A magnificent review has appeared in The High Window magazine. Thank you, Colin Pink, for your preceptive and thorough words, and for corroboration of how tricky it can be to find Beckett’s grave in Montparnasse. You can read the review and others here
Tyrella beach near Newcastle, County Down
As usual, these prompts are not a task or exercise, just something – a few lines or as a whole – to blend into your thinking, so that when you’re ready to write for ten or fifteen minutes, something will come. Trust that, however long it is since you last had a chance to write, your words are waiting to fall onto your page or screen:
The sun is puce the sky is green
The streets awash with brilliantine
This is my redcurrant dream
(Recurrent? No just the once)
I’m psychedelicate
From John Cooper Clarke’s The Luckiest Guy Alive, 2018
I know a little cupboard,
With a teeny tiny key,
And there’s a jar of Lollipops
For me, me, me.
From The Cupboard by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)
This poem is dangerous: it should not be left
Within the reach of children, or even of adults
Who might swallow it whole, with possibly
Undesirable side-effects.
This Poem… by Elma Mitchell
‘This was Mr Strugnell’s room,’ she’ll say,
And look down at the lumpy, single bed.
‘He stayed here up until he went away
And kept his bicycle out in that shed.’
Mr Strugnell by Wendy Cope
The atheist archbishop weeps
Life is just a trap
Gazing into the inky deeps
Of a Chateauneuf-du-Pape
The Ranks of the Heathen Saints from John Cooper Clarke’s The Luckiest Guy Alive, 2018
Who will bring me the secrets of night?
‘I,’ called the Bat. ‘By the moon’s silver light.’
The Treasures by Clare Bevan
If you would like to buy a package of my five books of poetry for £25 (including postage and packing), please drop me a line on rosiejohnstonwrites@gmail.com and we can exchange details. Some of the Lapwing books are hard to come by these days but are still treasured (I’m told) by those who bought them years ago. I have just a few copies and can sign yours with a dedication if you’d like me to.
A wonderful review of my latest poetry collection ‘Safe Ground’ has just appeared in the international culture magazine, London Grip. Jennifer Johnson is known for her meticulous reviews and I love the way she draws sections of the book together, building to this enthusiastic encomium at the finish:
“I highly recommend Safe Ground as it intelligently and powerfully communicates both the pain and joy of a complex life, lived by a cultured woman who has resolved ‘Like father, like daughter, I would live my life to the full and embrace love.’”
You can get your own copy of #SafeGround from your local Waterstones or online at Waterstones, the publisher Mica and Amazon.
These prompts are offered individually or taken together as a whole, whatever comes to you. Or you may find just two of three words take you off into your own writing world. With prompts, you can’t get anything wrong, as long as you write and keep writing as far as the energy takes you. The paradox, as always, is that the less you aim for excellence, the more easily the good stuff will be free to find you. Have a happy time:
The lad came to the door at night,
when lovers crown their vows,
and whistled soft and out of sight
in shadow of the boughs.
A Shropshire Lad, LIII, The True Lover, AE Housman, 1896
For I will consider my lover, who shall remain nameless.
For at the age of 49 he can make the noise of five different kinds of lorry changing gear on a hill.
My Lover, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, Wendy Cope, 1986
“A mighty pain to love it is,
And ‘t is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.”
Abraham Cowley, The Poems of Abraham Cowley, 1618 – 1667
‘Father! Father! Where are you going? / O do not walk so fast.’
Little Boy Lost, Songs of Innocence & Experience, William Blake, 1794
But it was from one little window, with its blind drawn down, a mere blank transparency on the night, that the sense of home and the little curtained world within the walls – the larger stressful world of outside Nature shut out and forgotten – most pulsated.
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame, 1908
it’s not that i miss tamarind balls mashed up in my palm
squashed by my thumb licking it clot by sticky clot
on its way to my mouth
One of the finest films I’ve seen recently is The Return, starring Ralph Fiennes as the Ancient Greek hero, Odysseus, and Juliette Binoche as his wife, Penelope. It’s the story of Homer’s Odyssey from the moment Odysseus finally washes up on the shore of Ithaca after ten years of war against the Trojans and ten years of bother and palaver as he tried to find his way home. Not one of the brave men he took with him to the war has survived so it’s assumed that Odysseus is at the bottom of the sea too. Or shacked up with a gorgeous ‘love goddess’ on an island somewhere. So, his home is besieged by ‘suitors’, each one hoping to step up and marry Odysseus’s wife, thereby helping himself to the marital bed, home and kingdom.
This is one of the original hero/warrior stories, handled exquisitely. (Here is my blogpost about how Homer breaks the Quest hero mould, while setting the standard.) The casting in The Return could not be better, not least in Charlie Plummer as Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope who was a baby when his father left for war and now, around 20, doesn’t know whether to save his mother or loathe her, or to head off on his own quest to locate his father. The beauty of this story is how it balances the pain of all three characters and this film captures that faithfully. There’s also the ancient pleasure, if you know The Odyssey at all, of seeing a familiar story beautifully retold.
My only quibble is that, as usual these days, the gods are left out. I particularly miss Athena, Odysseus’s goddess-champion, who flirts and banters with him, and crucially appears now and again with the deft touch of a Fairy Godmother to disguise him either as a beggar or his muscly, gorgeous younger self. With her merry sense of eternity, that ultimately human life is a game, she lifts the tone of the whole thing out of sepia tragedy each time she appears. Similarly, the film is rather po-faced in the interactions between Odysseus and Penelope. Homer’s Penelope can be as playful and nimble-minded as her husband and it’s a shame not to see the jousts in their conversations, not least because it shows us how they suit each other so well. How marriage itself is something integrally different from any other relationship. As I’ve said in a post about love stories, how not even a ‘love goddess’ like Calypso could match the fine pleasures of that kind of marriage of minds.
