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Friday Poem – Corpus

An Easter themed poem  for this week’s installment. ‘Corpus’ comes from Damian Walford Davies’ latest collection, Judas.

A shattered Judas Iscariot – that byword for betrayal – tells his own story in Damian Walford Davies’ compelling and finely wrought new collection from Seren.

We follow Judas over the course of five days as he moves through first-century Jerusalem trying to make sense of the bewildering events surrounding the life and execution of Jesus. But this is a man for whom the future is as real as his anguished and traumatized present, and for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict is as urgent as the tension between the Romans and Jews. Emphasising our compulsion to create, and challenge, gospel truths, Judas gives voice to man caught up in the promise and violence of history.

In short-lined, intensely suggestive dramatic monologues, Damian Walford Davies vividly summons moments of fear and swagger, doubt and passion, despair and nonchalance as an outlaw Judas finds himself haunted by his chequered and extraordinary past. Familiar stories are rendered strange and uncanny as the reader is caught in multiple ironies. As striking as the unnerving images on the news loops of our TV and computer screens, these poems locate us on the hazardous streets of a divided city with a companion-guide who shares with us his own troubling and troubled version of history.

Drawing on conflicting representations of Judas spanning twenty centuries, this chain of poems sets out to challenge orthodoxies and easy pieties. Judas offers an imaginative map of ancient enmities – and dares to hint at resolutions – in the form of a dramatic autobiography of the man whose most famous act (they say) was a kiss in the dark.

Corpus

What can I say? I wasn’t there:
neither ready to relieve him
of the transom’s heft

at Via Dolorosa, Station number five;
nor standing with his mother
on the quarry’s scree

to watch his wrists
spiked expertly
between electric nerve

and bone, and hear him
gurgle, drowning in the liquor
of his lungs. I could have tracked

the trail of blood
from here to where the last gob
hit the ground. The morning

had an air of perfect
commonplace. I howled,
so silently I know he heard.

Order Judas from our website.

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Friday Poem – Fireweed

Today’s poem – and painting! – is from A Fold in the River by Philip Gross and Valerie Coffin Price, due to be released at the end of the month.

A Fold in the River is the fruit of collaboration between T.S. Eliot prize-winning poet Philip Gross and the visual artist Valerie Coffin Price. Philip Gross once lived on the banks of the River Taff in Wales and his journals are the source for the powerful poems. Valerie Price revisited the walking route along the river and evolved the beautiful prints and drawings that accompany the poems.

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Fireweed

a tipsy pink, a night out
on the palette – mixing

Bloody Marys, lipstick,
a hint of the flare-up to come

*

as kids we played on bombsites,
the badlands of railway lines,

untimely places – back then
there was no such thing as waste

*

always first on the scene,
a bit too soon, after disasters

see us in the background
of the newsreel, inappropriately
dressed

*

one day, all this will be wisps
of white, of seed like grown smoke

forgetting ourselves into the future
wildly, willy-nilly, with a will

Pre-order A Fold in the River from our website.

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Friday Poem – The Love Songs of Davy Blackrock

Boy Running, Paul Henry

Today’s poem is from Paul Henry’s latest collection, Boy Running, published last month.

Paul Henry has gained a reputation as one of of the best poets in the UK. Boy Running is his beautiful sixth collection and the first to follow ‘The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems’. We begin in a ‘Studio Flat’. Cut adrift by marital break-up, the poet must sort through the emotional fallout and the various ‘chattels’ left behind; a sea of characteristic props: tables, lamps, metronomes, pianos, guitars. The poet’s sons are at the heart of this section where pathos is balanced by humour amidst the characters of a small country town.

A second section moves to the Welsh coastal town of Henry’s childhood, Aberystywth, opening with a long poem, ‘Kicking the Stone’ set in the summer of 1969. Also in this section are some familiar characters from earlier poems such as Brown Helen and Catrin Sands.

In the final sequence we meet ‘Davy Blackrock’: washed-up songwriter and modern day alter ego of Dafydd y Garreg Wen (David of the White Rock), alias David Owen (1720-1749), the blind, 18th century harpist and composer who fell asleep on a hill and dreamt the famous song which bears his name. In contrast to David of the White Rock, Davy Blackrock, ‘star of an ashen town’, drags his guitar from street to hotel to bedsit, an unsettled ghost who dreams of the perfect song.

