The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

Robert Hamberger on John Clare's poem 'The Field Mouse's Nest' and his own poem 'Herb Robert'

In this episode, I talk to Robert Hamberger about John Clare’s poem 'The Field Mouse’s Nest' and his own poem 'Herb Robert'.

In our conversation, Robert talks about how his art teacher introduced to him to the works of Sylvia Plath and John Clare (among others).  He discusses the 'everyday' language he uses in his poetry and how (through this 'political act') he doesn’t want to exclude his readers. He goes on to explore the idea of the sonnet - how can you find your voice inside the given ‘rules’ of the fourteen-line poem - the rhyme scheme, the weight of tradition: ‘a lovely challenge’.  Robert then elaborates on Clare’s background - his prodigious output of poetry (even when he was incarcerated) and from this reflects on how important it is to separate writing from publishing (to see them as two separate activities). Robert then discusses 'The Field Mouse's Nest'. He explores punctuated and unpunctuated versions of this sonnet, and Clare's use of dialect, reading from Seamus Heaney's essay ‘John Clare’s Prog’. He touches on the idea of Clare as an ecopoet.

He then goes on to illuminate the evolution of his memoir A Length of Road: Finding Myself in the Footsteps of John Clare from 1995 onward - and how the poem 'Herb Robert' fits into the larger scheme of the book. He talks about 'Herb Robert' as a queer poem, and from this insight, shows how the relationship between himself and Clare - and his understanding of himself developed as he drafted and redrafted the work. He then goes on to talk at length about the hold the sonnet has had on him over his writing life, and how this poem, in particular, fitted in as one of his 'form-testing' poems.

You can read John Clare's Northborough Sonnets (mentioned in the podcast) in this edition from Carcanet Press.  Seamus Heaney's essay on John Clare comes from his collection of essays The Redress of Poetry (Faber, 2002). Here is a version of 'The Field Mouse's Nest' from the Poetry Archive (with 'cesspools' instead of 'sexpools' in the final line).

Robert Hamberger has been shortlisted and highly commended for Forward prizes, appearing in the Forward Book of Poetry 2020. He won The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2023 and has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. His poetry has featured as the Guardian Poem of the Week and in British, American, Irish and Japanese anthologies. He has published six poetry pamphlets and four full-length collections. Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road: finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published by John Murray in 2021. His fifth collection Nude Against A Rock from Waterloo Press was published in October 2024.

You can find Robert Hamberger's website here.

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

Herb Robert

What flavour of man is this, whose tips
unpeel into flowers? His arrows blossom.
Five petals top each blood-line that dips
and lifts through the breeze. I've seen him
hide by the creaky bridge where lattice-water
dabbles a trout's tail while bubbles rise.
His leaves mimic ferns, his colour
campion.  How can he be less than he is?
He lives his name. Two bulbs branch from every stem,
until I catch him taking over
the wood-side. A hundred buds swarm
their messages on the air.
If I eat his breath will it heal me?
Stroke him across my temples quietly, quietly.

 

 

 

 

 

David Harmer on Dylan Thomas's 'Poem in October' and his own poetry sequence 'White Peak Histories'

In this episode, I talk to the poet David Harmer about Dylan Thomas’s ‘Poem in October’ and his own sequence ‘White Peak Histories.’

In our conversation, David discusses his connections with Thomas. He explains why ‘Poem in October’ (and ‘late Thomas’) appeals to him in particular. He talks about the shape and feel of the poem, its aural qualities, its preoccupation with birds and the seasons. David follows Thomas from the shore and climbs high up, ending his journey looking out over the water.  He goes on to reflect on what ‘the border’ could mean in the context of this poem. David then goes on to explore the background to his poetry sequence ‘White Peak Histories’.  He thinks about the lines he can draw between his own work and Thomas’s effusive language, Thomas’s verbal ‘swagger’. He delves into the geography of the White Peak and how this feeds into its histories in terms of both leisure and labour.

