Dolly and I are sitting in the sun, on the warm side of the window, revelling in the unexpected joy of it. Outside the grass and the little beds in our front garden are shaking themselves back to life after the fierce onslaught Graham made upon them yesterday afternoon. You can tell he’s in earnest when he gets the wire-tined lawn rake out and proceeds to de-thatch and de-moss the blighter. I can see the purchase of a bag of Autumn TopLawn in our near future.
We’d spoken about it on our way to the supermarket and when I woke from my afternoon nap there it was done! The interval between thought and action is less with Graham than it is with me. A lot less.
Yesterday, when I spoke of the stirrings of poetry and the likelihood of an imminent opening of a new poetry workbook I rather glossed over the process of settling in to a new landscape, giving rise to a perspicuous comment:
…was it your faltering adjustment to living in Wales that stopped you earlier from setting up your poetry workbook? Or, for you, does no poetry live inside of loneliness?
Made me think, did that.
Now, I don’t want to dig too deep or to analyse too closely what it is I mean by settling in to a new landscape, feeling out its roots and its flavour before I’m truly at home enough for the poetry to flow. For me, close analysis far too often destroys what it seeks to define.
It’s not a sudden on-off thing. It happens in layers as the eye and the ear penetrates beyond the rise and fall of the hills, and the trees and fields and the animals, birds and insects that live upon them. Beneath the surface lie the bones of place, of the people who shaped it and gave it voice. When once you’ve tapped into that you can hear the voice of the land, and share in it.
Loneliness? Oh, there’s poetry a’plenty in loneliness if you’re of a mind to find it. As a young man you may go up garret and live hastily, throwing words onto paper fast and furious, sometimes so fast you need to tape the paper together into a long roll so as to avoid interruption to the flow. That’s one kind of loneliness. When you get older, though, you seek the fireside and the burning of logs, listening for a quieter voice and a gentler, slower rhythm. Who’s to say if loneliness adds to or detracts from the poem?
When we went to live in Lincolnshire I seemed to key in to the landscape quick and easy, and the poetry followed.
In our recent sojourn in Somerset I had great difficulty in finding the sleeping bones, far less any degree of concern in myself for their dreams.
Here in Wales there’s a slow, ancient magic in the land. It’s a land that whispers and sings quietly in the soft evenings. It takes time to hear it and, like as not, a lifetime to participate in the song.
This is my fourth time in Wales, the third time with Graham. We keep coming back to it and each time I slowly but surely get to feel the landscape and to hear the song. Sometimes it is easy. Sometimes it’s hard. Sooner or later, though, I get to hear the music, and to try to sing along with it. It goes something like this, sometimes emerging late, after moving away to another place:
‘Walking the high road at Bancyffordd’
Walking the high road at Bancyffordd
where lost wool softens fence wires,
scrub willows scrawl the passage of winter gales,
and tumbled chimney stone stands in place of houses,
a line of tall elms defines the sky.In summer they whisper summer songs,
slow, four hundred years in measure,
gentle as an oven in the long afternoon.In winter they cry of loneliness
of loose shutters
of frozen paths
of Sunday cawl
and the complaints of sheep.–John Bailey
Somerset, July 2001
Yup. It can take a while before you really know your landscape.
