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Friday Poem – ‘Easter Sunday, Table Mountain’, Graham Mort

Easter Sunday Table Mountain Friday Poem Graham Mort

It’s Good Friday today and the start of the blissfully long Easter weekend. In celebration, our Friday Poem is ‘Easter Sunday, Table Mountain’ by Graham Mort, from Black Shiver Moss.

This transportive poem will sweep you – at all angles – through unfamiliar landscapes: whether high above Cape Town, the ‘broiling city’, or precariously gazing upwards at a rocky landscape on the cusp of falling.
Black Shiver Moss includes pieces about landscapes and peoples as distant as our featured poem’s South Africa, and as close as Europe. Mort’s talent for vivid descriptions and evocations renders each new destination intimate and familiar – here is a traveller who has taken his destinations to heart, reproducing their weathers and textures with a startling exactitude and intensity.

A note on the poem:

I wrote this poem after walking the old Pipe Track that curves around Table Mountain above Camps Bay, past the gullied buttresses of the Twelve Apostles. I’m working there again and it seems odd to be home for Easter in North Yorkshire, looking at snow on Ingleborough, which has always seemed a miniature of that other flat-topped mountain. When I wrote the poem I’d just visited a Saturday school in Philippi township, held in a church constructed of cardboard and corrugated iron, attended by a group of wonderfully enthusiastic children. I wondered about their futures in what is still an emergent democracy, in the lingering shadows of Apartheid. I’m not religious, but there’s a hint of George Herbert’s Easter Wings in the poem, a desire for equanimity in a part of the world where oceans, languages and cultures come together in a constant flux. I’m flying back out on Easter Monday into the worst drought for a hundred years, but also to another kind of thirst – the almost palpable longing for freedom, equality and restitution.

Graham Mort

 

Graham Mort Easter Sunday Table Mountain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Black Shiver Moss is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem: ‘Chinese Lacquer Egg’, Deryn Rees-Jones

Friday Poem Chinese Lacquer Egg Deryn Rees-Jones

We’d like to wish you a very happy Easter, and in celebration our Friday Poem today is ‘Chinese Lacquer Egg’ by Deryn Rees-Jones.

Deryn Rees-Jones What It's Like To Be Alive Selected Poems‘Chinese Lacquer Egg’ first featured in TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted Burying the Wren, and more recently in What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems. ‘Something is beginning’, it starts: there is a change, in outlook as well as nature. With intense lyricism the poet calls on the Roethkean ‘small things’ of the universe – birds, flowers, eggs – mysterious, and magical as well as ordinary.
What It’s Like to Be Alive features poems from Burying the Wren and four other collections, showcasing the arc of development in her writing over twenty-five years as she visits and revisits the concerns that are the mainstay of her writing: memory, love, desire, and heartbreak in all its manifestations.

 

A Chinese Lacquer Egg

Something is beginning. We feel it in the raw edges
of our dreams, our bodies hostage to light, to weather.
It is filling us with the weight of summer
which floats like helium through our wintered bones.
We wonder at it all, surprised by warmth, a sudden downpour –
the ruffled line of birdsong, a forgotten bulb
forcing its way through sodden earth towards the sun.
Or this Chinese lacquer egg, which appeared one morning
in my outstretched palm. Beyond the sound
of aeroplane or train, as we drift asleep, hands cupped
to the pillow, it shares its oval mysteries. Listen!
Between breath and silence it is showing itself.
In these shortened nights it is not unlike rapture,
an unworded prayer its indelible hum.

 

 

What It’s Like to Be Alive is available from the Seren website: £12.99
Join our free, no-purchase-necessary Book Club for a 20% discount every time you shop with us

 

 

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Recommended Reads this Easter!

There’s no denying that Christmas is a fantastically fun time of year, but a lot of stress, tears and an inordinate amount of planning goes into it – just 1 day out of 365 – meaning we barely get a chance to acknowledge it until the day’s over and done with, and we have to spend January living off what seems like an endless supply of turkey sandwiches.

Easter is a much more mellow holiday; a chance to enjoy a long weekend with a pile of chocolate and celebrate that spring has arrived at last! What better way to spend a weekend like that than with a good book?

judas cover rgbDamian Walford Davies’ latest collection, Judas, is a perfect read for this time of year. No matter your opinion of Judas, we guarantee this collection will both fascinate and horrify you, and by the end of it you may find your perception of the most famous traitor has changed. Check out our interview with Damian here!

If you’d prefer to take a step back from the religious elements of the holiday, perhaps Philip Gross aA Fold in the River_Layout 1nd Valerie Coffin Price’s A Fold in the River would be more to your taste. The arrival of spring brings out the green fingers in everyone, and with their marriage of poetry and paintings dedicated to the landscape around the River Taff this collection is an evocative tribute to our natural world.

Perhaps youseren_-_the_advantages_of_an_older_man‘d prefer to read prose, and if you’re in the mood for something fun and quick to enjoy over the weekend then why not read Gwyneth Lewis’s Advantages of the Older Man? In this light-hearted novella a young Swansea woman finds herself possessed by the restless spirit of Dylan Thomas, who is in the middle of a mid-afterlife crisis himself.

Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray. £8.99Sugar Hall is the ideal read for you if you’re in the mood for something a little spookier this Easter. Set during the Easter of 1955 on the edge of the English/Welsh border as Britain prepares for its last hanging, Tiffany Murray’s chilling ghost story is inspired by the tales of the slave boy that surround Littledean Hall in Gloucestershire.

You can find all of these books, and many more, on our website. From all of us at Seren, we hope you have a wonderful Easter!