Three Poems by Frances Presley

b

burning bush barely burning
barely bush angel flame of fire
behold the bush burned and was
not consumed out of the midst of
the bush called unto her i am that i am

bring them up into land whose
unashamed blush brush sporadic
red rain lost art of plastic wrappers
rarely seen splash of robin red breast
mate silver grey down breadth in the acer

red palmate held against maple
age spots dark cells and white veins
put your hand into your breast come out
leprous as snow come out as flesh do not
go into another land you are here burning

from Alphabet for Alina (Five Seasons Press, 2012 forthcoming)

Caratacus stone 

‘failure is not an option’ 

I

leans sideways  at an awkward angle   this is not the way to strain     gradual ceding      call it quits       double or quits         my double trouble          character gouged           smooth mouthed             leaning tower              kept leaning               lean times                 monitored always                  identify me with N                   for nepus

C                                      A                                      R                   Ā                                      A                   C                   I

chipped off                     the block                      pasted back                       with pale pink gum

E                   P                   U                   S

24 June 2007

II

 ‘The stone is so remote from railways, and the ways of Latinists, that it has hardly ever been seen by an epigraphist’

It is impossible to clearly show the inscription by means of an untouched photograph. So that the sizes and shapes of the letters, and the spacing of the inscription, can be readily seen, they have been outlined at the expense of naturalness

CARĀACI or Caratacus - Welsh national hero of early Roman days, taken in chains to Rome, where, according to Roman historians, he was given his liberty because they were impressed by his fearless bearing

NEPUS = Nepos (Romano-British reading) Sister’s son, descendent, kinsman, son, grandson, nephew

One of the pieces was distinctly inscribed with  

and exactly fitted the fracture immediately preceding the EPVS. The N was cut reversed – a not uncommon error even nowadays

It is to a local hillman, unversed in archaeology, we must turn for the key to the re-discovery of the missing for its jealous protection during many months, and for its fixing to the inscription in the exact position and with commendable skill

Carat – represents the passive participle of the verb, which is in Welsh car-u, to love

from Alfred Vowles ‘The history of the Caratacus stone’ (1939)

How2
("reversed N" should be just integrated in flow of text in part II; but not allowed by Blogger!) 

OCTOBER

ON NORTH HILL

bless test
mess of leaves
wings will not make
                                                    serious
                                                    back pack
                                                    stride
fern returns
leaf crisps
clenched
hear
here

                ~                      ~
break               stop                  wave
make it return
a flick of the wrist
she hasn’t got
yet


            who has not built
            a house
            will now no longer
            will not build

                                                                                no nay never
                                                                                or some version
                                                                                on the march
                                                                                against
                                                                                war


            no more
            builds now
            who has not yet
            who has not built
            yet builds now
            bilds


(this is the dialogue of memory)

bird rattle
sun slats
through dry leaves

like the turning
segments
of glass
at Foreland Point
occulting the optic



                                                                white outriders

                                                                                            over ride the line

from Myne: New and Selected Poems & Prose 1976-2005 (Shearsman, Exeter, 2006)

A VERY QUICK INTRODUCTION TO THE POETRY OF FRANCES PRESLEY (reading & talking about her poetry at 7.30, July 4, Coffee Corner cafe, Bishops Stortford)

Frances Presley was born in Derbyshire, grew up in Lincolnshire and Somerset, and lives in north London.  She studied modern literature at the universities of East Anglia and Sussex, writing dissertations on Pound, Apollinaire, and Bonnefoy.  She worked on community development and anti-racism projects, and also at the Poetry Library.  She collaborated with artist Irma Irsara in a multi-media project about clothing and the fashion trade, Automatic Cross Stitch (Other Press, 2000); and with poet Elizabeth James in an email text and performance, Neither the One nor the Other (Form Books, 1999).  The title sequence of Paravane: new and selected poems, 1996-2003 (Salt, 2004) was a response to 9/11/2001, and the IRA bombsites in London.  Myne: new and selected poems and prose, 1976-2005, (Shearsman, 2006) takes its title from the old name for Minehead in Somerset.  Lines of Sight, (Shearsman, 2009), includes an approach to the Neolithic stone sites on Exmoor, part of a multi-media collaboration with Tilla Brading, published in 2010 as Stone Settings (Odyssey Books & Other Press).  Presley has written various essays and reviews, especially on innovative British women poets.  Her work is included in the recent anthologies Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (edited Carrie Etter, Shearsman, 2010), and A Ground Aslant – Radical Landscape Poetry (edited Harriet Tarlo, Shearsman, 2011)

