Tuesday Poem: "Maze" by Nancy Mattson
What I miss is gravel
crunching under foot or wheel,
wide sky above
the road straight into horizon.
I want to walk the crease
of a prairie book, lines of wheat
as even type, all one size
the word gold over and over.
London's a fused maze
of alphabets: wherever you walk,
each road, wherever it turns,
is utterly paved or cobbled crookedly.
A crazed typesetter has been at work
every night for centuries, his head
swirling with shadows thrown
on crumbling walls by candle-flame.
He has set every line diabolical
in a different font and size,
Hot lead in higgledy-piggledy frames
and gutters overflowing with errata.
© Nancy Mattson
from Writing with Mercury (Flambard Press) 2006
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I met Nancy Mattson in 2008, when she and her husband, Mike Bartholomew-Biggs, also a poet, were resident in Christchurch for several months and appeared as guest poets as part of the Canterbury Poets' Collective annual Autumn Season of Poetry Readings at Madras Cafe Bookshop. Nancy is an ex-patriate Canadian now resident in London, and I love the way the poem, Maze, captures that experience in poetic form, using the extended metaphor of print. Nancy herself says:
"When I first moved to London twenty years ago I kept getting lost in the winding streets, the layers of history and the echoing voices of writers. What a contrast after the openness of the Canadian prairies, where I was born and raised. I now claim both places as part of my psychogeographic inheritance."
