tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68945147190052196182024-03-05T17:32:13.946-08:00The Poetry PileCora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-50378775385521810462019-07-22T05:07:00.000-07:002019-07-22T05:07:52.052-07:00Review of Ian Marriott's The Hollow Bone<div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>The Hollow Bone by Ian Marriott (Cinnamon Press, 2017)</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Review by Cora Greenhill</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>(Edited version published in envoi No 182)</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There are poems in this collection that seem, like the poles, to be magnetic: I turn to them again and again. There is something essential about them, in both meanings of the word - they are pared down to the essence in poetic terms, and risk territories essential to life that are often avoided and all too rarely articulated this well. They seem to distill what would be left unsaid if not said in precisely this way, while with words they seem to nudge consciousness beyond language. Some poems even insist on this: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Long held</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the tuning forked silence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The mirage season is on us,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">language detaches itself - (<i>Terra Infirma 10 & 13</i>)</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The opening lines of the first poem wake us up to the power of Marriott's unsparing imagery. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As if it were not enough</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">to reduce</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the great wild Aurochs</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">to this swaying udder</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">drained twice daily - <i>(Bovine) </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A naturalness of expression and bold, wide-ranging utterance is one of the features of this poetry. As one reads on, one realises that the poetry's sense of authority arises from deep personal process, through psychologically dark and dangerous territory, as much as physical journeying to as near the ends of the earth as one can get. The terrain of the human psyche in extremity, in a state of spiritual emergency, is a major theme in the collection, connected intricately through the pared down imagery with the harsh external landscapes, finding form in stark, unalterable lines.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Fist-in-front-of-face-dark.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Stretching out, the polar night -</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">between buildings</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">we cling to ropes of frost. <i>(Terra Firma 3) </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A Marriott poem is for the wild, as well as of it, speaking for and as the undomesticated, unexploited species and the remotest landscapes in which they still cling to life: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">green-eyed, glass-eyed</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">from where you have been,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">each iris an ocean trench. <i>(Albatross, from The Hollow Bone)</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Here is the voice of a man who knows what he's talking about, has been there more than once: we are sharing something beyond the incidental, momentary epiphanies that feature in much current poetry. Our journey with this poet as guide enters dangerous terrains, but we can be sure of his rock solid experience:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It would have been</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">map and compass work</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">all morning - and tricky at that- <i>(Christmas)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">(were it not for the absent fox who has left tracks as 'a gift')</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">A poem that leaves us in no doubt that we are following a profoundly challenging personal journey is <i>The Inner Work. </i>The two-part poem has a near-perfect, though not symmetrical, equilibrium, starting with flesh as food, ending with escaping being devoured as flesh: the savage compression of a life story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Nearly forty years,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">scratching a living</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">of meat and offal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When we might hope or expect the second part to lead out of 'the mahogany twilight', it fails to re-assure us at all: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Then the real hunger.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The work begins.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Rarely can psychological depths have been so convincingly depicted in poetry since, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, 'O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.' </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But whereas the Jesuit flails around helplessly in his despair, feeling abandoned, pleading for rescue, this seeker reaches for his own animal instinct: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">like the rag-doll seal</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">of the killer whale-</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">limp-bodied,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">playing dead,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">yet all the while</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">quietly gathering.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The jaws'</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">careless release.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Salvation doesn't come as an intervention or revelation of a higher power, but only through what myth would see as an underworld journey, what psycho-analysis would term exploring the unconscious (often symbolised by water in dreams).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The imagery of predatory sea life in this poem carries the poet's total authority, culminating in the reality that however hard we work on ourselves, deliverance is also a matter of chance - if the whale had been hungrier, it might not have been so careless. All human existence depends on the luck of not being in the path of the hungry carnivore or tornado, but it is still a necessity to work on evolving as individuals and societies, more than ever right now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is a pivotal poem in the book, and to my mind it is misplaced - my only criticism of the book being that its editing could have been more rigorous: some of the ordering the poems, and in a few cases, the inclusion of weaker poems, means the collection has less poise than the best poems merit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The polar poems seem to me to be at the heart of the work, their powerful imagery fusing the dominant themes of wilderness/otherness in nature, and the inner/underworld journey of the human soul. The descriptions of the natural landscapes can be breathtakingly beautiful, as in <i>Aurora Landscape; </i>though<i> </i>living in them is the edge of human endurance. In <i>Antarctic Winter 2, </i>a rare occurrence of repetition brings home the unbearable tedium, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We are wrapped in fibreglass,...</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We are living in treacle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We are living in treacle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The second part of this poem allows one of the rare visitations of other humans in the book: entering the deranged mind of the barely surviving speaker, the sensations of the parents' physicality, which may be hallucinations or memories, are shocking, uncomfortable and ambiguous. And just as there is no way out of the Antarctic in winter, there is no glimmer of escape from the psychological damage: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The memory of a woman</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">knots me as she un-knots me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I am a Gordian bundle of bone and muscle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In earth's harshest environment, people are ill-adapted both physically,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cook used the last lime a week ago,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">salt beef sunsets are gone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We are down to a hardtack moon,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the weevil holes of stars-'<i> (Terra Infirma 14)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and mentally, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Out there the suicide principle sits-</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">he has dropped his long line of hooks</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">through a hole in the ice and will wait.' <i>(Terra Infirma 8)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So compressed is the imagery of these glistening, dark gems of language, they seem to mirror the inner and outer landscapes few of us would choose to visit, yet there is a healing catharsis in the razor-sharp honesty about life on the edge. And there are also glimpses of redemptive warmth in the affectionate, almost humorous descriptions of animals who struggle to survive:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">can you hear him</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">singing his way to the surface?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Now he is out</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">a bag of seal</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">lying in a pool of himself. (<i>Terra Infirma 25). </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Or the penguins, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Fish-plump and oily they come,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">one-by-one</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">peeling the sea-ice distance-</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">heads bowed, each foot</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">shackled to the press-gang dark. (<i>Terra Infirma 19)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In fact, it seems any sense of redemption in <i>The Hollow Bone</i> is brought by animal messengers. The poetry makes no bones about its broad search for spirit in a world where '...the weight of church/drains away-' (<i>The Dream Master</i>). In <i>Christmas</i>, a wintry walk with a silent companion is made to escape 'the absence of god', and the sacred is found in </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the whiteness of hares,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">grouse flushed up,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">a dipper working his wintry patch.