We always remembered that
Spanish still life
of walnuts and oranges. We
loved the coherence of its browns
and gold and almost green,
the harmonious
light. The boxes held our
eyes
with their persuasive
geometry. Angles, triangles,
curves – the language of
pure form in a world
of things, of imperfections. You began
to talk about that lone
orange almost
out of the picture - the
one I’d missed: a reject,
was it, in a society of
mellow affluence?
And yet, I said, the atoms
of this fugitive fruit
have come from the fire of
stars.
© 2009 Daphne Gloag, and
used by kind permission of the author
Editor: Belinda Hollyer
Editor: Belinda Hollyer
Daphne Gloag is a poet
whose work I encountered only recently, and entirely by happy chance. ‘Poems in
the Waiting Room’ (www.poemsinthewaitingroom.org)
is a blessed – and tiny – UK charity that produces leaflets of poems for
display in doctors’ waiting rooms, and encourages you to take and keep a leaflet
for yourself. How wonderful is that: to find poetry amongst the dishevelled and
out-of-date magazines! And that’s where, last month, I found this poem.
I love the apparent simplicity of the poem’s brevity and precision,
and I am especially struck by the pace and power of the last two lines: the
‘fire of stars’ imagery is breathtakingly good. I freely admit that I am often
charmed by poems about paintings (the first I remember encountering was by
another British woman poet: U.A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Not My Best Side’). I love considering
the relationship between visual art and poetry, partly because both seem to
extend and enlarge the strength of their partner. And in this case I also love an
additional contrast, that between the National Gallery’s description of the
painting, and Daphne’s interpretation. Here’s the gallery speaking on their
website. (I like what they say, and it’s interesting as well as informative –
but oh! how different in tone and engagement from that of the poet.)
“In addition to the oranges and
walnuts, on the wooden shelf there are chestnuts, a melon, earthenware jugs, a
small barrel and some circular and oblong boxes. The jugs probably contain
wine, while the barrel possibly contains olives. The round boxes were normally
used for cheese, while the rectangular ones were used for sweets, such as
'dulce de membrillo', a thick quince jelly eaten in slices.”
Daphne
Gloag worked for most of her career as a medical journalist and editor. Many of
her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and several have won
prizes and commendations. Three collections have been published: Diversities of Silence from Brentham
Press (1994), and A Compression of Distances (2009) and Beginnings and Other Poems (2013), both from
Cinnamon Press. The long poem sequence ‘Beginnings’, which takes up half of
this last collection, has a cosmological setting but its chief focus is
Daphne’s relationship with her late husband, the poet Peter Williamson.
‘Oranges and Walnuts’ was originally intended to be part of ‘Beginnings’ but in
the end was published as a separate poem in A
Compression of Distances.
This
week’s editor is Belinda Hollyer, a New Zealander who lives in London most of
the time, and in Key West the rest of the time. Belinda doesn’t write poetry –
she thinks it’s far too hard – but she blogs here, and writes children’s books
when she can.
