Discovering All The Missing Names Of Love motivated me
to do two things I have never done before: buy something online, and write a
review. The first was easy; the second, definitely not so much.
Reading blogging friend Roselle Angwin's beautiful
posts over at Qualia and Other Wildlife, I knew her new book of poetry would be
worth reading, and now having read it, definitely worth sharing.
Like the tapestry by Anne Jackson on the book cover,
Roselle’s poems interweave her thoughts and feelings with a sympathetic vision of the natural world to which she is clearly
attuned.
In his haiku Nazuna
(The Shepherd’s Purse), Basho was
captured in an instant by the beauty of a lowly weed, then captured the moment
in a poem:
When I look carefully –
Nazuna is blooming
Beneath the hedge.
Roselle does this too. By capturing moments that
captured her, she captures us. This is from Tracks:
Now, dawn; the stillness
broken only by a clattering tractor
and its retinue of gulls.
As in On Staffa:
… It’s in these moments
that we remember the truths behind words;
and recover an ancient longing; and our
kinship, our covenant, with wild.
True to the title of the book, Roselle invites us to share her view
of love from many different vantage points.
This is Rosa Canina:
Rain, milky with mist, has gently
erased the moorland distances.
Lanes are at their heartbreaking
fullest: buttercup, bluebell, campion,
Queene Anne’s lace, buds of dog rose.
And this is also an act of love:
to see another over a threshold.
Love of nature, animals, friends, lovers, parents; joy
in their life, and sadness in their passing and decline.
I’m going to turn off my commentary here. These
excerpts easily speak for themselves.
From Wild Garlic:
Everyone we love will leave us eventually,
or we’ll leave them. That’s what the wise vicar
said at that wedding blessing all those years ago.
Knowing that, how can I not love you fully?
From All The
Missing Names Of Love:
Today I’m obsessed by things transient
or lost: the dog dead for fifteen years
who today lapped water in the kitchen
at noon, even though I couldn’t see her;
my father’s mislaid past; or the names
that slip through my mother’s grasp
like the minnows we’d try to catch
up to our childish knees in the Vellator streams …
From Rain Dharma:
Rain settling in like conversation between
lifelong friends; rain, plants, stone, birds
at ease with themselves and each other, at ease
with how the world needs to be.
From After
Midsummer:
My mum is so light now I can
carry her in one chamber of my heart.
From Going into
the meadow after the retreat:
the horse’s light breath on my cheek
the way he delicately politely
only just
meeting my eyes reads my face
hands hair with his gentle muzzle
as if he smells
questions, as if I were an event
blown in on the whirling wind
as if
from within the zero
of Zen in which he dwells
he barely
recognizes me, each thing wholly
new, every encounter the first.
From South
Cerney Sonnets ii Cotswold Water
Park: Plate Movement:
The layers beneath our feet are provisional
as anything else; time swallows its tail
and I’m afraid. Hold me. …
From On not
going over the lip of a waterfall in an oil-drum:
Tell me again
what you said about love;
speak it again – the one
about two bodies’ heat,
the one about crossing the water.
Tell me again.
From This rain,
the window open:
Still I lie on the roomward side
of the bed
after all these years
wash the pillowslips
on which I never lie
when I wash my own
put them out to dry
billowing in the salt wind
and reinstall them
neither foam nor feathers
ever as good a pillow
as his chest
Diagnoses
for my parents:
i Alzheimer’s
Once she found a goldcrest’s
nest,
tucked it carefully in a
crook, made sure
the entrance was clear and
open.
Recently the winds have
blown it far
from the tree, are gently
taking it apart.
ii Stroke
The last dominoes perch
unsteadily.
The rest have fallen so
that their black
sides are uppermost, the
numbers
and the narrative mostly
obscured.
From Whiteout:
… On that high crest
the snowdrifts fell and fell and were chest-height
and head-height and then filled the lane till
even hedges were eclipsed, the white drift a foretaste
of what later would take my mother’s brain and gently
erase it.
From Let there
be peace:
Let me go in a breath of applewood smoke from the mountains
Release a white mare into the hills for me
Whisper my name into her ear
Let her go.
Thank you, Roselle.
