

# Dates and Dorothy

## Prelude review of Dorothy Cowlin.  
Collected verse volume 2: life & love poetry.

### Richard Lung (of website: Democracy Science)

Copyright 2014 by Richard Lung.  
Copyright 2014 the estate of Dorothy Cowlin, her poems and prose, as here quoted in review.  
First edition.

* * *

### Publishing note.

I welcome this chance to publish this review of Dorothy Cowlin, as a Prelude to volume two of my own Collected Verse, part of which is about my friendship with Dorothy.

There is a historical fitness about this arrangement, because much of Dorothys story, partly in unpublished written accounts, to which she gave me free access, takes place in the inter-war years. Whereas, my story begins after the second world war. This starts as a forty-year chronicle or series of dates. The next two decades (the nineties and noughties) are a blur of my friendship with Dorothy.

Thus, book two is a fairly coherent story, up to the last two sections, which are collections of romantic and religious verse. Book one, The Valesman, and book two, Dates and Dorothy, are my best organised collections.

* * *

## Table of Contents

### Prelude: review of Dorothy Cowlin.

### Dates, historical and romantic, and Dorothy:

Part 1: dates from 1949 to 1988.  
Part 2: the Dorothy poems (1987 - 2010).  
Part 3: loves loneliness loves company.  
Part 4: the romance of religion.

### Prelude: review of Dorothy Cowlin

Poetic art of Dorothy Cowlin: the novels.  
Interlude. "The angry young men" and "The Movement"  
Poetic art of Dorothy Cowlin: verse.  
Comments on verse from the 1990s.

Record of Cowlin poem publications, prizes, etc.

Dorothy Cowlin biographical novels.  
Dorothys school days: The House By The River.  
A young poets sketches.  
Lost novels and a subsequent unpublished novel.

## Dates, historical and romantic, and Dorothy:

### part 1: dates from '49 to '88

49 bless you  
50 kaaa!  
51 trailer  
52 on the star-light trail  
53 is your journey really necessary?  
54 by the fountains and the flowers  
55 partners  
56 april first  
see you later  
57 long division  
Miss Marney  
58 the good guys always win  
he looked at his shoes  
59 Mission Impossible  
Brief Encounter  
this means war!  
60 the giggler  
61 Champ  
62 the first casualty  
no dice  
63 a slip of the pen  
64 The Beatles stopped at our house  
65 the test pests  
King Kongs engagement ring  
on his toes  
a disagreeable bout of time travel today  
66 war is wrong.  
67 turned away  
bad career move  
68 less the stranger

1968 again  
the anxiety dreams  
69 PR  
70 one-track mind  
The Naked Ape  
ded leters  
71 inside-out  
the lone star state  
Ill always think of you  
72 the pillar of fire  
73 3e lerning  
74 you can keep it  
bible communism  
75 death of a nation  
76 the drout  
77 an immature student  
78 the routine deception  
79 the unsafe  
ring of service  
80 Lennon  
81 his last visit  
82 on the shelf  
83 Bill  
84 speaking too soon.   
fysics as metafor  
85 the diamond thieves  
86 fall-out warning  
87 paying guests  
88 on the rebound

### part 2: the Dorothy poems

I wouldn't lower myself  
the wrong door  
Abigail  
attention!  
don't read my poems  
ahead  
the lost novels  
ghost writer  
without honors  
thought corgi  
old posts  
her new bird poem  
Dolly Dingbat  
that elfin look  
Dandelion Dorothy  
I do not think I am alone  
the rambler  
the gown  
Dorothy and the swans  
the charmer  
lafiti  
sudden parting  
ninety three  
uncanny reminder  
jujment day  
Sutton Bank  
leaving party  
death gets one down  
wake me  
the life she lent left with her  
looking for acorns  
cherry apples  
the lamp of poetry

### part 3: loves loneliness loves company

and some have bratness thrust upon them  
sullen  
that bird  
the prisoner  
dizzy mod  
surrender  
bewitched  
girls threw themselves at him  
lightning romance  
on a technicality  
farewell  
falling star  
erosion  
her loveliness  
star-crossed  
plea  
loves company  
natures child  
a compass wavers  
near miss  
toeing the line  
swanning around  
making up  
sensible  
cardiac Bel  
cover  
found sculpture  
storm of passion  
double star  
male and female  
a strapping lass  
a rarity  
the German lovers  
the introduced  
unconscious concentration  
marriage guidance  
a sherrickin'  
an allegory of love  
double act  
when the goodbyes were said  
the bewildered wife  
divorce  
not a natural right  
freed as a bird  
the wife that never was  
the girls

### part 4: the romance of religion

walking into the morning sun  
re-vision  
the Buddha attains enlightenment  
the Dalai Lama election  
Kung Fu-tse  
Pythagoras on science  
code-named Q  
go'spel  
pain  
tears  
priestess  
born again  
Santa Fey  
Timisoara Christmas  
the stars began to spill out in flocks  
Jesuses Sisters  
Christs just method  
Martha and Mary  
the Christian mystery  
after the Passion  
resurrection  
Ellerburn church  
the farewell stone  
dragon maiden  
in Coventry cathedral  
the cup cast aside  
authority  
a forgotten find  
in the midst of life  
now a major motion picture

essays:  
a genius for love  
learning to love

Found poem by John Donne: For whom the bell tolls

### notes

### acknowledgments

### after-word

### guide to five volume collected verse by Richard Lung

### guide to two more book series by the author.

_return tocontents_

* * *

# Dates and Dorothy

* * *

## Prelude: review of Dorothy Cowlin

#### Dorothy looking out over Dalby Forest

* * *

## Poetic art of Dorothy Cowlin

### A survey of the eight novels:

About Dorothy Cowlin, novelist and poet.  
Penny to Spend.  
Winter Solstice.  
The Holly and the Ivy.  
The Slow Train Home.  
Rowanberry Wine.  
An End and a Beginning.  
Draw the Well Dry.  
The Pair of Them.

### About Dorothy Cowlin, novelist and poet.

The reason for this appreciation is a belief in Dorothy Cowlins poetic talent, which may be discerned in her novels and journalism as well as the poems.  
Dorothy had eight novels published by Jonathan Cape, the distinguished English House, from 1941 to 1956. They are set in the counties of her origins and settlement, Lincolnshire to Lancashire to Yorkshire.

Of these _Winter Solstice_ (not to be confused with later novels of the same title) was re-published almost half a centrury later, but in unfortunate circumstances.

I checked with Dorothy that the unlikely events, surrounding the re-issue, were correct. She confirmed it. And added, perhaps wistfully: I suppose we should forgive them.   
Despite the off-putting and inaccurate promotion of its re-issue, _Winter Solstice_ nevertheless rates as Dorothys most substantial addition to the classics, black as a winter night, this great industrial city prose poem.

There are also the four biographical novels. A sample of her journalism was re-published in book form. Like Dorothy herself, these are well-informed and good company.

The same could be said for the unpublished autobiografical writings on her early life.   
Dorothy destroyed her unpublished novels and her many volumes of diaries, I regret to say.

Then there are the poems, mostly written later in life. Her travels, in retirement, from the Orkneys to the Scillies, and abroad, inspired her. Cowlin is a British but more a Keltic poet, as well as a northern English novelist and journalist.

All of her poems are short. ( _Winter Solstice_ is really her epic.) Poetry may be short but anyone who writes it may just leave a few lines that will live on in the collective memory of a great people.

Dorothy Cowlin is not a lyricist, who beats out lines of indoctrinating force or over-powering majesty, but mainly a free-verser of quiet moods in far-off solitudes. The consolation for the reader is in her own equable character. She is inner-directed rather than other-directed, to use the terms of David Riesman, in The Lonely Crowd. But there are precious few crowds in Cowlins poems. Indeed precious few individuals. She is in communion with nature.   
Her novels show acute understanding of human motivation and character. Perhaps, she couldnt really develop that in short verse, apart from the odd wonderful glimpse, like in _Orkney_.

The subtantial body of poems of the remotenesses of the British Isles and a good selection of others could become standards. Regretably, her collected poems were not published in her lifetime. Practical e-book self-publishing came too late for her.  
But Dorothy didnt believe in immortality, and being out-lived by her works didnt matter to her. She was the child who doesnt need a night-light.

* * *

## A survey of Dorothy Cowlins eight novels.

### Penny To Spend.

To survey contents.

A girl can never make up her mind what sweets to spend her penny on. When she grows up, she can't decide which man to marry. But fiction allows her the luxury of having her life twice. Of her two suitors, the one she marries, in part one of the novel, becomes her failed suitor and friend, in part two. And vice versa for the other suitor.

The novel was also published in Swedish, under a different title that conveyed the heroine was "The Two-ways Woman." Alternate histories are a conception that modern theories of physics have to confront in their quest for the true nature of reality. However, Dorothy Cowlin was partly influenced by J B Priestley time plays.

John Braine biography of Priestley quotes his play that declaims on the sadness of the unrehearsed theatre of life. Or, as Richard Feynman says, about time, that is what life is like: you make your mistakes and then you die.

Pascal and J B Bury claimed the course of history would have been changed with the length of Cleopatras nose. And in Cowlin novel an insignificant incident changes her life history. When the heroine is being courted in the park, a swan drifts by. This breaks the spell of courtship with one suitor. But in the alternative scenario, it makes the spell that decides her choice of suitor.

The poetic quality of the novels background reminded me of Mendelssohn music to _A Midsummer Nights Dream._ Fairyland is conjured by the dancing on ice-rinks in misty parks, the melting snow and swan drifts.   
The young womans second suitor appears, in that setting, as a monstrous spider, as he stands under the black drape over his box camera on tripod.

The poetic touch is light to the point of unreality, like old fotos bordered by halos. But, whatever choice the maiden bargains for, she cannot escape the dullness and drudgery of her fate.

Her choice of partner, in part one, the more showy man grossly declines in marriage. In part two, as the failed suitor, he is cleverly transformed into some semblance of an idealistic admirer. But, the fotographer, who wins the heroines hand, this time, has the bad luck (for himself and his wife) to be punished and broken in prison.

As a not very satisfying foot-note, Dorothy Cowlin first novel draws on the small Lincolnshire town of Grantham, home also to Isaac Newton and Margaret Thatcher. She was slightly older than the Roberts girl and went to the same grammar school.

Dorothy was top of her class but broke her right arm before the exams came up. This would have been an honorable excuse for not taking them. Dorothy, tho, was not going to let anyone forget that she was _top_. So, she started writing with her left hand. Anyone who has seen Dorothys scrawl with her right hand can imagine how readable were her left-handed efforts. But she made her point.

And no, she never knew Margaret Roberts at school. Nor did she know the Roberts grocers shop. Her first female character, with a penny to spend, was not served by girls.

* * *

### Winter Solstice.

To survey contents.

Dorothy Cowlin got the idea for her second novel from her mother. She told Dorothy about a young Grantham womans spontaneous recovery from a psychosomatic illness. During the first world war, a bed-ridden girl heard the soldiers marching by. She wanted to see them and got up to look.

Such germs of truth, more than once, grew into the plants of her fiction. The heroine is bed-ridden, tho there is nothing physically wrong with her. It is all in her mind why she cannot rise up and walk.

The author has assimilated the ideas of depth psychology admirably. You feel that common sense is being used to arrive at an intelligent understanding of the invalid. For that reason alone, the book would be worth reading.

The novel starts from the severely limited world view of the sick bed. This does not suit the modern craving for action. As mankind gets more crowded and domesticated, entertainment becomes more escapist. Adventure stories become more sensational and, as movies, crammed with impossible special effects, which are no longer special.

But _Winter Solstice_ confronts, in aggravated form, rather than distracts from the freedom-starved condition of urban settlement. Cowlin novel structure compares to breaking the conventional order of symphonic movements, by starting with the adagio instead of the allegro con brio.

As a young excitement addict, I wouldnt have appreciated this novel. It finds Arnold Bennett interest in the ordinary. (Bennett was one of Dorothys favorites.) The invalid has no choice but to follow the changes in her fire-lit room, the starry skylight, and the morning stirrings thru a partial window view on an industrial district. With this unpromising material, the author exercises our imagination to some poetic effect. She makes a lot out of a little.

Show business gets ever closer to replacing imagination with virtual reality. The fans perhaps become so fanatical because their imaginations have been taken over by some commercial fantasy. To be our individual selves, with independent imaginations, we need to learn from the poets ability to recover the magical from the routine. She makes the common-place wonderful, in a world which is making the wonderful common-place.

The invalid is looked-after by her twin brothers, the quirks of one compared to the other, being among her most successful characterisations. (The author drew on a visit to two master tailors.)   
The idea of having the bed-ridden girl noticed by a customer, who is a pioneer woman pilot, is inspired. One need think only of "flying bedsteads" to make the contrast perfect.

Not surprisingly, the girl falls in love with this role model, who is everything, freedom-wise she would like to be. The aviator is literally a woman of the world. And of course she had her real life counter-parts. "Amy, wonderful Amy," the musical title sums up the public regard for such women as Amy Johnson.   
That didnt mean you could take liberties, tho. When the English-woman finally made it, somehow, to land in Australia, the man, who ran up to kiss her, got slapped.

The patient breaks into her forbidding memories of the slums.   
She recovers to confront squalid scenes of her former life. Bridges take on symbolic meanings. The "brutal grandeur" of the railway viaduct dominates the skyline and pours smoke on the hovels clustered about its feet.

A bridge, over the brown wash of filth and chemicals, is frequented by rats. This is going to be covered. Yes, replies the patient, on her first walks, but it will still be there. The covered pollution compares to her own ugly memories, which she covered-up, as if that would make them go away, when it only allowed them to run riot, for not being attended to.

The painter, Lowry was possessed by the old industrial landscape of the north. As an experiment, he was placed, with a canvas, in the middle of the country-side.   
More smoking brick-work was the result.

But _Winter Solstice_ is Dorothy Cowlins only sustained prose poem of the black lands.   
This masterpiece is an unrecognised pioneer of the urban poetry that has superseded traditional nature poetry - if only because most of us are now townies. The unnamed town, that the story drew on, was Stockport.

Valerie Grove wrote a little masterpiece of a comic poem in Jamaican English, about a working woman shopping in _Longsight Market_. This is in a sort of no-mans land between Stockport and Manchester.

Dorothy Cowlins second novel has two foot-notes.  
Shortly after writing her novel of an invalid, the authors mother actually became bed-ridden. She had to look after her and a child, while her husband was away on service. It is just another instance of the disadvantages professional women have faced. She was not able to publish another novel for eight years.

The second foot-note to _Winter Solstice_ : a friend of the author told her the book had been re-published. This was 49 years after its first appearance in 1942. The cover said "She died in 1962." No source was given for this falsehood, not repeated by the re-prints Introduction, a forbidding ax-grind of feminist doctrine, with a lesbian slant.  
Eventually, the local and national press got wind of this occasion to repeat Mark Twain disclaimer: News of my death has been greatly exaggerated.

The introduction writer had been a student of a college teacher of social history. He had found the book, out of print, admired it, and used its vividness for his lectures. The student had told a new re-print publishers of forgotten classics of radical literature.   
It turned out that the publisher was an ill man. He had a financial backer, who was taking on much of the book production. But he had no experience of that business. At any rate, an American run had to be pulped because the pages were collated wrongly.  
Or so I understand.

The original edition of _Winter Solstice_ was also published by Macmillan in the United States. In war-time Britain, book production was halved. For authors, like almost everyone else, it was a bad time to be starting ones career. Then there was the post-war austerity. Even more so for personal reasons, Dorothy Cowlins third novel didnt come out till 1950.

* * *

### The Holly and the Ivy.

To survey contents.

For _The Holly and the Ivy_ , Dorothy Cowlin took the advice given by a character in _Lord Jim_ : In the destructive fluid immerse. Conrads reference is to romanticism. For Dorothy, the destructive fluid, to her novel-writing, was the womans domestic burden. But, on the principle of writing about what you know, "womans work" was precisely in what she immersed her third novel.

This story is like a boating trip. An adventure gets lost among a lot of little islands. Gradually the channel clears under the pull of the current of birth and death, even unto the approach of a final fall.   
Actually, the novel starts with a couple on a walking holiday between youth hostels. How important these getaways were for the industrial working class may be judged by the fact that they are featured in all eight of the Cowlin novels.

The "honeymoon" proves to be the cynics sweetness that doesnt last. The newly wed Sylvia is rather more sexy and charming than one would expect for that still puritan period. But this does not survive the ordeal of child-bearing, which is quite enuf for her to manage, without having to respond to her husbands further erotic interest. For which, he is liable to be snapped at.

But the main relief for her irritation is the poor mother-in-law. Prickly Sylvia is absorbed in her own motherhood. She resents an over-growth of mother-in-laws reminiscences. Hence, _The Holly and the Ivy_. This new birth is _her_ show. Probably for the same reason, she resents the kindly offer of hand-me-down baby clothes.   
Also, conservative tradition is giving way to wasteful commercial snobbery against anything "old-fashioned."

A Sylvia friend intends to write a novel describing child-birth, which she claims hasnt been done before. Sylvias factory production line birth-giving, in a row of other new mothers, gives some idea of a municipal hospital before the national health service.   
A hint from one of Cowlins later novels suggests that her editor made her tone down the account. This is a pity. Nevertheless, she brings out the terror and the triumph, the humiliation and the humor of the womans lot.

The distractions of real life, from contemplation, show in the authors struggle to get going, til about half way thru the book. Sylvia tells off the grandma for singing baby to sleep in the middle of the night. After that, the momentum is maintained with the mothers jealousy. Jealousy is to be found elsewhere in the novels.

This is a see-saw of a novel that swings from estatic heights to depressive depths. Sylvia is preoccupied with the emotional "ecology" or personal balance of life. That is the pleasant things in life enable us to endure the unpleasant ones. The latter, in this story, is, most of all, the helpless decline and death of the mother-in-law.

Sylvia realises she has been selfish towards her. The unsentimental ending locks us into the mind of the old woman, who knows she has never been so ill, but doesnt realise a blackbird song is her farewell.   
This may be the most moving passage in all Dorothy Cowlins writings. Tho, on the whole, her third novel is the weakest of her first four.

* * *

### The Slow Train Home.

To survey contents.

The meaning of the title is in a father eventually coming to take responsibility for his illegitimate son. His awakening interest is plausibly done. But it is the emotional development of the single mother that drives the story. As in _Winter Solstice_ , the author leads us into the heroines unconscious mind, which is the engine room of her behavior. At first, her awareness is limited to that of a passenger on the ship of her destiny. And we see why her life isnt working as well for her as it might.

In the second part of _The Introductory Lectures to Psycho-analysis_ , Freud speaks of a woman patient making improper advances. He makes the rare admission that it is, after all, love which we all are seeking. It's a question of finding acceptable forms of love for those available to give and receive it.   
In both _Winter Solstice_ and _The Slow Train Home_ , there is no jargon of psychic mechanisms to distract us from the message that love is at the heart of things.

To write this kind of novel, you need to catch the nuances of expression that pass between characters. And Cowlin reads them like a book. She is, in effect, an interpretive psychologist. The poet also makes a welcome return to this work. When the two leads meet again on a rural Yorkshire station platform, a train of coaches rattles thru like the slides of a mad projectionist.

The title is not only a metaphor. We are introduced to the family that runs the signal box and railway crossing. Mrs Carr is presented to us in full glory of her Broad Yorkshire accent, which is authentic.   
Charles Dickens gave it a pretty faithful rendering with John Browdie in _Nicholas Nickleby_. He spent three weeks in Yorkshire transcribing the dialect, using his fonetic shorthand, from his reporting days in the courts and parliament.

From Mrs Carr, in her dramatic decline, you also catch the dour side of the Yorkshire character.   
Fifty years after this novel was written, missed railway signals remain an item in the news, following on from disasters caused by them. In the story, the cross-roads are not sealed against the thru-train and there is an appalling smash.

The accident is all the more incongruous against the tranquil country back-ground. Whereas, _Winter Solstice_ is set in the midst of an urban disaster area, that has a disasterous effect on the inhabitants lives. The scale of the tragedy is altogether greater and is successfully transcribed into a greater book.

* * *

### Rowanberry Wine.

To survey contents.

Dorothy Cowlins fifth novel is a holiday book. An archeological group spend a summer under canvas, on the Yorkshire moors, investigating a barrow. The author loves this heather high land closest to a few free-circling birds. And her description is itself like a pleasant holiday memory.

For once, the reader escapes the three great verities of marriage, birth and death. Birth is reduced to a few family fotos on the farmers wifes piano. Death seems as remote as the few bones dug up from the barrow.

We are assured the heroines marriage is happy and successful. Yet she is perplexed by symptoms of discontent. Given the mercilessly unattractive disposition of her husband, this should be no surprise to the reader. Presumably, she is used to him and takes no account of her inner rebel.

She has a young admirer in the team. And thru him, tho it takes its time a-coming, her "symptoms" have their fling. Way up, there is a hollow, with no one but the sun to spy on chance bathers in its pool.   
This episode has as dubious a tang about it, as home-made rowanberry wine. Hence, the tales title. But there is a hint of fire in the heroines verdict on men, who have mass-produced food and drink at the expense of quality in the homely arts, which women did well with love.

A hostile husband is confronted with her indiscretion. They have quite a tiff, under the tent flaps, in early morning bleakness before holiday ending.   
On leave-takings, the youth finds the chance to express thanks for his treat. This 1952 novel just precedes the first "angry young men" of English literature, noticably short on gratitude for their common-place adulteries.

The well-regarded novelist Pamela Hansford-Johnson warmly reviewed Dorothy Cowlins novels. Dorothys favorite of her own works was _The Slow Train Home_. But Johnson much prefered _Rowanberry Wine._

* * *

### An End and a Beginning.

To survey contents.

When I first read _Rowanberry Wine_ , I thought it a light-weight work. Dorothys editor at Cape said the same. Moreover, Dorothy wanted to write a book of short stories. But her publishers told her they dont sell. Her sixth novel, however, is essentially such a collection unified by taking place in a boarding house. There, people keep to themselves and lead their own separate lives, about which information only gradually leaks out, like secretive British government and society, in general.

The heroine, Olga Ward goes off the rails of a steady job at the library to write books, rather than lend other peoples. Meanwhile, she takes on a small lodging house.   
More than that, she adopts a conscientious and intelligent womanly approach to the problems of her paying guests. Again one feels that Dorothy Cowlin is a psychologist who has missed her calling. There is the makings of a television soap opera about an amateur psychiatric practise run by a land-lady with an instinctive gift for it. Like a traditional British "soap (opera)" [chatty early tv series sponsored by soap adverts] the episodes teach by examples of how to get on with people, especially if they are occasionally difficult.

Hence, the improbable cast of visitors under one roof: a kleptomaniac; a flasher; adulterers, deserting and remorseful or suicidal and murderous; a bogus widow, really a spiteful spinster; a separated and alienated husband with unorthodox views on marriage. I was not much mollified when this dismal gentleman renounced a liaison with the young heroine.

Perhaps the best writing in the novel is Olga day-dreaming about meeting her dead husband.

The aspiring Olgas publisher "blenched" at the realistic birth and death scenes in her novel, and asked that they be toned down. This sounds like a hint at what happened to Cowlins earlier novel, _The Holly and the Ivy_.   
Perhaps, Dorothy anticipated a similar reaction to the episode of the "flasher." The very word didnt come into British currency till the 1970s. There being no name, for men who over-exposed themselves, suggests how the subject was once unmentionable. The plausible narration, not least the flashers panic, was confirmed as based on a true story - as were some of the other episodes.

It may have been fateful for Dorothys career as a novelist that she was not given free rein. Very soon, "the angry young men" would sweep aside convention. And there would be no more place for a (toned-down) gentle middle-aged woman on the publishers lists.

Over thirty years after Cowlins novels, I heard an editor, of formula romances, expected her writers to abide by the convention that the hero was not young, because young men do not have money or status.

* * *

### Draw the Well Dry.

To survey contents.

The idea for _Draw The Well Dry_ came from a news-paper report.   
A new parson finds boarded-over, in the garden, an old well, once favored for miraculous healing properties. He has to decide what line to take, on this troublesome discovery. This most undogmatic of clergy-men swings on the scales, he weights, in turn, with evidence for a wonderful or common sense explanation.

This is reflected in the recognisable character-type of Mrs Clough, who took this reader amusingly by surprise. Her animosity to the parson is abruptly changed by wanting the well water.

How _well_ the author keeps to the point of the story. At first, one is inclined to echo the parsons wife that the whole thing doesnt matter much. And the parson seems weak and lost in triviality. But as he grapples with the dilemma, his character develops. The wife was rather the novelists window view on the story. But we come out into the parsons world, as his character takes over.

In the end, the self-doubting man has explored the issue thoroly and is more a master of it than the dogmatist. Like the Lion in CS Lewis Narnia tales, God is seen as someone who does not break His own laws of nature.   
There is a moral here for governments not breaking their human laws that have been freely consented to.

This is Dorothy Cowlins most intellectual and least imaginative novel. It grows, in an unforced way, to a conclusion. Her equally spare, poetic first novel, _Penny to Spend_ is also about a dilemma - not one that can be argued to and fro between two beliefs, but which must be parted into two existences.

Dorothy was never one for religious observances, rather a religious attitude to life, expressed in supporting good causes, such as peace or the environment. She did write a poem about a Quaker meeting. Rather like Philip Larkin, she followed the religious heritage trail, if only for the glory of its art or the natural holiness of its settings.

Indeed, Dorothy Cowlin comes from the norths cultured urban working class, the same kind of folks described in the Bradford of J B Priestleys youth, which was in the vanguard of the British Labour party. Dorothys grand-mother joined the Labour party in the first year of its existence. Her father was a local trades union organiser of engineering draughtsmen. Her daughter carried on the left-wing family tradition.

This tradition was not only in politics. Music was a strong bond between her parents. Dorothys mother was a very good amateur singer. Like Priestleys writings, Cowlins also have a reference to the local choral societies vying to be the first to put on _The Messiah_ before Christmas.

As a footnote to Dorothys novel of religious doubting, I cannot resist the anecdote about her mother appearing at a choral concert, such as her writing describes. A woman, in the audience, told her mother: Oh, I do like you to wear black when you are singing. It shows up your aura so well.   
Sometimes, this story seemed to be too much for Dorothy, tho she repeated it. Modern laboratories can measure the bodys electro-magnetic fields. There are people so sensitive that they can pick up faint signals, such as radio waves without a receiver. When a person is happily singing out, it does seem their aura brightens and perhaps becomes beautiful, to those with the eyes to see it.

The halos of saints visibly communicate they are blessed in their bliss. Even the association of the halo with the sun may be significant, because we are bathed in its life-giving electro-magnetic aura.

* * *

### The Pair of Them.

To survey contents.

Like a pair of Buddhas at a house-clearing sale, a primary school teacher and her young man are meant to be together but become parted.   
The second chapter on education among the slums harks back all too briefly to the descriptions in _Winter Solstice_. The humorist also comes to the fore again. The genial semi-literate opportunist of a head-master had the makings of a great character study.   
But one feels that the author was only too glad to escape even the memories of her own exhausting teaching days. This is literatures loss.

After her working hours cease to be such a knock-out, the story turns to recreation. The League of Nations of the nineteen-thirties had its junior section, to which the author once belonged. Her novels heroine joins a similar organisation. The young people rapidly form into pairs. They visit the theatre. The heroine observes a couple in the row ahead. She notices the man is feeling his dates breast - "the fortunate flesh," as she calls it.

She herself comes in for seduction and divines that each step along the road to intimacy is going to be more enticing and less resistible. It does, however, take the novel some time to pose its problem, even one so time-honored.   
The novel has some vivid scenes, to pass thru, like a time travelog. One re-lives the past.

But did Dorothy know where she was going as a novelist? It didnt matter, because time had run out. The book trade was facing rising costs of production and a shrinking market. The circulating libraries, such as _Boots_ , were vanishing. By the mid-fifties, a majority of households were entertained by television, soon to be almost universal.

* * *

## The Angry Young Men and The Movement.

_return tocontents_

### Interlude to the poetic art of Dorothy Cowlin.

"The Angry Young Men."  
"The Movement" and Philip Larkin.  
The Whitsun Weddings.  
Wild Oats.

### "The Angry Young Men."

After the second world war, a journalist recalls that he thought he had really "arrived," when he attended a meeting of The Society of Authors with a talk given by Dorothy Cowlin. Her novels ceased to be published but a new generation was in evidence. Their politics, at least at first, was similar to Dorothys: left-wing Labour. Unlike her, they were aggressively post-war.

Incidentally, Dorothy Cowlins views had something in common with those of the novelist and literary critic, Margaret Drabble, who wrote a Fabian Society pamflet favoring (relatively) equal incomes. (Such a basic equality is needed to make the "free" market fair and prevent greed destroying the ecology.)

A famous review, of new writers from the mid to late nineteen fifties, dubbed them "the angry young men." Membership of this band was still providing John Wain with copy, in the closing years of the century. He pointed out that his first novel _Hurry On Down_ came out in 1953, the last year before television occupied most British homes. In other words, he was a genuinely popular success and not a media-made literary personality.

_Hurry On Down_ and Kingsley Amis break-thru, _Lucky Jim_ , are young mens novels. I remember how much I enjoyed them. As one ages, the dreams fade, and perhaps also youthful ambitions and their frustrations.   
Despite his career comedy of suppressed anger, Amis denied he was of some new group. And of course there was copy in taking that line.

These upstarts, from the working or lower middle classes, were the lucky elite, with university scholarships. (Dorothy Cowlin was an even rarer pre-war example.) Amis, like H G Wells before him, seems to dread falling back into "the people of the abyss." In the age of the Welfare State and Full Employment (with capital letters) Amis can afford to make a slapstick comedy of cliff-hanging onto a career.

Wain is ahead of his time. His hero drops-out (more or less voluntarily) after "coming down" from university. He does a series of menial jobs. Becoming a window-cleaner, he innocently seeks a job at his old school. The Head takes this as a practical sneer at his education.

The angry young men no doubt got their name from John Osborne play _Look Back In Anger_ , which is anger in earnest. The letter to the press, he wrote late in life - Damn you, England - might have been said by Jimmy Porter. (A suitably implacable performance was given by Richard Burton.) Was this social criticism or personal complaint?

There is a saying, it is the crying baby that gets picked up. Art becomes the art of attention-getting. I can't help feeling there was an element of that when John Braine swung over to extreme right wing, in the nineteen sixties, of all times - but then it was a way of standing out.   
Perhaps it was a way of suggesting he had found his own _Room At The Top_ when he was just keeping going. (The film of the book had another servicably surly performance, this time from Lawrence Harvey.)

His novels arent helped by the advent of the authors reactionary persona. Eventually, he swung back somewhat. He said on radio: people in this country have forgotten what liberalism is. He mellowed into a successful television personality, before his untimely death.

A useful motto of Braine was: Diversify or perish. For instance, he wrote about his fellow Bradford hero, J B Priestley, and about the Novel. If there was any bitterness left in him, he had no more time for it than a passing remark about Labour politics: the politicians being in it for themselves.

The grammar-school educated John Braine is usually linked to his contemporary, Allan Sillitoe another best-seller of working class stories, _Saturday Night And Sunday Morning_ , and _The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner_ , also successfully filmed. The latter title entered the language as a figure of speech. This is a literary achievement coveted by writers.

Sillitoe left school at fourteen. In this he has more in common with Colin Wilson, who was self-educated. The range of his reading was already apparent from _The Outsider_ , which made the young mans name.   
The follow-up was panned in Kenneth Allsop survey of _The Angry Decade_. But Wilson has proved a survivor. When things looked bad for him, he kept his courage up and kept on working and publishing diversely. He may lack academic scepticism but he writes with a hard-earned plainness for the general public, that most scholars have never learned.

Allsop reckoned that J P Donleavys _The Ginger Man_ is the kind of yobbish character defeated by Lucky Jim. Even in the fifties, this Irish story followed Joyces _Ulysses_ into exile, for its sexuality, with a first publication in France.   
But when you read Donleavy novel, you think: he is a poet. You wouldnt necessarily guess this from the first novels of Wain, Amis and Sillitoe, tho they all took poetry seriously and published verse.

Kenneth Allsop was frankly partisan towards Amis, like "a favourite son" he reproved for wasting his talent writing _New Maps Of Hell_ , an early survey of science fiction.

Amis himself made a success in the genre with _The Alteration_ a typical Amis under-statement. John Wain decried SF as a sort of literary bankruptcy, in a review of C S Lewis writings. Wain singled out the _Oxford History Of English Literature_ volume Lewis contributed. This must have been some last despairing protest, because Wain brought out an SF novel of his own, to the triumph of Braine saying, "Diversify or perish."

The device of grouping writers together into a sort of "convoy system" has proved there is safety in numbers. It helped them to be remembered as writers, if only of their first writings. This can be a further cause for complaint. But public acclaim in the arts often has to rely for a break-thru, on some work of extra-ordinary power. Later work may come as an anti-climax. Also, too much praise, too soon, may be debilitating.

The tag "angry young men" obviously didnt do women writers any favors. Iris Murdoch first novel, _Under The Net_ linked her sympathies to this group. But it was as a member of something called, instead, _The Movement_. Murdoch, the academic was to move away to long circumstantial novels. The term was soon appropriated for a new school of English poets - mainly men again.   
Before reviewing Dorothy Cowlin poetry, it is worth commenting on their program, as her style has much in common.

* * *

### "The Movement" and Philip Larkin.

To interlude.

The previous section contrasted Dorothy Cowlin work with a succeeding group of novelists, the angry young men. Some, like Amis and Wain, belonged to another new group of the nineteen-fifties, "The Movement." This provides a context for Dorothys poetry, most of which comes after their hay-day.

By and large, the angry young men were aggressive with ambition. The Movement could also be considered an upward movement in social mobility. Hence, Kingsley Amis points out Hull librarian, Philip Larkin as an outstanding new poet. (They were contemporary scholarship winners to Oxford.) And Larkin characterised meeting Amis as the odd experience of being in the company of someone more talented than himself.   
In other words, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

It helps the promotions of a mutual admiration society, if there is some truth in them. Larkin wrote two early novels, which proved to be wild oats. He summed up his true vocation by saying: I seem to have been waiting all my life for poems to arrive. Larkin is the acknowledged leader of the Movement. No attempt is made here to describe its extent. But we can look at the summit of its achievement in one or two Larkin poems.

* * *

### The Whitsun Weddings.

To interlude.

_The Whitsun Weddings_ may be the finest English poem of the twentieth century. I must admit it exploded my speculations about the nature of poetry. To me, the essence of poetry was the symbolic image or metafor. Nowadays, I would express this by saying that poems are dream-like experiences, while novels are the medium of waking life.

Poems, like dreams are short, elusive and concentrated, with over-lays of symbolic meaning, as Freud said. Novels, however, make readers imagine other peoples everyday conscious experience. We do so, thru usually imaginary characters. Even if the characters are historical, including our own past selves, they are necessarily imagined.

By involving ourselves in their circumstances and problems, we may get some idea of how they felt. Perhaps, novels have to be logic-led in their understanding of people. They are too long, otherwise, ever to get written.

Margaret Atwood novels, for instance, include dreams. They are, after all, part of the panorama of existence. But they are not typical of it, in the Western rationalised culture (if damagingly irrational in its corporatism).

Conversely, _The Whitsun Weddings_ is a north-south English train journey, that might have been material for a novel. Yet, draw as it does, on a wide-awake description of the bright of day, this narration is assuredly a poem. The experience is skilfully versed, yet so colloquial we are not on our guard against being sung to sleep by its incantation.

The poem is like one of those dreams we confuse with reality. The event described would be conducive to a hallucogenic state in the author. Larkin has a rush on, to catch the train for his holidays. Once safely aboard, he can relax, helped by the hypnotic iambic rhythm from passing over every rail joint and the tattoo over occasional cross rails (mimicked in the four-syllable second lines to each verse).

As when going to bed, no more action is required of the long distance train traveler for several hours. From the smell of the upholstery onwards, the passengers senses become acute - as the imagination comes into relief, in the night. The images rise up before us, thru the traveling window, as unbidden as a dream sequence. And the cross-section of the English landscape is as lacking in any apparent over-all logic.

Yet in eighty lines of picture language Larkin creates a pictogram of England that all such train travelers could recognise as representing their own experience. The poem is a symbol of national identity in the mid twentieth century.

