Steel and Ice

This morning's walk brought to mind this poem - written on a pre-Christmas visit to the City of Steel one year. Crystallising a certain moment.

Solstice City

a late dawn brings

smudge of yellow

a rim of hill light

breaking the fog

eight o’clock sleep

walkers hooting air

climb warily

a black-iced

footbridge

then the full beam

winter searchlight

scouring the city

illuminating

textures of raw frost

pavement pock

marks and brown

spatter, an early

sowing of salt

at the station

men in yellow hats

are blinded by

the stainless steel

water feature

and precinct pagans

torch the afternoon

with bonfire bonanzas

cabled tricks of light

this shortest day

soon spills its shine

in the rush of dusk

a giant wheel

spitting colour

slices the sudden

night with shrieks

invoking gods

and other desires

END

House of Horrors

It's worth taking a moment - while decrepit 'granpa' Dodge hollers sour nothings at his wife Halie - to study the extraordinary design of this Curve Studio production. Sam Shepard's darkly comic and disturbing Pullitzer-winning play Buried Child is set in an Illinois rural backwater in 1978. The stage bristles with towering stalks of corn growing out of a giant wooden rack that lifts to become the roof of a prairie homestead. It makes the ramshackle house appear like an underground bunker into which this dysfunctional family have retreated. Earthy roots might thrust through its ceiling any day now. Grimy windows are lit by sloshing rain. Mesh screens partition walls, doors and verandah so that characters seem to move between grey veils. A fine mist drifts across the living room, caught in light shafts which colour with changing hours but also pulse with the emotional undercurrent of this psycho-drama. The whole structure seems creepily alive.

Matthew Kelly & Matthew Rixon

Eventually, Matthew Kelly reels in your attention towards his shambolic patriarch stranded on a filthy sofa that hides more than whisky bottles. Good as he is, the most mesmerising performances from an impressive ensemble cast were the two brothers, Tilden (played by Kelly’s own son, Matthew Rixon) and Bradley (Michael Beckley). As broken as the furniture, these two lumber through interlocking rooms, trapped in the wooden interior. Rixon's portrait is more subtle. A scene where he spreads shelled corn husks over his sleeping father is both clumsily reverent and sinister, funereal even. This is matched by Beckley creeping up on his prone father with an electric shaver. Beckley plays this son as a horror movie grotesque but his twitching angularity and twanging voice are never less than startling. Even grovelling on the sofa, whining for his prosthetic leg, he is menacing. A looming nightmarish figure amidst the grimy realism, you look to him for the violence this play persistently threatens.

With Act Two, the pace picks up as two youngsters arrive; Vince and his girlfriend Shelly. Vince (Lloyd Thomas) is disturbed to find that his father and grandfather fail to recognize him after a six year absence. Except we don't know if they are his family. Shelly, (Catrin Stewart), a brash but winning young city woman, articulates our unease and asks the questions. She eventually concludes it is the house's inhabitants, not her, who are the 'strangers'. Shelly unpicks allusions to a family scandal but the play's title means it's never hard to guess where this is going. What it lacks in mystery though, it makes up in a sullen festering tension.

Lloyd Thomas & Catrin Stewart

Finally, matriarch Halie returns with a bumbling Father Dewis (Gary Lilburn) who might or might not be her beau with his garish bouquet of yellow roses. Jane Lowe, in vintage fifties frocks, blends the faded glamour of a Blanche Dubois with the cracked facade of a Baby Jane. 'I don't know what my role is here,' mutters the priest in a recurring Absurdist complaint about muddled identities. Through the miasma of secrets and confusion, it is the staging which delivers a climactic moment. The cornstalks pierce the rotten heart of the family in an uncanny mutation and Shepherd's armoury of symbols is once more re-arranged.

It seemed only afterwards fitting to tumble into a city under siege from swirling November fog. 'Buried Child' runs till December 3rd at the Curve and deserves full houses throughout for this impressive revival of an American Gothic classic.

Small Press Secrets

A year of immersing myself in the icy world of Antarctica and polar exploration finally bore fruit last night with the launch of my new chapbook, MAD, HOPELESS & POSSIBLE: Shackleton's Endurance Expedition. And not only that but a chance to interview my editor, the lovely Sam Smith of Original Plus books. The event was hosted by Leicester Writers' Club, a wonderful community of writers, and Sam's comments struck a real chord with them.

