Giles Watson's Blog, page 4

Poems from Ashdown Woods

Here is a little reading of some of the poems from my new book, A Glister of Leaves. These ones have their setting in common: all were inspired by the mixed oak woodland adjacent to Ashdown House, a National Trust property in the Lambourn Downs, where I regularly used to walk when I lived in the region.

The Covid-19 lockdown caused me to revisit many such old places in my memory, and the resulting poems, illustrated by photos I took some years ago, became the substance of my new collection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClVDV...


A Glister of Leaves

A Glister of Leaves

Sungazing: Badbury Clump

The air rings with the chimes of children
and chaffinches, the sycamore leaves
half grown, translucent. Beeches reach
towards them across the path, where
I lie down with my hair on the mould,
gazing up to where the sun burns through
the interstices, and a haze of tiny insects
hangs suspended. I can close my eyes
and come back here any time, from any
place on earth, because somehow, this
moment stopped for me and is preserved
for always, for as long as I breathe or feel
the leaf-split sun on my upturned face.

Poem by Giles Watson, 4 April, 2020. Photograph: Badbury Clump, Oxfordshire, 4 June, 2010.

The deluxe hardback edition of my new book is now available to order print on demand. It is printed on the best quality paper to ensure faithful colour-reproduction of the photographs. There is a photograph on every facing page, which I think makes it quite an appealing book, and a nice gift, especially for anyone who is in isolation. A regular paperback edition will become available in a couple of weeks. If any Albany residents would like a copy of this edition, let me know in the comments, and I’ll put in a bulk order, so that you can have it at a reduced price (around $53, or $60 by post anywhere in Australia). I’m trying to work out why the price is so heavily marked up for online orders, so in the meantime, if anyone from further away wants a copy for $53 Australian plus postage, please pm me your address, and I’ll arrange for the printer to send one directly to you, and for you to pay by bank transfer. The paperback will be cheaper.

Here’s the blurb:

Between 31 March and 13 May, 2020, Giles Watson went into self-isolation during the Covid-19 outbreak, and sought mental and spiritual refreshment in memories of some of his most beloved landscapes. Illustrated with photographs from his years in England, A Glister of Leaves revisits the megalithic monuments, woodlands and chalk downlands of southern Oxfordshire, recalls encounters with exquisite insects, and celebrates the gifts of solitude and quiet observation. The poems in this collection will revive the spirits of all who seek solace in the natural world during times of crisis.

A Glister of Leaves

Three Subterranean Poems

Here's a reading of three poems inspired by works of British artists in the 1940s, all of which explored subterranean themes:

https://youtu.be/oyFBOJ-oOwY

Shelter Women

Breathing roots, blanket-barked,
knot-mouthed slumberers, dead things
on the edge of sentience - gnarled ones
in the groined earth, grit-ingrained,
webbed with mycelium: we are Fates
and fated, sculptural, immovable,
hollowed out and whole - shelter women,
wombed and wombing. Waking, we glare
into ghosts of echoes, our sockets
blaring - the world above, a clatter
of blind unknowing. Buildings broken,
buses overturned, Blitz-dazed streets:
these things come to us as a dumb,
encumbered thrumming, a rattling
of plumbing. We are knitters, nursers,
blank standers, watchers of nothing,
white nocturnals warding off the morning.

Woman Seated in the Underground, 1941

She has been knitted out of wax, hands
unnaturally small: this Norn of worry, sitting
separate from the others, turned away
from the tunnel’s vortex. Her fingers pinch
each other; I think her nails are bitten. Instead
of eyes, she has absences, borrowing the tube stop’s
blackness. Her children are all evacuees:
that’s why she’s the only one who’s not
reclining. Incendiaries just ate her house,
her street’s all shrapnelled, every window
shattered, and the washing hangs in shreds,
but none of that matters: what haunts her is
the smell of trains, and how her daughters
wept, their nowheres scrawled on luggage-tags.

Man in a Cave

I hollowed it out with my own hands. The sandstone
was soft enough, so I only lost my nails. I’m amazed
at myself: how heedless I was to pain. The way above
is sunken, hedged with thorns and a needling grizzle
of gorse. After the chase, my trail smells more of fox
than any man’s; I too have learnt to squat watchful
over my spraint. Should anyone shine a light, I’ll hang
my head, so my pupils do not glow. See – my shoulders
have moulded to rock; my muscles might be sediments,
this flesh a brown compaction of trodden English soil.
If I emerged in daytime, birds would perch on me, worms
curl under my feet, and if it rained, I’d drizzle into loam,
but I’m safe here, and almost righteous. I’ll not come forth
to see what holocausts have raged, since I went to earth.

Poems by Giles Watson.

