Quinterview 10

The Passionate Transitory's tenth quinterview is with outstanding writer Morelle Smith, whose poem When The Almond Tree Comes Into Flower was one of the highlights of our first issue.  

Afterwards, reading the words I’d written, what struck me most was not so much whether what I’d written was anything "good", but that I’d been in a trance-like state and this had produced these words and this was astonishing to me, like a revelation. It was quite different, much more heightened and emotional than the prose writing I’d done before. It was like a kind of magic, that such a thing could happen.

Morelle Smith

Morelle Smith

Quinterview 9

Meet Anglican parish priest and poet Andy Delmege in our ninth Passionate Transitory quinterview. Andy is a keen walker, and is especially interested in walking as pilgrimage and as a form of prayer. Here he's consulting the map while walking the Camino Inglés, one of the Spanish Ways of St James.

Andy Delmege

Deadly

You were the wild cat

You were the frog

The quick brown fox that jumped over the lazy dog

You were the snake which curled in the sand

The spider crawling on my hand

You were the terrorist of my heart

The curare on a poison dart

You were the moon's deepest abyss

The peck of a piranha's kiss

You were the absinthe but just one shot

The memory even time forgot

Words: The Solitary Walker

Images: Wikimedia Commons

Attribution (from top to bottom):

Steve Snodgrass

Harmen Piekema

Hejwazzup

Ian W Fieggen

Bryce McQuillan

Nevit Dilmen

Oliver Delgado

NASA

Gonzalo Rivero

Eric Litton

NASA

Quinterview 8

The Passionate Transitory's next quinterview, with the poet Dick Jones, is one of the most fascinating we've published yet. Learn what happens when you say you're a poet at a dinner party, and find out why Dick is the master of tantric writing. And do check out again his tour de force of poetic jive, Manhattan Transfer — Going Downtown: an urgent and energetic riff on New York street life.

Dick Jones

Quinterview 7

Read The Passionate Transitory's seventh quinterview — this time with Bulgarian poet, Bozhidar Pangelov.

Bozhidar Pangelov

Quinterview 6

Did you know Rachel Fox has been commissioned to write poems for births, weddings and funerals? Read all about it in The Passionate Transitory's sixth quinterview. Check out Rachel's blog here, and her poems and other creative work (including some videos of poetry reading gigs) here.

Rachel Fox

Quinterview 5

Meet Dominic Rivron and find out what makes his poetic pulse race in this fifth Passionate Transitory quinterview.

I think of poems as coming from somewhere else, so although I write poems now and again I don't talk about poetry much unless someone pokes me with a pointed stick.

Dominic Rivron

Dominic Rivron

Quinterview 4

The fourth quinterview in The Passionate Transitory's series is with ballet dancer turned poet, Maureen Weldon. You can read it here.

Maureen Weldon

The Last Debate: Foreign Policy

Nobel Laureate Professor Wangari Maathai with US senator Barack Obama in Nairobi, Kenya.
  Source: Wikimedia Commons. Attribution: Fredrick Onyango

Show them tonight, President Barack Obama. Many of us here in the UK are supporting you all the way. We do not want the US to head back into the Dark Ages. 

We’re leading from Europe to the Asia Pacific, with alliances that have never been stronger.  We’re leading the fight against nuclear dangers.  We’ve applied the strongest sanctions ever on Iran and North Korea — nations that cannot be allowed to threaten the world with nuclear weapons.   We’re leading on behalf of freedom — standing with people in the Middle East and North Africa as they demand their rights; protecting the Libyan people as they rid the world of Muammar Qaddafi.

Barack Obama

Quinterview 3

The Passionate Transitory's third quinterview is with Merseyside poet David J Costello. See David's prize-winning poem, Horseshoe Bat, here.

The best poetry can describe the human condition like no other art form. It's no coincidence that at times of great joy or great depression, people who may normally decry poetry invariably look to verse as a voice for their emotions.

David J Costello

David J Costello

Quinterview 2

The Passionate Transitory is proud to publish its second interview — this time with Michigan poet, Ruth Mowry. Find out what motivates Ruth to write, who she writes for, and which poems and poets are her favourites. Ruth's blog is here.

