Category Archives: Poems

Sonnet: ‘Maz’ Griffiths, ‘Archaeology’

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Chink-chink, clunk-clunk, there’s no escape.
You spade us from the ground, then scrape
our skulls and excavate our teeth,
spread naked what once lay beneath
mute earth. You want to learn our name.
Ah, we are levelled, made the same.
This bone-yard bursting at the seams
is one deep bed of blended dreams.

Our bodies are transformed and rotten,
and what you are, we have forgotten.
We wish to feed the shrubs and trees,
to nestle wild birds as they please.
We are all light now. Do not weep.
Heap heaviness upon us. Let us sleep.

*****
Reading through ‘Maz’ Griffiths‘ poems collected as ‘Grasshopper‘, this piece felt suitably Halloweenish to share at the end of October.

Photo: One of the Batavia mutiny (1629) victims, excavated on Beacon Island and now displayed at Fremantle Shipwreck Museum. Wikimedia Commons, 7 April 2014, 06:19:51, Guy de la Bedoyere

Semi-formal: ‘Maz’ Griffiths, ‘Falling’

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In the library,
you fell over me.
You said, So sorry.
I said, Ouch.
Later you fell over me
on the couch.

Things were falling into place,
thigh to thigh and face to face.
Earth was falling
through the night
falling into birds and light.

As the sky unrolled
another day,
you kissed me,
then you walked away.

But walking,
I’m told,
is merely
falling
controlled.

*****

The always delightful Margaret Ann “Maz” Griffiths published in a huge range of voices: formal sonnets of wildlife and of the illness that finally killed her, blank verse rants against warfare or injustice, sad songs of the female loss of innocence, flippant anti-establishment sarcasm about the British Royal Family…

‘Grasshopper’, her 350-page collection of poetry (and also one of her nicknames) was assembled by fans after her death and published by Arrowhead Press in the UK and Able Muse Press in North America. It is readable and rereadable. I post the occasional poem in this blog.

Illustration: Wikimedia Commons: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alexisnyalphotography/5183318315/

Semi-formal poem: Mervyn Peake, ‘To Maeve’

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You walk unaware
Of the slender gazelle
That moves as you move
And is one with the limbs
That you have.

You live unaware
Of the faint, the unearthly
Echo of hooves
That within your white streams
Of clear clay that I love

Are in flight as you turn,
As you stand, as you move,
As you sleep, for the slender
Gazelle never rests
In your ivory grove.

*****

‘To Maeve’ is the final poem in ‘Mervyn Peake, Selected Poems’ published by Faber. Peake and his wife Maeve Gilmore were both artists and writers – after Peake’s death in 1968, Gilmore fleshed out a fourth book for the Gormenghast Trilogy from Peake’s notes and ideas, eventually published as ‘Titus Awakes: The Lost Book of Gormenghast‘.

Isabel Chenot, ‘driving by an Orchard, late October’

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Behind repetitive, recessive rows
of almond trees, radiance stutters:
an open phoneme that won’t close.
It flickers to the west, while lateral gutters

of long shadow interrupt its strobe.
The orchard’s shadows diagraph the road and flare
across to dust and scrub.
My inarticulable thoughts are there:

fleeing, opaque, colliding with the sound of glare.

*****

Isabel Chenot writes: ” I like to let the words speak for themselves as much as possible.”

‘driving by an Orchard, late October’ was originally published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Isabel Chenot has loved, memorized, and practiced poetry all her remembered life. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood Books.

“Almond trees” by mental.masala is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Semi-formal verse: RHL, ‘Conversation with the Beast’

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“And what are you?” asked the all-seeing sightless beast
bearing me on its back through vast seascapes,
going somewhere, nowhere, ceaseless as droning plane or priest.
“Are you one of the great lizards? Or the little apes?
The winged skylords? The many-tentacled?
An ape-displacing metal monster?”
“Of those,” I said, “ ‘Ape’ has to be my answer.”

“I talk with all of you,” it said, “you’re all identical.
You are all struggling up, and lying back and down,
and all are living with some lilac crown
on heads and clothed with your purple gown
while all your world degrades to brown.
This you all do, will always do, have always done,
always, while seas seem to run,
and while I seem to carry you with seeming motion.”

