Midwinter Skin

I'm falling in love with Leicestershire's landscapes in this winter skin. Another frostbitten morning today, this time out at Beacon Hill.

Not a whisper of wind and yet it felt as cold as Iceland. My camera kept dying - begging for a warm pocket. But we coaxed these pictures out of it in between ...

The ice and rock looks as stark as anything we saw in the Arctic and the fogbank eclipsed the country below. A very magical morning. How I want this midwinter to last!

To see the whole album, hop to my Facebook photos.

Snow-Witched

Snow brings out my inner child. The thrill of waking up to a snow day hasn't faded after all these years. Maybe it helps that I'm not a driver.

At 8 am on Saturday morning I prised my partner out of bed to catch this Narnia-moment at our local park.

I loved the way the sky colour kept changing as the sun pushed through the trees sluggishly. This is my Blue scene - light that reminds me of the Arctic.




Another thing that reminded me of Iceland was the way my fingers froze whenever I peeled them out of my gloves. And the sweetness of plunging them back after the frostbite!


Look at all the blacks and whites and the extraordinary baroque curves of this bench. Or the skeletal forms of the trees on the skyline.

I find this kind of landscape utterly unique. Time seems to stand still. Details are etched in vivid monochrome. Sound is muffled but the eye sees everything with an ice-lit clarity.







And here's that fallen sun burnishing the ice on the canal. The trees, arching impossibly in a Gothic gesture, make one of those accidental poems in the viewfinder.

How can I not feel that I've stumbled into the territory of the White Witch? I'm happy to be under her spell, having no impulse to look for the lamp-post and the way home. In the end it was only the prospect of hot porridge and honey that dragged me back.

Polar Poet at Holmfield Primary

Just back from a lovely morning trekking across the Arctic with the kids from Holmfield Primary. You can't ask for a better warm-up act than a headmaster with a puppet. My thanks to David Lloyd for that. The tots on the front row were shrieking with excitement at an assembly where a long-serving Premises Officer, one Graham Gummage, was presented with the Golden Screwdriver. A hard act to follow ...

When the dust had settled, I was left with 2 classes of 7 - 9 year olds waiting to see the Polar Poet in action. They seemed impressed with my thermal vest - 'really warm' - they agreed. Knew about the volcanoes of Iceland. And were definitely up for some Arctic Warming-up exercises. But they really took off when we did my 'Auroral Football' poem together. In World Cup Week, all the kids were primed for the football chants and lifted the roof when I reached 'and now he SCORES!' I also had some very able 'frost giants' to hold up my magical 'Firebridge' ( a sparkling green sari).

We went on to learn how to say 'hello' in Saami, how many seasons reindeer have and why Rudolf was really 'a girl'! Once shuffled into pairs and threes, they had a pretty good crack at the Reindeer Quiz with some excellent guesses. I ran out of time to take them on a mass reindeer migration but they listened very attentively to the Mansy legend (from Siberia) of the White Reindeer. Another flying, talking reindeer all-rounder. Asked about 'ice melt', someone was immediately able to explain about greenhouse gases - I was impressed - and we explored how climate change is affecting animals of the arctic. The Snow Queen had the last word in 'The Last Legend of the North' and then we were ready for a half-time munch.

They'd been very enthusiastic and involved in the poetry performance but I was even more impressed with their storywriting session. After break, they got to name their own White Reindeer and we talked about what it would feel like to fly for the first time. What does the earth look like so far below? The people are like ants, they said, and cars are like 'mini-beetles'. One boys said the people below looked like 'tiny crumbs'. Another one worked in words like 'tundra' and 'flickering lights'. There were beautiful descriptions of the stars 'blasting light' and the many colours of the Northern Lights. And some lively snippets of dialogue between the talking reindeer and his/ her human friend.

Where did their aerial arctic journeys take them? To the South Pole, to outer space and Mars (whose surface is brown like chocolate) and to the World Cup. We didn't get to hear which team the deer was supporting. Can we guess? For myself I can only hope their imagination was fired in the way mine was when I first read the story of the Snow Queen and Gerda's strange and perilous journey. How could I know back then that stories like that would later take me all the way to the Arctic Circle and back? I look forward very much to receiving some promised letters from the Holmfield kids who proved to be excellent companions for my latest expedition.

postscript:

and here are the letters which I loved. They show how much the kids used their imaginations and how they really engaged with the writing too, including these letters to the Polar Poet.


'I loved the brige of fire. I also liked the way the poems were said. The way the poems were acted. Now that's what I call Polar Poem DRAMA!'

'The one thing that I enjoyed with her was writting and learning. + especially loning about the norern lites, that was magical!!!'

'Thank you for coming to Holmfield and teaching us all about the North pole! I liked it when you showed us the Northern Lights, the Snow Queen, The Reindeers and the reindeer story. When we had to get into partners, I really enjoyed it.'

'The children in my class loved it. They thort that your were Beautifull. I loved the football poem.'

'And I like the football and all of ower class like the polar poet ... you have been so friendly to us.'

and some lovely comments from their teacher too:

'The children thoroughly enjoyed the visit. They found the stories of visits to the Arctic, and tales related to the Northern Lights fascinating. The poetry was wonderful and the children enjoyed the audience participation element ... It really opened up their world.'

(Holmfield Teacher)

Polar Poets Summer Gig

NEWSFLASH !! !

First ever Polar Poets gig now Booked for this summer's festival - see:

http://polarpoets.blogspot.com/2010/03/polar-poets-at-wrexham.html


see my sister blog for more details on the adventures of the 2 intrepid Polar Poets - myself and Susan Richardson - as we bring our new show Arctic-ulate to science festivals and other venues this year.

can't wait now to start rehearsals - somewhere in the ether between Wales and the Midlands ....

