RSS Feed

Tag Archives: Kevin Crossley-Holland

Harald in Byzantium by Kevin Crossley-Holland Illustrations by Chris Riddell (Arc Publications)

Posted on March 3, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Harald in Byzantium by Kevin Crossley-Holland Illustrations by Chris Riddell (Arc Publications)

These poems are ‘not narratives but revelations’ says the author, and this seems a perfect way to describe the light of insight and discovery that shines, momentarily, on the forgotten or unknown. Here are fragments, scraps of stories handed down, examples of warfare, leadership and love, contrasts between worlds in the north and in the south, all of which come together to reveal the connections and interdependence among men that are needed for life. ‘If one man breaks the shield-rampart,’ says the narrator, ‘all his companions suffer.’

Harald Hardrada, we are told, was the greatest warrior of his age, true to his Viking reputation for courage, ferocity and ambition for ‘the golden crown, hard-edged fame.’ Several poems end with words of defiance: 

‘I’ll brook no disobedience./None at all.’ 

‘I have no choice, only an imperative.’

‘Let me be blood and flames.’

Yet he is also a man of passion, capable of love if not fidelity. A beautiful woman can inspire him to lyrical, fervent outbursts:

            The delicate contraption of your right ankle,

            the downy crooks of your arms,

            your swan-neck …

                                    Dear Gods

            I who will rule

            the whole northern world …

            My head is thumping, my heart spinning

If needs must, he says, he will even take on the gods to alleviate his ‘torment’:

            Grant me one night 

            in your apple garden

            forever young

            and I will outdo the gods.

This is a slim pamphlet – 24 pages of poems and nearly all of them illustrated with drawings in black and white by Chris Riddell, each one complementing the mood of the poems. This is the quality that most appeals to me – the atmospheric combination of text and sketch that creates a world as the author imagines it, a world that is Viking, a harsh and brutal world of cold, wild seas where fate determines if a man shall live or die, enjoy freedom or live in exile and loneliness. 

Language, in Harald in Byzantium, creates the setting, is almost the setting itself. Kevin Crossley-Holland is skilful at blending a modern, colloquial style with kennings and phrases of the historical era. Some travellers, for example, are trying to escape destiny, their own ‘death-shadows’, a companion is described as a ‘blood friend’, Harald’s ‘dragon-prow’ is welcomed although his inner self yearns for ‘spirit-fruit’ and, of course, there is a raven, bird of death and doom,  that taunts Harald when he is trapped in ‘scorching wind from Africa … red dust whirling/ round me, red dust in my throat, my gut.’

A setting that is Norse – and yet with clear contemporary relevance. ‘This week another boatload of young bucks sailed in,’ says the narrator. ‘A tide of refugees… more, many more than shoals of herring in the fjord.’ Discussions follow as to the best way of dealing with the problem. ‘Stem the tide at source,’ says one, ‘meet them at the crossing-places/and cut off their right hands/and send them home.’ ‘Well,’ says another, we could ‘extend our borders’. Or, declares a thinker, we could let them know ‘our welcome will be strictly conditional.’

Harald in Byzantium is a varied and fascinating pamphlet that can be read at a sitting, dipped into, acted, or read aloud, enjoyed by all ages. A fine publication. 

Mandy Pannett 3rd March 2023

1 Comment

Posted in Children's literature, English Poetry, Pamphlet and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Gravity for Beginners by Kevin Crossley-Holland (Arc Publications]

Posted on May 31, 2021 by tearsinthefence
Gravity for Beginners by Kevin Crossley-Holland (Arc Publications]

I have always admired Kevin Crossley-Holland’s writing, particularly his Anglo-Saxon translations, so it is a pleasure to read and review Gravity for Beginners, his first new collection for six years. An additional delight is the setting – mysterious, atmospheric Norfolk with its wealth of legends.

The collection opens with an epigraph from a poem by Rilke which sets the mood for the theme of ‘times past’ and the sense of magic. ‘This is the heart of everything that ever was’ is the first line and it is also the heart of Gravity for Beginners.

The epigraph is followed by nine parts of a sequence called ‘Seahenge: A Journey’ and we begin a journey through an emotional and geographical landscape established by pieces whose titles themselves are poem-like: ‘Tump’, ‘Deadheaded’, Unliving’, Shimmer’. ‘Tree’, ‘Altar’, ‘Crossing’, ‘Tides’, ‘Burden’. Here the journey begins with ‘a search for a thumbnail of pottery’ that will remind the narrator of his belief that he was ‘an inmate of the barrow’ that once existed and whose echoes can still be heard:

         Footfalls in the sandy soil and soggy fen,

         footfalls through forests bedded

         with cones and needles:

         knappers and salt-panners and oyster-men,

         truth-tellers, outcasts, devotees

         still resting here.

The sequence explores the background to Seahenge – a timber circle of oak trunks with a huge, upside-down one at its centre. Here a young woman relates how she helped to build the circle and lay the body of her father inside it and here the atmosphere becomes ancestral, pagan, violent and ritualistic. We are in the realm of a ‘white skull, green earth, swarming sea’. This is the site of a ‘crossing place’ where ‘time and ‘dream’ have re-mapped the original henge ‘into another truth’ where the narrator is able:

         Wholly to immerse myself

         wholly to find myself.

Gravity for Beginners, like all of Kevin Crossley-Holland’s writing, is imbued with myth, history and the still-living past where wide steps are ‘scalloped by centuries of hooves’. (‘The New Familiar’). These lines from ‘The Northern Gods’ particularly appeal to me:

         Have you ever dreamed you were sitting in the bole

         of Yggdrasill, squinting up at the skull

         of the white sky, then down into the icy swirl?

