CORKSCREW HILL PHOTO

I started taking myself seriously as a writer and poet when, having never entered any poetry competition before, let alone won one, I found myself, very much to my surprise, winning the top prize  in the Poetry Society National Poetry Competition 2014 for my poem, CORKSCREW HILL PHOTO.  http://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/corkscrew-hill-photo/

In probably the biggest and most respected international poetry competition. There were over 13,000 entries that year.  My thanks go to the judges, especially Roddy Lumsden, a great poet (who unfortunately has since died most untimely, 10th January 2020. I only met him briefly a couple of times, but have a huge regard for him.  My favourite of his books is probably Not All Honey, and the 'omnibus' of his early volumes, Mischief Night, is especially good value, both Bloodaxe publications.)

"Roger's winning poem is a stunning poem, which mixes sweetness, sentiment, the visual and a touch of the grotesque. It seemed to contain a strange mix of naivety and complexity. Most of all, I couldn't quite grasp what it was about, but in the best of ways - I wanted to reread and make my own story from what was being offered."    (Roddy Lumsden)

You can hear me reading Corkscrew Hill Photo on the film-poem by James W Norton (commissioned by the Poetry Society.)  You can find it in the link above to the Poetry Society, towards the bottom of its page, below the poem. 

Or you can go direct to Norton's site on Vimeo:  https://vimeo.com/124710826

It takes a while before you hear the poem, but don't let that put you off, it is a great piece of imaginative photography and film-making; and if Norton, like Lumsden, makes his own story from what the poem offers, rather than what I had in mind, I still - perhaps all the more - very thoroughly recommend it!

Or, if you can't wait, here is an audio only file of my reading:

https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0b4i4nIcxOLuxwdUHw-6NZjOA#Corkscrew_Hill_Photo

Corkscrew Hill Photo

All afternoon she counts the sounds
until the fly-specked room crackles with silence.
Even the song thrush noteless. A thick drizzle
trickles rivulets down the window pane,
smears distance on fields, curtains-off hills
    and greens the sagged thatch,
    aches in the creaking gate and screws
    watering eye to misting glass:
    a hearse skids slowly up the muddy lane
    blurs in droplets on a spider-web
    spins sideways into darkness….

            ….rattling cough of cattle, rusty tractor,
            hinge of paint-peeled door, gears
            of cars forced to back in one-track lanes,
            buzz of pylons spanning the hum
            of outboards in the yachtsmen’s creek,
            yelp of kids in the converted Mill
            the soft click-click of a camera-shutter
            up Corkscrew Hill….

    The casement steams with sunset. She picks herself
    up off the floor, mouth dry as mourner’s grin.
    Her arm reaches, shakes, reaches again
    gathers the clattering jar from the shelf.

            “Cider?”
    The landlord frowns, sniffing cat,
    moth-ball, mould. She squares her back
    on his fine view – the duck bob,
    seagull clutter, gape of lime kiln.
            “And a nip of lovage,”
    before he can point her
    the off-licence hatch in the yard,
            “to keep out the damp!”
    and smiles spittle.
    Her flagon scrapes a scroll of varnish
    the length of the bar’s stripped pine
    past bleating townies, past the regular’s chair
    and the corner where the photographer
    sits draining her valley
    through a tilted lens.

Corkscrew Hill Photo is published in the Day and Dennis collaborative collection of paired poems, Invocations and Portraits, Wylde Publications www.wyldepublications.com

Some other poems that have been long-listed in major international poetry competitions:

    You Sat With A Bunch Of Friends Of A Friend Of Mine

    You sat with a bunch of friends of a friend of mine
    across the bar with a pint of heavy and those strands
    of almost curling hair that didn’t quite
    hide how your eyes kept catching mine.
    Then you said, No, you couldn’t stay, you had this
    farewell party to go to. But would I like to join you?

    Your alarm went off at six a.m. but what woke me
    was your whispering in my ear you’d really like
    to get to know me more, spend morning by my side
    as you rushed to catch the train to catch the ferry
    to work your summer on the silver darlings.

