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CAUGHT IN THE NET 131- POETRY BY
ROGER ELKIN
Series Editor - Jim Bennett for The Poetry Kit -
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|
Gave them lines on their maps: “meal roads” going nowhere, tracks across mountain and bog bringing nothing to no-one and not meant to be travelled
from; Task Work by Roger Elkin |
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CONTENTS
1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY
At moments of kill, the barn-owl’s eyes are closed
May Visitations
Red Admirals
Omaha Beach
Spiders
Rambling Peak District
Shooting Rhino
Ferriby Foreshore, Remembering
Task Work
Blackbird
|
3 - PUBLICATION HISTORY
4 - AFTERWORD
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1 – BIOGRAPHY: Roger Elkin
Roger is the
author of 10 poetry collections. He
was shortlisted for the Bloodaxe New
Blood Book-length Competition (1987); one of 10 shortlisted (out of 4,000
entries) for the Strokestown International Poetry Competition (2003); and
one of 6 shortlisted for the Keele University Poetry Prize(2007).
His poetry has won 45
First Prizes in International Open Poetry Competitions.
He has received
the Lake Aske
Memorial Award (1982 & 1987)
the Douglas Gibson
Memorial Award (1986)
the Sylvia Plath
Award for Poems about Women (1986)
and the Hugh
MacDiarmid Trophy (2003).
He was the first
recipient of the Howard Sergeant Memorial Award for Services to Poetry
in 1987; and was The Writer’s Rostrum “Poet of the Year, 1991”.
He has shared poetry
readings with among others:
Elizabeth Bartlett,
Martin Booth, Gladys Mary Coles, Helen Dunmore, Ruth Fainlight, U A
Fanthorpe, Roy Fisher, Katherine Gallagher, Philip Gross, James Harpur,
Sylvia Kantaris, John Latham, Bernard O’Donoghue, Mario Petrucci, Lawrence
Sail, Carole Satyamurti, Howard Sergeant and Pauline Stainer.
He has reviewed for
Stand, Outposts, and Envoi; and his critical
articles on Ted Hughes’s Recklings poems have appeared in collections of
essays edited by
Keith Sagar, The
Challenge of Ted Hughes, (St
Martin’s Press, [1995] ISBN 0-312-12054-0)
and Joanny Moulin, Lire
Ted Hughes,
(Edition du Temps, [1999], ISBN 2-84274-074-2)
and on
The
Ted Hughes Society
and
the
Earth-moon Ted Hughes
websites.
He was poetry tutor on
residential weekend courses at Wedgwood College and Conference Centre,
Barlaston; the literary advisor to the Leek Arts Festival, for whom he organized
an International Poetry Competition (1982-1992); the co-Editor (1985-1988) of
Prospice, the international literary
quarterly, issues 17-25 inclusive; and sole Editor of
Envoi 1991-2006, (issues 101-145)
during which time prize-winning writers Julia Copus, Tobias Hill and Owen Sheers
had their poetic openings in the magazine’s
First Publication Feature.
Roger is available for reading, book-signings,
poetry workshops and competition adjudication.
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2 - POETRY
At moments of kill, the barn-owl’s eyes are closed
He
should have read the signs (the blorting from
the cattle wagon as he crossed the market square
for cigs) but was so pleased to be freed from work
sooner than he’d planned that his mind was filled
with frames of his wife’s surprised face, eyes
gleaming, and before he’d realised was driving
deep in lanes, her face reforming with each
turn, each bend…
Headlights flushed a sudden fox – third this month –
sliding redly between hedgerows / brought luminescence
to
seed flumes (so many, such wealth) plunging from
carbeams / snatched at tiger-eyes of white cows (sudden
cover of brakes) ghosting the gritstone walls / located
the starting, startling mongrel (bag of limbs) that’s
always jagging from that
gateway, expected but never
contained, so found himself talking to himself “sodding
dog/silly bitch gender guessing should be indoors get
killed one day”…
But what really held him no matter where he drove
between these leaning fields was the shifting evening
sky, veined black opal, sun blooding on horizons, with
a
thin moon hanging beneath low cloud, so even the fluttered
plunge of bird – barn owl? – half-in, half-out of lights,
and thoughts of bloodied claws – ripping, ripped,
the torn flesh – hadn’t perturbed too much his peace
of
mind. Home. And coming home. Not far to go. Her face…
her lips… surprised eyes. Her eyes…
Till headlights flushed two cars friend’s and wife’s
sliding redly between gateways sudden cover of brakes
surprising mind filled with frames sooner than planned
snatched flesh brought half-in, half-out of lights face
reforming plunging jagging bag of limbs held leaning
driving home coming deep her pleased face gleaming eyes her
lips ripping ripped perturbed his guessing peace of mind
the starting sodding dog should be silly bitch tiger eyes
get killed talking to himself blorting crossed should have
read the bitch her shifting claws should have found
the fluttered signs her lips her gritstone eyes should have
read the signs…
May Visitations
Each morning,
Warren's field some fresher Pollock painting
of knotted
lady-smocks, of buttercups hazing to citrine,
of grass, its
silven heads blurring to bursting seed, a filigree ripeness
almost as tall
as the knees of the hawthorn hedge, and of clover
folding its
pink lips towards light,
each morning,
I say, they come
the seven
white cows
carrying my
new day swaying on their backs.