The symbolism is deeper and more universal than that. Whitsun was when the marriages took place and the couples departed. At station after station, Larkin was passing thru, the focus of existence repeats its message. Looking out at the leave-taking celebrations, he reads the expressions on the faces of all the different participants - from the newly-weds at the eye of the storm of attention, to the bored kids on the sidelines.

The train seems to be speeding thru time, as well as space, as marriage follows marriage, down the line. So, real life appears as fleeting as a dream, which it surely is, on the cosmic scale. The passenger lives in his eternal present. But that leaves him a helpless on-looker, like a dreamer, who never awakes to the possibilities of his nature.

In the whole poem, there are only two metafors. They are decidedly common-place but the latter is given a slightly different slant, to beautiful effect, as a conclusion. This poem is the bread of life, unbuttered by fantasies. The sense impressions are accurately described, not fancifully transcribed. Doing that takes imagination enuf, without dragging in other scenes.

The subject in hand requires its own language, or specific choice of words, that doesnt have to be translated in terms of some more familiar experience to be understood, or into something more exotic to be made wonderful.   
More and more imaginative translations of a given reality may mean the original gets lost in the translation, like the party game of Chinese whispers.

This is consistent with Larkin guidelines for poetry. Each poem should be a self-contained world. There should be no classical or trendy allusions that the general public cannot be expected to know. Likewise, no obscure symbolism that is private to the writers own imagination.   
Robert Browning was asked to explain what one of his passages meant. He replied: once God and he knew, but now... God only knows.

This was just the sort of reason why the Movement was against romantic poetry. In particular, they were against the excesses of its most recent exemplar, Dylan Thomas. Thomas is supposed to have said, with some merriment, that he would look for an obscure word to replace a simple one.   
Dorothy Cowlin, whose work we shall be going thru, loved the poems of Dylan Thomas, she saw anthologised. So, she bought his collected verse. She found that nearly all the other pieces eluded her.

In _The Whitsun Weddings_ , Larkin looks at the romance of reality but he does not enter the reality of romance, that he sees.

* * *

### Wild Oats.

To interlude.

This statement seems confirmed by Larkins rare poem about courtship, _Wild Oats_. The title is misleading. Chambers dictionary defines to sow ones wild oats, as to indulge in the usual youthful dissipations.   
A biography reviewer commented how Larkins private life was to belie his famous first lines:

Sexual intercourse began  
In nineteen sixty-three  
(Which was rather late for me) -

However dissipated his later life, _Wild Oats_ is about a youthful attempt at a mature relationship. Two women, who are friends, appear at his work place. The poet recalls he was too shy of the glamorous one. So, he makes do with making friends with the other woman. Tho, it is not friendship that he really wants but the evil enchantment of sexual attraction.

Even as he disparages, in a dismissive phrase, "bosomy rose," one suspects he is still held in thrall to the charmer. To the end, he carries a foto of both women. One can see why Larkin would be an anti-romantic, as a man, as well as a poet. Romance is an illusion that delivers none of its promise, yet does not allow one escape from it.

Our society undervalues friendship. And so friendship between two young people of the opposite sex is taken to mean courtship. Larkin submits to that understanding. He even seems to have become engaged to her, but he hadnt his heart in it. Naturally, the fiancée, as we must call her, was increasingly annoyed at having her time wasted. And tells him some home truths about himself.

The poet delivers himself from his embarrassment by being politely chastened. The poem is a prime example of Movement doctrine that emotions show up all the more strongly for being under-stated. There is none of the romantics passionate protestations of regret. (Altho, Emily Bronte could still expose Heathcliff "monomania," in _Wuthering Heights_ , for what it was.)

_Wild Oats_ is the more impressive for its quiet detachment. But its style is a personal alternative rather than a replacement for Emily Brontes kind of rugged power.

An under-statement, on a big issue, is John Wains _A Song About Major Eatherly_ , a fine mood poem. The Movement was criticised for not often tackling subjects of public importance. In this respect, Wains 1962 collection _Weep Before God_ is considered a radical departure.

There is no doubt that _Wild Oats_ offers a glimpse into a humiliating passage of the poets youth, which it took many years to come to terms with. So successfully does he pass off formal control as loose conversation, that I didnt even notice the rhymes at first. This is another stylistic hall-mark of the Movement.

In leaving him by, life left this nugget from its eruption of ashes.   
As a poem, it is a triumph of economy - he didnt want to dwell on it, yet manages to convey it. As life, it was a waste of time, tho not one that counts for much, in the scale of things.

The writer of this commentary was not far removed from Larkins sexually repressive era. This poem also speaks for myself as a failure in lifes unforgiving contest.

In 1971, an anthology edited by Jeremy Robson was called _The Young British Poets_. (As if there werent any others!) The publishers believed their book would be as influential as _New Signatures_ and _New Lines_ for Thirties and Fifties poetry. ( _New Lines_ , edited by Robert Conquest, was the Movement manifesto.) Some names now famous were there. The Keltic fringe was well represented. But only one of the twenty-three young British poets was a woman.

In _Scanning the Century_ (1999) Peter Forbes goes so far as to say:

"In Britain the real surge in women poets had to wait until the 1980s when the one-track Oxbridge domination of English poetry finally broke down."

The purpose of the following is to appreciate the poetry of a woman whose writing career began long before that.

* * *

# Poetic art of Dorothy Cowlin: verse.

_return tocontents_

Early poems: 1933 - 1948.  
Middle poems: 1948 - 1975.  
Poems: 1976 - 1988.  
Comments on Dorothy Cowlin verse, from the 1990s.  
Of birds and other creatures.  
Her deafness and aging.  
The nature of Cowlin poetry.  
Dorothy Cowlin poems by appearance in British poetry magazines, prizes etc.

## Dorothy Cowlin verse up to 1988.

### Early poems: 1933 - 1948.

Professional writing didnt give Cowlin much scope for verse. Her earlier poems, from 1933 to 1948, average about one a year (16 poems). Her middle poems, from 1948 to 1975 (14 poems), average about one every two years!   
Her own next grouping is the poems from 1976 to 1988. She counts over 50 in number, including seven "lighter poems."

This section, then, reviews some 80 poems. Not included is one or two juvenilia, surviving from her Kesteven and Grantham girls grammar school days. A triolet won a commendation.   
A deliciously over-written description of a swamp, The Coal Forest, might well have provoked her uncles response, to another piece in the school magazine: "Blimey!"   
Young Dorothy was mortified. But her extravagant love of words, or verbiage, augured well.

Her school-girl prose, by the way, had the impish humor, known to her friends, its comradely exuberance somewhat toned down by lifes trials.

Dorothy Cowlin was only 24 when she wrote her first version of the following verse, revised in 1967:

THE MOON IN WINTER

Shoulder to shoulder drifting, the cloud-floes  
tumble in white disorder down the sky.  
Diminished stars  
blow to their ruin on the sky's bleak scaurs.  
Two trees, like wrecks to mark despair  
shake broken rigging in the freezing air.  
But the bold moon  
quickening her silver,  
solitary goes,  
Endeavour-hearted,  
south - south - to seas uncharted,  
cleaving black lanes of silence  
through the silent floes.

Cowlin has caught "the romantic agony" of hopeless longing for these remote sky voyagings.

Dorothy Cowlin poems tend to be nature poems or poems with a point to make. One question will be: how well do they achieve either or both?

Dorothy Cowlin never went in for the traditional forms. Her earlier poems rhymed. But they are few. Short verse lines were favored from the start. Her poems have a lightness of touch that made my own seem lumbering, in comparison. Her influence made me strive to correct this defect over the years.

Miroslav Holub, or someone, noted that long verse lines, on paper, were belied by the poets recitals. Their pauses generally marked short verse lines. Free verse can ignore form to mark natural speech pauses with a new line. With the help of punctuation, this is largely true of Dorothys above poem.

I believe the ancient art of astrology links poets in general to the moons influence! (Something to do with the tides being natures verse, perhaps.)

I pressed her on poets she had admired. When she won a Grantham school prize, for achieving a certain standard, she asked for the poems of T S Eliot. She had taken to _The Waste Land_ , recently published. So little was this most influential of twentieth century poems yet in vogue, that Dorothys teacher could not obtain it.

One wonders what effect a personal copy might have had on her. Cowlin novel, _Winter Solstice_ is a great urban prose poem. But her verse did not follow Eliot _Preludes_.   
Instead, her early poems are late romantic nature poetry. She did also like Walter de la Mare, more or less.

Her greatest influence is the seasons and the days, themselves, that is the inclined orbital spin of the planet about the sun.   
One of these poems, _The Glimpse_ , is of this cosmic back-ground.

They are not spoilt by unduly straining after the notion that nature is a rhapsody. Eliot modernism was a reaction against such romantic escapism.

The early poems do display conventional sentiments. Most people would recognise these early poems as "proper poetry" - if a bit on the clever side. They are lively with observation and an uncommon gift of expression. Their feminine charm has endured in Cowlin verse.

* * *

### Middle poems: 1948 - 1975.

To verse contents.

Only one Cowlin early poem is in (quite) free verse. _The Mandarin_ (1939) makes up for this, by being gorgeously over-written - like his silk ceremonial costume. And as his garden is over-written, in chromatic bloomings and butterflies.   
This effort is perhaps a fond throw-back to that zestful young author of _The Coal Forest_.

A mere 13 poems belong to Cowlin middle period. (Dorothys typescript adds the revised _The Moon In Winter_ but it retains her early style.) One or two drafts in the old typescript, I'm consulting here, have the odd weakness, for her, of long and abstract words, which she nearly always avoids.

In these few poems, romance or passion is giving way to the classic or contemplative manner.   
_A Fancy_ (1949) is yearnful in mood but relaxed in style. Practically her first free verse, I find it satisfying:

A FANCY

So we set off for home  
the tree and I.  
But as we went, I heard  
the wind of our own going  
sough through his needles  
with a little mourning breath  
at every step.

He was to make child's heaven  
in a firelit room.  
Crowned with an angel  
he was to die in glory,  
to scent the Christmas air  
with his sweet dissolution.

But as I walked  
I fancied that he sighed  
for the cold resinous gloom  
of his own hillside;  
sighed for lost solitude,  
for winter rain,  
for the thin fingers of east wind,  
for earth - for roots - for Life.

* * *

However, Cowlins real throw- _forward_ in style is _Ideograph_ (1964). Tho they would be a while coming, among the best of her subsequent poems would share this new character. Classical spareness and authority mark this short poem out from the first line:

IDEOGRAPH

This day says much in a small compass.  
Brief snow  
hangs in the hedges,  
a paper winter in a Chinese play.  
But a lamb's cry  
rings a cracked bell for April;  
one slanting branch of hazel  
harks back to February;  
a handful of celandines  
liquefy in a burst of sun,  
buttering the year to May:  
the whole ideograph  
indicating - March.

Dorothy was charmed by the symbolic nature of Chinese theatre. For example, paper would be hung out to represent snow. Their choreography is like their calligraphy, a symbolic picture-language.   
In the poem, each country event, she sees or hears, is typical of a different month. But, taken together, like the different brush strokes that compose a Chinese ideograph, these events, after and before their time, average out at March, supposing one had to guess what month it was.

In this tiny middle group, there are some other strong poems. _Valentine's Day_ (1967) is a successful re-cap of her earliest manner, the winsome _April Fool_ (1935).   
_Fashions In Ruins_ is a rare satire. It amused me to admiration, before I knew its author.

But my tastes have changed. My favorite, here, is another anticipation of Cowlin free verse: _At Falling Foss_. _Power_ and _High Force \- Teesdale_ are also about falls. The latter is Englands largest. She seems to be in her poetic element with water.

The poets output only steps up with her retirement. One consolation is that there is no large body of apprentice work to get in the way of mature poems.

* * *

### Poems: 1976 to 1988.

To verse contents.

Surely then, something may come  
even yet  
from this obdurate grief?

From _Flint_ ( 1978 ).

Writing is supposed to be a therapy for some. Dorothy Cowlin may have turned more to poetry for this purpose, when she lost her husband. In its emotional charge, poetry is to prose, as dreams are to day-time.   
A stock complaint against post-war poetry is that it is so prosy.

In the little poem _Song_ , Dorothy realises she is no Orpheus who could sing back her love from the under-world, where she feels she already is, herself.   
In _Lock_ , she tells of how she feverishly preserved a lock of her dead husbands hair, and how futile a memento this was.

_Amputation_ (1982?) counters the pat consolation: "You have your memories." A raw poem but accepted by an editor.

Perhaps, the two poems that only allude to, or dawn on, the widows grief are more effective for allowing one to deduce the loss for oneself. _Water_ (1978) and _The Buddleia Tree_ (1979) both are fine poems but such a contrast in styles, classical and romantic, that one could not possibly serve to represent the other. For the same reason, one could not say one is better than the other.   
As a review must be rationed on quotations, I simply choose the shorter poem:

WATER

Water fell from the hill  
in a stony furrow,  
jumping from grey lip  
into grey lap;  
its cool contralto voice,  
clear as a brand-new conscience,  
calling imperatively  
"Drink!"

But my hands  
could never contain  
water to drink.  
You gave me yours -  
cupped, brimming, ample,  
and I drank  
as I shall never drink again.

Water in its moods, water-falls, still pools, storm tides and sea-scapes, are one thread of her work. Another theme is the winter winds shredding of the trees. Cowlin has a sure touch for Nature in contemplative mood. In this respect, _An October Day_ (1981?) takes a set of things most of us have sensed and transforms them into beautifully simple verse:

AN OCTOBER DAY

In the nut-brown woods  
I sit by the water  
hearing the far-off mutter  
of wind in the tops of the trees.  
On the brown water  
a raft of brown leaves  
revolves, with so little way  
the gentlest reversal of air  
suffices to turn it about.  
A falling leaf  
and its rising image meet  
without audible impact.  
Small unspecified birds  
moving about their business  
seem in a mood to listen  
rather than utter.

I like it here by the water  
in these brown woods.  
The year is not dead - nor dying:  
only a little sober,  
turning things over  
in its mind.

This is Dorothys favorite season. At this time of her life, the responsive nature of a sunny disposition only comes thru, in the odd poem like _Bilberry Pie_ , with its july associations of the moors, she loves.   
She is "sober with autumn," to quote from _Coming Of Age_ (1987). As a child is expected to grow into an independent adult, so the author at last can feel, after eleven years of "futile anger" at her partners death, that she is "content to be alone."

Anger still prevents the poem from being presented with a convincing detachment. But a sea change is in the offing. The fact that Cowlins third group of poems closes in 1988 suggests a new emotional climate, that may show in newer work.

Instead of falling back on her married past, she was determined to be out-going.   
I particularly like Cowlin holiday poems.   
In _Canterbury Pilgrims_ , giving a nod to Chaucer, Dorothy is one of the tourist bus of "dandelion clocks" looking out for the cathedral.

The rural corners of the British Isles have usually produced their own famous poets. Dorothy was just a visitor. For example, she has written a poem _Kingdom of Elmet_. This was the last Keltic strong-hold in England. It is Ted Hughes birth-place, celebrated in his collection _Remains of Elmet_ (1979).   
(Some of the titles are given in the magazine list of where her poems have been published.)

One of her strongest poems, and one of her last in rhyme (1976), _Glen Dhoon - Isle Of Man_ , was published only locally.

Dorothy has sometimes said about my poems that she didnt think my rhymings added anything to them, because you never noticed them. (Well, you werent meant to!) But I would say that the fact there are rhymes in _Glen Dhoon_ is incidental. This work is best grouped with those of her mature poems in free verse, that are, largely, the results of Keltic trips to the loneliest landscapes of Britain - often the outlying isles.

A favorite place, Dorothy Cowlin re-visited, is the following:

ORKNEY

Sea and land have here  
a shifting sovereignty.  
Lifetimes could pass  
before you learn their lineaments -  
tell Sound from Inlet,  
islet from promontary.  
Red-footed oyster-catchers  
and black-headed gulls  
cry territories eyerywhere,  
and build indifferently on field or shore.  
Men cannot say for certain  
if they fish or farm.  
Sheep thrive on sea-wrack or on grass.

Salt-laden winds  
Viking the cowering trees.  
But dust from sea-milled shells  
blows inland for the flowers.  
So cliffs are sweet as heaven  
with clover and with thyme;  
low meadows sunk in buttercups,  
and every inlet decked as for a Fair  
with yellow flags.

This land of mildly flowing hills  
a little greener than the sea  
would be, you'd think  
a place for dreamers, with grey eyes  
wistful for the Past, and tongues  
melodiously telling over tales  
already told too often.

Not so.  
Men here are dark and ruddy,  
speak free and hearty as the wind,  
will brook as little nonsense as the sea,  
laugh loud and often,  
give brisk welcome to a stranger,  
dance vigorously, and sing  
like seamen on perpetual leave.

* * *

## Comments on verse from the 1990s.

To verse contents.

Suddenly  
comes up a familiar spire:  
sister to Salisbury  
for grace and height....

Too fast to read the name  
the station passes.  
This place where once for me  
all journeys ended and began  
is Inter-City now.

From _Grantham._ (1993)

In this period, Dorothy Cowlin wrote nearly 100 poems, more than all the poems she had written up to her late seventies. Of these, about 10 per cent are practically perfect. This need not mean that they satisfy some standard form, new or old. Rather, they read fluently.   
Typically, Dorothys better poems have the quiet assurance of a master craftsman.

The more recent poems have not all had the time to reach finished form, as Dorothy was well aware. About a dozen need re-thinking. Dorothy rarely writes badly. Now and then, she uses an idea too weak to sustain a good poem.

Only the odd one of these feebler works has been published, and not the worst at that. Revision has much to do with the art of poetry and these few poems may well be transformed or scrapped.

A few poems on time sometimes work less well. She hasnt gone beyond the common sense notions.

You wouldnt guess from her poems that she is well-informed by popular science reports, in _The Guardian_. When I have talked to her about some new development, from a book for the general reader, she has been able to characterise the subject - to my surprise.

Now and again, she does use contemporary scientific ideas. To frame her typical sleep memories, one good poem gives the gist of Christopher Evans on computer theory of dreams, described in the book, _Landscapes of the Night_.   
I may have missed other allusions, thru ignorance.

Ive met a few women, her age, who could have been good scientists. One of Dorothys brothers was a mathematics teacher, the other a physicist. There has been a lack of balance in the education system. Obviously, womens intelligence has not been enuf used. Also, specialisation has tipped one either onto a science or an art side of things.

Dorothy Cowlin is not a "metaphysical poet," who plays much with the theories or inventions of her times, tho she has read and understood them. This doesnt matter. Much more important is her keen observation, with a warm sympathy.

* * *

### Of birds and other creatures.

If I could catch   
in words   
an equal vehemence   
proportionate to my size  
I could astonish the world

from _Wren._

To verse contents.

Birds have always been there in Dorothys nature poetry, as they are always in the back-ground of nature walks. Cowlins eight novels all have country hikes. Many years of experience taught her the avian sights and sounds. After our walks, she would consult books. No doubt, that came of long habit. She identified spring flowers, especially, and native or migrant birds for me.   
It's sad that the young dont always appreciate this gift of naming.

More recently, a nightingale and a wren asserted themselves for special attention, in her poems. Since 1989, these have been followed by quite an aviary of poems: about an owl, _In the Cave of Pan;_ cuckoos, _By the river Duddon;_ a robin, _Pocohontas in the Snow;_ sanderlings, on the _Sea Shore;_ _Nightjar;_ _Lapwings;_ _Winter Rooks;_ _Waxwings;_ goldfinches, on a _Morning Visit_...

Dorothys verse can be as "sleek" and "delicate" as the goldfinches. Or, while remaining clear as the sky, her lines can convey the ponderous beat of rooks:

WINTER ROOKS

The chilly rose of a December sunset   
spans the horizon   
from nearly south to nearly north.   
Commuting rooks go to their roost   
in some tree-dormitory   
north of where I sleep.   
Time for my tea;   
for them an early bed.

Knowing the way too well to argue,   
yet exchanging an occasional   
rook-platitude for company's sake,   
they take their slow-winged time;   
unnumbered and unregimented,   
orderly, yet free.

Their passage lifts me   
into their calmer, broader hemisphere,   
clear of the fret   
of questioning, and words.

No wonder there are so many bird-watchers: urban man has little contact with animals to exercise his sympathy for their predicament. Moreover, Dorothy is not a "dog-person," as she would put it. She prefers cats. Like them, she is independent to a fault, but in an unselfish rather than a selfish way. She would go out of her way to do chores that you could have done easily for her.   
In contrast, others would put-on you, without gratitude.

Cowlin is not sentimental about cats or anything else. One of a couple of poems about them, _Cat's Love_ observes a cat turn on its mate still reeking of dental anasthetic.   
Dorothy complained that Ted Hughes was always pointing out the cruelty of animal life. But her own poem _Throwbacks_ is about the inhuman treatment of sheep.

Cowlins rare encounters with animals, as with the birds, have produced some of her most charming poems: _Mice_ tells how her sick seven-year old self fed a mouse at her bed-side; _Bats_ , a "little miracle" to see and touch; _Applause_ sought by a chimpanzee.

About people, the former novelist has only written the odd poem. Tho, _Aunt Adelaide_ (1999) is an effortless nostalgia of sensuous memories.   
_Barbara Hepworth_ is about a mock longing to get fingers on the Dames sculptures. Neither are nature poems but both are priceless!

The poet did come to terms with losing her husband. That and a few reminiscences are the nearest to a relationship threading thru the poetry. Close family and a few old friends complete the human face of Cowlin verse. But, as personalities, even they are practically absent.   
We learn her spouse was colour-blind (partly) - as is fairly common among men. Another concise poem, neatly summed-up, comes of it. We learn little if anything about the man.

* * *

### Her deafness and aging.

To verse contents.

Of the poet herself, we hear of ages infirmities, notably her deafness, an under-rated affliction. This gradually forced Dorothy to give up her pleasure in the auditory arts, whether listening to music at home or going to theater, concert and cinema. Nor can the hard-of-hearing make out meetings when people mumble, slur their speech or talk over each other.

Deafness is the more frustrating because people are not sensitive to it as a handicap. It is easier to make fun of looking and feeling old, as Dorothy does in _Timely Reminder_. Or remembering when she asked her husband, did he think she was pretty? ( _Question._ )

The following poem does not propagandise for deafness. Yet admirers have asked to hear it again. And I was told I had to include it here:

THE SOUND OF RAIN.

I have almost forgotten   
the sound of rain.

Eyes must now calculate   
by size and quantity   
of drops on spattered panes   
whether the rain   
falls delicate as finger nails   
or coarse as gravel.

From the geometry   
of spreading rings   
within the birdbath   
eyes must report   
whether the music plays   
pianissimo or forte.

I smell the rain   
mixed with the summer's dust,   
and on my hand can catch   
the coolness of a shower.

But for my ears   
the rainy season's over.

_The Sound of Rain_ is perhaps less about deafness or the poet than about nature.

_Windows_ reinforces the point that Cowlin is an out-going poet. The first sentence is:

Penned in this double glaze   
mind has to manage   
with one sense alone.

While the envoi reads:

Bring me a stone,   
that I may let life in   
and the mind out!

Cowlin makes the link between _Windows_ and _The Sound of Rain_ , in a third poem, _Deafness_. This compares the deaf woman to a "Princess / in a glass coffin." Despite her decline, she is at heart a princess,

but knows   
it is too late for princes   
and their kisses.

The poem _Old Age_ (1989) describes herself as "an inveterate traveller" at the wheel of a jalopy. This image is as "clapped-out" as the jalopy. Still, we get the picture of one with

pulse light as a girl's   
in the delight   
of going places

More even than a nature poet, Cowlin is an out-going poet. Her main pursuits are nature and the arts. The art of architecture is most easily assimilated to a poetry of the great outdoors.

_Old Age_ finds her "unperturbed / if death should overtake." This is a play on words. The jalopy of her aging body is what death steadily over-takes. Cowlin is a skeptic of life after death. Yet she is well prepared. To break out of windows is to discard the bodys shell. To get outside is to get outside oneself, by paying attention to the great outdoors, rather than ones little body.   
Having shed ones body, not every-one may wish to inhabit another one.

Studies of near-death experiences, for what they are worth, suggest "life after life" (title of the classic study by Dr Raymond Moody) is a liberation from our bodily limitations. This may be less true, it is claimed, the more the dying person clings to the deadly sins.

* * *

### The nature of Cowlin poetry

To verse contents.

I can only find the odd urban poem out of some 200 Ive seen or heard. _The Mersey Way_ reads like a foot-note to Cowlin novel _Winter Solstice_. I doubt even that little poem of river pollution would have been written but that it was a memory of walks with her brother.

The exception that proves the rule is her poem about hell, which concludes hell on earth is already here. And that hell is largely one of urban noise and congestion.   
That was a sequel to her idea of heaven, _Tailor-made._ Lapwings clown over cloud-swept barley, mountains beck, the wild flowers, hedged and heathed. There is warmth and humor from male company. But:

Heaven would provide a door  
to close at will.

These things are at the heart of Cowlin inspiration. It is good traditional nature poetry, written in free verse.   
G K Chesterton said these are the subjects we want to come back to, not, for instance, some poem about a new cult.   
This may be true. But Cowlins work impressed me as having more to it than a good typical work, like _Tailor-made_.

Until pensioner age, Cowlin had written only 30 poems. They show her to be a nature poet, pure and simple.   
The rest of the poems, in her first folder, the red folder, number about 50. About 30 of these are nature poems. Eight others are about man-made places, like churches. They mostly belong to her holiday poems, tho these are mainly in wild settings.

Cowlins second folder, the blue folder of poems from 1989 to 1996 contains some 94 poems. (Four more poems from this period are published but not in the blue folder.)   
Some of the blue folder poems are drafts. Eight of the weakest are not nature poems. This is largely why I reckon the ratio of Cowlin nature poems to other poems remains at about three to two, in this later period.

Naturally, there are more poems on age and its infirmities: deafness and memory loss; and about time and death.   
A few more poems mourn or celebrate people. Half of these concern her husband, followed by family and friends.

There wouldnt even be three poems about tourist sights. But the pensioner won one of her holidays as a poetry prize. Add, to these, the odd poems about home towns.   
A few verse are comments on life or the arts.   
I guess some 40 poems out of this output would stand by themselves for publication. Tho, the lesser ones should still be included in a collected poems, as distinct from a selected poems.

But numbers are deceiving. Growing older; a few kith and kin are inescapable conditions of living. They are a sort of tax, whether or not willingly paid, on ones calling. Cowlins calling is the great outdoors - with more than a nod to the great indoors of art galleries, museums, theatres and concert halls. But the latter must be marginal to her poetry, an art in its own right.

That is not to say one is just ones calling. Dorothy Cowlin the poet does not give a proper idea of Dorothy the person. My comments hinted at much broader interests. Tho she is as quiet as the country-side, her sunny disposition can enjoy a wide range of company. Family and friends mean as much to her as to the next person.

### Dorothy Cowlin poems by appearance in British poetry magazines, prizes etc.

To verse contents.

Dorothy Cowlin (1911 - 2010) was a founder member of her local poetry work-shop. They held a private annual competition judged anonymously by different out-siders, often successful poets or other-wise distinguished. While she was there, Dorothy won about a dozen times. For many years, she took the cup more often than this group of practised poets (including myself) put together.   
She has since passed the popularity test of open competitions. This is despite the fact that she didnt write much verse till she retired and, being a pensioner, avoided most competitions, of any standing, which are fee-charging.

Dorothy Cowlin appeared on the Yorkshire television magazine programme _Calendar_ , when she won their "poet laureate of the North" award, for her poem _Pennine Tunnel_. The prize was a trip to Paris with her daughter.

In 1999, Dorothy won her regions poetry prize, sponsored by Faber, in conjunction with national poetry day.

On 7 november 2004, BBC Radio 4 programme "Poetry Please" broadcast _The Sound of Rain_.   
On 28 january 2005, this poem was also broadcast on the programme, "The Sounds I'm Losing".  
Both broadcasts were repeated.

In summer 2005, Dorothy's poem _Cloughton Bay_ was the winner (in the over-16 category) in a National Trust competition of poetry on the Yorkshire coast, to commemorate the bi-centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

**_The dates given (where known) are the year the poems appeared in print:_**

_Aireings_

The Fens - from a train (1992?); Bats (1995) Foreigners Are Odd (1998); Gardening (1998).

_Counter point_

The Wilful Rose (1979); Water (1979); Windows (1980).

_Cumbria_

Farndale (1997); By the River Duddon (1997); A Long Winter (feb. 1999); Ideograph (march 1999); A Day in March (march 2000); Snow (dec. 2000).

_The Dalesman_

A Long Winter (1998); May Day (1998); Lapwings (1998); Autumn Day (October Woods, 1998); Leaf-fall (1998); Cabbage White (oct. 1999); Scene Shift (aug. 1999); A New Beginning (feb. 2000); April Fool (april 2000); Vapour Trail (july 2000); Bilberry Pie (sept. 2000); Wren (aug. 2000); Gathering Holly (dec. 2000); Snow (dec. 2001); January Blues (jan. 2001); April Pilgrimage (april 2001?); Ingratitude (feb. 2002);  
A Bat; White Egret; Robin in the Snow.   
( _Dates uncertain for these last three._ )

_Envoi_

Flint (1980?); An October Day (1981?); Amputation (1982?).

_Hybrid_

The Sound Of Rain (1990); Leaf Fall (1992).

_Iota_

Ideograph (1992).

_Moonstone_

A Glimpse (1982); Sand Ripples (1983); Malvern Hills (1992); A Day In March (1993); The Buddleia (1993); Bilberry Pie (1994); Parachutes (1994); A Fancy (1994); Hare (1995); Woods In Rain (1995); Early Snow (1995); Intruder (1996); End Of Summer (1996); Warning (1996); The Green Isle (1996); Undressing (1997); Winter Rooks (1997); First Footing (1997); My Himalayas (1997); The Art Of Dying (1997); Time (1998); Water (1998); Summer (1998); October (1998); Ingratitude (1999); Lapwings (1999); Valentine's Day (1999); Stonehenge In The Rain (1999); Solitude (1999).

_New Hope International_

Helicopter To The Scilly Isles (1991); Bells (1992); Calendar (1995).

_Nutshell_

Pennine Tunnel (1989); Power (1990).

_Pennine Ink_

Gravestones - Recycled (1992); Pennine Tunnel (abridged, 1992); Deafness (1994); Channel Tunnel (1995); Botanical Love (1997); Colour Blind (1998).

_Pennine Platform_

Jet Lag (1990); Mobile (1991); Moving House (1992); The Cat (1992); Quaker Meeting House (1992); November (1992); Morning After Snow (1993); Evening Pool (1994); Windows (1995); The Lovers (1996); No Season For Rhyme (1996); Waxwings (1997); Gardening (1998/9); Fashions In Ruins (1999/2000).

_The People's Poetry_

Tailor Made (1995)

_Poetry Now_ (editor choice)

Tinnitis (1993).

_Psychopoetica_

After A Concert (1988); Illusion (1991?); Danger! (1993?); Applause (1994?); Battlefield Of Love (1995); Phobias (1996?); The Sound Of Rain (1998); Short-Term Loss (1998?); The Lock (1998); Hallucinations (1999).

_Ramsey Chronicle_ (Isle Of Man)

For Kathleen Killip (1996).

_The Rialto_

Canterbury Pilgrims; The Sound Of Rain.

_Success Poetry_

Orkney (Draft version, 1988).

_Tell-Tale_

Early January (1982); Sand Ripples (1983).

_Weyfarers_

Throwbacks? (1990); Orkney (1990); Water (1992); Kingdom Of Elmet (1997); Protest (1998).

* * *

## Dorothy Cowlin biographical novels etc.

_return tocontents_

Notes on her four biographical novels (mainly for young people) & journalism:

Greenland Seas. The story of Scoresby the whaler.  
A Woman in the Desert. The Story of Gertrude Bell.  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  
Note on spiritualism of Rupert Brooke.  
Cleopatra.  
Do You Remember? A selection of local journalism about the Vale of Pickering.

* * *

### Greenland Seas.

The story of Scoresby the whaler.   
_by_ Dorothy Cowlin   
_Illustrated by Ray Bailey._   
Published by E. J. Arnold and Son Limited Leeds, 1965. (176 pages).

"There, on the top of the cliff, was the old abbey, where he and his friends went to scramble about the spiral stairs, high up in the ruined walls. There were the 199 steps climbing up to it, looking nearly vertical from this distance, like a ladder up a ship's side. There were the gravestones on the cliff-top graveyard, peering over the edge as if to see who was next to be drowned. There were the houses of Henrietta Street, all cock-eyed because the cliff underneath them kept falling. There were the brown fishing-nets laid out below on the steep grass at the foot of the cliffs.   
Now the bridge swung past, with its drawbridge flaps drawn up to let the ships go past. And now the other cliff came into view, with the flag flying half-mast, to show it was half-water."

Here Dorothy Cowlin describes the departure from Whitby of the ten year old William Scoresby. He has managed to stay aboard his fathers whaler bound for Greenland seas. At Shetland, William Scoresby senior tries to sail off without his son...

The narrative begins in 1800, the time of the Napoleonic wars. It is no more a celebration of killing whales than of fighting the French. After the boyish fascination of learning to be a mariner, William the youngers real interest is that of exploring and natural philosophy.

His self-made and inventive father has him first mate at sixteen and a half. And encourages his education. His first command soon follows. He has the novel idea of connecting barometer readings to the weather. He devises means of measuring temperatures of various under-water levels of Arctic currents. He notes the pastel colors in icebergs, the patterns of snowflakes (these miniature paintings can be seen in Whitby museum) and differentiates kinds of snow and ice, as might an Innuit.

Different temperatures of air currents create lens effects. William saw a perfect mirage of his fathers ship, upside down. Making a note for checking with his father, they decided, the ship had been 30 miles away and 17 miles below the horizon.

William the elder made an improved crows nest, to keep Arctic look-outs from freezing or falling. Like a small coach cab, with a trap-door, it can be seen in the Cook and Scoresby section of Whitby museum.   
The curators, of this section and the ship models, helped Dorothy Cowlin with her book researches. She drew on William the youngers manuscript autobiography. After she returned it, the document went missing. Tho, most of the material was used in the biography by Williams nephew.

The crows nest features in a beautiful phenomenum, described in Dorothys book:

"The fog was low. Where he stood, a hundred and fifty feet above sea-level, he could look down on its upper surface.  
Suddenly the sun came out behind him, and there grew on the surface of the fog a circular rainbow, with four circles, one inside the other.  
The outside and innermost ones were brightest, with all the rainbow colours. The third was coloured but fainter, and the second was a silvery lilac colour. Right in the centre was his own shadow: his hat, and his shoulders, and the barrel of the Crow's Nest, with his arms sticking over the top. A funny, wooden-looking little mannikin!   
William stared at the rainbow rings, so ethereal, floating on their bed of vapour, yet so vivid and alive, coming and going, as if the colours were breathing."

Robert Frost, _Iris By Night_ , describes a similar incident of standing in a circular rainbow, but caused by moon-light on a dewy night:

It lifted from its dewy pediment  
Its two mote-swimming many-coloured ends,  
And gathered them together in a ring.  
And we stood in it softly circled round

Eventually, with only rude rebuffs from the Admiralty, William explores and charts 400 miles of largely unknown Greenland coast. One long fiord, he named "Scoresby Sound."   
The admiralty ignored his published journal and map, sending a later expedition to re-name the headlands and inlets!

This is reminiscent of the official treatment of fellow Yorkshire and Lincolnshire man, John Harrison inventing sea-worthy time-keepers. Dava Sobel book _Longtitude_ was also made into a tv play on the punishment by the unworthy of persevering genius.   
He and his son, like the Scoresbys, were an example of the value of apprenticeships.

Dorothy took this reviewer to see the elder Scoresby birth-place, set on a bend in the river Severn in Yorkshire. Nowadays, the building is a holiday home, against one of the wooded hillsides to the river basin. This is an ancient sea floor once roamed by pre-historic sea monsters, ichthyosaurs. (Skeletal remains grace the natural history section of Whitby museum.)

The house is a limestone oblong. It is like a winter barn, where the animals would be kept below and their fodder on top, or indeed the people who looked after them. Scoresby elder was a farm hand, whose education stopped at nine years.

The garden slopes to the river edge near a ford. Above, is a meadow bank, surrounded by mature timber. Anemones run wild. Dorothy said Shelley called them "wind-flowers" - the literal Greek meaning of their name. She would quote Shakespeare. And despite her deafness, she identified the call of the yaffle, as the green wood-pecker is locally known. Or, she would point out a nuthatch searching for insects under the bark of tall trees.