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">References to religion and spiritual paths are throughout the book, often in the titles eg <i>Pilgrim, the Shaman Speaks, The Cathedrals are Sinking</i>, and of course the book's title referring to a shamanic discipline of consciousness. But no religion offers comfort: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is not a god</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">of consolation, (<i>The Shaman Speaks)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Buddhist. Activist for twenty years-</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">she stepped out into busy traffic,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">mind on the next best thing. (<i>A Kind of Passing</i>)</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It was a cold</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Presbyterian morning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the torch-lit rafters</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">row upon row</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">of wintering butterflies,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">magnetised</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">like iron filings</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">to some distant north. (<i>Soulcraft</i>)</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As a mature student, Marriott was guided to read Heidegger, and he did, and read about how shamanism has become an artistic practise in the modern world: in poetry perhaps first and most famously through Rilke. Altered states, dreaming both awake and asleep, participating in other forms of consciousness, and a profound engagement with death, are some of the strands of this area of artistic endeavour evident in this collection. There is a bow to the mother of all shamans and gods: <i>The Cathedrals are Sinking</i> describes the work of trying 'to shore the walls of Winchester up-' as the great church crumbles into the flooded earth. It ends with a questions that has no question mark:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">or is it simply</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">that the wet earth</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">is rising up -</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">shunned goddess</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">of cave and fen</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">reclaiming - without malice -</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">what was hers</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">all along.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The last two poems of the collection make a significant and well-placed ending. The title poem, <i>The Hollow Bone, </i>offers haiku-like tributes to birds and animals: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Each forward movement an age -</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the eyes' fixed bayonet. <i>(Heron)</i> </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">These exquisite distillations of wildness remind me a little of Kathy Tower's more domestic soul medicine in <i>Remedies</i>. Marriott's final poem, <i>The Dream Master, </i>with its dream-like irresolution, suggests our models for a soul-life need at the very least updating:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">music for a gramophone</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">cold-pressed for another age</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"> - a line that could well be applied to human's relationship with the living earth today. But there is no polemic in this book: it exists to replenish the soul. I'm thirsty for more of this kind of poetry: work that has earned its authority through living with open eyes. Its courage is reminiscent in some ways of Adrienne Rich's iconic <i>Diving into the Wreck</i>. One doesn't have to choose to spend winters in the Antarctic - that is both real and a metaphor for the perilous world we all live in. There is no hope offered here except in the courage of utterance.</span></div>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-71007364040342359422018-02-18T11:49:00.001-08:002018-02-18T11:49:46.027-08:00Review of Artemis, the People's Priestess by Dilys Wood<span style="color: #2b1ea8; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">I felt very honoured by this thoughtful and appreciative review - and it's great to know it makes readers laugh out loud!</span><br />
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<span style="color: #2b1ea8; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">Review of Artemis, the People's Priestess by Dilys Wood, ARTEMISpoetry, Iss 19, Nov 2017</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">Myth now spells freedom. Were there times when writers dare not meddle? Now myth is freely re-shaped to focus on key contemporary issues, while serving as a means of escape from directly confessional poetry. </span><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">Cora Greenhill’s</b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">Artemis, The People’s Priestess</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"> evokes a modern ‘goddess’ – Diana, ‘The People’s Princess’. This may be adventitious, but this lively book-length verse drama pivots on the role of woman, explored in a way that’s both many-layered and ‘no holds barred’, with particular attention to women who refuse to conform, who have ambiguous (not always hostile) attitudes to sex and tradition, who are perhaps, ultimately, tradition-makers. The emphasis is on flesh and blood employing modern vernacular. Characters include Artemis, tom-boy and rebel, her more conformist twin, Apollo, Kallisto, a tragic female figure, and Maya (Earth), who keeps the substructure firmly in view while others lose themselves in aspects of the superstructure – rituals, art, meddling in politics. There’s nothing diagrammatic about either plot, characters, or the rich Cretan setting (well-known to Greenhill). The debate around woman’s role could have been thin and schematic with the thrust towards easy victory for Artemis the rebel – it isn’t. The background of ancient </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">mores </i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">(clothes, make-up, rituals, based, it seems, on wide research) gives colour. The power and beauty of nature is a sub-theme: “massive / olive trunks threw purple lines / across the dappled tracks. // ‘Look at that mountain!’ I whispered, / pointing at a profile chalked onto blue” (</span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">Arrival</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">). The plot is deliberately labyrinthine and this matches the handling of ideas. These are juggled, kept in the air: no preaching here. Ultimately, the protagonists vanish into the future with their questions. A fine achievement and enjoyable read with ample laugh-out-loud, edgy humour.</span>Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-62492903371944773972018-02-06T06:38:00.002-08:002018-02-06T06:38:28.658-08:00Rave Review of Artemis, The People's Priestess, by Rosie Jackson<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(64, 64, 64); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #404040; font-family: Times; font-size: 14px;">This fabulous review is published in Tears in the Fence in February 2018. Thanks to Rosie Jackson and to David Caddy for </span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: Times;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(64, 64, 64); font-size: 14px;">commissioning</span></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(64, 64, 64); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #404040; font-family: Times; font-size: 14px;"> it.</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>Artemis: The People’s Priestess</i> by Cora Greenhill</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">(Three Drops Press, 2017, £8)</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In the present climate of fraught sexual politics, where years of backlash against feminism are finally having some kind of day of reckoning as male privileges and abuse of power are being called to account (in the film industry and elsewhere), a verse drama which takes us back to the very beginnings of patriarchy – and an evocative reminder of all it lost and subdued – could not be more timely. Yet Cora Greenhill’s long poem never surrenders to mere polemics or abstract feminist thesis; this is a vivid, dramatized exploration of what it means, and has meant for centuries, to inhabit a male or female psyche, and the lasting cultural effects of both, ever since Greek mythology first represented our gendered identity in its various gods and goddesses, and told of the love and warfare between them. Y</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;">ou need only look at the full title of <i>Artemis: The People’s Priestess,</i> to know this is going to be a deft blending of classical myth with contemporary reference. Artemis, goddess of hunting in Greek mythology, became Diana to the Romans – hence the jump to Diana, the people’s princess, sliding into the people’s priestess. This typifies the treat of irreverence, irony, subversion, wit, and an artful blending of ancient and contemporary, which run throughout the poem. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The drama begins with a Prelude in 1450 BC, when a volcano on Mount Thera lays waste the island of Crete, destroys fleets and leaves the populace more open than ever to the controlling powers of religion. Born that night of a union between Leto and Zeus, the twins Artemis and Apollo come to represent the split between matriarchy and patriarchy, the (elder) f</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;">emale strong but enabling the man’s strength, the boy weak, but taken care of by his twin sister, their growth </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">less a complete split than a complicated co-dependency:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I wouldn’t let go of him, so he survived</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and wouldn’t let go of me. Original</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">co-dependency. Start and end of story. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Could neither split nor live in harmony.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Artemis becomes goddess of the wild, of remote, lonely places – Aeschylus called her ‘lady of the wild mountains,’ - and Greenhill captures in a brilliant, unromanticised way, her passion for birds, animals, the untamed outdoors, dance, freedom of movement, foraged food, sensuality, fertility. Where Artemis is mythology’s ‘arch-outsider’, beyond the rule of man-made law, </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;">‘all she ever cared about was feathered or furred,’ </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">her brother Apollo, by contrast, is elevated to the god of civilisation, of harmony, proportion, transcendence, music, living by the rules he has invented to suit himself,</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;"> - ‘There’s no place now for a woman without a man.’ This is a </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">a </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;">superficial and destructive order in his sister’s eyes, easily degenerating into war, the abuse and rape of women, not inherently civilised at all. Thus their perennial conflict and s</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">ome of the most telling lines come from the siblings’ descriptions of themselves and each other, each aware they are the other’s shadow, the edge of their identity, constantly at odds in their values. </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;">‘You’re hunted, sister, not hunter now. Your subversive teaching is a threat.’ In </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">their ‘last sibling spat’, </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;">Apollo, who admits he ‘Bigged up my brilliance…. I never did get mystery…’ asks: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What exactly was my original sin? Being a BOY?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Or going with those who recognised my worth? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And Artemis puts down Apollo for his not knowing the less visible way, the road less travelled. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Of course you’d have been lost!</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That’s the point. Don’t you get it yet?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To be lost in love would have made you a man – </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Following the labyrinth’s way, losing yourself to be found.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Indeed, it is their never ending spat, still going on in our culture now, which underlines the power of this work as a feminist epic, a kind of poetic allegory, huge in its ambition and reach, and that is how it lingers in the mind and imagination long after its ending. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Thanks to many clever contemporary references, the story is constantly pulled into our own day in other ways too: a satire of diplomacy in the Knossos council; a critique of modern farming methods and carnivores; a warning of climate change; an attack on relying only on charity and handouts; men pursuing profit rather than sustainability – ‘they are harming/the balance of our land with all their farming.’; men reckless with their own seed too; and dire <i>Handmaid’s Tale</i> warnings of the punishment facing girls who don’t toe the line ‘Your little girls will be rounded up like rabbits,/ cured of their strange notions and uncouth habits.’</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(64, 64, 64); color: #404040;">Perhaps all poems can only come from the highly specific combination of personal and cultural factors that go into their making, but this strikes me as conspicuously the case with A<i>rtemis</i>. </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Cora Greenhill had English parents, but grew up in rural Ulster, where she felt to be on the edge of a culture. Like me, she studied literature at Warwick University in the heady days of Germaine Greer’s teaching there, and could hardly avoid the lasting influence of Greer’s powerful and unique brand of feminism. Then she taught in Nigeria and lived and worked in Crete, whose history of shamanic, pre-patriarchal </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(64, 64, 64); color: #404040;">‘Minoan’ </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">society became inspirational. Add to this twenty years of practising and teaching Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms dancework, marriage, motherhood, travel, a home in Crete as well as Sheffield, combined with writing, art, theatre, and the developing of her own distinct poetic voice in <i>The Point of Waking</i> (Oversteps, 2013) and <i>Far from Kind</i> (Pindrop Press, 2016), and it’s hard not to see <i>Artemis</i> as the happy, even inevitable, fruition of these various strands of experience and intellectual history in Greenhill’s rich creative life. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If the feminist darts come thick and fast - </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">You see, they just made things up<br />
to create male supremacy –<br />
‘s how they invented so-called history.<br />
Wait ‘n’ I’ll put the records straight.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;">they also reveal the possibility of a different way, less visible than the linear and logical – wild, mysterious. They leave me w</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">ith a renewed desire to learn more about matriarchal culture and the exact origins of patriarchy, so I’m now dusting off my old copy of Ann Baring and Jules Cashford’s wonderful study <i>The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image </i>(1991), which Greenhill quotes as one of her seminal texts. Is it true, for example, that when the huntress women removed their </span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;">boobs, it was not for ease of shooting arrows, but to reduce their market value in slavery? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Personally, I found the rhyming couplet contributions of the chorus (priestesses) and some of the other characters – Kallisto, Daphne, Hyacinthos, the Greek traders – less compelling than the dialogues and monologues of Artemis and Apollo, as this is so vividly and memorably their story, with all it has come to embody and represent in layers of mythology around gender and the psyche ever since. (Though, of course, everything might be transformed when the work’s in performance rather than being read on the page, and I would have loved to see the production in Sheffield at Off the Shelf’s Festival of Words, 21 October 2017).</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;">Nevertheless, this is a formidable achievement, especially in a poetic culture where the </span><span style="font-kerning: none;">long poem has often been considered a problematic genre for women writers, its roots in epic traditionally making it (despite works like <i>Aurora Leigh)</i> a predominantly male form. How wonderful, then, to have a long poem by a woman which not only holds it own, but radically addresses some of the very questions which have locked us inside unhelpful notions of gender and power imbalance for far too long. In Artemis’ last words -</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">a labyrinth will always leave </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">its ghostly pathway for those</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">who know how to walk between the worlds. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Amen to that. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Rosie Jackson </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For Notes on Contributors</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Rosie Jackson left a successful academic career at the University of East Anglia and elsewhere to pursue a creative writing life. Her poems <i>The Light Box</i> (Cultured Llama) and her memoir <i>The Glass Mother</i> (Unthank Books) came out in 2016. In 2017 she won 1</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 8px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><sup>st</sup></span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> prize in the Stanley Spencer poetry competition and 3</span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: 8px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><sup>rd</sup></span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> Prize in the Hippocrates. She is a Hawthornden fellow. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span>Review of</div>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-59539660892356344912017-06-27T06:20:00.002-07:002017-06-27T06:20:32.164-07:00Artemis has arrived!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeiVl7Gy45-KDc5ddkl1MLEtflrD0KyFYG6H1FVdf1jgAIE_qy2bgmDriY5Qo63QtR0ZWmd42GLh_jR6XN97VgwGQ9Wg8U96rKU9WPrMObcIBs1aCmO5Do0iYjRmneb77LMkSTTK1cPAA/s1600/1+Artemis+Cover+300dpi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1120" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeiVl7Gy45-KDc5ddkl1MLEtflrD0KyFYG6H1FVdf1jgAIE_qy2bgmDriY5Qo63QtR0ZWmd42GLh_jR6XN97VgwGQ9Wg8U96rKU9WPrMObcIBs1aCmO5Do0iYjRmneb77LMkSTTK1cPAA/s320/1+Artemis+Cover+300dpi.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>
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The beautiful cover of my newest book, published by Three Drops Press last month!<br />
