Forward!

Thrilled that my poem A Hum (see below) has been put forward for The Forward Prize by Artemis poetry! Yeah!

Nature Cure published in The Interpreter's House Autumn 2015

This poem was written very spontaneously from the 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.

Nature Cure

Neglect your child. Set her free to find home

in bogs brash with marigolds, cuckoo flowers,

harebells in heather.

She’ll dawdle the braes peeling rushes,

find green valleys tender,

dream alone by a loch on Bin Mountain. 

Lay no tables. She’ll know

to slip a hand under the maran’s downy breast

for warm eggs; learn to make fire,

build shelters in hollows of bracken

- she’d rather watch fine rain fall

than feel the cold stove.

Or she’ll slink to cottages

where embers wink

under black-bellied pots of purties:

a sprinkle of salt, a cup of blue milk

with a wrinkle of cream from the churn.

A curl of new kittens to hold. 

She’ll mount an old donkey with fostered boys

split skin in a fall, let them laugh,

spit on grazed hands.

When navy serge stiffens with first blood

she’ll know the stale smell of herself - her shame

and knuckles blistered scrubbing stains.

But alone she’ll find her own wild cries,

hidden in hay bales and on branches rising

to open skies. She never was yours.

She’ll hitch-hike to Istanbul

sleep under new arrangements of stars

with the half moon lying back.

She’ll not know where a day 

will put her down, may learn to trust

the mysterious kindness of strangers.

Endangered: published in The North 2015

Endangered was written by a swimming pool on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam on our trip to Tanzania in 2014

Endangered

a pretty slip of a thing

purest green serpentine

slithers past my bare foot

lithe on warm sandstone

to whip up the leg

of the next sun-bed

... in the circumstances

in the situation of the hotel pool

the children playing on the edge ...

though I am also enchanted

and in the lightning moment

think it is the harmless kind

that lives under rafters, not

the green mamba ... but I know

(I still see a thin loop of him now,

in the shade of the mattress)

that I will not lie on a bed

with a slinky young snake beside me, so

with a look to the woman serving drinks,

I betray him. The Masai!

she shrills, as her tray sways

and steadies, and the Masai guard

is here with nagual speed, dapper 

in red wraps, bone anklets, machete erect.

I won't look to where excited children gather

around the limp thing in his hand.

These 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.

A hum

A colony has been moved from the loft

this morning, the rafters scraped clear

of their stash of sticky gold.

Brick-sized ingots drip into buckets,

bowls overflow. The girl who cleans knows

honey’s royal role in winter remedies

and how it keeps you young. Her grandma’s

skin is soft as a baby’s at eighty, she says.

Today, she’s straining and storing the harvest

for the Dutch bankers who bought the house

with the honey in it. They know nothing about it, 

she says. Just sniff at the scented mess.

They know even less about her, the help,

and the man who’s followed her from Waterford,

erected a tent in their orchard.

How she trickles downstairs, slides into night, 

belly brimming amber, trembling

to be touched, to be tasted.

How the tent walls billow, 

how the orchard is flooded with light,

and the lovers are humming somewhere

outside of themselves, without names,

or addresses, on sweet rooty earth, where air 

smells of honey musk, erica in bloom.

By the end of the week, jars are sealed, 

shelves stacked, tables scrubbed - 

the kitchen reeks of Vim.

She is replete, still perfumed by him.

The bankers pay her to leave.

Girls 

Some schoolgirls from Makunduchi

came to the water this afternoon

still in their hijabs -

upright monochrome sea birds,

wading in the green prairie 

of the shallow, outgoing tide.

Laughing, they stooped and scooped water, 

splashed each other, 

got the hems of their black skirts wet.

The older women are always here,

crouched on the beach over lumpy sacks, 

pounding soaked coconut fibre on rocks 

to soften it for rope. Though the boatmen

begin to use nylon now, the women,

wound in scarves, still labour like crabs

that dig endless holes in sand

to collapse with every tide. 

But the girls stood out, a sign 

among the rag bag of small boys

squealing in deep jade pools.

And three older boys, nonchalant 

in football shirts, hovered, 

swaggering as boys do, held

in their sphere like Jupiter’s moons,

circling but never touching.

