fabergemonkey

hidden

behind your voice
in the shadows
of what you say
a hidden thing
a child born of
something feared
in the way you pause
the silence
and the shades
of your tone
the whisper
that is your conviction
the emptiness
that colours words
squeals faint agony
in the tautness
of your voice
a simple need
for solace
stares out from behind
the shallows of
your laughter
little earthquakes
along the edge of your
world
echoing
the crying inside
waiting for something
someone
to turn their eyes
into the sun
and see the child
inside
to turn into the glow
to bear the heat
of your truths
clasp the hand
that cannot reach out
to walk a while
with the shadows of your
smile
and stand witness
to your self belief
to see
all there is
to see

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the influence of books

A couple of years ago I was fortunate to get tickets to listen to Terry Pratchett talk at the recording of Radio 4′s “With Great Pleasure” Christmas special. In it, with a cast of brilliant readers, he would introduce and elaborate on the books that had an impact on him and his writing. It was a very well done, hugely enjoyable and very much got me thinking.

A couple of weeks ago I happened to read this lovely post by Eyoki that talked about the books that were present in his home when he grew up. Sian’s blog also has a number of intelligent and intriguing posts about the books she grew up with, which are well worth a read, or particular note (for me) being this recent one about graphic novels.

Books influence us in many ways, of that there is no doubt, be they fiction or non-fiction. They can inspire and/or enrage us, leave us warm and cosy or thoughtful and melancholic. They can, and will, evoke a range of emotions in us that, often unknowingly, will echo down through the rest of our lives, influencing and colouring our thinking and the decisions made.

I love books and find brilliant ones every day (okay, every week or so, ish). And they do evoke emotion and thought and do stimulate me in different ways, reinforcing or reshaping the way I think and feel with great subtlety. There are, however, a few books that resonate on a deeper level, that make me think and ponder anew every day.

Tanith Lee’s Night’s Master has long been one of those books. Short, it is effectively a collection of linked fantastical fairy-tales, set in an other worldy place not so removed from our own. With intense and yet somehow sparse prose, the stories are beautifully written, and in the tradition of fairytales they deliver a heady mix of the cruelty and bliss both, playful and brutal in equal measures. In here are the roots of much of my writing, and Lee’s prose is full of dark beauty, distinctive and telling. It is a book about morals and lessons and the savage nature of the semi-mythological world of gods and demons that lies alongside our own, matched only by the cruel necessity of the humanity that exists inside it. It taught me, at the most basic level, that we are ever intertwined with our tales and myths, shaped by the powerful ideas that sit at their heart, and that they, in turn, are shaped by us.

CJ Cherryh’s Book of the Faded Sun is science fiction at its best. She has ever been wonderful at realising and emphasising the nature and psychology of the alien, making it accessible and understandable despite its other-worldliness. The mri are a race of castes, and the book is about the last of them, fleeing across the universe, accompanied by a solitary human. This is the crux and heart of the story, the tension between two different species, between psychology and culture and nature, contrasting the malleability of humanity against the rigidity of the archaic, anachronistic mri culture. It is here that we begin to see the elegance and freedom of such unforgiving, unrelenting adherence to caste and structure. In the mri nature, culture, biology and psychology have evolved to a singular complete point, diamond hard and immovable, where each individual has their place, integral and relevant and justifiable by the simple fact of it. It is this evocation, this tension, this gap between two different and opposed mindsets that echoes out, reminding me constantly that everything has a place, no matter what my views; that mine is not the only right and wrong.

Reach for the Sky, the story of the Battle of Britain fighter pilot Douglas Bader, inspired in me the heroic ideal of derring-do and battling against the odds, reflections of which I have long since sought to emulate in the stories I write and the tales I dream. Bader represented the best of what it was meant to be British, stoic, skilled, fighting with flair and leadership, despite having lost both legs and eventual incarceration in a PoW camp. Heady stuff for a young boy.