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I call it a myth-interpretation - or a performance piece in verse, based on the mythical twins, Artemis and Apollo.<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>The Greek Goddess Artemis - whom the Romans called Diana - is mythology's arch-outsider - lesbian feminist, environmental activist, radical midwife, shaman huntress, man-slayer when necessary, and like her tragic namesake, called the People's Priestess. Her twin brother Apollo, despite his extravagant juvenile delinquency, was elevated to be God of civilisation, harmony, proportion, and music.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">"Greenhill applies the mind of a scholar, the ear of a poet, and the eye of a painter to create a fascinating allegory that explores the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy as expressed in the sibling rivalry between twins Artemis and Apollo. An amazing achievement." </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Debbie Taylor, Editor of Mslexia magazine</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">"Cora Greenhill's verse drama begins on the day of the cataclysmic volcanic eruption which irreparably changes the ancient island of Crete and its inhabitants... a sensuous and heady brew of jealousies, same-sex passions, hints of incest and rites of passage. Modern day reference and vernacular with a liberal scattering of humour ensure it is both accessible and captivating from start to finish." </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Geraldine Monk, poet</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">"<i>Artemis: The People’s Priestess </i>pulses with light, heat and movement. The collection tells the ‘back story’ of Artemis ... through a series of dramatic poems spoken by different characters. Like Tony Harrison’s translations of Greek Comedy, it restores the physicality and vibrancy of the original Greek myths, incorporating dance, rhythm and humour. This is a wonderful collection, and left me with the fire of Artemis in my belly."</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Rachel Bower, poet</b></span></div>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-47781230729048304192017-03-30T13:10:00.000-07:002017-03-30T13:10:37.063-07:00Review of Far from Kind by Mandy Pannett<h3>
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Another lovely review for Far from Kind from Mandy Pannett </span></b></span><b><span style="font-size: large;">in Tears in The Fence 65 (edited by David Caddy) - my warmest thanks!</span></b></h3>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Far from Kind</i> by Cora Greenhill Pindrop Press 2016 £9.99</span></b></span></h4>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"> </span> Like the orchard in ‘A Hum’, <i>Far from Kind</i> is flooded with light. Here the poems are lightscapes – ‘changing lightscapes we came to call beauty’ (‘Aquatic Ape’), wealthy in gold and kaleidoscopic in colour. Here the sea may reveal ‘the glide of a golden angel fish / then blue spotted ray, / purple parrot, yellow batfish,’ (‘On Chumbe Reef’) or a skyline of birds with wet feathers where the fading day turns ‘mauve, dull silver, deepening grey.’ (‘Last Supper’).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"> <i>Far from Kind’ </i>begins with a description of a house being cleaned and prepared for new owners. This involves moving a colony of nesting bees out of the loft, scraping the rafters of honeycombs, of their ‘stash of sticky gold’. (‘The Hum’). This poem sets the tone for the whole collection: the ‘stash’ on display is not just honey but an outpouring of richly sensual, evocative imagery. ‘The Other Hand’ offers us a fine example: ‘I have stirred the cream and the curd/sprinkled spices/cardamon, rose petals, cloves’ says one who has lived among the royal silver-smiths, ‘my skin is silky/as the suspension/of butter in sauce.’ The narrator in ‘Dancing in Zanibar’ is ‘rewarded/with cardamom jellies,/dates softened/in passion fruit.’ We, as readers, are also rewarded, not only with a gorgeous feast of words, but with the fascinating technique of an image personified into metaphor as, for example in ‘The Hum’ where the girl who is clearing out the bees finds ‘the mess’ transformed into a gift of love when she ‘trickles downstairs, slides into night,/belly brimming amber, trembling to be touched, to be tasted.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"> This sense of joy in language, this exuberant exploration of possibilities strikes me as the keynote of Cora Greenhill’s writing. Many phrases such as ‘bogs brash with marigolds’ and ‘harebells in heather’ (‘Nature Cure’) brim with the fun of alliteration or leap off the page with their aptness and wit like ‘lightning that electrocutes the blood’ (‘For My Firstborn’). Among my favourites, also from ‘Nature Cure’, are ‘a wrinkle of cream’ and ‘a curl of new kittens’ closely followed by phrases from ‘Dolphin Trip’ where ‘The bay foams with testosterone/at the first sighting of fins. Twelve speedboats scream/with love lust to spear them,/ snorkels cocked, zooms at the ready’. Opening and closing lines of the poems also show this deftness and precision with words. ‘We would green deserts for that smile’ concludes the narrator in ‘Hannah’s First Birthday’ while ‘Hit’ explores the poignancy of a relationship where ‘Free to leave, you left’ with these ending lines:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There was a time when people thought</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>smells like oranges and cloves</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>could keep disease at bay.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>though this is heaven’s scent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"> Others have commented on the images and themes of music and dancing in this collection. They are strong motifs and I would like to explore further the way in which ‘Voices sing words our world has never heard.’ (‘Night in the Museum’). In this deserted museum, closed for restoration many years previously, the marble floor is thick with ‘five winters’ of plane tree leaves, there are ‘wads of cobwebs’ and glass cases at twilight are grimy with dust. Yet above all this there are curves and spirals on vases and jugs that reveal ‘dolphins swimming, dancers arching’ and in an empty Bronze Age room ‘Sistrums/begin to rattle, harps pluck at our hearts.’ Similarly, in ‘For My Firstborn’ the narrator lists an assortment of things she remembers, many things she has loved including ‘drums hammered out from palm oil cans,/rattles of chilli peppers and raffia,/dance steps that vibrate/beyond the feet’. Possible the most striking and original motif of melody and dance is in the poem ‘Single Parent’ where the exhausted mother, faced with her toddler throwing a tantrum on the kitchen floor, copes with her anger by ‘turning the rising/rage into a tarantella no one had taught her, / whirling, to stop herself hurting him.’ In these poems by Cora Greenhill it is not only sistrums that pluck at our hearts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"> There are many voices in <i>Far from Kind </i>including the not only human. There are many settings as well, some exotic, some everyday. There is brutality too, poverty, anger, hardship, an exploration of the seedy and cruel. Most of all, however, there is an overlay to these poems of love, joy and an exuberant relish for ‘the elastic stuff of life’. (‘Hannah’s First Birthday’). In <i>Far from Kind</i> people endure and survive, learn, as in ‘Aquatic Ape’, to see ‘skylight in each other’s eyes’. </span></div>
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Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-9111184587678341702017-02-10T04:10:00.002-08:002017-02-10T04:10:45.720-08:00New review of Far from Kind<div class="page" title="Page 54">
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">My deep thanks to D.A. Prince for this review, and to Orbis for publishing it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">RHYTHMS OF HUMAN WARMTH: REVIEW BY D. A. PRINCE
Far from Kind </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">by </span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">Cora Greenhill</span><span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">, 76 pp, £9.99, Pindrop Press, Mallards,
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Steers Place, Hadlow, Kent www.pindroppress.com
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Cora Greenhill’s name is well-known because her poems appear regularly in a
range of magazines (Orbis 169) and I thought this had given me a sense of
familiarity with her work. My mistake. Previous piecemeal acquaintance with a
handful of poems was scant preparation for the richly-coloured language and
energetic rhythms that drive Far from Kind. It travels through Ireland and
Nigeria, Crete and the Peak District, having a constant engagement with people
and their way of life. The book proves the bonus of reading a full collection,
and concentrating entirely on one poet. Open to ‘the mysterious kindness of
strangers’ as much as to her own family, Cora finds colour and texture wherever
she is: ‘down here on the cracked heel of Europe’ (‘Borrowers’); ‘Like butterflies
with folded wings / pinned primly on the bay.’ (‘Dhows’); ‘... Burbage Brook
...freckled with amber light that flickers through oaks / like half-remembered
dreams’ (‘Starting with Rivers’). She is drawn to the natural world, to those
who live closer to it.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">‘Nature Cure’, its three-line stanzas packed with detail, could be an account
of her own childhood as well as providing guidance on child-rearing.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Neglect your child. Set her free to find home
in bogs brash with marigolds, cuckoo flowers,
harebells in heather.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">It’s a celebration of positive neglect, the kind that allows for learning about
personal relationship with the rhythms of Nature, knowing: ‘to slip a hand
under the Maran’s downy breast / for warm eggs ...’, or which neighbour will
give her ‘A curl of new kittens to hold.’ This is the Ulster of Cora’s own
childhood. Yet ‘For My Firstborn’ turns unexpectedly from all she had loved
about life in Nigeria:
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">I loved the hypertension before the rains,
lightening that electrocutes the blood,
maps the night sky with mercury,<br />
ignites yellow bulbs in paw paw trees
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">and where six of the stanzas begin emphatically ‘I loved ...’, to build a pattern
of intense engagement, but end with a final couplet in strong emotional contrast
with the quatrains:
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">And I left, to be with your father,
make and love you.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Her instinctive response to music and dance rhythms, particularly West African
and Cretan, shape her choice of language, such as in the ending of ‘To my
Firstborn’, letting the simplicity of monosyllables reveal the elemental in love.
It’s most effective. In ‘Dancing in Zanzibar’, she is ‘looped / into the tunes /
feet hips hands / unable not to dance’. With ‘Single Parent’, she shows the
mother dealing with a toddler’s tantrum by ‘...turning the rising / rage into a
tarantella no one had taught her, / whirling, to stop herself hurting him.’ The
shifting rhythms between the poems give the collection variety and energy, a
human warmth that she has encountered in every country she has travelled -
and she travels with her eyes open.