How Mimma came to be written

How Mimma came to be written:
by Librettist Giles Watson

(This piece explores the writing of the musical. The novel was written concurrently.)

Mimma is a musical about the meeting of two very different minds and hearts: two women from very different cultures, with very different aspirations, whose friendship transcends the conflict between their nations, and endures the ravages of history. The musical itself is also the product of a chance meeting of creative minds.

Ron Siemiginowski, Mimma’s composer and producer, was originally a touring classical pianist and musician, and is now owner of Orana Cinemas in WA. After a chance meeting at a recording studio, it became evident that Ron and I shared a lifelong ambition to write musical theatre. During that first get-together at Ron’s house in Albany, he played on his grand piano the melodies he had already written: an Italian rhumba, the beginnings of operatic arias, and tunes which seemed to belong in the London of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The meeting of minds bore instant fruit. As Ron played, I began to write a flow-chart which would eventually become the plot for Mimma. The 1940s style and the Italian influence took me back to my own doctoral studies of Britain during the Second World War. Ever since then, I had felt that the British government’s decision to intern anti-Fascist Italians, Germans and even Jews after Mussolini’s declaration of war in 1940 was one of the great and largely forgotten ironies of history. This process had culminated in the sinking of the Arandora Starby a German U-boat. The converted passenger liner was deporting ‘enemy aliens’, including many vocal enemies of Hitler and Mussolini, from Britain to Canada, when it was hit by a torpedo, with the loss of 865 lives. It was a story, long forgotten by many, which I had long hoped to tell.

As I listened to Ron’s music, characters emerged in my mind: a young Italian woman journalist, exiled to Britain in 1938 because of her anti-Fascist views; her mother and her brother, who would later participate in the genesis of the Italian Resistance; her uncle, an Italian immigrant to London and the owner of a nightclub in Soho – and his vivacious English employee, a singer who would soon be a rising star.

In the months that followed, the story of the two women, who would eventually be named Mimma and Sarah, inspired new songs, as Ron and I immersed ourselves in wartime Italian and British culture. There were strong personal connections for us, too, in our family histories. As young adults, Ron’s own family had endured life in Nazi-occupied territory, and my own parents’ childhoods had unfolded against the backdrop of the wartime British home-front. My father still has the wooden Spitfire, Messerschmitt and Heinkel which my grandfather, a carpenter, had made for him to play with, and these too were the inspiration for a song called ‘Spitfires and Hurricanes’.

In the context of current migrations and the plight of modern refugees, the story only seemed to gain relevance as we wrote. Wars bring out the best and the worst in people, and officials in times of conflict can play roles which are either heroic and compassionate, or exactly the opposite. It is as though war casts a gigantic magnifying lens on the contradictions of human nature, and Ron’s music and my words gradually began to breathe life into characters who would live these contradictions.

A part of our own experience, too, is the enormous benefit conferred on Australia by its Italian immigrants, who entered our country through Fremantle port both before and after the Second World War. It became obvious during the writing process, that this was the final inspiration which would draw the different strands of our story together.

The story of how Mimma Mimma - A Story of War & Friendship came to be written would not be complete without mention of the extraordinary generosity of spirit which Ron has shown in pursuing this shared dream. Ron has succeeded in drawing together a team which includes some of Australia’s most talented opera singers, one of its foremost dramatic directors, Adam Mitchell, and an orchestrator, Sean O’Boyle, who is perhaps the most prolific musician in the country. It has been a consistent delight to work with all of these people, and to know that in the process, we have created something beautiful and unique.

MIMMA: A Musical of War and Friendship, had an exclusive session at Perth’s Regal Theatre from the 9th – 21st April, 2019.

Celtic Goddess

A couple of years ago, Simone Keane​ and I collaborated on a series of songs inspired by the stories of women in Celtic mythology. We initially intended to go into the studio and produce a fully engineered album of these songs, but over time, we have realised that the freshness of the original performances - recorded by Simone as soon as she had received my lyrics and composed the melodies - would be difficult to replicate. There is an exquisite effortlessness to Simone's performances which I think is perfect for these songs. An album of these recordings has been on Reverbnation for a while, but Soundcloud is more easily accessible.

Buffarches created the beautiful cover image for this album.

https://soundcloud.com/tytoalba0568/s...

Lover of Cold Weather

Here is the title poem for my new collaboration with artist and photographer Martin Williamson. Martin’s photograph was taken near Silsden in Yorkshire, but for me, it triggered memories of long walks in the snow when I used to visit my Grandmother in Longsdon, near Leek in Staffordshire. The title of the collection is true: I am a lover of cold weather, and I used to adore it when it was icy and snowy. I love the way snow transforms landscapes, and the uncanny silence that descends with it. The poems in this collection are often expressions of that love for weather which others call “bad” (I love rain and wind and mist, too!) Is the collection a lament for our changing climate? Yes, but it’s a gentle one. For me, it is also an extended reflection on what it is like to belong in two very different countries at once.