Ted Hughes’ Crow remains a powerful influence on me, containing a near perfect evocation of such mythological and primal life force as to be contained by the written or spoken word. Deep and dark and inventive Hughes reflects back on us the urges and desires of our race, hints at a multitude of hidden secrets and layers and meanings. It has forever lain over my eyes and imagination a veneer of what may be; the mundane can indeed be interpreted in the most profound and ridiculous and primeval of ways.

Finally, and by no means least, Festival in My Heart (example poem/post here) is the perfect antidote to the heaviness above. Touching, beautifully written and translated, these poems express the world in a more open, honest, innocent voice, all captured with surprising delicacy and simplicity. Sometimes the world needs to be viewed with a child’s eye, with a child’s creativity and a child’s sense of trust. Sometimes the world need be nothing more than what it is, a world of wondrous mystery and possibility.

***

Night’s Master, Tanith Lee
Book of the Faded Sun Trilogy, CJ Cherryh
Reach for the Sky, Douglas Bader
Crow, Ted Hughes
Festival in My Heart, Bruno Navasky

…for the human voice…

From somewhere near the front of James Kirkup‘s ‘The Descent into the Cave and other poems‘:

Yes, totally.

insomnia

insomnia
renders me conscious
tracking oblivion
with a hunter’s intent
spins time
to infinity
midnight
passing through
my breath
a silent count
rasping sheets
a bell toll
surreptitious
the long mile
to dawn
eyeblink
another
step
a quiet desperation
beneath these
empty lights

rod mckuen

Just because I have been sitting here, window open, watching the graceful fall of night as music plays, reading his various collections. Just because.

—

Making popcorn
for the seagulls on the porch
you look up from the stove
just long enough to look away.
Some new obscurity behind your eyes
I’m not as yet as liberty to know
stays lurking there
between the popcorn and the flame.

-Popcorn; The Sea Around Me… the Hills Above

—

April people  all are lonely
that’s the general rule
and more than once a lonely heart
has made an April fool.

Born in April, sad of heart,
you’re a lonesome child,
but you could make the sun shine
with even half a smile.

April people live for love
nothing else will do.
So come along and take my hand,
I was born in April, too.

- April’s People; Grand Tour

—

I’ve saved the summer
and I give it all to you
to hold on winter morning
when the snow is new.

I’ve saved some sunlight
if you should ever need
a place away from darkness
where your mind can feed.

And for myself I’ve kept your smile
when you were but nineteen,
till you’re older you’ll not know
what brave young smiles can mean.

I know no answers
to help you on your way
the answers lie somewhere
at the bottom of the day.

But if you’ve a need for love
I’ll give you all I own
it might help you down the road
until you’ve found your own.

- Thirty-six; Lonesome Cities

—

There’s a few more lonesome cities
that I’d like to see
while the wine of wandering
is still inside of me.

There’s a few more pretty women
that I’d like to know,
a bridge or two I’d like to cross
a few more oats to sow.

Maybe when I’ve done it all,
seen all there is to see,
I’ll find I still cannot
run away from me.

But as long as the trains keep runnin’
a restless man I’ll be,
and there’re a few more lonesome cities
that I’ve yet to see.

- Lonesome Cities; Lonesome Cities

—

We come into the world alone.
We go the same way.
We’re mean to spend the interlude between
in closeness
Or so we tell ourselves.
But it’s a long way from the morning to the evening.

- April 12; In Someone’s Shadow

—

How can you say something new
about being alone?
Tell someone you’re a loner
and right away they think you’re lonely.

It’s not the same thing, you know.

It’s not wanting to put all your marbles
in one pocket.
It’s caring enough not to care too much.

Mostly it’s letting yourself come first for a while.

