Fishing In Gairloch (A) First Part Poem by Sally Evans

Fishing In Gairloch (A) First Part



The three subjects of poetry are love, death and poetry.

Above the loch known as the aeroplane
the loch known as the diamond gleams all day.
Twin glinting lochans called the spectacles
are neatly pocketed behind the brae.

You think it isn't true? It's true.
gairloch; s the bit you'd hold the map of britain by
high on your left, if your right hand steadied the lump
of Kent and Sussex below the Thames.
the map might break at the Thames, or it might break
across the narrow part of Northumberland.

You think nothing so beautiful
could ever happen inside this space,
a huge island you are sick of. We can fly out,
but we don't. It solves nothing. We come back
with another Greek dress, an Italian jug,
swatch of Aussie phtotos,
moon dust.

We can't have a new land, hence fiction.
Poetry is sworn to the truth
but it may take the road of fancy towards the truth.


How Dylan Thomas did it

In London among the mashed potato and poems in a studio
of Cardiff men speaking English and making girls plague
the smart Varsity editors of disgraceful rags,
owning, devouring letters between friends and fiancees
and the looming figure of threadbare Edith in London Paris
America. Seagulls crowd rudely, lorries brake, hot tarmac
melts the mirages of girls who write stories and stay middleclass.
He is Shakespeare in Swansea, Taliesin in London
but in America only a visiting twerp
poet with a drink problem and a musical voice.


American Emily and Sylvia

Always give or take a feminist change of ground.,
an oligocracy, economic war fought in the home,
fought by scribbling mothers, workmen, pavement artists
local government officials, buskers, teachers, screamers,
& people who would hide in a room and write.

Young women mopping babies - no playroom laptop
but scrubbed elm lid, a hermit window wide -
clashed words slip out, slide round, fly everywhere
to pool in poems, play tig with elves of night
and count their winnings in the quiet dawn.


How Gerard Manley Hopkins did it

I draw and pray with words, take sailships
from Liverpool to Clyde, through Scotland with Black's Guide
back in the eighteen-sixties, though you wouldn't credit
ny boi-oi-oink rhythm and my general comments
with not being modern

Inversnaid, a remote waterfall low-to-lake falling
on north east Lomond. The trees are inspired and make my poem.
After me many a nun woman or man poet possessed
of every one of my ordered ordained words yessed.

At this point 'this darksome burn horseback brown'
is quoted, as much of it as the reader can remember.
Hopkins was still considering Medieval Moderns, Rossetti et al
and he 'desired to be where springs not fail' etc
We can't talk about Hopkins outside his own words
and this is the ultimate accolade of a poet
but makes him not much use to the universities.

Rain falls on the lochan the spongy everything
of heather, slate-blue blaeberry. butterwort, ling
stretching to screes and peaks, a few red deer
who can be dangerous at this time of year.

The poets in the North of England drain from the moorlands
and collect in a puddle in Huddesfield. The poets in London
sulk on the tube in the dwindling rush hour.
Plonking words together, necessarily other people's
used words, is this an honourable occupation
to which we are driven, habit to mad pastime?

Why not sit by the loch and fish,
why not sit by the loch and wish?
Rain patters on your black umbrella
while the sun shivers on the other fella.
Why, because fish skulk in the cool dark stones,
alive, apart in fathoms, of irrevocably distant intellect,
but I do not wish to kill them. Political correctness
has very little to do wth it, their deliciousness
has less. I am a soft creature in some ways
but not when it comes to sorting out a poem.

It is ideas I fish for, here in Gairloch,
ideas that I invite to my beautiful home.


How Keats did it

Shakespeare wore out many pens, tools of necesssity,
gleaned twenty-five years' harvest, twenty years
not wasted, central in England, central in time.
Keats' pen, further on in history,
rushes on mischief, meshes his short years
of sedged precipices far too visibly.
La Belle Dame hounds him mercilessly.
In Highgate's enchanted forests, chases of Enfield,
'Now more than ever seems it rich to die.'
He made illness help him. I don't resent Keats' death.
I have always resented Dylan Thomas' death.
Dylan Thomas was a fireball. Keats was a moonbeam.
Both of them loved women. Isabella staring at her basil-pot
flowering from the skull of her lover. Caitlin with ice-cream
on her arm, asking her dinner-party neighbour to lick it off.
Caitlin wrote poetry in secret. There is always a lover and a loved.

transcription in progress
[1996]

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