We have worked very hard on the aesthetics of this book. We think we have made a little gem. We hope you do too!

After the poem, you’ll find a link to a reading of it, and also a link to the site where the book can be purchased online.

Lover of Cold Weather
(Poem by Giles Watson. Photograph by Martin Williamson.)

Snow on an ungritted road
is a crusted slurry: the way
is tar-black where a tyre
has crushed it, coasting
into a passing-place. Sloes,
shrivelled round their stones,
still cling to twigs. Ash-keys
dangle.

I have worked up sweat
beneath this dark overcoat;
my scarf is loosened. Though
I should have worn an extra
layer of sock, the chilblains
will be worth it, when I reach
the stone bridge in the valley,
find coal-tits on the suet hanging
at her door, and breathe the black
smell of slack drifting through
the village. Up here, anticipating
the charred and singing kettle, I hear
the hillside amplified, as though
the snow has brought rustlings
closer from the hedgerow, and
the woodpecker at the hollow
thrums in my left ear. Voices
drift from terraced cottages;
cows sigh out cud-sweet
steam within their byres,
magpies scold and scatter,
and somewhere, inscrutable
in cold drystone crevices
grass snakes coil, scale-eyed
and sleeping. I breathe in
ice-crystals, keep on walking.

In the old monochrome
of the snow-drift evening,
my grandmother is waiting
with her cooking in the oven,
the stems of her brussels
split with crosses,
her carrots seethed in butter,
salt and pepper,
and love and warmth
are black and white:
the only things that matter.

And only ivy prospers –
only holly will not wither –
yet I find I have become
a lover of cold weather.

The book is available here:

http://www.lulu.com/…/lover…/paperbac...

Here is a reading of this poem:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i0jVB7M...

A Dawning Fascination with the Mabinogion

My fascination with Wales, and ultimately with its ancient mythology, really began when I was seventeen years old. I was in the passenger seat of a rental car, reading the map, and it had just gone dark. My mother was in the back seat; my father was driving. All day, it seemed, we had been negotiating narrow, sunken lanes. Every few miles, a sign would warn that there were flood waters ahead, but there was never more than a puddle on the road. I could see on the map a shortcut to our destination: an attractive looking B-road which cut across a valley. We turned down it. There was another sign, and moments later, the water level was rising towards our knees inside the car.

My father slipped the car into reverse, miraculously without stalling, and we opened the doors to let the water out. My rare Bob Dylan tapes, just purchased, looked like spirit levels when I looked in their windows. Books, luggage, clothing: all were soaked, with the exception of a copy of Rachel Bromwich’s translations of the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym, which I had also purchased that day. We decided to drive to the nearest village and get accommodation for the night in its pub. By chance, the village was Beddgelert.

And so, I learned the story of Gelert, Llewellyn’s hound, who saved a child from a pack of wolves, and then, by dreadful mistake, met a bloody end at the hands of his master. But before that could happen, when I saw the dog’s celebrated grave the next morning, I got a powerful muscle spasm in my neck, which left me pinned to the bed the whole evening. There was nothing to do but to lie there, reading the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym for the first time.

That was the beginning of an obsession which would culminate in me writing English paraphrases of more than a hundred of the master bard’s poems. It was his love for nature which won my heart.

When I returned to Britain as an adult, and gradually realised that my stay was long-term, I forged a friendship with Kathryn Wheeler, a multi-instrumentalist and a composer who was as fascinated by folklore as I was. We began writing songs about the folklore of trees and birds, and I developed a voracious appetite for Celtic fairy-tales, hungrily turning them into song lyrics so that Kathryn could write the music. One day, she mentioned the Mabinogion.

I have been enthralled by the myths of the Four Branches of the Mabinogion ever since. The stories of Rhiannon, Branwen, Arianrhod and Pwyll never really left my consciousness when I was writing – but it was the account of Blodeuwedd’s creation and transformation that gripped me the most.

Dafydd ap Gwilym had a poem about Blodeuwedd. I paraphrased it once: a pretty grim portrayal of the hatred shown to her by all other birds once she had been transformed into an owl. It was easy to read her story as a simple one of marriage, adultery, betrayal and punishment, but Dafydd’s poem was full of pathos. I began to think a long time about Blodeuwedd, and invited her into my dreams.

