’t quite know what I felt. That I didn’t really have anything of great value to say; that it had all been said, far, far better than I ever could; that I was too busy, too lazy; and ultimately not talented enough. All of this sounds suspiciously like self-pity, or false modesty, I know, but I think it’s reasonably accurate. I started again at least in part after hearing my friend, maestro John Thomson playing his own settings of the words of another local who wrote, and thinking- this sounds rather wonderful, though I don’t much like the words. John rashly said he’d set anything I wrote, which was a daring vote of confidence- so I decided to begin again. It's both exciting and terrifying to think of hearing some of my words set to wonderful music and beautifully interpreted by such fabulous musicians as John and Simone, so as I continue to wait for a publisher to come knocking with an offer I can't refuse, here are the poems to be performed on Saturday.
Doves has a very clear origin story. One October half term we took a family holiday in Dorset, staying in Puddletown, famous both for its martyrs and for its Thomas Hardy connections. I’ve loved Hardy since I was seventeen, and, wandering along Chesil Beach on a blustery autumn afternoon, before climbing the hill to St Catherine’s Chapel, once part of the monastery, I found myself thinking about his wonderful descriptions of Gabriel Oak in far from the Madding Crowd, who could identify the type of tree from the sound of the wind as it whistled through the leaves. The chapel was empty save for the three of us, and the doves were left very much in charge; if only Hardy had been here, I thought…
Our eyes adjusting to the wind’s absence
See small moons bejewelling the gloom;
Stalking, silent, their familiar room,
Indifferent to our wind swept presence
They strut and preen, stumble, strut and stumble
Ungainly, peck at the parched earthen floor
As though like their priestly predecessors they saw
In the dust something unhidden to the humble
Whether Holy Grail or Holy Grain
Their eyes look up and with a flurry of wings
Ascend to the east window, nestling by the window light
Worn thin by centuries’ westerly winds and rain
We’re tempted to believe their minds on other things
Seeing something beyond our sight
Mothers’ Day is a belated tribute to my late mother. It seems to me to be one of the mysteries of the human condition that we’re born to people we don’t really know, and who only come into existence for us gradually and incompletely, our understanding of them remaining ever imperfect. The evidence of old photograph albums or familiar anecdote only goes so far towards convincing us that they did enjoy an independent existence before us, were once young, and once faced many, more or less travelled roads into unknowable futures, before embarking upon the only one they ever really could have. My mother was, amongst other things, an exceptionally talented and precocious pianist. I have her sheet music, and am awestruck by her repertoire aged eighteen. As a strictly amateur player myself, I play, or try to play, some of what she performed, and have that curious sensation of an intimacy across the years, my fingers falling where hers once did- and where of course the composer’s own fell even longer ago. Born in 1926, she came of age at a time when Europe was beginning to take tentative steps towards peace after the extraordinary horrors of the Second World War, and I’ve always been fascinated by the ways in which individual lives intersect with the great world events. She would shortly meet my father, much older, and himself emerging from seven years military service.
This rainy day in March, I sit and read
Your scores, propped, mute, upon the piano:
Waltzes, ballades, The Warsaw Concerto,
Imagine your working fingers, unringed;
Here, the preludes you’ve already outgrown
And here the nocturnes I imagine you played-
Dark, depthless, salted, and as troubled
As the North Sea, unquiet beyond the town.
I turn the Etudes’ pages, thickly inked,
Note where your bold flourish’s marked
The date, war’s end, September 45;
And your maiden name, soon to be extinct-
The die’s not yet cast, though you’re embarked
On change, at nineteen; hopeful, bold, alive
New Year’s Eve responds to a time which has rarely been my favourite in the calendar. I mentioned Thomas Hardy earlier and I was marked years ago by his poem The Darkling Thrush, written as the 19th century was about to give way to the 20th. in which Hardy ruminates. Hardy makes it pretty clear that he’s not optimistic, but he hears a thrush singing, and allows himself to think for a fraction of a second that this aged, blast-beruffled bird might, just possibly might have reasons for cheerfulness that Hardy himself wasn’t aware of. It’s not exactly optimistic, but then I don’t imagine Hardy would be most people’s idea of the perfect party guest. This poem owes something to Hardy, and also to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, a poem I’ve always loved. I’d like to pretend that I wrote it on New Year's Eve 2019, as we headed, Titanic-like, for the iceberg of Covid, but it was a year earlier, so I claim no prophetic gift.
The bay is calm, waters still beneath a silvered sky;
Furies spent, they pool pellucid between rocks,
So now it’s their candid openness that shocks,
As weed and stone lie washed and open to the eye
On the black rock perch cormorant, heron
And oyster catcher, their gaze set seawards
What do they see, in those still far off tides,
That darken and deepen, this late afternoon?
A ripple- and one flaps off with sudden stealth
To snare some unseen hapless fish; resumes
His post; as the water calms, the gloom’s
Deepened. Beyond these rocks, what stirs beneath?
Here December’s waters pause, still and clear;
Lying through the strait, the sea, another year.
Vanishing Point is a poem about exams, their pressures and their poignancy. I remember quite clearly my first experience of invigilating an exam. This is in part because a student of mine, who had clearly decided he’d written quite enough about whatever it was, decided instead, to draw the examination room. He was an incredibly talented artist, with an extraordinary grasp of perspective, and he reproduced, in biro, on lined paper, a perfect drawing of the single desks, the backs of bowed heads, and at the apex, or vanishing point of all these lines, a bespectacled figure, recognisably me. He gave it to me afterwards, and thirty years later it’s still pinned on my classroom wall. I’ve always found invigilation an unnerving experience- being silently present amidst all that tension and effort is quite draining, and above all this, it’s the pathos of the whole thing. All those young people, randomly together, sharing space in silence, like monks in a scriptorium, and for one last time before their lives diverge in so many unknowable directions. And that’s without getting involved in the bigger question of what it’s all for…The title alludes not only to the geometry of the scene, but also to the questionable value of force-fed knowledge which evaporates so quickly, so often leaving no trace behind. This poem was a little prophetic, for having written it, we were deprived of exams for three years.
Midsummer heat, the air still; heads are bowed
Beneath the clock which watches on, ticks on,
Sifting the minutes measured and allowed
To explore Hamlet and coastal erosion;
For a little while longer it all makes sense.
Half past three; and seventy writing hands
Stop short; and upon the slow, stewed silence
Time breaks, a cool wave on hot sands.
My eye’s drawn down rows of desks which unfurl
To their vanishing point, where sits a girl;
Her pen laid down, a weapon new outgrown,
She’s turned to stare, as though somewhere
Is revealed to her shadowed gaze, alone,
The future, writ in the slow-clearing air.
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