* * *

### A Woman in the Desert.

The Story of Gertrude Bell   
_by_ Dorothy Cowlin.   
_Illustrated by Penny Carey._   
First published by Frederick Muller in Great Britain in 1967. (182 pages).

To biographical novels

Like William Scoresby, Gertrude Bell was a Yorkshire-born explorer. Again, Dorothy Cowlin tried to research original documents. But someone was already working on Bells papers, in the possession of relatives.   
Currently, there is a scholarly project to digitise the entire Gertrude Bell archive, so it should be available to everyone. This is a measure of her works historic importance.

To attract child readers, Cowlins Scoresby biography started with boyish enthusiasm for his fathers voyaging. So, Cowlins Bell biography starts off with girlish enthusiasm for her fathers blast furnaces and rolling mills.

This unfashionable lack of sophistication reminds me of the pre-war story books, much-loved by my mother, which she won as prizes from _The Yorkshire Gazette_. M E Fraser: _The Madcap of the Family_ might have been named after Gertrude. Tho, her wild climb, of the family mansion, was understandably provoked by scaffolding being put up. She coaxed her younger brother to follow. He fell thru the conservatory roof.

Not surprisingly, Gertrude became a mountain climber, as well as a desert journeyer. What Cowlin calls "her flawless courage" also perhaps accounts for her many friendships, not least with Arab tribes - that, combined with her linguistic abilities, and an interest in middle eastern history, not yet shared by the inhabitants.

Her fascination with ancient ruins in the deserts would culminate in founding the Iraq Museum, she wanted to be as splendid as the British museum. She would see to it that foreign-financed archeologists did not take more than their fair share of exhibits from their excavations.

Her expeditions proved to be the (exhausting) ground-work, in helping to prepare for independent Arab states, which the League of Nations gave British and French mandates for. Like T E Lawrence, Gertrude Bell was trusted in this endeavor. The Arabs "Daughter of the Desert" had become "Mother of the Faithful," a great distinction.

Gertrude had started-off against womens suffrage, thinking women would have to prove themselves, rather than disgrace themselves with suffragette disturbances. Blessed with a wealthy and generous father, she paid for her adventures with the books she wrote. (She was too modest to put her name to the first.)

She could hardly endure to be house-bound for a day, let alone be in purdah.  
But, as an Arab friend told her: "real freedom is not to be given. It can only be taken." Amongst such friends, Gertrude promoted education for girls, as well as boys, to give them enuf outlook to, at least, _want_ freedom.

Gertrude Bell shared the convention that marriage and children come first. But she was unlucky in love. Later, she fell in love with a married man. Dorothy Cowlins biography doesnt mention this transgression in Christian society, tho nothing remarkable in Eastern societies.

Nowadays, Western society gets round its own ruling, with the serial polygamy of divorce and re-marriage, for those who can afford it.

Justly famous tho Gertrude Bell became, one can sympathise for her lack of personal fulfillment.

Dorothy Cowlins third biography was about another scholarly woman, tho their physical conditions could not have been more different. The mountain and desert darer translated the _Divan_ of Hafiz, Persias most famous poet. The Koranic scholar A J Arberry reckoned it the best of some twenty such ventures into English.   
The title of Bells _The Desert and the Sown_ , widely regarded as her best writing, comes from lines by Omar Khayyam:

The strip of herbage strown  
That just divides the desert from the sown.

Dorothy Cowlins third subject, the mostly invalid Elizabeth Barrett was both a translator of classical languages and a famous poet in her day.

* * *

### Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

_by_ Dorothy Cowlin.   
( _Illustrated by Sheila Bewley_. )   
First published by Frederick Muller, in Great Britain, 1968. ( 192 pages. )

To biographical novels

I twice failed to watch out the film adaptation of the successful play _The Barretts of Wimpole Street_. To me, it was as slow and dull as the real Elizabeth Barretts bed-ridden years must have been.   
In complete contrast, I found Dorothy Cowlin biographical novel a breeze. The simple style and vivid scenes makes it leisure reading. The acute understanding of personal relationships makes the story absorbing.   
As a typical boy barbarian, this book would have bored me. I would have had no difficulty understanding the facts, as stated to me. Emotionally, I dont think I would have understood or benefited.

Girls, not spoiled by a mean outlook, might appreciate Elizabeth Barretts loving nature. This was not confined to family and friends. She threw her whole being as ardently into great public causes and suffered correspondingly.

Her wilful father used her love to limit her life to his wishes. It was long before she was lucky enuf to find a lover to liberate and not jealously restrict her.   
Moreover, love alleviated her chronic sickliness enuf for the secret flight to Italys healthier climate, newly betrothed to Robert Browning.

(One minor point: the Brownings meeting with the medium, "Hume" was actually Daniel Douglas Home. Robert Brownings animosity to him was not shared by his wife or his contemporaries. Indeed, Brownings reactions have been considered none too creditable. Nor was Home "later thought to be a fraud." (Dorothy never thought much of spiritualist claims.)

Of course, Elizabeths father was a pathological case in cutting off all his children, who dared to marry. He was a jealous household god, even by the standards of the Victorian patriarch. But he was still an object of filial piety, as Mr Dombey is to his daughter Florence, in Charles Dickens: _Dombey and Son_.

Dickens had a dislikable side that forsook his wife for a secret affair. But, in Florence Dombey, he knew about the pathetic endurance of a childs undeniable love. Again, even by Victorian standards, Elizabeth Barrett gave a full measure of devotion. Unlike the fictional Dombey at last, her father was never reconciled to his once favorite daughter.

Dorothy Cowlin doesnt excuse the stress Mr Barrett unwittingly created in his household, by never consulting his children on his intentions. Tho he favored the great Reform Bill, he was not "parliamentary" towards them. He was paternal enuf - too paternal, perhaps, when parents cannot ever conceive of their offspring as anything but children.

From the age of six, when he jokingly called her "Poet Laureate of Hope End," Elizabeths father encouraged her precosity. Scholarship and literature took up her long years of confinement.   
In the nineteenth century, the novel became as much a womans work as a mans. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a forerunner of those British writers who earn women equal recognition with men as poets.

These pages are a study of Dorothy Cowlin as one such poet. So, it is of interest to quote her assessment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

"Born with a generous, passionately loving heart, and a fine brain, cruelly pent up in the frailest of bodies, she had put up a gallant fight for at least forty of those fifty-five years, and come at last to most of what her heart had desired.   
On the day of her funeral the shops near Casa Guidi were all closed in mourning. The Florentine newspapers announced her death as that of "the greatest living woman poet, and a true friend of the Italian cause."   
The first item in this praise would have delighted her somewhat less than the second.

...too often the praise was for a _woman_ poet...

She is remembered chiefly as the female partner in the most famous love affair in English literature.   
Certainly a great deal of her poetry looks, to the twentieth-century eye, more than a little facile, sentimental and "dated." But there are many flashes of original, striking, even startlingly modern imagery, some daring experiments with rhyme and metre, much humour and much wisdom, for the careful reader.   
_Aurora Leigh_ , some of the shorter lyrics, and most of _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ are well worth a look.   
And there are no love-letters in the English language quite like hers..."

Dorothy Cowlin shows how, against all the odds, love found a way with Robert and Elizabeth (who called herself "the Portuguese" because of her looks).  
The novel form allows our sympathies to participate in this romance, which is nevertheless true and instructive.

* * *

### Note on spiritualism of Rupert Brooke.

To biographical novels

You only have to compare the Brownings lasting relationship, of reciprocated ardor, with an affair in 1912, not uncovered til march 2000. The British Library released the letters of Rupert Brooke to the artist, Phyllis Gardner, and her memoir of the poet. (The relationship featured in their 2000 exhibition, _Chapter and Verse: 1000 years of English Literature_.)

Brooke describes himself as a "wanderer" who belongs to nobody. He is the classic "lady-killer" or serial lover. She is over-whelmed by him and holds out for marriage. He is under-whelmed and must be perfectly free.   
(From article by Andrew Wilson, _Daily Telegraph_ , 11 march 2000.)

Wilson comments that Brookes death seems to have "unhinged" Phyllis. A more likely explanation is that the lovers had an agreement that if Rupert died, his apparition might visit her: "the sign was to be if I actually saw a waking vision of him." Credence is lent to this interpretation by Brooke poems such as _Hauntings_ and "Sonnet" ( _Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_ ).

Young Dorothy Cowlins "pin-up" was Rupert Brooke (called, by Yeats, the handsomest man in England). When the poet of "1914" did die on a hospital ship in 1915, Churchill ensured he _was_ buried in the nearest "foreign field," a Greek island.

In _The Slow Train Home_ , Cowlin quotes Brooke:

CLOUDS

Down the blue night the unending columns press  
In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,  
Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow  
Up to the white moon's hidden loveliness.  
Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,  
And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,  
As who would pray good for the world, but know  
Their benediction empty as they bless.

They say that the Dead die not, but remain  
Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.  
I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,  
In wise majestic melancholy train,  
And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,  
And men, coming and going on the earth.

This is another sonnet influenced by spiritualist ideas, to grand effect.

Brooke was only 26 yet had achieved mastery of this difficult form. He projects his lucid feelings on the night clouds, as surely as the sun projects its light on the moon. But he does so, observant of how clouds actually behave. This lends a dignified restraint that prevents romance from becoming merely effusive.

Brookes metafor makes an earnest point, whether or not one chooses to regard it as a supernatural fancy. This explicit message does not detract from the scenic description but transfigures it with potent meaning.

* * *

### Cleopatra.

Queen of Egypt.  
_A biographical novel by_ Dorothy Cowlin.   
First published in Great Britain ( 1970 ) by Wayland ( Publishers ) Ltd. ( 144 pages. )

To biographical novels

Little is known about the legendary Queen of the Nile. This novel version is told from the womans point of view. It is a good corrective to the male-centred dramas of Shakespeare and Shaw. Also, Cowlins version follows events more closely than dramatic neatness would allow.

The purpose of "faction," a blend of fact and fiction is not so much to make things up about historical figures we dont know properly. Educated guesswork does come into it. The author is trying to reconstruct what life was like for the characters. The reader is put in their shoes. She shares their experiences and follows where they go. She has to make the same life-or-death decisions.

Dorothy Cowlin does this as well as the best of them, James Michener, "the professor" himself. Duties of state, religious observances, climate, food and dress, manners and customs, economics, battle tactics are not presented as a chronicle but as enjoyment and ordeal.

This kind of reading is education, in the best sense, for the whole person. It is suitable for adults and children at secondary school age. (Tho, some younger children, who like reading, might enjoy it, too.) Like Cleopatra, Cowlin biography doesnt show its age. Certainly, it would be worth re-printing as an informative introduction to one of the most famous women in history.

Plutarch describes Caesars Gallic campaign as bringing the treacherous to civility. To do this, he stormed above eight hundred cities, killed a million in battle and took as many prisoners.   
Roman Imperialism came home to roost in chronic civil war. Dynastic ambition and treachery characterise the age. Mark Anthony alliance with Cleopatra was tested, when Octavian declared war on Cleopatra alone (formally). And Cleopatra was in turn tested, with an offer of "every reasonable favour" if she would put Anthony to death.

* * *

### Do You Remember? Pickering 50 Years Ago.

60 pages. Blackthorn Press. 2000.

To biographical novels

This is a selection of 25 articles from _The Malton Gazette & Herald_. Malton is a small Ryedale town, mentioned by Charles Kingsley in _The Water Babies_. It boasts a Dickensian connection, because the great man stopped there on his Yorkshire trip.

This Cowlin collection of nostalgic journalism continues her biographies. For, it is a recollection of local people and places, centred on Pickering, circa 1950. Her husband taught there and at Thornton Le Dale. Dorothy started as a teacher before becoming a professional writer.

The change in the provisions for schooling and shopping are commented on, as are the people who provided them. For recreation, Dorothy might have said, but didnt, that people entertained themselves, as well as were entertained. But, apparently, there wasnt much local interest, then, in concerts.   
(Dorothy doesnt say she played the piano and has played with other amateur musicians, privately.) There were amateur dramatics. Festival and fair are freshly remembered.

The Helmsley pageant was scripted by Sir Herbert Read, the poet and art critic. A local man, his gravestone also testifies to his being an "anarchist." This is not in her social history. But Dorothy took me to see, and that is the best way of confirming facts.

She consulted her diaries and local people, as well as her memories. At least one mistake in her articles was corrected by readers of the paper, before the booklet came out. This was useful, because it is essential to check ones facts for a printed record.

Dorothy describes this period with her husband and young daughter as the happiest years of her life. In faraway corners, as the feet tread, they would stop for rustic teas, a rare treat in those years of austerity. "The House in the Wood" is the story of how they found a lonely homestead, they later learned was where William Scoresby the elder was born.   
Her biography of his son is reviewed above.

We've had poems on the under-ground. Some publisher anthologised the poems resulting from train journeys. On another page, I discussed closely Larkin, _The Whitsun Weddings_. Several of Dorothy Cowlin poems are seen "from a train," including her prize-winning _Pennine Tunnel_.

Her short introductory article, "To Pickering By Rail" is a beautiful poem in prose. She picks out the oddities and distinctive character of the period. She does not need to strive to be authentic as nostalgic film sets do.

"The angel in marble" is seen by the sculptor, cutting with the grain of the wood or seem of the stone.  
Sometimes, poets, like sculptors, may cut too much. At any rate, a poetic evocation of an event may not exhaust its interest. The born stylist Simon Armitage wrote a poem called _The Tyre_ , in his collection _Cloud-cuckoo Land_. Even he felt the need to re-tell the story, with personal back-ground, in his first collection of prose, _All Points North_.

Back-grounds to some Dorothy poems can be gleaned, for instance, the one she wrote about a newly discovered Roman floor mosaic. A workman at Malton museum assured her it would be the sight of a lifetime - rightly as it turned out.

The article on _Pickering Castle_ is less like the recent past than a fairy tale and an idyll. It wouldnt be out of place in a collection of poetry.

* * *

## Dorothys school days: The House By The River.

_return tocontents_

### An early life in novel form.

On my review page of Dorothy Cowlin novels, I related how she ceased to become published. Rejections turned her to writing for the sake of it, about her early life. By the time she'd finished, she thought this was rather good, and decided to try and get it published -- as one does.

Her old publisher answered: It all seems so long ago.

Roundabout 1960, Britain broke with its past. It was not a good time to look back -- unless in anger.

Another publisher said that her story wasnt to the taste of the times. People like excitement and adventure. The appetite for action, as in the movies, never wanes. To appreciate Dorothy Cowlin you have to believe, as Arnold Bennett did, in the interestingness of things about one. They may seem common-place and boring, but time lends them a romantic distance.

In 1960, people may have wished to turn their back on the pre-war era. By 2002, there is scarcely any need to break with it. It is almost out of reach. As soon as we cannot have something, we begin to wonder whether we have lost things worth having. And this is likely to be true of any era, even if, on balance, we might be incomparably better off than the Cowlin family living in very ordinary circumstances. (Most of the world is far poorer, still, it has to be said.)

What has been lost, perhaps, is a certain simplicity and self-sufficiency. Dorothys grand-father hadnt lost his farming roots. He supplemented the house-hold economy with a vegetable garden.

The classic movies of Dickens novels, by directors such as David Lean have an authentic touch that it seems will never be matched. As time goes by, the past seems to become alien and unreal. Attempts to reach it are transparently our own era looking in the mirror at itself in period costumes.

Cowlin tells her story as a novel. She was still wanting to write novels even when they were no longer wanted. So, she turned her autobiography into one. She was doing the same as Clive James in his _Unreliable Memoirs._ Memory, being unreliable, is like fiction. He said that most writers really wanted their novels to be autobiography, whereas he wanted his autobiography to be a novel.

Cowlin and James novelistic memoirs follow the tradition of the father of the English novel, Daniel Defoe. They are first person narratives which allow you to enter the life of another mind. In a sense they are fiction, since we cannot do that. But also, for that reason, they project a greater sense of reality than that social historian, who gives an objective account of past living conditions.

Cowlin lives up to Defoe legacy of meticulous attention to detail of her surroundings. Her descriptions of contemporary housing conditions, domestic amenities, all the different types of upholstery or dress fabrics provides a most convincing stage set of the mind. I doubt a social history could give more information per page or put it so well in context.  
(There is more to be got out of re-reading _The House By The River_ than the first readings of most literature.)

However, attention to detail ran away with Tolkien story-telling. In providing so solid a back-drop that the reader, as imaginary actor, need not fear to lean against for falling out, only _The Hobbit_ and the Ring epic got really lived out in the imagination.

Consider JRR Tolkien, _Lord Of The Rings_ and _The Silmarilion._ The one is a novel, the other a myth, tho their stories coincide. Tolkien myth has the most tenuous link with old England of the shires. It owes much to old Englands own myths, particularly the first example of English literature, _Beowulf_.

The first part of The Rings has been likened to Tolkiens England of the nineteen thirties. For this reason, it has been claimed that Tolkien would be more at home in New Zealand, where the film was shot, than in modern England. At any rate, Tolkien opening chapters betray a love-hate relation with pre-war provincialism. It seems as comfortable and certain as a dream. But the author is far from cosy with some of his neighbors. A cutting sarcasm is at war with their mean and petty tricks.

The departure of Frodo Baggins from his fellow hobbits is a shocking breach of the barest civility, when he literally disappears on them. He is practically saying that they are incapable of being moved by anything. He has to go out to meet the fearsome events closing in on them.

Tolkien invests the wide world with gothic glamor. Meanwhile, back in the old English shire, Lincolnshire to be exact, there remains a traditional topic for romance beyond his power to imagine, namely the mind of a growing girl.

Male writers have attempted this with well-deserved success, by assimilating research with sympathy. One might mention Arthur Golden, _Memoirs of a Geisha_ or David Guterson, _Snow Falling On Cedars,_ the latter involving a Japanese American girl.   
All I can say is, when a woman, as introspective as Cowlin, tells it herself, it is different!

### An over-worked conscience.

Cowlins finished account, of growing-up, differs from the version I remember before 1990. She told me on the fone, with the earnest hesitation of a soul-searching puritan, that she had tried to write honestly about her girlhood.  
Instead of venting a derisive bark, I just said that I'd heard of a monster of iniquity but she was a monster of honesty.

Not that she has any thing bad to say about any one. She hasnt. The characters are drawn with the observant eye of a novelist. They are real people who live and die like you and I. They go by their own names. The reflective author merely questions whether certain exhanges were quite as they might have been.

She says she was used mainly to being with older people. Her soft-hearted ex-sergeant of a grand-father is particularly endearing.   
Those described are mostly adults, her aging little family circle in Grantham. She gratefully remembers their care of her. But her cloistered youth must be unimaginable to most succeeding generations of girls.

Dorothy tells of her own infatuations with her teachers, which were fashionable with the girls. There is a remarkably good novel characterisation of such idolatry by H G Wells, _Joan and Peter_ (1918). He has been criticised, perhaps unfairly, for the lack of good female characters in most of his output.

Dorothys most searching critique is reserved for herself. Presumably, being always in her own company, she has the most opportunity for putting herself on trial -- a sort of Bleak House _Jarndyce vs Jarndyce_ conducted against herself. In other words, Dorothy is a serious introvert. Or rather, that is the side of her character uppermost in her early memoirs.

By the way, this is the only part of her life story she wished to publish. C S Lewis said it is always by far the best part: Lewis law, as I have called it elsewhere. He refused to go beyond his youthful memories, in _Surprised by Joy._

Dorothy is definitely not the Dorothy in _Gentlemen Prefer Blonde_ _s_ when Anita Loos has the two gold-diggers visit Dr Freud, who advises the blonde to pick up some inhibitions.

At Kesteven and Grantham Girls school, we hear more about Dorothys best friend than any of the other girls. (And even that relation was started by Dorothys uncle considerately arranging the matter with the best friends father.)

Living in her mind, rather than others society may have had to do with her easily excelling in her lessons. She doesnt sound much fun. You perhaps wouldnt guess her cheerful disposition. It's only a toned-down version of the arch humor, evident from a school girl essay, Dorothy doesnt quote.

If any thing makes you smile, in her life story, it is the abnormal sensitivity of childhood and youth to trivial embarrassments, naive indiscretions and irritating follies. Tho, this becomes fateful error of judgment in choosing the subject for the scholarship she won.

### Dorothy Cowlin, nature poet.

Dorothy Cowlin quotes a little of her first lines of poetry, the worst of it. It is perhaps typical of her that she doesnt show the best of it, not even the good bad poetry of inexperienced ambition with talent, from which her enthusiasm for words is infectious. Apparently beyond the pale was her prize-winning translation of a poem by Lamartine, given by head-mistress and incomparable ice-skater, Miss Williams.

Dorothys talent as a nature poet is again evident in _The House By The River._ The river was the Witham and the houses quiet garden reaches first brought out the unskilled poet. I "commissioned" (that is, more or less begged) her to do verse versions of her described awakenings to natural beauty.

I suggested one of these awakenings be called _The March Hare Discovers Contemplation_ , because it began with her haring about on the hockey field, as usual without getting anywhere near the ball. Dorothy was hopeless at all sports and an odd one out of team selections. Sent down to the lower field to practise dribbling, she absent-mindedly discovered with a shock that elm trees flower. In the distance was the cathedral-like spire of St Wulframs...  
She was considered unworldly, bookish and impractical.

Oddly enuf, an outcome of these memoirs was a rare personal poem about Aunt Adelaide. The poem cut her free from her prosaic life of hardship and made her into a legend.

She was an aunt in name only, til she married Dorothys uncle, who fostered her. The biography is a memorial to him, William Exton.

Dorothys early life story is a data-dense historical source. Better than that, it is a substantial prose poem. Two of my favorite passages follow. The first occured on the day she was due to take a spoken French examination:

"It was a perfect summer's morning, hot and still, with a band of almost purple sky along the horizon, like a sediment filtered down to the bottom of the great dome of lucent blue. The cuckoo's season was nearly over, but as I climbed Hall's Hill I heard one stammering his goodbyes, from a little copse of ash trees. Cows stood as if bewitched, knee-deep in buttercups and sorrel.

Along the top of the hill ran the old Roman road unmacadamised, soft to the foot with creamy lime-dust, patched with blue shadows of beeches overhanging one side. Half way along the road was a small abandoned limestone quarry, and for no particular reason I turned in at a broken fence to have a look at it.

Scarcely had I stepped inside, when I felt myself, as it were, soaring upwards on a column of wonder.  
This was only an old quarry. All there was to look at was a semicircular wall of limestone, a blue sky, and a few hardy little hawthorns, poised on the edge of the cliff as if about to throw themselves over.  
But the colour of the stone! The fierce, incandescent creamy-white of it, against the intensity of blue within blue within blue of the sky! More than that -- a sort of breath-held stillness and expectancy, such as sometimes came at the bottom of the garden -- but never so strongly as now. Something, surely, was about to happen?

Something did happen. A yellowhammer alighted on a branch of hawthorn, and began to declaim.  
I had heard plenty of yellowhammers before, and had duly been instructed by my uncle that they were singing -- "A little bit of bread and _no_ cheese!"  
But I had never before seen one in the act of singing. And I had never before seen a yellowhammer like this one: surely a bird fresh from the hands of its Maker, ready for Paradise?  
I stared, watching its little soft throat of gold vibrating with the thrust of its song, and the way it turned its head every now and then between staves, to dip its beak into its blazing plumage.  
This was no song of "bread and cheese." Nothing so prosaic could come from such a throat.  
I stared and listened, lost in my eyes and ears, til the bird jumped from its perch, leaving the branch gently bouncing, as if meditatively weighing the infinitessimal burden lifted from it.  
Then I looked at my watch, and was stricken with dismay."

The next and final quotation is near the end of the story, when Dorothy is in transition to adulthood. She could not remember the vision of the owl, some thirty years after her first written version of the book, and came to doubt its authenticity. All I can say is if it didnt happen, it should have happened:

"My parents found a newly built house at Swanpool, on the outskirts of Lincoln, with a view across fields of the Cathedral...

I loved being able to walk straight out into a field from the front door, and to cycle along white, unmetalled, almost traffic-free lanes, very like the old Roman road at Grantham. There was a large pool a few fields away, with a fringe of willows, and a rich fauna of dragon-flies of many colours: small, filmy blue ones, large peacock green, or homely brown ones, and some with bodies of metallic pink. You could hear larks first thing in the morning. At nights the windows were beseiged by hosts of plush-winged ruby-eyed moths. Once an owl came and sat on top of my open casement window, staring at me in my bed."

* * *

## A young poets sketches.

_return tocontents_

Dorothy Cowlin gives an insight into how she learned her craft. She did not keep much early verse but has left some good poetic sketches, of which I quote a sample.

### Student years.

As a "Fresher'"student at Manchester University, she says:

"I rather enjoyed walking alone down Oxford Road, past Platt Fields Park, and Whitworth Park, enjoying the traffic, after the quiet of Grantham: excited then by what seemed a vast quantity of cars and other vehicles. There were tram lines all along Oxford Road then, to Fallowfield. I liked the look of the metal rails and the metal wires overhead, shining into the blue distance, with an occasional flash of electric blue light when a trolley jumped a point. I liked the noise and swish or purr of vehicles in the frequent rain. I liked the sooty black trunks of the city trees, shining silkily in that rain: or shadowy -- getting fainter and fainter into the distance, on foggy days. I liked, altogether, the feeling of being in a _city_ , and wrote several poems about it."

As far as I know, these poems were not kept. Virtually none of her writings, in the verse form, are urban poems.  
A new student friend got a poem in the University magazine, _The Serpent_. Then, Dorothy Cowlin started getting poems published there.

Sybille Bedford novel, _A Slight Compass Error_ , has a woman make a slight error of jujment that takes her ever more in the wrong direction, as years go by. Dorothys wrong decision was to take geography, instead of English, as her main degree subject.

Her inspiring teacher at Kesteven and Grantham girls school had taught geography like a humanities subject. When she got to Manchester university, geography was taught as a science. Even so, she was taken by surprise, to find herself demoted from an honours degree course to a pass degree course.   
In her third year, her geography teacher did treat the subject much more in the way she prefered, like anthropology. But that was too late to help her.

Dorothy was a (then rare) scholarship girl, her headmistress had suggested stay on a year to try for Oxbridge. That had seemed too long a wait and a risk, as well as an expense. Yet, at Manchester, a year later, she had been deprived of the honours course she won. As her scholarship award only lasted three years, it was too late for her to try for the English school. She felt like a "pariah" from then on. Very few went in for a pass degree, leaving her with very few to seek companions among.

But people who suffer injustice may find that they meet kind as well as unkind people. Dorothy says her English literature teacher, a Jewish Scot called Zammick, gave her back some of her self-respect. Once, she was chattering away at the back of a crowded lecture hall. The teacher began the Shakespeare sonnet, 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' adding her name to the question.

Dorothy hadnt realised he knew who she was in all the crowd, and felt flattered rather than rebuked. (I can also confirm Dorothys sunny disposition, which may have been a reason for her being widely liked.)

Her lecturer on Elizabethan and metaphysical poets liked her essays, several times ending his comments with "Well, well -- I am grateful." When she compared a poem to porridge without syrup, the Scotsman put "salt!" in the margin.  
She was too shy to confide her wish to be a writer. But at a Lees Hall Social, he sought her out, to tell her how much he liked her essays.

"You don't try to write like a man! he added. Then, as I probably looked dismayed, added again "And I mean that as a compliment!"  
To this day it is probably the nicest thing anyone ever said about my writing...

At this same social, playing nervously with my beads, as I always do with beads, I broke the thread, and they scattered with a purr all over the floor! Mr Zammick went on his hands and knees to help retrieve them. He was so natural \-- so utterly without pomposity -- yet had a very good mind. I remember him as sitting on a corner of the desk in the lecture room, swinging one short leg, his book in his hand, speaking always fluently and well, without notes, commanding, yet easy -- as if talking to us rather than lecturing."

Dorothy, being a classic introvert, made few friends at university but they lasted a life-time. I dont mention them because this is a literary account not a personal life story. Privacy is a personal right.  
A close student friend infected her with fear of a fire practise drill, using a sort of bosuns chair coming down from a window. They hid upstairs and were declared by the warden to be _burned_ to _death_!

Dorothy was in bed when she felt it heave under her and throw her slightly to the wall. Other students at the Baths told her how the water swung from one end to the other, like a tipped basin. This rare English "earthquake" -- "tremor" would be a better word -- may have stimulated, unconsciously, the following event. More likely, the very warm weather was sufficient.

In Lees Hall garden, where students often "swotted," they decided to put the beds out, one warm evening, tho she doesnt remember how.

"We put macs on top of the covers, which was just as well, as there was a heavy dew when we woke the next morning -- very early. We didnt sleep very much. The night was short in any case. It was close to Midsummer. It is the only time I have ever "slept" out of doors, and my memory is a magical one of the beauty of the dark blue sky, luminous until nearly midnight, like the wings of tropical butterflies. Against it the trees in the garden stood clear cut in dark silhouettes -- turning slowly back into three dimensional trees when, after the brief dark, the sky grew paler again."

Dorothys "shabby, studenty clothes, mostly home-made" were supplemented, by shocked relatives. This was how she met her first "real" writer. Temple Thurston was a best-selling novelist and playwright of the early twentieth century. (When Dorothy mentioned his name to me, I knew of him from the second hand book-stalls in Manchester.)

It is true he was not a classic and is now forgotten, as most of the contents of every period are soon forgotten by those who have not lived thru them. But he was famous, in his time, beyond what most of us can claim.

"He had even been asked to contribute to the library of the Queen's Doll's House, shown at Wembley! It contained some miniature poems about birds -- rather charming. One -- the song of the wood pigeon, went: "Two sticks -- across -- and a little -- bit of moss. That'll _doo._ That'll _doo_!"

Thurstons wife, an aunt, asked Dorothy to send some poems for criticism.

"I still have her letter of criticism -- just enough, I think. She thought I had "a distinct gift", but must work hard before marriage took away my energies! "Earnest" also thought I had "a real poetic gift" -- if I would work hard and not be discouraged."

All these remarks seem, to this reviewer, to be true.

Also thru relatives, Dorothy had her first trip abroad. At Brussels Fair, besides the dodgems and suchlike, there was a "scientific" and "educational" show on the evils of tight lacing, with fotos of organs distorted by stays and diseased organs in bottles. In large glass cases, wax models of child-birth finally succeeded in making her feel ill. She was hurried out.

She was no more favorably impressed by "a Dancing marathon -- towards the end of the ordeal":

"A last few couples were tottering round the floor to the sad dance music, more or less holding each other up, like drunks or zombies, their eyes glazed, their feet dragging as if from a stroke. It was horrible, disgusting in some way."

Not being an honours student, Dorothy wouldnt have much chance of a post-graduate course, and, like many, "drifted" into teaching. Needing the money, she obtained a holiday job in Wales at the Friendship Holiday Association, where they were encouraged to fraternise with the guests.   
I think it was one of those interludes, everyone has in their lives, that stand out in ones memories, poised before ones choices of destinies.

Dorothys year of teacher training was at Leicester University College, housed in the eighteenth century lunatic asylum.

"Once that summer, feeling unable to bear another minute of School Practise, I played truant, and went walking along the canal alone, and was bewitched by the quantity and variety of dragon flies, of many colours and sizes, from tiny thread-like shining blue "demoiselles", to big green, pinkish, or brownish creatures, much more like their name. I have never seen and have never since seen such an abundance. It induced a feeling rather like the yellow hammer at Grantham had done, but less intense.   
A very respectable looking young man was also walking the towpath and tried in a gentlemanly way to "pick me up". I rebuffed him. Later he passed me and muttered "sorry", and I wished I had _not_ rebuffed him. It was an instinctive reaction -- probably sound."

At the college leaving party, the students used the "fire-escape" across attic rafters -- like a C S Lewis story -- and down a spiral stair-case route into a padded cell of a thick sort of cardboard. It offered little cheer.

That summer was marked by her only camping holiday, which she loved, despite the midges. I dont think she wrote or preserved a poem of this jaunt across the wilds of Scotland, with a friends family.   
Here follows a long extract from her description:

"We bathed in (Loch Lomand's) icy waters, lounged in the sun on its shingly beach, picked wild raspberries from an old deserted garden. And in the evening climbed again, led at breakneck speed by Lucy, into boggy, brackenny slopes from which we looked down on a loch like a ribbon of dark blue glass or blue steel. Back at the camp-fire, Walter talked a great deal of Canada.

The next camp site was in Strath Farrer, N W of Inverness, off the River Beauly. This was the best part of the holiday. Strath Farrer was wild and beautiful, with dark brown pooled streams, bilberries galore (we ate them most days for dinner) pine trees, Prince Charlie's Cave (where we thought we saw a wild cat) a newt and green beetles...We saw deer, too, and snakes. And I smelt for the first time the spicy smell of bog myrtle... (A) hedgehog was found on the road when we moved on to Loch Torridon, and ravaged the biscuit tin the following night...

There was a lake further up Strath Farrer with an island, and a house on it. There was also a lodge to a big house, where we bought milk, and horrified the lodge-keeper's wife by eating bilberries. She considered they were poisonous!  
We went to Loch Torridon...to see "the parallel roads of Glen Noy," said by geologists to denote former beach levels.  
We never saw them. No sooner did we move west than it began to pour with rain. We camped in the dismal downpour in a quarry by the roadside -- the only real rain of the fortnight.  
After two days of this we gave up and turned back east to Loch Ness. Here it was blazing hot -- so hot I walked in a gym slip without a blouse, and gym shoes without stockings or socks. I had worn this old school gym slip for most of the holiday. It was well above my knees. It and my flowing locks caused great amusement, and made me look less than fifteen.  
Loch Ness was not so much to my mind as Strath Farrer. It was much too long -- a walk one day along the opposite shore from Urquehart Castle seemed endless. Nothing seemed to change. We never did get "past" that castle! It was really much too hot to walk far in any case. One day -- up in some mountains along the shores, we found a small tarn. Lucy and Walter bathed in it...

Walter had learnt to "tickle" trout in Canada, and one day, probably in Strath Farrer, he lay on his stomach and "tickled" enough trout for our breakfast. They were fried, with mushrooms, straight away, and I thought them delicious..."

This was the end of Dorothys "prolonged girlhood." She says: "I was never to experience anything like it again."

* * *

### Rambling writer.

There was supposed to be too many teachers in England of the nineteen thirties. Over-qualified teachers, like Dorothy Cowlin and some of her friends, had to settle for posts in elementary schools. Yet class sizes up to fifty children were allowed. Dorothy remembers having forty eight. Often, classes had to share a hall, adding to the noise and distraction. Dorothy could not keep order. For many years she hid from her family and friends that one Head demoted her to a younger class.   
It was yet another demotion after the degree demotion.   
She would try for a job as a journalist. The editor of the _Stockport Advertiser_ told her: _I_ wouldnt have a woman on _my_ paper.

After recovering from her exhaustion from teaching, she began writing. It was long before she had an editors acceptance and these were few and far between, in her twenties. The first two novels she completed did the rounds.   
The teacher joined the junior branch of the League of Nations peace campaign. (This period is described in her eighth published novel, _The Pair of Them_.) Whittier hymn of peace voiced her sentiments. She wrote a few plays for the youth group, one mainly to interest a young man with a part.

There she also met her future husband, Ron, after a long courtship. The couples lack of money, and perhaps sexual tension, helped add to the quota of lovers quarrels. He was patient and mature, tho younger. She noted that: I cried when we met; he, when we parted.

Hopes for an income were put on getting a novel accepted. There was no such timely good fortune. When publication did come, it was in the impoverished conditions of a world war.

Meanwhile, Dorothys partner, Ron, had the integrity not to concede that she was as good as Mary Webb, a forgotten but great writer, who died young. Cowlin, also a nature writer, would eventually produce a novel of comparable power, but on the industrial city.

Jonathan Cape published Mary Webb, and eventually Dorothy Cowlin. Mary Webb novels are prose poems of the wilds of Somerset, not least its rustics. After her early death, an edition with introductions by Stanley Baldwin, G K Chesterton and John Buchan vouched for her work.

I named Mary Webb to our local readers club and no-one had heard of her. But they knew of Stella Gibbons: _Cold Comfort Farm_. This is a parody of Webb novels and praised as such by _The Readers Encyclopedia_ , for instance. Indeed, the comedy only leaves out her genius.

