Workshop with Donald Adamson at The Bakehouse

I'm more than happy to suggest folk might like to go along to this workshop from Donald Adamson.  It's at the lovely Bakehouse in Gatehouse of Fleet on Sunday 25 September.  It promises to be a really interesting and fresh look at the art of poetry in translation. 
I'm going to feed it into my weekend round Wigtown Book Festival and Doors Open Days, on the principle (just invented) that good things come in threes.

Workshop: What makes a good translation?

Facilitated by Donald Adamson

The Bakehouse, 44 High Street, Gatehouse of Fleet DG7 2HP

Sunday September 25^th 10.30am  – 1.30pm

Followed by a light lunch and discussion.

Cost £8.00

This workshop is for everyone – poet or otherwise – with an interest in poetry in translation. You are invited to bring translated poems that you have enjoyed and say why they appeal to you. (It will be helpful if you have some copies to pass round.) What do they ‘preserve’ of the original? What has been the translator’s strategy?

If time allows we’ll look at some translations from 20th century poets (Rilke, Vallejo) and from earlier periods (Ronsard, Horace, Catullus), with translations by Robert Bly, Ezra Pound, Yeats, etc.

Donald is a poet and translator, who taught Creative Writing and Translation Studies in Finnish Universities until his recent retirement. A rare opportunity lively discussion with an expert in his field.

Reviews of some of Donald’s translations:

‘This record should come with a "parental advisory" sticker, for the venom - musically and lyrically - scarcely lets up throughout. Folk music as cultural terrorism, anyone? (Times Review of  Värttinä album)

‘...the sound is decidedly dark...The lyrics (don’t miss reading the translations – they’re freaky!) are also pitch black, (“my loathing drips blood, my pain slashes, curses, drenches with pus”) ... like toe-tapping dirges sung by the ship’s band on the boat to hell...’  Stanford University Review of Värttinä album)

Another opportunity for writers and Writer’s across the Region to meet and engage with each other in the warm and supportive atmosphere of the Bakehouse

BOOKING: Tel 01557 814175 or bookings@thebakehouse.info or chryssalt@chryssalt.com

Getting acquainted with Being Human

'Being Human', the new anthology from Bloodaxe, has been brightening my life for the last three months.  Witness the fact that when I want it, I have to track it down, because it wanders from room to room. Sometimes it's been read in a saggy chair in the conservatory in the chilly early morning; or it's tucked under the chair by the Rayburn after a wet summer evening.  Or in the capacious basket we keep in the loo.  Or lying doggo on a windowsill, waiting to go out to the garden with a cup of coffee.

What a book!  Wander into it and it will enrich your life.  Here's some favourites.

'Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs)'

Louis MacNeice's beautiful exploration of the slowness and strangeness of time when you're waiting for someone.

Then there's Ruth Stone's 'Second Hand Coat'.

'I think when I wake in the morning
I have turned into her.
She hangs in the hall downstairs,
a shadow with pulled threads.
I slip her over my arms, skin of a matron.'

Think about it, next time in Oxfam!

Try Thomas A Clarke, 'In Praise of Walking'.  A long poem, like his walk, full of steadiness and meditative rhythm. 
'Walking is not so much romantic as reasonable.
The line of a walk is articulate in itself, a kind of statement.
Pools, walls, solitary trees, are natural halting places'.

For an evocation of haunting, Fleur Adcock's 'Water':

'I met an ancestor in the lane.
She couldn't stop, she was carrying water.
It slopped and bounced from the stoup against her;
the side of her skirt was dark with the stain,
oozing chillingly down to her shoe.
I stepped aside as she trudged past me,
frowning with effort, shivering slightly
(an icy drop splashed my foot too).'

Simple, and absolutely believable.


I've no way read enough yet.

New poetry written with midges and OS Explorer 318

Out west in the Galloway Forest Park are the mountains of Benyellary, Bennan, Craig Neldricken, Craignaw, Mullwharchar and the big daddy of them all, The Merrick.  Scattered among and below the hills are the farms, in an arc north of Newton Stewart.  This is the area of the recently designated Galloway Dark Skies Park, a recognition given to only a few places in the world whose natural darkness is almost entirely unpolluted by human sources of light.