Ruth Mowry

Bardney To Woodhall Spa: Memories, Sweet Memories

Back on the Viking Way you could tell it had been raining overnight. But this afternoon was dry and bright — and breezy.

I left unremarkable Bardney behind me, with its ploughed fields and its sugar beet factory, where British Sugar turns, err, sugar beet into sugar. Who would have thought it.

The path took me past more turned and tilled fields, and yet more of the same. Every now and then I skirted a lime wood. The area used to be full of them. Thankfully there are still some left. But rich, black earth mainly filled the landscape...

... a landscape which became flatter and flatter with each mile I trudged.

In Southrey I was surprised to come upon this thatched cottage — a rare sight in Lincolnshire. 

I was also pleased to discover the Church of St John the Divine. (Note to my American readers: this has New England written all over it, don't you think?) Though sadly the weatherboarding is now PVC and the windows plastic.

The village backs onto the river Witham. It was nice to see the river again. There was a pub, a landing stage and two goats. 

There was also the trackbed of an old railway line which had been turned into a cycle path and named the Water Rail Way. After eating my sandwiches and drinking from my flask of coffee at a handy bench and table by the waterside, I decided on an impulse to deviate from the Viking Way and follow the Water Rail Way as far as Woodhall Spa. I love deviating from 'official' routes. It gives you a heady illusion of freedom. 

Here's the view east along the river...

... and here's the view west. In fact, the furthermost bench and table you can see is where I ate my lunch — to the sound of clucking moorhens and droning Vulcan bombers from nearby RAF Coningsby.

I rather enjoyed walking along the river bank. Above me crows and gulls were being battered by a strengthening wind. Clouds raced across — some of them dark — but no rain came.

Then all of a sudden I chanced on this signboard about the Bardney Pop Festival of 1972, which had been held in a field close by. Bardney had never had a pop festival before, and it certainly hasn't had one since. And yes, you've guessed it — I'd actually been at this legendary event! In an instant I went back forty years. In my mind I watched again on-stage cameos of the Beach Boys, Don McLean, Joe Cocker and Sha Na Na. If you enlarge the pic you'll find that the local pub did so well it ran out of beer — twice!   

Soon after the signboard I found this curvy wooden sculpture inscribed with the words For men may come and men may go but I go on for ever — a line from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, The Brook. Tennyson is one of Lincolnshire's most famous sons, and he was born not far away in Somersby Rectory. 

At this point my camera battery sadly ran out of juice, so I wasn't able to take stunning shots of the nudist colony round the next corner, or of an air ambulance crew involved in the daring rescue of a farmer trapped under his tractor, or of the elusive and legendary wild lions and tigers native to these parts...

Only joking.

I was, however, waylaid by this frozen procession of Rastafarian sheep...     

Finally, after three hours, I arrived at Woodhall Spa. And once more my memory took me straight back to my youth. For it was here that I'd seen the film Doctor Zhivago for the first time — in Woodhall Spa's quaintly authentic Kinema In The Woods.

Quinterview 1

The Passionate Transitory begins a series of quick interviews (quinterviews) with its poets. See the first one — with Les Merton, editor of Poetry Cornwall — here.

Les Merton, founder editor of Poetry Cornwall.

An Adventurous Life

Robert MacFarlane reviewing Artemis Cooper's new biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor in yesterday's Guardian...

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Patrick Leigh Fermor's legendary life is that it lasted as long as it did. He died in 2011 at the age of 96, having survived enough assaults on his existence to make Rasputin seem like a quitter. He was car-bombed by communists in Greece, knifed in Bulgaria, and pursued by thousands of Wehrmacht troops across Crete after kidnapping the commander of German forces on the island. Malaria, cancer and traffic accidents failed to claim him.

He was the target of a long-standing Cretan blood vendetta, which did not deter him from returning to the island, though assassins waited with rifles and binoculars outside the villages he visited. He was beaten into a bloody mess by a gang of pink-coated Irish huntsmen after he asked if they buggered their foxes. He smoked 80 cigarettes a day for 30 years, and often set his bed-clothes ablaze after falling asleep with a lit fag in hand. He drank epically, and would 'drown hangovers like kittens' in breakfast pints of beer and vodka. As a young SOE agent in Cairo in 1943, the centrepiece of his Christmas lunch was a turkey stuffed with Benzedrine pills; at the age of 69 he swam the Hellespont — and was nearly swept away by the current.