In the mid nineteen thirties, on a summer holiday with friends in Scotland, she sometimes took short walks on her own "hoping to think of poems -- but somehow never as romantic as I would have wished." She describes:

"two beautiful evening sails up Loch Duich -- one when the light was brilliant -- green gold on the hills, the seagulls blue against the sky, chinese white against the dark sea; rainbows in the ship's spray: a rainbow we sailed _under_. The other sail was more sombre, but we saw porpoises, turning like ship's wheels."

A further sail took them to Portree, "I thought the most perfect harbour I had ever seen."

Country walking holidays were ever Cowlins main recreation. They issued in several attempted poems, in her twenties, which never came off. She thought herself very modern for writing a poem about a dead sheep. It, like the sheep, has perished. The following is more typical:

"In the evening of this ramble, walking in mist on the moors, there were moor fires -- lines like breaking gold foam, creeping in low running waves out of the misty dusk. I thought them a beautiful sight and tried to express the feeling (unsuccessfully) in a poem."

The Derwent Valley was turned into a reservoir for Sheffield. Before Derwent Hall and "a rather lovely old pack-horse bridge" were submerged "we looked into the deserted garden of the Hall and saw a host of snowdrops. Ron picked a small bunch for me. The flower is for me forever connected with the Derwent Valley and the drowned hall...  
I wrote several rather poor poems on the subject. The poem is still in my mind \-- never crystallised I suppose."

Also to receive a reservoir was the Goyt valley where "leaves on the water, and wind-ripples, made the bridge seem to travel along." This kinesthesis or feeling of motion, even if illusory, is a sense more than "the five senses." (The seventh sense, the feel of vibrations, is described in Cowlin poem about Englands highest water-fall.) She felt that the tranquility of moving clouds was akin to that from watching water flow.

Vanishing snow at least "crystallised" in a few early poems. She noted:

"The snow was late. I was charmed by the look of the snowflakes falling on the moors, netted by their limestone walls, and now in another net of snow -- like a spotted muslin curtain. Its perpetual falling motion gave me a feeling of upward movement, of curious buoyancy.  
But it didnt last long -- Spring snow is briefest of all."

Alone at the end of january, in Lyme Park, Stockport under snow:

"I was stirred by the beauty of the sprinkled flakes on the deers' backs, and the spotted veil over the trees. The lake was dark green, striped with white...Lovers came by and kissed and made me sad."

This scene was used for 'a queer little poem called "Snowfall," and a story, both unpublished.'

A further poem of her own, "Wedding Morning," she wrote as an anticipation. She gave it a cover with a green ribbon and also made a foto album as a present. People did make their own presents more, in those days. A book of poetry was among the bought presents for her partners birth-day. When embracing, he called her "a lovely slippery salmon."  
Cowlin has a poem that fits the nuptial description. If it's the same one, the title has been changed.  
When she committed herself to her husband-to-be, she remarks of their holiday by the Dinas Lake, in Wales: "I was amazed how the beauty of the place was magnified by happiness."

I'd thought that Dorothy Cowlin was a nature poet pure and simple. But it turns out, she did write some "over-adjectival" love poems as well. She thought none of them any good. They were sentimental, not at all as she felt. That was still the stultifying convention in poetry, but Dorothy was never sentimental.  
One subject was a kiss in a shop doorway that seemed to set the couple luxuriously apart from the sound of wind and rain in the street.

I dont know whether the following description of a "cinematic" kiss was the subject for a poem. The partners went to a Hallé concert, or on this occasion a Garbo film.

"Afterwards, in a small secluded square near St Georges Church, we stood and kissed in perhaps a rather cinematic fashion. There was a high wind. Clouds, lit by moonlight, scudded along fast and magnificent behind the moonlit spire of the church. Though it was November, the sky seemed translucent, like black ice. Ron's lamplit and moonlit face looked beautiful to me.  
Sometimes we sang to each other. I lent Ron books. We went ice-skating. More often, I went ice-skating with Molly."

They "discovered Alderley Mere -- in a park in a very run-down state, where we heard deer barking, and watched ducks scudding across the lake in long parallel lines...  
Rain and golden leaves fell together as we stood on top of Alderley Edge."  
Under "a twisted old oak tree...acorns dropped stealthily as we were kissing." Another night, "we could see the dark plain stretching away to Stockport, with the headlights of cars, like searchlights, boring through invisible tunnels of trees. It gave a wonderful sensation of height..."

"One Saturday afternoon in Bramhall Park, on a frosty day in November, there was ice on the water. Ducks slid about on it comically. And Ron said he could hear the swan cracking the ice with its breast. My ears could not catch the sound. But my _mind_ caught the poetry of it, and I used it in my first published novel: _Penny To Spend._ "

A year later, she believed a poem called _November_ to be her best to date. This was about mistletoe picked, from an apple tree in the village of Aconbury in Hereford, and put in a pewter pot. This was 1938, the year of "the let-down of Czecho-Slovakia" as Dorothy described it.

"On the 28th September I arrived at school to find my class-room full of gas masks! It was a terrible shock. The smell of the rubber, and the effect of all the black rubber and the dirty white of the straps was visually appalling -- somehow symbolic of what they _meant._

The Thursday was spent at school distributing gas masks.  
But on the Friday, 30th September, Chamberlain came home, waving the notorious umbrella and assuring us of "Peace in our Time." We didnt believe it would last long, but could not help but be relieved that the threat was even temporarily averted."

That winter, Dorothy had "some stupid green and brown tweed for a jacket" made to measure:

"The tailors, called Gogh, were a pair of very naive, old-fashioned brothers, who lived in a poor street in Stockport called, I _think_ , Finkin Street. One sat cross-legged on the table to sew. I was so taken by them I afterwards tried to portray them in _Winter Solstice_."

The jacket served her for many years of rambling. At least two other authors have since used the same title as for Dorothy Cowlins second novel, which was itself re-published after nearly fifty years.   
Two years previously, in the Castleton area, somewhere near Mam Tor, she saw gliders for the first time "and was moved to tears by the grace of their flight." She "vaguely planned a story about them." They found their way into this novel.

At that time, walking alone, she was making notes of "poetic" phrases and details of the landscape and people. One man, with an amputated thumb and a peacock tattoo, had frighteningly glittering eyes. A landlord had "a small wild head like a Tomcat, plus-fours, and a pseudo-aristocratic manner."

Autumn was always Dorothys favorite season. Another november, in 1939, she saw very dark hollies and remembered a mixed tree of holly and ivy seen near Hereford, in the Cardiff area. That memory eventually inspired her third published novel, _The Holly and the Ivy._  
A work with the same title, by another author, was turned into a film. At any rate, Cowlin didnt merely lift the title from the carol. The image for two incompatible characters came from her own observation, as should be the case.

In June 1940, Dorothy noted in her diary a lovely evening "very still, with a clear remote sky, and a yellow frieze at the horizon, turning to apricot, with one star -- next to a barrage balloon." "In the loveliest of summers, how we longed for Peace, and no more partings!" One evening that month, "the whole of the western sky was spread with gold clouds."  
That night, at 3.20 am, Stockport heard its first air-raid siren: "That awful wail up and down the scale in raucous thirds..." There was another, within the month.

The Germans had driven their tanks round the Maginot line. Dorothy wrote: "This makes us really shake in our shoes. What in Hell's name is in store for us?"

Her partner was called up.

"We had a 'last ramble' in our favourite 'secret valley' -- and a 'last supper' at his mothers.  
And so this era of our life came to an end."

* * *

## Lost novels and a subsequent unpublished novel

_return tocontents_

### Lost novels

Dorothy Cowlin had twelve novels published, eight by Jonathan Cape and four by other publishers. As is usual with writers, first attempts were rejected, tho signs of promise were encouraged. Ironicly, this can also be the fate of the last novels. But then it is no longer encouraging! Dorothy destroyed her last unpublished novels.

I particularly regret this, because Ive tried to help preserve the record of her work. In his last illness, George Orwell regretted he had destroyed an early dud manuscript, because there is nearly always something you can salvage.

Many years ago, Dorothy offered one of her manuscripts to me. I only refused it, because, as I explained to her, I had no future. As soon as I died, her manuscript, as well as my own work, would be at the mercy of the waste disposal.

I said that she had a family line, who could keep her work. This was before personal computers and the internet. Otherwise, I would have offered to make an electronic copy.

One of Cowlins lost novels was about biandry. That is the same as bigamy but two husbands instead of two wives. This is an institution in Tibet. Often, the two husbands are brothers. The reason for it is simply that the barren desert mountain plateaux will not sustain increases in the sparse population. It is a practical and humane scheme for survival in a harsh environment.   
Robert Heinlein has astronauts adopt a similar arrangement in his classic science fiction: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

I can't help thinking other reasonable adaptations are not without relevance to a world of desertifying over-population. Ive seen the odd British magazine write-up of some celebrity living openly with two partners. That was honest bigamy, tho. And it doesnt seem so strange now that people from polygamous cultures live in formally monogamous cultures.

Cowlin novels are sometimes sparked by a newspaper story, such as an actual case of concealed biandry that came to the laws notice. Nevertheless, fiction editors told her that they found her story unbelievable.

Dorothys explanation for the biandry was that her original husband worked nights. She spent an enjoyable day (or night?) at Middlesborough steel works, as research. Her journalism shows that she is good at assimilating all kinds of specialised knowledge. And I know from the incidentals of conversation, how far-reaching her general knowledge. Anyway, the other man didnt know of the husband, who was away, and eventually asked the married woman to marry him.

Having read the minds of Cowlin narrative characters in other novels, I can imagine how the author would convey the thoughts of the married woman, who wants to keep the relation with a new partner on a day job. If she doesnt accept the proposal, the proposer will move on, and she doesnt want that. Wishful thinking tells her: she has only to go on as before. Of course, the deception does not last.

Cowlins biandrous novel was written in the nineteen sixties, when sexual mores were becoming more relaxed, allegedly. Up to the early sixties, the monogamous code was strictly enforced. Breaking it brought disgrace and professional ruin. You see that in C P Snow novel "Corridors Of Power". The Profumo scandal was perhaps the last such sacrifice of a major public figure, especially as the offense was compounded with possible breach of national security. There was also a tragedy of wrongful blame, that only came out too late even for recriminations.

Profumo adopted what looked like a penitential role, atoning for the play-boy of the West End, doing social work in the East End of London, for which he was eventually honored. You could sense by the news-reel, tho, that there was still a sense of real shame, in the man and his loyal and blameless wife, that he would always be associated with the scandal that bore his name.   
Perhaps facing the unavoidable, their writer son has just brought out a book.

For many a year now, Britain has been a different world, when it is hard to imagine a politician being ashamed for anything.

* * *

### P.S. : the surviving unpublished novel.

The all-powerful sex drive is also behind Cowlins surviving unpublished novel, P.S., reviewed here. The original version has not survived. What happened was that someone told the author that she had told the story from the wrong point of view, which took all the mystery away, and didnt keep the reader in suspense. I dont want to give away the plot. Its resolution is bizarre if not repulsive.

But nowadays novels, such as those of one of Cowlins favorites, Margaret Forster, do deal in the regrettably repulsive realities of living and dying. Perhaps Cowlin was just before her time in this respect. And the novel, P.S. may yet be published.

However, the denouement could be edited from this novel. It's no more relevant than a seed plant to the grown plant. Indeed, you could - somwhat - moderate the ending without greatly affecting the course of the novel.

Moreover, all the worrying of Erica, the narrative character, over her husband having a mistress, is like life in this respect. However worries may dog us, they are in themselves often inconsequential and forgotten for some new pre-occupation, in its turn superseded. Rather, it is incidents that fix lifes journey in our memories. And this novel serves a good store of them.

Happenstance may seem inconsequential but it is our unique route in time, for the sympathetic reader to follow. Novels are like mosaics of events taken from experience, not copied from other books. I know many of the stories in this novel are true, because the author told them to me over the years. I have them here again more fully than in conversation. Of course, they have been altered from their origins, many years ago.

I must admit that the sheer introspection of the main character did fill me with misgivings about the currency of this novel. Who cares all that much about some wife worrying about the Other Woman? The expression itself sounds quiant now. That doesnt really matter, provided it is understood that the novel has become a period piece. More-over, period piece or not, the wifes feeling, of being shut out from her husbands secret life, serves as well as ever to show that no matter what our social condition, we are still liable to be essentially alone in the world. We are alone united in our aloneness.

If the limitations of marriage are not enuf to disconcert the reader, the novel also presses birth and death into service.   
Lifes graces are not forgotten, tho. The characters have not lost their cultural independence from the mass media, which only get fleeting mention.   
Ive noticed a tendency in modern novels to become accessories to the mass media, in its proliferating forms, and its observations or perhaps obsessions. P.S. is a novel not shackled by this cultural imperialism.

_return tocontents_

# Dates and Dorothy

## part 1: dates from 1949 to 1988

1949

### bless you

He talked away a while of fate   
this lonely figure scaled the hills  
from his humble vale of hardships  
that leaves the hearer to meditate.

Than poets of professionals on holy-days,  
fashions of the salon, or court history,  
some owe Wordworth more his study  
for real, out in the fields, charted by his lays.

Famously with his sister in tow,  
keeping diary on their rural tours,  
he married in the village church,  
baptised yours truly. Drops of cold

made me sneeze. The congregation broke  
into unceremonious mirth.  
Famously absent in Wordsworth  
was this non-resistance to a joke.

* * *
1950

### kaaa!

My carriage reviewed the land   
complete with foot-woman  
but no other motor  
on the writhing rural road  
I would fling my arm out  
and shout triumfant: kaaa!  
at a solitary passing car  
of a daytime shooting star  
shivering country stillness.

The subdued masses  
in their darkness visible  
before the moving pictures  
of such another auto  
heard joyous squawk  
of recognition: kaaa!  
And shared a laf  
for the moment driven out   
of their unconnected souls.

* * *
1951

### trailer

They headed for the lowering sun  
shadowed by their orchard branches.  
I picked my way over fallen branches  
while hens abreast filed to their coups.  
In avian sprints, laggers joined a group.

Before language pretends to reason  
they moved me in their exchanged mutters.  
Rebelious sentiments hustled  
with withering condemnations  
confidential indignations.

There you have it, my role of trailer.  
A class count, that turned out even, left  
one with me when the rest had fled  
raucously across the play-ground.  
Kids in rows told: Turn round! Turn round!

And at college, a ritual shunning ambushed  
me, led to a library canteen.  
He watched as I took-in the steamy scene  
where I'd never been. And asked who I knew-of.  
Each claim dismissed, til I'd had enuf.

Not even the hens! Well, dear chap, you stopped  
your maths talks as class size approached a low   
limit. Don't differentiate me at the close.  
You let me down and now to your derision  
Ive got no friends. That's none your business!

* * *
1952

### on the star-light trail

Blindly in the blackness we slowed  
and blundered over village curbs  
playing touch as touch can with stone-work  
to emerge upon the country road  
as silhouets against the star-burn.  
Only feet saw-off the verge.

My father offered me a lift  
if I got too tired. Too fell  
to see the beauty all arranged.  
In another age, I'd have heft  
him, too, when down he fell.  
By then, my sight was on the wane

to doubt the world is seen aright  
and never as that lost child who'd fail  
not to feel each step and stare  
without cloud in the lens of night  
at the prospect of a diamond trail  
in a rapt quiet of the air.

* * *
_return tocontents_

1953

### is your journey really necessary?

A wheel a year around I'd rolled  
to the present they could ill-afford,  
the trike that took me without goals.  
From the side-door by the coal shed  
mud ruts bar the tractor shed.

Bumping stones up the hump bridge  
travailed my vehicle first and last  
to miss the transports folk expect.  
One dame mocked the now old man:  
"Urr, give him some roller shoes."  
You don't stand for much, not on the move.

Was my journey really necessary?  
Not the one I took myself upon.  
Getting off train was a liberation.  
I failed persuade my mother not to come   
or the inter-viewer not be afraid  
to let me stay the course, short of grades

sank me on the spot. I confessed break  
inside yellow covers of Gollancz SF.  
I was "introspective enuf to make   
a good sociologist." he says.  
I gathered how Heads reports must weigh

on the minds of entrance arbiters.  
The Head vetoed my choice science of mind  
because I was "too introspective"  
and threw me sociology (later he tried   
talk me out of). I'd not have been shored   
even that second interview but for

lone college did not rate Heads advice.  
Their senior said so, early days.  
In the end tho, sociology was not right   
for me, they jujed. They'd finally made   
a three-year mistake to select me.

* * *
1954

### by the fountains and the flowers

Five years assured them he would be fine  
to cross the road down-hill below the blind  
corner to catch the bus into town.  
I knew the money had to be found.  
My mother could not afford to be away  
to take me from village school, every day.

I'd stop by the fountains and the flowers  
near the railway station clock tower.  
The state turned teaching girls into old maids.  
The Head, who'd taught my mother, stayed  
like an inmate behind the play-ground wall.

It was her dusk and the globes when she called.  
She wanted me to stay on, as if I'd been  
her own, she'd missed. I prayed: Dont yield  
to her entreaties. Let the infants class,  
run by a relay race of training teachers, pass  
up on sabotaging me, hand and brain.

She warned them off the sink school, in vain  
my mother pleaded with authority  
to spare me, on waiting lists to charity  
schools, unless you paid. My parents, to trade  
their skimped and bullied educations, paid.

* * *
1955

### partners

In their sub-let shop-shell  
of egg-carton walls way thru  
the roof stole a years work  
plowed back in a window  
full of smart wrist watches  
behind a perforated hard-board

shield to his self-made work-table  
the technical staff shoved  
his no-you-go new country wife  
out at a customer, hiding  
her frenzy lest she not make the sale  
of the baubles that women are led by.

He nosed to the grind-stone  
pivots of his first repair.  
There it ticked in anticipation.  
Surely its owner had a radio  
that told when to stir himself  
and his morning beverage

in those Beveridge work-for-all days  
with wage enuf surely  
to ransom cheap alarm.  
Perhaps he woke up and broke from  
the shackles of a clacking clock  
in new-found free silence.

Or perhaps he just found himself  
broke. Is this the way  
the throw-away society began?  
Like a practical joke at the times  
expense of some bloke thinks  
his service can earn a living?

* * *
1956

### april first

well maybe nine twenty  
minutes later than usual  
she was among the first  
to stride purposefully in

like the healer she was  
making whole again  
she made the medical sign  
of the snake on breast-bone

of a boy subdued already  
guessing she was the one  
tho no memory previous   
would remain to explain

why he knew as he eyed  
her down slender finger   
leading him more than she knew  
with that scribbled signature

marks an off-hand receipt  
for a parcel on others behalf  
as only too truly she  
pronounced April Fool

before moving on to days  
upon days nothing to do  
with him in the same room  
for a lasting dissociation

* * *

### see you later

I was hailed an alligator  
with the million-selling Comets cut.  
See you later six-decader  
object of an adolescent look  
after she so calls her chummies.

Nought cared she in her scrutiny  
for a wan old smile from lifes shared fate.  
By the seventies, the golden age  
of pop had popped  
tho we hardly knew it in advance

when a survey of lyrics we adopt  
found this alone in common parlance.  
Little did we know the salute long  
in the deep south before the song!   
Yet Ive heard said that quoting even

a single line from tin pan alley  
is litigable without permission  
from those money bags. A physicist ralleyed   
her chapters with permitted few words  
from lyrics like broken strings of pearls.

* * *
1957

### long division

Being talked-to in an undertone  
from a desk neighboring   
at the back of the class  
eight-old didnt need glasses   
at last they are teaching

something called long division  
from the top of the blackboard  
drawing down and out the score  
into a flag-tailed flying dragon  
not called long for nothing

* * *
_return tocontents_

### Miss Marney

Of one who was said to like boys  
I once took care to spell her voice  
call that rhymed with blarney shorn  
tho her accent to educated northern.

Her ineffectual crossness at young ladies  
blotched her face within a spinsterish braid.  
Passionately she pleaded to all  
that people are not animals.

And when I came round her desk  
she spoke in a warm way as impressed  
you were like a personal friend  
making me better than in the event.

From a small boy, to coming of age  
in the old town, I sleep-walk my days.  
A look is worth a thousand words  
of good will from a passing stranger

who disturbed my day-light slumbers  
incredulous that could have been her  
while she must have known me at once.  
No braid – Did I get that wrong?

I wouldn't have thought  
but it must have been - gone   
like the shadow of a wing beat  
from a passing angel of mystery.

* * *
1958

### the good guys always win

Mothers and fathers shop was in ruins  
of foundations lost as the ancient world.  
My hauntings surprised a child couple.  
The slim boys suit tailored a model adult.  
I asked his date if she was the hat-shop girl.  
She wore a hat and coat crimped at the waist  
I'd seen come and go across the way.

No answer. Her very young man smirked  
and told me to: go away from here.  
I stood on my rights. He advanced with fists  
and threw me down in the plaster drifts.  
I didnt like his slippery hands career,  
held his wrists, rolled the suit over, got clear.  
Over the road, his grown-up cronies cheered

as he saw me off, like Audie Murphy  
telling the bad guys: "and dont come back."  
This mouse slipped back in its hole,  
when he tried stock in my parents new shop  
surrounded by enthusiastic young jacks,  
and Ive taken a lifetime to envision  
his dad send him on a good-will mission.

* * *

### he looked at his shoes

He brought a series of wise-cracks  
to a growing chorus of lafs.  
A grown-up broke-in on her charge

before the kids all fell apart:  
Don't take any notice of  
him while he's showing off.

A familiar reflex made him duck  
as if struck at the rebuke.  
From this crouch, he peered up

at a maroon tide welling up  
the womans neck to flood her face  
showing off a beacon of shame.

She liked him no better as a sulk.  
She ordered him to join the folk  
dance and offered choice

of partner, not hers to poise.  
They would not approve.  
He looked at his shoes.

A forest of legs moved restless  
in the wait with ebbing patience  
before he was laft down and taken.

* * *
1959

### Mission Impossible

Before visiting ended with television  
our hosts bought a tape recorder  
like the one in the series Mission  
Impossible that says it will self-destruct

after it has told Jim his mission  
"should you decide to accept it..."  
Unlike myself, Jim was a gentleman.  
And when I heard on tape this whining git

I was appalled and over-come with shame.  
I thought it impossible that any one  
could love such a brat. And impossible  
I could ever change my condition.

Indeed, when my chance came for love,  
I could not accept it. I felt assured  
of humiliation as a failed me-first ruf  
and so chose renunciation and grief.

* * *

### Brief Encounter

Five half or quarter turns of stairs   
down from my garret bed hiding  
I know the stage props of sliding  
glass doors and staccato shelves.

The lady in waiting to the shop  
window-dressed in velvet display  
with clips and pins and sticky tape   
Mammon inhuman star of the show.

Few customers compliments sounded  
are her fragile treasured reviews  
of opening night -- every night from sea views  
and all summers days encountered.

She tows me by a mouse-hole cafe  
named, I was told, after a kinema  
tale Brief Encounter. Notice, she had   
no time to be served with a tray.

This rendezvous was abandoned  
after a duel, between back-to-back  
boarding houses, sliced one away, hacked  
sheer from roof ridge to flag-stones

leaving a tall windowless wall  
for a life-time in grey cladding   
with no prospects after the parting  
to small-hours sighs of desert shore.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### this means war!

To war-monger over school dinners  
kindly these two had been put where  
but in kindergarten and its chairs.  
After the movies ketchup-blooded winners

we used to make-up fantastic quarrels  
about the diplomatic infringements  
on our dignities and dominions  
culminating in a tone affronted

most unforgivably: This means war!  
to make the enemy burst out lafing.  
Except he was a palely serious kid  
passing his eleven-plus at just nine-more.

On the receiving end of a one   
such carefully coached declaration –  
leaders then used to declare war  
like a match of cricket: Time to declare –

I was blown away off my chair  
landing on my back on the floor.  
He leapt fingers like flames before wide  
opened eyes in astonished hilarity

at his own power of vanquishing.  
My clowning over-throw, to surprise  
in its playful innocence, cast  
the shadow of an effect of blast.

* * *
1960

### the giggler

"Hailo, my darlings!" cwed Charlie Drake.  
He screeched a calamitous "Ah-ha Ma-ma!"  
I'd repeat for a roaring gigglers sake  
when his wide and rolling peepers flashed.  
An aging sports fan of a teacher,  
not unlike father, marked two athletes:  
Top, he mused, as tho he'd just seen it.

Back by the door, a giggle: "Fiddled!"  
The sports coach strode the middle,  
flung arm in hurry to denounce.  
He shouted: "Get out! Get out!!  
and stand outside, the rest of the class."  
He got off lightly. None dared laf.  
A sense of humor is lost in a storm.

The giggler bagged crisps in blazer.  
His free hand snatched my arm, in wonder  
why he pulled. A silent car cruised  
close as a vice by parked cars  
I entered. "Saved your life there, Charlie."  
His throw-away line. I'd have lwked  
-out better alone, or was I more

like the Depression when The War  
of the Worlds broadcast a panic?  
The brand new school imposed-on  
me as all-important for a gud job  
(I never got) in a scholastic  
slavery tricked out with palliatives.  
I was lucky not lose life and limb.

* * *
1961

### Champ

His old school repute as a sprinter ran ahead   
of him and he never did catch up with it.   
His loose-necked gait looked set to lope off   
any moment. When one did catch him

on the track, he kept up with the best of them.  
His physique said: natural athlete.  
But other motives fought shy of his fate.  
Somehow he never made sports events.

Sending class off on a cross-country run  
no doubt set off alarm bells in his psyche.  
In my breathless efforts to do some good  
I caught-up with his lot strolling in the woods.

He later remarked: You did well, didn't you,   
Charlie? (Not adding: for me.) I hav to laf  
at a Rolls congratulating a bubble car.  
Having hands in pockets was an offense.

One reprimand and I wouldn't repeat it.  
Champ was a serial thumbs pocketer  
yet he always managed to look adultly  
casual and minding his own business.

The Head seemed to address him with a   
faintly impudent air. Champ looked wary  
as in fear of an outbreak of friendliness  
to be sporting "for the good of the school."

He half-turned, as on pressing business  
if in school time; his answers, of the briefest  
consistent with politeness, and distant  
in spirit. Champ would not be volunteered.

Some prior ordeal had warned him  
not to let them take over his spare time.  
The Head was a patriarch who kept control  
of those not in full control of themselves

limiting his scope to be quite human.  
Champ was of a matriarchy, muted, observant,  
and considerate, sympathetic without show.  
After some harmless trick, he had a nice line

in insincere apologies: Awh, sorry, Charlie!  
You had to laf and laf. He was a tonic. And   
a ladies man: She couldn't fall flat on her face.  
So, of course, right away, you turned to stare.

His charm was liable to be his undoing.  
For all his maturity, a stubborn streak  
tested how far he could go in folly:  
Beyond what some'd seek to blame me for

just to find a reason for their dislike.  
In the event, he chose a disciplined career  
of daring that let him test to its limits  
his first-rate athletic co-ordination.

In sum, he was chivalrous, much as CS Lewis  
describes the medieval ideal of knighthood.  
He had the outrageous good looks and build  
and even the artistic sensibility of actors.

They become disillusioned by pretend lives.  
Actors, like athletes, have to think about after.  
Better to do aught real while in ones prime.  
We both did well in art class. But in truth

there was no comparison. I scraped  
an unfeeling and talentless caricature.  
He showed me how to sketch a spirit   
of boyishness, alert and aspiring.

It was a lesson in draftsmanship  
and in human sympathy. And a witness  
of how undeveloped my charity.  
He had emotional intelligence in spades

long before the expression in currency.  
Before he leant to speak, he'd pondered  
his words, while seeming only humorous.   
Quietly, as usual, he announced

he was the handsomest man in the world.  
My neighbor second or third. I only fourth!  
An also ran! I was deflated but never so   
gently from a lulling fantasy of vanity.

It was high time to realise there were others  
in the world as estimable as myself.  
I am sorry I failed this wake-up call.  
A rugger singer proved more robust a critic:

Why were you born so beautiful?  
Why were you born at all?  
You're no bloody good to anyone.  
You're no bloody good at all.

His shrewd humor evoked a rueful smile.  
A teacher was more forthright still: telling  
this simpering so-and-so to turn round.  
He urged kindly, later: You can't go it alone.

In truth, I couldn't do anything else.

* * *
1962

### the first casualty

A row of rockets poised their javelins  
for East or West, forget which fellows,  
to fly over a globe on death row.  
The news-paper foto yellows  
as time ignites its touch-paper.

The weapons waited on their pads  
so futuristic yet so final a stand.  
The president flew to Europe  
not by way of his Irish home-land.  
White House excuse made no sense.

Courtesy demanded Kennedy   
in Spain shake Francos white-washed hand.  
For, this would be the finger hold  
on a continent over-run and banned  
from private enterprise, free trade.

Recon fotoed stacked in rows  
great missiles on freighters running  
a blockade by any other name  
seconds away from a sinking  
and undeclared open war.

The spy plane, shot down over Cuba  
over the heads of the US hawks,  
was kept quiet as the grave  
that the first casualty of World War  
Three might be the last.

* * *

### No dice

Twelve year olds pair with first dates.  
This clay, for all he knew of twelve, just threw  
a pair of dice, by making two clay cubes.  
The cubist saw his non-art states  
kept out of kiln, as if grenades.

The waves washed-up shell Mother of Pearl  
that made him make a crude ash tray.  
Mother stopped his throwing away  
this end-of-term despairing offer,  
the firer took-on with resignation.

He, well as it, too lumpish to fetch  
the hint his crude urn would abort all clay  
cooking, no less, a pubescent class-mates,  
Champs statuet nude in mammalian stretch.  
All risked for a childish daub under glaze:

A red bud with two drooping leafs for   
arms to a forked stem of rooted legs  
be a Green Man in dumb hope of begs,  
the most forlorn, for love without freedom  
that will appal in freedom without love.

* * *
1963

### a slip of the pen

Curious how I came to tell this tale  
out of the shadows of a momentous year.  
A woeful grammar school entrant before   
an elderly mumbling nervous wreck  
of a maths teacher I doubt instilled in me  
all year a single demonstration.

The class rioted to distraction, his and mine.  
(Confessing to professionals made me  
a spectacle in a hall of mirrors.)

The poor man gave me courtesy marks  
of one or two out of ten. What am I saying?  
This poor boy was straining to learn!  
He gave me six out of ten. A miracle!   
I looked up in awe. Without looking back  
he muttered I did better that time.

Contrast this flash in the pan with class leader  
who demanded as of a personal tutor   
why he was given nine instead of his usual ten   
out of ten. And he would get an answer, too!

I had a sofisticated statistical intuition  
that random fluctuations in token marks   
given to the handful of very worst pupils  
was all that prevented me always   
taking last position on the list of a hundred.

My situation compared with quantum  
fluctuations in atoms preventing matter  
from reaching a temperature of absolute zero.

My report read I would have to work   
very hard to make up for my lack   
of ability in any subject.  
Demoted to a less qualified teacher  
my devastated confidence convalesced.

So much so, next year I turned from a down-  
and-out dunce into a perfect mediocrity   
coming exactly half way on the math list.

Merely because first letter of my name   
came earlier in the alfabet than another  
with equal marks, I was pushed up into last   
place in the second grade and scheduled  
to be taught again by my old nemesis.

This was too much! I begged tearfully   
of the registrar to demote me to third grade  
and the instructor I understood.

A few pupils waited at back of the room   
for their fates. But these ruf diamonds  
did not show unkindness to my plight,  
I mention, as elsewhere there was ill feeling.   
I could see the registrar thinking over my plea.

He would know only too well the situation.  
A slip of the pen, and it was done.  
Decades later, I met him, as a neighbor

of Dorothy, who probed me about this tale  
after he died. When told, she said with feeling:  
I wish I could have told Jack that story.  
You may guess my thoughts on an article   
that was captioned: We need bad teachers.

I went back to my teacher for plodders,  
coming in late, not without the odd glare.  
Later, my protractor was abducted

cut up and scratched, thrown on the floor   
below me, to be innocently pleased  
with this damaged substitute for my loss.  
There's a parable there I think.

Third grade was promised good enuf marks   
in year-end exams would rate the top class.   
I made the short graf papers last question   
as time was up. My neighbor looked back to tell   
the answer. I put it down! He turned   
on me angrily calling out: he cheated!

A frog-march to the head awaited.   
Teacher told informer turn round, he was not   
supposed to talk. The exam was not over yet.  
He looked down on me assessively  
but said nothing and neither did I,   
looking woe begone, you may be sure.

The informer and his mate, on sight, always   
chorused: "Cheat!" teaching me to slink away.  
I was pleased my dishonesty was all for nought.  
My two illicit marks, out of two hundred,  
counted half a mark, which was rounded down.

My efforts catapulted me into first grade.  
Staf didn't keep their promise.   
They bundled me back with my doom   
into grade two. Their excuse was third grade   
hadn't done all the first grade syllabus.

Again in desperation I asked my teacher   
if I could cover lost ground in the holidays.   
He said I don't see why not, and consulted.

I was tutored at home by the new teacher  
who left his personal text with answers   
to alternate questions, this sad case copied,

maths certificate or no, a certifiable liar  
if I'd cared to look at myself for what I was,  
throwing away my youth like dirty dishwater,   
as Priestley put it, just to best a class list.

The funny thing is, the first thing first grade   
teacher told class was that extra syllabus   
wasn't needed for the coming certificate.  
The excuse, to bar this cheat, was a cheat!  
I was relieved at not having to answer  
for an infallibility on alternate questions.

First grade teacher had a flurried style  
not suited to this plodder but I did pass   
my GCE early and, a year on, scraped   
thru a further math ordinary level.  
It helped secure a college place after   
this burnt-out passed just two advanced levels.

At seventeen, came a glimmer of belief  
man moved without force, the other face of fraud.  
Looking back, this coincided with first year   
the threat of assault was lifted from me   
but not the abject condition it left me in.

* * *
_return tocontents_

1964

### The Beatles stopped at our house

The Beatles stopped at our house,  
stopped their limousine, couldn't get out,  
heard clunkings on roof in a storm of wails.

The mass hysteria of the female  
gave stunning reason to be kept  
schools apart (even from the inept).

In what weird world was I unwilling guest  
that the weaker vessel tout such unrest?  
Mama said: You should have seen it.

You could walk on their heads, believe it,  
all the way up town and far away.  
I expect the police got their car away.

From stage door, the short and climbing road  
echoes, down a life-time, that gig in frescoes  
of pop-art lurid sprays. No regrets

I missed religious after-effects  
of a wild revival of romance  
I missed altogether in performance.

* * *
1965

### the test pests

The story of my young life  
is as nineteen sixty-five.  
When I was hit by a ball

in the eye, I'd no time at all  
to give the bruise a rest  
from all the bleeding tests

by which your youth is supposed  
to carry the man to his repose.  
A protest song fore-saw the Eve

of Destruction. I believe  
exams served the function  
of testing me to destruction.

* * *

### King Kongs engagement ring

The schooling of privileged passers  
had class ushered to the lesser hall.  
A cocktail cabinets roller shutter

opened upon our youthful vintage  
examined by connoisseurs of promise  
held in a glass rock glow the image

of King Kongs engagement ring  
the once high-lighted for us to blink  
stolidly enuf into its TARDIS

of a shadow play. The tv tested,  
the gesture made, we trouped out with   
a renewed sense of our advantages.

* * *

### on his toes

How he tied his shoe-laces  
showed he'd run the races  
by winning from the blocs for  
would-be scholars to Oxford.

From starting in the throes  
of tying, he threw the bows  
together, in an impulse  
gift wrap of himself by results.

* * *

### a disagreeable bout of time travel today

A disagreeable bout of time travel today.  
The metallic scrape of my boots on the way  
did it. Their dishonest hollow heels   
had to be filled with a waterproof glue  
that capped with stair tread each healed shoe  
ringing on stone a rubbered iron peal.

And my elderly exertions that morn   
had me toiling up from the shore.  
Then I was on other steep, tided of old,  
a raw and breathless teenage son  
in vest and shorts, on cross-country run  
and resigned to missing the school bus home.

The sodden climb up the slippery heights   
impelled ask my parents buy me spikes.  
The news electrified other youths  
passed on to each other like a baton  
as if in competition with someone -  
me of all folk - wearing seven league boots.

