These are poems from a settled life. From such a position you can look at the world calmly and thoughtfully. In my poems peace seems often to be a theme, sometimes simply with reference to the absence of war, as in ‘Milk’, sometimes as a state of daily life. Often language bursts through, in a seizing of things by their names or in the joyful feeling of creative possibilities, as in ‘Walking through Slack’, the village near the top of the drive at Arvon’s Lumb Bank centre. Being a Christian also underlies my view of life, bringing an understanding of the need for hope, though this isn’t always easy to achieve - as in ‘Stained Glass.’ Having been happily married for a long time, however, is a constant help. After marriage, we lived first in a university flat, then for nearly fifty years in the same house with a big garden, before finally moving to a second floor flat with extensive views. This did not, as I had feared, cause the poems to dry up but rather generated more, beginning with ‘Moving Day’.
Growing up in the fortunate generation of free Direct Grant schools and free university tuition, I was introduced to a generous breadth of literature. Decades later in retirement I filled in some of the long gap since graduating by doing an M.A. in Contemporary Poetry at Sheffield University, including a dissertation on Seamus Heaney. Nothing stays contemporary, but one can keep reading.
The first contemporary poet who sparked my sense of new powers of writing was Thom Gunn, whose second collection The Sense of Movement I borrowed from the library in about 1959. I was entranced by the poem ‘The Nature of an Action’ with its magical last lines ‘Much like the first, this room in which I went. / Only my being there is different.’ Many years later, one of the poets who has resonated with me most clearly has been Heaney, who I heard read at Attingham Park when he was touring his newly published first volume Death of a Naturalist. Of all his collections, Seeing Things is the one I value above all. A later discovery was Eavan Boland, with poems about the intrusion of another layer of existence into ordinary life as in ‘The War Horse’ and again in a different sense, ‘The Achill Woman’ where the writer’s realisation of her own blinkered perception of life beyond literature expressed something of myself. Following her sudden death, we await the publication of her, alas posthumous, collection The Historians in the autumn.
Occasionally of course something in particular may generate a poem. ‘Were there Trams in Odessa?’ grew quite suddenly from a question which I just caught without its context one morning on Radio 3. Later I learnt that the presenter had been referring to David Oistrakh and his place of birth and to the trams of Manchester, but by then I was deep into an image of a to me unknown city at the turn of the twentieth century and the realisation that my knowing nothing about it fed, rather than obstructing, this image – how the mind ‘mixes memory and invention.’ I wrote to the presenter, Petroc Trelawny, and it became Radio 3’s ‘Friday Poem’ one week, with a credit to PN Review.
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The village street tips me out into hills.
I watch the clouds canter on slopes far off,
on crests of the grassy mountains.
The midday peace is warm and edible.
Slackening pace at the lane’s top, I see
the circle of the world.
Wonderful, the great presences of land
the sun is making play with
and wonderful in the mind how thoughts that lay
like stones in a dark landscape
moving at last
prepare themselves for speech.
War’s end:
we were resuming, in a shadowy world,
the burden of peace;
patiently, patiently beginning.
Outside the infants’ dining hall
two air-raid shelter humps
(haunted, they said)
resembled graves.
Milk, white among dampness,
waited for playtime.
Job’s Dairy, the bottle told me:
a patriarch, unseen in early morning,
clattering to school with rough crates
tangling his windy beard.
Then a first ha’porth of learning took hold of me:
it was job, like a job,
like something simple you get up and do.
War finished, you begin on peace
like a favourite pudding.
Later I was told, no, it was Jōb.
Peace harsh on the tongue,
chewy and difficult,
was cold and necessary like milk.
Single planes overhead at night
droned like speeches; through lanes at evening
went canvassers foraging for votes.
Milk, day by day appearing,
washed into us by ounces knowledge
of the new world and its ways.
At our next school
quiet men from big new dairies
made the deliveries, anxious about their rent.