In drizzle
under low clouds, they huddle:
silent morning
ghosts, marble-still, haunting the hedge.
Shifts of wet
dress their flanks. Their sculpted heads,
thin outlines
etched out of sky, hang down;
their amber
eyes, Egyptian sad, fixed to the ground.
Or if fine,
after liftings
of morning mist, and crane-flies unhinging
from dew's
silver-quick evaporation, they enter delicacy,
cresting
through grass, wading veils of webs, sailing to havens
beneath
sycamore's shade.
All day in the
field's rising heat they mouth and champ, or suffer
hieroglyphs of
flies, and patiently wait
for evening's
release, its drizzle of gnats
and the slow
lowing roll home.
At dusk they
file, seven of them
as if freed
from the Acropolis frieze,
seven together
in silent processional
to some hushed
celebration.
It is then, as
this grass recovers, that I imagine
fields away,
his cloven hoofs thrumming desire,
Dionysos
lifting his heavy head
to bellow home
these deities.
Red Admirals
Pulsing heart-beats,
the isms of being; almost iambic
their blood-tick, their wing-tick –
break flash / break flash
or outstaring the day-gaze
with a vermilion blaze
upon black: the colours of poppy.
Long-tongued, seeking
the speed of flowers –
getting high on it, higher, higher,
a drugged, stumble-flight
up at the moor’s edge
with its milk-thistles, its knapweed.
(Is it purple that pulls them?)
Or gardened with trailing
skeins of buddleia (their scattered
flashes like girls parading
headfuls of hair-slides)
sudden savagery in our town;
a native face-mask, stabbing
from greenness – a pirate-slash,
a stirring of groin.
Are the splayers of flowers,
caressing petals, and stamens,
feasting their isness, their futures
with the kneading-keenness of sex.
Closed-up, are paper wafers
of bark, or Cape Triangles
of good hope. (Many the nets
we kids broke; and jam-jars
a day-or-two jungle with
blades of grass and strangled
flowers. Even then, amidst cup-handed
flutter, that out-facing, out-daring
blazon of colour gave us
tastes of excitement – the sudden
blood-bursts of cuts, that pain
of amazement.
Ageing, we add
fragilities of life,
the nothingnesses of life.)
Red Admirals, captains
of ships of youth, harbingers
of sad passages, of death.
God’s other toys.
Omaha Beach
Seagulls cry alert: Mine. Mine.
Wave after wave assaults the shoreline.
Polished shells push explosively through sand.
Crabs founder like grounded tanks, or move
amphibious and armoured, sideways and back.
There are carapaces and skulls, limbs and bones
where they’ve gone over the top.
Starfish surrender arms for the cross of Lorraine.
Above, the sky is forget-me-not-blue.
And, beneath feet, the surf is whispering
Vergissmeinnicht.
Spiders
Dad didn’t like them either: unpredictable,
wriggly things, frizzy in their busy-ness,
with seeking feelers and bended legs;
their quicksilverness in turning into ball
or escaping in swathed veils of web;
and abseiling down on air in starts and stops,
their snapped trails snagging in his hair.
Their suddenness from box or pot
ambushed his gangling walk; threw
shadows where he dared to square his boot.
That dash of black or brown panicked him:
he feared to tread – squelch, squish – in case
he slipped: their death somehow anticipating his.
So trapped them under clarity of glass:
that way managed their activity. Fitted lids, screwed
fast, and watched them skirting the curve
and scrambling crab-like in some tragic dance.
His eye bent level with the held-up jar,
he fed their fear. Must have seemed like Gulliver.