They were running ahead and fleeter.   
Near the top, the alerted sports teacher   
suddenly turned. The usual blanket cloud  
of his countenance showed unsuspected  
a kindly light, that rarely appears the end  
of an unrelenting winter day. He allowed

go back. I never thought how I'd stroll   
in spikes where the circuit met the road.  
I had odd feeling of peace, dressing, sat  
alone in the changing rooms, that bane  
of my youth, together with all the games  
and gymnastics I was no good at.

* * *
_return tocontents_

1966

### war is wrong

I think the Vietnam war is wrong.  
The gilted plaques of two world  
war dead line the corridors.  
Give the names of the maimed  
and wounded a silver and bronze stain  
and we could not have set eyes  
at rest without those recalls of fate.

I think the Vietnam war is wrong.  
Now this new war's got under way,  
I have a mind to object early.  
Was my life to be passed on and out  
from this barracks of a proving ground  
to any available fool  
war for a finishing school?

I think the Vietnam war is wrong.  
I thought about it, the night before  
I venture the opinion to doctors  
counsel. She snapped a blitz:  
What would you do, let the Communists  
walk in? I admit, I don't know,  
knocked down like a domino.

I think the Vietnam war is wrong.  
She didn't deny it, tho.  
A bad conscience hates, so,  
reminders of its expedience:  
That slaughter of the innocents.  
If she doubted whose side I was on,  
the feeling was mutual, doc.

I think the Vietnam war is wrong.  
My protest in class got the  
retort: you needn't be worried,  
you won't be going. My pacifist  
leanings get a laf with true jest  
that the Americans should bomb  
Vietnam with dollars to corrupt them.

I think the Vietnam war is wrong.  
The powerful framed an enemy  
to attack in the name of security.  
Vietnam was not the real foe.  
Dishonest power is, don't you know?  
American Presidents lied in this tale.  
The truth is great and will prevail.

Envoy:

"War is organised murder. Nothing more."  
so said a last soldier closing the door  
of memory on world war one.

* * *
1967

### turned away

A new girls school prompted stares  
over the fence. At assembly in files,  
the Head ordered: keep away from there.  
Instincts, like love, are blind

and will turn against their meaning  
as surely as a blocked water-course.  
The youth of our Allies were being  
conscripted to and by force.

While this flesh was concerned  
about unwanted mortalities,  
the authorities were concerned  
about unwanted pregnancies.

The isolated boy seeks solace  
in ersatz romance, as the new-born  
chick imprints on any face  
that moves, regardless of form.

* * *

### bad career move

Some secret diktat control freak  
not content cram young minds crammed a six   
day time-table into the five day week.

So was sprung from some scholastic   
Ptolemy transplanting his theory   
of epicycles onto planet Terra.

One Eng lit lesson, we're tipped:  
You wouldnt count all the stresses  
in writing poetry, of course.

I made a mental note of that bounce.  
Did it mean folks like me perforce  
after I'm examined and pronounced

dead to the world that reaps   
when I wake up from dreaming   
steeples that my grades wont be steep

enuf to jack to a life after learning   
Ive never known but fluf  
that I could get to write this stuf?

* * *
1968

### less the stranger

It took some believing to be leaving  
after eight years time for the crime of youth  
and away from Toy-town shopping booths  
scarcely breathing: now my life can begin.

Of the grime I make passing study  
thru a maze of mill-stone grit to diffuse  
milling millions like coated molecules  
heated motions from break-fast to tea

all as anonymous as finger-prints.  
When lo! he's from my local catchment.  
Eyes clash. We decently stop to comment  
why here, tho talked not, at our origins

and trust to chance acquiantance renewed  
no more. Yet, in that exchange, he is  
human, it dawns, even as he crosses  
into the river of the multitude.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### 1968

It was daring sixties stuf: the future  
beckoned with a three-day course in computers  
those glorified pattern weaving looms  
housed in some airy secret room.  
Messing with flow charts, we all  
had to draw making a phone call.  
I said: We didnt have a fone.

Such innocent subversion, I own,  
got picked, when lecturers lost their cool  
and rushed about pointing out the fools  
and trouble-makers, from the obstreperous  
to the more or less studious.  
I saw there would be no more justice,  
than in machine-guns, to informers hit lists.  
In calmer mood, the shirt-and-tie came human.

He'd come from business, a new man  
to college, bought the little red book  
just in case he'd need to look  
this up as the fashionable plan.  
I saw he was just a middle-aged man  
out of touch with youth, ours and his. This fate  
you could forgive him in 1968.

* * *

### 1968 again

I came to college thinking "student" the  
alternative word for revolutionary.  
Their occupation was the occupation  
of university administration.

News came in almost daily of student revolt  
across Europe, across America, across the globe.  
Students were fighting the Vietnam war  
in the States, burning the stripes and stars.

Some had braved the civil rights marches.  
Students were on the barricades in Paris.  
Students were barricading themselves in  
Common rooms. It was the age of the sit-in.

Our little college bloc joined in the ferment.  
I was accosted about being militant.  
I made clear my disbelief in force,  
I'd no idea he meant Militant, of course.

The Press took a decade to grow raucus  
with the Trots after Labours caucus.  
The cramming made time there over-blown.  
And then the sud popped: I was alone

in an attic, on the bed. The radio insists  
the flower power hippies and idealist  
radicals are no more. The new students  
are get-rich business suits and career men.

* * *

### the anxiety dreams

They have never quite gone  
away, the anxiety dreams.  
I think they are gone for good  
then back they come.

Not so much of failing exams  
and ever missing school buses  
but can I get away with so much  
as not turning-up again to this?

My sleeping mind is unconscious still  
or oblivious to the con  
tho the law allow this old bean  
to leave school at sixteen.

It was that having to stay on  
two, then yet one more year, between  
me and a further education.  
Tho, I conned a place for later

and needn't have stopped, then.  
But they talked you into it, you know.  
And worse, I didn't have the sense  
of independence to go. Just go.

Well, I've wasted time and much else  
since then, besides that lost break.  
I'd just have stalled myself  
cramming for college: big mistake.

And so I dream-on of old  
trailing-in trying to pass muster.  
Everyone my age left long ago  
and got a life. Well you know

there is a school of life, I never  
saw beyond lighted windows  
where folks found their partners  
with jobs and family homes.

* * *
1969

### PR

Few months into college already  
I was weary of set essays.  
This might have warned me   
I was not for a literary station.  
The last straw was to write about   
proportional representation   
and the alternative vote.

I thought for once I needn't bother   
to research this topic. After all,   
I knew all about election cover  
sat up on general election night?  
I look back on my essay as a model  
a model for being lost in the night.  
On this and presumably every other

specialist subject, ignorance is bliss.   
I remind myself of this self-inflicted lesson  
every time I am tempted to dismiss   
my kinship with the common man.  
Having enuf padded my commission  
I reluctantly realised I would have to scan   
a listed book to gloss my decision.

One was that monumental work   
by JFS Ross: Elections and Electors.  
I settled back into a shirk  
long after, a forgotten failure  
who had mislaid a life, yet could not   
quite forget Ross for my own research  
finding the harmonic mean quota.

* * *
_return tocontents_

1970

### one-track mind

The arcade reverberates an amplified  
female voice to trains coming in  
amidst the clamor and their chugging din.  
Your choice, her orders be obeyed, defied.  
The converging dispersing parade  
will only step in line, before line of rail.

A peaked cap at carriage window  
forages with iron beak makes ring  
wheels flat steel bells, below. Each ting-  
whack down line fades into a slow echo.  
Of plumage, rail-worker blue, why!  
this bird is a wheel-tapper striding by

on the forbidden track; a plover  
sanctioned by a crocodile  
to pick clean his teeth in file  
on some mud-bank or other  
quay, you realise the platform  
be, in your tiny leap aboard.

I felt out of step when my stride  
homeward caught in the commuter  
hop. On a wide front, these suitors  
for seats advance to the ride  
their free-for-all army in a race  
day after day to capture a place.

The paras hang onto over-head  
straps and carry packs, to stagger  
with the brakes for staggered suburbs.  
(Space within, without, the view is sped.)  
Their jumps may be why the trains run,  
I settle down, my journey begun.

Track fences patch their barricades.  
The railways take cities in the back:  
Our slovenly privacy in the mass,  
a collage and a planning charade,  
an anonymous and intricate  
decadents reef of abstract art.

A rail bridge flashes a terrace length  
or red-brick stores flash their high-lights  
like working girls out on a night.  
Now stray shrubs cling over a trench.  
Now spectating from embankments  
trees cloud over a sea-green open.

The memory cupboard hosts  
a cram whose doors only tumble  
a minute fraction of the jumble:  
Three children are looking lost  
in time, among the deflowered  
slag heaps by the winding tower.

The smog-bound hill villages cof  
over declining cobblestone lanes.  
The sudden tunnel under the range  
brick-bounces back the rumbles off  
the banned hall begrimed that burrows  
the bulb-lights off the windows.

The folly of a chimneyed steps  
over the lonely hill tops looked.  
Crossing a Roman viaduct  
over a ravines rivuleted depths.  
Amongst its primal foliage  
nestles a picture post village.

The flat-lands hope keep in their frames  
a shining broads to the ocean.  
The exhaustion of motionless motion.  
On the look-out for the names  
to undeceive of similar platforms.  
The slow to a chug makes folks yawn

to the clanking joints of train sections.  
The high walk-ways to splinter isles  
amidst the cataracts of rail  
you took at a rush for connections.  
But the whole country roll  
and urban sprawl of hidden folk

of whose lives I cannot say  
are as the folded card mislaid  
from a childhood board game.  
This gives the game away  
that being moved solely  
by routine rules moulded me

into one of its inert pieces.  
Trains foster a waking dream  
of bewildering changes of scene  
just to get to where choice ceases.  
Like my mother, I am ashamed  
I made so little of lifes stay.

* * *

### The Naked Ape

The Naked Ape was one academic  
book selling out of packing cases.  
Had it been titled an ethology survey,  
a name the author never mentions,  
it might have sold in high places  
but still not been so out of the way

as I, lent copy of this sensation.   
The cover shone over the borrowers  
impress to a pic of the male head  
to a pair of back-turned naked humans.  
The females hair resembled the borrowers  
and the way the male held his head

resembled the note recipient.  
This was a sign without significance  
as when invaded nations swivel  
their sign-posts to confuse the enemy.  
Zamar was a self-possessed young man.  
He'd get calls in the small hours middle

from a lady in distress. And would take  
himself with his kindly smile on loan  
to helping-on a good bed-side manner.  
It seemed to me a good precaution  
he, soon after, brought back his own  
choice woman, he was sniffy about, at first,

in my presence. Someone else perhaps  
expecting me hostile. After dinner  
she was a mathematician un-demonstrative   
(if not presumably in her equations).  
The matriarch held a critical seminar  
on her supposed warmth deficit.

Zamar himself was forgiven the unamiable  
Freudian slip of switching the light off them   
leaving the room. More than once thus blessed  
he coming back with a chuckle to make good  
this bishop Berkeley foible of idealism  
that they didn't exist out-side his consciousness.

He was used to the limelight. Been head boy.  
I think he told me this, to give a bench-mark  
of his maturity, so I wouldn't be discouraged  
or misled into thinking his social ease the norm.  
I happened to be acquainted of one wark  
who went to his old engineering college.

And was surprised at the blunt retort:  
Never heard of him!  
Well, you wouldn't, I said, taken aback,  
he's only just got there.  
I added: You would like him.  
I knew of company just in the lack

and he introduced me betimes to his.  
He must have cautioned them of me.  
One affected young southern accent  
as much as called me a vegetable,  
I suppose, in resentment that they be  
put upon by this social absence.

A visit to some trainee doctors  
went better. As we were leaving,  
one in an abundance of friendliness  
came out to see us off, leaving  
cleverly off-hand the gleaning  
Zamar they'd be seeing, not myself.

* * *

### ded leters

Again an egzam-zombi slyps awa'k  
the swinging sixtis hits to banshy screams.  
A pak-m'ul to trek set surpr'is thyms  
persuaded stay for the longer it ta'ks

to wander as the dam'd sels of klas-rwms.  
The great ka'v of wisdom resounds the doum  
wer task-masters avalanc lws-set toums.  
From kreacon segrega'ts lernings tomb

som m'in and d'in with antenas entw'in'd.  
Down kobl'd Bwk Hil, the sun burns al  
bwk-bow'd heads of hair, at the funeral  
of inskripcons. By ramcakl stal, in l'in

I stand among stranjers respekts to thrown  
as'id gra'v-toums of p'il'd-up leavs, aloun.

* * *
1971

### the lone-star state

Consider the material of the cosmos  
as amorous. Then my life has been passed  
in the furthest reaches of outer space  
attracting no-one. Last term at college  
was desolate enuf. There were finals  
to revise for - yeah, yeah - so I found myself  
wander into some suburban park.

Its garden confines visited a scrum  
of cubs with pawings of the trunks of skin.  
They were the legendary disportings  
of some constellation, for the notice  
they took of me. The distraction moved me  
out onto a vast lawn, remotely  
from such bright clusters, in celestial green.

At last, tea-time being their dawn, all went in.  
And I was left alone, or rather, I was  
reminded of how alone I always was.  
A wiser dog than myself sat down by me  
companionably looking into the distance.  
I looked away when he looked at me.  
The dog-star got the message and went.

A scamper of pugs braked in awareness  
of this grounded ape. Their contemptuous stare  
at close quarters challenged how to fare  
in their company. But they chased the last  
folk trailing out, with no more idea of what  
was the matter with me or how I was cast.  
It becomes soon enuf of no import.

* * *

### inside-out

College almost done and we were  
sent off to a careers officer  
marked me out like a dog-eared page  
for a librarian, for role off-stage.

Would I be able to read books?  
He said the job was more to do  
with outside the covers than within.  
(Schools worthless cramming to examine!)

I have re-called, in my contrition,  
shunning a nice safe job if not  
too poorly paid for thrift as mine  
me and my hush persona he divined.

Yet critics weaken on the public purse.  
Handy, tho, to pick up latest works.  
He resisted appeals for choice.  
Sociology plainly had no voice.

Instead, I scrabbled in jumble sales  
again, which was no way to make  
relations. Would I have found I did  
at long last? Who knows or gives?

* * *
_return tocontents_

### I'll always think of you

On being advised what heaven is like:  
Think of the happiest moment in your life.  
The thought left me floundering  
then as a young man, now as an old thing.  
I cracked a joke by Groucho Marx  
to mark forthcoming deserved low marks.  
I was clearly out of favor with the staf.

"I started at the bottom of society  
and worked downwards." Made her laf:  
This student, who scarce gave me a word  
in three years, after I'd campaigned for   
a certain reformist to be recognised   
as a sociologist, in my one-man rise  
to the protest years, at the end of the course,

said to me, in a way to strangely give pause  
from one smart and reserved and wanting nought   
to do with me, said something I forgot  
for a thinking lifetime, said to me, led  
by some whim to console or to cheer, said  
that whenever I hear of HG Wells   
I'll always think of you. No more she'd tell.

* * *
1972

### the pillar of fire

Not getting on, get out!  
Emotional alone relapse.  
Double-dip recession.

Freudian regression.  
Verse morbidly obsessed  
with body functions.

Mind full of empty jargon.  
Dismiss background noise   
wwmf! watching tv news.

Uncomprehending dismissed   
fathers mounting fury.  
Little partition kitchen

chip pan roars a pillar  
of fire licks lead gas-pipe.  
I stand there in a funk.

He wraps towel round  
hot handle. Tipping pan  
outside, scalds hand.

* * *
1973

### 3e lerning

in 3e noisy dusty l0nly  
atik of my up-bringing  
laboriusly 1 re-r0t  
countles t'ims few pajes

out gramar out speling  
for a ryl of imajes  
in p'ur riten sound  
bre3les as my runing

grandilokuently t'itl'd  
at uon sta'j 3e lerning  
from erliest memorys  
3e meaning of l'if

satirisd by Monty P13on

* * *
1974

### you can keep it

The results never matched-up to ones hopes.  
We would wait in suspense on the ropes.  
The small seats rushed be first to declare   
made fools of sitters all night just to stare

for six-hundred MPs so well trussed  
by the two parties in that homogenous  
nation. May you live in boring times  
that seem as tho they will never mind.

And so many since simply don't vote.  
I tested once an eighteen year-old  
innocently saying: You have the vote now.  
"You can keep it!" He disavowed.

I lost first chance, away at college,  
the least of growing-up I fore-went.  
Mam and Dad consoled by staying away  
from the polls, as their two votes out-weighed

mine, in a safe seat whose resolution  
for one party out-lived the Russian revolution.  
'Seventy-four held two election fights:  
Go to the polls again till you get it right.

Did that start things moving? It saw off third  
inept party challenge. Fair Votes whirred  
down before reform or a tinker  
failed under-mine fortress Westminster -

Westmonster where whips unplug brains  
from debate. On defense, the nuclear insane  
dont know its difference from a deterrant  
if ever used would poison life on the planet.

Envoy:

The safe seat's safe again – it seems a fluke  
that they ever lost it. The tree was not shook  
of Britains infantile duopoly  
they are pleased to call a democracy.

* * *

### bible communism

If you can't stand the heat, get out  
of the kitchen or open the door.  
The washer-up, with arms, in the sink,  
like tide-marked pier stumps, glimpsed  
a stranger, with a water holder,  
a long-haired softly-spoken youth.

The kitchen hand was dipping also  
in the Gospels. He enthused  
at the strangers apostolic life.  
His exam-tormented youth knew  
no sixties hippy commune.  
This remnant of hip, he found

himself in, was a bus conversion  
with kitchen, bunk beds, clothes bins.  
There looked more folk than there were  
from the more inter-actions imposed  
in a confined space. Yet, they had a way  
of huddling off in quiet ones and twos.

Their spokesman - they did have one -  
once a communist, was born again.  
Something he said made the guest ask:  
That's fundamentalism, isn't it?  
He said: we're the most  
fundamental of fundamentalists.

They held everything in common  
tho a couple would stay-on in town  
a week. One was the gentle youth.  
If anyone needed a jacket  
to go out, they just borrowed  
what was available, money, too.

Collectivism was tested when they lost  
the keys. Since they didn't belong  
to any-one, no one knew where they were.  
Every-one delved into the furnishings.  
It looked hopeless, til someone got  
lucky. This signaled all to give up

impassioned thanks, hosannas.  
It took the guest aback the first time  
but it would not be the last. He'd doubt  
to himself their trust in a teacher.  
But innocence lent conviviality  
most attractive to the friendless.

The spokesmans repeated joke  
about kidnapping was not quite  
pleasant (nor perhaps meant to be).  
When the guest said goodbye, they all  
replied in a happy chorus.  
(Not dissembling happiness you're gone.)

One woman cautioned intellectual  
arrogance. The menial spoke thoughts  
that commanded his attention  
at the time. However cautiously aired,  
having ideas might sound arrogant.  
But no offense was taken.

The Gospels revealed persecution  
from transgressed superstitions.  
Mankind, down the ages, swung between  
unbalanced states of rage and dread.  
Jesuses message of love was thru a minds  
rational or balanced freeing itself

from baseless fears and unjustified hatreds.  
Once, a social science student rebeled  
against non-ethical knowledge. The Greens were  
mocked as biblical beards and sandal wearers.  
Pioneers like Vance Packard and Gordon  
Rattray Taylor regaled his bookshelves.

* * *
_return tocontents_

1975

### death of a nation

(First instalment, the 1975 referendum.)

At the polling station, having voted,  
a woman smiled at me, like the posters  
every-where of a big happy family  
from Yes to Common Market entry.  
Wandering the streets showed the No campaign  
couldn't splash out against those empty claims.

I must have looked as gloomy and grim  
as I felt, enuf to lend her brow a twinge  
of misgiving and discompose her.  
I hoped that I was wrong and things would work  
out better than I feared. Surely, with all  
the right people saying yes, and the wrong sort  
saying No, I was worrying over nought.

Now I wonder how they hoped to redress  
matters after the pretended success  
of the re-negotiations over a fiefdom  
imposing ever-lasting reparations,  
the surrenders of rights and freedoms  
of trade and historic relations.

* * *
1976

### the drout

Some dozen years since ladybirds plagued   
The Beatles, a ladybird plague  
of beetles spotted shards of slates

ladybirds being beetles with wings  
as Macca was a Beatle with Wings.  
'Seventy-five was afid humid.

'Seventy-six was relentlessly fine  
with unblemished skies into evening shine  
relaxingly warm in a light shirt.

Until I felt more, well, like an afid   
embarrassed over a drout of women,  
enquired about, not already married.

* * *
1977

### an immature student

My hobby was election methods.  
That's all arithmetic and, sure odds,  
higher math, I couldn't get away from.

I was what texts call an immature student  
for the rigors of an experiment  
set by himself, let alone any one else.

I seemed to spend half a lifes work  
over-looking the stumbling block  
that the harmonic series non-converge.

The Droop quota is such and I tried  
misguidedly to find the pattern hides  
in variations on its arithmetic.

My father came upon abandoned attempt  
and asked with interest quickened  
what it was about. I confessed it nought.

But I had briefly seen  
what he might have been  
did but befall him a chance at all.

A study found all but seventeen per cent  
students found text-books so much dead-weight.  
And I'd no tutor, but me, to put me right.

* * *
1978

### the routine deception

This was a listening year   
(before a general election)   
even on electoral reform  
til after the ballot fears:  
The routine deception.

I gave talks – or mouse slips  
out of my wainscot view –  
to the Young Conservatives  
then the Young Socialists  
where Young Libs turned up, too.

I passed the latters questions fine,  
til they all piled-in to relieve  
each other. I, too inexperienced  
to say: One question at a time.  
But I guess that they deceived

themselves there's so many questions  
from which you needs must refrain  
reply, at least when asked all at once.  
They were the stock objections  
that have been met time and again.

Both groups asked in accord with aught  
kept them in receipt of providence.  
Parties need impartial referees  
but seek to bolster bias of thought.  
Science seeks contrary evidence.

* * *
1979

### the unsafe

The rain flooded in thru the beams  
of a walk-way to the out-doors  
toilet that left unpleasant dreams  
of straddling its creaking floor-boards.  
Water cascaded without stop  
on stock at the back of the shop

rotting the lower floor asunder.  
New planks lay loosely cross-ways.  
Half the boards had crumbled under  
a big old-fashioned iron safe.  
It defied gravity only with a stay  
from the back of the stair-way.

Fungus ate into the step ladder  
that improvised for cellar steps.  
A stone trof brimmed with rain-water.  
A farm gate once languished in the depths.  
The safe was given a pretend  
prop of wood crumbling at one end.

I couldn't believe the ill luck  
of the lead gas pipe being strait  
under where the safe was stuck  
or, I should say, the unsafe.  
I told my parents I was going -  
to move this great and growing

menace to a safe place. Luckily,  
father told me of the two  
iron bed rails to be used as skids.  
I'd attempt the removal  
on sunday while they were out  
golfing and the shops were shut.

Watching old films I'd half-forgot,  
sundays were supposed to relax.  
I put the rails under the strong box  
at each edge and stood on the tracks  
to pull the handle, against the inertial  
safe, with the key lost (typical!)

As the iron box began to shift,  
the wood prop clanked on the stone  
cellar floor. I didn't think  
much, any-way, of the post.  
The prop was desperately  
unstable, like its propper, verily.

There was no time for second thoughts.  
The safe slid willingly along  
the rail-way to a solid spot.  
I was relieved at its grating song.  
And glad I tackled this worry  
that had nagged my memory.

If the premises were to be repaired,  
every sunday I had to descend,  
masked, into the cellar to clear  
the filth of ages and do penance  
perhaps for how an under-world  
of mind under-mines the world.

* * *

### ring of service

out from under   
the holiday clackers   
of feet and tongues   
a funny customer slunk   
round show-case mirror   
doors ajar to a mahogany   
box-office slot where   
the watch-repairer kept   
watch with the eye   
not in an eye-glass

taking refuge from dust clouds   
and exhaust the exhausted   
pigeon could not be bought  
of all lavendar gifts   
among the perfumed   
soap and hankies   
just the staf would use  
shop lights iridesced the guests   
plumage while it downed   
a saucers bread and milk

the premises repaired   
had no such lair  
for one more homing pigeon   
led up-stairs with bread and water   
for this less novel visitor   
politely stayed my watch  
as befitted its ring   
of service in flight  
taking to the roof   
it compassed the sky

* * *
_return tocontents_

1980

### Lennon

cleaning at the old stone   
basin sink to catch chug   
the lead pipe tap wobble   
dance near hand-to-mouth   
draw-bridge cupboard

against the partition   
close by the open stairs   
did for a kitchen  
coming up for air   
from shop service

she asked with foreboding   
unturning if over-night   
I'd heard the dreadful   
news I thought there   
was no way for me to

a life gone is gone   
for everyone   
with its iridescence   
into the dark leaving   
the quiet of the night

I knew now too well would last   
forever bringing home   
to me we were stuck  
like a cracked record   
in this tenement

* * *
1981

### his last visit

Having ended the horror  
of the indoor waterfalls  
the damages of the repair bills.

It's tempting to write off the eighties  
as given up to debt honoring.  
All the decades were daunting

to account for, year by year.  
My gallant grandad turned-up here  
when we moved back to the refit.

In the shop, I found him a seat.  
He was perspiring and done.  
He made tremendous effort to come

to the solicitude of his daughter  
less a wife/mother and a son/brother.  
It would prove to be his last visit.

At the end of the decade, his will  
secured my parents retirement,  
having helped him, living on his strength.

* * *
1982

### on the shelf

The seasons custom was streaming down  
the streets before we could get stock out  
and the shop was a shell. We had to stop  
more expense, bar the most basic shop-

fits. An angular window was awkward  
to shelf. Plywood was easiest sawed  
but had to be velvet-covered and trimmed  
with varnished beading for smartness and rim.

Bit by bit, I added glass show-case  
shelf to the still vacant wall space.  
Shelf to the stock room. Shelf by the steps  
to help fill the gap in a chimney depth

of stairs to the buildings top-most reach.  
Two sets of kitchen cupboards, three shelf each.  
Shelf for the living-room storage. School classed  
my skills the pits. Real jobs must be passed.

A hardware store opened handily,  
for this regular, down a side street.  
I still had to go all over town  
searching for suitable grids to crown

a vent and a drain, that gaped their surprise.  
In the end, I had to improvise  
or passers-by would bung the vent train.  
I'd just rigged a grid for the drain

when an unheard-of almighty storm filled  
the main street to a river down the hill  
flooding cellars on the way left a tide  
of debris, an otherwise choking pile.

* * *
1983

### Bill

The SDP sent of their Gang of Four  
to our back-water. The half empty hall  
was half full, well attended then.

Who rushed the stage when he finished but me  
from The Electoral Reform Society.  
At table, the local chairman

smiled with a twinkle in his eye  
letting him know why I'd come by  
(not then as a party activist).

I handed him a leaflet note  
about the single transferable vote  
and watched carefully he slipped it

in the un-bulging unused pocket  
of his expensively tailored suit.  
Even I could see that it was in truth

a cut above the common cloth weeds.  
He had a definite air of authority  
I had not noticed in local swain.

The former Cabinet minister  
was not an over-bearing visitor.  
And I heard him on a campaign

broadcast in an after-thought pass-  
on some finer points of STV (as  
ranked choice of candidates, from same

and different parties, are decisions  
effecting primaries and coalitions).  
Few politicians took that much pains.

* * *
1984

### speaking too soon

He flipped digits of year '48 thus  
1984 was made notorious.  
His draft title, The Last Man, penned  
ironic echo of First and Last Men.  
(I was the lost man, quite gone.)  
George Orwell was wrong:

Margaret Thatcher intoned  
in her usual over-bearing moan  
that set on edge cartoon teeth  
of Steve Bell penguins saw her screened.  
Some near future was all the date meant.   
New Labour she claimed her greatest achievement.

Yeah right - the surveillance state boss  
of fear-inducing regulation bathos.  
She spoke too soon, backing the wrong hoss  
getting on its band-wagon to her partys loss  
the party in the end got lost the  
incarnation of poll tax liability.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### fysics as metafor

I felt a mechanical model would be good  
exercise, as if I'd be ever young  
taking breaks between customers  
to run up-stairs bash on the type-writer.  
By middle age, I thought it high time

to answer (with some success, to my mind)  
the old under-graduate query:  
is there a science of society?  
My slim knowledge of relativity  
gave election method a metafor.

An American journal report  
wouldn't discourage me from this  
but for lacked testable consequences.  
Into old age, I tiredly played out  
naive models. Yet things were found.

"Work cannot love you back." claims author.  
But with no alternative to court  
a life-time in many a research taught   
love is its own reward in discoveries  
from the reluctant goddess of verities.

* * *
1985

### the diamond thieves

They were a new line  
the two big sparklers  
mounted to the fore  
of the angle window  
by the doorway

I looked again but  
looking didn't help  
the sinking heart  
undo black magic  
of their being gone

uncannily by themselves.  
Why trawl the small fry  
to risk being spotted?  
The diamond thieves  
were a passing trained

kind of artists slick  
enuf to go unseen.  
Usually you knew  
the greedy amateurs  
you were up against

and just had to watch  
stressful tho it was  
it did not appall like  
six months lost of a war  
on debt, were the stones not

of new refractive index  
confused even thieving   
experts with diamonds   
for why the new-out   
cubic zirconia had flown.

* * *
1986

### fall-out warning

A nuclear power plant had blown  
and all Europe was under a cloud.  
Way across the contaminated continent  
out on our little isle and keep  
we, too, were in deep  
and the uncannibalisable sheep.

Some expert sat before the news-reader.  
In an apparent after-thought, he threw over  
his laid-back shoulder at the viewers,  
risking the long-suffering publics dismay,  
that it might be a good idea to stay  
in-doors for the next three days.

If ear-lobes blinked like eye-lids,  
I'd have missed this most laid-back warning.  
Well, you know me, as I see it,  
if the authorities say three days,  
I consider whether it is worth a foray  
this week. I'll never know, any-way,

such are the vagaries of fall-out,  
whether I still got it in the neck or not.  
The state is more afraid of a nation in shock  
and indignation at being quarantined  
than of a few days or weeks  
nipped off every-ones life expectancy.

* * *
1987

### paying guests

My father provided watch repairs.  
His charges were too reasonably bid  
to keep up with demand. And so he undid,  
with delays, regard for the good he did.  
A bit like the old National Health Service.

He would be bent over the counter  
wearing an eye-glass for some tricky  
operation, with tweasers, we couldnt fix.  
Some sympathetic but thankless soul shared  
to me: He'll never become a millionaire.

My mother was a skilled sales-woman.  
Father saved many a sale re-sizing rings.  
I was their unskilled assistant thing.  
Covering costs, before we could leave  
for home, was a scramble to be free.

Most folk were guests on best manners.  
They made it tolerable to serve.  
One furious exception came back  
peaceably. At first, I was perturbed  
and then touched he made no stir.

Some played the old shell game with stock  
to confuse and slip goods under cover.  
You served one of a pair when the other  
has the bad manners to start finger.  
Theft was a strain. I'd call other server.

I sold a pocket watch to a man  
who came straight back saying it didn't work  
and demanded his money back, to learn  
I was in the window when he went  
up street and dropped it on the pavement.

A group of youths was a signal to ring help.  
You could no longer trust the girl gangs.  
We left before walkie-talkies were standard  
equipment for the large shops assistants.  
And false conscience of CCTV plants.

* * *
1988

### on the rebound

My one chance and I blew it!  
No surprise there then, truly  
except that I had a chance to blow.  
I had asked almost a decade ago

but she kept to her long-term prospect.  
The infatuation was obvious.  
She didn't try to hide it or pretend.  
Tho, the bond fell thru in the end.

As ever, I let caution prevail.  
It was easier than to chase again.  
At thirty, the very thought of her trust  
energised to do what needs must.

But her eyes closed me out of her sight,   
shut out. Maybe she wanted quite  
to impress chronic boyfriend might  
others be glad of her. Too right!

Our shop closure may have drawn her.  
Just as I was looking forward  
to huge re-inforcements of freedom  
like an exhausted western front

waiting for the Americans to come.  
More to the point to regard her love  
as the emotional re-inforcements,  
in truth, I was so desperate lent.

It didn't help to admit that after  
nine years I hadn't recognized her.  
Her manner quickened and she snapped  
scornfully and shrewdly: what happened

to her, had her features become drawn  
with age? Hands drew down face to mourn  
in a melodramatic state.  
I kept calm and said, to placate,

since she didn't seem to believe me,  
that she had lost her puppy fat, to see  
her show of disappointment refuse for me.  
I was a reluctant Hobsons choice, see,

without that womans resolve to rail  
it thru, in but one meeting, constrained  
by being held not in confidence.  
(And new social round put me on the defense.)

This nobody might seem nobody there  
obsessed with ideas going nowhere.  
That would not have been fair to her.  
And you wont believe shared concern

lend stability against the temper  
tantrums that cowardice yields to.  
She did at last marry happily.  
My faint heart did her a favor.

* * *

# The Dorothy poems

#### My friendship with Dorothy Cowlin from 1987 to 2010.

_return tocontents_

### I wouldnt lower myself

A clotting biro carved this slowly:  
on sunday closing, in the stock room  
lifting refuse, an arm wont lower,  
bringing on a fever this is my doom.

I knew no better from my folks:  
Nothing to be bothered about.  
The local paper put-in odd poem:  
Fashions In Ruins made me laf out loud

and hail the author. Heedless I was  
of drops before the summer showers.  
I knew not, nor would have thought,  
that the once I went to the writers

the poet was she who gave a talk  
on her novels. And not a rumor  
showed of comic verse, that was not   
to type, nor her still arch school-girl humor.

That evening she reminisced, at table  
side, so reserved was she, wound  
still in her coat, poised at an angle  
such that she seemed only sat down

to up and go without persuasion.  
She would not remember the occasion.  
She will tell me, on a ferry her mother,  
adjusting summer hat, is surprised

to find awhile her arm wont lower.  
In days, she's bed-ridden, half paralysed.   
I told when my like movement broke.  
Dorothy diagnosed a minor stroke.

I am sure she was right. Even small  
hemorage in the brain impairs  
more by the disruptive scab that forms.  
Had I known, I'd have despaired

that I was for a serious inkling  
of life, which, for me, is thinking.  
Defoe has Roxana say, from her school  
of life: Never marry a fool,

for a fool can never take counsel,  
a fool will make you miserable.  
And so, be free of the disagreeable  
who thwart and stress to disable.

* * *

### the wrong door

There is no such thing as society:  
Thatcher said. There certainly weren't  
so far as I, in despair, was concerned.   
I would sit alone to find company   
on the old bench for guests in the Friends  
Meeting House. People came and went  
leaving me out from the many

or from slipping in without seeming foreign.  
On the eve of the general election,  
at the Liberal club, I lost direction  
on the stairs, tried a door in this warren.  
It was the wrong door, a room too cramped  
for public meeting. A bare seat chanced  
so I stayed the evening and listened

fourteen years by way of blending in.  
The best of it was an intermission.  
I had the luck to be homed-in on  
by one of the elderly women.  
Her lapel sported an up-turned trident.  
Her peering sunny disposition, defiant  
to wield that badge like a shield for a heroine

as she turned about towards all comers.  
To the end of her long life, she was CND,  
Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.  
She was a radical among the conserves.  
But she carried it off well, was courted.  
That first night, she did ask how I voted.  
When I claimed independence, she perked.

* * *

### Abigail

Scarcely by the edge were we stood  
before the village pond was attacked  
by furious paddling on our track  
from two fluffed balls left mother coot.

I impersonated this frenzied motion  
with my arms, for Dorothys next berth.  
Abigail bobbed forward in her mirth  
a little like the pond-life commotion.

Even more so than Dorothy, she stirs  
herself, a bird-like elderly lady  
with no extra weight on her to stay the  
popping up and down like youngsters.

They admitted me, nothing loath,   
between at meetings like parents protective  
of a youngster, in comparitive terms.   
Her father was a Minister of the cloth.

I was impressed by William James  
devotion with a social conscience.  
The Varieties of Religious Experience  
Abigail asked if a rehash. I said: the same.

Her little sect held you must never climb  
into bed thinking ill of anyone lest   
you die in your sleep and find yourself  
on the other side in wrong frame of mind.

To believe non-sense, Dorothy declined.  
Yet, the Catholic confession consents,  
before you die, to forgive all offense  
that you may be forgiven in the next life.

