Andrew McNeillie’s Late Night Pheasant

Yesterday we had half a dozen of them still scrounging under the bird feeders.  (The shoots don't get very close to us).  Later in the year we see pairs of males sparring in the garden.  Which means I’ve often seen them up close – not to mention the times you disturb one when walking, and they burst from under your feet with that strange panicky honking, wings whirring.

So I went back to Andrew McNeillie’s poem ‘Pheasant’, published as ‘Plato’s Aviary (Puts Out a Wing) in his 2002 collection ‘Now, Then’ from Oxford Poets.

Pheasant

Comes under the wall where it’s broken, onto the road:

Humble not a word for him, though; nor his gait

In his scaly crocodile party shoes walking

Delicately on his toes like an elderly gent with corns.

But so burnished, Oriental in his princely ornament,

So finely beaten, his dark copperware

Laced like damascene, with the black rim tip

Indent of the craftsman’s hammer mottling

His waistcoat-breast.  How well he has worn the night

Down all these years, a thousand and one years exiled,

Out late and looking for the way home, his majesty

In all his finery, still dressed for the banquet, at dawn.

I enjoy this poem both for its sustained joke and its wonderful observation.  The male pheasant is so exotic, ‘so finely beaten’ that none of this is exaggeration.  Even the self-important strut of the bird is captured so neatly ‘Delicately on his toes like an elderly gent with corns.’

Pheasants have been in Britain since the 10^th century, introduced as a game bird.  And are native to Ancient Colchis – now Georgia. So –all dressed up, but lost.  ‘How well he has worn the night’. 

If I’d had this poem before ever I’d seen a male pheasant in the early morning, I’d have recognised him by it.

Poem of the 18th century Publican: Robert Burns, you're bard!

...by Hugh McMillan.  Well, who else?

 

The sun was shining on Dumfries, and I was tempted out a-Poem Hunting again with my trusty point-and-shoot. 

Inside the Coach and Horses on the Whitesands lurk short poems built on dreadful puns; Jackie Galley's marvellously strange thoughts on the Gulls of Dumfries;  Pippa Little's feline first footer...

I walked up Bank Street and back past The Stove, which already had a few window-readers.  So I moved to the next window and this time I read Chrys Salt's poem about Angus McPhee.  I read Roger Hutchinson's book at Christmas, and there's a wonderful blog too, written by artist Joanne B. Kaar http://joannebkaarbakersbotanistswhalers.blogspot.com/ Thanks Chrys.

 It really was a crisp and lovely day.  Through the narrow vennel to The Globe, which is packed with poems.  Where to start - Sarah Hymas (love this one), Josephine Dickinson, Polly Atkin, Rebecca Sharp, Angus MacMillan...  No sun down by The Globe, but I stood there freezing and reading.  So did a couple of other passers-by.

I warmed up on the way across to Burns' house.  Swarms of escaping schoolchildren packed the street end, while I read poems by Mike Barlow, Stephanie Green (very witty - see below), Jane Routh, Vivien Jones, JoAnne McKay, Fiona Russell and many more excellent verses. 

What fine places to place fine poems.  Thank you, Hugh Bryden and Dave Borthwick, who have probably seen enough melinex to last them till next January.

And I still haven't had time to read them all.

Windows for Burns - poems all over Dumfries

It's January in Dumfries.  Which means the wind whistles through the streets, and it's nearly Robert Burns' birthday.

He would surely raise a glass to see the windows of some of his favourite hostelries covered in poems. 

On Friday afternoon I took a camera to find poems on windaes. (It was windae all right). And a cheerful man was holding onto the roof of his market stall with both hands. "I'm surfing!" he cried.

'Windows for Burns', invented by artist, poet and publisher Hugh Bryden and Glasgow University lecturer Dave Borthwick, expanded rapidly into an international event.  Hugh and Dave invited contemporary poets from Scotland and as far afield as the USA, Sweden and all over Europe to submit their own work for display as window poems, and received hundreds in response.