They stayed alive for days on dusts of nothings,
till dried to skin, paper-thin; pale veins;
stick limbs dangling, angular, akimbo
as if caught mid-stride to freedom.
So it became with him those last three months
of bed-baths: his trailing web of being; limbs
hanging hopeless/helpless; staying alive for weeks
on nothing; trapped by the clarity of where he’d
slipped, panicked by the suddenness of his
sliding path to death; his freedom-fear.
Rambling the Peak District
and finding ourselves in Bosnia
Fallen stone-walling
springing to attention in the militia
of
Srebrenica’s coffin-lid headstones:
so
many mounds, graves, names
so
much stone.
Hushed cabalas of foxgloves
behind walls and in gateways –
the huddled mothers of
numbness and grief at street corners.
Sad-eyed rams out-staring our trespass
with all the incomprehension
of
bloody guts through slipping fingers.
Red-dyed sheep-head –
blood flash against grass –
the shorn flanks thinned to iridescent skins
like blood-letting limbs in Mostar’s bazaars.
This copse is makeshift mosque
where larks call from sky’s tall tower
with plainsong, ancient and eastern,
while high on the hill-ridges there crackles
the ack-ack-ack of magpies
Kalashnicoughing at raiding neighbours.
Not homes, but buildings gutted and
shattered, windows gone missing, roofs hanging
in
air, rooms outside in, and doors spanning
space in wreck of brick, bone of stone,
the folks vanished away, fields being idle, abandoned
tractors and rusting ploughshares, the land
surrendered to nettle, ambushed by weed,
strafing rain and wind’s ricochet –
so
much spoil in brambles barbing ditches and trench.
In
the graveyard stillnesses –
the seed in the ground
seed in the ground –
old soil is growing new owners.
Consider, then,
this country, too,
has bridges to build.
Shooting Rhino
i.m.
Martin Booth (1944-2004)
You’re aware keratin’s the carrot dragging
your attention, so it’s patience, and a steady hand
you need, especially when he’s doing that wheeling
heave, coming in and out of focus, and in again
in his quiet grazing, a delicate swiping of grass,
a stumbling, halting stroll that counterpoints his bulk.
The trick’s lining him up in your sights –
that’s if you can distinguish him from the crop
of rock just under the tree-line, that black mass
which looks as if it’s grazing, head down, and rump
declining to ground level.
So it’s sharp binoculars you need - and luck - once
you’ve spotted him, bringing him into focus.
Full view. Centred, so he occupies the total scan:
a magnificent pan of a magnificent animal:
Black rhino.
Adult bull. Three years old.
What sheer bulk of hulking flesh. If you were a painter
you’d break him down to planes and plates, make the play
of light define his flanks, chart the massy anvil of his head,
that almost excuse for an eye so small against the jaw-line,
his pricked-up ears, and those curving thorns of horn:
No wonder
horn commands high prices.
And you need to take his horns, so bring him in big, bigger
till you can see his ears’ whiskery bristles, his twitching tail,
the way the dung has dried on his hide, the spittle dribbling
on his slow rolling lips, and the defiant spikes that make him
wanted. Vulnerable.
And you’re getting him large, larger, in your sights –
till he’s practically in your face, has taken hold of your mind,
his horns thorning in your head, and you’re falling down
your sight-line, falling into him
but are ready with that finger-itching readiness
and clicking – once – twice -
have him bagged:
a gap filled in the family album.
In 1986 Martin
Booth, poet and writer, visited Luanga National Park in Zambia to survey
the area for a television documentary centring
on a group of “upwards of thirty” black rhino. Returning in September
1987 with a film crew, he found that the particular group of black rhino
had been reduced to “perhaps three.”
North Ferriby Foreshore, remembering
i.m. Granddad Charles and Peter Reading
who never met
Not sand, but reaches of mudflat
veined by rainbowy seawater-seeps
along the Humberside strand. And,
further out, a pewter gleam where
the
fattens to estuary’s broad blade, then
wider still, circle-swirls to mouth
at silent horizons, the
Seems worlds away from Trent’s
well-head and its insignificant sibilants
trickling through Bailey’s farmyard.
How memories tumble. To hills.
And home: the moorland village
cricked safe in
where gritstone walling collects
the fields’ purposes.
And to Granddad – simple man
crowned local bigwig – mouthing down
his home-grown workmates,
Thait senatucked.*
Laugh at that. That bastardised Latin
he hadn’t even had chance to learn
let alone forget, any more than he’d
heard of Ferriby. Or estuary.
Though knew belonging,
like the sons of his name.