- Some travelling music; In Someone’s Shadow

deborah pope

Way back in October, 2008, I posted a Poem of the Day which was Deborah Pope’s Leaving. I can’t remember how or why I came into contact with her poetry, I only know that the moment when I finished reading that first poem of hers was breathtaking, bewitching and humbling. Deborah Pope is a poet of consummate skill, vision and talent, her poems echoing so strongly, with such imagery, of emotion and time and place. Her words depict as stark and brutally open a view on to her life as you could ever imagine, her imagery and sensory evocation so sublime you feel every sensation hinted at. The only other poets to affect me the way she manages to do are Basho and Rod McKuen, rarefied company indeed.

In Fanatic Heart Passage highlights a perfect transition from the surroundings to emotions, in Loose Ends she depicts the moment of her father’s departure from the family home to his sudden return. On the Mountain, written for Judith McDade, is a simply beautiful farewell; open, uncomplicated and honest.

On the Mountain

– for Judith McDade

You would have been climbing all morning,
moving patiently, carefully,
over the sunlit rocks,
bending to the pitch of the slope,
breathing the pine,
feeling the cooling air.
Somewhere in those hours
you would have passed the timberline,
moving into the time
of the mountains, climbing closer
to the beginning, becoming
older with every reach.
If you had looked back
at the green camp
lying between two fingers of snow,
the small world you were leaving
must have seemed no more
than the moss at your feet,
the clouds at your hand,
when you turned
and stepped into the sky.

Even in death you are more vivid
than any of us, more vivid than this day,
a high, deep cloudless blue,
the full light of late October,
the autumn-turning trees.
All over the ground, numberless,
lie fallen ginkgo leaves,
bright as stones underwater,
lovely, yellow ginkgo leaves,
pooling the shade,
the colour of your wind-scattered hair.
Nothing I know answers for this.

Mortal World, Pope’s second collection, is perhaps my favourite, wandering through life and love and emotion with exquisite detail, juxtaposed against the environment, the travels, the events of life. Leaving (see above for link) is amongst my favourite of her poems. Bloodspell evokes the physical and emotional moment and aftermath of liaison, of awakening and wondering. There is No One to Tell This Story to reflects on family, on love and her relationship with her sons. Other poems range from commentaries on newspaper articles to travels in Oxford and Nice to moments with her family.

Turning Point

I think you stopped wanting me then,
that last afternoon past the pier,
not in any way you thought of,
but that way that it happens,
so that later you only know
somewhere you left it behind.
I remember you were swinging
the children, your shoulders
taut, wet, rimmed
in the lowering light,
smooth like cream I wanted
to sink my teeth into,
I could smell your sweat,
your sweet oil close
in the wind, in the scrim
of rain widening over water,
the horizon unmooring,
and thunderheads rising to canyons
in a sky turned the colour
of veins in my wrist.
Still no rumbles, no fissures
of light had appeared,
and you flung out to catch
the breakers at their full.
I wanted to be beautiful,
wanted not to turn back.
Then I looked at the children,
tracing,absorbed,
so suddenly small on the sand,
and I gathered them up
like strange treasure and ran.

Falling Out of the Sky is the final volume of Pope’s poems that I own. In many ways it carries on where Mortal World leaves off, touching on old loves, family and scares. It is a more reflective collection, from the introspective Lines from the Book of Days, to the hushed terror of Mammogram and Biopsy. Pope is wonderful at weaving emotion with the world around, articulating the seasons, the feel of the moment against the backdrop of her emotional state. Pavane for Sleeping Children is a tender depiction of a mother’s love for her children, both sorrowful and weary.

The Angel Poems

Tell it, she said,
the Angel who sometimes
speaks to me,
and so I told
the only story I knew,
though I gave myself
another name.
You know the story, too,
but you know it
by another name.
That is the story.

—

Fanatic Heart; ISBN 0-8071-1748-x, Louisiana State University Press

Mortal World; ISBN 0-8071-1983-0, Louisiana State University Press

Falling Out of the Sky; ISBN 0-8071-2360-9,  Louisiana State University Press

winter sun on my back (Po Chu-i)

A winter sun rises huge and bright,
lights the south corner of my house.

