Thank you to David Selzer for inviting me to present some more of my poems in the OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS series on his website.
This selection begins with a translation of a poem by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) which I started in a remarkable workshop with the poet and translator Sasha Dugdale at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, held on 21 September 2019. It would not have been possible without Sasha Dugdale’s knowledge of the Russian language and of Akhmatova’s poetry. It amazed me that, with no knowledge of Russian myself, it was possible to produce what, for all its faults, is an original translation. Dugdale’s poetry collection, Joy, also made me pay proper attention to William and Catherine Blake. So thank you, Sasha.
There then follow three original poems definitely written by me, all addressed to someone no longer living; despite which, one of them answers back. The first is to Akhmatova, written when I was reading a lot by and about her and was struck by the way in which the story of her life often seemed to obscure her prodigious poetic gift and extensive body of work. The second is to an unnamed dead person, and took its origin from the funeral of a onetime work colleague which was beautifully done. It also picks up an idea I came across in The Guardian’s series of podcasts on the newspaper’s links to slavery, about the importance of being a good ancestor, or, at least, not a bad one. Finally, readers of David’s site may be familiar with the eighteenth-century Welsh poet Jane Brereton from the item about her in Between Rivers , and the last poem in this selection is an encounter and dialogue with her. She is a minor poet, but I have spent a good deal of time thinking about her. I was always very impressed by the title poem in Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, which imagines encounters with various people caught up in the conflict in Northern Ireland, and this is one influence on the poem to Brereton.
Here all is the same… by Anna Akhmatova (1912)
(Translated from the Russian.)
Here all is the same, the same as before,
Here dreams have lost their fight.
In a house by a road that’s a road no more
I must bar the shutters though still it’s light
My quiet house, bare and brusque,
Looks out at the wood through one pane.
Here they pulled a dead one out of a noose
And damned him now and again.
Whether in sadness or secret joy
For him only death was the big affair
His flickering shadow sometimes plays
On the rubbed-out plush of the chairs.
And the cuckoo-clock gladdens as night arrives,
Its regular chat is all the more clear
Into the slit I look. Horse-thieves
Over the hills are lighting a bonfire.
And, in omen of bad weather near,
Low, low the smoke blows abroad.
I’m not afraid. For luck I bear
A silk navy cord.
To Anna Akhmatova, in a Cheshire Coffee Shop
Leaves of cake display themselves in the drawers,
and the wine-rack’s glassy grin bares dark red molars.
A hundred years, a thousand miles, the wars:
yet, dear Hooknose, you’ll find all this familiar.
As for the rest – famine, prison, shootings –
thus far, these we avoid; unlike you.
They say Modigliani drew you nude,
and, plainly, you were a bit of a one.
But me, I ask your photo for a clue:
how did you write it all, legend
and love-charm and lament? Now all’s complete,
Old Woman of Kitezh, young woman
of the horse thieves’ bonfire, will you not eat
this slice of Bakewell tart? It’s surely yours,
full of your raspberry sun; and none too sweet.
Ancestor
We’ll never get to heaven, that’s for sure,
but from here see something like,
the planets glittering beyond the lurid
floodlights at the sea-lock.
These hills our ancestors ploughed
over for refinery or saltworks,
and you’re one of them now,
buried by cow-parsley heath and oil dock
where the old ferry once put out.
It’s water country: pools and slimy rocks;
do not fall in. The loved ones
praised you so, that, for a moment, in the box
went all our petty, half-lived lives along
with yours. After all, you had the knack;
and now the evening cows make a mournful song:
they snort, and bend their backs
to see you slip away by sleight of hand,
leave them like painted boulders in the grass;
for in the casket’s just the candle-end,
but here’s a place where what you gave to others
can be dreamt on. Walks drop through pine-needle land
to the thistly fields, and on past concrete coffers
for reactor waste from subs. It’s top security.
I’ll tell them we saw nothing.
To Jane Brereton
(born Mold, Flintshire 1685, died Wrexham, Denbighshire 1740)
My mind is a black slate fence, and on the lade
are shims of yellow leaf, but water clatters
over limestone, and here you are, with your maid
to carry the books and the old culture.
You make demure greeting. I do too;
then it all spills out. Your face is unclear
– there is no known likeness – but the wit is yours:
None can read me now! Surely my verse
made home for beetles, crumbled long ago?
How to explain? We have it in a moment, anywhere.
You gaze at the blocks of stone and rolls of hessian
tree-guards by the ride: a truck reverses.
So this is true. And all through Mr Newton’s
‘subtle spirit hid within gross bodies’.
Now tell me this: is Humankind perfected under Reason?
Reason has done great good, I say, and equal bad.
You nod. And when I was a babe, women
were hung for witchcraft through an abundance
of religion, of a too officious faith.
I say I love your letters, the clarity of argument.
And Mr Law, he is still read today.
But you are grave: I fear for controverting him.
A devout and learned man. Noticing your dress,
the practical economy, the embroidered margins,
I recall the church under which your bones are lost:
my son and I searched it all out, peered
into alcoves, found no memorial. You are impressed:
Now that is fair defence against the sin of pride!
Somewhere a hopper empties. What, you ask, of Britain,
of the Female Race, of Cambria, and bards?
My question: our lives, do they feel the same?
You smile.
I see that men still delvie in the rocks.
I do not doubt we suffered the more pain,
the iron cold, many young lives lost.
And truly was my sex ruled by the rod.
But correspondence, natural philosophy,
the news of stars and nations: all Creation beckoned.
The maid interjects in Welsh. What she has said?
She asks of that most important point: what of God?
Ah, I say. There we fail. A klaxon sounds
in the quarry. You raise gloved fingers I cannot touch.
The maid bobs. Into the frith you recede.
At the last, as you cross the ditch with its skin of dust,
I remember, have to shout: In Ruthin. I read your actual
letters. In the record office. I mean, what you posted.
In your hand.
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By David Selzer