The Return is excellent, however, and has joined the pile of my favourite films.
Homer has cropped up in my blogposts over the years. Here are his ten top storytelling tips again:
For an excellent translation in readable English of this part of The Odyssey, there’s Enitharmon’s The Bending of the Bow by Neil Curry. For the full length Odyssey, Emily Wilson’s version is superb, as is poet Simon Armitage’s. (It’s Armitage, incidentally, who addresses Odysseus’s relationship with Calypso head on and describes him as her sex-slave.) And Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead is still an important, really enjoyable read around anything to do with Homer.
Happy writing!
My latest book ‘Safe Ground’ is getting a wonderful reception. Many thanks to everyone who’s contacted me to say what made you laugh and moved you. Where can you find the book for yourself, or for your friends?
There are the usual websites: Waterstones, the publisher Mica and Amazon.
On the north Kent coast where I live, you can buy or order it in our wonderful independent book shops, like Top Hat and Tales in Faversham’s Market Street,
in the gorgeous Little Green Book Shop in Herne Bay’s High Street (below),
in Whitstable’s Harbour Books (where I used to host a monthly evening called Words on Waves) and the Margate Book Shop, and in Waterstone’s in Deal High Street and Canterbury’s Rose Lane.
Also in Faversham is Creek Creatives, a marvellous hub of all kinds of creativity – art, jewellery, sculpture, exquisite food – and it has copies too!
Your own local favourite book shop can order it through my publisher, Mica Press. Happy reading!
Look at this line-up! Many thanks to Nancy Charley (Smokestack, Arachne Press) and Lana Arkhi for their wonderful poetry and music evenings in Lana’s beautiful gallery in Broadstairs, Kent. I’m thrilled to be reading on Sunday 18 May from 6.30pm along with Frances Turner, Ann Hilton and Nancy herself. There will be music, food and wine included in the £10 ticket, and an open mic.
These evenings book up pretty fast so it’s a good idea to book your place soon.
Family, friends and a wonderful beach sunset surrounded me last night here on the north Kent coast (UK) to celebrate publication of ‘Safe Ground’ by Mica Press. We laughed, danced, ate beautiful food and (some of us with sandy feet) soaked ourselves in poetry by my wonderful friends Posie Brown, Setareh Ebrahimi and Maggie Harris, and from ‘Safe Ground’. We had a short, powerful open mic too with poets including Nancy Charley, Mike Bartholemew Biggs, Nancy Mattson and Sue Rose. Gorgeous words from everyone and wonderful warmth.
Then today, on the way back from ice creams in Broadstairs with family, I found an email telling me that ‘Safe Ground’ has its first review. Thank you, Billy Mills, for your enthusiasm here, and in full below. If you would like to find out about ‘Safe Ground’ for yourself, you can buy it here:
Rosie Johnston’s previous book, Six-Count Jive was a study in domestic abuse and escape presented in sets of haiku-like poems. Her new publication, Safe Ground sets that experience, ‘a bad case of bad, bad husband’, in a wider context of trauma and recovery that reaches back to a troubled Belfast childhood, with a much-loved womanising, hill-climbing, opera lover father and a mother whose resentments ruined her relationship with her daughter, and forward to a happier present in poems that are baggier, more discursive, than those in the earlier book.
These personal troubles are set in a background of the Troubles, and at moments the public and private seem to overlap, as in this poem on the Abercorn bombing in 1972:
Over his shoulder we’d all seen it: the beast was out of its cage.
Chill control, red-eyed in our homes, ready to clot our lives.
The lowest we can be was loose. Nothing mattered now but blood.
Her escape was, and remains, the sea, right from the very first poem here, ‘Carnlough Bay’:
I breathe. Expand again, at last, to my full size. I’m
tallest in bare feet, on sea-rolled shingle, back
heavy in my heels, cupping the weight of
whelk shells in my pockets.
Constant in it all, so
many years, the
need of
sea.
We see the breakdown of that bad marriage and the speaker’s fraught relationships with her children, but in the end, in the final poem in the book, there is a sense of wholeness, the Waste Land redeemed, its curse lifted by (and by) the sea:
We run, crabs loose from a spilt
green bucket,
back to the best of childhood.Content with plastic spades,
we burrow
where our simplest selves can find us.On Margate Sands songs and laughter
ride the winds,
connect us all with all.
That ‘loose’ brings us back to the Abercorn poem, but the worst we can be is transmogrified into the simple best in an echo of marvellous deftness.
And it’s not quite the end, as that final poem is followed by a four-and-a-bit page prose piece, ‘Laughing and Grief: Paris, 2020’ (recalling the Mock Turtle’s tale in Alice in Wonderland) telling the story of a visit to Beckett’s grave, or at least a failed attempt to find it that was salvaged by a kindly 80-year-old Parisian gentleman, Henri, who brings her to Sam’s grave, and then that of Jean Seberg, where he shows the narrator a card he wrote and placed there earlier. The story brings us back to her father, via Horace, a shared enthusiasm, and we get to see their final interaction before his death. And the card? It read Jamais de désespoir (Horace’s nil desperandum) translated by Johnston as ‘Never lose hope’, fitting words for the book to end on.
This very well-written story (definitely not a prose poem) leaves me wondering what next for Rosie Johnston? After two fine collections navigating trauma, is she now moving away from that subject and on to a post-recovery mode in which the bright world of Margate Sands is her theme? I’m eager to see.
My latest review for London Grip was terrific fun, of the first translation into English of Christian Morgenstern’s comic poetry. By Timothy Ades published by The High Window.
Rosie Johnston 