We watched it all from a distance 

the girls being girls in the water 

their white hijabs flapping: sails

straining in winds of change.

Proud to have 'Borrowers' in latest Tears in the Fence

Borrowers

They’d been living on borrowed time

twelve years for the promise of one -

down here on the cracked heel of Europe

where they’d retired to grow their own 

weed, feed twenty cats, turn their hands

to this and that. She grew fat, he thin,

before the ‘borrowed’ gin 

got into her liver’s cells again.

Their life was making up and making do.

He’d built her a cottage - dirt floor, tin-roof -

that squatted on land they could never quite prove

was theirs. Pink plastered walls rubbed smooth

by his hands, curvy carved casements -

a competence of touch came with failing eyes.

 A thieving magpie of the fixable,

 he became a poet of possible uses.

He’d fend for us and filch from us,

‘borrowing’ our tools. We were fooled.

He came to the door and took our power

with a cable and pliers and lies 

about how they could pay next week. 

For five years their heat came from our meter.

Then the woodpile he helped us to stack,

wasn’t there when we got back.

He’d get loans from Yiannis to lubricate

Georgios. At Easter, he’d tend the spit, 

baste, and carve us all mountains of meat. 

Her strudels and kartoffeln salad, 

his stories, our wine - they never touched

a drop, stuck to fizzy pop. Then,

in our absences - they had a key to feed the cat -

our gin would shrink, inch by inch.

As he nursed her, his blindness spared him

her smoked haddock skin, while his devotion

may have kept at bay how her mind lost its way,

meandered like sheep tracks in the Cretan hills.

He gave her a proper burial, in a graveyard 

with views of mountains he could never see. 

Then the bills came in, for the hospital,

the funeral he’d claimed he’d get for free.

At the end of the line, he tried one more time:

legs were seen flailing from our bathroom window, 

at noon. We loaned him a phone to call the son 

in Berlin... 

They were always the have-nots,

but now they’ve gone, less careful thieves 

come, and all the stashed tools and mongery,

crockery, fallen birdcages, gilded frames

lie scattered like bones in an ossuary.

Unpruned branches of fern palm

have cordoned off the path. The prickly pear

has perished like rubber soles. An aloe

dangles from the wall - a complexity of claws

with nothing to cling onto. The bougainvillea 

is still ablaze as if it meant to set the place on fire,

clean the slate. The hand-carved fence

is a blue electric shock of morning glory.

New review of The Point of Waking by Wendy Klein

This lovely review by Wendy Klein came out in Artemispoetry in November 2014. 

The Point of Waking, is Cora Greenhill’s third collection, and the opening poem Unhinged, 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 Crete and Wild Relatives, 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 (Today) take the reader through the everyday tasks of settling in, meeting the locals, smelling and tasting the cuisine. In Well of Sheep poignancy 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 Change of Hearth 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.”  An archaeologist finds a cave containing the graves of five female saints, imagines waking them, hearing one sigh “For heaven’s sake, what now?” 

Here is wit entwined with humanity.

The second section, Wild relatives 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.

Review from David Caddy on the Tears in the Fence blog

Cora Greenhill’s The Point of Waking 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.

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.

The slub and slap of the waves were only
a restless ally to my toss and turn
that clammy night, and dawn had a dull veneer.
Stubbornly aching back and blear
from broken sleep, still I stumbled to the water,
as I had resolved, to swim. On surfacing
I catch a flash, a splinter of sea, a glint
like glass in air. Then, alchemically distilling
his perky form from black pumice, bright fisher king
surveys his day – with me alighting in it.

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’.

The raw and cooked are nudged along through nuanced and succulent language. The poems probe, elevate and mark boundaries.

The yellows: rabbit brush, cliff rose and snakeweed.
Browns were onions, oak bark and tea.
Deep red was juniper, but most precious of all
was a pink from a shrub called purple bee.

These grains were so few, they were kept in a skull
of a grasshopper the wind had spun in. And we’d ask
and ask, what were rabbits, what were bees,
what was a snake, and what the colour of grass?

I am proud to have published several of these sensual and deeply felt poems. They are quirky and live on in the memory.

David Caddy 13th August 2014