Chris Armstrong's Blog: CuratedLines, page 9

The Absent Sailor

Chris

Sunset

Letters

Those love letters from the seventies
I could not bear to read again
and could not bear to throw

Those airmail forms
those tortured lonely twelve page laments
that I read and read so many times
in my cabin off Cape Town,
in Melbourne and Sydney:
So many words
So  much love

But in the end
They were just ash
And I scattered them

Ashes to her ashes

First published in Mostly Welsh 2019 (Y Lolfa) p.92

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Happy Christmas…

Chris

… to all our readers!

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A Winter Poem

Chris

Winter White

Winter white. The cold wind across the fields

spoke only of snow and wearied him

prisoner in the cottage where his impatience yields

no words on the cold and barren purity of the snow

white paper, no words longing for their page longing

.

for their precise moment to mark the dreadful whiteness

that had come with winter’s snow and the ice that followed it,

their precise moment when reality’s niveous brightness

might be dispelled by their genero...

Gorillas, Children and Reading

Chris

One of the charities that I support is Nkuringo Education & Community Support (NECS) which was set up to support the school and villages of Nkuringo in Uganda – who hosted a group of us when we visited in 2014 to see the mountain gorillas of Bwindi ‘The Impenetrable Forest’. The charity – through its ever increasing membership has supported many, many children through primary and secondary school (which involves providing clothes, shoes, school books, bunk beds, desks and mattresses a...

Notes for Book of the Spirit

Chris

For those who have a copy of Book of the Spirit, it may be helpful to look at the notes and annotations that I have recently made available. The short collection of poems merges the secular with the theistic, while the language borrows from religions and there are references drawn from religious works. The notes may help with an understanding of sources and references. The pdf files can be downloaded from the Resources page.

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The Sea

Chris

The sea is ever present in my writing – both in my prose and in many of my poems. I spent ten years of my life at sea and, both before and after that time, the draw of swimming or surfing continued to take me to beaches. I was lucky to have spent most of my childhood on the Gower in South Wales so had ready access to wonderful beaches. Perhaps that explains – to some extent – the sea’s tidal pull.

Much of the story… much of the two stories in The Dark Trilogy is governed by the sea ...

Who is Trystan Lewis? Who Am I?

Chris

Much of The Dark Trilogy deals with my past. A while ago I read, and felt that I had to respond to, a blog post – Clearing Out – by Andrew Green, one-time National Librarian of Wales. He had written:

I’ve been clearing out.  Clearing cupboards in the front room, full of books, files, magazines, papers, photos, games, maps and other detritus.  Many of them have been there since the cupboards and the bookshelves above them were built some thirty years ago…

The cupboards have yiel...

Structure of a Book

Chris

There are only seventeen poems and 27 printed pages; but there are also four sections in Book of the Spirit!

An Introit is something sung at the beginning of a religious service – the section sets the scene, placing reader and writer alike within a world, reminding them of their insignificance, as drops in the grand scheme of things – in the ocean – as they try to understand, and in the case of the writer, try to express the beauty of communication, and thereby of destiny, fate and...

Another day, another book launch!

Chris

This post launches my new collection of poems – Book of the Spirit – which was published this week. Further details and a link to buy a copy can be found on the Books page.

In developing this small collection – it was always destined to be a small collection, a chapbook – I wanted to celebrate – to write in praise of – writing, particularly the writing of poetry and love poetry especially, by creating a work in which the medium itself was the message, and by raising that message, th...

Art Trail Magazine

Chris

The Ceredigion Art & Craft Trail (CACT) were kind enough to feature me in the Autumn/Winter edition of art trail magazine which can be read online here. CACT was formed to raise the profile of artists and craftspeople in Ceredigion, which it does through their website and through a number of exhibition-sales throughout the year. The next will take place at The Bandstand in Aberystwyth from Thursday 15th – Saturday 17th December. It is advertised on Facebook as a fantastic opportunity ...