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<span style="font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">In a world increasingly reduced to computer screens, smartphones and virtual
experience, we need poems like these. </span><br />
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Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-45093685136178696262016-05-21T14:29:00.002-07:002016-05-21T14:32:26.160-07:00Invitation to launch of Far from Kind<br />
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<br />Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-80498059672676770732016-05-21T00:50:00.000-07:002016-05-21T00:50:52.529-07:00Far from Kind: introduction.<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; min-height: 17px;">
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The striking picture on the front of Cora Greenhill's new book is of a collage of her own work - a frame containing debris from the sea - plastic and nylon rope mixed with fragments of seaweed. Inside a fractured mask of Aprodite, symbolising the broken Greek Goddess in the refuse of today's oceans. The dark yet beautiful image sets up some of the themes of the poetry in <b>Far from Kind: </b>sensual, darkly beautiful, suggestive of the precarious edge on which humanity teeters.</div>
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The title, <b>Far from Kind</b>, is a phrase taken from the poem <b>In our own Hands</b>, about touch: how we need to learn to be in touch again, deeply and naturally, with each other, and crucially with other species. The poem is triggered by an intimate encounter with an aging baboon, who 'rested her slim palm, cobweb-soft, in mine,' and reflects on how far we've travelled from when our earliest ancestors made the first human footprints in the mud of Africa. Other poems take the reader back to the roots of human ways of thinking and acting. The sonnet, <b>Aquatic Ape</b>, pictures the lives of the earliest humans who gradually migrated along the coasts of Africa, making the radical suggestion that 'Free of the need to hunt to survive/and before labour was invented, ... Holiday was the spur of evolution.' Another poem is in the cynical voice of a woolly mammoth in <b>The Natural History Museum</b>, and another in the voice of the ancient Mesopotamian river God, Enki, despairing of modern politics and hunkering down in his muddy domain.</div>
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But <b>Far from Kind </b>is as personal as it is universal, with many poems in a more confessional tradition which also explore unflinchingly human unkindness, whether due to a conditioned fear of another species 'a pretty slip of a thing/purest green serpentine' which causes a snake's unnecessary death in <b>Endangered; </b>or the callous feelings of a liberated young woman towards a lover she's finished with, 'your hunger, so recently/my horn of plenty, just looked like poverty'; or an African philandering professor who assumes FGM to be the norm.</div>
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Though the author is a lifelong feminist, the exploration of human frailty and sometimes cruelty in this collection is equally critical and compassionate towards men and women, and all held within an overriding tenderness towards the living world of which we are only a part, with a passionate hope that we can learn from and for the children:</div>
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Let her throw socks! we laugh.</div>
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Grow those throwing muscles!</div>
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Make free with your world</div>
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as old gods hurled thunderbolts</div>
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when they were gay as Picasso</div>
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shaping the elastic stuff of life</div>
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like play-dough in their hands,</div>
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amazed what they could do. </div>
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(<b>Hannah's First Birthday</b>)</div>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-67786230602823343232016-05-21T00:27:00.000-07:002016-05-21T00:27:12.347-07:00Endorsements for Far from Kind<h2>
Here are the lovely comments on the back of Far from Kind!</h2>
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<b style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">By Helen Mort</b><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">, poet, author of</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">TS Eliot Prize shortlisted </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">Division Street.</i></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px;">'Tender without being sentimental, these are poems that attend carefully to the details that make our world rich: 'the orchard...flooded with light', the 'muscled back' of a great river, an off-key singer who makes the audience dance anyway. Poems that look for the places where 'a day can put you down', or the way life can leave you 'suspended in strangeness'. Every poem is so rich and absorbing. Savour them.'</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px;"> </span><b></b></div>
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<b>By Noel Williams</b>, poet, reviewer, and editor for <i>Orbis</i> and <i>Antiphon.</i> Author of <i>Breath</i>.</div>
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'The strongest moments here are Janus-faced. As the poet glories in colour, the palettes of love, sensory delight, mystery, compassion, she sees their shadow: the appetite, a sneering inhumanity, decay, death. The ecstasies of love are found in a ditch. Her poems reach to the light but are rooted in dark earth, with a lyricism that can veer easily into sensuous violence. Her luxuriance in succulent nature spits fragments of grit and blood. She finds anthropological joy in a beggar and thief. In poem after poem she dips into 'the river beneath the river...between tough weeds and broken glass.'</div>
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By <b>Carole Bromley,</b> prizewinning poet with several collections including <i>The Stonegate Devils. J</i>udge of Yorkmix Poetry Competition.</div>
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'Cora Greenhill, whose strong, witty voice I have always liked, took me on a tour of foreign parts in this excellent new collection. Hers is ‘a voice far from home/melting us like butter.' Her endings are often to die for and there isn’t a weak poem in this book. Whether writing of a neighbour in Crete whose sick wife has ‘smoked haddock skin’; longing to ‘spray paint Wonderbra ads again’; or capturing a thrush, a frog, a much-loved tree given a death sentence, her writing is razor sharp and always engaging.'</div>
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<b>By Wendy Klein</b>, prizewinning poet, reviewer, author of <i>Anything in Turquoise, Mood Indigo.</i></div>
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'In this wide-ranging new collection, this poet speaks out in many voices (a heron, a mammoth, the earth itself), for the planet and humankind. Dance is a metaphor that inhabits it. A single mother turns her frustration over a toddler’s tantrum into a dance, ‘The Tarantella’; and even stoats dance! Indeed, the poems themselves break through words into a dance of life: ‘Feet hips hands / unable not to dance,’ in Zanzibar. In a fine sonnet reflecting on Elaine Morgan’s famous aquatic theory of evolution, the poet leaves the ‘aquatic apes’ on the brink of dancing into a whole new stage of existence.' </div>
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<b>Biography</b></div>
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<b>Cora Greenhill </b>grew up in rural Ulster, mostly outdoors, escaping the turbulence of family life. She has lived in The Peak District for nearly 30 years. She studied literature at Warwick University, most memorably with tutor Germaine Greer, a lifelong inspiration. She's had a long and varied teaching career, the high point of which came early, at The Universtiy of Nigeria just after the Biafran War. She moved to Sheffield and became freelance in the heady days of liberal Adult Education. In the same year she met her partner whom she married eleven years later, on a shared journey exploring feminism, the Goddess, Crete, 5Rhythm dancework, African music, and poetry. Their son and grand daughter live in New Jersey. Cora self-published two collections and was widely published before <i>The Point of Waking</i> came out with Oversteps Books in 2013. She hosts <i>Writers in The Bath</i>, the premier poetry reading venue in Sheffield!</div>
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Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-81902414998406154032016-04-12T05:04:00.000-07:002016-04-12T05:04:15.657-07:00Forward!Thrilled that my poem A Hum (see below) has been put forward for The Forward Prize by Artemis poetry! Yeah!Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-23643243582287783712016-01-02T08:37:00.000-08:002016-01-02T08:39:08.877-08:00Nature Cure published in The Interpreter's House Autumn 2015<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This </span>poem<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> was written very spontaneously from the </span></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">simple prompt of 'neglect' as a theme. I've long been interested in the fine line between freedom and neglect in the context of childhood, as well as in the sense of the natural environment as being innately nurturing.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<h2>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Nature Cure</b></span></h2>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Neglect your child. Set her free to find home</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in bogs brash with marigolds, cuckoo flowers,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">harebells in heather.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She’ll dawdle the braes peeling rushes,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">find green valleys tender,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">dream alone by a loch on Bin Mountain. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Lay no tables. She’ll know</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">to slip a hand under the maran’s downy breast</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">for warm eggs; learn to make fire,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">build shelters in hollows of bracken</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">- she’d rather watch fine rain fall</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">than feel the cold stove.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Or she’ll slink to cottages</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">where embers wink</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">under black-bellied pots of purties:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">a sprinkle of salt, a cup of blue milk</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with a wrinkle of cream from the churn.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A curl of new kittens to hold. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She’ll mount an old donkey with fostered boys</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">split skin in a fall, let them laugh,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">spit on grazed hands.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When navy serge stiffens with first blood</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">she’ll know the stale smell of herself - her shame</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and knuckles blistered scrubbing stains.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But alone she’ll find her own wild cries,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">hidden in hay bales and on branches rising</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">to open skies. She never was yours.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She’ll hitch-hike to Istanbul</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">sleep under new arrangements of stars</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with the half moon lying back.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She’ll not know where a day </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">will put her down, may learn to trust</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the mysterious kindness of strangers.