“What is this sea?” I asked. “Time, that we’re moving through?”
“Why not?” it said. “There is no Time, nor Ocean.
All is more dream than stream;
I am not as I seem
and nor are you.”

*****

I’m very happy to have this in the latest edition of Cerasus – “now published and currently available to buy at a special discounted price:

In the UK: CERASUS Poetry Magazine # 6: Amazon.co.uk: Wilks, John: 9798160784458: Books

In the USA: CERASUS Poetry Magazine # 6: Wilks, John: 9798160784458: Amazon.com: Books

(For other countries, click on a link then change the .co.uk or .com in the address bar as appropriate.)”

Thanks, John Wilks.

Sonnet: Richard Fleming, ‘Boy’

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He closes his eyes while, around his head,
like playground shouts, a flock of angry birds
explodes. He feels an overwhelming dread,
remembering his irate father’s words
and what the words preceded: those first blows
that pummelled his thin shoulders and his ears,
left him confused and with a bloody nose,
his much-loved, navy T-shirt stained with tears.
He blinks, refocuses. The birds have gone.
And, looking at his wristwatch, he can see
hours have slipped by like buses missed. A pawn
on life’s great chessboard, he stands helplessly.
Time flows around him. In it he will grow
to strength while it diminishes his foe.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “I’ve written a great deal of verse over the years, much of which I’d happily disown, but amidst that unruly scrub-grass a few flowers have blossomed. The bouquet presented here comprises a mixture of formal and informal verse, including a number of older poems that have appeared elsewhere: there are also several more recently written ones that have not previously been published.

          “The Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, is quoted as saying: ‘a poet’s autobiography is his poetry’ and that may be true to a degree but let’s not forget that poetry is a creative art, a flight of fantasy, therefore poems that, at first glance, may appear to be autobiographical will almost certainly have been embellished by the writer’s imagination.

          “The selection leans strongly towards rhyming verse: my preference, despite the fact it seems to have fallen from favour in the world of modern poetry. What odds? I’ve never been one to run with the pack.”

‘Boy’ was published in The High Window.

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on

Facebook https://www.facebook.com richard.fleming.92102564/

or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com

*****

Photo: Boy Walking Contraluz by Wilfredor, Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication

Odd poem: T.S. Eliot, ‘Interlude: in a Bar’

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Across the room the shifting smoke
Settles around the forms that pass
Pass through or clog the brain;
Across the floors that soak
The dregs from broken glass

The walls fling back the scattered streams
Of life that seems
Visionary, and yet hard;
Immediate, and far;
But hard…
Broken and scarred
Like dirty broken finger nails
Tapping the bar.

*****

It’s very Eliot, isn’t it! A poem written in pencil in his early Notebook; dated provisionally to the years immediately before the publication of Prufrock in 1917, the Notebook is wryly headed ‘Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot’. The near 100 pages of the Notebook, with the twice as many pages of Christopher Ricks’ notes on the poems, comprise the bulk of the material in ‘T.S. Eliot – Inventions of the March Hare – Poems 1909-1917’.

Ricks’ nine comments on this poem include pointing out the similarity of the line
‘Like dirty broken finger nails’
to the passage towards the end of The Waste Land:
‘On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.’

fwiw

Photo: “Lucky Strike.” by H.Robertson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Armand d’Artois,’Oxen’, tr. John Gallas

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Under a porridge heaven (scourged with black,
and prickly-pale as sackcloth) drear and dun,
the road lays down its cobbles, mirrored slick
with recent rain and half a sickened sun.

A passer-by or two. Not noticing
the shambling creatures going to their deaths.
A troop of oxen, slipping on the slime,
heading for the abbatoir. Their breaths

resigned and patient; runny eyes that see
the emerald grass, the clear, bright streams, the fields,
the apple-blossomed ease of Normandy.

Silver-drooling snouts. Sometimes a snort
or sniff. But nothing more. Remembering
the sea. A passing smell. A passing thought.

