I’m not done with 2023 just yet.
Alien Buddha, the publisher of my last poetry collection, Fifty, has brought out an anthology featuring some of the art, fiction and poetry that it brought into the world last year.
I’m pleased to say that my poem, From The Notebooks, features.
I’ve only just started reading the collection, but I’m evidently in good company. And before you ask – no, that’s not me on the front cover!
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about absence.
And memory. Or memories, plural.
Can anyone be truly absent when they are still remembered? Can memories fill the vacuum caused by absence?
I’ve just finished reading this book.
In it, McCartney says that he recently bought a lot of writings and drawings by John Lennon. He’s put them on the wall, and so he looks at them all of the time. You get the sense of how much he still misses his old creative partner. And how he holds those memories close.
These dark, winter months seem to provoke feelings of longing. There is a Welsh word, hiraeth, that doesn’t have a single, perfect translation in English, but means something along the lines of ‘homesickness’.
But it is more than that. It’s a yearning and (yes) a longing, tinged with grief and sadness, for a place we are now removed from.
And everything connected with it.
And through that longing these lines came to me, provoked by these ‘dark, winter months’. Absence and memories. Memories and absence.
We have officially entered autumn, meteorologically speaking, but summer is hanging on with a glorious last hurrah. As well as the sun that is currently baking these British Isles, I’m also walking with an author along a sunshine-flooded Venice Beach, while he tells me about his friendship with a young Jim Morrison and his love for Jim’s girlfriend.
At the same time I’ve been seeing photographs documenting the friendship of the two Mamas,
and also of their meeting with guitar virtuoso Hendrix, again in a sultry West Coast climate.
Soon this Indian summer will pass and the oceans turn cold, as cold as the oceans that I am usually drawn to, far from that sparkling Pacific.
I’ve mentioned to you guys before that I’d live on Orkney in a flash, and a stay on the Isle of Bute a few years back similarly had an affect on me. It does something to me, a feeling I can’t quite explain.
My surname translates from Scottish Gaelic as ‘sea settlement’ / ‘settlement by the sea.
Maybe that’s it, a trace memory that lingers from beyond the point of recognition. Something that calls me back to a place of origin.
My previous Jackdaw post was a reblog of a post by my friend and fellow northern poet Nat Hall, from whom I’d learned of the passing of Kenneth White at his home, on the north coast of Brittany, on Friday evening.
White was one of the first poets I’d encountered who spoke to me of places I was familiar with and the kind of things that also inspired me.
Although I also have some of the books that recount his many travels (he called them waybooks), it’s his collected poems that I return to the most.
When my first poetry collection, Heading North, was published in 2015, I gave White a namecheck in the foreword. A few months afterwards I received a lovely encouraging letter from him in the post. He mentioned the poems that I’d written that were of places equally familiar to him, of outer landscapes that connected us internally. He also mentioned future projects that I’ve since seen starting to come to fruition.
Like the travel literature, his poetry remains a waybook for me, a path into a creative world rooted in both the land in which I live and the open world waiting for me to explore.
Wherever he now is, I hope Kenneth is at peace and still walking that bird path.
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work…
Do Justly, Now
A beautiful passage which is rather timely (timeless?)
I’m very pleased to announce that my third poetry collection is soon to be published by Alien Buddha Press. Conceived as fifty poems to mark my fiftieth birthday, I decided to go all out Adele and call it Fifty.
It is out on the 2nd of June. Here’s to a good Summer! 🌞
I happened to be in Manchester this week. Of course, I live in Manchester, what I mean is I was in Manchester city centre. Although it’s a city, when travelling there we always say “We are going into town.”
Local vernacular and all that. Anyway, there I was – in Manchester. Not much had changed since my last visit. One thing I did notice, though, is where you used to be able to buy a can of Pepsi or Fanta, there is now this:
An eyelash dispenser. Whatever next?
******
Some of the homes on our estate have been without water for a while. There were reports on social media of water tankers scattered around the area. I’m not sure what the problem is, or if these tankers are indeed flushing water through drains as has been suggested, as I’ve not taken that much interest because our home has been unaffected by the problem.