David Harmer lives in Doncaster and is best known as a children’s writer with publications from McMillans Children’s Books, Frances Lincoln and recently, Small Donkey Press. A lot of his work for the Grown Ups is published in magazines. He also performs with Ray Globe as The Glummer Twins, often at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Here's a little window into David's writing for children (his book It's Behind You) from the Pan McMillan Site. And here's the details of David's most recent book from Small Donkey Press.

We mention the poetry magazine Tears in the Fence during our conversation. You can find out more about this poetry journal here.

We also mention W S Graham's poem 'The Thermal Stair' (for the painter Peter Lanyon) which you can listen to - and read - on the Poetry Archive.

Owen Sheers discusses Dylan Thomas with Matthew Paris on the BBC Radio 4 programme Great Lives here.

You can read Dylan Thomas's 'Poem in October' at this website.

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

White Peak Histories
 
Rhienster Rock
 
Once Raenstor Crag, the haunt of ravens
hræfn; harbingers of wisdom, of slaughter,
guardians of the Duke’s old coach road
 
that twists beneath this sudden rise of limestone
where the Bradford narrows near Hollow Farm
a slow drift, thick with sedge and celandine.
 
The ravens are long-gone, no hoarse
ghost cries over burial bones or carrion chatter,
no close councils and conspiracies.
 
Shifted into tricksters and thieves,
they left their reef-knoll condemned as vermin,
an abrupt unkindness bringing despair.
 
Two shot in Youlgrave churchyard
fetched eight pennies, four birds a shilling,
held by their legs, their smashed skulls open.

 

Trackways
 
Half-lost, eroded like rumours
whispered beneath the skin of maps
 
the tracks of travellers,
pack-horse carters, cattle drovers,
cloth merchants, drifts of malt-horses
 
lie abandoned under new-sprung roads,
uprooted farms and tarmac.
 
But here at Robin Hood’s Stride, the mock-beggar’s hall
high above Bradford Dale, jumbled rocks protect
the Portway, guide it past the Nine Stones Circle
down to Broad Meadow Farm
 
where Saxon ridges rise like waves
to push the causeway
straight over the river at Hollow Bridge
then up Dark Lane.
 
The path still beats below our footfall,
it flowed before settlers on Castle Hill Ring
brewed their iron or buried their dead
in the heaped barrows and tumuli
and when we walk it
their voices clamour through the rain, eager
to point out the way ahead.
 

Portway flood, 1718
 
Winter unleashed a deluge of waters,
the ford at Alport scoured out by river-force
Bradford and Lathkill locked in a tumult
of pell-mell, white-flecked land-soak.
Monk’s Hall up to its haunches, inundated,
thick ropes of stream-melt, cattle pushed
up breakneck banking, dams burst
foaming like the mouths of dead horses.
 
A gang of carriers faced the flooded Portway.
How to travel to the north of Old Town?
How to cross this fury of water?
They tried to push through. It hurled them away,
ankles tumbled over their heads, mouths gaped,
breath failed them, limbs flailing and snatching
at quick grasps of rock, branches, horse-gear.
 
Their bales and bundles, leather goods, baubles
dragged to the mill-race, the broken wheel
reluctant to offer any hand hold. Instead they drowned
crying out for a bridge, found their souls sodden
in Derbyshire rain-drench, unprotected by ravens.
And as the waters had not yet dried from the earth
no dry ground rose to cover the corpses.

 

 

Katharine Towers on Elizabeth Bishop's poems 'Sandpiper' and 'Jerónimo's House' and her own poem 'Elizabeth Bishop's Sad Epitaph'

In this episode, poet Katharine Towers discusses Elizabeth Bishop’s poems ‘Sandpiper’ and ‘Jerónimo’s House’ and her own poem ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph.’