The Love Songs of Davy Blackrock

  “The songs I had are withered
   Or vanished clean,
   Yet there are bright tracks
   Where I have been,”

                         Ivor Gurney – ‘The Songs I Had’

Few remembered them
but by the end
it was enough
that they’d brought love,
some good friends.
What was ambition
after all but the drum
of rain on a glass room,
a distraction from the moon?

He’d sit late for hours, Davy
in those final days,
inventing new chords
in his conservatory,
oblivious to the news,
worrying less about words
than the melody,
trusting his ear,
not counting the bars

and, between downpours
keeping one eye on the stars.

Paul will be launching Boy Running on 27th March at the bear in Crickhowell. Find out more or book tickets here.

Order Boy Running from our website.

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Friday Poem – A Birthmother’s Catechism

This week’s poem is from Carrie Etter’s Imagined Sons, first published in 2014, which has been shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

In Imagined Sons  Carrie Etter has written a book of vivid, heartbreaking poems on the experience of giving up a child for adoption. A prize-winning author, lecturer, critic and popular blogger, Etter imagines the possible destinies for the child and presents us with various scenarios from the tragic to the absurd. That the child’s birthday is also Sept. 11th adds a layer of irony and pathos, ‘What is the anniversary of loss?’ – asks the narrator in one of the ‘Birthmother’s Catechism’ poems. A pamphlet containing some of these poems was a Poetry Book Society Choice.

A Birthmother’s Catechism

How did you let him go?

With black ink and legalese

How did you let him go?

It’d be another year before I could vote

How did you let him go?

With altruism, tears, and self-loathing

How did you let him go?

A nurse brought pills for drying up breast milk

How did you let him go?

Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling?

Order a copy of Imagined Sons from our website.

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An Interview with Damian Walford Davies

Today we’re chatting to poet Damian Walford Davies about his latest collection, Judas, which you can pre-order from our website here.

Damian is a poet, writer and librettist. He is the author of three Seren collections – Suit of Lights (2009), Witch (2012) and Judas (2015), together with the pamphlet Alabaster Girls (Rack Press, 2015) and the co-written volume, Whiteout (Parthian, 2006). He is Head of the School of English, Communication & Philosophy at Cardiff University, where he specialises in Romanticism, the two literatures of Wales, and Creative Writing.

Had you always wanted to write about Judas, whether it was Judas the man or Judas the metaphor, or did the poems in this collection quietly creep up on you?

Judas creeps up on you, certainly. I’ve always found him (or ‘it’ – Judas is a phenomenon, a problem, a crux (‘cross’), a paradox, a sore point) compelling. (The same with Lazarus, by the way, but that’s another, if related, story . . .) He is contradictorily represented in the canonical gospels, and that’s before we come to the second-century AD gnostic Gospel of Judas, where he is Christ’s confidant. There are a myriad of historical, theological, political and psychological arguments as to why Judas did what he did (if he did). To accept the historicity of Judas – which many scholars of first-century Palestine and early Christianity do not – means recognising him as an elusive figure. He is a no-man as well as a knot of contradictory representations, built up over twenty ideological centuries. (See Susan Gubar’s excellent 2009 biography of Judas.) This is the guy with the dark halo.

What is it you enjoy most about exploring history through poetry?

I like to write against big accepted narratives, intervene in them at personal, psychological levels, offer case studies of emotional quandaries, reveal terror on local, personal scales. I use the dramatic monologue for this, aiming for an imaginative inhabitation of voice and situation, aware at the same time that ventriloquising others has an ethics attached. This is Judas’s speaking platform, throughout. My previous Seren collection, Witch, did similar things, exploring how a witch is ‘made’ in the tense atmosphere of 1640s Suffolk. In Judas, I’m constantly negotiating suggestive gaps in the canonical gospel accounts. One has to be nuanced here, as well as bold. I made the decision from the outset to play with timescales, and so Judas is encountered during the week after the crucifixion, wandering through first-century Jerusalem one minute, but then clocking two women air kissing in the contemporary city’s Sheraton Hotel the next. Judas quotes Bob Dylan. Time is spliced; the Arab-Israeli conflict is as real to him as the Roman occupation. He is disturbed by a history that hasn’t yet happened. So I enjoy querying dogmatic versions of history, indulging in counterfactuals (which is more than a parlour game – it’s a way of changing the future). History always happens somewhere, and (like religion) is in many aspects terrifying. All this is not to say that the collection is iconoclastic, or without belief/faith, or blandly ‘materialist’. Quite the opposite. Multiple ironies mean that there are no final, fixed positions in this collection.