I’m standing in the hall.
To my left, a commentator is amazed
about a long putt birdied at the twelfth.
Someone is coming down the stairs, declaring
United are ahead; behind me
a plaintive voice asks why this lampshade wobbles.
I’m trying to discuss when tea should happen.
The cat sulks past, upset by a strange toy
bought to amuse him. I get vague replies.
The phone rings; urgent feet thump to an answer.
My aged washing machine rocks into spin;
the TV peppers no one with applause.
The lampshade voice is gauging shades of blue;
the cat, consoled, slicks down his marmalade;
September yellows softly in; our world
must turn some more before the dark.
My focus switches, balancing, attention
pulled thinly sideways as the moments pass.
Sunday. I walk the garden path
where sun-blotched paving warms my feet.
This border’s rich confusion shows me
weeds whose generations
are fifty years, a hundred years
older than the house, the street.
I name their blossoming:
violet, figwort, viper’s bugloss, vetch.
Our garden logs the years
in layers of planted hopes, yet weeds endure,
old words tucked under the hem of speech,
leafing up unnoticed till a sudden colour
lights the hedge bottom and reminds me,
sends me back to the flower book to be sure
I’m naming them right:
enchanter’s nightshade, self-heal, fox-and-cubs.
A rain shower drives me in, to move aside
leaf patterned curtains and stare out
across a garden full of words. Tansy, etym. unknown,
perhaps linked to the Greek for immortality,
holds up its yellow buttons. I watch seasons pass
while buried names like little bursts of thought
spring from neglected corners:
coltsfoot, bittercress, toadflax, poppy, spurge.
Moored Boats
That man and wife who kiss
out in the sea between the moored boats
are German, it appears.
Her black, Babylonian cap
describes her as a thriving dress-shop owner.
They swim about together.
Walking on sand, he shows a heavy figure:
she smiles at him, fair-haired on land,
and buoys him up.
Afternoon Wind
The wind of afternoon shivers the trees.
Think of it as a brown goat,
hot, small, distant,
picking its way over dry country.
Think of it as a fish,
slipping through clearness, crossing water
in swift glides.
Think of it in winter as a coach
rocking through mountains, black with rain.
Before the days of texting, here’s my mother
leaning across the sink to tap the window
at my father, weeding.
She places one index finger across the other: ‘Tea.’
Looking up, he waves,
turns to survey his work then parks the hoe.
She fills the pot, carries the tray through.
The nestling’s gape, the ladybird’s spotted badge
give meaning without words: the tulip offers
its stripey bugle; yellow flowers
primp the forsythia. Under the little bridge
small dappled fish declare themselves as gravel.
The lonely man hang-gliding over Stanage Edge
feels what the winds tell as they clear the ridge.
Now after so long, you and I
find ourselves humming tunes the other started
in a different room, or guessing thoughts
from a slight inflection, look or trick of the eye.
Invited to ‘tweetle’ when tea’s ready, I ‘Olly, olly!’
the old Cam racers’ cry, to call my cox,
deep in twelfth-century rivalry, from his books.
Unchanged for centuries. Yet the saint’s feet
darken as her halo thins, her motto pales.
Glass creeps, liquid, down into her toes.
She is becoming earthly again.
Her cloak still throws blood on the stone floor.
Could heaven abandon her after all this time?
She stares out as though ready to suffer her martyrdom anew.
Meanwhile she is claimed like us by gravity
which insists on weightiness.
Though defiant, her stance admits
that she is always sinking,
and sanctity is heavy work and never finished.
Sitting in the top-floor study
I look out at clouds and think
I could open this window and step through.
I kneel on the desk, free the latch and clamber
into the sky, one hand on the tiles to steady me.
The breeze that suddenly pulls me free is warm.
Now I am cycling the air, legs and arms
working as though in water as I find my way
bit by bit over the tall trees opposite.