In the interview, Katharine explains how she went from being a prose writer to a poet in part from reading Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. She examines the qualities of Bishop’s writing through an extended reading of ‘Sandpiper’, focusing in particular on line lengths, repetitions and rhymes. Katharine highlights the three things that Bishop strived for in her work — accuracy, spontaneity and mystery which she goes on to reflect on in both 'Sandpiper' and 'Jerónimo's House'.  With regards to ‘Jeronimo’s House’, Katharine delves into her own interest in solitude when looking at this piece. She considers the idea that Jerónimo’s house is a ‘love nest’: unpicking this notion through various ways of reading this phrase. She explores the idea that Bishop (or her subjects) are often looking for a refuge or somewhere to hide away.

Katharine then goes on to illuminate her own poem ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph’. She talks about how she was inspired by Bishop’s comment to Robert Lowell about being the loneliest person who ever lived. Katharine sees this work as being a part of a sequence of first-person poems in the voice of various 'alone' women - and the ways in which aloneness was important to them.  She reflects on the poem’s slant, the language of the work, the perspective (and possible feelings) of the narrator.

There are various editions of Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems - the one I have is Complete Poems (Chatto, 1991).  You can read ‘Sandpiper’ here.

As well as the Bishop poems highlighted we also touch on ‘The Moose’, ‘The End of March’, ‘The Bight’ and ‘The Fish’ in our conversation.

 

Katharine Towers has published three collections with Picador, most recently Oak which was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian. The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Observer. A fourth collection is forthcoming from Picador in 2026.
A pamphlet 'let him bring a shrubbe' exploring the life and work of the twentieth-century English composer Gerald Finzi was published by The Maker’s Press in 2023. In 2019 HappenStance Press published another pamphlet The Violin Forest.

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

'Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph' by Katharine Towers
 
In my fairy palace I am as lonely as I could wish. 
The ivy has grown up and over, and cosily inside
there’s just little me reading or sitting.
 
I could be on the moon or I could be 
in a Hans Christian Andersen story
or I could be a girl getting over a love affair.  
 
The first room has two beds, so one will always be empty.
The second room has two chairs, so I can see where I will sit tomorrow.
The third room has two notebooks, so there will always be blank pages.
 
At night I listen to flamenco on the radio.
As I snap my fingers and click my heels I feel tremendously 
Spanish, or I feel a sultry empty weary joy. 
 
Covering the windows are the ivy’s mathematical hands.
Daylight pokes through when it can, 
making of the worn-out floorboards a map of bright dots.                  
                        
 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Pullinger on Shinkichi Takahashi's poem 'Sparrow in Winter' and his own work 'Magus' and 'Untitled'

In this episode, poet Mark Pullinger discusses Shinkichi Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’ (translated by Lucien Stryk) and two of Mark’s poems: ‘Magus' and ‘Untitled’.
 
In the interview, we talk about Mark’s introduction to Zen poetry - and Zen haiku in particular - through his discovery of Shinkichi Takahashi’s work. We examine the multifaceted qualities of Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’, which adopts simple language to create nuanced and complex associations around consciousness, the void, how the narrator and sparrow ‘mesh' with each other.   We then go on to explore Mark’s approaches to writing through focusing on ‘Magus’ and ‘Untitled’.  Mark talks in some depth - drawing on the specifics of these two pieces - about how his poetry has evolved over the past decade since the publication of his thesis.

You can find Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’ in his collection Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems by Shinkichi Takahashi - translated by Lucien Stryk (Grove Press, 1986). I picked up a digital copy of the book.

 

Mark Pullinger lives in the Dearne Valley, walking distance to RSPB Old Moor and its satellite sites, where he walks with his wife daily. The philosophy outlined in this interview was conceived for his PhD thesis, The Speaking World, available on Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository. He has recently completed a poetry collection on Kafka and the natural world, making a style shift from his thesis, but still expressing the same worldview.
 
The Speaking World is available at https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesis/The_speaking_world

 

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

Sparrow in Winter
by Shinkichi Takahashi
translated by Lucien Stryk
 
Breastdown fluttering in the breeze,
The sparrow’s full of air holes.
Let the winds of winter blow,
Let them crack a wing, two,
The sparrow doesn’t care.
 
