Chris Armstrong's Blog: CuratedLines, page 7

Coming Soon!

Chris

Contents

Chorus

Chorus Chorus

Corona Sutra

The First Winter

Longing

Ystrad Fflur: Dusk  

Uchtryd’s Summer Place

Evening Light

Autumn Rain

Legacy

Seeing Starlings with Will

Town

Seaside

The Estuary

Tides

Heatherslade

Innocence

Life Tercets

Sea Story

Shell

Thálassa, Thálassa

Et le feu s’éteignit sur la mer…

Dark Seas Dawning

Ex Libris

The Interface

A Memory of Night

Evening Poem

If Only the Sky Could Drea...

The themes of Lost Time

Chris

Cover design to follow!

I have just finished curating a selection of my poems into my next collection – Lost Time, and am now pondering the idea of writing a short introduction. Maybe this will be its first draft! The poems are arranged through six themes:

Covid – Place – Sea – Writing – Memories – Time

although it would be fair to say, and intentional, that the edges to the themes are blurred. To the extent that during the process I have once or twice moved a poem from one sectio...

Creation

Chris

As I write, each line reaches for memories
lost, fallen beyond the edge of the world:
kamarupa dwelling in infinity, fading

when my lines do not find them
and my words fail passion and desire.

Eons, lost pasts. Which of them
could dream my frail dream of this
verse? Which, thrown

across the fabric of time, could make
nothing everything?

The post Creation appeared first on _______________ Curated Lines Publishing _________________________ .

The Poetry Reading

Chris

I have never really liked giving readings of my poetry. I am not sure why. Perhaps it is partly that I sense that my speaking voice is not the mellifluous voice I hear in my head, does not have the timbre that the poems deserve—that it does not—in my humble opinion, as they say—present them well. I am not a natural performer! Or perhaps it is that I seem to possess a skill, which surely must be unique to any wordsmith: I have the ability to read aloud a line that I have read hundreds o...

The Welsh Swagman

Chris

I have been working on a poem about a farm. Or perhaps it is about its tenant for some fifty years from July 1848.

In ten years Joseph Jenkins created a farm that was judged to be the best in the county. He had learned everything there was to know about farming from his father and put that knowledge to good use, becoming prosperous and well liked in the community. He had little formal schooling – apart from some early learning he spent only a couple of terms at a school some five m...

Consequences

Chris

Because I have seen
such small glory as heaven found
Lit translucent in the wing of a dragonfly serene above the dark pond depths
Lit gold in the sunlit pelt of that one white cat still beneath the tree
Lit in Spring’s faint skeleton of Winter’s fallen leaf
Lit in the fractal eternity of each flake that floats snow down
and know the pain each angel hears
Held in a single seadrop soft splashed on some high rock above the surf
Held in that single grain of sand that shapes the sloping beach or c...

The Sea Stories

Chris

A few posts ago, I mentioned the seven short stories from When I Am Not Writing Poetry that are set in the merchant navy: three short snapshots and four longer pieces: The Beginning, Cargo, The Sailing Board and Such Sweet Sorrow. While the snapshots and The Beginning are true stories or are based on real events, the other longer pieces are complete fiction… although heavily based on my experiences.

Cargo tells of the life a third officer on board a general cargo ship bound – as I ...

Back to being a poet!

Chris

I am working on bringing together my next collection of poems for publication in a few months time. I had made an initial selection some time ago but coming back to them ‘cold’ after a few months when I had not looked at or thought about them made me begin to doubt, to wonder if the selection and ordering was quite right! Some of them no longer seemed worthy of publication! From the vantage point of these few months, the collection looked almost random!

A few days on and about ten ...

Two Short Stories

Chris

There are two stories in When I Am Not Writing Poetry  that are linked – the one relating the ideas behind, and the birth of, the other.

The original ideas behind The Endless Border was to write about escaping from, and searching for life beyond, Covid. A journey made by two friends into the unknown. And I wanted to use their contrapuntal conversations – a little like Beckett’s Mercier & Camier – as a means of adding a further dimension to the story. At the same time it was to be a ...

My covers and the sea

Chris

By now some readers will probably have noticed that there is a theme linking all of my covers: the sea, that “watery part of the world”(Moby Dick) that for some ten or so years was both the foreground and the background to my life as I served as a Navigating (or Deck) Officer in the New Zealand Shipping Company and Overseas Containers Limited, travelling mostly to New Zealand and Australia. Before that, my love of the sea was confined to teenage years of swimming, fishing and surfing o...