Sam spilled the beans on how the world of small press publishing looks from the inside. Sam explained that as an aspiring novelist, it took him 23 years to break into print. Editors would accept his books only to find that the salespeople wouldn't run with it. Finally he turned to poetry and got published within months. This fuelled his desire later to get into small press publishing himself as a way of contributing to that community of poets:

'I do it because it was so important to me to get something into print. I wanted to give that opportunity to other writers.'

We discussed the economic realities of small press publishing. This is a one man press - virtually a cottage industry with all the chapbooks printed up at home. With his poetry magazine, The Journal, his biggest cost is postage for subscribers. It's a 'hand-to-mouth' operation and very much a labour-of-love for this dedicated writer and editor. To find out what Sam had to say about how English Poetry changes, what he looks for in submissions and the future of print publishing as e-books take off, have a look at this fascinating interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4A-5jCLusw&feature=youtu.be (many thanks to Ambrose Musiyiwa for posting this)


It was timely that as I prepared for this event, I was being captivated all over again by Attenborough's ravishing images of the white continent in FROZEN PLANET on TV. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mfl7n Here were the wind-tortured icescapes, the mighty glaciers and the wild creatures of the South that early polar explorers encountered on foot. Don't miss this beautfiul series. And you can catch readings of my poems inspired by all that magnificence on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9VusaWXVW4&feature=share&noredirect=1

And if you're wanting to find out more about my book on my website, hang on! My trusty techie is working on a revamped website right now and we will unveil this in a week or so.

So watch this space ... and have a look at Original Plus for this and many other titles. See: http://www.freewebs.com/thesamsmith/originalpluschapbooks.htm

Sledge Rations

Huskies fed, sledge unpacked, now for the diary ...

I feel like I'm back from a long expedition out on the ice. And I'm ready to break radio silence. This week the proofs arrived for my new chapbook, Mad, Hopeless & Possible. Based on Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17, it relates this epic story in poems and prose.

It's thrilling to have the pages in my hand already. My editor, Sam Smith of Original Plus press, is some kind of genius. Only days after my sending off the mansucript, here they are. So now for the careful work of checking typos, working out the best pagination and locating the illustrations I need. Maps to be drawn, for instance ...

In this long year, a very busy one at college, I'd thought my writing was rather bogged-down in the crevasses fields. Unable to make any of my schedules, months vanishing into the white unknown. But I brought back this little book and I love its stories, these voices of Edwardian venturers, the vast landscape they got lost in. The frazil ice and hummocks, the sastrugi and cliffs of sea-ice. And the tiny human details that got buried in it.

So now for the telling ...

The Lure of Scott's Hut

With the 100th anniversary of Scott's dash for the South Pole running into this year and Shackleton's own Endurance anniversary looming, there's been a spate of documentaries on recently about Polar Explorers on the last continent. V. useful indeed for a Polar Poet, especially when they send out a celebrity/ explorer like Ben Fogle to present to camera. Suddenly I can see the texture of the ice, like ropes of sheer glass, running down the Beardmore Glacier. I can learn what pemmican looks like or what the body does when there is no more fat to burn. And I can take a virtual tour with the amiable Fogle into the darkness of a wintering Scott Hut - almost touch those ancient packs of Colman's Mustard and rusty tins of Real Turtle Soup ...

Last week's programme, The Secrets of Scotts Hut, was absolutely fascinating and raised many pertinent questions about both polar exploration and polar archaeology. Can we (or rather the New Zealanders) justify spending millions on painstakingly removing and preserving the 100s of artefacts from Scott's Hut, only to place them back in that same environment in which they are rotting - especially when only a handful of people will ever see them there? Though he might have made more of the burgeoning tourist industry which makes an ever greater imprint on Antarctica's 'pristine wilderness' - an appetite which Fogle's programme can only further whet.



Sir David Attenborough made the case that Scott's Hut is an essential historical marker of 'the human spirit' and its quest to journey into the unknown. I can see what he means if we read polar exploration in the light of millennia of human migration and colonisation of the globe. They were conscious, this Brotherhood of the South, of stepping onto the last uninhabited continent - as it then still was. 'The white edge of every map' as one of my poems has it. But pick up the diaries or the mission statements and it's clear their endeavours need also to be read in the more immediate context of turn-of-the-century European Imperialism - the same Scramble for Colonies that ushered in the First World War. Fogle was very struck by the wall of packing crates Scott erected between officers and men - a powerful metaphor for the class politics they unloaded along with the corporate sponsored foodstuffs onto the ice.


