new year, new thoughts

horses in a field
A few years back, I wrote the post what’s in the poem, where I said that I didn’t like how poets tend to use an explanatory “blurb” between pieces at readings to tell the audience how they should understand the poem rather than giving listeners the chance to respond for themselves.

This week, though, I attended a poetry reading by Michael Hulse and saw just how well that inter-poem blurb can be used.
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positively logical

It’s not all fun spending a week in a house with a pedant whose current reading matter is the biography of a logical positivist (or that of any other philosopher, perhaps). I was told yesterday that describing someone as “a good poet” was meaningless, it was a value judgment, that what I was actually saying was, “she is a poet; hurrah!” (As opposed to “she is a poet; boo!”)

Guard dogs
No dogs or other animals - clustered or otherwise - were harmed in the writing of this post

We did however manage to see eye to eye – or was that hear ear to ear? – when the news was on the other night, reporting on a disease affecting dogs in the UK recently. The disease remains unidentified, but the reporter said that some progress had been made after vets observed clusters of dogs dying all across the country from the south west to the north east.

It is probably sad but true that in the course of their work vets observe animals dying. But to observe clusters of them dying and not take action – as opposed to noticing the clusters of reported dog deaths – seems heartless. I think any vet who did so would be a bad vet and deserve to be booed.

no movement but sound

I went out early today, but the birds must all have been awake long before me and when I left the house the noise in the street was startlingly loud for a Sunday morning. I suppose they were busy discussing air pressure and wind speed, temperature and flight paths or whatever it is that birds talk about before they get moving in the morning.

There was so much sound, but no movement and not a single bird to be seen even though the trees are bare of leaves and they must surely have been visible as dark blotches among the branches.

Telegraph pole silhouetted against sky at daybreak
I remember thinking as a child that the insulators on telegraph poles were birds perching; I reckon it was a reasonable mistake.
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work in progress

Although I understand that the UK weather was dreadful over the holidays, I’m not sure that it was really cold; certainly there are already signs of spring about. Of course we’re bound to get some real winter weather later, so I hope Nature has the good sense to be patient.

spray of buds

Chrysalis

Tight as apple pips,

buds spiral around
a moss-supple stalk

anticipating spring
when they will split 

and shake free

tissue wings.

 
That’s a draft, and questions remain:
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travelling

When I was a teenager we had fairly regular bomb scares at school. I was too politically naïve to know if it was the IRA or the PLO who were intent on disrupting my education, but I do remember that we spent many happy hours out on the playing fields waiting while sniffer dogs and their handlers searched the building.

countdown on computer screen
We were always told to take our bags with us when we evacuated the building as it left fewer things to be searched. And I learned to be wary of bags and packages left unattended at airports, railway stations and shopping centres.
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