Thursday 21 May 2015

Voices



After a very difficult family fortnight with a major bereavement, it was lovely to have an evening out yesterday at the Winchcombe Festival of Music and Arts. There was a very appreciative audience at the White Hart Inn for "Voices", a poetry reading given by Matt Black, Anna Saunders and Peter Wyton - three very different poets who were equally interesting and entertaining.

Matt Black was for two years the Derbyshire Poet Laureate - once confused, as he told us, when visiting a school to run a workshop, with the national Laureate, Carol Anne Duffy! But they asked him back, which must have been a sign of their satisfaction with his performance. His reading from his book of children's poems involved audience participation for his amusing rendition of "Toast" and then he moved on to subjects as diverse as Arkwright's cotton factory and conversations overheard outside a hairdressers and in Waitrose expressed in the 17 syllables of haikus. Brilliant.

Anna Saunders is well known in the area in her role as Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival and she read from her collections "Struck" and "Communion". Of her poems, a favourite of mine is one based on the chapter in Laurie Lee's "Cider With Rosie" that tells of the murder of a brash and bragging young man who comes to the village pub one winter's night - you may know the story. I have always loved the book - the setting for which is only a few miles from my home - and Anna's poem echoes the chilling reality of locals closing ranks against an unwelcome outsider.

Slam champion Peter Wyton was as great as ever, giving us a "fast trot around Cotswoldshire" with his take on the history of the villages and our "rogue river", the Severn, "distaining restraining orders"  by flooding with monotonous regularity. I could never tire of hearing his poem on "The Ladies Of The Charity Shop"; he has them well and truly (affectionately) taped.

All in all, a really good evening and just what I needed.

Sunday 10 May 2015

Honouring the past

A lot in the news this weekend about the commemoration of VE Day. It makes a very welcome change from all the election goings-on to which we've been subjected of late but especially for my generation - the children of those who fought - the commemoration is an important time of reflection in its own right.

It's only been in recent years that I've realised how little my father spoke about his wartime service in the Royal Navy and how little interest I must have expressed during my youth anyway - like most young people, I was too busy pursuing my own life to take too much notice of his! Now, of course, I so regret that ...


Jigsaw

Of ten thousand pieces, only a handful  
of straight edges and no picture on the box - 
the elusive fragments of your days 
before they interlocked with mine. 

Now I sift through faded photos, 
visit naval docks, trawl through your letters, 
probe the depths for any random pieces that align -

and wonder why it's taken three decades 
for me to miss the stories that I never knew - 
and to pay the homage that's so long overdue.


Roland Ewart Garrett, RN 1941 -1945

(Copyright Gill Garrett 2014)


Wednesday 6 May 2015

Found poems

Lately I've been reading up about, and reading a lot of, "found poems". In the past it hasn't been an area that has much interested me but I'm beginning to see the attraction of taking other written forms and refashioning them into something original. Over the last few days I've been trying my hand at the odd cento - I had no idea that they represented a tradition going back so many centuries. Currently I'm working on a biblical one (I have always found the King James version beautifully poetic) but you may well recognise some of the lines in the following! Hope you'll agree though that they make an interesting and thought-provoking combination in such a different context.

I had not thought that it would be like this -
in the full clutch of circumstance
I was much too far out all my life.

I saw the danger yet I walked along the enchanted way
alone and did not mind,
walked on at the wind's will -
knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted I should ever come back.

So mindless were those outpourings!
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
worthless as withered weeds.

(Copyright Gill Garrett May 2015)