~
First, Plutarch has replied to my question about following swallows over at Compasses.
... to follow the most delicate of birds, which drinks
as it skims the water, crosses oceans and continents,
feeds on flies, perches on telegraph wires
like musical notations, knows where to go, where to land
and when. Its nests are mythic architecture.
His poem is called A ball of string, so as you might imagine not only swallows but other themes emerge. It's a beautiful, visionary poem which sweeps broadly through time and space, to the edge of clouds and down into labyrinths, belying the human limitations he laments. To me it forms a fine diptych with one he recently had published in Qarrtsiluni, where he posits that
To monitor the flight of birds
in consideration of what is received
(for which we should be truly thankful),
to count and name their variations,
their prey and predators,
is reason enough to be on Earth.
I'm inclined to agree.
~
Second, these came in the just the other day:
I've corresponded with and come to know and love Teresa and her work for a year or so now. I have both her previous books of poems, and found them wonderful, and when she asked me if she could have a photo she saw here for the cover of her next, Itching, itching, I was honoured and delighted. I've been waiting for my copy impatiently.
In the first poem there is an artist, who
took pain and shaped a vision
and this is what Teresa does. There are a number of artists in these pages, like the metal artist, who
labors
into the night, twists
the thin strands, presses
with tools of mysterious use
and who
rubs
shine back into the hammered medallion
of blackened silver
There is music, too, especially jazz, woven through her writing everywhere, a kindred spirit appears unexpectedly 'to borrow earphones' and then stays, in a sensual encounter, incidentally there is 'Mingus in the other room', and elsewhere
chords
that thumbed the G, spun it straight in
to hope's solar plexus
This kind of music seldom exactly has savage-beast-soothing charms, though; like the love and passion of which it forms a part it is often a lacerating, flaying experience, so a man's 'easy singing'
rusts a scream onto bare arms
There are moths and a sinister, metaphorical cat, there is raw physicality in plenty - chests, throats, teeth, bones; we find ourselves up at 3 in the lonely morning more than once. This is pain-filled stuff indeed, (more so than in her two previous volumes, I would say) but love is also exalting and exulting, even if it is absence and loss which reveals this; the voice of the beloved lost brother to whom the book is dedicated
... splashed
down the channels of my ears...
and she longs to hold on to
everything you ever touched, the golden light that rests
on places where your arms passed through.
Time and tide only increase the store of beauty of those we love -
nieces came
and went, growing lovelier with the storms
(how I love that one!)
... lapels flying and clean grin
for friends, lover mother, then wavering
at the edge like reed, windblown
a whole block of flats, shimmying in streetlight,
but syntactical ambiguity can express and enrich a complex emotional landscape.
And sometimes it's hard to confront such an onslaught of intense, sometimes violent, synaesthetic sensory impressions, the omnipresence of pain and shadow and the lightning flashes of ecstasy, which are in essence a refusal to experience life by any half-measures, no matter how much it hurts.
The title poem starts with the poet
At the sink in nettles to my elbows
which makes one wince, of course, but it is the sting, the itch, the pain, the acid taste of
... still-warm rhubarb that sets my teeth on edge
which needles and drives and provokes the creative act;
searching a stony streambed, we seek the heart
of all that water, the salt and darkness, the emptiness
that billows jewelled nets strung from every part
of this place where nothing misses me.
If I didn't know her a bit, and if I didn't know enough to know that one need not confuse the writer with the places where they take you, I might worry about Teresa. But that kind of worrying about can be a sign of smallness, resistance, jealousy even; that I can't quite go to those places on my own, but need her to take me there. It is a privilege to share something of the vision and experience of someone who has
...yew
along the front path, violets down deep, forsythia, mint she'll never
be free of, bleeding heart, the sounding out of poems fresh
and mysterious, a source she'll never tire of sipping.
I hope she never does tire of it.
(Itching, itching is published by Finishing Line Press )
We thought they probably shouldn't be allowed to flower, but they were so lovely we left them, then cut them off and brought them into the house in a big jar on the windowsill.
A wilding lilac, mauve in May among yellow broom, stands at its corner; surrounding it are fractured fences of crumbling wood flaked with dull green paint,
their surfaces and clefts infibulated with barbed wire
and embossed with the oxidising nodules of iron rivets.
Briars and brambles spring and coil among the untensioned wire,
The wood is becoming inert and stoney in decay, while the thorny stalks and stems merge with the wires that mimic them. The organic becomes atrophied and mineralised, the man-made, metal and silicate appears vegetal. The boundaries between states are mutable, uncertain here. 