The air streams through him, free, easy,
Scattering feathers, bending legs.
He hops calmly, from branch to empty branch
In an absolutely spaceless world.
 
I’d catch, skewer, broil you,
But my every shot misses: you’re impossible.
All at once there’s the sound
Of breaking glass, and houses begin
To crumple. Rising quickly,
An atomic submarine nudges past your belly.
 

Untitled
by Mark Pullinger
 
Polar bear
smells life
kills
spreading
through her
her cubs
extending skies
earth’s breath
expanding
sun’s reign

 

Magus
by Mark Pullinger
 
In a distant desert
a lone speck crosses
the horizon
mumbling,
“the desert
has dignity
moving through it”.
Sand drifts
across humps,
clinging,
rolling on.

Heat, like breath,
rises, waves
reaching skies.
Camel’s eyes
large distant
suns.
 

 

Fay Musselwhite on David Jones's book-length poem In Parenthesis and her own sequence Memoir of a Working River

In this episode, poet Fay Musselwhite discusses David Jones’s book-length poem In Parenthesis and her own sequence ‘Memoir of a Working River’ from her collection Contraflow.

In the interview, we talk about how Fay came to Jones’s poem - a book that follows soldiers' long trajectory toward the Somme battlefield, but has so much more within it than the subject of war itself. For Fay, it’s ‘the fact that one’s part of the earth,’ and that Jones focuses on ‘class, land and nature’ that makes this such an inspiring and important work for her. We discuss the abundant details, images, hauntings contained in the work - and how war plays out like some violent codified ‘sport’ inflicted on these young men.  Fay then goes on to explore the difficulties she encountered trying to write her ‘big river poem’ and how she found ways to embody the Rivelin as it runs through the western Sheffield by giving the river itself a voice and, for a while, the body of a young man. Fay explains why she wanted to make the river a human because she wanted to explore the world of those youthful Rivelin mill-workers. We reflect on the music of her poetry and how important it is to Fay’s project as a poet.

The extract that Fay read’s from In Parenthesis covers pp. 165 - 168 from her copy of the book (Faber, 1978).  

There's a recording of an extract of the poem on the Poetry Archive website. It includes an introduction by David Jones himself, and actors playing the many voices in the work. It gives you a good sense of the polyphony in the poem. You can listen to the audio here.

You can read more about, and buy a copy of Fay’s very fine collection Contraflow (Longbarrow Press, 2016) here.

 

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

From 'Memoir of a Working River’

6

Woken by some beast’s nudge then stunned
at the incredible stillness of sky, slips in
to bathe where the mill-dam overflow cascades
slithers out freshened, rises and shivers
watches the mud where new droplets nuzzle.

Donkeys trudge by, pressing on, faces low
as if the cinder track hears their moan.
Follows their swagger-loads
sees motion onward driven
by the momentum of raw and wrought iron.

Wavers as they near the spark-shed
shy of its screaming grind and gritty guffaws
but the torture rack, humped on its back
in full watery swing, pricks his learning’s gap.
Keen to find why the wheel must turn
braves the factory door

steps in and into a gusting blur
tastes its metal, feels particulates snag in sweat
takes a moment to see where he is.

In geometry against nature’s grace
humans are caught in a web
each slumped over oak, held by spindle and belt
to a stone that spits hot grit.

His feet itch.

He swerves a man dragging iron rods
and trying to make his free hand speak.

On the river-run some images stick:
flashes of crimson through blackened fur shreds
on that donkey’s neck, the clench of combat
riddled through men’s backs.

Lying on a weir
to rinse metal squeals from his hair
on the air a tang
enthrals the inner juices —

he paces it downstream, tracks the prey
to a tufted cove, a pail propped in rocks
a man doubled over racked in rasp-spasms.
When coughing releases its grip
he sits near the man, asks how life is.

Sunk in the chest, not quite
sitting up, the man shares his snap
and between pneumatic seizure
tells how he offers blunt steel to grit
till it’s flayed by resistance to its leanest edge
how each day he enters the valley
more of it enters him.