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-10095268154705726512016-01-02T08:24:00.001-08:002016-01-02T08:26:16.630-08:00Endangered: published in The North 2015<b><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Endangered was written by a </span><span style="font-size: 14px;">swimming</span><span style="font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> pool on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam on our trip to Tanzania in 2014</span></span></b><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Endangered</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">a pretty slip of a thing</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">purest green serpentine</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">slithers past my bare foot</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">lithe on warm sandstone</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">to whip up the leg</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">of the next sun-bed</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>... in the circumstances</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>in the situation of the hotel pool</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>the children playing on the edge ...</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">though I am also enchanted</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and in the lightning moment</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">think it is the harmless kind</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">that lives under rafters, not</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the green mamba ... but I know</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">(I still see a thin loop of him now,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in the shade of the mattress)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">that I will not lie on a bed</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with a slinky young snake beside me, so</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with a look to the woman serving drinks,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I betray him. <i>The Masai!</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">she shrills, as her tray sways</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and steadies, and the Masai guard</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">is here with nagual speed, dapper </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in red wraps, bone anklets, machete erect.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I won't look to where excited children gather</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">around the limp thing in his hand.</span></div>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-53854142449726467342015-07-30T10:57:00.002-07:002015-07-30T10:57:40.532-07:00These two poems appear in the most recent edition of the wonderful ArtemisPoetry published by the just as wonderful Second Light and selected by Susan Wicks.<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>A hum</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A colony has been moved from the loft</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">this morning, the rafters scraped clear</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">of their stash of sticky gold.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Brick-sized ingots drip into buckets,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">bowls overflow. The girl who cleans knows</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">honey’s royal role in winter remedies</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and how it keeps you young. Her grandma’s</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">skin is soft as a baby’s at eighty, she says.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Today, she’s straining and storing the harvest</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">for the Dutch bankers who bought the house</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with the honey in it. They know nothing about it, </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">she says. Just sniff at the scented mess.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They know even less about her, the help,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and the man who’s followed her from Waterford,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">erected a tent in their orchard.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">How she trickles downstairs, slides into night, </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">belly brimming amber, trembling</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">to be touched, to be tasted.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">How the tent walls billow, </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">how the orchard is flooded with light,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and the lovers are humming somewhere</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">outside of themselves, without names,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">or addresses, on sweet rooty earth, where air </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">smells of honey musk, erica in bloom.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By the end of the week, jars are sealed, </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">shelves stacked, tables scrubbed - </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the kitchen reeks of Vim.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She is replete, still perfumed by him.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The bankers pay her to leave.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin-left: 56.7px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Girls </b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; min-height: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some schoolgirls from Makunduchi</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">came to the water this afternoon</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">still in their hijabs -</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">upright monochrome sea birds,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">wading in the green prairie </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">of the shallow, outgoing tide.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Laughing, they stooped and scooped water, </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">splashed each other, </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">got the hems of their black skirts wet.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The older women are always here,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">crouched on the beach over lumpy sacks, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">pounding soaked coconut fibre on rocks </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">to soften it for rope. Though the boatmen</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">begin to use nylon now, the women,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">wound in scarves, still labour like crabs</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">that dig endless holes in sand</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">to collapse with every tide. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But the girls stood out, a sign </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">among the rag bag of small boys</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">squealing in deep jade pools.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And three older boys, nonchalant </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in football shirts, hovered, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">swaggering as boys do, held</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in their sphere like Jupiter’s moons,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">circling but never touching.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We watched it all from a distance </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the girls being girls in the water </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">their white hijabs flapping: sails</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">straining in winds of change.</span></div>
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Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-79533754950003846482015-03-15T09:10:00.000-07:002015-03-15T09:10:00.010-07:00Proud to have 'Borrowers' in latest Tears in the Fence<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Borrowers</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b></b></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They’d been living on borrowed time</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">twelve years for the promise of one -</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">down here on the cracked heel of Europe</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">where they’d retired to grow their own </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">weed, feed twenty cats, turn their hands</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">to this and that. She grew fat, he thin,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">before the ‘borrowed’ gin </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">got into her liver’s cells again.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Their life was making up and making do.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He’d built her a cottage - dirt floor, tin-roof -</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">that squatted on land they could never quite prove</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">was theirs. Pink plastered walls rubbed smooth</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">by his hands, curvy carved casements -</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">a competence of touch came with failing eyes.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> A thieving magpie of the fixable,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> he became a poet of possible uses.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He’d fend for us and filch from us,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">‘borrowing’ our tools. We were fooled.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He came to the door and took our power</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">with a cable and pliers and lies</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">about how they could pay next week. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For five years their heat came from our meter.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then the woodpile he helped us to stack,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">wasn’t there when we got back.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He’d get loans from Yiannis to lubricate</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Georgios. At Easter, he’d tend the spit, </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">baste, and carve us all mountains of meat. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Her strudels and kartoffeln salad, </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">his stories, our wine - they never touched</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">a drop, stuck to fizzy pop. Then,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in our absences - they had a key to feed the cat -</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">our gin would shrink, inch by inch.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As he nursed her, his blindness spared him</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">her smoked haddock skin, while his devotion</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">may have kept at bay how her mind lost its way,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">meandered like sheep tracks in the Cretan hills.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He gave her a proper burial, in a graveyard </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with views of mountains he could never see. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then the bills came in, for the hospital,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the funeral he’d claimed he’d get for free.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At the end of the line, he tried one more time:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">legs were seen flailing from our bathroom window,</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">at noon. We loaned him a phone to call the son </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in Berlin... </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>They were always the have-nots,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">but now they’ve gone, less careful thieves </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">come, and all the stashed tools and mongery,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">crockery, fallen birdcages, gilded frames</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">lie scattered like bones in an ossuary.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Unpruned branches of fern palm</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">have cordoned off the path. The prickly pear</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">has perished like rubber soles. An aloe</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">dangles from the wall - a complexity of claws</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with nothing to cling onto. The bougainvillea </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">is still ablaze as if it meant to set the place on fire,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">clean the slate. The hand-carved fence</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">is a blue electric shock of morning glory.</span></div>
