Burying the Wren E-Book

Deryn Rees-Jones

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 27

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

In Burying the Wren Deryn Rees-Jones returns to familiar preoccupations but with a new clarity and maturity of vision. With intense lyricism she calls on the Roethkean 'small things' of the universe -- truffles, slugs, trilobites, birds, stones, feathers, flowers, eggs -- which, mysterious, and magical as well as ordinary -- she sets up against loss. Her sequence of 'Dogwoman' poems, which draws on the work of artist Paula Rego, is a an extended elegy to her late husband, the poet and critic Michael Murphy. Above all these are poems of the body, "...the blue heartstopping pulse at the wrist", which are alive to the world and the transformative qualities of love.

Leseprobe

Deryn Rees-Jones

Burying the Wren

For Michael

(1965-2009)

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood –

A lord of nature weeping to a tree,

I live between the heron and the wren,

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

– Roethke

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,

On St. Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze;

Up with the kettle and down with the pan,

Pray give us a penny to bury the wren.

– Traditional Irish Wren song

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

I

Three Glances at a Field of Poppies

Burying the Wren

A Dream of Constellations

After You Died

Dogwoman

II

Trilobite

Truffles

A Chinese Lacquer Egg

Shaved Fennel with Blood Oranges, Pomegranate, Pecorino

Couvade

Daughter II

Aderyn Yr Eira

Slugs

Hallucigenia

My Grandfather’s Tattoo

Daughter III

L

III

from: The Songs of Elisabeth So

IV

Shrub & Willow

The Fetch

The Box

A Scattering

Chinese Lanterns

Peony

Moon River

Kinks

Ellipsis

Stillborn

Letter from Marrakesh

Meteor

Persephone

Tom-Tom

Burying the Wren (coda)

Acknowledgements and Notes

Also by Deryn Rees-Jones

Copyright

I

Three Glances at a Field of Poppies

The first, a pointillist’s dream:

blood drop, an ache, or a smudge

of dolour.

*

Zoom in, where an ant tips a blade

of grass and the steps of its brothers

are footfalls of sorrow.

*

Now where? To the dark, where a seed

might sing, imagining a life

pushed into form, pure colour.

Burying the Wren

I kissed you at the corner gate,

our breath warmed with whisky and ale

and thought of that small brown bird

the Wren Boys brought:

soft as the hairs behind your ears –

so cold – the wren on the pole in her little box,

the fluttering breast you longed to touch.

A Dream of Constellations

When the months that were left could be held in our hands

I wanted to speak, but I could not. The astrocytal cells

that formed and grew inside your brain

following heart lines, speech lines, bedding in,

bringing you visions, disrupting your speech,

brought us a night that was suddenly known,

but not as itself. And so, like a dream about to be spoken,

silence buried itself in me. In this new pitch,

the navigated darkness of our life,

this telling and untelling of the world,

Time sped and slowed. The constellations shifted,

bringing us messages in particles of dust and light.

Together we looked up to the sky

as Ursa Minor became the headless bear,

the twin sons of Castor and Pollux, unexcellent, unsweet,

buried themselves beneath the earth,

and Vela’s sail unfurled, became ragged.

Sagittarius the archer, staggered, wounded,

ripped his arm on a jagged star, unnamed for this instant;

together we wept for Berenice

with her one breast, with her shorn-off hair.

And as Time was slinking, doing its business,

the fiery empyreal nature of things

became the thing on which we most depended.

It was a new world, our night sky,

and I’d like to think the story of what lived between us then

expanded in the moment of our looking:

charting new maps in the darkness, allowing us to trust