The man says he’s seen eighteen summers
a grinder for three, and nails in a voice hollow-loud
what binds the wheel’s turn to that cheese and bread.

Twice the man says — The mus’ave a name.

Only once — Come wi’ me, if tha needs a crust.  

 

Lydia Allison on Tom Phillips' A Humument and on her own Metro Erasure Poems

In this episode, Lydia Allison reflects on Tom Phillips' 'treated' book A Humument and how it influenced her own Metro erasure poems.

 

In the interview, Lydia talks about going to an event where Tom Phillips talked about his practice as an artist - and about A Humument in particular. She relates how the book came about and describes its various iterations - the different ‘river’ poems that Phillips came to write using the original text - an obscure Victorian novel entitled A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Lydia discusses the overall ‘narrative’ of the book, and then focuses on two pages in particular: page 40 and page 305 (which you find and can click on below). 

Lydia then goes on to explain where, why and how she developed her own Metro Horoscope-page found poems.  She talks about the rules that she follows in the making of these works, how she distributes them on social media, and what sort of reactions she has got from printing these versions. We then go on to explore a series of poems, looking in particular at how she uses punctuation and word choices to create her original pieces. 

 

Lydia Allison is a poet, writing facilitator, creative mentor, and tutor. She has been involved in a number of projects and collaborations, including Stevie Ronnie’s ‘A Diary of Windows and Small Things’, Doncaster Arts’ activity books for lockdown, and ‘Dancing with Words’, a project that paired poets and dancers. Her writing is often inspired by her working life, which spans from bridal consultancy to teaching overseas. 

She is interested in approaching writing in an experimental and playful way. This largely takes the form of blackout poems where she tries to unearth poems hidden in other interesting texts.

She has appeared a number of times in print and online, including The Result Is What You See Today, Introduction X, Surfing the Twilight, Poetry Salzburg Review, PN Review, Feral, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. You can read more at lydiaallison.com, or follow her on twitter/X @lydiarallison 

 

The Tom Phillips poems that we focus on can be found here:

Page 40 (slideshow):
A Humument Page 40 (slideshow)

Page 305 (Slideshow)
A Humument Page 305 (slideshow)

You can the book in its entirety here (Tom Phillips also reads one version of the book on the website):

https://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument

 

I also mention Nicole Sealey in the podcast. You can find her poem "'Pages 1-4,' An Excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure'" here.

 

Lydia Allison's Metro Erasure Poems

grow
trees
start a
home.
begin now

/

It's time to
help
others,
reorganising
The
what
and when

The Sun
moved
to mingle
with your
life and soul

/

come in
for now,
get
your thoughts
sizzling
with
romance

 

be
logical but
very illogical
. Be
physical and
creative
and
perfect
, Gemini

/

Are other people
you?
the Moon
could be
.
,
time
time spent
beautiful

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth Holloway on Sharon Olds' poem 'The Blue Dress' and her own poem 'Blue Dress'

In this episode, I talk to the poet Elizabeth Holloway about how Sharon Olds’ poem 'The Blue Dress’ influenced the writing of her own poem ‘Blue Dress’.

Liz talks about the impact Sharon Olds had on her when her first British collection - The Sign of Saturn - was published (in 1991). She talks about the idea of confessional poetry, and how closely we can connect the author with the narrator of the poem.  She talks about Sharon Olds’ own version  of free verse and how technically skilful she is in terms how she uses uses run-on lines and punctuation to carry the narrative along. Liz also reflects on the different versions of Olds’ persona that are represented in the poem. She talks about the idea of ‘safety’ and disguise in this work, and goes on to discuss the figure of Electra in relation to Olds’ poem too.

Liz talks about how aware she was of Olds’ poem when she was writing her own piece ‘Blue Dress’.  She describes the free verse form she has taken on, then explores the similarities and differences between her poem and Olds’ piece.  Liz talks about the use of blue in other mother-daughter relationships she has written about, then considers the tone of the poem - how both doubt and anxiety play a big part in the making of this work. She goes on to examine the ‘prosy’ quality of her poetry and where she allows herself to tune into more heightened language. She talks about touch and feel, and getting back in touch with someone special who has been missing from the narrator’s own life in the context of Falling Mother.

