Skin-dancing with the Snakes

This collection should come with a warning. Its word-charms get under your skin and wriggle it loose. Its rhyme-chimes sing you awake. The poet SusanRichardson strides into her third collection by CinnamonPress, abandoning rucksack-baggage, at ease with her own voice. In the opening poem, 'Let my words be bright with animals', she announces her song;

'Let my verbs be studded with Glow Worms.

Let Painted Ladies flit from each vowel I sound.'

Richardson's eco-poetry is as subversive as it is playful. A tiger-woman hunts 'not just for prey but for pungent signs/ that her kind has stopped declining.' I caught the spirit of AngelaCarter lurking in the undergrowth of her reworked fairytales; a daughter-turned-deer in 'The White Doe' is undaunted:

'Though the man I was meant to wed

turns hunter,

I will out-wood him.

For an un-life in the unlight

has taught me slinkness …'

At the same time, the bounce and burble of its sound-patterning, the glitter of its word-coining, reminded me of Gerald Manley Hopkins. So her starlings insist on their collective pronoun;

'… though she'll try to un-us

she'll cuss our dizzy-dazzle

us-gloss of flight

… us loves to live thus

usly ...'

The lower-case title skindancing signals the collection's unifying theme. It is a twenty-first century Ovid's Metamorphoses that refuses species/ gender boundaries or lexical standardisation. Throw the dictionary away with your rainproof OS map. Richardson explores the 'Humanimal's cloven nature, our intimacy with and alienation from our animal origins. In 'born wrong-bodied', a mole-human celebrates ' mud's velvet hug' while in 'Chiaro', the pure animal Brown Dog 'sniffs your body-length/ then pisses stars and glitter';

'This is my joyspace! This! This! This!'

Others are more conflicted, like a seal-woman unwillingly changed:

'I had to earn the sea's esteem

spurn the urge to scream

beneath its upturned ceiling.'

('Homophoca Vox Pop')

Richardson's metaphors typically put you right inside the metamorphosis so you experience the sensuous possibility of another skin;

'What my spine believed were prickles of unease

were the birth-hurts of feathers.'

(The Pen is Mightier')

However Richardson also dances her way in and out of the skin of words as much as stories. She is teasing at the edge of language, its whoop-whooping and its gestures towards a physical reality. This poetry swoops from the ancient to the urban, from the lyrical to the colloquial, as easily its creatured humans shape-shift;

'… and i look

down and omigod

my belly's covered

in scales and

i'm like

wow Sri Lakshmi

what have you

done here? … i'm

totally cool

with it though ..'

(the full moon)

As in texting, sentence lose their capitals but the polyphony of voices gets ever more fluid. They slip the boundaries of 'man-made' grammars. Word-classes revolt and re-form; neologisms slither into animal language – the 'rrrrrraaaaaw' of the lion, the 'gubfobs shrull glupper' of seal-speak and best of all, the vowelled-sibilance of a merfolk transcript complete with an extended 'translation';

Flosha plisha flof sleeshi

ull sosh hallisha soosh.

Blip floff mosh ussa lasha.'

('Sleesh Flosha')

 

I haven't even mentioned the wonderful illustrations by Pat Gregory which 'con-verse' with the poems. They match the closely-textured nature poetry and catch the undertow of its mythologising. Richardson is a 'Wales-based' poet and Welsh stories and place-names lace the collection with a distinctive Celtic tang. Gregory captures this in her twining spirals of animal-human forms, in prints that echo the capitals of an illuminated manuscript and a cover as knotted as the 'what-animal?' riddles of the verse. The artwork heightens the pleasure of the word-singing. Gregory also captures the rich vein of humour in the poems, as in the wry illustration to Zoomorphic' where the Insomnia Llama clasps a sleepless woman, clothed in 'zzzzzz' pyjamas, in an unshakeable embrace. But above all, these poems will leave your skin tingling and your synapses firing. You will be itching to slip into a new pelt with a richer musk;

'When I tried it on I suddenly believed

I could speak shrimp and brine.

It made me feel oceanic.

Made me as high as a spring tide.'

Polar Snaps & Snippets

Well, I was all blogged out by last Friday after a week-long launch of our Polar Poets blogpage. It was fun thinking of new items to fill each day with and we were very pleased with the number of visitors we got and particularly, the people who posted comments and entered our competitions. Now we just have to live up to the launch!

You might like to take a look at the interview with Susan Richardson, my fellow Polar Poet, or the one she did with me. We got to share some of the secrets of our separate journeys to arctic regions. There's also a couple of our poems to sample - and piccies of course - plus captions from our guests.

As for me, I'm already getting nostalgic for the snow. I can't believe it's only 9 days ago I was tramping around in it. And I thought I would revive the mood by posting some of the photos I snapped on that magical walk around my local park. If I wasn't snowblind, I was certainly mesmerised by the long tree shadows it threw, mapping the ground with ghost branches and a maze of boot tracks.

So much of the news has reported this as 'bad weather', a catastrophe we've battled through with a 'Blizzard Spirit'. Yet it seems to me we only get to experience this kind of deep winter landscape once in a few decades, if that. And so I hoard every rumour of returning snow, every morning of frost-crusted rooves. Don't even mention spring ...

Promises in Glass

She has returned. I've been longing for the crunch of blanketed snow under my boots, its muffled thuds, feathers on my face. A trip to the park this morning ushered me into a world I'd almost forgotten. There was the Victorian lampost with its red signs and there was me, wearing the contents of the wardrobe. Trees were giant creatures, frozen under her spell. Lakes were fallen fields of white, across whose surface a moorhen picked delicately. Boundaries were lost. Birds hushed. Black railings traced hieroglyphic warnings. This was a world etched in ink and light where skeleton beeches threw impossibly long lines of violet shadow.

In the Japanese garden, red dragons snaked between weeping willows, their writhing forms echoed in the twisted branches of the maples. The mirrored shadows across the lawn had me mesmerised but as I turned, easterly winds were shaking a fine ash of snow from the pines. And then came real flakes, fattening on these icy gusts, whipping across my vision. I heard jingling high above me. It proved to be a rag of cloth flapping on the flag-pole. But it might have been reindeer. She is close by, the White Witch, and I am one of her minions. Specks of glass glitter even now in the sunshine like promises she scattered.

I was urged on this morning by the voices of two writers on the radio, enthusing about how winter landscapes inspired them. The poet Susan Richardson and novelist Margaret Elphinstone, told John McCarthy on BBC Radio 4's Excess Baggage, how they relished the disruption to routines and the usual rush of life. Susan spoke of 're-learning to wait' in the snow and mentioned the Finnish tradition of 'keeping the twilight'. Margaret recalled being snowed in for weeks on end on a Shetland island and how it allowed her to just settle into 'being here and now'. Both of them felt they did their best work in the winter and I'd echo that.

So could there be a more perfect time to launch the Polar Poets website? Yes, we've even arranged the weather. From Monday 11th January, Susan Richardson and myself will be joining forces, to bring poetry and stories of the arctic across the country. We will be going live on Monday and all through the week, there'll be interviews, competitions and blogs, with something new each day. I hope you'll drop in, add a comment, maybe even win a prize! And for this week only, I'll be linking up 'Shaking the Colours' with this sister-blog. Just let the ice enchantment last a little longer ...