“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.’”
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:
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.
You can never tell when you’re writing something whether it’s going to have impact or not. I never foresaw that so many people would bother to thank me for this one, even walking down the street after me in Broadstairs last summer. The poem I’m reading here is ‘Being with Anne’ (‘Safe Ground’, Mica Press, 2025), for my beloved Auntie Anne. My mother was senior in a long family so Anne, her youngest sister, isn’t that much older than me. I have so much to thank her for.
Last weekend I was being blown over with my sons at the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh – many thanks to the kind stranger who caught me and helped me to my feet before I crashed sideways into a boulder! Today it’s Amazon’s French Poetry list that has me blown away – ‘Safe Ground’ is at number 4, between Billy Connolly and ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’.
How on earth is a wee book of poetry written in English on that list at all? My book ‘Safe Ground’ tells the story (in poetry) of my travels and escapes from Northern Ireland via Cambridge and London to the north coast of Kent. Where does France come in?
In February 2021 my home was full of builders making emergency repairs to the roof. In icy blasts, they clambered like mountain goats among the scaffolding. It felt at the time as if we might never get to socialise in public again, so escapism took hold. I wrote about a little trip I’d made alone to Paris the previous February and relived the pleasures of sitting in a Parisian restaurant. Those scribbles became ‘Laughing and Grief’ (as the Mock Turtle used to say), and were published later that year by American Writers Review in their 2021 Turmoil and Recovery anthology.
With thanks to lovely Henri who helped me climb through the graves in Montmartre cemetery to find Beckett and Seberg, ‘Laughing and Grief’ is about how laughs and sadness jostle together in our lives and how recovery can find us at the strangest times. You can buy here from Amazon or here from publisher Mica Press.
Thanks to No Alibis in Belfast who had this sign outside their excellent book shop years ago and I couldn’t resist a screenshot.
It’s Safe Ground‘s big day! You can find it on Mica Press’s website here and on Amazon. No reviews yet but the initial responses are huge smiles and enthusiasm.
If you’d like to buy one from me direct, signed specially for you, please don’t hesitate to contact me at rosiejohnstonwrites@gmail.com
The cover photograph is me beside the Mourne Wall in County Down, taken by my father more years ago than I care to count. As I said in my dedication to Bittersweet Seventeens (Lapwing Publications, 2014), he gave me life in so many ways.
Rosie Johnston 