Seeing the floodlights of United’s ground
I set a course, buffeted by soft gusts,
and meet a crowd of airborne travellers.
Nice day! a woman calls as we sweep down
and settle on the station roof like pigeons.
Daddy, why are we here? a child asks.
He tells her quietly, This is the terminus.
Now all at once I see – we are the dead
waiting in this warm spot for heaven to open.
A stir begins. We start to look about
and see below on Platform One somebody
holding a whistle. Here we go! At last!
the cry goes up. Look there! The clouds are parting
clear over Sheffield station and a tall angel
in boots and golden tunic waves us through.
Sepia. Tall house-fronts, pale above the dark streets.
Three tiny figures in heavy coats,
walking. What year is it?
It is the sepia year of long ago.
There was no time then. Streets were empty,
shops unvisited.
Inscrutable stillness, the camera’s moment
fixed against the flickering human eye.
Caged in history.
No. The picture’s imagined, conjured up
by that creative tool the hopeful brain
which mixes memory and invention.
But such a place and such a year existed
outside the mind’s embroidery. There was trade,
there were marriages,
as in the nameless photographs which drop
out of an album from your mother’s youth –
But then of course they knew if there were trams.
An easy question.
In the middle of the night the cows came
breathing their hay-breath into the silent kitchen
and I, turning in my cold bed above,
was also there among them - felt their motherly warmth,
saw their shadowed flanks, gleam of damp muzzles,
sensed the flick of their tails across the cupboards.
Companionable silence. So I slept,
woke with the light, looked out and saw the herd
leaving in a slow walk over the meadow.
A wooden silence so dark
the floor is invisible, the shutters
defined only by blades of sunlight.
We feel our way to a bench,
steadying our feet between its uprights,
settle, pause.
When we open up
it’s the fourth day of creation.
Moorhen and coot, grebe ferrying their young,
pattern the lake’s glitter with black and brown
while over the teeming water mallard fly.
Dazzled, we stare
as though we had entered
a world beyond our knowledge
and come upon a different use for seeing
or as though sight itself invented
this fine embroidery of clouds and ripples,
of birds and air.
One, two, three
and we vault
across the valley and land
here in another postcode
where a squirrel fossicks in the rain
on the moss-lumpy roof of now our garage
and the back of my mind says
when we get home
but we are home.
We wake to a mild, damp day
and walls of boxes. Oddments which can’t be returned
to drawers which are ours no longer.
The unencumbered squirrel sits on its haunches
and enjoys the air.
We are in the sky,
living among treetops in the region
fir cones drop from. Out of the window
we sense the passing traffic of radio waves.
The future crouching in the valley
opens its arms as the sun rises and the row of pines
retract their shadows and whisper of possibilities.
We empty and stow, fight through our box walls like prisoners
digging a way out. Evening comes.
Morning comes, the fourth day. Birds look in at us
from their neighbourly branches. We are here
for keeps. Day passes. Far down the valley
an owl couches his soft notes on silence.
*
JENNY KING was born in London during the Blitz. Her parents, both teachers of German, encouraged her in writing poetry as a child and struggled with wartime paper rationing to make her a book to write them in. She studied English at Cambridge, taught for three years in Shrewsbury, then married and moved to Sheffield, where she and her husband, a medieval historian, have lived ever since. She has continued to write, with poems in a wide variety of magazines including PN Review, The North, Stand, The Rialto, Orbis and a number of others now sadly extinct, such as Smiths Knoll, Staple, Iron and Outposts, as well as several yearly PEN anthologies. In 2003 a poem of hers came second in the Bridport Prize competition. The first of her three pamphlets, Letting the Dark Through, (Mandeville Press 1981) had its roots in an Arvon course with Peter Scupham and George Szirtes; the other two, Tenants (2014) and Midsummer (2020), are published by Smith|Doorstop and owe a great deal to Ann and Peter Sansom’s Poetry Business workshops and support.