A fully-grown woman, conjured out of flowers by two magi, Math and Gwydion, Blodeuwedd was purpose-built as a wife for a man who had been cursed with never being able to marry a woman born by natural means. Superficially loyal at first to her husband, Lleu, Blodeuwedd fell in love with a neighouring lord, Gronw, whilst her husband was absent. They conspired to kill Lleu: a feat which could only be achieved by engineering a perfectly ridiculous set of circumstances. But when Lleu, one foot on a bathtub and the other on the back of a goat, was speared by Gronw, he did not die; he soared off in the form of an eagle, only to be found and returned to human form by Gwydion. Blodeuwedd found herself transformed into an owl, and condemned to be eternally hated by all other birds.

I instinctively felt a lot of sympathy for Blodeuwedd, even reading the story at face-value. She had been created as a sort of automaton: Lleu’s sex-robot, if you like, but she had a will of her own. As is true with most Celtic legends, however, her story had a deeper meaning. She was also a seasonal goddess of sovereignty, and the killing of Lleu and then of Gronw was a re-enactment of the age-old battle between the spirits of winter and of summer. In a sense, she was flowers every spring and summer, and an owl every autumn and winter.

It dawned on me only slowly that of course, I had read Blodeuwedd’s story before as a child, in the form of Alan Garner’s extraordinarily beautiful and insightful novel, ‘The Owl Service’. But by the time I had made that connection, I had arrived at a different conclusion from Garner. Garner’s protagonist, Alison, who is possessed by Blodeuwedd and is gradually becoming more and more owl-like, “wants to be flowers, not owls”. The Blodeuwedd I had come to know was quite the opposite. She revels in her life as an owl, because now she is free, in charge of her own destiny, and well equipped for taking care of herself.

I probably arrived at this conclusion because I had worked with injured owls as a teenager. Falconers will tell you that owls are comparatively stupid compared with hawks and falcons. I disagree, because I don’t count a steadfast refusal to cooperate as a sign of intelligence. Anyone who has worked with an owl and afforded it the respect it deserves will know what I mean. It is also a creature which seems perfectly adapted to its environment, and to its way of killing and eating. The woman, Blodeuwedd, was also made to be fantastically beautiful. For me, it was therefore no coincidence that she was transformed into that most beautiful of birds: a barn owl.

Over the years, I have written about Blodeuwedd many times, in songs and poems, many of which appear in Slippery Elm’s wonderful Blodeuwedd inspired anthology, ‘Tu Muerte Liena De Flores/ Your Death Full of Flowers’. I knew, though, that Blodeuwedd wanted something bigger. Gradually, a longer poem, which would tell the whole story from Blodeuwedd’s perspective and in her voice, was crying out to be written. The narrative from the Mabinogion would be intertwined with passages about her life as an owl, and each page of poetry would be illustrated. My daughter would be the model for Blodeuwedd in her human form. There would also be pictures of Blodeuwedd as a barn owl, and of the landscapes in which her story is set – landscapes with precipitous mountainsides, white-water cascades and rushy lakes, which recall that journey through the hill country of Wales when I was seventeen.

All proceeds from the sale of Recollections go to Friends of Friendless Churches

Churches in the British Isles are more than places of Christian worship. They are hearts of villages, records of generations past, and repositories of spirit. The furnishings, monuments, churchyards, lychgates have often been made by local artisans, the stones laid by local masons, whose names are carved in the stone. The yew trees in the churchyards are often ancient. Wildflowers grow amongst the graves; bats and barn owls use the belfries. These places are havens for walkers, and places of rest for those who feel weary of the modern world.

Friends of Friendless Churches is a charity which cares for churches that have fallen into disuse, preserving the memories they harbour, and maintaining their beauty. The profits from 'Recollections', the book I have made with Martin Williamson, will go to Friends of Friendless Churches. This poem-picture features just one of the churches which are in the care of this charity.

A poem for Blodeuwedd

What a wonderful surprise it was Flower Face: A Devotional Anthology in Honor of Blodeuwedd to open this beautiful publication by Ninth Wave Press and find my paraphrase of Dafydd so Gwilym's mediaeval Welsh inside it, attached to an article by Frances Billinghurst. The whole book is a treasure-trove!

Rivals of Dafydd ap Gwilym

My new little book of homages to mediaeval Welsh poets is now available to buy online. $6 Australian + postage.

The fourteenth century Welsh bard, Dafydd ap Gwilym, left a lasting impression on the poetry of his age: verse which often addressed preoccupations we still share today. This collection includes love poems, a lament for a felled tree, extravagant praises for wealthy patrons - including the Welsh freedom-fighter Owain Glyndŵr - scurrilous satires on friars, newfangled harps and prickly beards, a curse on a violent husband, and Gwerful Mechain's unapologetically explicit song of praise for her own genitals. Giles Watson's lively reinterpretations in modern English give a strong impression of the vivacity and daring of the originals. Some of the poems contain explicit language, reflecting the earthy humour of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.