    And me, I was pen pushing, undoing
    dot by careful Rotring dot the careless
    or deliberate disposals in medieval middens
    and while August bored its callous smile
    right through the draughting room’s one window pane
    skewed nails, broken buckles, gap-toothed combs
    dropped pilgrim badges and luck-leaked charms
    monochromed my daily drawing board.

    I walked down to the harbour pier hoping I could catch
    in the tang of salt sea spray something of your scent
    but all I got was iodine and the tarry choke of fag ends
    that tracked the tourist trail.

    “It’s a bit tough,” I wrote, “to find all my friends saying
    ‘good-bye’ at once. But thanks for the cards, they’re great
    and I hope at least the rain has stopped for you.”

    “I’m getting used,” you replied, “to the rank reek
    though I think I’ll never get it from my nails —
    the gloves they issue make fingers thumbs
    docking pay, we’re best without.”

    “It worries me,” you said when at last we met
    “that it seems to be meaning more to you
    than to me.” And I, I grinned
    in attempt to give your words the lie
    while anticipations and the head on my pint
    frothed and spilled and slipped slowly to the floor


"You sat...." was long-listed in the 2015 Poetry Society National Poetry Competition. It has since been published 2023 in Invocations and Portraits  by Wylde Publications www.wyldepublications.com

    Traces

    Not noticeable at the time, just a few grains, barely a dusting.
    Not so much taste as sensation of the tongue, as if walked on
    by spiders, dry and sharp, sloe spiced with honey. You'd think
    it'd be overpowered by the iron-sweet cloy of blood, but it lingers on.
    Mistletoe pollen. Wind blown. Dust on cooling bread. Infusion
    of mead. Or scattered from the wreath round my head. Food
    they say, of the gods. As I, as we all. Before. Before the intrusive gift

    of softness. Before mud and sphagnum, softer than fleece, softer than the tufts
    of bog-cotton waving over my head, softer than the damp velvet nostrils
    of bulls that grazing the heath, came to drink, and snorted, bellowed,
    shied away from the necklace of blood at my throat, the axe-blow
    baring brain to the stars. Before.

    Before peat mire darker than un-milked tea, a vinegar Lethe, tanning
    skin, reddening hair, embalming tissue, smoothing out the long slow
    sink into the deeper dark. All the while the pee-wit! pee-wit! of curlew
    the drab brown scurry of lark through myrtle and heather, the breeze
    heavy with gorse blossom, with catkins of alder and willow, the clouds
    drizzling sleet, snow, hail, the downpours of daylong drenchings, day
    on day, the brief sunlight, the lark scurries, the risings. The lark song.

    Then one day, the peat-cutter’s spade.
    
    A water-blacked log, picked up, is thrown at the worker’s mate.
    Hits the ground. Splits. Out falls a human foot. The police.
    The archeologists The partially exposed re-interred. Then dug out
    in one sarcophagus block. Stretchered to the hospital freezer.
    Radiocarbon. CT, xeroradiography, atomic absorption spectroscopy.
    Intrusions by scalpel and by lens. The soak in polyethylene glycol.
    Frozen ice solid. Freeze dryed. The display case.

    Reflected in the boxing glass, goggling museum trawlers find
    their eyes in sockets in my skewed face, compare their full torsos
    to my “naked but for fox fur armband mid twenties one point
    seven three meters sixty four kilograms well groomed hair
    trimmed beard filed fingernails” body turned leather sack.

    But long ago I quit skin and bone. Moved into pale long leaves
    tapered as farewell tears crossing a lover's cheek. Made my home
    on apple tree or poplar, or even, that king of kings, the oak, a realm
    not water, earth, or sky. Where the song thrush feasting on my
    white berries coats beak and claw with cling of waxy seed and so
    winged and hymned I am translated godlike through sheer air.