Yes, Leigh Fermor was an insurer's nightmare, an actuary's case-study, and his longevity was preposterous. He might best be imagined as a mixture of Peter Pan, Forrest Gump, James Bond and Thomas Browne. He was elegant as a cat, darkly handsome, unboreable, curious, fearless, fortunate, blessed with a near-eidetic memory, and surely one of the great English prose stylists of his generation.

Mosques in Istanbul (Constantinople). Image: Wikimedia Commons. Attribution: Christiaan Briggs.

Fermor wrote two of the last century's outstanding travel books — A Time Of Gifts (1977) and its sequel Between The Woods And The Water (1985) — about a walk he did as a young man from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. I've read and enjoyed immensely both these books. The final volume of the trilogy will appear posthumously from John Murray next year. I can hardly wait.

To read MacFarlane's whole piece, please click here.

Magdalene In The Garden

I watch you train an olive up the fence.
After your op you weren’t supposed
to pull at weeds or wield a fork —
that’s my job now, exclusively. I dig
a spit. My spade hits root and jars
my arm and shoulder like a jabbed right hook.
I groan a little, once more slice the spade,
slantwise this time. It bounces off the root,
grazes my shin and bruises bone. I curse.

And you, across the pathway, by the fence,
where you are working with peg and twine,
look up from your kneeling mat and ask
concernedly, ‘Are you ok?’ You wince —
your old demonic pain still sharp
after so many months. I say,
‘I’m fine. D’you know, Marlene, I struck
a root thick as my arm?’ I lever in
the spade to prise it out and show you,
but it remains stuck in the earth.

Silent again, sullen as Caliban,
I clamp boot onto metal and resume
digging for clues, airing dark secrets,
preparing the bed, charming my wound away,
while you protect your own across the pathway.

An Autumn Day On The Viking Way

Gardener at work.

We're completely redesigning and replanting our garden at the moment — a project that won't be finished until the spring. If such things are ever finished, as gardening is an ongoing labour. But a labour of love, I hope.

We couldn't have done this without Phil, a seventy-four year old local tree surgeon, landscape gardener and expert in all things horticultural. He's the same person who felled our rogue Corsican pine tree here. His knowledge, industry, meticulousness and wiry strength put me to shame. He's hacked away the jungle of our back garden, renovated the overgrown pond, returfed the lawn, constructed a raised bed for vegetables and put up a compost bin. Carmen and I have been busy too (he added guiltily) at the front and side of the house — digging, weeding, painting fences, planting bulbs.   

A naked pond crying out for some pond plants.

I thought it was high time the Solitary Walker took another solitary walk and escaped the domestic confines for a while. So, yesterday afternoon, I hiked another stretch of the Viking Way. I left the car at Fiskerton east of Lincoln, walked the seven miles to Bardney, then returned to the car by bus. It wasn't the prettiest stretch of the route, but I tried hard to find some magic in the black, ploughed earth and the flat, featureless landscape. Though it was difficult. Perhaps I was tired. Or perhaps it was my mood. Anyhow, no matter. Accept what is, what was, how you feel, how you felt. You can't force the magic. It will come again when you're least expecting it.

Drunken sign on the Viking Way.

Planting the crops: tractor with seed drill.

These fields and others close by were at one time the site of Fiskerton Airfield. It was from this airfield that Lancaster bomber crews of 576 Squadron attacked Hitler's 'Eagle's Nest' at Berchtesgaden in their last mission of World War II. 

The hedgerows were stippled with hips and haws, the fruits of the wild rose and the hawthorn bush. These are rosehips.

The rich, black earth of Lincolnshire.

Bracket fungus in an elder tree with colourful lichen.

All that remains of Barlings Abbey, one of the former nine religious houses of the area.  In the twelfth century the region was marshy with low, isolated islands — ideal terrain for sheep farming, a major source of income for monastic communities. I skirted the abbey field and was watched the whole time by a bull, which fortunately stayed where it was. 

A pair of mute swans, their cygnet brood fledged and gone.

Arriving home in the late afternoon sunlight, I spotted this small tortoiseshell butterfly on the garden asters.