Since May I've been working with OS 318 and 319 close at hand, on a new poetry project, working title 'The Dark Farms'.  It's developing into a themed collection of poems focused on the landscapes and extraordinarily dark skies of the Galloway Forest Park.  It's about places, on the human scale of cottages or sheep pens (they're sheep rees in Galloway).  But I also wanted to consider the immensity and complexity of space-time, as visible in the dark skies that are still part of this area.

I've been reading astronomy and discovering extraordinary things about the cosmos that I was ignorant of.  I'm still pretty ignorant, due to the marked lack of a science education, but I'm staggered by facts like -
a black dwarf is surrounded by a sort of faint light, which is a 'memory' imprinted on the fabric of time and space, of the blazing star it once was.  Or telescopes move in altitude and azimuth.  Or that dying stars spin out electrically charged winds.  That wind makes no sound in space.

(My teenager heard me exclaim about the last one and looked at me pityingly.  "Well of course it can't" he said, "no sound in a vacuum".  Ah).

I've been walking alongside huge striped dragonflies in places where there are no longer even sheep tracks (just bog) and whenever I stopped to write something down, the midges caught me up.  Stood on foundation stones of cottages long gone, their hearthstones gathering rainwater.  Met a huge red bull all too like a comet, while I was looking for a place called The Castle of Old Risk. 

Working with me on this project is artist William Spurway, who I persuaded because of my great admiration for his draughtsmanship.  Also, since his work is about light, he's interested in dark too.  Here's one of William's bull drawings, and part of one of my poems in progress.

and now             they’re emptied
the dark farms
now crouched        in their earths 

                        
for years               
they swallowed      glints               
and flakes          of stars                        

     

Shropshire Butterflies - a book from Fair Acre Press, edited by Nadia Kingsley



Ringlet, Linda Nevill

 
New from Fair Acre Press is the extremely lovely hardback anthology ‘Shropshire Butterflies’.  It does do what it says on the tin, providing keenly poetic and sometimes scientifically observant glimpses of each one of the 39 species of butterflies wise enough to take up residence in Shropshire.  This book celebrates them richly in poetry and original artwork.

I must declare an interest at this point, as by a series of happy coincidences last year I met Nadia, and had the chance to join a frolicsome band of poets, cautiously shepherded by a very nice ranger, on a butterfly walk near Ironbridge.   On a soft summer morning we hovered beside bushes, waiting for a shaft of sunlight that would fetch our delicate quarry out to bask.  Then we made amateurish swipes at them with butterfly nets, slowly learning the neat wrist flick that turns the net to stop your butterfly simply fluttering free.  My first catch was a slightly shabby Comma, and able to see it so close up  I was entranced by its warm markings, and the tattered edge of its wings – this specimen had come through winter.  Later we stood under a row of old oaks and the ranger really did tell me that he’d seen Purple Hairstreaks flutter down to drink the dew on the woodland ride.



Grey Pilgrim, Ellen McBride



Nadia’s book is illustrated with a beautifully reproduced array of artist-created prints, drawings and sculptures which explore the vivid forms and lives of butterflies.  The book is arranged in the sequence of the butterfly year, so the 39 species appear in the order in which you’re most likely to encounter them.  Slightly unusually for an anthology, ‘Shropshire Butterflies’ is presented without any poets’ or artists’ names beside their work.  In the end I rather liked this, as I kept one finger in the back of the book for its comprehensive index and biogs, and so zig-zagged back and through, discovering many delightful things to alight upon.  (If you want to read one of my poems for this book, click here).

