AS IN THE LONG AGO

They wound me and they bless me  with strange gifts The salt of absence The honey of memory Norman McCaig  I wonder how many people these days feel the resonance of the words wound and bless that occur at the climax of this deceptively simple poem? (the full text is a couple of posts back) There was a time when almost everyone would have recognized that the words, used in conjunction, have a religious significance. I cannot hear them without thinking of the images of Jesus that haunted my Catholic childhood, one hand raised in blessing, the other indicating a chest apparently split by a gaping wound which reveals a beating heart within, and which echoes that other wound, the one in Jesus's side which Thomas felt obliged to test by inserting his fingers.  Strangely though, I stopped believing in God when I was seven years old, about the time when I made my first confession and God took no punitive action when I failed to admit all my sins. I then proceeded to take m...

Well, I was going to fit these photographs tastefully into the post about Norman MacCaig, but I couldn't make them go where I wanted them, so here they are in a new place. The first picture was taken in April. I stumbled into this ruined village by accident - it wasn't marked on the map. The other two were on a misty August afternoon. It was a very rainy week and I was lucky to be able to see anything at all. I don't suppose you'll ever see a crowd on the top of this hill, like the one we met on top of Snowdon this Easter, as you have to walk several miles before you can start climbing.

I've been meaning to write about Norman MacCaig for a while, and as the BBC is having a poetry season this seems like a good moment. MacCaig is second from the left on the book cover. Worlds was edited by Geoffrey Summerfield who also produced the excellent Voices series, of which more in another post. The book contains interviews with seven poets: Charles Causley, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Norman MacCaig, Adrian Mitchell and Edwin Morgan. It also has photo essays on each poet by Fay Godwin, Larry Herman and Peter Abramowitsch. I first came across Norman MacCaig in the late 1980s when I heard him being interviewed on the radio. He also read some poems about frogs. I went out and bought his Collected Poems and read it from beginning to end - not a thing I usually do with poetry books. For the last twenty years I've had a poem of his pinned to my wall: Between mountain and sea  Honey and salt - land smell and sea smell,  as in the long ago, as in forever....

I looked out of my window today and saw a poem in action.     The Trees   The trees are coming into leaf  Like something almost being said;  The recent buds relax and spread,  Their greenness is a kind of grief.  Is it that they are born again  And we grow old? No, they die too.  Their yearly trick of looking new  Is written down in rings of grain.  Yet still the unresting castles thresh  In fullgrown thickness every May.  Last year is dead, they seem to say,  Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.   Philip Larkin I don't know whether it's just because leaf rhymes with grief , but this isn't the only poem which connects trees and mortality. There's Spring and Fall, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and New Hampshire by T S Eliot . Feel free to let me know of others!