Hi Everyone,

The Isles of Scilly are a jumble of granite scraps thrown down twenty-eight miles west from the coast of Cornwall. Five of them offer shelter and a living for some one and a half-thousand people. Needless to say, for a community that sits permanently in the eye of Atlantic storms through the winter, and basks in beautiful, temperate Gulf Stream-fed summers, there is no shortage of drama, humour, resilience, and resourcefulness to be found there. From Scilly, the next stop west is New York; to the north are the ancient Irish strongholds of Wexford and Waterford. It's a land- and sea-scape of enormous beauty and contrasts: Caribbean-blues and flat-calm golds in peerless spring air, slate-greys and blood-purple moorland, horizontal spume and spray in autumn and winter.

I've been lucky enough to spend a great deal of time there over the last twenty or so years, and it's influence on my poetry is immeasurable. It continually (but not exclusively) provides me with materials from its environment and its four-thousand year old history, but is inextricably bound up with my methods and practice as well. The poetry is in the place - it just needs to be tapped into.

Last May I was fortunate enough to (re)launch a collection of Scillonian material in the islands themselves, and the return of those images to the place that gave them form and expression was a huge joy, as well as a professional highlight for me.

I'd like to share with you - for starters - a couple of poems that have arisen from this long association.

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Bottling*

(in praise of the Atlantic grey seal)

 

Consider the velvet, the nose:

a full-bodied indolence

supported by notes of translucent depth

with a long, playful finish

and an aftertaste reminiscent

of layered silk, fluttering

beneath a surface lace.

A moment that may be enjoyed fresh,

but which will mature with laying down.

 

Here's no great message to send to the world,

no hollow vessel neither:

half empty, half full, all balance.

 

*bottling - a lazing, often sleeping state, in which seals bob and float vertically in the water

 

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Change of Weather

 

The glass begins to plummet.

 

And when the needle slides

Cornwall is further

than merely twenty-eight miles.

Storms bristle, scratch their manic scribble

on the broken-edged slate of sky,

and the surf surge conducts a pent-up energy

from somewhere beyond the eyes,

leaving dates, promises,

appointments, certainties,

every fact on the calendar stranded.

 

Something easeful and temperate

gets smashed with a change of weather:

the wreck of what can be foretold

on that which is still unseen;

the knowable and familiar lost

through indeterminate sea-sky

or sky-sea smithereens.

 

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Hope you enjoy ...

Dave R