However, yesterday morning, as we were on the school run, we spotted one of the tankers parked up on a neighbouring street. There was nobody with it. We turned onto a main road and saw another two tankers, again unmanned, as though they’d been abandoned.
“More tankers!” exclaimed my wife. “It’s like they’ve taken over the world. Just appeared overnight.”
It’s normally me that’s given to flights of fancy.
We approached the school and, lo and behold, more tankers were in the small car park outside the gates.
“They’re even here!” she said. “They’re like aliens. Everywhere we go they are hounding us. It’s like the world’s coming to an end and they are our masters.”
Wow.
Maybe there’s a story in that.
******
I’ve always believed that it’s the insects that will take over in our absence.
I’ve been sorting through my Mum’s things since she passed away. Donating furniture to charity, giving things to people that we know, to friends of friends, anyone who would be grateful of them. Dismantling bit by bit the things that make up a part of who I am.
While emptying her kitchen drawers I spotted an ant trap on her window ledge. She had been plagued with them off and on over the last few summers. This was her last response – an irresistible cocktail of sugar and boric acid.
Some lines came to mind from a Walter Tevis novel I’ve just read, a novel about ‘another’ alien invader:
Or think of living with the insects, of living with the shiny, busy, mindless ants
which prompted the question: should we co-exist? Or should we exterminate?
This summer it will be someone else’s dilemma.
When my wife comes down looking for me at 3.00am, after I said I’d follow her up to bed after finishing my chapter.
I checked up on two of my children today when I was in the library.
It’s not often they’re both in at the same time, which I guess is a good thing.
Coincidence. Serendipity. I’ve been speaking a lot about that kind of thing recently. From a reader posting comments on City Jackdaw about places from her childhood that also hold connections for me, to a fellow blogger describing serendipity playing out in her own life.
Along with what’s the chances of that happening in the face-to-face world that we operate in, too.
Highlighting them seems to be attracting more of the same, eavesdropping universe that this is.
This post is an example of a string of coincidences that recently played out over the last few days.
It began when I messaged my cousin to see if he wanted to go to a local Non-League football game. He replied that, along with his family, he’d gone to Glastonbury for a few days, a place I know that they love.
In answering his text I told him to “Enjoy Avalon”, referring to the link that the place has to Arthurian legend.
Later that day, while absently scrolling through Facebook, a video surfaced that was first posted in January by the group Kula Shaker. It featured them spending some time on top of Glastonbury Tor, at either sun-up or sundown, with some music and chanting featuring in the background.
So of course I sent this video on to my cousin as I was sure he’d appreciate it. He did.
Then, speaking of Avalon, in a local charity shop I came across a book that I’d been meaning to read since I was a child:
I snapped up a bargain and was able to start it, a few decades down the line from those first youthful intentions.
Now, back to Kula Shaker again:
They are a band that seem to be marmite to people, but I like them. I first encountered them in 1996 when I worked for a short time in a warehouse (predictive text changed that to whorehouse 🙈) on Stakehill Industrial Site.
Driving an electric pallet truck, I passed the radio, perched on a bottom stair, that was playing what sounded like a slice of 60’s psychedelia, which I love.
After first catching my ear, it seemed that, as I made many circuits around the warehouse throughout the next few days, whenever I passed the radio that same song would be coming from it (coincidence again?). This regular amount of airplay demonstrated that whatever it was, it must be new music, and eventually I stopped my truck and hung around long enough to get the name of the track:
Tattva, by a new group named Kula Shaker.
I went straight out and bought their debut album ‘K’ which featured that song, and have been a fan ever since.
Now, fast-forward back to today.
Kula Shaker’s last album had come out in 2016 (K 2.0) but they had been posting/tweeting/crowing for a few weeks about some new music and a tour that was imminent.
Then we got a countdown promising . . . something.
First there was a cryptic smiley drum thing.
Then the countdown became more specific.
And then D-Day, a video was posted showcasing the first music from this pending new album. The title of the song?
What’s the odds? I’ve stopped asking that question.
Glastonbury/Avalon/The Once And Future King
Don’t be surprised if the group play Glastonbury this year. This thing is going to run and run.
I will follow their lights/And I will follow their star.
City Jackdaw 