Watery Landscapes

APRIL: ALDEBURGH: WOODCUTS

by Simon Turner

i

———– (the eye un-

oooooo hitched in the fog

at the marsh’s edge where

the tide’s peeled back

a fossil giant’s dis-

junct lower jaw’s

leering through the Alde’s silt

oooooo the light un-

oooooo strung in the fog

a jetty’s uprights whittled

back to blackened stumps

arrayed to form a heart-

shaped harbour round a row-

boat’s charcoal carcass

oooooo the land un-

oooooo hinged in the fog)

ii

the boatshed’s hollowed out:

a Mondrian ghost of

salt-fried timber &

bare-knuckle brick, the

ground reclaimed

by buddleia, bramble,

dark billows of gorse,

remorseless squalls

like long-range wave crests

collapsing in the shallows

oooooo (a raw wind seethes

oooooo in the hip-high grass;

oooooo the larks unleash

oooooo their arcade chatter)

&the roof-beam jutting

like a petulant razzing tongue

from its northwest wall

concludes the structure

abruptly in a fog-blind

vacancy of air –

o

o

o

THE LEVELS

by Tony D’Arpino

wrist sinuous drainage rhynes

droveways and scattered farms

the ancient wooden tracks

preserved by mother peat

jeweled jaws of the sea

settlements called ‘huish’

a family holding or ‘worth’

enclosing oval infields

seahenge causeways

burrow wall beer wall

linked the islands

otters herons curlews

new rhynes and ditches

crack willows pollarded for hurdles

thatching spars

hay meadows

when the moon grew in the water

osier beds coppiced for wands

basketwork and fishtraps

alder beds and turbaries

the peat cut by hand

with the long-handled

square-bladed turf spade

the turves dried in cones and domes

the mouths of all the rivers

sealed by clyses

tidal sluices

closed against high tides

ley lines notched woodlands

ridge and furrow strip lynchets

the shapes of terraced farms

lines in an open hand

 o

o

o

BLURRED EDGES

by David Woolley

The end of  a week of storms,

the calm after what will come again,

the world soggy with rain.

I read ‘American Painters’, think

of you, how your dead husband’s

crazy family stole all your

Winslow Homer posters.

Henry James thought Homer’s work

‘hopelessly unfinished’, but he missed

the point –  those figures rising

blurrily from the landscape, the ocean,

thumbed to mist, fighting for light.

At Seaton, Porthcothan, beaches

we walk are smashed.

The rural idyll, like

the Cornish sea-walls, fell,

but Homer’s world’s not one

of harsh, straight lines.

His people, live, like us,

like his fisherman, edges blurred,

backs bending to the swell.

o

o

o

Simon Turner was born in Birmingham in 1980, and currently lives in Warwickshire.  He has published two full collections, most recently Difficult Second Album (Nine Arches Press, 2010); a pamphlet, Works on Paper, was published by Seren in 2015.  His poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Poetry Wales, Tears in the Fence and PN Review, and the anthologies Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon, 2012), and Dear World & Everyone In It (Bloodaxe, 2013).  He is currently working towards a third collection.

Tony D’Arpino’s most recent book of poetry is Floating Harbour (Redcliffe Press). His work has also appeared in the anthologies The Echoing Gallery: Bristol Poets on Art in the City and The Other Side of The Postcard (City Lights). Magazine credits include Agenda, Barrow Street, and Poetry East. His most recent nonfiction book, Trees of Bristol, explores the natural history and legacy of the ancient forests of the West Country, local tree lore, and the bio-diversity of the urban forest.

David Woolley was born in Plymouth, has lived in Cornwall, Essex and Wales, and is now back in Cornwall. He has worked in literature development for 30 years, chiefly as a festival organiser.  He ran the events and festivals at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea for 15 years, and has published four collections of poetry, most recently Pursued by a Bear (Headland, 2010). He now directs the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival (27 – 29 May – www.bodminmoorpoetryfestival.co.uk).