Traces was long-listed in the 2019 Ginkgo Ecopoetry Competition. It too has since been published 2023 in Invocations and Portraits by Wylde Publications www.wyldepublications.com

    Galactic Gavotte

The Gavotte En Rondeau from J. S. Bach’s Partita No.3 in E major for Violin is one of the many wide-ranging musical selections making up the ‘Golden Record’ loaded into the 1977 Voyager 1 & 2 space missions. Both craft are now in interstellar space, having passed out of our sun’s protective bubble the heliosphere, and will not come close to another star for at least 40,000 years.   

    It started with my nails. How often they needed cutting. Everyday,
    then twice, then morning, noon, tea, evening, more.
    My fingers stretched, until they could scratch their own wrists
    and became translucent when held up to the window, soft LEDs
    phasing pinks, purples, greens, gleams of white bone.
    Then transparent. How I studied those fine branched roots
    of veins, delta-prints of many-mouthed Niles and Amazons
    distracted only by the expansion of my spine
    as it arched up above the house, the trees, and on
    into the sky, by my spinal disks spinning off left, right,
    all directions like flung quoits, leaving my dispersing vertebrae
    enlarging, remoulding, simplifying into spinning globes
    seeking their own separate orbits. Meanwhile my clothes
    from coat down to underwear, shimmered into sheets
    of Aurora Borealis, a cool and silky wrap-around
    whispering of the days to come. Soon that voice faded
    into the thinning atmosphere, and then out completely.
    Till the expanded dishes of my eardrums picked up the buzz
    and whizz of particles, gauge and Higgs bosons, quarks, leptons,
    mesons, baryons, neutrons, electrons, a helter-skelter jitterbug
     ived to the bebop and swing of the Spheres, to the steady backbeat
    of reverb echoes from the Big Bang. Meanwhile each drop
    of my haemoglobin had become a sun. Which I placed carefully
    into galactic systems, one by one, as a flower-arranger fills a vase
    selecting my vertebrae as planets for a favoured few.
    I observed the limits. Respected the etiquettes of relativity
    conserving my energy and my momentum. My only mistake
    a pasodoble with a neighbouring Black Hole, who snubbed me flat
    vamooshing off with her dark-matter mates. So now I chew
    the rich dimension-loaded cake of Time, quaff the watery swell
    and ebb of Space, sleep on soft dream-packed pockets of Probability.
    Waiting. For such as you, my long-nailed friend, to minuet me
    up-and-away down the next available parallel universe.

Galactic Gavotte  was long-listed in the 2019 Poetry Society National Poetry Competition. It is due for publication in Between New Year And Old, due out from Wylde Publications www.wyldepublications.com later on in 2024.

    Wistmans
   
    I met Isabella de Fortibus coming through the wood
    her silk gown green from moss and lichen hoar in her hair:    
   
     “Oh I am sick at heart and would lay me down and die
    from trying to make count of all the trees growing in my wood!
    Every time a tally’s made, there’s a baying of the hounds
    with cries of ‘Whisht!’ to right and ‘Whisht!’ to left
    and the Dark Man shrilling on his knife-sharp pipe
    and in the darkness of his passing my mind is wiped slate-clean.

    I wake on dawn’s hillside with all my count to make  
    fearing that my trees are seedlings ripped up in the storm 
    High Willhays sends to scour his scarred and heathy moor
    with his henchman Herne driving all before into Dart’s cold arms
    and oh I am soaked to the skin and oh so tired of life  
    from trying to take count of all the trees growing in the wood!

    Yes I was Queen in Castle Carisbrooke and Lady of the Wight
    Countess of Devon, and of Aumale, and Holder of the Honours
    of Skipton, Holderness, and Brunswick, from Hampshire
    and from Yorkshire my income came in pounds by the millions 
    I banked with Riccardi of Lucca, knew the Statutes of The Realm,
    not Edward King of England, not Edmund Crouchbank, not
    Simon de “Mighty” Montfort could lay a hand on me and mine
    but all my wealth and power turns to Dartmoor mist
    and oh! I am skin, and oh! I am bone     
    in the counting of the trees that grow in Wistmans Wood."

Published 2023 in Invocations and Portraits by Wylde Publications www.wyldepublications.com