Arctic Hunger

It's a perfect sun-fired day. Every leaf and brick gleams and out on the street, the whole neighbourhood is gearing up for the Divali lights switch-on. And on this crisp, autumn day I am thinking of ice. I'm re-reading Susan Richardson's beautiful collection of poetry, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone (published Cinnamon Press). I was lucky enough to hear Susan read at the summer's Polyverse Poetry Festival and was envious of her account of visiting Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland – all places on my travel wish-list. Because like the penguin that recurs in this collection, I feel :

'… a force that's attracted to the north in her,
the thunder of summer light,
the blood of explorers in the tundra,
the tilting cap of ice.'

Susan undertook this trek to trace the footsteps of a Viking woman and the first sequence of poems, Gudrun the Rare, follows her on a life of sea-voyages. From the first line, it is utterly spellbinding: 'I know the gasp this grass gives/ when it's first touched by snow.' I was also very moved by the following poem, which relates the 'Resettlement' of an old woman from a remote, fishing island. As the men are lifting her wooden home into the water, she reflects on:

'… the lives of its five generations,
the twenty-eight births,
the labour pains ingrained in the wood of its walls,
and all those oil-skinned hours of waiting
while the men were at sea in a storm.'

No less engaging is her account of the evolutionary journey of a penguin, from migratory bird to ice-locked creature of the pole: 'Her need now beats its wings… propels her against/ the speckled shell of the sky …' The language is all lucid and unfussy like this, images arising naturally from the environment of her stories. The rhythms are also seductive, pausing sometimes to let you take that ice-tanged breath:

'So now, with tender eyes,
I must hunt for a hole in the white

and wait

patient

at the rim
for the whiskered nose of inspiration …'

This poem is about the act of writing and it is indeed 'tender eyes' Richardson turns on the Arctic world and its creatures, both animal and human. In a clever structure, the collection begins with sequences about 2 Viking women and ends with a section about the male Arctic explorers of the early twentieth-century. Here is the voice of Edgar Evans, the first of Scott's men to die:

'My hand is quite okay, sir.
Yes, I'm quite okay.

I just feel such crimson hunger.
My ribs are what's left of that rotting ship,
wrecked in Rhossili Bay, stuck
in the sand for dogs to piss on.'

I hope to get the chance to meet up with Susan again and share our mutual arctic fascination. Meanwhile, if you're another ice lover, I can't recommend this book highly enough. And even if you're not, there's much to relish in these stories of human wanderings and foibles.

Icebergs and Dark Flames at Polyverse

I feel my recent silence in the blogosphere needs some explaining. For the past fortnight, I've been nursing a bad neck strain, negotiating the world at eye-level gaze. Even neck swathed in scarves, peering at my keyboard aggravated it so blogging was out.

Luckily, I was able to rehearse my revived show STORIES DRUMMED TO POLAR SKIES. I was thrilled to be appearing this weekend as one of the headlining acts at the Polyverse festival. On Friday evening, I played to a very responsive audience in the Martin Hall theatre at Loughborough University. It was great to be doing this show in a theatre space again, with Saami music drifting over the PA and dramatic lighting to capture the mood of these arctic stories. At the end, one audience member said she wanted me to rerun the PowerPoint images and replay the whole thing; poems, music, auroral physics and all. Now that's what a poet loves to hear.



Polyverse was my first ever poetry festival and I was completely smitten. I heard some stunning poetry, bought a heap of books and chatted with editors and jobbing poets from across the country and beyond. It was especially good to finally meet my lovely editor from Original Plus, Sam Smith, down all the way from Cumbria. The festival lived up to its name with an astonishing range of styles and voices and subjects. I particularly enjoyed the other 'arctic poet', Susan Richardson, whose vivid performance was a revelation. I am so envious of her journeys to Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland and her poetry found a magnetic resonance in my bones:

'It's a force that's attracted to the North in her,
the thunder of summer light,
the blood of explorers in the tundra,
the tilting cap of ice.'

There were many other very engaging readers, including some startlingly talented young poets, and of course, Carol Ann Duffy was sublime. A consummate storyteller, here is no declaiming. Her delivery is sly and taut and draws us in to collude in her mischief. The hair is all dark flames. She has a way of holding back on the last line, leaning into the mike and loosing that killer phrase with a glint in her eye. Her wicked narrative poem, 'The Laughter of Stafford Girls High' , rang a real bell with me from my own Catholic girls' schooling. This was delivered in separate slices to keep us begging for more. And then the moving sonnets of Rapture to finish. Here in the lover's 'Row', Duffy's images are so astonishing and right and conjured for me that stomach-pit feeling:

'But when we rowed,
the room swayed and sank down on its knees,
the air hurt and purpled like a bruise,
the sun banged the gate in the sky and fled.'

On Sunday I attended 2 really useful workshops on 'what to write' with Pam Thompson and 'who to ask' with Damien Walters of the Literature Network re. resources, funding, publishing etc. So I feel I got a glimpse of the whole poetry landscape. We were incredibly lucky to have this festival on our doorstep and let's hope this is the first of what will become a long tradition. I'm indebted to Radcliff Gregory for his vision of it and also Kerry Featherstone who steered this rambling herd of poets in the right direction all weekend. Fabulous!

Now I would mention Lyric Lounge, that other great spoken word event in Leicester, running all this week - but my neck is starting to do that twisty, creaking thing. More later ...