* North
Staffordshire dialect for You are sinew-tight; exhausted.
Peter Reading’s poem,
Dog’s Tomb, (Untitled,
2001) contains the lines,
“QVI CAECVS ET
SENECTVTE CONFECTVS.
Who blindness and senility
prepared”.
C. E.
Trevelyan, Memorandum of August 1st, 1846
They gave them task work:
low hills to lower, meadows to level,
hollows to fill, rivers to dig deeper,
fallen walls to stand tall, fields to square off
and boundaries to build around acres
of grass-land walling nothing in but hares.
Gave them lines on their maps:
“meal roads” going nowhere,
tracks across mountain and bog
bringing nothing to no-one
and not meant to be travelled
so mostly unfinished, unusable if,
and built for thrupence per day with
two splats of stirabout’s wetted maize
eaten off spades swiped twice on grass.
They gave them breaking of stone:
silver sweeps of hammers, the liftings
and falls with dull thuds like hollow barrels,
the slicings of light as splitting stone
into moon-halves, odd sparks glinting,
and rock splintering to chippings
for packing potholes in coach-roads:
tons done by hand, mothers and children
at penny-ha’pence a day, squatting
as knocking rock against rock.
Gave them shalings in baskets and creels,
women reeling at barrow-wheeling
till abandoning stone-piles by roadsides,
their own funeral pyres.
They gave them task work: heavy and hard.
And grimmer still as winter fingered in
under bitter winds and snow, with hungrier folk
spraunged on haunches waiting for neighbours to fall
and pellagra, marasmus, starvation
staking their claim.
They gave them stone-walling
with never a reckoning
it might cost them their lives.
Gave them stone.
Blackbird
As he runs under his shoulders
this sneak-thief between greenery
what gives his feathers
their svelteness, their sheen…
What sleeks his beak this citrine-yellow,
his head levelled with his black back feathers…
What contrives his eyes their bead-keenness,
his tail-display cocking - just-so –
in flashing alarm…
What lends his song
that heart-rending, pulse-throbbing longing…
Why, nothing but earth-dirt,
worms rehearsing their turnings,
and traceries of gnats
dancing selves to perdition…
3 -
Publication History
At moments of kill, the barn-owl’s eyes are closed
1st Prize, Norwich Writers’ Open Poetry Competition, 2005
– published in
Blood Brothers (Headland
2005)
May Visitations
1st Prize,
Douglas Gibson Memorial
Award, 1986 – published in
Home Ground (Headland, 2002)
Red Admirals
1st Prize,
The Trewithen
Poetry Prize
, 1998 – published in
Rites of Passing (Shoestring, 2006)
Omaha Beach –
published in
Points of
Reference (Headland, 1996)
Spiders
Shortlisted, Strokestown International Poetry Competition,
2004 – published in
Fixing Things (Indigo
Dreams, 2011)
Rambling Peak District
1st Prize,
Cannon Poets Open
Poetry Competition,
2009 – published in Marking Time (Sentinel Poetry Movement, 2012)
Shooting Rhino
1st Prize,
Southport Writers’ Circle Open, 2011 – published in
Chance Meetings (Open
Space Poetry, 2014)
Ferriby Foreshore, Remembering
1st Prize, Segora Open Poetry Competition, 2012
Task Work 1st Prize, Sentinel Literary Quarterly Open Poetry Competition, June 2012
Blackbird
Commended,
Ver Open Poetry Competition, 2010 – published in
Bird in the Hand (Indigo
Dreams, 2012)
His poetry appears in the following collections:
Pricking Out
ISBN 0-7275-0401-0
(Aquila,
1988)
Points of Reference
ISBN 0-903074-80-X
(Headland, 1996)
Home Ground
ISBN 1-902096-72-X
(Headland, 2002)
Rites of Passing
ISBN 1-904886-43-4
(Shoestring,
2006)
Blood Brothers, New & Selected Poems
ISBN 1-902096-96-7
(Headland, 2006)
No Laughing Matter
ISBN 975-1-905614-34-9
(Cinnamon Press, 2007)
Dog’s Eye View
ISBN 978-1-907276-24-8
(Lapwing, 2009)
Fixing Things
ISBN 978-1-907401-27-5
(Indigo Dreams, 2011)
Marking Time
ISBN 978 -0-9568101-1-3
(Sentinel Poetry Movement, 2012)
Bird In The Hand
ISBN 978-1-907401-87-9
(Indigo Dreams, 2012)
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4 - Afterword
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