Her poetry is marked by its high seriousness of intent and theme, made lively by her constant innovations in style and presentation, and a quiet humane humour. It is a remarkably unified project, in which avant-garde procedures such as improvisation, collaboration, multi-media presentation and site‑specificness come from long work in feminism and social activity as much as from artistic experimentation. Games are played with the meaningful things of this world (like words and stones) to rearrange them and see what they say to us. This isn’t complicated or obscure – it is what both children do and what our ancestors did. It is how we get to know language, land, ourselves and our relationships with others. It is the very project of human culture.

This is poetry, then, which reflects contemporary social and artistic practice, but also picks up on the play with words and stones we all engage in and can relate to. The ancient stone relics on Exmoor that have interested her recently are characterised by their obscurity and small-scaleness, far‑removed from megalithic mega‑monsters (doubtless commemorating the power of our eternal ruling elites) like Stonehenge, Avebury and Brodgar. The Exmoor stones are equally marks on the landscape, but presenting not domination and incomprehensible awe, but smaller-scale, more human action, and need searching for rather than thrusting themselves upon their on-lookers.  This is the level we actually live and work at, where our consciousness is formed. Her close attention to the sounds & letters of language is evident in her forthcoming Alphabet for Alina sequence (Five Seasons Press, 2012), and in the poem “Learning Letters”, an improvisation on her childhood Dutch primer (her mother’s tongue): “a new formation” always, whether from childhood words or quartz pebbles.

Another delightful quality is the openness of her writing to the world around her – whether it is writing where the site of its writing is important (poésie en plein air) or where the world itself forces itself in. Thus the poem “Culbone”, written in the numinous location of Culbone Church, with language overheard earlier at the Ship Inn, Porlock (various Romantic poet memories ion these places!) ends with the famous “Nonsense” that had got Walter Wolfgang ejected from the Labour Party Conference the day before.

Frances Presley on the Internet

Poems online

from Alphabet for Alina 

• Carrie Etter: Poet, teacher & critic (blog): http://carrieetter.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/infinite-difference-sampler-no-5.html
• Litter http://www.leafepress.com/litter2/presley-skelt/presley-skelt.html

earlier poems

• Great Works  http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/fp1.html
• How2  http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_2/ecopoetics/presley.html

About herself & writing

• Edmund Hardy, “An interview with Frances Presley”, Intercapillary Space, http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2006/10/interview-with-frances-presley.html
•  “Collaboration… collaboration…….collaboration”, 'Readings': Response and Reactions to Poetries, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/readings-old/r2/frances.html
•   “Statement of Poetics”, British Electronic Poetry Centre, http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~bepc/poets/presley_3.htm
•  “Hazel Eardley-Wilmot: a search for origins”, Junction Box, http://lyndondavies.co.uk/w/769/frances-presley-hazel-eardley-wilmot-a-search-for-origins/

Criticism, Reviews etc 

• Tony Frazer & Frances Presley, “Frances Presley” (+ bibliography), Poetry International  http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/9177/29/Frances-Presley
• Douglas Messerli, “Frances Presley” (+ bibliography), The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog, http://pippoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/frances-presley.htmlSteve Spence, “Remembering & Interpretation: Lines of Sight, Frances Presley (Shearsman Books)”, Stride Magazine, http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag2010/march%202010/Lines%20of%20Sight.htm

Bibliography

•              with Irma Irsara, Automatic Cross Stitch (Other Press, 2000)
•        with Elizabeth James, Neither the One nor the Other (Form Books, 1999)
•               Paravane: new and selected poems, 1996-2003 (Salt, 2004)
•               Myne: new and selected poems and prose, 1976-2005, (Shearsman, 2006)
•              Lines of Sight, (Shearsman, 2009)
•              with Tilla Brading, Stone Settings (Odyssey Books & Other Press, 2010)
•              with Peterjon Skelt, Alphabet for Alina, (Five Seasons Press, forthcoming 2012)