Dr Elizabeth Holloway (formerly Elizabeth Barrett) is an award-winning poet whose work has been published extensively in journals and anthologies. She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry. Her first book Walking on Tiptoe (Staple, 1998) focuses, in part, on the diagnosis of her son as autistic. Elizabeth received an Arts Council of England New Writers’ award to support the completion of her follow-up collection, The Bat Detector (Wrecking Ball Press, 2005), which continues to explore the experience of parenting an autistic child. In the collection, Elizabeth uses the metaphor of detecting bats to understand the process of communicating with a non-verbal child. The collection led to a collaboration with the violist Robin Ireland who composed original music for a sequence of the poems. Subsequent collections include Walking on Tiptoe and Other Poems (Bluechrome Press, 2007) and A Dart of Green and Blue (Arc Publications, 2010). In 2018, Elizabeth received a Northern Writers award to support work on her future collection, Falling Mother.

Liz Holloway read Sharon Old’s poem ‘The Blue Dress’ from her collection The Sign of Saturn: Poems 1980 - 1987 (Secker and Warburg, 1991) . A version of the poem can be read here: https://www.wisdomportal.com/PoetryAnthology/SharonOlds-Anthology.html.

 

Blue Dress
 
The call comes out of the blue. 
How else? There is only the blue. 
It is what we have lived with. 
Afterwards, I am dazed by the day.
I replay the phone ringing twice —
the way I picked up the second time
remembering she used to do this. 
“It's alright Mum, it’s me calling”.
She names a date and place, 
the hours she could be there. 
She knows it might sound crazy. 
Too far away. Afterwards, I wonder 
if she heard the hesitation in my voice.
 
I want to get something for her. 
Perhaps because I don't believe 
I am enough. Maybe to make up 
for birthdays I’ve missed. Or just 
to have something, whether true 
or a lie.  Something she can't deny 
is a gift from her mother. Something 
she can hide from her father if he asks. 
I would need to pick out something 
not too expensive she could say 
she bought for herself. Something 
un-extraordinary. A plain gift giving 
nothing away. Something to wear perhaps.
 
I choose Oasis, the airy boutique 
with a glass lobby and mirrory gallery 
at the top of a silver river of stairs. 
Thin men in hoodies and tall girls 
with eyeliner and ponytails 
peer over a chrome rail. 
I flatten myself against the side 
like a nun, try to be invisible. 
I braved this place for her. 
Beyond the lobby, random rails 
of fluid clothes. Denim. Sweats. 
Coats with fur-edged hoods.
I don't know who she’s become.
 
It’s foolish. Impossible. As I turn 
to go, a rack of spare clothes —
one-offs, small sizes, shop returns —
and suddenly a bolt of blue in my eye
like shot silk from Shandong.
I run it through my fingers.
The grain catches. I trace 
the scalloped neck to the waist, 
test the lay of its deep V over 
an inset panel, across the breasts.  
I push my hands inside, try to gauge 
the space for her ribs. In the LED light 
it turns purple indigo delphinium iris.
 

Angelina D'Roza on Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy (translated from Sophocles) and her own poem 'Correspondences: The Credence of Birds'

In this episode, I talk to the poet Angelina D’Roza about how an extract from Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, a verse translation of Sophocles' play Philoctetes, influenced the writing of her own poem ‘Correspondences: The Credence of Birds’.