Better for oneself, as well, to please  
not carry ill-feeling to sleep with you  
leaving an emotional inertia thru-  
out the night is liable to freeze.

Dorothy gave me a lift with Abigail  
who robustly told me: You're not coming in.   
There speaks the world, tho Abigail,  
like me and myself, had no family.

Driving in the dark to Abigails,  
Dorothy said this car knows its trip   
there by now. By her many long friendships,  
I suppose mine was unremarkable.

With her spinsterly use to be alone  
Abigail would closet herself to peek  
before the tv all Wimbledon week.  
Came a time Dorothy lifted the fone

of invitation for Abigail to answer pat  
she (the loner) isn't bothered really.  
Dorothy was put out. She hoped dearly  
she didn't become withdrawn like that.

She didn't. Dorothy could charm a cat  
to the end, for company to bless.  
She had me return a book (what else?)  
to her locker in the hall of the flats.

Abigail came to the foot of the stairs  
and blew me a kiss of farewell.  
I didn't tell till a much later spell  
but I doubt still the news did well fare.

I don't know the slight did quite mend  
or recall the lend of a fotoed Abigail  
on board of Dorothys leaving sail.  
Like her sects belief that, in the end,

ill-will reaps an ill reward, so Abigails  
final indifference reaped as sown  
maybe. The lonely need to be alone  
in advance of the inevitable.

* * *

### attention!

This embarrassment may be forsook  
for a friendship she denied ever flawed.  
I was just looking at one of her books  
I'm sure, having asked or been drawn.

And I kept glancing back at the page  
even at her words intervention  
until she leant forward in a rage  
I did not have her full attention.

She would chastise me on occasion  
later, that she was so incensed  
by my bad manners that her persuasion  
was to end our meetings there and then.

In calmer mood, she had assumed  
I was not that used to live narrative.  
Choosing books for mates spoke volumes.  
I tripped rejections out-right and subversive.

Envoy:

After being stripped of degree honors  
Dorothy darent tell she'd been demoted  
to junior class for not keeping order.  
If ever I fell foul of the rogue teacher

I have to say she was the most self-  
effacing of mentors who made some poet   
of me without so much as a pledge   
of credit to herself as the bestower.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### don't read my poems

In the domain of the boarding house  
many a terrace flanked each portal  
with bay windows looking out and down   
steps arched a sky-lit under-ground.

A poetry group of guest mortals  
in arm-chairs bolstered luxuriate.  
I adorned a corner of the couch  
well, once, but some-how not again.

Sunny Dorothy had her summer   
thunder-storms made me hunker   
down until they blew over. She   
could be stroppy but she wasnt bossy.

One more year slid into an other  
before Dorothy gave me my remit  
adding crossly: "Dont read my poems.  
They all laft. And I didn't like it!"

They'd moved to a hat box, little bigger,  
not tied-up with an opening ribbon,  
but as propriety in turn-out demands.  
I soon saw their thinned-out ranks

had to conscript my subscription.  
Joined tables in the center of this cell  
pinned every body against the walls  
like more of the peeling notices.

One bore the legend of a talk  
that Love is not a Luxury.  
She was not kidding! Who indulged me?  
Love is a fugitive; has a good grace.

The group soon took to my faith  
as if it had been their own always.  
Well, Dorothy did win nearly all  
out-side jujments on our scrawls.

She did win a northern tv award.  
And, before the end, my site for her  
was means the nation tune into verse  
The Sound Of Rain she no more heard.

* * *

### ahead

(rondeau)

She fixed ear-fones when I was due  
and turned as if steam were in view  
to ask: Can you hear the train call?  
These rare birds haunt, also, my hall  
with their fifties wail to imbue

the happiest time she went thru  
with family and novels to do  
and excursions that seemed to sprawl  
ahead.

But better I'd other venue  
then, said she truer than she knew,  
having the heart to hasten all  
out my spring with its early fall  
thru an onset of the mildew  
ahead.

* * *

### the lost novels

She put it to me, on the lane  
home, the day still young, summer sun,  
and she still full of vigor for her age.

The type-script, she offers, is of as many  
as her books, I'd read, but remonstrated  
that I was alone and all I owned   
would scatter with the atoms of my body.

In two decades, her body hits the brakes.  
She is propped with cushions in her chair  
hinting the dumbness of a doll in state  
who is on notice to quit lifes actors.

No type-scripts. Theirs is the trial demise  
of the creator following her creations:  
Personality unmasked shows characters

diversely make-up personality  
now lost witness to her conversing mind.  
Typescripts pick-out period, tho she assured me

there was nothing there. Rejections shouldered  
her with a literary sentence of death.  
One plot visited a northern steel works.  
Furnace glares a-nights poured and moulded

the molten metal into its tributaries.  
(Works, like her own, faced killing competition.)  
The steel-worker shifts tempted to a wary  
life of biandry. Into Swedish her first novel

translated as the both-ways woman.  
After Priestleys time-plays (and her youths flights)  
she lives two lives in two betrothals.

* * *

* * *

### ghost writer

They said she's snuffed thoroly out in  
their reprint of Dorothy Cowlin  
book Winter Solstice.  
She cried "How remiss!"  
with a great deal of authorly howlin'.

Mis-spelt Sunday Times her name Whaller  
which also caused her to holler.  
She's not only re-born,  
she's becoming a thorn.  
To gise we'll have to appoller.

For she was really of course married "Whalley"  
who was having enuf but there's more, see.  
Nought else left to chance  
she fumed "Where's my advance?"  
I'll have it or else now or bawl "Fee!"

* * *
_return tocontents_

### without honors

Oh you're not going to write about that are you?  
Irritated by the link to her famous opposite  
who prompted a biopic. The camera view  
down their mutual school roll of honor  
showed Dorothy wistfully she was not on it.

She won a rare pre-war scholarship.  
On the strength of a teachers flair,  
she chose her weaker subject, geology  
and found it impermeable in first year;  
found her degree of honors ripped bare

and herself a wraith of the corridors.  
She'd be paid more to teach with a degree   
in English but less than one with honors.  
She offered me a free hand with the diary  
of a prolonged courtship and furtively

such as has exercised the popular press  
with tales of those in the toils and stirrings.  
All that passed me by, to no express use,  
unlike the future novelists wordings  
in wintry water-colors of their wanderings.

* * *

### thought corgi

When still on his laureate honey-moon  
Betjeman Royal Wedding verse suffered reverse  
from unamused indeed museless Members.

Hughes Thought Foxed palace, of the silver spoon,  
whose grounds Her Majesty trotted her corgis on.  
Thought Corgi didnt have quite the same frisson.

Yorkshire tv obtruded a proem:  
"...and who will be poet laureate of the north?"  
Ted thought he was, and of t'south an' all.

Meanwhile viewers were begged: no more poems.  
A state of panic, known by new editors,   
of verse sought to impress: THIS IS FINAL.

THAT'S IT. The presenter announcing,   
a touch imperiously, "The poet laureate   
of the north is Dorothy Cowlin."

* * *

### old posts

When I come across her scrawl  
she speaks to me from by-gone years

as following old tracks of deer  
tell of traveling on the long haul

winding thru a maze of conifers  
whose mantle shrugs off heavy coats

when the tundra sun-streams float  
singing to the ends of the earth.

* * *

### her new bird poem

The pike gives up its ring for Pickering.  
A coot picks its way among the rushes  
and in its ring-folder rustles  
the new wings of Dorothys birding.

### Dolly Dingbat

Dorothy boards train  
boards Dingbats game  
for Christmas holidays  
with the daughters kids.

* * *

### that elfin look

An aloof flapper instructed  
the scholarship student:  
tweak up your eye-brows  
to give you that elfin look.

Too right, pixie face!  
Her impish smile beacons  
myths of the enchanted isles  
from hazel-flecked turquoise eyes.

* * *

### Dandelion Dorothy

They came from outer space  
in sundials and clocks  
of spears and spores:

Dandelion Dorothy  
waits for the council  
to cut her grass verge.

* * *

### I do not think I am alone

I do not think I am alone.  
Repeated scratchings I cannot place.  
What springs against the lowest panes  
within the door of summer?

I put my treasure under glass cover  
to help out its futile jumpings.  
To think the plagues of their cousins  
were taken sign of the one God just.

It stayed as still as perfect trust.  
I fell in love on way to its release  
into garden where I've never seen  
grass-hopper sport before or since.

In whisper-dales were their chirrupings  
all around a sightless sound.  
Dorothy said if one were found  
she'd be my friend for life. I own

I do not think I am alone  
in fellow feeling for a fellow creature.  
Ravine-climbing to the heather  
as usual she would not wait

tho they now were seen in spait  
as I joined them in a crouch.  
Past the heights, she had me vouch:  
Had that made a man of me?

Made a grass-hopper of her pupil  
tho without the acrobatics  
of Kung Fu disciple, so nick-  
named by his Taoist master monk.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### the rambler

Down the lane to ox-bow farm-stead,  
she named, for me, springs petal spread.  
Round a cut, in the steep green highness   
lies the pit to look-up at the gods  
shining their suns of dafs in the brightness.

Thru the passes into valley billets,  
brushing against the bracken thickets  
past guard on the slopes of the massed pines.  
On the track of an under-ground river  
clambering rounded boulders in dry bed-time.

The wood-land stream into a cove  
of the moors exposed strata, hollowed   
by a thunderous pour of clouds  
onto the slippery wreckage of rocks  
discarded bones from its beaten mound

by the water roarer in its forge.  
Climbing a side of grasshopper gorge  
heard high over the crawling floor  
I knelt on their little grass terraces  
stepping up to the open moors.

On the ramp of the Roman fort  
the rambler gave never a moments thought  
for basking in its tepid sun-bath  
a most startled adder slithering  
double quick from her determined path.

A smiled sigh of fully worn-out  
after we trekked all the muddy way round  
the forest crown of an alluvial plain.  
In a natural maze of the low-lands  
getting lost on twin country lanes.

* * *

### the gown

The neighbors found her laid out trance-  
like on the back lawn for a rustic funeral  
that proved but a green dress rehearsal  
when she found herself in an ambulance  
back from the dead to the world we're loaned.  
Names on her calendar were foned.

Every summer evening shone or so I re-call  
as I walked and found my way to her ward.  
She was propped in bed with sensors  
sucking on her chest to a monitor.  
She picked among the books from me  
since all she could do all day was read

and often did, no less when at house.  
She wore a turquoise night-gown  
she told me her husband bought her.  
He bought it to match your eyes, I taught her.  
It was in character that this news leant  
her more to doubt than sentiment.

Tho, more brilliant than the gem-stone  
and flecked with hazel, those lamps shone.   
On discharge, she told me I came to see her  
once. She could not believe evenings ever.  
She would have denied it. Are you sure? Then,  
forgotten the: You are a good friend.

Of which it would do no good to go on.  
The doctors could not find aught wrong.  
Their best guess was: She had a near   
stroke with a clot must have cleared.  
But that little loss of memory, broke  
distinct calls, points to a minor stroke.

We still had many rambles together. One halt,  
she told me how memory plays you false  
when we reached the moors above  
a foresters stair-case down a hill-side  
of uneven steps amongst the pines  
to the water-fall that quarried a cove.

* * *

### Dorothy and the swans

When swans snap sandwiched bread in fingers,  
I repeat "Ouch!" to teach them: Be careful.  
And it works!

"It doesnt." gently Dorothy rebuked.

These water fowl waggle their tails,  
like sea-dogs flagging stores a welcome aboard.  
They mean: I like that. More please.

"No, they dont." She had to say  
with a teased-out smile at superstition.

Oh yes they do.  
In hospital, a nurse tagged you  
like the lake swans.  
Does that mean you're precious, too, Dorothy?

"Oh yes," she agreed, good-humoredly.

* * *

### the charmer

We were granted again the sight of the herons  
that stood as one with the tops of the trees  
unblinking and radiant as the heavens  
nesting in the valley of their delving stream.

A buggy bumped to a stop in the ruts  
of the track on the ridge. The rough-riding two  
young ladies, of all they surveyed, stood  
up and said: You are tresspassing. Just go.

The old woman of the woods came out of cover  
to entrance as a local spirit of the wild.  
Her head bowed in a smile that took over  
the teens who watched her with sparkling eyes.

I invoked neither homage nor alarm:  
They saw a scare-crow instead as a charm.

* * *

### lafiti

"You have a good memory  
for places but not names.  
Most of the time, you don't  
bother much. But when  
you look, you really look"  
(trailing that guide and juj).

After leaf Fall, the Sweep  
of road-sides and pastures.  
A lone vicarage lectured:  
"No bull in this field."  
One could see that  
at a glance on the patch.

Maybe the sign contrived  
to encourage the parish.  
The biblical word, flourished   
after "bull," proclaimed exiled  
strait talk to the remote spot.  
My guide convulsed not.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### sudden parting

She is on schedule to go first  
and I am just about to speak  
the timing may be reversed  
when the omnibus that is for me

jumps the corner to fly  
like a beast out of a cage  
about race by  
and I, in awe of my fate,

have to hail it, run without   
a moment to say good-by.  
I turn in my seat to look out  
thru a glass darkly.

The listless way she returns my wave  
says already she is risen  
from our day dream save  
to scarce believe in an apparition

I imagine from her port of call.  
As I depart, she walks toward her ride  
of rides for us all.   
If once more they come along-side

we may see each other freely  
wave and get off gay  
to walk again the vale of eternity  
as we did that week-end day.

* * *

### ninety-three

Still fit at ninety three, she has slowed  
enuf, after seventeen years, to show  
the cut to a nearer stop than the station.  
Forgeting four minutes off this destination,  
"Dont worry if it's late on holidays."

Over the terrace, the evening rays  
squint thru the haze on my sun-hats drop  
as I sit on a slab at the door by the stop.  
A maiden passes in a rain cover  
for her swim-suit: it is an English summer.

Towards my lowly stage and stony  
trots a barrel-chested Thelwell pony  
who wears a fringe and riding-capped tot.  
A desert-hued show-horse clicks on the spot.  
A man on a bike reached back to her muzzle.

She rushes at his hand and nuzzles,  
leaving-off the four-footed tap dance.  
To cross the road, the artiste looks askance  
at this sacrifice on the altar of time  
against door ninety three, where I'm.

* * *

### uncanny reminder

At the readers club, I was denounced:  
You're not a novel reader.  
This was too uncanny a reminder  
for a book-worm to decry  
the late friend thus so echoed by.

She was a serial novel reader.  
Her disdain was to loosen a tie  
of obligation. I cannot deny  
this was reason for a vacation  
from my sustenance of our relation.

Well, I read all her dozen novels,  
and period piece picture poems  
as a journalist in the groove of novels,  
and how she versed her wild elation.  
I was honored in her celebration

of friends, strategicly foldered   
right by my chair on the table.  
Watching me was closest she was able  
to come to offering to lend.  
I didn't know her other friends.

And while it is true that I didn't  
think she knew the half of me  
I guess it was rather mean of me  
to make it so obvious by not offering  
to read this last literary offering

but to forego her at the last.  
One visit, she was steadfastly cutting  
of my pretensions. I readily admitting  
she was right, college was the spark  
that lit the fuse train of my life work.

And what a slow burn it was.  
Such as it was, the display of invention  
attracted scant enuf attention.  
No wonder she was sceptical.  
But I'd responded so equably,

the month later, she was a model  
of feminine propriety, subdued  
from a word out of turn, only once  
coming-up with the cutest of rebukes  
when I so much as put a foot wrong.

From coming of age I always wanted   
to change the world, when, in my dissent,  
the world returned the compliment   
changing me with Dorothys intervention  
to make my way in an extra dimension.

* * *

### jujment day

"There's not much wrong with you."  
I spoke my mind of her, as the one who  
ever saw the need to ask, and dared.

The peg jujing ill of the holes fit  
is as much a jujment of the peg on itself.  
And I know, I, too, must have been pared:

"You've mellowed since first I knew you  
twenty years ago." Her prompt response:  
"My husband said that." As much as to

accept the jujment (not a harsh one)  
she leant forward, to press her case  
as the day-light flashes from her gaze.

She entered the plea that the stream borne  
stone smoothes to a pebble surface;  
a horse becomes docile in harness.

My cliches miss what she really thought.  
Having to look-after her daughter  
sounded apology to a spouse absent.

Dorothy didn't believe in the after-life.  
She was a child in no need of a night light.  
Any last jujment must be in the present.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### Sutton Bank

1

She was determined to take me to the end of the line.  
I had no desire to totter some wind-swept ridge.  
I was glad bad weather forestalled her ringings.  
Well into her nineties, she had to go south,  
to see her brother out, on top of a fall-down.   
But I reckoned without her life-time of outings.

I finally agreed to meet for the bus  
but the company altered the route  
by a road, she in an invisible maze  
apparently aimlessly on the high-way  
pushing her chair. She bore that frail  
fixed head-droop of extreme old age.

A worried-looking woman had come out  
to take her in hand and hide in a house  
just as I arrived to take her side.  
Dorothys look would have reassured  
play-mates meeting on an adventure,  
her eyes alive with a mischievous smile.

We just made for the bridge by the spring  
and ate lunches meant for the longer trip.  
This grandstand of that arena of walks,   
being her limit, I sensed our farewell.  
Tho it would come as a shock to hear her tell  
she could do this short trip no more.

2

Ankles brushed among wiry clumps stemmed  
not more than one under-sized specimen  
of a blueberry to mock at lost plenty.  
She laft it off with a characteristic flare  
of the feminine wave in her hair  
all the way from the nineteen-twenties.

The low tide of a golden mist gave before   
the exposed depths of a green ocean floor.  
From the sea-abandoned head-land,  
a light plane towed gliders in a steep climb  
before their release to the thermals ride  
over the chalk horse abstract on the bank.

We followed the plateau path as it fell.  
This hyper-carrier suspended in a swell  
took the gleaming gliders long slides back  
on its springy heather mattress run-way.  
The fearsome height of clif was allayed  
by out-growths and navigated by tracks.

The visitors center was a water hole  
for hairy models of hunkering home-makers.  
As lost, to moderns, were the skills detected  
from early tinkerings of the industrial age.  
We sat as extras in this exhibit cage  
our own birds of passage for inspections.

Dorothy thought she'd nothing to lose  
in her nineties by booking a flying cruise.  
And had talked of asking all those friends  
for a subscription. (Rather her than me.)  
In the event, she gave us a leaving party.  
And posted-on a book of her poems.

I am glad a Dorothy, tho much reduced, prevailed  
for our last big sunny day out in the dales  
before the chill surprise of her going  
the sudden sun-down of some equatorial clime.  
I am so grateful to her memory that mimes  
all she did for me, this shunned old thing.

* * *

### leaving party

Her birthday party really a good-by  
before the ebb of life desert her.  
Now in a wheel-chair, none heard her   
to be kind to me, because I was shy.  
A history board of family times  
and friends; she, too, in her smiling prime.

The unrevealing snap sideways she'd  
surprised me with, while feeding ducks,  
knowing how bad a foto I took.  
She could stand for a short lucid speech,  
long in her mind, about finding friends  
to get-by from losing her husband

and this party was her thankyou to us   
all. Ninety-eight candles blown in a blaze.  
The foto pose with a knife on the cake  
which they kept saying not to try cut.  
It wasn't so bad, was it? she asked me.  
I had to say: no. Even grief is a gift.

* * *

### death gets one down

"I bet you never thought you would see me  
like this." 'No. Sufficient unto the day  
the evil thereof.' "It is evil."  
She was hunched and shrunken and stif and fey.

She looked blown and pale. You helped her  
stand-up. With the hold of her stick she felt  
to punt between the shores of chairs  
but kept you close, like a life-belt.

'I never thought I would see you again.'  
I said to her surprise. After the party  
in a slump, she was wheeled away.  
I foned. She was not up to have me.

Book-shop shelfs would no longer serve  
her favorites now made me feel alone.  
Then, in the post, a last book of her verse  
and news she was in a rest home.

She asked me to post to her daughter.  
The letter address was all shakes.  
"Yes, write it for me properly."  
It was touch and go she made this place.

She suspected an other stroke.  
In her eighties, pen re-learned the strokes.  
She bought second-hand a computer  
and taught herself even to publish.

Now, she had stopped writing rounds.  
No, she didn't want me to write things down  
for her. She was sure she had finished.  
She was bored. But, days at home, she wished

dozing-off she could sleep under the stars.  
All she could do was knit and that was hard  
on her arms. She never got finished  
beyond a few wool rows of blue scarf.

Every one in the home learned from matron:   
And Dorothy is the oldest one.  
'That must do wonders for your morale.'  
"Oh yes," she sighed resignedly rolling over.

A poet daughters last interview  
I read for a page, when she said:  
"That's enuf for now." I left her the news  
but Dylan Thomas never came-up again.

New glasses somewhat failed her gaze  
and moving a magnifier tired her hand.  
Reading had been always her solace.  
She wrote of dying with a book in her hand.

I surprised her along the corridor  
and the delighted smile this summoned  
told my coming not guessed before.  
Her eyes would go vacant like a blind woman,

a sign her mind was in a limbo  
and I would draw her back to the room.  
If I put her to look out the window,  
she would do so to her doom.

Someone got-up, while I read to her,  
and she looked-up wonderingly after.  
I would start again and she was all there  
again, following fairly well, considering

her deafness had me hand poems over.  
She'd prefered to read by her own flame.  
Now I was sat by her on the sofa  
feeling a tremor run thru her frame

from an erratic heart, and speaking  
close-to with the paper in front of   
us tho she could not much see it.  
She'd make pithy comment: That comes off.

Or note likely poem, The Rambler (her fate).  
Made an impression had The Girls.  
She thought I'd had a good run of late.  
I told her it was due largely to her.

'Coming to see you is the high-light of my week.'  
"You poor thing," her giggle-making reply.  
"Just come once a fortnight." she speaks.  
"You don't have much to tell me.

And bring your poems,"  
she added warmly, to soften the blow.  
Tho she could do no else  
she could still encourage so.

* * *

### wake me

On entering, I saw the eyes closed   
in a drooping head. I sat by her sit   
below the soundless tv, for my visit;  
the others said they didn't mind.

A fire in the grate and snow outside.  
A pile of Christmas cards beside her.  
She fancied a card came from my mother  
saying I was telling our talks together.

I didnt tell I'd told her of telling Ma'am.  
And pleased her to hear of mothers childhood  
trips to the local market town on the flood  
whose tributary ran past the farm.

Just a touch wakes her, and she murmurs:  
"I didn't think you'd come this weather."  
She adds: "Letting me sleep is time wasted."  
'What am I to do next time?' "Wake me."

"Oh, I had a bad night last night.  
I had to call the nurse three times."  
She was finding it harder to breathe.  
I forebore to say it was hard to believe

how she was to go on, and left this riddle.  
"Yes, I had pillows to lift me, a little."  
She was leant back now in the chair,  
her breathing still labored with wear.

'It's all those twenty mile walks, Dorothy.'  
The reminder raised a tired smile broadly.  
"I'm tired of the snow." She knew its lay  
picturesque but she wanted out again.

Some other guest wandered out-side  
in the cold without a hat and coat on  
looking for a visit from her son  
and had to be shepherded in-side.

My brought poem was all too human.  
In youth, I'd canvassed local Tories  
on true PR; met an elderly woman  
played Mozart on piano (Dorothy

played Bach, her grandma joined Labour  
year one). I'd been palmed-off with trite  
Conservative response, "Jack I'm alright"  
that mirrored the famous satire on Labour,

"I'm Alright Jack." Yes, she'd seen the film,  
tho no buf. There followed deep silence  
of unspoken feelings. Others conversed  
among themselves, as I confided to her.

She replied: "It's a great honor."  
'Well, we'll see if anything comes of it.'  
(Experience taught me: generally not.)  
'They have a strong democratic tradition.'

"Ive always liked the Scottish people Ive met."  
'Your poems of the Keltic wilds seem set  
for me more even than they are for you.'  
Dorothy had door-opening dreams she knew

meant she was looking for her husband  
which may have been why she didnt respond.  
She would never accept this loss was less  
a loneliness to anyone elses.

I changed tack to her favorite Orkneys  
gave her a fine poem; and Iona.  
'Tho, you didn't like the Hebrides?'  
"No, but I was sick before that holiday."

She really had sicked curdled milk  
outside her tour bus, then got a taxi  
to catch-up en route. That blunder  
could not stop this nineties trooper.

"I havent had many visitors lately;"  
she gave me a look and I wondered  
whether or not to renew my offer  
of weekly calls, it proved, belatedly.

She was nearly out of syrup of figs.  
I offered to bring some from town.  
The staf assured me they were in  
and I'd no need to walk all that round.

Afterwards, my mother explained Dorothy  
was not used to having things done for   
her. That's why she was only  
onto getting low and buying more.

She'd been slow to have me help provide.  
She taught me how to live and how to die.  
If death is a sleep, as they say, and you be  
on the other side, I say: 'Wake me.'

* * *
_return tocontents_

### the life she lent left with her

Up and down the ribbon road, no-one knew.  
The air was getting squally and not to be late  
I rang the vicars lodge. He said: Quite a way yet.  
But I was glad to break loose of estates  
for field and hedge holding back the woods fret  
to leave an out-look all round the heavens.

I moved on with the illuminated vapors  
in shades as warm as the autumn foliage  
that clogs a country lane as they burn.  
Within weeks, I was walking snow-fields  
slid feet like sugar, if a brown churn  
to slush in town. Winter held, that year.

Twenty years of after-noon visits, now  
she was tired in an hour of our repose.  
I took a detour back in town, passing  
unstocked windows, side-roads to depots,  
a few back-street work-shops, still going,  
an open rail-way by a river running high

enuf for trees to wade to their waists.  
A pipe was thundering-in more wash.  
Over the bridge, the hill-side is broke-  
off, where Dickensian ware-houses stash.  
Dickens himself was big here, in a folk  
memory of a visit by the great man.

High heavy columns of stone held-up  
how strong the banks were in his day.  
The author of Little Dorrit exposed their fall.  
My host herself was in the literary trade.  
She was bused to the classical hall  
for concerts, not to her classical tastes.

The spirit of the place departed with her.  
Made me leave, too, perhaps for-ever.  
A hill-sides imposing buildings wall  
cut-out the view until you reached the top  
that opened onto a sea of vale  
thru gaps in mature park-land trees,

traditional tower church and mansions.  
Down other route past the cattle stalls  
where my grandad traded, a day out  
for his family (forgotten by the small)  
in this still prosperous market town.  
Tho there are more signs of shops

famished or bare in the side-streets.  
One premises was abandoned to piles  
of old books left to rot down. Further  
down to the main street, the sky-line  
lowered over flimsier and flashier  
utility shops, and back to the station.

* * *

### looking for acorns

I'd had it with hazel nuts.  
My mother told me: They often don't   
mature here. Nothing but husks.  
And you can't be late or theyre gone,  
I found, going back to a friendship way.  
And a lonely prospect it was, I'll say,  
big-dipper hill, on a damp october day.

Dorothy now confined to a home  
and for less time than she led believe.  
They say roasted acorns taste like almonds.  
She wanted to try them. So, she's  
still an appetite, she'l have me know.  
I explained that I was looking to grow  
them and not finding many oaks.

Well, it's the right time, she reckons.  
Their wavy leaves would wave me down.  
But their bases clogged in nettles  
and gratings of dense under-growth.  
Thread-bare hedgerows into the distance  
bled green to a parasites sickly essence  
of yellow pin-cushions mounted insects.

Way past the side-lane to her fold  
the rising road turned-off to no-where.  
This would be the route to the wolds  
with not a village settled there  
that the husk of my friend last rode  
beyond the range of a living soul.  
I trecked at a trot back down the slope

before the lane to the home again  
where, over the road, a towering oak  
bordered an estate. Branches strained  
far enuf to reach over the road  
that exposed, at last, a few acorns.  
Foraging the verge unearthed a score.  
My friend, over the road, seemed no more.

The sun was low; the bus times pass.  
After the worst winter in thirty years,  
seeds germinate in pots under glass.  
More show amongst the potted cheer.  
Outside, two or three. I plant them close  
as a coppiced trunk. Would acorns grow?  
Looking dubious, she'd supposed so,

as I, that I'll see fruit this memorial  
to last days with my companion.  
By spring, their wavy ribs first parasol'd.  
Green-fingers cleared my barren plantings  
stuffed a nut in with her cuts and good grief  
I almost plucked a weed in disbelief   
of its heart-shaped saw-tooth hazel leaf.

* * *

### cherry apples

In the valley of the hazels  
not a nut shell.  
Back at the bus stop  
over the wall, knocked  
by a bunch of cherries.

I plucked serries  
and found-out happen  
I ate cherry apples  
sour dry pink flesh.  
Now I know why

the birds passed them by.  
The travel times invite  
to my late friends town.  
First stop, the old warehouse,  
I once found the lines

of Adlestrop man  
out of its lumber mine  
of antiques, but for that   
brand new petrol station.  
Places, like people, disappear.

Half-day late on  
half the shops shut here  
half a friendship shy.  
The streets desolate  
and so was I.

* * *

### the lamp of poetry

I only got around to rehearse  
an account, she said, was poetry:  
The past is turned by the spade of verse.  
A rag-tag of failures and non-events  
the lamp of poetry newly presents.

Perhaps it's as well, I lacked presence  
of mind to ask what day she died.  
For all I knew her so well and good sense  
to confide in more than any middle  
I yet told her remarkably little.

During one of my more recent strays  
from out-put, Dorothy urged: "Don't stop  
writing poetry." That was her dry way  
of caring about me after she'd gone.  
She nurtured. Ive since crossed far on

deserts of obscurity for oases.  
I no longer feel quite the fugitive  
from myself. The novelist persuasive  
forward rolled, the girl in a swing flight  
taking to the journey with an appetite.

When it was already obvious she was  
slowing down, I confessed: I'll miss you.  
She rejoined in a rush: I hope so.  
Not like her at all to be over-come.  
Then the conversation resumed.

* * *

# Loves loneliness loves company.

_return tocontents_

### and some have bratness thrust upon them

We're going now, come on.  
Here's one for him and for you, one.  
I'm not stopping for you to look

any more. I'm not waiting for you...  
No, you can't have that book.  
This one will do.

"I dont want that one!"  
The toddler breaks down. Her face  
pouts and crumples. She throws back

her own choice with a whack  
of picture book into the book-case.  
"I dont want that one!"

Alright, youre not getting that one.  
Are you going to stay here all night?  
And have them take you home?

The teased child bawls her way out.  
An assistant softly groans to rout  
the riots where world summits roam.

The mother closes the shop door:  
I'm not taking you here anymore.  
Her upright posture affronts like a lie.

Turning to prostrate herself and cry,  
her child foretells a wedding day  
when the love of her life has gone away.

* * *

### sullen

He didnt want to talk at all.  
But she talked him round,  
without call, to an impatience  
for words at play. She turned  
slowly but without delay

and stretched herself, to leave  
an arm lolling in the lap  
of her palm. She sat next  
to him, on the last day,  
gave address and showed the way.

He nodded but his look  
was hard and vain animal  
distrust and flight from pain.

* * *

### that bird...

An eight year olds wings  
of hair cropped at the nape  
profiled a beaky chick.  
Bold and bright-eyed  
her bearing staunch upright  
beheld all with unswerving

good-humors insight.  
Mirth seized her  
a harlequin complexion  
till silent lips groomed  
and eyes gleamed to smile  
a gaze shrewd but serene.

Hands to eye of her storm  
hurl high tidal tears  
in lashes rainbow-flare  
seige-tower waves.  
She stifled a petrel distress -  
or distance - call.

* * *

### the prisoner

A boy was over-taken  
by the absurd notion  
a tuf acted the cur.  
It seemed safe now  
to put on a show.  
Surprise! Number One comes  
and goes, remonstrating

with him to see sense.  
He knew nothing of rufs.  
Was he so dense?  
No, only dumb  
and unresponsive.  
Passionate reasonableness  
cannot reprieve the suspicion

of a plea in his eyes.  
Who bound him before her  
and why? What crime   
in some former life  
what ill in this  
dismays he's no match  
for her good-will?

* * *
_return tocontents_

### dizzy mod

From all rush and splash about  
of fearsome flouncing in and out,  
a dizzy mod of delightful swagger  
affects an infants box of chatter.  
Muddled mutters over-fast  
prevent the smart talk getting past.

Her mishaps are an object of fun,  
she flouts mock snooty ways to shun.  
The friendly feeling of peering eyes,  
in serious effort, self-hypnotise.  
She denies herself of any merit  
to seize on any given credit.

Exchanged insults'd paddle apace,  
not be marooned in a tide race.  
Lolling beside you, turned in her track,  
she rolls a relaxed arm round you and back.  
But is, responding to the unknown,  
at her best or comes into her own.

* * *

### surrender

Months enuf had gone by, he felt,  
for his last crime to be laid.  
Tho, hint of scorn from her escorts  
and he'd be off, no weakling, he.

Hands in his pockets, he edged forward  
grunting her formal first name  
to savor the magic of its owner.  
And to be different from her friends.

A ripple passed up her spine.  
Heightened, too, a coaxing tone,  
that prefered him her nick-name  
with thrilling smile, by dint of dimples.

To his clueless, brooding look,  
the scapegrace self-corrected.  
She was preening pleased on so little  
seeming grudged attention.

But the sincerest of compliments  
is in an unwilling surrender  
ever so little to face the danger  
of passion, unmanning and unrequited.

* * *

### bewitched

A sun-king of a teacher commands  
raised grove of sapling hands  
issue plaintive peeps from cute  
fifteen years of slinky beaute.

Made uneasy by affection  
admiring her fair complexion  
gravely her disdain defects  
oppressively to pay respects.

Sun-shine quenches deep blue eyes  
to lime seas tropical surprise  
with jubilant sparks that deride.  
Wildest night falls in black glide

of hair. She's fancy-free from guiles,  
brows and lips both arched in smiles  
genial contempt ennobles the snitch  
of a cloaked-in-purple pretty witch.

* * *

### girls threw themselves at him

Young Streetwise was out-grown by his voice.  
A first lass joined him to try their new toys.  
Canned music whispered to her to jive.  
They got down to business. And as she left,  
a quiet stocky lad arrived beside.

Girl two crammed into Streetwises corner,  
so that: I 'ave a dead leg, he informed her.  
The leaving lass stood behind to stalk.  
Is she jealous? Yes she is! they decide.  
Girl two popped the quiet lad like a cork:

I only sat so close Streetwise, she blagged,  
because I thought Quiet-lad was coming back.  
Nothing fazed, girls threw themselves at him,  
Streetwise leaves. Quiet-lad a mite turned  
to girl two, but made no move to her rim.

She combed out her hair  
and had a pre-occupied air.  
Quiet reigned.  
Not a word passed between them.  
Some things don't change.

* * *

### lightning romance

The mating season squeezed into a fortnights  
holiday from, since roofless, factories  
rag trade posses of West Riding cow-girls  
in their kiss-me-quick bad guy black hats  
banter to a duel any lws lads or lassw  
with shoulder-bag straps some lass pendulum swings  
under the lunar clock tower of her hypnotic crotch.

Escorts into a pub, self-conscious youths  
awkwardly manoevre behind her cotton print  
skirt to do the honors of a furtive pinch:  
a whoop she gives is at pains to please -- whoever.  
Time, gentlemen, please, and damsel, at hotel  
window over-head, opens shop on her gudies,  
to sturdy cheers, and sneers: Theyre all the same.

Keep ye k-nockin' ye kanno kom in:  
After curfew, spwking next door, a discoer  
will make his last call, by first light, to kick in a panel.  
For one, three sleepless flights up, at three,  
the summer thunder rain-dances in the streets.  
Blessed pair of sirens, traipsing up town, tempt the lightning,  
one of them, with joyous shouts up to fuk her bum.

* * *

### on a technicality

Before she got by the check-out robot  
he caught her in order to court her.  
He'd just met her at the self-service:  
reaching for pomegranates off the same shelf,  
he gave her his.

His suit began when he gave her his suite.  
You know that elf of a girl with the eye-brows?  
Sam sez she 'ant left 'im.  
She's just a bit of a h...high-brow  
and gone on a course.

Of course she can't see him -  
not 'cos she dont want to -  
til things git back to normal  
whenever that will be.  
Sam sez that's the nub of it.

