Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Rebecca Hurst's first collection bridges memory and observation, noting the detail of the natural world and our changing relation to it. The book's places are made familiar by walking. It encounters other worlds alive with new and recovered ideas and images – from the folk traditions of her Sussex childhood, to archival encounters with a nineteenth-century nurse-explorer, and her undergraduate training as a Kremlinologist. Her language is deeply rooted, as keenly aware of etymologies as of history. Shaped by myth, history and desire, the poems of The Iron Bridge are theatrical, fierce, music-infused.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 79
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
Contents
9For Luka
11The secret is to walk evading nothing through rain sleet darkness wind, not to abandon the spirit of repetition:
– Alice Oswald
What we habitually see confirms us.
– John Berger12
The Iron Bridge
Rough Music
Eye-level with the blacksmith’s bench, his daughter
picks through the mess of nails and bolts to find,
clean amongst the grease, a silver gleam.
The ball-bearings flash from her fingers,
skitter, comet-bright, across the concrete floor.
She scrambles after the little balls of light
until the chase becomes a game, a race from
forge to yard, as laughter cracks the grip
of her father’s craft, the striking and shaping.
To silence her the blacksmith hurls
a hammer. It does not reach its target,
the daughter he dashes after –
down the garden, his face an anvil. Still
she remembers how she jumped into the lilacs
to escape. How his hand reached through
the blooms and grabbed the roots of her hair.
How she rolled up in the dirt like a woodlouse.
How she turned into a pillar of salt, hands
clamped over ears and eyes squeezed tight
to deflect whatever loud, bad thing
was coming: the furnace-red gape.
She remembers late that same day she sat and
held his rough hands. Each nail a half-moon
of dirt; his knuckles scarred, callused, burned. 16
After any job he did there was some tiny piece left over.
Like a poem, with words that rub and won’t sit flush.
The acrid stink of coal smoke makes her sick. No blacksmith
can bear a world without forge, anvil or furnace.
Without fire and quenching water. Here she stands –
his untempered daughter. The one who holds a pen,
who’s loyal, who has inherited her father’s quick temper
and rough hands. When she hears a hammer dropped
on concrete it chimes like his voice calling.
I: MAPPING THE WOODS
Walking Dwelling Thinking
This wood has a thousand exits and entrances:
stiles, gates and tripets, gaps and breaches.
This wood is hammer-pond, clay and chalybeate,
charcoal and slag heaps, leats and races.
This wood hides the boar in a thickety hemmel;
is home to flindermouse, scutty, and kine.
This wood is cut and coppiced and burned;
chestnut and hazel broom-handles turned.
This wood is two green flanks of sandstone
pinched by the link of iron bridge over water.
This wood holds its secrets: the peat-black
knuckerhole where the dragon sleeps.
This wood scolds with a tawny owl’s brogue
shrucking and shraping, kewick hoohoo.
This wood is ashen, eldern, and oaken –
a mile from the village, ring-fenced, well-trodden.
Daybreak. This wood calls you out of your house
to walk through leaf-fall and bluebells and moss.
[East Sussex, May 2009]
Pentecost
At season’s height it comes over us like a green flame
snouting the air for summer’s imminence; cloven tongues
greening so thickly they must be harvested with scythes.
We fill barns and kitchens with crates of the verdant spears.
You tell me it is called Hadley Grass because it greens
with exuberance in fields along the Connecticut river valley.
It is the acid green of all sprouting things charged to break
winter’s spell. As the snow clears and soil warms – up it roars.
It holds winter in its green stem – thick as a man’s thumb. It does not bow
to the wind or hail. It drinks rain like a dog sucking water from a puddle.
Its green bounty cannot be contained, though we try: poaching,
pickling, canning, roasting, even churning it into ice cream.
We eat a scoop in waffle cones while sitting on the front porch.
The ice cream is a frosted green and tastes both vegetable and not.
We stare across the fields to where above Mount Tom’s slow-greening flank
there is a cindery bank of clouds. We talk in fits and starts. Fall quiet.
The ice cream melts on our green tongues. We watch the moon, gold as the yolk
of a poached egg, push up through the clouds and sail clear of the hill.
[Hadley, Massachusetts, May 2018]
Dark Peak
It’s two years since I’ve been
to the hills. Winter, spring –
tethered to the valley floor I watch them
hunch down. Slowly, when I can, I hobble
along the rutted track that falls due east
from the Saxon church on the ridge towards
(if I could go) Kinder Scout’s flat, notched
crown. I tell them, I’m waiting. They shrug.
Indifference is trout-brown, ash-green. Summer
comes. Language rushes through me like rain-
water through gritstone. This gap in the wall
is as far as I can go today. Tomorrow. I stand
in the shade of a hornbeam to sketch the summit.
The rough line bumps against the edge of the page
so I turn and let it wander verso from right to left.
On the wall my fingertips read the fine grain, sickle-
sharp; old news that I carry with me on the walk home.
Somedays wind carries word of the hills; smoke from
moorland fires pricks the air. The rivers Goyt and
Etherow – which at their confluence swirl back
against each other – exchange gossip; clamour;
I stand on the bank and listen to their talk of fitful
rain, drought, cloudbursts and diversions during which
they probe loose soil, slate tiles, red brick, barrow bones
and bling, porcelain chips, a blue glass bead. All the news
from the hills these past one thousand years. Today I linger,
listen to them speak of their work making, reshaping.
We’ve had a night of heavy rain. The silty waters
roar in spate. Trout-brown, ash-green –
a process like any other – they
carry the hills to the sea.
[Mellor, July 2020]
Desire Lines
Facing the glass, lamplight divulges the lines silvering skin between
throat and breast. These days what I want is straightforward:
my daughter’s good health; a decent night’s sleep; to walk land
that sparks my senses like fire flies netting the summer night.
Sleepless I set to the task of recreating in mind a walk to Parson’s Wood,
across the iron bridge and back home down the High Street at dusk, as shops
are closing. The wood brinks on a southern ridge. A creased line of oak and
beech. Paths among the trees converge, pushing eagerly through a gap
in the hedge until one day – a fence, wire between hazel stakes diverts
the path which steps back on either side, affronted. I split the line
with wire-cutters and leave it neatly folded, this path being an expression
of my longing: a way through the dirt and grass, ribwort and cinquefoil
to last a season. More if my desire chimes with others’ restlessness: as feet
press down blades of grass, trample and score movement, compact the earth
across lawns, verges, playing fields, public places: as we circumnavigate
or trace each other’s paths, and our feet inscribe their lines of yearning.
[East Sussex, June 2016]
Mapping the Woods
Parson’s Wood, Mayfield, East Sussex
Longitude: 51.061001
Latitude: 0.308827
[…] woods are evidently places propitious for wandering, or getting lost in, all woods are a sort of labyrinth.
(Francis Ponge, The Notebook of the Pine Woods.)
I. Winter solstice
(21 December 2009
sunrise: 08.00 am
sunset: 03.54 pm)
Between dark and dusk
we walk to the brink of the year,
an iron-red line on cinereous clay.
Hands cramp with cold on the old road
as we sketch and note this half hour
past sunrise but not brightening
though the rooks are awake and jigging
on the frosted shoulders of a broad oak.
Pass a nip of brandy, roll another smoke.
Make a mark
and a mark on the damp page.