Angelina talks about how Seamus Heaney’s stage directions from The Cure at Troy grabbed her attention, the ‘right thing at the right time.’ She goes on to discuss how she uses this text (and other corresponding texts) as a way in to explore a subject like colonialism, but it’s as much the delight in language at the beginning of the play, apparent in Heaney’s translation, that drew her in. She talks about how she negotiates appropriation of other writer's work in her poetry. Angelina then goes on to expand on all the different influences, alongside Heaney’s stage notes, including the inciting incident from Damon Albarn’s opera Dr Dee, and a poem by Jane Kenyon (on ‘the presence of an absence’) , that worked their way in to her own piece. Angelina develops at length her own processes as a writer, how she draws on exemplary texts from a wide range of sources, a patchwork approach, as a way of an introduction to her own poem ‘Correspondences: The Credence of Birds’. She talks about the play-like quality of this poem, and where it geographically references in the Peak District. She discusses how she doesn’t want to explain all the levels of ambiguity in the poem - to keep those spaces open for herself and the reader. Angelina reflects on bird-lore, and on notions of time before finishing the conversation by discussing how lyrics and songs have influenced her own approach to writing poems.

You hear Angelina read an extract from The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles Philoctetes (Faber, 2018).

Angelina D'Roza lives in Sheffield. She was a writing mentor with the Koestler Trust and writer in residence at Bank Street Arts, collaborating with artists, writers, photographers. Most recently her work appears in Blackbox Manifold and Shearsman Press. Her debut collection Envies the Birds was published by Longbarrow Press in 2016. The Blue Hour is Angelina's new collection and was released by Longbarrow at the end of 2023.

 

 

Correspondences: The Credence of Birds
 
A gritstone edge. Boulders higgledy-piggledy with sprouts of purple heather. No sun to speak of but light diffuse and silver, an evenness to it. Maybe rain, if there’s the wherewithal. Or a sort of shimmer to the flattened grass, as though rain has been. An absence left. A man in a red anorak, a bouldering mat folded on his back, walks quickly right to left. If Heaney’s chorus of boulder-still birds beginning to stretch from under their shawls can be made as lovely as he wrote it, do it. Pheasants, falcons. A spray of meadow pipits darting out from their hair and hands. Chip-chip- chip-chip. A woman climbs the rocks toward a platform stage-right, with the silhouette of an ancient fort just about suggested. The birdsong continues – ek-ek-ek-ek – but she is alone. Perhaps she addresses herself. Or perhaps, someone else. Someone absent. No questions, but the fractals in the bracken, their green mathematics transposed as music, the closing cadence that resolves the song.
 
 
 
She:
 
I might believe that a kingfisher strung up on silk can predict the weather, or that placing the semen of a pigeon on someone’s shirt can make that person love you. You think it’s wild, but you believe time runs as the crow flies. Take the roses replanted to my new house, those roses that know a home before this, my young son, the woman I was, its stems grown long and winding through the pale fuchsia, the fuchsia with its pale pink memory of a previous owner. The latitude of these two recollections mapped in space, in gradients, and tangled into a grammar of now, or here, the woman I am. I would send you their late bloom like a temple tumbling into the sea to keep in your wallet with the present tense and the half built, a botanical representation of time, the ongoing of what’s gone inscribed in the ground underfoot.
 
 
 Chorus:
 
sip-sip-sip-sip
 
 
A cage in the side of a boulder opens. A Japanese tit flies out and across the water. A stone arch at the back of the stage, where the river runs down to the orchestra pit. Hanging from the stone, an iron hook and a small bell. The bird rings the bell and collects a folded piece of paper that could be your fortune from the hook, flies into the gods. Let it go.

 

She:
 
I would send you John Cale’s “Big White Cloud”. After all is said and done / everything is just like it began. But time flows one way, whatever leaves it gathers in its talons, and to predict is to look back, to believe that autumn will cause the trees to redden. Bergson says that what we express is the dead leaves floating on the surface of the water, the various and fugitive reduced to the same handful of words, as though love isn’t changed by having loved. I don’t know what this means for us. Perhaps, that’s the point. The reds and golds were always there, it’s only that we see them now. Everything’s clear, everything’s bright. To leave this unspoken way of being unspoken, and so unchanged by language that can only approximate how it feels, to dream in birdsong, the water trickling down from the moors.
 

The chorus boulders huddle against the cold – chee-chee-chee-chee – Light fades to black – ek-ek-ek-ek