She's just on loan  
on loan to the university.  
He's only been thrown  
thrown out on a technicality.  
But he leaves the pomegranates be.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### farewell

In passing but twice was she mine to see  
since the childhood I failed to befriend her  
in. A kak-timed hello from a stranger  
was an unnerving idea not to be.  
Not to be caught in surrender of pride

but cause ever for joy was the very  
sight of her. Excited smiles grinning wide  
at her, wickedly lithe, she brightened some  
an instant before deprecatory  
asides with that sharp hand plied a glum chum.

Russells centenary: at two, radio  
three thrived on The Marriage Of Figaro.  
With a bird-caged rush around, I glimpsed wend  
her brides back; on the kerb, a high-heel bend.

* * *

### falling star

As a vain child, I vowed never to live  
by appearance alone, tho privately  
I yearned for natures nobility  
whose pretty patronage held me captive

in secret, too proud to own, til of age,  
against existence alone, I throw pride  
away, revolting all pretty young plied.

The wished-for went with their names in marriage.  
And strangers glance off a smile to placate  
as would skirt crown of a fallen meteor  
and coolly take samples that grade the ore.

Like a cross raised, at prayer for a date  
from a vampire, she'll have no divorces  
from her steady, as she goes, star courses.

* * *

### erosion

While an island maintains its stand  
the sea goes round to gently wear down  
in shy embrace, left rills in the sand.

Land into beach is brought down and round.  
The tide confronts the eye on every side.  
Not to take sides, still it comes aside  
and gives leave to move, really command.

Unmoved by any cool pretence to save  
the stand, gone round, is left as planned  
and rebirths of moons in waves turn graves.

Believe it, delight, and know the case  
is not to presume on a shining place  
as held a moment in its regard  
tho a moment is good as all time barred.

* * *

### her loveliness

We Frankensteins  
make a good-looking girl  
monster of revenge  
induced into a whirl  
with Her Loveliness

who gets the theory  
men never weary  
but needs be merely  
so hopeless  
pretty potency's ignored

by some likely luckless male  
to be scored against  
thru a subtle encouragement  
to lure the fool  
into his punishment

with brushed caress here  
and steady stare there  
of promise unfulfilled  
make him aware of her  
trying her skill to see how long

a line terse smiles hang him on,  
in hope wrong about her  
furthers the drop to despair  
exhalted view of man  
once low childs care.

* * *

### star-crossed

who wouldnt give even a good-by  
sure's worth not much of a sigh or cry  
begins the lesson of life in the wry  
tho loves sun falling out with the sky  
over-turns so the spectral stars spy  
all alone before a mocking moon pry  
round the shroud blankets of cloud lie  
over tired love cannot die but turn shy  
as children of the night not with light die  
facing without ever knowing why  
the glamor spell passed close to defy  
a passion no more cared to deny  
the mischief to half choose those by  
in the dark and lost as night froze by

in the dark and lost as night froze by  
the mischief to half choose those by  
a passion no more cared to deny  
the glamor spell passed close to defy  
facing without ever knowing why  
as children of the night not with light die  
over tired love cannot die but turn shy  
round the shrouding blankets of cloud lie  
all alone before a mocking moon pry  
over-turns so the spectral stars spy  
tho loves sun falling out with the sky  
begins the lesson of life in the wry  
sure's worth not much of a sigh or cry  
who wouldnt give even a good-by

* * *

### plea

begged and prayed for love  
mother most kind and wise  
in the order of things  
didnt demand conditions  
other than those  
being alive already brings:  
that could love only who  
it was rage of nature to.

Some-how was heard.  
A woman, well worn  
into middle age –  
she'd passed, passed her  
without a word --  
slowly turned into a question  
of go give self up.

She'd been less ill than wrecked  
with all kinds of sickness  
and how much so emotionly  
scarce dare reflect.  
But that many were in  
on the action, hard found  
a common-place attraction.

Then but prayed  
she's on the mend again  
and off to her problems  
or with someone else  
in person or spirit.  
There were times when  
insistent calls did catch her  
right down on luck, with none to hand.

All of a sudden, of herself,  
she once made wistful visit.  
No-one can have too many friends;  
even as the mentor said.  
Still that infinite sense of loss  
from attempting the futile   
love half caring, half desire,

tho desire only half selfish,  
hers to rebuff, while she tried  
turn to those more free  
for dire attentions.  
Life is a choice of regret,  
so, to and for love,  
pray and beg yet.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### loves company

i)

To be a gift, given back, foretells all  
human love must come to loss in the end,  
if not from the start, having to befriend  
that anguish. Terror is the foe to stall  
oneself of giving. The mercy is love  
need not stop for want of a love returned  
and by that denial, loving may be learned  
the way of living. An easier love, of  
enjoyment, partners share, can grow to woe  
in care of young, who for mates must foresake  
them. Even should one never learn but take  
some day all loving can do is let go  
if only ever to show a person  
no less than loves self may possess one.

ii)

To be in love was not enuf. Much more  
must one live in love, a Being to be  
with, called God, alone but never lonely,  
and no more do without, to withstand your  
loss or loves wait. If love's, for once, returned,  
still we need the habit of love, to make  
us livable with, as all live for its sake.  
Love is an artist whose skills must be learned.  
Craftsmen work with the grain or lines of stress.  
A silken thread, tho easily broken,  
may be, into fine art, strongly woven.  
So, lovers each others limits must bless  
or sheer strength of will can break a joint need  
and oneself in meaning ones vows to heed.

iii)

This woman, time and again, did prefer  
requite not love, leaving but loves own  
company, as one of all those hearts flown  
out to her. This was a gift failed see her  
more happy. Her adventures, in knowing  
so many, had met with the rare one, dealt  
an aura of loves doing, to be felt  
almost as some near presence: foregoing  
not merely to devour goods was in mind,  
but all desires absence, in a state you  
deemed scarcely to exist. Yet to prove who  
is for real, this saint was the draw. You'll find  
enuf surround you, when not wanting much  
their wants, and your means with ends are in touch.

iv)

To realise in others the need to give  
is better than receive, we all can ask  
if only so they are given the task  
to choose who by their charity shall thrive.  
We get by on such time some few can spare.  
Loves courage has its rich and poor in heart.  
Sacrifice means what we dont want to part  
from, but must, much or little as we dare.  
Indeed, to expect all of one's unfair!  
For, if you yield, to one, all devotion,  
cheap as free to throw away on someone  
else, they may do just that, without a care  
that it beggar you, a displaced person  
from the country of love, known as heaven.

* * *

### toeing the line

Hands, pressed to her face, hide and make as blushed,  
from airs and graces (that secretly please)  
naively yielding admiration with ease  
and a moments make-believe tear to be brushed.  
Sweet anxious soul of indecision  
pedestal-kneeling sensual tiredness  
to flutter a frown of pretty distress  
as hid behind a brazen vision.

Yes, fashioned somewhat on St Trinians lines  
were infants school cum shop assistants smocks  
regaling her little ladyship locks.  
From black stockings worn gauze a toe-nail shines  
thru, without varnish, that did but enhance  
unruly gardens rebelious romance.

* * *

### natures child

Some sixth sense of sensuousness  
rounded her, observed.  
A slip of cream cheeks her -  
sullen, a pendulous pair.

Gaping pouty lip ripples  
streams of humor to rapids  
of tickled pent-up giggles.  
Preening shy, she lets fall

modest eyes of one sweetly  
tensed to watch discreetly.  
From a leaning, gazing  
reverie of affection

she stands neatly meeting  
in homely guise gentler than smiles.  
Midst hairline cascades  
in mood meditative

she's a magic glade.  
From a pin-ups over-head stretch  
to pathos of grateful on-rush  
glumly her look humbly enquired.

* * *

### a compass wavers

A compass wavers at ways before her  
in heartfelt sentiments awkward fending  
him off, lists-tilting heroic facing  
him off, this suave if grave girls implorer  
turns her off, airily his ignorer,  
falters, be relenting from an ending -  
as merciless fierceness from him rending  
raises her to its remorseful aura

that redeems condemning him to complete  
course, lost, without magnetic attractions  
of her moods, mysterious and knowing,  
mete melancholics choleric defeat  
in his moral compass quarters actions  
unsteady, unstably to and froing.

* * *

### near miss

Lost in an awareness but how she sailed  
seas swing and slide off the figure-head ride  
of the swell. Her thrust-forward face wears pride  
of place, bows parting of the spray unveiled.

Look-outs desperate "Scatter!" to the crew  
was informed by top-sails throwing the light  
at the dark ship looming in sudden sight.  
Suspense -- a grappling collision full threw  
all on outraged timbers screeching surprise.

Pilot movers out of sea-lanes, not Presses,  
round coastal verdures seeming softnesses  
beyond a wild headland into sunrise  
swung off with her; her hands, as forestays at  
bowsprit of a lifted keel, belay that.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### swanning around

Of extraordinary expressive speech  
she accepts your conforming  
to good taste, perhaps  
really unsure why she's in haste  
not to question the conventions.

They breach  
in a quick command  
of intrigue.  
Does she live  
routine like a story

to believe  
the heroine is herself,  
you perceive,  
and rehearse her temper  
in jealousy or affection?

She straightens up to eaves  
of thatched Saxon-style  
sun-bleached hair;  
compact lips,  
calm eyes fluoresce her stare.

She rabble-roused urbanely  
your reprieves for cheek.  
Reproach, puffing out her breast  
she mock-shocked ghost-of-smiles  
swan-like majesty.

* * *

### making up

She's modest but upright  
coming-to with satire in her smile.  
Tones clear suggest reply deserved.

A lisp-look turned near to distress,  
the reserved might risk regress  
to poignancy for one bewildered

when thought, gone with her,  
all desire to afar, as in a well shade  
stars telescope during the day.

* * *

### sensible

Warm touch of light  
on the skin was unseen,  
vibrations were felt  
before hearing was keen.

Now radar blips  
and heat-foto sight  
can sensor her home  
on a foggy night

to a home-grown world  
of own telly eyes  
while telefones keep  
on line his replies

having make do with  
a long distance kiss  
since the one was such  
a very near miss

brushing her cheek  
so the healing blow slips  
off the tip of her nose  
to spring from her lips.

* * *

### cardiac Bel

A brave sight, the bright and blooming Belinda  
working those intolerably long young doctors hours  
worked up intolerably longing patients impatience.  
Thru sickly mens wards, with bed charts gone seismic  
she stole the hearts of heart cases stealing a short cut  
in short-cut slip of a night shift slipping on night shift  
as she slipped by, in the duty nurse half-light  
like a dark ship in the night. Edwardians taught  
gasp at young ladies ankles, in duty relapsed  
at passing great wodges of wobbling thighs.  
Hobbledehoys eyes-popping breath-dropping heart-  
stopper, Bel prescribed moon-rise on skirting tides --  
also raised cleavage for weaning dosage --  
raised her boss the nobel prize. No, Bel, not for you,  
Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin, Madame Wu.

* * *

### cover

Not till art school did I behold the nude.  
Her raised palms and thumbs outward  
attitude, with wrists for necks,  
peek their geese heads and beaks  
in imperial crest of arms fashion,  
ekes out breasts cover

but to impose bosom.  
She waits on self-hugged shoulders  
for cheek rests. Curls cover brow arched   
in clear line arose from cute nose  
under the crowns inclined cover  
to pay tribute to covered thighs

modest inclined cover one  
the other. Cover for all her form  
with a lover of muted lip  
in soft shadow-lit chin;  
only a hip pronounced  
her by its chin.

* * *

### found sculpture

The cup handle broke  
from a holders embrace   
turning it into a   
topological figurine  
of the Venus de Milo

* * *
_return tocontents_

### storm of passion

Fountain trains sheer the rails with snow-plow waves.  
The dressed stone road jumps in its sockets  
from the shock to the shore as the spray explodes.

A blown sky-high skirt of tides slips its race  
of foam-lace back to the well of all being  
leaving an aerosol flirt of salt.

Luminous green shags feed on the swell.  
Over-flow tubes squirt and suck with blow-hole snorts  
at corrosive pools in concrete pocked.

Round about, my dainty dashes court  
each passing alcove in the sea-walls  
trapping second tier en route to the blocs

blinded and deafened end of the world.  
The corner is turned on a youth, hauls  
his girl with her back braced against a rock face.

A clasped hand-bag buttons the flight of steps -  
even lucre has loosed its grasp - to tempt, as  
I leapt from the floods so much blood in the ears.

On this desert way, it appears he is me  
and mine, the girl, whose face I could not see.  
Then I'm a wandering spirit again.

* * *

### double star

Rocking and rising  
became rock steady  
that close  
two heat envelopes  
merged into one atmosphere.

How lovely she was.  
Watched by the would-be  
other woman would  
whimsicly whirl him  
apart to no worse fate.

* * *

### male and female

The sporting-capped youths arms  
collared the maid, he was walking with,  
as if a mutt on its hind-quarters  
had decided he was the master

(tho he would fall back on  
all fours were he not her pet  
sharing the human condition).  
He regarded dependance upon her

much as a public chain of office  
confered the more dignity  
for being more weighty;  
she, bearing herself up-right

and looking straight ahead  
as one proud of her destiny  
straddled by a living satchel -  
to do her home-work!

* * *

### a strapping lass

Boss frowns down before Stompabouts  
strapping girl way to work out  
for keeping herself "cosy"  
when not by-the-hearth rosy.

"Getting back at you," she takes ill  
kind words, to quip: "Cocky devil."  
Gamely she blooms cheeks to  
a haughty amused one up on you.

For what do we deserve  
this free show of your vim and verve?

With pleasure, she clomps and fumes  
to be good enuf to tell whom  
she likes: "I'm in a bad mood."

You sound it. You do feud.

Breaking her into the brunt  
Chief gives her cause to take affront.  
The strapping lass straps him with a clout.  
Never cast one till May is out

Those toiling hands out of control,  
make a crown-enthroned hat roll.  
Threats, in earnest, almost do the trick  
of convincing us all she's sick

of it, as rubbers smoulder.  
Wonder wide-eyes you dont scold her.  
She asks: Are mumbled orders aired  
by "the talking horse?" Her straw hair

downs on a berry suit. Bird-cheerful  
her sore throats croaking earful  
of squeeks (as she clocks out) take wing  
from peeps to a stream of singing.

* * *

### a rarity

The rarity of her had more than  
usual display value for her man  
who swaggered in a dream of self-esteem  
thru his own race, all around him, til he  
almost bumped into a fellow honkie.

Aside, he swiveled, full of concern  
for his fellow man, who took no notice  
of this walking her past a street churn  
of colonists, not yet colonised, by the sixties.

Her generous figures gracious pace  
in a grey suit; swept-back hairs coastal bushes  
as if held by pins of palate brushes  
for each mixed color of the human race.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### the German lovers

He looks on me with a dreamy smile  
of peace on earth and good will to all men  
due the woman in front, on the omnibus,  
separated by her seat backs blunt steel  
ceremonial sword of chastity.  
The sporadic gutterals, she peppers him with,  
are in the universal language of loves

lilting laughter, between periodic head  
engagings; her cheeks, too young for pinch or flab  
partially eclipsed so just one ice blue  
iris focuses its wheel of re-birth  
on my furtive smirks at their dovings.  
The mans similar slimness gently rounded  
like a first fall of snow on his lean land;

white flecks above the shaved side-burns,  
a mud-flecked window reflects hooded eyes  
as he sucks on the paps of her lips;  
she, throwing a burning brassiere of arms  
about his shoulders. Only a childs silver wire  
on her fingers; their engagement ring, a circuit  
of Herriot country they have no eyes for.

* * *

### unconscious concentration

The mad scientists plant  
of an unembodied brain?  
A "cute babe" laid on table

a bonnet of a basket  
that potted mostly head  
sculpted of the palest clay.

Lips and eye-lids set firm  
in their need to sleep  
out death to the senses.

The unconscious concentration  
of this hold-off the world  
defied it was no still-birth.

* * *

### the introduced

About her, there was an innocence  
in service that freed even  
from the burden of its dignity.

The very sight of her  
made the unsteady man get up,  
from his chair, to be introduced.

An infant was held, to her side,  
with one hand, the other hip swung out  
to balance the off-springs weight.

She bore the boy with the slender strength  
of a suspension bridge  
between the head-lands of the generations.

Her swing rocked to sleep  
as rocked awake Bill Haley Comet  
surfing the waves of his double bass.

* * *

### marriage guidance

On prolactin smile of maternal bliss  
she turned back to her own  
true treasure trove in a cart,  
with hugging voice, prone to kiss.  
Talking to babies is good for them:

You love Mummy, only Mummy,  
and youre never going to leave her,  
are you? You love her so much,  
you wont get married ever, will you?  
You'll stay at home to look after Mummy,  
till youre sixty. (She squeeled with ecstasy).

No'but a few minutes on, the registry  
littered confetti for blossom cherry.  
Zebra suits flanked a flamingo-gowned lassy  
whose self-consciousness made self an enemy.  
Anemone, the state spouse was of an age,

in no unseemly way, would have woken  
the young mothers dreamy smile  
as her childs marriage day. Two kids  
in carriage, whose handle carried mans weight,  
not he theirs, were, by sneering sage, told:  
Look at those idiots getting married.

* * *

### a sherrickin'

From high-boned Highland cheeks,  
taut chin, drawn back thin, speaks  
imperious scorn for those who dare  
her righteous quiver of bare  
self-contained wrath. To make mild  
her nonetheless adventurous child,

with the bosses name, she intimidates  
from a fire escape circum-navigates  
to a crows nest on bed-room windows:  
she ahoys her daughter from below.  
A sherrickin' she got her man thru  
steadfast repeated to make believe true.

Roguish close or touching shy  
as heather her humor is dry.  
Surprise of grateful eyes disarming  
denouncing whispers make more alarming.  
As for leading questions aimed wide  
wildly she lafs her sides.

* * *

### an allegory of love

Welcome to paradise  
where, by the fates, bright  
sun makes you smile on her  
creation, whose chauvinists  
shun the tourist nation,  
with whom a treaty's signed,  
for other states to laud and favor.

Visits enjoyed ill  
the growing audacious  
guerrilla war. Routinely  
rulers own negotiators  
assassinators were of promise,  
til rebels controled the capitol  
to slay relations.

Token reconciliations  
kept foreign good will.  
Communications, like Zen  
one-handed clap, became one-way.  
Powers destabilise such  
countries to exploit.  
Loving, tho, may mean letting go.

* * *

### double act

I knew the friend would be just fine  
from the moment her saw I.  
I'd have liked her to be mine.  
You could tease til her face would shine  
but their chores ringed each her eye.

I knew the friend would be just fine.  
A balancing attraction she gave sign  
before the friend began to put me by.  
I'd have liked her to be mine.  
She always sent was to decline  
me making sure I didn't sigh.

I knew the friend would be just fine.  
She was modest, she was boldly out of line.  
The pair of them were enuf to make you cry.  
I'd have liked her to be mine.  
She was more than I could well divine  
and the friendship theirs to me deny.

I knew the friend would be just fine.  
I'd have liked her to be mine.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### when the good-byes were said

When the good-byes were said  
from the harbor of attentions,  
you watched her cast off.

And altho the tide did  
not immediately take her,  
you could see, by the bridge,

she was about-facing a voyage,  
in her own water-tight world,  
on which you had no passage

and would not be remembered in.  
You were already forgotten  
before she made the open sea.

* * *

### the bewildered wife

They give their age over-hauls.  
They over-haul their age  
more than shows in a face

til the mouth's set in a vice  
as hard as the hand that hauls  
the bewildered wife

into breaking step for a step-wife  
from the altar of wed-lock  
to the altar of sacrifice.

He gambles away the old life  
throwing a few million bucks  
on new pairing of genetic dice.

* * *

### divorce

Divorce forced upon her  
an addicts trauma  
down to the "spoilt child"  
who wont consent on  
nor leave despised palliatives  
for her former spouse.

Misfortune comes as a jujment  
on the victim to punish herself  
for sin real or imagined  
at loves death for her bereavement.  
She wanders as a Shade  
in the Underworld

with Shade of the deserter  
living a dream and a snare  
that her real life proved to be.  
Some camps inmates view  
on lifes meaning saw their mass  
trial by ordeal as way

to forgiveness and reunion.  
She'd have been humbled  
reserve of two wives –  
tho not called-up –  
was,  
half living two lives.

* * *

### not a natural right

Drank deeply rejection   
grief and insecurity  
of a woman distressed.  
Vows had been suddenly  
subverted almost fatally

as a poisoning the well  
of her passions.  
And all the calamities  
that ensued were more  
than enuf for God or man.

Love is not a natural right  
and if a spring runs out  
need seeks of others  
in this or any life to come  
you suppose and still entreat:

sweetly flow among  
so many supplicants  
as you do with such ease  
but allow to live by  
the eternal source of love.

* * *

### freed as a bird

The down turned to hoar  
as her pallid face bore  
into a permanent blizzard.

He was hearty as a cabin hearth  
in his rough-hewn nature  
comfort of the crying creatures  
in wilderness, in melancholy.

But when the fire went out, he   
went into the woods yonder  
where the wild swans wander.

Waded into the river windings  
when they caught in mans bindings  
to share their extravagant freedom   
into the skies he released them.

* * *

### the wife that never was

The wife that never was  
wears the same coat  
I last saw her in  
an age ago.

She stands beside me  
and smiles  
when queues stretch  
and so do I.

She is the reason I am here  
tho she is not.  
I keep her in mind  
when the day tries

and wish the way  
she put in awe  
could be for some-one  
I adored like her.

* * *

### the girls

They have a distant look of Polynesia  
but for their pony-tailed Indian hair.  
The one gives me a look that means: man  
(who knows she is prettier  
but is too old to care).

The one has the other girl reach  
her near arm out of its sleeve.  
The one has her mobile set-up for her.  
The one talks and talks some Babel speech  
liquid as the Southern Seas.

The ones phoneless head-resting hand  
displays fingers, pale and slender,  
their nails well-formed and unworn.  
The other girl has working hands  
rounded like the rest of her.

Some point needs her own fone on-line,  
too. She points the one into seeing,  
now and again, the out-side crowding-in  
its set-asides of wind-break pines.  
Yes, it's still there – for the time being.

* * *

## part 4: the romance of religion

_return tocontents_

### walking into the morning sun

Walking into the morning sun  
this must be how the devout on their journey  
put God before them, their religions  
reflecting the massive personality

of the Solar as Divine on Earth.  
This luminous dab leaves a black hole.  
Silver outlines gold spears on the verge.  
Sweet yarrow bobs from grass by the road.

A pale warmth comes thru the perfect calm  
that the half-naked trees, untrembling, trace  
under a light blue coat, the vapors scarve.  
No-one stops to catch their slow-moving wave.

Cars whizz close; in blasts, the lorries tower.  
Toiling north to the tip with my load,  
in bluster and spatter, in mist and lower,  
the joy of release, returning home.

* * *

### re-vision

Before enlightenment,  
draw water, chop wood.  
After enlightenment,  
draw water, chop wood.

Before enlightenment,  
draw water, chop wood.  
After enlightenment,  
save water, grow wood.

* * *

### the Buddha attains enlightenment

When the sun of Sri Lanka dims to a foot-light  
vapors fall in sashes of an abandoned carnival.  
Deathly pale is the reclining Buddha

as the rising moon rounds out a stupa  
from among the ruins. Along the temple tiers  
march-on the motionless high reliefs

beyond a huddled frieze of macaques  
in the silenced Babel of their banyan colonnade  
reaching to the rolling hub of spun-off star-dust.

On its springy mattress of spines  
a solitary porcupine snuffles thru the night.  
Tarsius globes hold a violet perfume of light.

Towering from the henge central portal  
the enlightened one reflects a non-message  
in the stillness of the lotus posture.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### the Dalai Lama election

From the north-east,  
curious cloud forms came to Lhasa  
and a great star of fungus  
on a wooden pillar  
of the late Dalai Lama shrine.  
To the east, wise men, sent   
thru-out Tibet, secretly

realised, at the village of Taktser,  
the Regents jade and gold vision  
of monastery roofs,  
and turquoise, the tiles of a house.  
A two-year old asked the visiting  
servant for his rosary,  
really the former rulers,

received, on guessing   
he was "a lama of Sera."  
By these and many other signs  
was the lama convinced  
here is the new incarnation  
of "the ocean" of wisdom,  
the Dalai Lama.

* * *

### Kung Fu-tse

The shao-lin priests martial arts tour  
de force came from the unarmed poor  
who flung to dust many a high-horsed   
armor-clanking sword-weilding war-lord.

Kung Fu-tse, let propriety record,  
is name of honorable Confucius,  
tho Jesuit missionaries confuse us  
by giving him his Latin baptism.

Kung fu translates as "Empty return"  
which makes Kung Fu-tses concern  
to swaddle China in selfless decorum  
to promote civil peace, all the more rum.

The Buddhist wheel of lifes sensory slaves  
is powered by a love for no thing craves.

* * *

### Pythagoras on science

(a researchers prayer)

Learning is of answers possessed, did we  
but ask the right questions. If God, we come  
from, makes us of immortal lineage, we  
cannot begin to know home: tho become  
exiles, it is ours still, to only recall.  
Who has guessed truth counts less than to know  
God thru His Works. Well be original  
or feel the divine is in you, yet go

in mind back to our divine or timeless  
origin. We pine, for time-trapped souls yearn  
to be time-free. Then, not alone from kindness,  
rejoice more than worry what others learn  
first to be decked in grand finery of  
that acclaimed but passing band-wagon love.

* * *

### code-named Q

Flinders Petrie found Egypt a house on fire.  
Loot from the black market moulders  
in museum crypts or private re-burials  
unlikely to resurrect.

A life-times closed shop of partial scholars  
kept Qumran scrolls from the public domain.  
Delayed also secret sayings of Jesus  
revealed a mirage of the master.

The oldest Christian text dates around one  
hundred, from gospel unknown, differently worded  
and with a new miracle by the Jordan.

Pot-sherds, in Dead Sea caves, may point  
to "followers of the Way", Christs early church,  
or Nile out-back dump yield, in Demotic Greek,  
code-named Q, an infered gospels source.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### go'spel

The Septuagint Epistle (slipped texts ban) seen  
in fourth century uncial Alexandrine.  
Two sisters charmed extant e'en secret recessed  
Mount Sinai monks Syriac palimpsest  
in Aramaic akin to Galilees.

Oxyrhynchus tipped Logia release  
fifty years before Apocryphal Gnostic  
Gospel of St Thomas found whole in Coptic.

Dura site scrap of scrapped Diatessaron  
and cryptic touts codices attest canon,  
too: the four Gospels (and Acts) are one book  
midst yet unjoined New Testament out-look;

Rylands Papyrus shred, by John, maybe  
his later witness dates eighty AD.

* * *

### pain

God said pain will be  
the reminder I transcend  
all my lesser selves

Man said pain will be  
the reminder I cannot  
transcend my lesser self

### tears

Tears are of oceans  
that offer no sustenance  
but madness and death

Tears are of tidings  
that over-whelm ones defense  
from anguish in love

Tears purging bodies  
in their souls purgatories  
baptise communion

* * *

### priestess

Hers is a communion service  
once of ancient standing  
as a priestess to fertility rites.  
For, she holds forth the martyr:  
This is my body of lives hereafter.

This is my blood of menstruation.  
The Being of union eats her flesh  
and drinks her blood  
before the Passion of child-birth  
that redeems the rule of eat or eaten.

* * *

### born again

In a slack moment  
the door-frame served  
as a projector view-  
finder in the dark

shop feeding thru  
a slack of film  
on a spool to slide by  
a slender woman

all but a girl-mother  
without effort pushing  
pram up hill town  
she didnt see.

Her face shone  
like still waters  
in a trance from the  
dyings tunnel vision

before the Being Of  
Lights razzle dazzle  
(without our sun  
gods hurtful nature)

sharing that wonder  
of being born again  
freed her from self  
in baby to care for.

* * *

### Santa Fey

I played jingle bells on the door bells  
to prove that I do exist  
but they thought it an SOS.

After screaming away like poppers  
"it's a proper red 'ooded mugger"  
they fled up the chimney breast.

So now I put up my wellies  
and every-one is a guest  
to bring me down my pressies.

* * *

### Timisoara Christmas

Before the Spanish tenor  
and Romanian prima donna  
Christs sheep gather

to carol up to the canopy  
of a petrified forest

as in the hallowing

of a songsters glade  
at the deliverance

we didnt know for a respite  
in the innocent eye  
of beseiging storms

* * *
_return tocontents_

### the stars began to spill out in flocks

The stars began to spill out in flocks  
pouring over the oasis home  
of a cave inside a low hill of stone  
where Joseph embraced his kith and kin.  
No space was left in the upper room.  
All of space waited upon her within

as Mary lay in the lower gloom.  
The desert listened to a bleat of lafter.  
A babes hand reached its blessing  
after the moist breath of herbs,  
the beasts knelt all round Marys infant  
in the hay cresting the mangers curbs.

Wending a way to the cave entrance  
three lordly camels sank to the earth.  
Three strangers fell down like a penance  
with gifts before the newly born.  
The moon, in Aries, blew-out like a candle.  
In its stead, a star out-shone the dawn.

* * *

### Jesuses sisters

We're sisters of Jesus  
the Gospels dont deign  
to know by our names  
or how many of us.

Who's white robes and a staf  
think he is to cure the worst?  
He's young Marys first,  
men gave out with a laf.

The birds fly the forests  
and still find their nests.  
The fish fly their sea bed.  
The night hides his head.

Come you, our brother,  
come you back in.  
Your numberless sisters  
have become half your kin.

* * *

### Christs just method

Christs heart went out to the waiting crowd by the shore.  
For, they were as sheep without a shepherd.  
The teacher explained his parables to the disciples  
"for they had not understood the incident of the loaves."  
Had hero-worship made a miracle out of his method,  
miracle enuf if man practised Christs just method.

Before the assembly, he asked the brethren   
to gather, in baskets, all left over, even crumbs  
to re-distribute to the still unfed.  
No famine in the world need have been  
in last century of the second millenium.

Surplus transfer is politic, well as economic,  
democracy. In just proportion, it least wastes  
votes, transfered to candidates most prefered,  
in ordered choice from the first to the last  
for a Sanhedrin, if not the Kingdom of Heaven.

Souls of electors and candidates, alike, are lost  
with in-a-spot votes, for party pharisees or zealots.  
Untaught X-voters could not ballot their names  
marking, instead, the sign of the cross.  
The undemocratic spot vote is cross  
folk, the world over, have been left to carry.

* * *

### Martha and Mary

The previous black sheep of the family,  
who also had none of her own tree,  
ended in an old town hospice.  
She at least had to visit and attend  
her, my mother - one of lifes Marthas.

And the black sheep, before me, wanted,  
circumspectly, to give all to Mary.  
In her suitcase of personal clothing  
a family Bible, which Mary offered  
to have, to the pleasure of its owner

had she but known. Martha being placed  
with the volume of the suitcase.  
Acceptng that folk are like that.  
Even when you are down and out and under  
and passion impotent, the loosening bundle

of associations that made up ones self  
scheme with any pitiful offerings left.  
In her final poverty, she yet had the luxury  
to disappoint of affection the dutiful one.  
As for this black sheep, I will die alone.

* * *

### the Christian mystery

If Christ was Son of God, his crossed despair,  
in plaint the psalmist wrote, was agony  
of the Almighty become man wholly.  
One who is every-where is no-where  
to be found. We sense but His shadow-played  
presence with a joy that takes rather the shows  
for real. Our lives are chasing shadows

to match, in gorgeous tints, soul-colors shades  
that on each other redouble in love.  
If shadow love be lost in the crowds,  
as one fire of life fades from sun-set clouds,  
for like, of its spirit returned, we rove  
to rekindle that host evenings embers  
for all the divine image in them stirs.

We simple souls make a paper idol  
of the crowning rubric on illumined  
scrolls to the common cifers they dimmed.  
For, to read our Makers Holy Bible  
of life, one must learn the characters.  
God knows Himself by the halo shadows  
that from immortal tyranny arose,

as minds know themselves to be free actors;  
aught, He did not know, to evolve.  
Could we be His time-bound servants, not time-  
servers, shared was dread pain of loss to mime  
by true being, as shadow selves dissolve  
and matter no more. This may be, if hove-  
to in the hope of all-enduring love.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### after the Passion

(apocryphal)

Stretching to heaven, he gave over care  
of a mother who shared his pain in dying  
as in birth. Threading her way thru the night air  
Mary Magdalen sought his place of lying.

A boulder rolled away from the entrance.  
The shroud rolled away on its stone bed.  
Two white-robed youths shone the days entrance:  
"Why seek you the living among the dead?"

So, they left their angelic message.  
A man, stained with herbs, leaned on a hoe.  
The garden dawned on her like a presage  
at the strangers call with a familiar echo:

"Dont touch me! Let my wounds be sealed."  
'Your disciples are not here to take amiss,'  
her faint address 'or worry who is to lead,  
should you be given a gentle kiss.'

A sealed meeting found itself a host  
without knowing him among the living.  
Unsealed lips spoke and ate to lay a ghost.  
Thomas, not there, pledged his hands to the seeing

of iron nails and spear thrusts, as a leaven  
of proof, Joshua endured: "All lives are as close  
to me for my Father in Heaven  
as you three, when you needed to be, most."

* * *

### the resurrection tree

Christmas tree hung bulbs  
of flames are as blood  
on buds out-growing nails  
from the writhing chestnut sails  
candelabrum fingers

that swipe upper windows  
for peering in and knuckle rap  
on double-decker omnibus top  
to be let in this upper nave

raising the ghosts of galley slaves  
in oarless passengers on trips  
who jump at the whip  
come springs haunting presage  
the easter savior is risen.

* * *

### Ellerburn church

Keltic is the preaching cross, the knot.  
Thors temple yields to Hilds mission spot.  
The gagged serpent's like a currency letter.

Easter rabbits resurrect from the skulls fetter.  
A coarsened air scratched off their kilted Christ.  
St Patricks deer soon will be worn to grist.

Irelands snakes, he turned to stone, were ammonites.  
Far flocks still read Gospel of the Ebionites.  
"Ah, Carolingian," those chancel columns.

'Charles I or II?' -- "Charlesmagne," the experts solemn  
answer. Hells mural is white-washed under.  
Whom God has brought together, let no man sunder.

* * *

### the farewell stone

Take all to buy your passage for the poor.  
We are becoming an island of ghosts.  
Make my passing mean a new life for sure.  
Our bodies are rows of rocks on the coasts.

If there is no bread, I dont need a stone.  
You'll not be dying afore you're going.  
Heed me now, only, before you're alone.  
Dont break your heart, over the fields, rolling

an other boulder in to famine line.  
It's of no account to engrave my name.  
I'll tell you the farewell stone that is mine.  
To you, let me be for ever the same.

I'll never be yours grey and old and worn.  
That standing stone a-shining on the cove  
likens me, rather, to a rose gold dawn  
seeing you over the ocean with love.

* * *

### dragon maiden

On sunday her folks were even flouting  
their way to dank church, if on an outing.  
They left Joan be maid-in-service for good  
since three females, for one mans unspilled blood,  
fought their own great war to the marriage banns.

A maiden-at-the-stake hostage soul glance,  
for surviving bachelors, raked the pews  
to find this turn-about smile turned loose  
dragons teeth in her at rows of rival  
ringletted faces set hard on survival.

Charging chore-worn palms with bayonet claws  
she prayed for more compassion in mans laws  
on spinsters, young widows, painted ladies  
left youths from sadist orgies in Hades.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### in Coventry cathedral

In Coventry Cathedral   
arises the cross lethal  
to shadow you across the floor   
and fall on every back the war

in voiceless echoes   
of the dead and lost.  
A blown-up car contorts   
into a crown of thorns.

Stumbling into the rubble came  
an old top-hatter with his cane.  
Churchill could not let any know   
they'd cracked the enemy codes

by ambushing the Coventry raid.  
Is it me, Lord, who will betray   
you? Is it me?  
Is it me?

* * *

### the cup cast aside

The hosts of heaven have lost their bearings  
in the loft of the holy spirits farings.  
Pigeons flutter out sleeves of eaves.  
They slip in thread-bare cape of slate.

This tabernacle of the miracle-maker  
doffed its magician hat steeple  
from pate of the tower worshipful.  
The body of Christs church stripped

of table, stripped of forms in rows slipped  
knees, stripped of but a chalice tipped   
on floor. His spilt blood to dust does rise  
and float thru the searching rays of light.

No faithless remain to ask for a sign.  
Seeded into the masonry mortar  
the walls loft a cross of a tree altar  
like the hill of the skulls crossed heart.