So Fogle was raking over the conflicting myths of Scott - a heroic leader who inspired undying loyalty - or a failed explorer whose obsession with beating first Shackleton then Amundsen led him to sacrifice his men's lives. Reading Scott's private diaries revealed a man of great tenderness and passion and his own photographs showed men pulling together to drag sledges across the vast Ross Ice Shelf. But any comparison with Amundsen makes Scott's party look ill-equipped and wantonly amateurish. On the other hand, Fogle's documentary shows how Scott's hut was packed to the rafters with scientific research materials and examples of the latest technology. Unlike Amundsen - or Shackleton - Scott took the science very seriously and his team amassed considerable data that contributed to the study of climate change for instance.


All key questions and debates. At the end of the day, I'm always drawn back to asking what were they really doing there? Why did they go? And why jeopardise all that was going on at Hut Point for a desperate dash to plant a flag in a wilderness? Theirs is such a very different endeavour from indigenous arctic peoples who never felt the need to stake such claims and who learned to be completely at home in their polar wilderness. From the opposite end of the century, we are still reassessing the myths. But the fascination of that frozen hut, heaped with the debris of Edwardian gentlemen explorers, remains irresistible and unarguably poignant.

Sometimes We Bless Each Other

Wow! what a day!

see: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=799524860&aid=290025

And here was the wedding poem - which can hardly do justice to 20 years of companionship and so much more. But sometimes you have to try to say it anyway:

Cartography for the Heart

I

With you I am a traveller
a maker of maps:

charting the body's terrain
from stone rise of hip
to waist's sloping glen;
by navel's crinkled landmark
I divine the leylines
of your scent.



II


With you I reclaim lands
waterlogged, history bogged:

on Bohey’s raw hills
we navigate gradients,
search out the ruined tombs
of Tullyskeherny,
doorways of limestone
white as bone.



III


With you I am circling futures
the mind's latitudes

between trays of smoky tea
we cross Baltic blue seas,
skim ice water in Kvaloya,
drift with bergs in Jokulsarlon
where a midnight sun
is melting colours.


And the afternoons we make
are meadow sweet
puddled with sunlight

talking of places
and things to come ...





(c) Siobhan Logan 2011

Stitching the Cliches

Spring is busy trashing my garden with wind and rain and I see poetry slams and events shooting up all over the place. Something is definitely in the air. But for me, all normal writerly service is suspended for the next week as THE WEDDING approaches. It even demands to be capitalised with barely 6 days to go. Life is now a whirl of menu-choice spreadsheets, table plans and sparkly accessories. For a wedding wraps a writer tight in the very thing s/he most abhors - yards and sequinned yards of cliche ...

However, this nuptial circus training has also entailed the writing of the Wedding Poem - the subject of this week's blog. A very tricky assignment. And not only writing and editing it but then getting it past the censorious scrutiny of the Registrar's Office. On Friday, I submitted my offering in person at Leicester Town Hall. A very helpful young woman cast her eye over the poem and looked uncertain. She passed it to her superior who scanned it with even more gravity and took it away for further checks. I don't know how many officials subsequently passed judgement on it or whether they used surgical gloves. What were the critieria for this entry? Were they hesitant about line breaks, thematic cohesion or the secular connotations of the verb 'to divine'? I'll never know. When it finally secured approval, no critique was given. Whew!

Because I certainly couldn't have produced another one. I'm quite lost when it comes to writing poems for occasions and it's very rare these days I write about personal experiences at all. I'm no Carol Ann Duffy, not a poet of the heart or human relationships. And how do you engineer a love poem that's not riddled with cliche - or a lyric that is authentic and intimate and yet immediately accessible to fifty or so guests? I had to rummage through notebooks as far back as 1994 to find the raw material for this one. Now give me an iceberg ... which did manage to make an appearance in this one:

we cross Baltic blue seas,
skim ice water in Kvaloya,
drift with bergs in Jokulsarlon

And that's all you're getting because even more than the dress, this adornment of words is under wraps. The only people who've seen it are my trusted critics, Leicester Writers' Club, who helped me edit it this week. Much snipping, pinching in and stitches in time. Certainly the groom has not had a peek. Because when you strip away all the language, all the civil ceremony and wedding cliches, he is what the day is all about.