'Listening to Glenn Gould on Orton Scar' by Kathleen Jones

From Ravenstonedale
driving north on unfenced roads,
moonlight reflects the tarmac’s

frozen wake across the moor —
a snail's trail  in my rear-view mirror.

Bach unwinds from the c.d.
a landscape of variations
into this zero night.

The grass is white; trees black.
The walls run off like staves.

The moon fingers each stone
separately, in unexpected harmonies
and structures, endlessly practising —

compelling me to stop.  Listen
to the quiet significance of the moment.

Across the counterpoint
I hear the chill cry of a predatory bird.
Single notes glitter like frost.

©  Kathleen Jones 2011
.
From: Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 by Kathleen Jones, Templar Poetry, 2011.
Reproduced on The Tuesday Poem Hub with permission.

Kathleen Jones is a fellow Tuesday Poet so it was a great thrill when her collection, Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 won the Straid Collection Award in 2010 and was subsequently published by Templar Poetry in 2011. The collection comprises a number of themes, including family relationship— particularly those between mothers and daughters—both history and natural history, as well as a strong sense of place. Every book of poetry will have some standout poems and usually many more again that I will enjoy reading. But to work as a collection, the sum of the poems must comprise a greater whole, so that when the final line is reached one may say:  yes, this is a book. For me, Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 met that test.

Nonetheless, in every collection there will still be standout poems, and Listening to Glenn Gould on Orton Scar is one of those poems for me. It is both a poem of nature—the moonlight, the trees, the moor—but also of place. Although I have never been there, as a reader I get so strong a sense of Ravenstonedale and the unfenced roads to the north that I feel I have stood there and seen the "tarmac's frozen wake across the moor." Yet there is more to the poem than this: as a poet I admire both the strength and precision of the language, and the way music itself—as the poet listens to Glenn Gould—is used to encapsulate both the moment and the landscape:

  Bach unwinds from the cd
  a landscape of variations
  into this zero night.

I feel that Listening to Glenn Gould on Orton Scar achieves, in a larger form, exactly what the Japanese haiku form is intended to do:  the poem captures the experience of an "ah-ha" moment in language, lifting the discreet elements of the moment to a sense of something larger. Again as with haiku, I get the sense that no one word has gone unconsidered; every word has earned its place in the poem.

And so we end with:

Across the counterpoint
I hear the shrill cry of a predatory bird.
Single notes glitter like frost.

Chilling. Austere. Perfect.

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Kathleen Jones’ first solo pamphlet of poetry,  Unwritten Lives, won the Redbeck Press pamphlet award and her first full collection,  Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21, was joint winner of the Straid Collection award, and published by Templar Poetry in November 2011. 

Kathleen is also a biographer, author of a life of Christina Rossetti, Learning not to be First [OUP] and A Passionate Sisterhood [Virago], a group biography of the sisters, wives and daughters of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.  Her most recent biography, Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller, was published by Penguin NZ and EUP in 2011. 

Kathleen Jones’ home is in Cumbria, but as her partner is a sculptor working in Italy she lives there some of the time too. She has taught creative writing in a number of universities and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.  

Website:  www.kathleenjones.co.uk
Blog: www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com

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This week's editor, Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer, and a 2012 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury. She emerged onto the NZ poetry scene in 2003 as an inaugural Robbie Burns Award winner and has since had over fifty poems published and anthologized, both in NZ and overseas. The Gathering of the Lost, the second novel in her The Wall of Night series, was published internationally in April, and she recently won the Gemmell Morningstar Award 2012 for the first-in-series, The Heir of Night. Helen posts every day on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog and is a regular Tuesday Poem contributor. You can also follow her on Twitter: @helenl0we

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'Joseph' by Michael Woods

I

It was all tension
in the delivery room,
and you still seemed
glimpsed galaxies away,
pouring your heart out
in the automatic writing
of the foetal monitor's pen
that traced its racing.

I heard each beat
as an outside broadcast
through a squeaky speaker
live-wired to your scalp.
These electric things made
more than a potential difference
as the nurse noticed your distress.
The machine plotted nothing
and found its origin.

Shocked into memory
all I recalled was our first
virtual meeting in those
early scanning days when,
searched for like fish by sonar,
you showed up shadowy
in your secret space, waving a hand to me
that could be a plesiosaur's paddle,
a coelacanth's fin - semaphore from
an oceans away womb-home,
moon distant where you had landed.

Then, in the blink of an aeon,
you broke radio silence,
translating yourself again
into the language of graph lines.

II

I saw you born from water
into air as you barged
into the summer.
You were an astronaut to my eye,
space-walking from the mother ship
but blood-roped still,
already miming our every voyage.

It was the quick slow motion
of it all that lives in me -
you coming from your sea of tranquility,
washed up by the amniotic tide;
that suspended second when you looked
and held me in the forever of your face,
before you drew breath,
before you cried.

Copyright Michael Woods
from 'Absence Notes',  2011,  Templar Poetry
Reproduced with permission

                                                Editor:  Kathleen Jones

I've just been reading  Absence Notes - the first collection from Michael Woods - and this poem really stood out.  It's a beautiful poem about the birth of a child from the father's point of view rather than the mother's, and that's what makes it unusual. We don't often hear about birth from a man's perspective - aren't often reminded that bonding is just important for them as it is for the mother.   I like the images and metaphors, 'blood-roped'  - the womb astronaut. 

Several of the poems in this collection are about family relationships - Carol Ann Duffy in a review noted that it 'maps the events and connections which shape our lives - childhood, parenthood, friendship and love.'   Michael is an authority on Gerard Manley Hopkins and there are echoes in some of the poems (particularly the title poem 'Absence notes') which link back to Hopkins.  Apparently every collection should have at least 3  'Wow!'  moments.  This is definitely one of them.

"Michael Woods was born in London.  He is married with three children and teaches English and Drama in Malvern, Worcestershire.  His poems have won several prizes and have appeared in a number of anthologies.  As editor of Tandem poetry magazine, he has sought to promote the work of young writers.  He also runs live poetry events at the Lamb and Flag pub in Worcester."





Kathleen Jones is this week's Tuesday Poem editor, currently living in Italy.   She is a biographer and poet, whose first collection of poetry  'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21'  was published in November 2011.   She  blogs regularly at 'A Writer's Life'.

Once you have enjoyed "Joseph", take some time to enjoy the other poems posted this week by members of the Tuesday Poem community. You will find them all listed in the sidebar.