* * *

### authority

When Christ was bound upon a tree  
his sweat baptised cloth to Christianity.  
The lip-opened grain of parched desert wood  
took holy communion by drinking his blood.

And humans saved everlasting souls  
in body transplants to books and scrolls  
for the Elect Mammon would publish  
and be damned if the others were not rubbish.

Books born again off reproduction lines  
were short on revisions to refine  
classics of the Word, whose propriety,  
went the sermon, redeemed one for society.

Books specially gave immortality  
a rigidly individual personality.  
But as browning paper follows peat and coal  
we convert to datas universal soul

in electronic editions change by the minute  
so whole social cross-sections contribute.  
Man, the author, was like God Immanent  
God Transcendant is in the ascendant.

* * *

### a forgotten find

The nuns almost broke into a run  
to see Jesus down the road dolorous,  
with double deckers of kids, from lessons  
so much was said to hang-on, to the opera   
house, an other double decker, you crept  
its winding chimney onto a cavern ledge.

In red regalia with braid and the hat  
of a Chelsea Pensioner, an Ancient  
punched tickets for Maundy Money passed  
from the Queen in civilian raiment.  
We, the paying commonalty,  
were in the role of royalty.

When that old movie found new address  
on after-noon viewing former interest  
I could not bear to have childhood impress  
rubbed and written-on like a palimpsest  
to see not Christ on his cross but an actor  
or hypocrit – one withered by his scorn.

A crucifix languished in the attic  
lumber out of a sky-lights slowly swayed  
beam of motes. God alone knows that is  
how it is to be so cast-away  
without so much as an island reserve  
til the power of speech itself deserts.

Christ stirs on his tree to the groans and sighs  
that beset forest canopies in a ferment  
with concerns childhood finds too high.  
This was not so much Christ triumfant  
as Pan reduced from the universal good  
to a god of the woods, to a god of wood.

Great God Pan is dead; the faun of the glen,  
a fancy foregone with saying prayers again.  
Is God, too, lonely, condemned high  
on a tree, having re-learn how, in pain  
and solitude, to form words of reply   
to: Do we live-on when we die?

* * *

### in the midst of life

A haughty infant in the lotus  
seat, on a sarcofagus,  
waggles feet. A grave-yard chest   
pops her mate, its startled guest.

Over the church wall across  
the street, bigger grey box  
framed a grey old girl  
behind glass plate. This turn

lies between livings dead  
in bed, on a late supper,  
mistressless mattressed;  
bread without butter.

* * *

### now a major motion picture

A dead star argued with God the Great  
Film Producer in the sky, as he would  
never have dreamt was done in Hollywood  
taking in bad part his allotted fate

to slum with the Hell set. "Are you so dumb?"  
God rejoined. "If you want them to applaud,  
you will have to win sainthoods own reward  
that the bad in you may be over-come.

That is my gift of defeat and failure  
to allow you to sin till you find your way  
to a good part you've earned, so folk may say  
you're human -- if by then they can endure

you -- not Gods puppet -- and value Me, too!"  
'I think there is a flaw in this free will --  
yours or mine. Are you God or the devil?'  
"Are we not both without and within you?"

* * *

### essays:

_return tocontents_

### a genius for love

#### Jujment by Frances Anne Bond?

on the following essay, at local writers circle, some time in the 1990s (most likely by the novelist before she retired. Her voice is in the words):

Intriguing title.  
No market mentioned.  
Presentation... wider margins all-round required.

I found it rather difficult to follow the line of argument. I had, in fact, to make a précis before I really began to understand it. I think if this is intended for publication, it is unlikely that an editor would be prepared to do the same thing.

What the writer was saying, and I may be wrong about this, is:

1) All of us could be better than we are. We are all capable, therefore, of improving the lot of our fellow men and saving and improving the environment in which they live.

2) we are confronted by difficulties in the shape of human greed; by false prophets who may have a temporary charismatic and potentially disastrous appeal; by the illusion of romantic love and unnatural stress emanating from false values.

3) the only thing that can save this is the true charismatic love of God and the development of those strengths given to us by Him.

In order to be effective, the whole thing needs simplifying, both in its language and sentence construction. The subject is too important to remain wrapped in the mystery of convoluted sentence structure. Make up your mind what it is you want to say and say it as simply as possible.

### a genius for love

_There is enough for mans need but not for mans greed.  
Mahatma Gandhi._

Since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, a chorus of disapproval has grown at the economic world war being won against the life-support system of the planet. Would-be Earth-savers do ideological battle with the remorseless campaign by fanatical materialism to indoctrinate us all to be wasteful spenders.

Why don't we have equal advertising time on television to make us savers of the world's limited resources for the poor and future generations?

Islam calls the faithful six times daily to pray.  
Western tv adverts call the viewers every few minutes to pay.

Conspicuous consumption enslaves ourselves, as well as denies the needy. This snobbish greed corrupts the humble and natural desire of everyone for a little fun, pleasure and excitement in life.

Deep within our sin-clinging selves, there is a better person, trying not too hard to get out. So, we know there are better people than ourselves, who it would be a relief to lean on for moral support and leadership.   
There is also a deep-seated cynicism and jealousy, desiring to test to destruction the apparently better human being than the rest of us. The good die young, especially if they speak inconvenient truths. They are in the religious traditions of the saints and saviors or the secular tradition of human rights.

"Charisma" is a Bible word, meaning the gift of grace. The term is over-used and debased, much as the praise "genius" is. The truly charismatic person has a genius for love, beyond that of some fashionable name or celebrity.   
The mass hysteria of sporting and pop fans for their idols is all as "a sound and fury signifying nothing" or hero-worship without a hero.

The careerist politician, with his "ghastly charm," as Doris Lessing calls it, is a false profet who becomes a fallen idol, with few and infrequent exceptions, who show how much better the world might be for more statesmanship.

Each new party leader appeals to the public to be their personality cult, which is really only the personal vanity that he can do better than those before him. They have no concerted plan of action to safely avert the human races run away self-destruction.   
People stay at the mercy of vested interests, like the giant energy corporations. Politicians best understand their party advantage and its powerful and wealthy supporters, denying people the self-help, constituted thru more effective political and economic democracy.

Modern history has its more or less avowed anti-christs. Their power for evil has been more evident than the influence of a few arguably Christ-like figures. In our everyday lives, we meet extraordinary folk, who convince merely by their presence that they are benign and can be trusted.

Take that to extremes, in the rarity of a Messiah. Such a ones aura of goodness might draw out your soul from obscurity and bathe it clean with your tears. One would know emotionally that a human being like oneself is after all capable of a purely selfless love, of being, if you like a child of God. You might leave everyone and thing dear to you to follow and purify your soul for the good of all.

Unscrupulous sects take advantage of the disciple latent in us.

Idealistic youth hopes and expects to meet that wonderful person who will be the companion of their days. But romantic love is exclusively directed towards a partner and family. Charismatic love peels away all the layers of our limited sympathies for our selves, family, tribe and nation, that war against each other, and releases to universal caring.

We know, by ourselves, that all Gods creatures need love. God is the Being strong enuf in love to fulfill that all-embracing need. That feels infinitely beyond us and we just want to get on with our own lives. The charismatic leader disturbs all that and is devoutly to be feared.

Yet the end of the second millennium certainly seemed ripe for the Second Coming. Society is strewn with the tortured wreckage of lost loves and broken homes – a plague of little domestic wars as bitter and soul-destroying, in their way, as national conflicts.

Much of this no doubt owes to the unnatural stresses, leading us astray from the simple life, with false values, wrecking the planet for habitation. Much to blame may be financial pressures born of unrealistic and unnecessary expectations, that commercial interests seek to make the fashionable public conform to.  
Virulent hatred and intolerant prejudice defend against the threat to established beliefs. They may be misleading. It is only too easy to dismiss the concerns of ordinary and fallible folk who challenge a massive status quo.

Mankind consumes the planets annual wealth, ever earlier in the year. As we go to ruin, a Second Coming may not come. And if it did, we might not be able to recognise, let alone respond to it. One supposes, we have somehow to keep that divine spark of universal love, that is our immortal soul, from dying within us, so perhaps we may be of some use to others and thereby even ourselves.

* * *
_return tocontents_

### Learning to love

(This piece was written probably as a sequel to the previous essay and is somewhat revised.

_"The most important thing..."  
Nat King Cole_

It doesn't matter how good are your ideas to help make the world a better place, if they don't move people. So, one must start, however briefly, with "the greatest thing in the world" and you all know what that is.

One may feel that love is the greatest power in our lives, at least that it could or should be. But how can that feeling justify a belief that love is the greatest thing in the world, or universe, for that matter?

The short answer is that just as life only makes sense in terms of love, so nature only makes sense in terms of life. The universe cannot be known without a knower. It's supposed existence or reality, independent of a knowing life within it, is metafysics or beyond fysics, which is dependent on scientific observation.

Universe is, by definition, self-sufficient. A universe determined by something else could not be the whole universe. The concept of universe implies self-determination or freedom, which is an attribute of life or a living thing. The logic of the universe appears to be that of an organism or, at any rate, an individual.

This notion is not so out of the way, when one considers that animate organisms are conglomerates of cellular organisms.

Moreover, fysics is coming increasingly to suspect that the universe itself is but one of a community of individual universes, known as the multiverse.

Thus, individual freedom may be a microcosm of the freedom of the cosmos. This is like the holografic principle. If you take pieces from a hologram, the pieces still show the whole picture of the original whole, tho less perfectly.

This reminds of Christ saying: you must become perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

This also explains the Buddhist and Jainist reverence for all life forms, as divine manifestations. Indeed, Robert Merton on the sociology of modern science traced its origins to a religious desire to study the manifestations of God in all His works.

Fritzjof Capra, as director of the center for eco-literacy, combines modern ecological necessity with the ancient ethic of the universal religions. This is to educate us that the self goes beyond just our own fysical bodies. All creatures interact in the web of life. To break some of its strands threatens to ruin the whole structure of the environment.

David Hume divorced ethics from science with his famous saying: you can't derive an "ought" from an "is."   
Of course not. Knowledge cannot tell you what to do. But knowledge still has the purpose of allowing you to make informed jujments. "Know the truth and it will make you free." And freedom is needed to find out the truth. Knowledge and freedom depend on each other to grow.

In "Physics As Metaphor," Dr Roger Jones argues that "pure science" has its limits. Even making a measurement comes down to an act of jujment that involves choice.

You could share the mystic view that all creatures express one consciousness (of "God" if you like) tho all in more or less different and highly limited ways.

Moreover, we understand the expression of the emotions in man and animals, (as the language) we ourselves feel.  
Our mortal bodies are the expressions of immortal emotions.

The ancient Greeks were perhaps nearer the truth than we are. We believe we have moods. They believed moods have us. In the Iliad, when panic spread thru the warriors outside Troy, that was the doing of Pan, the immortal god of fear.

Short of a radical religious rejection of the world, we cannot fail to be moved by our senses. We did not make-up the pantheon. The emotions are our masters. In this respect, CG Jung said, we may only choose our masters.

Love is the greatest God of the pantheon of the emotions. But for the grace of God, love may not have been our lot. Our lives may have been ruled more by the lesser gods. They have their functions, unless these lesser passions become ruling passions, in which case they become dysfunctional. Then their inferiority shows as an imbalance of pairs of emotions, like hate and fear.

Like a stuck see-saw, chronic hate is an oppressive emotion and chronic fear a depressive emotion. Some dysfunctional relationships, as in an unhappy marriage, may be between partners unconsciously addicted, the one to anger and the other to timidity.   
Without admitting it to themselves, they are getting their emotional fixes from each other. The man secretly enjoys always blaming the woman for being annoyed by her. The woman secretly enjoys provoking his frightening temper.

Blaming others is a slothful or lazy way of putting-off the difficult job of self-mprovement. Human relationships from the family to global politics may be observed to be arrested in a torturously slow realisation of this personality flaw in human nature.

Society at large displays such unholy alliances, as between sloth and avarice, the polar extremes of emotional stupor and emotional gluttony. Executives with stupefying emoluments boast about how hard they work, as if no one else knew the meaning of the word.

A further stock response of the undeserving is to accuse their critics of envy, actually a projection, because envy is the unholy ally of pride, swollen in its unrestrained command of corporate loot.

In contrast to these shameless people, other unfortunates may have been indoctrinated in childhood with a sense of their own unworthiness, that has conditioned them to an unhelpful habit of shame, making them out to be worse than they were, and perhaps succeeding in their degradation.   
I am not so sure, in this respect, whether shame is always the cloak of pride, as William Blake said; perhaps more of a wet blanket sickeningly thrust on proper pride.

Emotional imbalance can be both a social imbalance and an imbalance within an individual personality, such as the manic depressive, now more diplomaticly called the bi-polar personality.

If one recognises that one is a plaything being swung between two contrasting emotional masters, one can allow for it, by giving way, less to each master in turn, as they take hold of one, and thereby emotionly stabilising oneself, and liberating oneself from their over-mastering control.

One can observe oneself working oneself up into a temper over some excuse or other. One can recognise ones indignation as an excuse to enjoy being resentful and self-righteous. Then one can calm oneself down, to be rewarded with the knowledge that foregoing vindictive feelings, one can also forego being fearful of provoking others thru ones hostility.

One can break the vicious circle of hate and fear within oneself and with others. I'm not saying it's easy or ever completely successful or we would be all saints. But it appears to be a necessary condition both for satisfactory personal achievements and relationships.

For, chronic hate and fear unsettle the mind. Mental illness is really emotional illness. A preoccupation with petty animosities is a waste of mental energy. One may need to feel strongly to feel alive but a diet of hate and fear merely use a person to feed off each other, leaving you with nothing more than an unsatisfying addiction.

When one feels angry, one can remember that anger comes from feeling threatened, which is prompted by fear. Balancing one end of the emotional see-saw with the other helps regain ones poise. Likewise when feeling afraid, one can warn oneself not to fall into an angry reaction.

Mood swings, such as between hate and fear, divide and rule oneself into ones own unjust society of oppressor and victim. Blaming others becomes an excuse to worship these gods of emotional self-indulgence and lazily distract from the long-term difficult job of making oneself a better person.

As Dale Carnegie said, in his popular psychology, you cannot win an argument.   
One can only be a better example.

Peaceful and quiet surroundings help to become at peace with oneself, damping down the storms of mood swings, to save emotional energy to good purpose. With restored spirits, the ability to give and receive love may seem less remote, boring or tiresome.

Some folk may be possessed by the fuss demon, that cannot bear peace and quiet, but has to be stirring up themselves and others, perhaps to distract from or gloss over an emotional hole in their lives.

Emotionally rested for a store of energy to command, one is potentially back in control of ones life. One can now choose a direction in life. One may opt permanently for quietude. But not many people have the monastic calling. More likely, one will wish to reserve regular periods, to get away from it all, all the storm and stress of everyday life.   
These mini-holidays or restoratives may include a few minutes break now and then or an hour in the evening, nowadays the subject of fashionable meditation techniques from the wisdom of the East.

* * *

### "Found poem" by John Donne:  
For Whom The Bell Tolls.

_return tocontents_

#### preface

A good many years ago, when I was still almost young, I was searching in John Donne poems for the sonnet, For Whom The Bell Tolls. I had studied the metafysical poets, at what would now be called sixth form college.

I had made the well-known mistake of confusing the source of this famous quotation. It actually comes from Meditation 17. Our English teacher had read it to us, but such is its poetic force, I remembered it as verse.

When I made this rediscovery, it may have been with some lingering regard for the sonnet form, because I scanned his prose. And to my recall, it comprised almost sonnet length.

I thought it must have been an abandoned sonnet, like one of those Easter Island cylinder heads, left only partly quarried.

Memory does play one false. I tried to find this passage from Donne sermons, till I saw a note of my own, which mentioned meditations. The paragraph in question is shorter than I thought, about 10 lines worth. The meditation close supplies the deficit in a meaningful way. For which purpose, I've decided to add a six-line extract.

If the resulting verse is a "sonnet", it is a blank verse Meredith sonnet! George Meredith introduced the 16 line sonnet, adding two lines, to make four uniform rhyming verses.   
This "found poem" by John Donne, For Whom The Bell Tolls, does not rhyme, unless by accident. I have not changed any of his words. Two breaks are each shown by the customary three dots...

Meditation 17 is of the bell that tells of anothers affliction, and, in thus digging the gold of affliction, applies that gold for me.   
Here, a found poem is dug out of his meditation, as follows.

* * *

### For Whom The Bell Tolls  
by John Donne

No man is an island, entire of itself;   
every man is a piece of the continent,   
a part of the main; if a clod be washed   
away by the sea, Europe is the less,   
as well as if a promontory were,   
as well as if a manor of thy friend's   
or of thine own were; any man's death   
diminishes me, because I am involved   
in mankind, and therefore never send to know   
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...

No man hath affliction enough, that is   
not matured and ripened by it, and made   
fit for God by that affliction... I take   
mine own into contemplation, and so   
secure myself, by making my recourse   
to my God, who is our only security.

* * *

## notes

_return tocontents_

As in book one of my collected verse, I have gone beyond my usual simpler spelings, especially with regard to the foneme (phoneme) spelt with letter, f.

Generally speaking, I would leave alone most of the spellings of the vowels and dipthongs, except where letter, e, is used as an accent to distinguish five dipthongs from five vowels. Ideally, I would like to replace accent-e with the apostrofe. I merely introduce the idea, because it's too big a change to do all at once. This idea is explained on my Democracy Science website.

I also support Valerie Yule reform, Cut Speling: leav out unecesary leters.   
Ive done a bit of that but not as much as I'd like to do.

Comments follow on a few of the poems in this book:

My part in the first poem of this collection, Bless you!, was told by my father. My mother told of the Kaaa! crier, subject of the second poem.

#### a slip of the pen:

The title of this verse harks back to a short story, which HG Wells, it's said, took some trouble in writing, "A slip under the microscope." This is also about examination cheating.

#### PR:

I asked Major Frank Britton if he had a copy of Elections and Electors. He was secretary of the Electoral Reform Society. Tho the book was not on their list, he kindly found one to send.

In old age, by way of a Ross rule of constituency distribution, I would circuitously arrive at the harmonic mean quota. That is the harmonic mean of the Hare and Droop quotas.   
Further explanation is on my Democracy Science website.

#### the drout:

Answering a quiz, Bob Monkhouse quipped that the only beetle with wings, he knew, was Paul McCartney.

#### the routine deception:

The electoral reform, I campaigned for, was STV: single transferable vote, on behalf of the Electoral reform Society.

#### lightning romance:

As alluded in the verse, "see you later," the music industry is touchy about copyright of music lyrics even down to honestly quoting a single line. Regretably, I changed a line from a rock 'n' roll classic to an old world parody of it.

Blessed pair of sirens: title of an oratorio by Hubert Parry, from a poem by John Milton.

Ive slipped in alternative spelings to the "oo" digraf. Like the Anglo-Welsh word, cwm, to be found in a Mary Webb novel, Ive spelt: lws for loose; lassw for lassoo; spwking for spooking; as well as: gudies for goodies.

#### thought corgi:

corgis could be heralds for a crowned republic. No?

#### cardiac Bel:

time note: set in the 1960s with temperature charts on the bed ends.

The section title, the romance of religion, is a frase (phrase) borrowed from GK Chesterton.

#### the Buddha attains enlightenment:

As seen from the award-winning The Natural World, 26 oct. 1997. BBC 2.

#### the Dalai Lama election:

Adapted from "My Land and My People" by the Dalai Lama.

#### Go'spel:

Source: Leo Deuel, Testaments Of Time.

* * *

## acknowledgments

_return tocontents_

Spread over my five volumes of Collected Verse are over thirty of the poems published in the Poetry Now anthologies.   
A London cabbie had seventy poems published by that House. He was invited to a Buckingham Palace garden party.  
I had thirty five poems published by Poetry Now.  
Half way to Paradise!

#### Poetry Now:  
(anthologies)

A compass wavers; Divorce; Erosion; Not a natural right (titled as: Love is not a natural right); A strapping lass; Making-up (titled as: Reconciliation); Swanning around; and (I believe) Loves company.

Authority; The Resurrection Tree, Pythagoras on science (titled as: A researchers prayer) and (maybe) Code-named Q.

#### The Banshee   
(UK):

ded leters (originally titled: Dead Letters)

#### T.O.P.S.

A sherrickin'

#### Strong verse:

When the goodbyes were said.

#### Kritya:

The Buddha attains enlightenment; re-vision.

#### Handshake:

Double star [originally titled: When worlds collide (2)]

* * *

## after-word

_return tocontents_

Volume one of my collected verse follows the tradition of nature poetry.   
Following the prelude review of the writings of Dorothy Cowlin, which takes about half this extended volume, this book two of my collected verse, is built largely and loosely round the tradition of love poetry, including religious poetry.

On my Democracy Science web page about The Four Loves, I follow a different order of treatment to that of the book by CS Lewis.  
This volume of my collected poems follows Lewis order of treatment: affection, friendship, romance (which he calls eros), charity. I stray most from this scheme, in part one, which is not particularly affectionate. It is primarily a year to year chronicle. Thus, part one is "life poetry."

Part two is about a friendship, or the love of shared interests with another person. Part three is about romantic love. And part four is devoted to religion, which is based on the universal love called charity.

After the Dorothy Cowlin review prelude, the first two parts of this volume, including most of my own verse about Dorothy, were written after she died, and are among my most recent out-put.

I brought the teacher out in her. Dorothy closely criticised my work. Some of my poems bring back personal associations of her comments. And she left me with written remarks about others.

I always wanted to change the world but Dorothy Cowlin was a generous as well as gifted spirit, who changed me.

Most of my early poems are in part three. Like many novices, my first poetic efforts followed traditional form. I once estimated that I'd kept about fifty of these poems, out of a hundred or more.  
Like most of my work, they were much revised later, with their rigid forms sometimes "deconstructed," to use the literary jargon.

No doubt the romance of youth is most attracted to poems about love. Ive written less love poems with growing older. They make this old man cringe: hopeless failure. In so far as mating is a sport, then like sports in general, I just didnt get it. I was no good at it.

Occasionally, I continued to write as an observer. To tell you the truth, that is all I ever really was. It is just that age has obliged to become ever more detached an observer. Life should not be so empty.

I wondered whether the youthful poems, which are more common in the third section than anywhere else in my five volumes, shouldnt take a usual spot in poets collections. That is at the end, with the forbidding title: Early poems.  
But Dorothy, a good poet and friend was more warmly disposed to these romantic poems than many of my later more mature (or cynical) efforts.

In the fourth section, collecting my poems, with more or less religious themes, confirmed how much I was brought up in a Christian culture, on the western side of its schism. (Not to mention the splits within the western side, which were absent in my childhood before the Troubles.)

The first few poems have Buddhist themes but they only reveal how little I know about that religion, however much I might admire it. Britains present diversity of belief and culture, religious and otherwise, from the world over, would have been unthinkable to me in childhood.

All the poems, in part four, were written after I was forty. I cannot claim this is a religious awakening, because I wrote practicly no poems in my thirties. Some of the more traditional poems were written in my early forties and resume from the earlier style I left off at thirty. That formal style faded away in the course of my fifth decade and in this group of poems.

The found poem, of versified extracts from Donne meditation 17, was first put up on my Democracy Science website. Its theme fits in with the previous religious verse and two essays. And is perhaps a fitting end to this book.

* * *

## guide to five volume collected verse by Richard Lung

_return tocontents_

#### The Valesman.

_Published on 3rd august 2014._ __

#### Dates and Dorothy.

_Published on 2nd september 2014._

_Reader-sets-price at Smashwordshere, in epub format _

#### He's a good dog. (He just doesnt like you to laf.)

_Published on 14 november 2014._

#### In the meadow of night.

_Published on 26 january 2015._

#### Radical!

_Published on 3 march 2015._

_"Reader-sets-price"at Smashwords_

_The author intends that all five books of collected verse will become available from Smashwords eventually._

For further publication details, please consult: Collected verse of Richard Lung.

_If you read and enjoy any of these books, please post on-line a review of why you liked the work._

_While preparing this series, I have made minor changes to arrangement and content of the material, so the descriptions of companion volumes, at the end of each book, might not always quite tally._

* * *

### The Valesman

The first volume is mainly traditional nature poetry.   
(160 poems, including longer narrative verse in section three.)  
The nature poet Dorothy Cowlin reconnected me with my rural origins. Many of the poems, about animals and birds and the environs, could never have been written without her companionship.

The unity of themes, especially across the first two sections, as well as within the third section, makes this volume my most strongly constructed collection. I guess most people would think it my best. Moreover, there is something for all ages here.

1. How we lived for thousands of years.

Dorothy thought my best poems were those of the farming grand-father, the Valesman.

2. Flash-backs from the early train.

More memories of early childhood on the farm and first year at the village school.

3. Trickster.

Narrative verse about boyish pranks and prat-falls.

4. Oyh! Old Yorkshire Holidays.

Features playtime aspects of old rural and sea-side Yorkshire.

* * *

### Dates and Dorothy

Book two begins with eight-chapter review of works, plus list of publications & prizes by Dorothy Cowlin.  
(Seven of these chapters are currently freely available as web pages.)

This second volume continues with the second instalment of my own poems, classed as life and love poetry.  
The Dates are historical and romantic plus the friendship of Dorothy and the romance of religion.  
169 poems plus two short essays.

Prelude: review of Dorothy Cowlin.

Dates, historical and romantic, and Dorothy:  
1. dates.  
2. the Dorothy poems.  
3. loves loneliness loves company.  
4. the romance of religion.

The hidden influence of Dorothy, in the first volume, shows in this second volume. The first two sections were written mostly after she died. Thus, the first section, Dates, reads like a count-down before meeting her, in the second section, as prentice poet.

She was warmly responsive to the romantic lyrics of the third section. This was reassuring because some originated in my twenties. (I gave-up writing formal poetry during my thirties, to all practical purposes. There were only about three exceptions.) These surviving early poems, like most of my out-put, under-went intensive revision.

The fourth section probably stems from the importance attached to religion at primary school. Here humanitarian Dorothys influence only slightly made itself felt by her liking to visit churches.

The prelude review of Dorothy as a professional writer is freely available, at present, on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin.   
Nearly all the text is there, except a preface and last section, which I didnt upload before losing access to the site in 2007.  
The fotos, I took of Dorothy, are published for the first time.

The continued availability of my Dorothy Cowlin website is not guaranteed, so I welcome this opportunity to publish my literary review of her work, as an extra to volume 2.

* * *

****

### He's a good dog. (He just doesnt like you to laf.)

The third volume is a miscellaneous collection of 163 poems/pieces, making-up sections, one, three and four, with the arts and politics the strongest themes, as well as themes found in other volumes. There is also a story in section one, and a final short essay.

1. with children  
2. or animals  
3. never act  
4. the political malaise  
5. the lost  
6. short essay:  
Proportional Representation for peace-making power-sharing.

The first section includes a sort of verse novela and dramatic poem with an eye on the centenary of the First World War. The idea stemmed from an incident related by Dorothy Cowlin (yet again). Her uncle was stopped flying a kite on the beach, because he might be signaling to the enemy battle fleet.   
No kidding!

In this miscellany, previous themes appear, such as children, animals and birds. Verse on the arts comes in. Ive organised these poems on the WC Fields principle: Never act with children or animals.  
The fourth section collects political satires from over the years. The fifth section reflects on loneliness.

This volume is classed as of "presentatives" because largely about politics and the arts, with politicians acting like performing artists or representatives degenerating into presentatives on behalf of the few rather than the many.

However, the title poem, He's a good dog..., hints how eccentric and resistent to classification is this third volume. This title poem is based on a true war-time air incident. The good dog is also derived from a true dog, whose own story is told in the poem, the bleat dog (part of the free sample in volume 1).

* * *

### In the meadow of night

The fourth volume is of 160 poems and three short stories on the theme of progress or lack of it.

part one: allure.

The allure of astronomy and the glamor of the stars.

part two: endeavor.

The romance and the terror of the onset of the space age and the cold war.

part three: fate.

An uncertain future of technologies and possible dystopias. Ultimate questions of reality.

This fourth volume is of SF poetry. SF stands for science fiction, or, more recently, speculative fiction. The verse ranges from hard science to fantasy.  
This literary tradition of HG Wells and other futurists exert a strong influence.  
Otherwise, I have followed my own star, neither of my nature poet friends, Dorothy and Nikki, having a regard for SF poetry.   
Yet science fiction poetry is a continuation of nature poetry by other means.  
This may be my most imaginative collection. Its very diversity discourages summary.

* * *

### Radical!

Volume 5 opens with a play about the most radical of us all, Mother Teresa: If the poor are on the moon...  
This is freely available, for the time being, on my website: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin. (Performers are asked to give author royalties to the Mother Teresa Mission of Charity.)

The previously unpublished content consists largely of fairly long verse monologs, starting with artistic radicals, in "The dream flights of Berlioz and Sibelius," which is a sequence of The Impresario Berlioz, and The Senses of Sibelius.

Next, the intellectual radical, Sigmund Freud, followed by short poems on a sprinkling of more great names, who no doubt deserved longer. (Art is long, life is short.)

The title sequence, Radical! is made-up of verse about John Stuart Mill, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, George Orwell and JB Priestley.

Volume five ends with an environmental collection, some of it, currently available on my websites (mainly: Poetry and novels of Dorothy Cowlin).  
Should that website close down, I hope the green verses and the Mother Teresa play can still be obtained in this volume five.

## guide to two more book series by the author

_To contents._

## The Commentaries series

#### Commentaries book one:

### Literary Liberties

Literary Liberties with reality allow us to do the impossible of being other people, from all over the world. Our imagined other lives make the many worlds theory a fact thru fiction.

This book of books or illustrated reviews span fiction, faction and non-fiction.  
It goes some way to substantiate the belief of Benedetto Croce that history is the history of liberty.

I only wrote of books that I appreciated, so that I could pass on that appreciation to others. It must be admitted that I went with novels that looked over horizons confined to family values. (Family is, of course, a basic trial of liberty, compromised by obligations to partner and children.)

Likewise, these reviews themselves need not be bounded by the horizons of literary criticism but reach out to solutions for the problem novel or the non-fiction book with a cause.

In promoting others writings, I hoped to promote my own, any-way, the liberal values that inform my writings. It took a lot more preparation than I had anticipated. This is usually the case with my books.

_Available free from Smashwords:  
Literary Liberties_

Literary Liberties is the first of a short series of Commentaries. This author also has a Democracy Science series. The series of Collected Verse was the first to be completed.

* * *

#### Commentaries book two:

### Science and Democracy reviews

As they separately pursue their shared ethic of progress, scientific research and democratic reform conduct themselves as two different journeys, both here followed, as the evidence mounts that they depend on each other to meet the stresses that survival poses.

Works reviewed and studied here include the following.

The physicist, John Davidson under-took an epic investigation into the mystic meaning of Jesuses teachings, as for our other-worldly salvation, supplemented by a revelation in non-canonic texts of the gnostics.

The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, 1876 autobiography of the "moral force" Chartist and author of the famous six points for equal representation.   
Organiser who anticipated the peace and cultural initiatives of the UN, such as UNESCO.

Jill Liddington: Rebel Girls. Largely new historical evidence for the role especially of working women in Yorkshire campaigning for the suffrage.

"How the banks robbed the world" is an abridged description of the BBC2 program explanation of the fraud in corporate finance, that destroys public investments.

David Craig and Matthew Elliott: Fleeced!  
How we've been betrayed by the politicians, bureaucrats and bankers and how much they've cost us.

The political system fails the eco-system.  
Green warnings, over the years, by campaigners and the media, and the hope for grass roots reforms.   
From Paul Harrison, how expensively professionalised services deprive the poor of even their most essential needs. And the developed countries are over-strained, on this account, drawing-in trained people from deprived countries.  
Why society should deprofessionalise basic skills important for peoples most essential needs, whether in the third world or the "over-developed" countries.

The sixth extinction  
Richard Leakey and other experts on how mankind is the agent of destruction for countless life forms including possibly itself, in the sixth mass extinction, that planet earth has endured in its history. Why world politicians must work together to counter the effects of global warming.

On a topic where science and democracy have not harmonised, a few essays from 2006 to 2010, after "nuclear croneyism" infested New Labour and before Japans tsunami-induced chronic nuclear pollution. There's a 2015 after-word.

Some women scientists who _should_ have won nobel prizes.   
Lise Meitner, Madame Wu, Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell, Alice Stewart, to name some. Reading of their work in popular science accounts led me, by chance, to think they deserved nobel prizes; no feminist program at work here.

Julian Barbour: _The End Of Time._   
Applying the Mach principle, to an external frame-work of Newtonian absolute space and time, both in classical physics and to Schrödinger wave equation of quantum mechanics, by which the universe is made properly self-referential, as a timeless "relative configuration space" or Platonia.

Murray Gell-Mann: _The Quark and the Jaguar._   
Themes, including complex systems analysis, which the reviewer illustrates by voting methods.

Brian Greene: The Elegant Universe.   
Beyond point particle physics to a theory of "strings" that may under-lie the four known forces of nature, and its material constituents, thru super-symmetry, given that the "super-strings," as such, are allowed to vibrate, their characteristic particle patterns, in extra hidden dimensions of space.

Brian Greene: The Hidden Reality.   
A survey of the more extravagant physics theories that have invoked many worlds or a multiverse..

Lee Smolin: Three roads to quantum gravity.   
Reviewing the other two roads (besides string theory) namely black hole cosmology and loop quantum gravity. All three approaches are converging on a discrete view of space and time, in basic units, on the Planck scale. General relativitys space-time continuum is being quantised, rather as nineteenth century thermo-dynamics of continuous radiation was quantised.

Lee Smolin: the trouble with physics.   
Impatience with the remoteness of string theory and hope for progress from theories with more experimental predictions. How to make research more effective. Smolin on a scientific ethic. Reviewer criticises the artificial divide academics make between science and ethics.

Free from Smashwords: _Science and democracy reviews_

### Commentaries book three.

If and when time allows, it is intended to gather a final note-book, consisting largely of tables, graphs and diagrams, too large to conveniently include for e-book readers...

* * *

## The Democracy Science series.

To top.

The Democracy Science series of books, by Richard Lung, also is edited and renovated from this authors material on the Democracy Science web-site.

### Book 1: Peace-making Power-sharing.

The first, of two books on voting method, has more to do with electoral reform. (The second is more about electoral research.)

"Peace-making Power-sharing" features new approaches to electoral reform, like the Canadian Citizens Assemblies and referendums. I followed and took part in the Canadian debate from before the assemblies were set-up, right thru the referendums.  
This was a democratic tragedy and an epic in the dashing of idealistic hopes.

Some developments in America are reviewed.

The anarchy of voting methods, from the power struggle in Britain, is investigated over a century of ruling class resistance to electoral reform.

A penultimate chapter gives the simplest way to explain transferable voting, on to the more formal treatment of a small club election.

The last chapter is the earliest extant version of my work on scientific measurement of elections (in French).

#### Peace-making Power-sharing

_from Smashwords in epub format:here free._

* * *

### Book 2: Scientific Method of Elections.

The previous book had a last chapter in French, which is the earliest surviving version of the foundation of this sequel, Scientific Method of Elections. I base voting method on a widely accepted logic of measurement, to be found in the sciences. This is supported by reflections on the philosophy of science.

The more familiar approach, of judging voting methods by (questionable) selections of basic rules or criteria, is critically examined.

This author is a researcher, as well as a reformer, and my innovations of Binomial STV and the Harmonic Mean quota are explained.  
This second book has more emphasis on electoral research, to progress freedom thru knowledge.

Two great pioneers of electoral reform are represented here, in speeches (also letters) of John Stuart Mill on parliamentary reform (obtained from Hansard on-line). And there is commentary and bibliography of HG Wells on proportional representation (mainly).

Official reports of British commissions on election systems are assessed. These reports are of Plant, Jenkins, Kerley, Sunderland, Arbuthnott, Richard, and (Helena Kennedy) Power report.

The work begins with a short history on the sheer difficulty of genuine electoral reform. The defeat of democracy is also a defeat for science. Freedom and knowledge depend on each other.   
Therein is the remedy.

#### Scientific Method of Elections

_free from Smashwordshere._

* * *

### Book 3: Science is ethics as electics.

Political elections, that absorbed the first two books in this series, are only the tip of the iceberg, where choice is concerned. Book three, in preparation, intends to take an electoral perspective on the social sciences and natural sciences, from physics to metaphysics of a free universe within limits of determinism and chance.

To top