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Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-90103167088598918502014-12-13T10:30:00.000-08:002014-12-13T10:33:40.932-08:00New review of The Point of Waking by Wendy Klein<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 11px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<h4>
<b>This lovely review by Wendy Klein came out in Artemispoetry in November 2014. </b></h4>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>The Point of Waking</i>, is Cora Greenhill’s third collection, and the opening poem <i>Unhinged, </i>written in direct address, convinced me that the point of waking that day was to read this enchanting collection. The book is in two sections <i>Crete </i>and <i>Wild Relatives, </i>and in the opening poem, Greenhill invokes the colours and moods of Crete on a windy morning where “…this North Westerly... has a trick / of unclasping shutters to slam against windows, / a knack of slapping awnings, / and shaking doors that ache to unhinge.” She continues, “and then you wake up: “It’s what you do. Wake up, slough off / the sleeping animal, work out / what in the world needs doing,” and we are happy to join her in doing what needs doing in one heartening poem after another. Two neatly executed modern sonnets, ending with crisp and interesting rhyming couplets (<i>Today)</i> take the reader through the everyday tasks of settling in, meeting the locals, smelling and tasting the cuisine. In <i>Well of Sheep p</i>oignancy is smacked by irony as the poet attempts to feed a sheep fallen into a well and is mocked by the locals who are roasting a sheep nearby for lunch, for her foolishness – a clash of cultures sensitively observed: “…Leaving something to starve to death / goes against being human, I start to explain,” while acknowledging she is , … “still a stranger here, but can listen to …the acapella from the trees / fail to recognise the songs.” Encounters with humans and other entities are interspersed: a Pakistani refugee with an uncertain future, even a scorpion. An imagined meeting with Hestia, the goddess of the hearth in <i>Change of Hearth </i>ends as “…Hestia laughs her wicked laugh, / flaunts her gorgeous glow,” and for that night she and the poet ... “will outstare each other, new lovers, burning together.” <i> </i>An archaeologist finds a cave containing the graves of five female saints, imagines waking them, hearing one sigh “For heaven’s sake, what now?” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Here is wit entwined with humanity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">The second section, <i>Wild relatives </i>is less specifically themed. Pieces on nature and ageing were reflective, nicely crafted, but not, I felt, as infused with the fervour of the Crete poems. Comments on the back cover: note that the poems “possess a wonderfully grounded quality…at once anthropological and physical…a delight to read.” I can only agree.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></div>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-17273943064825577052014-08-19T08:38:00.004-07:002014-08-19T08:38:58.339-07:00Review from David Caddy on the Tears in the Fence blog<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #121212; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Cora Greenhill’s <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Point of Waking</em> has more than a whiff of D.H. Lawrence and that is no bad thing. She draws upon female saints, goddesses, mythology, circle dances and Christian worship as part of the backdrop to her book. Cretan agriculture has been in decline for some decades now and she registers the changes. A profusion of herbs and flowers, sheep stuck at a well bottom, women toiling in the garden, displaced people and creatures, populate the book’s foreground and give it a wide-eyed focus on contemporary Crete.</div>
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Greenhill’s poems explore the wild places and natural world of Crete in a deliciously sensual and lived way. Her suggestive vocabulary and cultural accretions energise moments of being and life’s cycles to produce a pungent and elemental poetry.</div>
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The slub and slap of the waves were only<br />a restless ally to my toss and turn<br />that clammy night, and dawn had a dull veneer.<br />Stubbornly aching back and blear<br />from broken sleep, still I stumbled to the water,<br />as I had resolved, to swim. On surfacing<br />I catch a flash, a splinter of sea, a glint<br />like glass in air. Then, alchemically distilling<br />his perky form from black pumice, bright fisher king<br />surveys his day – with me alighting in it.</div>
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Her poems are wonderfully grounded in the physical, the working and dancing body. She reveals a pointed picture of modern Crete with its multifarious and changing tourism, migrants and refugees from Africa, Serbia, Pakistan, and is alert to both ritual and the stories of labouring men and women as they harvest olives, herbs and other crops. A poem rich in detail about a Pakistani illegal, who walked through Iran to Greece and hides in the mountains ends: ‘The thyme is on fire, seething / with bees’.</div>
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The raw and cooked are nudged along through nuanced and succulent language. The poems probe, elevate and mark boundaries.</div>
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The yellows: rabbit brush, cliff rose and snakeweed.<br />Browns were onions, oak bark and tea.<br />Deep red was juniper, but most precious of all<br />was a pink from a shrub called purple bee.</div>
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These grains were so few, they were kept in a skull<br />of a grasshopper the wind had spun in. And we’d ask<br />and ask, what were rabbits, what were bees,<br />what was a snake, and what the colour of grass?</div>
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I am proud to have published several of these sensual and deeply felt poems. They are quirky and live on in the memory.</div>
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David Caddy 13th August 2014</div>
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Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-40196085654687580002014-08-19T08:27:00.003-07:002014-08-19T08:27:29.748-07:00Endorsement from Jay Griffiths<br />
Jay Griffiths is the writer who has given us the extraordinary books 'Wild' and 'Kith' among others - a radical visionary for our times. I'm so honoured that she's read and appreciated my book!<br />
<blockquote type="cite">
'your poetry is more something to be eaten than to be read - and I mean that as a compliment! They have a sensory field around them which you can almost taste. And they have a generous empathy, whether it's for the architectural past, or for an abandoned wife. And the language is so precise and vital (my heart/kites/for you)'.</blockquote>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-91258731909926844472014-08-19T08:20:00.002-07:002014-08-19T08:20:51.403-07:00Review by David Harmer in Orbis<div class="section">
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<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">My </span><span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Garamond;"><b><span style="font-size: 15px;">thanks to David Harmer for this interesting review - so great to be told things that your collection does that you'd never realised!</span></b></span><br />
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<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">PERSONAL LANDSCAPES: REVIEW BY DAVID HARMER
</span><br />
<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">The Point Of Waking </span><span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">by </span><span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">Cora Greenhill<br />
</span><span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">52pp, £9, Overstep Books, 6 Hallwell House, South Pool,<br />
Nr Kingsbridge, Devon, TQ7 2RX www.overstepsbooks.com
</span><br />
<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">These poems are told with acute observation, rooted in landscapes and in
people. The opening piece, ‘Unhinged’, like so many others, is closely textured,
layers of narrative knotted together with densely packed rhyme, assonance
and alliteration. It also introduces major themes, running throughout the book:
the juxtaposition of natural forces against the human condition, and how the
former often outguns the latter. In a house, during a fierce gale:
</span><br />
<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">You must fight to fend off its force /while you clamp the stiff catches closed
again,/ wrench and secure the latches
</span><br />
<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">I liked this very much, and other poems continue its investigations. In ‘Borders’,
a young Pakistani gardener in Crete is on the run from the authorities as he
searches for sanctuary. His insecurity and sadness is contrasted with the
permanence of the land he is so carefully tending. The poet displays a forensic
accuracy when she lists the plants surrounding him: ‘beds of rose bergamot,
cinnamon trees / five varieties of sage’, but he cannot stay; he has no papers.
</span><br />
<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">It isn’t just flowers. In ‘A Local Habitation and a Name’ (doffing her cap
towards Norman Nicholson), one voice lists many birds and butterflies that
exemplify a natural order of things, while a second voice asks ‘will their names
outlive them?’, a pleasing expansion of technique as well as a pertinent question.
</span><br />
<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Other pieces are set in the colder landscapes of Derbyshire, and again, the
metaphor works. In ‘Burbage Edge In Snow’, her frailty is ruthlessly exposed
against the powers of the natural world: ‘as I, with nothing to cling on to, felt
sick /at the skid I could see coming.’ She is also interested in exploring ideas to
do with the ageing process. Sometimes we can win a battle or two; here is ‘Nil
By Mouth’: ‘this ballooning / happiness, held on a rope of grief.’ But eventually
we can’t. The process is as natural as the plants and animals that populate the
collection. In ‘Your Love of Wild Horses’, she says, ‘You’d shrunk so small by
then / you’d slipped the halter of your life with ease.’ Some poems take on
another tone, such as ‘A Sport of Water’ where the narrator watches a loved
one wind surfing off the coast of Crete. Inevitably, it invites a comparison
between Penelope and Odysseus as well as displaying a lightness of technical
choice:
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<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">but how my heart/</span><span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px;">kites/</span><span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Garamond; font-size: 15px;">for you</span><br />
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<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">I also enjoyed ‘Seen In Sheffield’ where a group of boys are doing parkour
and their exuberance and cool is captured: ‘This / is what boys are: poems
freed in air’.