Throughout the collection you play around with many biblical images, such as the ‘thorns’ in ‘Annunciation 1’ and the ‘silver coins’ in ‘Denominations’. I imagine it would be difficult to write a poetry collection titled Judas without them! But did you ever worry about finding a new way to use imagery that has been around for centuries?

I saw it as an opportunity – to inflect, defamiliarise, and recontextualise these ‘core’ images. Judas is a collection in which all these images exist (I hope) in a complex, kinetic, shifting relationship. Did I worry about this? All the time. Poets must always be on edge, edgy. Poetry is about edgework. Judas is published at a time of political-religious crisis and horror. The collection is a reflection on fundamentalism, belief, faith, history, knowing, unknowing, violence, intolerance and human beings as agents and casualties of history. And (of course) beauty, friendship, love, worlds of spice.

You paint a very vivid picture of Jerusalem throughout the collection, picking out places like Yad Vashem in ‘In Vino’ and Ben Yehuda Street in ‘Siloam Pool’. Was giving your poems a specific setting important to you while writing the collection?

It was crucial. I was lucky enough to be able to visit Jerusalem in April 2012, and parts of the volume were written there in a hostel room under the muezzin’s recorded call to prayer and on the hostel’s roof, from which I could see the Al-Aqsa mosque to the east, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the west, and a sea of satellite dishes in between. And so the journeys that the shattered Judas takes through the old city are the ones I myself took through the narrow streets – full of managed but mangy colonies of cats – and souqs, around the Baths of Bethesda (a place of deep peace), down to the Garden of Gethsemane (from which I phoned my 93-year-old grandmother, who quite understandably asked ‘How big is it?’), back up to the ‘tufted wall’ of the Temple and through the four quarters of the divided (and machine-gun-patrolled) town. Judas is a map. Gethsemane, by the way, is tiny.

What, if anything, have you learned about Judas and the idea of evil through writing this collection?

He wants answers as much as we do. He’s still waiting.

Pre-order Judas from Seren’s website.

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Friday Poem – The Sound of a Diamond Planet

Short Days Log Shadows Sheenagh Pugh

The Sound of a Diamond Planet comes from Sheenagh Pugh’s collection Short Days, Long Shadows, published in 2014.

In this, her twelfth collection, noted poet Sheenagh Pugh steps into a new, northern landscape, the Shetland Islands, with poems steeped in the wilder weathers and views of rugged coastlines, sweeping sea-vistas and the hardy historical characters who have inhabited these lands. There is a lovely pared-down spareness, and elegiac formality to poems like ‘Travelling with Ashes’, ‘Staying’, and ‘Trondheim: January’ where the inhabitants appear lost in a ‘strange pink daylight’, and in ‘Gardening’ where ‘White stones are shaped like hearts’. The author’s characteristic dry humour emerges elsewhere as in ‘Extremeophiles’, a paean to bacteria – ‘chancers’ who live without sun. A poet who considers ‘too accessible’ to be the best sort of compliment, Sheenagh Pugh’s work has as much to offer the general reader as it does the specialist, who will admire her artful use of traditional forms.

Sheenagh will be reading at the Stanza Festival on the 5th March. For more information check out our website!

The Sound of a Diamond Planet

I seem to be surrounded
by things not quite there,

like the fieldmice munching
unseen inside my walls,

the spit of sand
uncovered at low tide,

the slick rock waiting to be
a waterfall again.

A planet, they say,
made all of diamond

resonates in its orbit,
light years beyond

human hearing, its brittle sound
broadcast in space.

Order Short Days, Long Shadows from Seren’s website.

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‘Understudies: New and Selected Poems’

Anne-Marie Fyfe – as is apparent in her Understudies: New and Selected Poems – is a subtle and engaging poet. She has developed much like a painter, spare themes moving towards a deeper complexity. Her earlier work includes quite a few domestic interiors; rooms recalled from an Irish childhood and stories told by parents and grandparents. Later poems often feature crucial or pitvotal moments in her life and the imagined lives of others: a significant conversation, the look a woman gives herself in the mirror when she’s about to leave her husband, the odour left in the air by a certain perfume. All this eventually evolves into her characteristic poem, a cityscape wrought with careful observation and melded with flashbacks of memory, both her own and including her family, and others, beautifully imagined. Her voice is direct, with a conversational tone that invites you into the narrative. This volume includes selections from her previous books:Late Crossing (1999), Tickets from a Blank Window (2002) – both from Rockingham Press, and The Ghost Twin (Peterloo, 2005).

Published by Seren in September 2010.