Brian Lavelle's Blog, page 3

Wavecrash One

Wavecrash One is some new music from me as the days shorten and the shadows gather at the edges of life. I hope this will be the first of a sequence of similar works of improvisations for electric guitar and ZOIA, and I hope too that you might enjoy it if you have a chance to listen.

Available free or pay what you like here.

La Maison des Feins

A low house lies in this forest,
and nothing lives
there, but silence.

Its passage a corridor
of mirrorbark or skyloam:
grace or grave tidings, anyway.

Inside is no-space,
the pull of shadows.
An architrave of particles.

And I have walked there
amid pillars of dust and caustic mesons
without seeing.

These photographs are from a visit on 1 September 2023 to la Maison des Feins, an all��e couverte or passage grave in the For��t du Mesnil just outside the town of Tress�� in the d��partement of Ille-et-Vilaine in Brittany.

Greenhall: a memory

Beneath a canopy of green, arches of foliage racing into the distance, a father runs after a boy on a bike. The moment is anxious: for the man, a fear of letting go; for the son, fear of falling, of gravity's pull towards pain and bruised and bloodied knees. This place, this retreat from the world at large: a haven where a house once stood. The road on which the bike flies is the old, meandering driveway, a perfect location to learn to cycle: in his mind it feels infinitely long, like the summer, like childhood itself. The father and son have both seen the brick and stone towers that pierce the trees, the supports for a rail bridge that has long since vanished, leaving only those pylons to watch over the parkland of the former estate.

The boy has often wondered where the big house once stood. No convenient site or open space seems to fit the picture in his mind of what it might have looked like 50 or 100 years ago. There are no remnants of it at all, he thinks, not even the ghost of a foundation to mark the absence. He doesn't know why it disappeared: his father has never told him; perhaps he'd never asked. It doesn't really matter. The disappearance left behind only some outbuildings in which, if he was lucky and his dad agreed, a man in 1960s overalls sold them choc ices from an antique chest freezer. He remembers that freezer as an integral part of the building, bursting up out of the floor like a living thing. He can still see the lurid paint of the interior walls too, hear the sound of the freezer's lid sliding open, sense that delicious gasp of cold air escaping.

All of this was decades ago, at least 45 years more or less. The memory seems so vivid but perhaps that's only the result of the twists in time that have reified his recollection across all these years. Whatever that place is or was, for him it represents an interconnection of happinesses in the form of the trees, the gentle slopes, the swings and roundabout and climbing frame, the river which runs along the bottom of the small glen at the foot of the estate. It's that first solo bike ride without stabilisers, without his dad holding on to the back as he pedals furiously, a moment of pallid expectation, even of exhilaration, of love and trust in their most intense forms.

The house and the bike are both gone now. He has never been back there, to Greenhall, even though he often thinks he should. The father is gone too. But they all still exist in memory���in memory almost as unbearable as it is unbreakable.

Originally written in March 2016 and presented here in revised form, passed through memory���s filters yet again.

tree's arc

tree's arc
against sky
beneficent tilde, bending
bark untitled
and yet
so dense with meaning
that it sounds
a cadence across the woods

this tree
tree imprint
tree singular
tree intimation

filament in dark canopy
an adaptation alight with sharpness
and sway

forks
������������in roots and trail
and half-slowed exclamation

The photograph which opens this poem was taken in the woodland around the Japanese Garden at Cowden on 16 September 2022.

comma,

From the archives, a year ago today:

comma,

Lines

amid fern and bracken
the rill sings
                    of metal bridges, reservoirs aligned

pylons overhead,
lines crackle
and fizz, the overheard

now keep silent
on the emptied path
in the heron’s eyeline
near the half-seen shore

find an outfall
instead of falling
and a carpet of cornstalks
                    awave in the breeze

watch as she emerges
from the shallows,
mere shadow of black cotton lines
merging into white skin
at watersedge

and later,
the picture fading
from maiden to phantom,
pines creak and sway:
soft bark,
stripped light

[words and images from a morning walk at Torduff and Clubbiedean Reservoirs and beyond, Monday 17 July 2023.]

Lines

amid fern and bracken
the rill sings
������������������������������of metal bridges, reservoirs aligned

pylons overhead,
lines crackle
and fizz, the overheard

now keep silent
on the emptied path
in the heron���s eyeline
near the half-seen shore

find an outfall
instead of falling
and a carpet of cornstalks
������������������������������awave in the breeze

watch as she emerges
from the shallows,
mere shadow of black cotton lines
merging into white skin
at watersedge

and later,
the picture fading
from maiden to phantom,
pines creak and sway:
soft bark,
������������������������������stripped light

[words and images from a morning walk at Torduff and Clubbiedean Reservoirs and beyond, Monday 17 July 2023.]

nine scenes from a diminutive notebook, January 2017

Wintering the storm:
it unfurls so silently as she sleeps alone.

(16.1.2017)

Insinuation. The pathway twists toward her,
and disappointment.

(17.1.2017)

A boy on a bike, its stablisers removed;
his dad runs behind.

(18.1.2017)

The frostbitten path,
angularity of ice, shades and shards
like glass.

(19.1.2017)

Outside, the robin rings the twigs
and starts a round of feathered pinball.

(23.1.2017)

Enter the water
and swim, swim into the blue.
You cross a border.

(25.1.2017)

A heron stood there, statuesque
by the roadside.
Slategrey sentinel.

(27.1.2017)

The cemetery stones standing
in granite lines:
vigilant of loam.

(28.1.2017)

A distant thunder,
roiling, brooding, gathering
at the edge of the skyline.

(29.1.2017)

Nine scenes from a diminutive notebook, January 2017

Wintering the storm:
it unfurls so silently as she sleeps alone.

(16.1.2017)

Insinuation. The pathway twists toward her,
and disappointment.

(17.1.2017)

A boy on a bike, its stablisers removed;
his dad runs behind.

(18.1.2017)

The frostbitten path,
angularity of ice, shades and shards
like glass.

(19.1.2017)

Outside, the robin rings the twigs
and starts a round of feathered pinball.

(23.1.2017)

Enter the water
and swim, swim into the blue.
You cross a border.

(25.1.2017)

A heron stood there, statuesque
by the roadside.
Slategrey sentinel.

(27.1.2017)

The cemetery stones standing
in granite lines:
vigilant of loam.

(28.1.2017)

A distant thunder, roiling, brooding, gathering
at the edge of the skyline.

(29.1.2017)

M. John Harrison, ‘Wish I Was Here’ (Serpent’s Tail, 2023)

This delightful, insightful, stubbornly peculiar “anti-memoir” by Mike Harrison is my book of the year so far; I can’t see anything overtaking it, frankly.

The writing is as luminously sui generis and haunting as his best work, although there’s so much in that category to render the superlative clumsy. Wish I Was Here is also fictively tricksy, memory standing in for the undeniable, unreliable narrator, the weight of evidence such that each of us is essentially no more than palimpsest, dense overlays of misrememberings and dismemberings. Perhaps it’s a book about writing, about not writing, about an escape to and from writing: I don’t really know, and don’t need to know; I just absolutely loved its brilliance and its ghosts.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing the author at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this coming August.

Wish I Was Here was published by Serpent’s Tail in the UK in May 2023.