Extracts from my current work
In 2006 my younger son, Louis, took me on a renaissance tour of Italy, making up, he said, for a lack of inspired presents in previous years. It was quite magical - I brought back a full notebook and a full camera.
Dining with Copernicus ‘Al Brindisi’, Ferrara
Away from blazing main street restaurants, we thread our way between cyclists, cruising the internet cafes, through the shadows of narrow alleys, until the sun sneaks a beam through onto a sign board – Al Brindisi AD 1435 - yet another ‘oldest tavern in Europe.’ Banquettes, dark wine bottles behind chicken wire frames, a wooden board with cheese spiralled from mild to ferocious, the waiters whisper and offer only expensive wine. My place mat, made of brown paper, says that Tasso and Cellini ate here, so did the student Copernicus, who,seeing this same sky, thought up earth moving heresies. So do I, walking slowly back, seeing the full moon through the open oval above a courtyard, thinking of the curious Copernicus, a moment’s dizziness may just have been the angle of my gaze, but it felt like the moon sucking.
Chiesa di S.Giorgio Maggiore, Venice 2006
Ten euros for the tower. We are hot already, unlikely to enjoy the climb, stopping for longer rests at shorter intervals, just to hunt down that view. We weigh up the discomfort.
You shrug, I succumb, we walk towards the stairs, to face a netting wall. A robed and tonsured monk approaches, motions us towards a gleaming lift.
Long forbidden, long sloping steps with shallow drops encircle the lift shaft, its steel skeleton humming. We watch the stairs recede, the monk smiles, speechless.
A swirl of wind balloons my skirt, we lean out of our brick basket blinded by sun on white buildings and water, light that trembles flashes evidence of glass on boats. Water buses like fat woodlice interlace
with speedboats darting between in joyful, suicidal transits, a liner at rest, a Gulliver sleeping, disturbs the scale of boats, buildings and the grandest of canals, wearing its gondolas, a plague of stick insects.
The monk is patient, speechless, waiting for us to tire of the world, seen as half-map, half-model below. I raise my camera, catch a habitual impatience cross his face; he knows and I know the futility of possession.
Review
Something in the Blood a chapbook published by Selkirk Lapwing Press
There’s an Italian flavour to many of the early poems in Vivien Jones’ book, plus several haiku and one wince-inducing line in ‘The Mermaid’s Song’, but the collection really hits its stride later on, when she gets much closer to home. ‘Best Medicine’, ‘Belated’ and ‘Chambers Street Museum, Edinburgh’, deal with motherhood and family relationships with a nice balance of gentle humour and poignancy, while ‘After The Music’ and ‘A New Viol’ build on that, with the former making good use of form and repetition, and the latter boasting the splendid line “How I love yew”. When Jones sets about disputing her own line “as if life itself could be silenced”, she’s at her best, a poet engaging with vitality and honest passion.
Matt Merrit in Sphinx Chapbook Review
Fountain ; Bologna |
Kazu
my first grand-son
Only a quarter my genes
are yours, half my son’s,
who has half of mine.
Such dilution moves you
away from the blueprint
You have the almond
eyes of your mother’s
genes, already practised in
veiling anger, her light
bones are yours too.
At the shopping mall fountain
you bow
in faith to the Spirit
who lives there.
That quickness of mind
that finds geometry common
in tipped over chairs and
music stands, the eye that
measured the guitar
and placed its fat belly
between the chair legs,
exactly;
that’s pure me,
that’s the tailor who cuts without a pattern,
the cook who measures by looking,
the musician who intuits the coming note.
Little Japanese boy
one quarter mine,
I know you.
In 2008, along with several other writers, I took part in a Kinetic Poetry project - creating poems to be animated - if you'd like to see the results visit http://www.dgaaweb.net/ There was a launch event at the Wigtown Book Festival in a red velvet cinema-in-a-tent, in a gale, which felt like a Dorothy moment......
This is a piece of flash fiction - a sound bite of words that tells a story in 250 words or less - a great way to practice brevity
Parrot
It was an African Grey. He, she – no-one knew which or how to tell – spent most days huffed in a ball of grey feathers, opening its lemon eyes in a slow blink at passing traffic. Every now and then the child begged a wooden cotton reel and poked it through the hole where the feeding bowl fitted. The parrot pinched the reel between its sharp upper and chiselled lower beak with surprising delicacy and hacked it to matchstick splinters in an hour. The child gawped at the little pile of debris mixed with its oily shit on the floor of its cage. One day, impatient to find a bare reel for the parrot, she searched in her mother’s sewing box but there was only one nearly empty. It had a short length of red thread on it. She didn’t ask. She knew it was too little to be useful so she gave it all to the parrot. She had never heard a parrot choke. She was too afraid to fetch her mother while the parrot strained its beak against the tightening loops of stout nylon thread. It fell so softly. The thread was the same colour as its tail.
I also love photography - I'm fascinated by textures in nature, particularly those I can see on my daily walks around our estuary village.
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