         Have you heard the vitriol of the dragon,

         the corpse-devourer, and seen how the squirrel

         whisks it up to the eagle on the topmost branch?

There’s humour as well as lyricism in ‘L’Abbaye-Château de Camon’ where the ‘rondel/ of the seasons seems to spin faster’ and the breath of the medieval queen Aliénor ‘is always here/or hereabouts, trailing her wailing/retinue of troubadours.’

But this whole collection is a journey and in ‘En Route’ we are reminded there’s ‘always some unscheduled halt/with its attendant wonders’ which may be:

         The marvellous or the monstrous

         but more often the humdrum 

  • a reclamation yard, or the smell

of an autumn bonfire; this siding, say,

choked with dusty purple nettles,

an ochre butterfly flickering over them.’

There is a sense of wonder throughout Gravity for Beginners and this brings me back to the starting point of Rilke’s lines about the way ‘the heart of everything … returns to each of us, our very being,/woven into us.’ Kevin Crossley-Holland invites the reader to share in the essence behind the appearance, to see the landscape behind the words.  The collection’s title poem sums this up:

         Words slipping into the mind’s casket,

         quick rain falling to attending earth.

Or maybe the essence and wonder is best expressed in this, my favourite poem, ‘Winter as it Used To Be’:

         Birds flew in searching for seed

         and all at once became snowflakes;

         as words do.

         A burst of sunlight, an angel’s aureole,

         and then mist; and the trees,

         and our singing selves made of morning air.

Mandy Pannett 31st May 2021

Leave a comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Casket by Andy Brown, 2019 the vase in pieces by Rod Mengham

Posted on August 9, 2019 by tearsinthefence
Casket by Andy Brown, 2019 the vase in pieces by Rod Mengham

As I have mentioned before there is something powerfully elegiac threading its sinuous path through Andy Brown’s poetry and “the bloodlines that flow through our bodies are those veins and arteries that pump our sense of immediacy: they keep the here and now moving” (Review of Bloodlines, Worple Press 2018). Reading the recent Shearsman Chapbook by Brown I am struck yet again by the poet’s haunting use of language as he traces the runic symbols upon the lid of an 8th century Anglo-Saxon treasure chest:

“In all these figures, filigree and knots –
In all this yielding bone that’s swum across
Sea-lanes and history to a monk’s refuge –
The ghosts we see, of course, are no such thing,
But simply what remembrance makes of them;
The laden look we witness on a stranger’s face
That houses recollections of our dead.”

According to Ralph of Coggeshall in his Chronicon Anglicanum a merman was caught at Orford in Suffolk during the reign of Henry II in the 12th century. When Kevin Crossley-Holland produced his version of this event he added a note to say that the merman “was imprisoned in the newly-built castle, did not recognise the Cross, did not talk despite torture, returned voluntarily into captivity having eluded three rows of nets, and then disappeared never to be seen again.” And so a tale is told and the world of the long-gone reappears on the page not only of folk-lore but also of imaginative reconstruction: one might well look at Conrad’s short story of ‘Amy Foster’!

The Franks Casket, housed in the British Museum, is made of whalebone and is decorated with runic inscriptions, some Latin text and images from various religious and mythical traditions. Like all tale-tellers Andy Brown attempts “to capture something of the layered histories, from ancient times to present”. As a lyric poet of distinction he also gives voice to an attempt at translation “of the place where I now live: the river Teign and its surrounding area”.
The poem is in five sections and it opens with an account of the casket’s front panel:

“From the river’s curved calligraphy
We haul up a trawl-net of treasures
And tip the shells out on the sorting rack…
Dark mussels fall in clattering cascades.”

The second section opens with an Olsonian sense of istorin, as the lines echo the words offered by Olson to Dorn in his ‘Bibliography on America’ where he suggested that the young poet should absorb himself intensely and entirely in his subject, “to dig one thing” in a “saturation job” that might require a “lifetime of assiduity”,

“To reach the present day, dig deep
Through the level berm that runs above
The ditch and counterscarp of Castle Dyke”

It was in a workshop session given in Vancouver in 1963 that Olson said the great back door is not only Hesiod but also Beowulf and the poems of Casket open up a gateway through which we can peer at a past.

AND as if from a past the Oystercatcher’s beak pulls up a new treasure: seven substantial poems by Rod Mengham two of which are dedicated to other poets, Peter Hughes and Jeremy Prynne. As if to emphasise the emergence of a distant past the opening poem of this little volume is deeply unsettling:

“those are not the colours of the dawn
but the painted breasts of Iceni women
as fierce and stubborn as sap”

As the past feeds the present a shimmering light of the long-gone acts as a mirage but this can only emphasise the unsettling awareness of isolation. With its quiet nod in the direction of ‘The Waste Land’ it must be clear that “there is no spirit who walks beside you / only a coincidence and its shadow”. In the Preface to ‘Inhabiting Art’, the second section of Grimspound (reviewed on Tears blog, a month ago) Mengham expressed his interest in different types of history:

“Although I have a personal interest in natural history, these essays are about cultural history in relation to landscape and cityscape, cultural history viewed episodically or in the form of a palimpsest, where the present state of the habitat both reveals and conceals its own prehistory, the record of its own formation and transformations.”

‘As It Is’ (to J.H.P.) opens with “Memory is recast from the ground up” and closes with fishes that swim down “under five crushing fathoms”. Ariel’s song to Ferdinand’s ears sinks deep to discover that “the bottom of all the land is this stone”.
Andy Brown’s conclusion to the opening of the casket, to the lifting of the lid, is to demand that “These fragments” are given “back to the machinery / Of the world…this shared and ever constant now.”

Ian Brinton 9th August 2019

Leave a comment

Posted in English Poetry, Pamphlet and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
%d bloggers like this: