Wed 1st November
On Wednesday the 1st. November we met at Helen’s house to read and discuss some short pieces based on Christmas or Winter.
We started in the now time-honoured practice of reading in turn the next section of Jeff Evans’ book ‘The Saga of Thørkil’ in which the young Vikings prepared for a winter of skating, skiing and hunting while noting the evil Freydan’s lack of generosity and his belittling of our hero.
Sue started our winter/christmas readings off with a signed limited edition of a pamphlet, (now sold out!), by Simon Armitage inspired by his visit to the Arctic called ‘Cryosphere’ in which he takes us on a small-boat trip with him where he encounters:
“With the engine almost stalled
we nudged and nosed through crystalline lilies,
past bergs like half-sunk galleons snared by frost.”
The poet is amazed by the sensory reactions he is feeling:
“no word of a lie the spitting and hissing
of melting ice was a forest fire to the ear”
He then finds himself confronted by the sight of a huge glacier:
“Here was an ancient empire of snow being tipped
over the edge, its pages thrown from the cliffs.
Here the forces of heat were shunting temples,
pavilions and winter palaces into the flood.”
We are left with the feeling of such catastrophic, impending doom as the little red boat sails:
“in the marbled wreckage of smashed altars
and broken tombs, as toppled ice surrendered
it secret unsayable blue to the sky.
Here in the revelation of the indescribably specific blue of the glacial ice which had been formed over millenia and now attacked by global warming Armitage personifies it in all its beauty and tragedy. I think we were left with both a sense of wonder and of foreboding.
Marie followed this with another of Armitage’s works called ‘A Glory’ in which an unnamed person whom we assume is his son or daughter
“...made an angel of yourself
free-falling backwards into last night’s snow,”
After the child had sprung clear from the impression he/she had made in the snow Armitage remarked:
“and the angel remained: fixed, countersunk,
open wide, hosting the whole of the sky.”
The poet having brought to life the marks in the snow becomes uneasy, concerned, for the fate of his angel. He returns to the “scene of the crime”. The snow is melting away from the place and he worries for the spoiling of the heavenly image with:
“grass poking out through the scored spine, the wings
on the turn, becoming feathered, clipped.”
His identification has gripped him so far that he fears for the unconcerned degrading and mutilation of it with cows trampling “roughshod over it” where “somebody’s boy might try it on for size” that he then addresses the angel and tells it that he will mount a vigil and
“I keep watch; wait for the dawn to take you,
raise you, imperceptibly, by degrees.”
Suzanne chose a Wendy Cope poem from her collection ‘Serious Concerns’ called ‘19th Christmas Poem’
She starts with “Christmas is coming” but the goose isn’t getting fat, quite the contrary, her literary editor phones and she curses as it’s a request for a “Seasonal verse.” Much of the sense of anger and irony is accentuated through her highly intelligent use of rhyme which in this case she uses in the second and fourth lines of each quatrain:
“Christmas is coming,
Last week in September
Can you let us have it
By the second of November.”
Cope’s poems are all carefully and methodically constructed. In this one alternate stanzas start with the mantra “Christamas is coming” and they all have a carefully considered metre. They are humorous but in each case they carry a deeply felt concern or observation. She retains her Christmas theme and fully fledged irony to the end when she says:
“Dear Dial-a-Poet
Hope it will do.
Please to pay without delay
And God bless you.
Elaine then read a good amount from Carol Anne Duffy’s long poem ‘Mrs Scrooge’ which was illustrated by Posy Simmonds and brought the post Dickens ‘Christmas Carol’ up to date with references to:
“when shops were window-dressed with unsold tinsel, trinkets, toys,
trivial pursuits, with sequinned dresses and designer suits,
with chocolates, glacé fruits and marzipan, with Barbie,
Action Man, with bubblebath and aftershave and showergel;”
Scrooge himself she says is “doornail-dead”. Mrs. Scrooge is distributing leaflets with “Find out how turkey’s really die” outside Marley’s Supermarket. She meets the ghosts of Christmas Past where we witness the green, unspoiled fields of the heath at Heath Row, of Christmas Present in which we see all the terrible things that we are doing to ourselves and to the world and Christmas Future where she is shown her lovely family and friends all at her graveside saying good things about her and she wakes on Christmas Day, the doorbell rings and
“and in they poured,
taking the stairs two at a time - Bob, Bob’s wife,
the grandchildren, the Fezziwigs,
their girls, babies, partners,
all shouting
“Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!”
Her present, of course, is offered her by Tiny Tim who calls out:
“Here you are, Grandma, the sweet that Grandad gave you
every Christmas that he lived! A ...”
“HUMBUG!”
exclaimed Mrs Scrooge!”
Diana’s contribution was 'Snow' by Gillian Clarke, now a firm favourite with the group since Diana introduced us to her. In this poem Clarke invites us to think about how snow changes things, our perceptions. The first line contains a phrase which, typically for her, is ambiguous or more accurately perhaps is ‘portmanteau’ as Gerard Manley Hopkins might put it:
“We’re brought to our senses, awake
to the black and whiteness of world.”
‘brought to our senses’ is immediately received as being pulled up short, awakened, but the poet here is also saying that it brings us to our actual human, physical senses. In the next line she emphasises this:
“Snow’s sensational.” she says, framing for us the two meanings of the word. She then goes on to illuminate for us the senses that it touches, its taste, its touch, its sound even; and surely when she says that it awakens our senses to “the black and whiteness of world” we are not only to visualise what snow covering our environs does in eliminating the greys and colours but also leads us to the world’s divisions between Black and White, East and West, Rich and Poor and so on?
The poem continues in this dense manner to the last stanza so I could go on to expand but I won’t, for your sanity if not for mine! She takes us from her musings in her own locality and in her own room to where we observe:
“Motorways muffled in silence, lorries stranded
like dead birds, airports closed, trains trackless.
White paws lope the river on plates of ice
in the city’s bewildered wilderness.”
Helen chose ‘Christmas Trees’ by Robert Frost for a welcome revival of the classic. The poem is in the form of ‘A Christmas circular letter,’ what we would cal a ‘Round Robin’ and to the many city-dwelling friends that received one Frost tells a story of a hard-nosed entrepreneur/dealer who draws up in his car to Frost’s country home:
“He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was”
It turns out that he wants to buy some of the poet’s fir trees.
“My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.”
The buyer picked out all the best shaped ones and told Frost that he would pay:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”
Knowing full well that he could get that much for each tree were he to allow them to grow to their full height he refused as he knew he was going to do all along.
“Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them.”
At three cents each he says he would rather give them away and:
“Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.”
Helen’s second piece was ‘December 26th’ by Kenn Nesbitt which is essentially for children but was appreciated by all in its brevity and humour. The poet makes a rhyming long list of toys including:
“A cowboy hat.
A comic book.
A baseball bat.”
Until he gets to the final lines in which he explains:
“So that’s my list
of everything
that Santa Claus
forgot to bring.”
Enough said!
Geoff read a short story by O. Henry called ‘The Gift of the Magii’ wherein Della and Jim Dillingham Young, who were desperately poor, secretly sacrificed for each other the most treasured things they each possessed for the other’s Christmas gift. It didn’t turn out well apart for the fact that they learnt how much each meant to the other and how much they were in love. O. Henry told the tale in a wry, amusing and sympathetic way.
After all our labours Helen treated us to hot drinks and slices of home-made spicy cake. Delicious!
gw
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