</span><br />
<span style="color: rgb(13.725000%, 12.157000%, 12.549000%); font-family: 'Garamond'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">Possibly some will question linking the natural world with immutable truth,
and opposing it with a faltering humanity but that is Cora Greenhill’s message,
one expressed with passion and technical skill. In the end she is right; our name
may not outlive us. </span><br />
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Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-18033574949964408382013-12-02T04:02:00.000-08:002013-12-02T04:02:10.610-08:00'gems hidden within our physicality'<br />
Will Parfitt has generously left this review on Amazon.<br />
<blockquote cite="mid:EDB07449-128E-4C46-9AD7-F0A6C9670ECF@willparfitt.com" style="text-align: left;" type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">In this slim volume of quality poetry, Cora Greenhill bares her soul through engaging honestly with the minutiae of life until something more than the obvious emerges, poems rich and sensual in life energies. A continuously clever use of words illuminates her life and the reader's experience in sharing her deeply connected vision. Her last poem ends 'Pelts are rent, ribs cracked, tusks splintered,/We trample the carnage of ourselves' - yes, but so to uncover the gems hidden within our physicality, and bridge the imaginary divide between soul and body. Support first rate poetry, support a first class poet, read this book! </span> </blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote cite="mid:EDB07449-128E-4C46-9AD7-F0A6C9670ECF@willparfitt.com" style="text-align: left;" type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><b>Will Parfitt,</b> author and publisher.</span></span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-50437614617139897872013-12-01T13:42:00.000-08:002013-12-01T13:42:31.970-08:00Appreciations made legible!Here are the appreciations of The Point of Waking from the back of the book!<br />
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<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Cora Greenhill’s poems explore the wild places and natural world of Crete in a deliciously sensual and lived way. Her suggestive vocabulary and cultural accretions energises moments of being and life’s cycles to produce a pungent and elemental poetry. Here the raw and cooked are nudged along through nuanced and succulent language. The poems probe, elevate and mark boundaries. They possess a wonderfully grounded quality. They are at once anthropological, physical and magical, and a delight to read. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>David Caddy, poet, critic and Editor of <i>Tears in the Fence</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i></i></b></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i></i></b></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b></b></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Reading The Point of Waking, I felt myself uncurl, tensions warming away</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in the pleasure of lyric language. This is writing as a garden of delights, lines moving musically from scene to scene, resplendent with colour and scent. From the rich, earthy evocation of Crete, as it drifts slowly towards modernity, yet remains still languorous and mysterious, still charged with spiritual presence, to the tender observation of children playing with danger in urban England, the poetry takes you on a journey of the body, offering new understanding of place through sensuous description. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Rose Flint, poet</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I can’t describe how excited I am about Cora Greenhill’s poetry. It’s not just that it’s good – it’s good in the way I really want poetry to be good – a rich and sensual poetry with blood and earth in it, physical and grounded, but also thoughtful and deeply felt. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Elizabeth Rimmer, poet</b></span></div>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-68053851400043594712013-10-21T06:05:00.000-07:002013-10-21T06:29:37.246-07:00The Point of WakingThe books have arrived and I think they look great! You can get your copy(ies) direct from me for £8 (+£1pp) Just email me at cora@thirteenthmoon.co.uk and I'll post straight away.<br />
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<br />Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-32547841005865598902013-07-26T04:24:00.001-07:002013-07-26T04:24:39.555-07:00Breakthrough time!In the last month I've had a collection accepted for publication by Oversteps Books! <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.overstepsbooks.com/" moz-do-not-send="true" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 12px;">www.overstepsbooks.com</a> It will be called <b><i>The Point of Waking</i></b> and will come out later this year. Working with an editor to design a book is quite a learning curve!<br />
I've also had a poem chosen by Penguin for their upcoming anthology <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Poetry of Sex, </i>due out in January,<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>AND my first piece (prose) to be published in the next MsLexia! Am I on a roll? I hope so!Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-22619592411249627242013-07-26T04:09:00.002-07:002013-07-26T04:09:32.902-07:00Bare Hands: Departure LoungeBare Hands had a competition for poems and photos on the subject of Bare Hands!<br />
This poem was Highly Commended and is on their website, which is full of intriguing poems and artwork - have a look! <a href="http://barehandscompetition2013.tumblr.com/" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande';">http://barehandscompetition2013.tumblr.com/</a><br />
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<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Departure Lounge</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’d tucked the last of our green figs</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in a thermal mug in your hand luggage</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with these fingers now linked</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">to your working hands</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">that fix things: locks on gates</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the windsurf sail, the cistern.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They played on my skin this morning</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">teasing out tension</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">between my shoulder blades.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And your eyes that look</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">at all of me</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and your tongue…</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">that time when I wept</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with self-loathing</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">it licked the salt from the wound.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The queue for the check-in is long.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You tell me to go but I stay.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s hard to find conversation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When you reach the corner of the stairs </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I text, ‘I missed you first.’</span></div>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-15659436308196719352013-07-26T03:31:00.000-07:002013-07-26T03:31:27.580-07:00A Knowledge of Meadows<br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>This poem was </b></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><b>written after a walk near Dronfield in Derbyshire. It has gone through various versions but I am very happy that it has now been published in Artemispoetry Issue 10, selected by the wonderful Anne Cluysenaar. Artemispoetry is a bi-annual magazine of women's poetry, articles and reviews published by Second Light in London - I love it!</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>A Knowledge of Meadows</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b></b></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Site of Special Scientific Interest,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">a sign had said, evoking fences, </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">closure, inspections. Not this</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">damp muddle where air is heavy</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with the breath of meadowsweet,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">unruly above betony, darts of orchid,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">sparks of ragged robin,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">hoary willow herb, bloody spears</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">of sorrel, rock roses: a holy hash</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">of Flora’s things, half hidden</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">by high hazel already speckled</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">with pea green clusters</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the milk teeth of nuts.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That’s a native small-leaved maple</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and an airy space of aspens whispers</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">over a hollow at the bottom of the field.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I feel a marsh of past meadows</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">in me; shift through mist to bogs</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">of marigolds and lady’s smock,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and rushes we’d peel all the way </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">to school, not knowing that before </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">schools began, their wicks</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">lit the lamps of history. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now, framed in a gap in hawthorn,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">lake bright, pale as bulbs:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">a group of ponies, all the colours</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">of summer clouds. Their backs are bare</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">horizons, their bellies, globes. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Muzzles lift curiously, manes</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">raise question marks as they swerve</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">towards me, and noses nuzzle me,</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">hot with scientific interest.</span></div>
Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6894514719005219618.post-66648247142834816142013-07-26T03:18:00.001-07:002013-07-26T03:18:06.463-07:00The Living LineThe next meeting of The Living Line women's poetry group is on Sat August 10th. Come and enjoy writing and reading poetry on a summer's day in Grindleford! We have room for a couple more women writers - level of experience not important. Get in touch!Cora Greenhillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13355785047422005308noreply@blogger.com0