Eyes closed, I sit warming my back,
ch’i stirring through ever muscle,

serene. Soon it’s like sipping wine,
like the refreshment of hibernation.

Body genial, its hundred bones clear,
spirit serene, no thoughts anywhere,

I’ve forgotten where I am, boundless
mind all emptiness rendered whole.

Po Chu-i, The Selected Poems of Po Chu-i (Translated by David Hinton)

sadder

His mother and child dead, his wife dying from pleurisy and sentenced by the ravages of incurable tuberculosis….

When I breathe in

there is a sound in my body

sadder than the winter wind

Takuboku

(source: Takuboku, Roads to Sata, Alan Booth)

flash fiction and haiku

Nicola Morgan, author and proprietor of the helpineedapublisher blog has a flash fiction competition over at her Wasted blog (in support of her new book). Fifty words or less; about Fate, Chance or Luck. Go enter.

In a fit of bravado and, well, more bravado I dashed off a short story within the above requirements and sent it in. Part of me wishes I hadn’t. I am, frankly, terrified that I have done a very bad job indeed, such was my haste and impetuous impetuosity. At least I get another two chances to redeem myself, although how I will do this I do not know.

I like flash fiction. I like the restrictive nature of it, particularly where the smaller word count constraints are concerned. As you may know, I have a tendency to less than sparse with my prose, so anything like this is a refreshing chance to write in a very different way. There are dozens, tens of dozens of flash fiction competitions out there, from the heady heights of the Bridport Prize to the those run by enthusiasts and clubs and authors and they produce very good work indeed.

Flash fiction is very much like another favourite form of mine; haiku. I love haiku with all my being and enjoy writing it immensely, the 14 syllable restriction of the form I use forcing me to concentrate and craft with as much skill and emotion as I can bring to bear. Haiku, like flash fiction, by the very nature of its restrictive metric nature has to emote or imply more than that which is contained within the words. A good haiku poem can reach into anyone and build within them, from their own experiences and emotions, a context to surround the poem, amplifying and increasing the impact of the words used.

Basho and Buson are considered at the eptiome of haiku writing, the sheer poetry and mastery of their art coming through in the exquisite use of imagery and emotion to describe an idea, a place or emotion. There is a further skill here at play too, in the ability of the translator to capture this detail, successfully evoking the intent of the original in a completely different language, mindset and culture. Years ago Penguin published the Penguin 60′s collection, a series of small ‘cut-down’ classics, including a trimmed down version of Basho’s ‘On Love and Barley’. I carry this everywhere with me.

Perhaps my favourite haiku poem is Basho’s last, written just before his death:

Sick on a journey –

over parched fields

dreams wander on.

For me this poem, amongst many others, reaches the epitome of the haiku artform, carrying with it more than just the words written. It touches something inside, and yet manages to retain the ideas of mortality within the natural world.

Flash fiction, like the above, is a self contained restricted form that manages to be much more. It is more than the story, containing within it implications without the bounds of the tale, as well as the endings and beginnings of other stories. It takes its place in the flow of a world of stories, a brief snapshot of something small within a greater whole.

It requires effective and skilled writing, an excellent mind’s eye and a willingness to pare down a story to its simplest form, without necessarily losing the complexity of its intent. Just trying can lead to being a better writer and there is nothing wrong with that.

So, with that in mind, attempt number two will be crafted tonight. I will not feel any less sick when I send it in, but I will have a more considered, thoughtful go.

in the garden

winter’s dying edge
wraps around me
lovingly her kiss
upon my flesh
tenderly the touch
of her embrace
night’s eloquence
seduces me
demure her sultry
stars
hidden in the
shadows of her
moonlit rest
clad only in the
shift of her imagination
i stand alone
perplexed

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