*****

John Gallas writes: “I love ‘Oxen’, a little gem you find sometimes when translating from periodical/magazine contributions that mostly sank without trace over time. I’d be delighted. It’s from ‘La Parnasse contemporain’ (only ever 3 editions – 1866, 71 and 76).”

Armand d’Artois (1788 – 1867) was a French playwright and librettist. Here is the original:

LES BŒUFS

Sous un ciel bas, d’un blanc triste, teinté de noir,
Qui prend l’aspect blafard et morne d’un cilice,
La rue étend au loin son pavé rond et lisse
Que l’averse a rendu luisant comme un miroir.

Quelques passants s’en vont, flanant sur le trottoir,
Sans voir ces condamnés qui marchent au supplice :
Des troupeaux de bœufs, dont le pied trébuche et glisse
Sur le chemin qui mène au sanglant abattoir.

Et dans les yeux rêveurs de ces bêtes superbes
Sont encor peints les clairs ruisseaux, les hautes herbes
Et les pommiers en fleur du gras pays normand.

La bave en fils d’argent tombe de leurs narines,
Et parfois l’un d’entre eux renifle longuement,
Comme au ressouvenir d’âcres senteurs marines.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.

“Herd of Cattle on Red Dirt Road, Vietnam” by AdamCohn is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Nobel Prize Disappointment goes to Anne Carson

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So the Nobel Prize (good) for Literature (good) goes to a Canadian (good) “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” That’s all very well… Then the Nobel Committee should create a new category for awarding the Literature Prize to Anne Carson, because if her work isn’t a novel, short story or memoir, it certainly isn’t poetry either. Bold, inventive, playful, new forms – perhaps. But in any way comparable to Kipling, Yeats, Eliot or Walcott? Nope. She has created new (perhaps) forms for contemporary literature, but what I’ve read of hers isn’t poetry. Reuters says she blends verse with (whatever), but I haven’t found any verse of hers, nothing that is immediately word-for-word memorable. There may be some. If there is, it’s not prominent. As The Hindu editorialised, “The Academy has chosen a writer who belongs in no category in particular.”

Oh well. Maybe she got the prize for Icelandic-Canadian dual citizenship? Or translations of Sappho?

So it goes. There’s always next year.

“Is that all there is.” by Onlysilence is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Unforgettable nonsense: Mervyn Peake, ‘Lean Sideways on the Wind’

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Lean sideways on the wind, and if it bears
Your weight, you are a daughter of the Dawn —
If not, pick up your carcass, dry your tears,
Brush down your dress — for that sweet elfin horn

You thought you heard was from no fairyland —
Rather it flooded through the kitchen floor,
From where your Uncle Eustace and his band
Of flautists turn my cellar, more and more

Into a place of hollow and decay:
That is my theory, darling, anyway.

*****

Another one of Mervyn Peake‘s poems from ‘A Book of Nonsense’, collected by his widow Maeve Gilmore. He was casually proficient with iambic pentameter — there are several passages in Titus Groan, the first of his Gormenghast books, where several lines of iambics are unobtrusively buried in the text, to be noticed only by slow readers like myself. Asking Quill, my ChatGPT, about this, I get:

Yes—there is published criticism addressing exactly this. The most directly relevant piece I found is R. W. (Robert) Maslen’s “Mervyn Peake, the Poet of Gormenghast,” in Miracle Enough: Papers on the Works of Mervyn Peake, edited by G. Peter Winnington (2013), pp. 127–138. Browse by Glasgow Author

You can read it free here: Mervyn Peake: The Poet of Gormenghast.

Maslen identifies three examples particularly relevant to your observation:

The final chapter: successive pentameters give the closing predictions an oracular quality, anticipating the sequel’s violence and upheaval.

The fight in the Hall of Spiders: the narration moves into iambic pentameter as the action takes on an epic character. Sepulchrave’s fragmented speech catches the same rhythm, associating his madness with Shakespearean tragedy.

Titus’s christening: the ritual text contains blank verse printed as prose—very much the unobtrusive insertion you describe.

*****

“Windy skirt” by Paula Satijn is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.