Full Description
These poems have been brought together under one cover during the winter - January 2013 and revisited July to September 2014 and 2020-21. They are not easy bedfellows, there is no dominant theme and some come from many years earlier. The oldest was written fifty years ago 'God is everywhere' while I was working as a volunteer nurse in
Shenley Hospital - then known as a mental hospital with locked wards. The hospital has since been pulled down and the site used for housing. In the main I have chosen from four settings - sea, war, pastoral and winter poems - and fog. It is a follow-up selection to Your Skyward Eyes published in the spring of 2013 ... which itself is forty years since the publication of the two narrative poems 'Judith' 1971 and 'Athens' in 1972.
One or two of the poems in this collection have appeared in The Writer, the Journal of The Society of Medical Writers. Three have had public readings - Newbury and 'When I was one' at the Thame Literary Festival 2011 jointly with a string duo, viola and cello, Roz Clark and Rose Redgrave my daughter-in-law. The poem 'Five protections inside a sorrow' was set by Edwin Roxburgh for baritone and piano and performed in the Wigmore Hall 2014.
Contents
Foreword vii
i In his own spring shadow 1
ii To lease the children's light 3
iii Swimming Woman 5
iv The Fen 7
v Across the water the spirit steps 9
vi Salt Fog 11
vii Acquainted with grief 13
viii A Field of mustard 15
ix Smoothes an ointment of hope 17
x Coasting a summer wind 19
xi When I was one 21
xii Dancing the Habanera 23
xiii November Tree 25
xiv Two autumn fields 27
xv Five protections inside a sorrow 29
xvi Fox hole 31
xvii Waiting for the morning light 33
xviii The web 35
xix Pariah 37
xx God is everywhere 39
xxi Oom pah pah 41
xxii Ebb tide 43
xxiii And stays at bay 45
xxiv A pigeon black and back 47
xxv Like a butterfly's shadow 49
xxvi Fire spider 51
xxvii Sun's summer passage 53
xxviii Madness I straddle 55
xxix On a late May mourning 57
xxx A river has two arms 59
xxxi As a surprise 61
xxxii A name Mary gave 63
xxxiii In prison ye visited me 65
xxxiv Blue as a morning's glory 67
xxxv In a shadow's ash 69
xxxvi Blue Rider 71
xxxvii Four colours grey 73
xxxviii A Summer's walk 75
xxxix Tennyson Down revisited 77
xl This way, I cried 79
Athens 81
