A Plague of Poetry: 50 days of Poems
Thursday, 9 July 2020
Poems from the Backroom 115: Stephanie Green
One of Hugh’s great ideas was the 'Burns Windows' project. As you probably know Burns used to carry a diamond tipped pen around (the accessory of choice for all ploughboy poets) with which he would inscribe folks' windows with comments in verse about his experiences in the locality, a kind of 18th century Trip Advisor. I don’t know how he got away with it given when I wrote a pejorative essay on the toilet wall of the Globe Inn about another poet I was threatened with arrest. Anyway Shug’s idea was to cover all the windows of the Globe, Burns fave pub, with acetates bearing words from poets all over the world. He did this marvellous project several times in Dumfries and once in Dunfries’ twin town in Germany, Gifhorn. It was a marvellous effect, a glistening sea of words.
I think 'Burns Windows' is where I would have first come across Stephanie Green’s poetry although she was also involved in several projects in Dumfries including, as she is an expert in dance, the Dumfries troupe Oceanallover who can always be relied to come to arts events dressed as prawns. She's also the first poet we've had in the #plague who is a trained puppeteer. But it is her poetry we are concerned about here, and it is glorious indeed.
Steph is another Irish/Welsh meld, a Welsh speaker with an Irish parent though she now lives in Scotland. Her first poetry pamphlet, 'Glass Works' from Cat's Pyjamas Publications in 2005 was short-listed for the Callum McDonald Award and her latest pamphlet 'Flout' was published by HappenStance and launched at StAnza in 2015. She has read at many poetry festivals in this country and beyond. Stephanie's poetry is often born from history and in her hands it is not only a thing of beauty but work that holds a mirror to our contemporary hearts and souls.
Stephanie's Website:
http://www.stephaniegreen.org.uk/
Poetry Library Profile plus two poems:
Hanmer’s Agate: Experiments of a Tulip Fancier,
Sir Thomas Hanmer (1612-1678)
Returned from exile, he stands in a muddy field,
once his garden of formal parterres;
the trees are war-torn, storm-slashed; fireweed
rages through the grounds and the unhinged door
into the great hall; mice rampage,
bird shit weeps on the lace and lovelock
of his portrait as a young man; dung in the chapel
requisitioned for Parliamentarian horses.
Far from the Commonwealth’s courts, Sir Thomas
tends his garden, remembering the promise packed
in papery brown bulbs brought back from France
in the ship’s hold, his first wife left behind in her grave.
He plants the knot-garden they’d planned together: auriculas,
ranunculas, anemone and above all, tulips:
Belle Isabelle, Belle Susanne and Agates.
They rot in the wet Flintshire soil.
Should he sprinkle wine on the earth with incantations
to the moon? No. But after much experiment,
he shares his success with a fellow tulip-fancier,
Cromwell’s second-in-command.
To Major-General John Lambert,
From Sir Thomas Hanmer, Bart.
Plant them about the full moon in September,
in soil taken from mould from the fields or woodstacks
and mix with a 4th part or more of sand.
A gift of beauty, beyond faction: the mother-root
of the most exquisite and gallant, a tulip agotted
with scarlet, and gris de lin on pure white,
well parted, its base and stamens blue.
(First published in Magma: the European edition, April, 2018.)
I tell my husband I am pregnant and he sets out to make a tiny coffin (1891)
Poetry Library Profile plus two poems:
Two Poems from 'And Other Poems':
Hanmer’s Agate: Experiments of a Tulip Fancier,
Sir Thomas Hanmer (1612-1678)
Returned from exile, he stands in a muddy field,
once his garden of formal parterres;
the trees are war-torn, storm-slashed; fireweed
rages through the grounds and the unhinged door
into the great hall; mice rampage,
bird shit weeps on the lace and lovelock
of his portrait as a young man; dung in the chapel
requisitioned for Parliamentarian horses.
Far from the Commonwealth’s courts, Sir Thomas
tends his garden, remembering the promise packed
in papery brown bulbs brought back from France
in the ship’s hold, his first wife left behind in her grave.
He plants the knot-garden they’d planned together: auriculas,
ranunculas, anemone and above all, tulips:
Belle Isabelle, Belle Susanne and Agates.
They rot in the wet Flintshire soil.
Should he sprinkle wine on the earth with incantations
to the moon? No. But after much experiment,
he shares his success with a fellow tulip-fancier,
Cromwell’s second-in-command.
To Major-General John Lambert,
From Sir Thomas Hanmer, Bart.
Plant them about the full moon in September,
in soil taken from mould from the fields or woodstacks
and mix with a 4th part or more of sand.
A gift of beauty, beyond faction: the mother-root
of the most exquisite and gallant, a tulip agotted
with scarlet, and gris de lin on pure white,
well parted, its base and stamens blue.
(First published in Magma: the European edition, April, 2018.)
I tell my husband I am pregnant and he sets out to make a tiny coffin (1891)
I choose a name: Mhairi or Callum.
He searches the tide-wrack daily for driftwood.
He forbids me to make clothes
But I make sheets for the coffin-crib.
There will be clean linen until the last
while I will rock and croon to my babe
for the few blessed days of its life.
It is God’s will. I shut out imaginings:
the fourth or fifth night,
when the babe gives up sucking;
the seventh, clenched gums,
even for my finger dipped in water.
I am knitting a shawl of such intricacy,
nothing so beautiful will have been seen before.
(Published in ‘Northwords Now.’)
He searches the tide-wrack daily for driftwood.
He forbids me to make clothes
But I make sheets for the coffin-crib.
There will be clean linen until the last
while I will rock and croon to my babe
for the few blessed days of its life.
It is God’s will. I shut out imaginings:
the fourth or fifth night,
when the babe gives up sucking;
the seventh, clenched gums,
even for my finger dipped in water.
I am knitting a shawl of such intricacy,
nothing so beautiful will have been seen before.
(Published in ‘Northwords Now.’)