Tucked away around the participating venues, see below, you'll find poems from Jen Hadfield, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Jean Sprackland, Andrew Greig and many other fine poets.  Hugh (who must be travelling even faster than the wind through Dumfries this month) even zoomed round Primary seven pupils at Heathhall, St Teresa’s, Loreburn, Holywood and Shawhead Primaries, who also have their window poems displayed.  How good is this?

So go poem-hunting. Windows for Burns is out there till 31 January, and you can find poems in

• The Globe Inn
• The Stove on the High Street
• Robert Burns House Museum in Burns Street
• The Coach and Horses on the Whitesands

And as part of the Big Burns Supper event in Dumfries 27th and 28th January, 30 of the finest poems will be projected onto The Stove, to mark its opening as Dumfries' new arts centre.  Have a poem and a pint with the Bard.

Poems are breath-maps

"Poems are breath-maps", says Alice Oswald. "They use punctuation and line-endings to show you how to reach and keep some of the air's invisible energy."

Here is her poem 'Marginalia at the Edge of the Evening'.

now the sound of the trees is worldwide
and I'm still here/not here
at the very lifting edge of evening

and I should be up there. Bathing children.

because it's late, the bike's asleep on its feet,
the fields hang to the sun by slackened lines
and when the wind blows it shows
the evening's underside
(when the sun sinks it takes
a moment smaller than a spider)
I saw the luminous underneath of a moth
I saw a blackbird
mouth to the glow of the hour in hieroglyphics...
who left the light on the clouds?

pause

the man at the wheel signs his speed on the ringroad.

right here in my reach, time is as thick as stone
and as thin as a flying strand
it's night and somebody's
pushing his mower home

  to the moon

Here is a poem which is exactly a breath-map.  It flows so naturally.  Read it aloud to hear your own breathing place the flows and pauses of the poem. 

The poem has an informal, even exploratory feel. 

'and I'm still here/not here
at the very lifting edge of evening'

I love 'the very lifting edge of evening'.  It tells me something intense, something poised on a brink, that sense of crossing a border.  Right from the start, it positions the reader in time.  The evening unfolds, delightfully.

'because it's late, the bike's asleep on its feet,
the fields hang to the sun by slackened lines'

I find these lines curiously visual.  A drowsy leaned-up bicycle. 

Look.  Bicycles asleep.

The field pattern lines of hedge and wall reaching uphill to the sky and a setting sun.  But they are also fantastical, and suggest a moment apart from the everyday.  Time 'is a thick as stone/and as thin as a flying strand' so we can't fix it.  Something measurable has become harder to pin down. 

But then
'it's night and somebody's
pushing his mower home
   to the moon'

It's just an observation.  But playfully ambiguous.  Stay out at dusk and you might see a lunar mower.  Or just bats.

And as a mother myself, I warm to the line -

'and I should be up there.  Bathing children.'

The breath-map coded by the full stop.  Maternal responsibility and stolen time - distraction - all in one dot.

Voices ringing through snow

The Feral Choir performing 'Forgotten Carols'

'Snow is sometimes a she, a soft one.
Her kiss on your cheek, her finger on your sleeve
In early December, on a warm evening,
And you turn to meet her, saying "It's snowing!"
But it is not. And nobody's there.
Empty and calm is the air.'

(Ted Hughes, from 'Snow and Snow')

We drove through snow to get there.  The woods were draped white in the headlights and the car, laden with our three generations, slithered rather on the bends above Balmaclellan.  At The CatStrand the theatre was packed with people hastily stripping off many outer layers while they compared notes about dodgy road conditions.

But in moments we were immersed in an evening of warm, intoxicating song and reading. The richness of mixed voices, expertly trained and conducted by Ali Burns, the sense of time past and re-evoked, was just wonderful.  Wendy Stewart's harp was marvellous with the voice of the singer Richard Trethewey, whose sense of rhythm was also completely engrossing - I loved the version of the ancient 'Come and I will Sing You' - incantatory, deeply strange, puckish.  The Boar's Head Carol, first published in the 1520s, but known to be older still, raised the little hairs on the back of my neck. 

Tom Pow made the readings resonate with their own strength, never overplaying where the words do it all, as in Charles Causley's 'Innocents Song', which ends:

'Watch where he comes walking
Out of the Christmas flame,
Dancing, double-talking:

Herod is his name.'

- but Tom's telling of a royal icing incident taken from 'Let Me Eat Cake: A Life Lived Sweetly' by Paul Arnott, actually disturbed the admirable poise and discipline of the choir members.  The audience had given up completely and when the aforesaid icing defeated male pride armed with a sterilised woodsaw, we simply collapsed in giggles.

How living in forests makes your stories refer to conversational, bonneted wolves...

"Totally speculative and extremely ill-founded", said Sarah Maitland, smiling broadly as she contemplated her about-to-be-published work 'Gossip from the Forest'.  "And overwritten", she added. 

Well, I doubt it.

We were listening to the famed author in a lecture theatre on the Crichton Campus, part of Dave Borthwick's excellent series of visiting writers talking about how their work is related to the natural world.  (Good for you Dave, Dumfries & Galloway is suffering a dearth of other lit programming until various powers get their act together again).

Sarah's new book will explore, she says, the impact of landscape on the imagination.  Specifically, it explores 12 walks through forests (yes, that's one for every month) and en route the relationships between such places, their natural science, their atmospheres, sounds, particularities etc - and north European fairy stories. 

She talked about Staverton Forest in Suffolk, with its 4000 ancient pollarded oaks, and expounded on the 'casual' nature of magic in story.  That is to say, it's usually wholly  unearned (by the feckless younger son, or undeserving bossy sister) and doesn't require study for even an OWL at Hogwarts. 

An hour flew by.  Tom Pow contributed the happy thought that fairy stories are there to explain to us that 'shit happens'.  Sarah leapt on this and in seconds they'd constructed the ground-breaking concept of 'Luck and Shit', to encompass all human eventuality.

'Philosophy is odious and obscure;

Both law and physics are petty wits;

Divinity is basest of the three, Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile,

Tis magic, magic that has ravish'd me'

said Sarah, quoting Kit Marlowe.  

Luck, shit and magic.  I think that covers it, really. 

In Wales in the company of The King of Britain's Daughter

I walked uphill on a muddy green track which might not quite take a small car.  Then it narrowed and became barely suitable for a pony.  I could just see roof timbers higher up.  It was very steep, and there was no sound but the sea, far below.  The green track led to a cottage which someone had begun to renovate.  But not recently.  It was unmistakably a little bereft, a little sad.  Beautiful slabs of stone fenced its tiny garden, and a mighty granite post marked the gate.  I put my hand on a delicate roughness of lichen so white it looked like a splash of paint, and stepped up, but with the odd feeling always present when you know your touch and step is the physical echo of so many others. 

I sat down on a big stone under the empty window of the cottage, looked out to sea and fished a book out of my pocket.  Just out of the wind, and for ten minutes, I enjoyed the company of Gillian Clark. 

Seal's head in water,
Bran's footprint in a slab of rock
Deep enough for a child to swim.
An ess of light as far as Ireland.
Salt in my mouth and the wind to lean on.

Later we climbed Yr Eifl's curving peak and looked down onto the Iron Age ruins of Tre'r Ceiri.

Beached for good on the high-tide line,
the houseboat leaned to sea,
at odds with the level earth
in its ballast of stones

and fishy drifts of sand.

Cargo of cuttlefish,

bladderwrack, blue mussels

the horn of a unicorn,

the skull of a curlew
and maps for the journey,

the King of Britain's daughter
making for open sea

past headlands like drinking dragons,

marked by that neolithic stone

from the giant's pocket.

All week we had stones, sea foam and radio.  We had slate caverns where they played ghostly recordings of Blaenau's male voice choirs, and bookshops in Caernarfon and Porthmadog where readers talked books with the bookseller and no-one had a loyalty card.