Brimstone, Barbara Gunter-Jones

There are wonderful poems in here by much published and award-winning poets of the calibre of Mario Petrucci, Roger Garfitt, Mavis Gulliver, Alwyn Marriage and Gillian Clarke, but there are also wonderful poems by poets I discovered for the first time.  I particularly like Marilyn Gunn’s work – here are the first lines of ‘Small Copper’:Spark offerer,
you scatter cinders on rudbeckia suns,
those beckoning planets where the border
leans, bees in its flames.

and this, from ‘Presences’ by Rita Carter:Level with the Long Mynd
white clouds brush the dark barrow
tent-cloud to war -

Twisting in the fosse, pellets of bone hollow under moss
as tawny Gatekeepers patrol each hedgerow

Butterfly Library, Francis Carlile

Carol Ann Duffy says on the back cover: ‘This is one of the most delightful ‘green’ poetry projects I have heard of in recent years.’ 

A  book for all your butterfly seasons, to flit through again and again.  You can buy it online from www.fairacrepress.co.uk  and from various outlets in Shropshire, all detailed on the website.

How simple things are complex really

I was entranced this month by Vija Celmins’ work on show in Gracefield Arts Centre.  Small greyish frames of sketchy dark, lit by stars and cobwebs, mostly.  It’s part of the Artist Rooms On Tour exhibition that is showing around Britain this summer, and I think it’s great that Gracefield has succeeded in bringing it to Dumfries. 
I walked slowly round the exhibition, trying to tune in to what the artist was doing.  There is much repetition of subject.  Or a sense of someone trying afresh, afresh, to catch something there.  It feels quite meditative, all that near-focus on cobwebs.  They are extraordinarily beautiful and have the imperfections of a torn thread caused by a passing sleeve; or a rent where a fly was captured.  They have just the right torsion and drag on their connecting threads, whose anchors are just off the paper, but you feel that they too would be everyday and recognisable.  Celmins takes the everyday, and makes us see it with wonder.  Well that’s art, for me.

I started off by thinking the stars were curiously ‘similar’ to the webs.  And in certain ways they are.  But the webs are close up.  And the stars are infinitely distant.  They are still familiar to us, but in all ways they are truly stranger. 
I am impressed by Celmins’ dedication, almost a vocation, to her subjects.  You really have the impression of a mind at work, really working, sticking at it, doggedly, inventively.  Then there are the starscapes set beside tumbling aeroplanes, and my  mood darkened.  This work says so much, without seeming to. 

My favourite piece is 'Constellation – Uccello 1983' which brings together Celmins' own image of the night sky and a found image of a drawing by the Renaissance master Paolo Uccello. While Uccello’s  drawing of a chalice explores the representation of three-dimensional space on the flat page, Celmins' own image explores a different way to render space.  I sat down among the drawings and thought about the shape of space, and what we think we see as we look back millions of years into the past.  Webs, waves, stars, sand - Celmins is inspirational.

Getting ever so 21st century

Ravenglass Poetry Press have just arranged for 'The Treeless Region' to appear as an e-book.  If I had a Kindle, I could read it on it.  This is simultaneously very nice, and quite strange. 
It's probably a good thing, because of course if you write, you hope someone else will read, and perhaps new platforms for reading will just increase readership, and even opportunities for reading.  I like to think of executives skiving into poetry during long meetings. 

Here it is, anyway.  http://www.amazon.co.uk/THE-TREELESS-REGION-ebook/dp/B004ZULP6Y/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=A3TVV12T0I6NSM

Sheepwalks

At the launch of Southlight 8 recently, I met Kate Foster, a Borders artist.  Southlight 8 (poetry, prose, literary interview and illustration, published in Dumfries & Galloway http://www.dgarts.co.uk/349/literature/southlight/) contains a double page spread of Kate's work.  What with all the lambs hopping around at home, I'm drawn back to take another look at Kate's work.

I find it both delicate and hard.  The soft shades of her pastel drawings are certainly reminicent of wool, but also of mud, and the grey and green landscape.  Her lines are lean, and there's an awareness of skeleton, the boniness of a sheep's face.
She's exploring the many ways sheep make marks on the landscape.  They make their own landuse, in a mirror of our own.  They follow contours, favour certain slopes, sleep at the foot of particular dykes.  I notice ours move around according to time of day.  This is a very predictable pattern, but they vary it to take shelter from bad weather. The routines and the paths are learnt by the lambs at their mothers' tails, and passed on along the generations.
Find Kate Foster's work at http://inthepresenttense.net/, I recommend it.