·         Anthologies

• Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (edited Carrie Etter, Shearsman, 2010
•  A Ground Aslant – Radical Landscape Poetry (edited Harriet Tarlo, Shearsman, 2011)

Poem C

Totem

Behind the chain-link fence

the mobile homes 

shudder under the battering wind,

abandoned hulks

stranded in the dead time

and the day is weary,

dingy in the low light,

colour gone – 

even the road goes nowhere, trailing away

through barren dunes

where the wind stalks the headland.

 

On the gatepost

a totem sits still as stone,

hunched,

head bent,

of no consequence

in the scattering rain

when a sudden movement breaks his contemplation,

then the pose is fractured,

head twisting

in a neat swivel, half circle,

the gaze malignant and full-on.

Distracted, he shifts

and with short skips flits

to the next post as if to show a playful side,

post to post,

tracking the field’s boundary.

But it’s short-lived. Scything the air on arching wings    

he maps out his territory,

like a vengeful angel quartering the ground.

Poem A

We never really bothered with New Year

– Or Valentine’s day, come to that –

But always we were ambivalent about New Year.

We did go to parties when invited,

It would have been churlish not to.

Left to ourselves we would take a drink

At midnight

To see off the old year, acknowledge the New,

And that was it.

We had been war children,

Had known the precariousness of life

At a very early age.

Remembered when New Year had brought dread

Of what might happen in the months to follow

And was a time of desperate prayers instead.

It was some time after the war

With family re-united

That my Aunt Rhoda determined

I should experience a “proper” New Year;  –

Steamrollered my Mother into allowing me

To travel to Trafalgar Square

With her & Uncle John in their car.

It was exhilarating to be in that melee of people,

Scary to be in a stationary car

Rocked by exuberant revellers.

When the clocks struck midnight

And the bells pealed out

And the haunting sound of fog horns

Resonated from the river,

Aunt Rhoda turned to Uncle John and softly said

“This is the year I shall die.”

She did not intend that I should hear,

But I did.

And it was.

So no, we have never really bothered,

Much, with New Year.

At last year’s New Year

For the very first time

We didn’t even bother to stay up.

We went early to bed.

– Strange, that.

As if subconsciously we knew

It would not be a year to welcome

But of course, that was something

We did not know.

Now January comes again

But the beginning of it holds none of the memories

That overwhelm me on other anniversaries,

When I remember our love

And how we celebrated it.

I am glad now

That we never bothered with New Year.

Poem B

Chin-hugging, short-trimmed beard

Listens attentively

To two women

And turns behind

The Italian ladies

Sunglasses as weapons

Hide their eyes

Emotions concealed

Behind darkened visors

What are they thinking?

The boat turns at Lenno

Skims sun-dappled water

Whines with speed

As hydrofoil skis

Mock resistant water

We glide past a small town

Huddling the hillside

Tumbling to the water’s edge

Past beach huts

Pink – or salmon?

Parading for browning bathers

And green hills

On the train to Switzerland

Rolling and falling to the earth

Above which I tower

Lord of all I survey

Below the towns are specks

Mere houses clustered for warmth

Against encircling nature

Children’s voices from behind me

Red baseball caps balanced on growing bones

And their games, handclaps

How long ago it seems

Was I really so young?

A black dog lies down

Scratches languidly

Looks with idle curiosity

As the school group leaves

His eyes tell no story

Hold no mysteries

It is peaceful here now

Only flotsam and jetsam of chatter

Tickles the silence

This is how Switzerland is – and always will be –

The lethal calm always seducing

Purple t-shirt

Clothing a short beard and combed back hair

He has an opera look

A tenor face

He holds his lady

Who returns his attention

With promise eyes

As the mountain train snails down the track

Slithers to civilization

Passengers stare

And think of tea

Time is slipping and saving

Through my bones

Blue shirt

Silvery-grey hair and turned-down mouth

What has he seen

Or felt

That I have not done?

Has he loved as I have loved?

Has time filed its copy on his eyes?

The children sing