Notes on the half-hidden, Thimblerig by Annette Skade

Thimblerig by Annette Skade Bradshaw Books 2013 63 pages

---

Notes on the half-hidden

Annette Skade’s debut collection Thimblerig was published by Bradshaw Books in 2013. Thimblerig is a collection of some 53 poems on themes of family, familial history, and on the poetic striving for voice. Skade’s sub-thematic flow, her buried themes, are brought out using the symbolism of light,  and of the natural world that surrounds her.

Skade is at her best as a writer and recorder of history and tale, her preoccupations are carried through the text as light-maps. She uses the symbols of the caul, the moth, and the cord (as rope, umbilicus, even as muscle ). Her symbols often denote boundary both in the  physical and in the emotional sense.  

Women play an important role in Skade’s familial tracery, her bloodline. Thimblerig is dedicated to Skade’s mother and to her daughter. In Thimblerig Skade’s grandmother forms the apex of the matrilineal pyramid, appearing in The Caul

The Caul

She was born with a caul on her face.
The mid-wife said it was good luck,
cut away the membrane,
examined its milky translucence
and placed it in tissue to be kept.
Her father sold it to a sailor
as a charm against drowning.

…

All her life she loved chiffon scarves.
Its my belief she missed
part of herself sold away.

p 11 Thimblerig

Family tales are held together with fine wisps of poetry which will transmogrify into light. Annette Skade uses light to map her history and to create boundaries of safety in which to enclose and keep family safe. There is an element of ephemeral about her use of light which she has developed into a fine sense in the beautiful Oak Grove,

Oak Grove

I draw a ring
around this house:

snail shell
harbour
omphalos

Strophe, antistrophe:
from oak to oak,
bin to bench,
winter green to herb,
washing line, shed.

Tread the seasons,
serve the sickle moon,
observe it spring,
orange, low on a dark sea.

A rope of days, twined strong,
to ward off the stranger,
the letter come to dispossess.

Oak Grove answers to A Map of My House In Terms Of Light, where the poet shows her reader the physical interior of the home traced with light: as impermanent, subject to deep loss and to necessary change. The exterior ring of protection and enclosure traced by the poet belies the move to drift of the lives of those she means to protect and to keep. those that are within the home:

To plot all changes
from dawn to dusk
and through each season,
I need many such maps
an atlas of light.

from  A Map of My House In Terms Of Light, Thimblerig.

Skade is always striving to make her meaning through her use of symbol. In one poem here she has capped a false tail onto the work Papyrus Fragment forcing her ending too soon. Skade deserves a broader canvas for her imaginative play, which she will follow through with in her next collection.

Two moth poems occupy the ground where the poets strives to examine the vulnerability of her existence. I wanted to look at these closer because they form the penates and laertes of the collection and of the poet’s thematic concerns. These are Papyrus Fragment and Restless.

Restless

A hundred moths made a lattice
on blue-black window pane,
some the size of wrens
others torn corners of paper:
a nightly frantic race of wings.

Papyrus Fragment

It darts, bares a blaze
of underwing to plain sight;
this endless fragile need
to make a mark,
to come to light.

Skade’s investigation of nature is where she triumphs as in Solstice Rose. This poem and Oak Grove in particular show a poet who is  an imagist. A perfect image is accomplished in thirteen brief words,

Solstice Rose

Thorn switches
cage
a single yellow bud,
clenched
against wind whips:
a sundrop.

---

• Thimblerig
• Annette Skade on Poethead

The Co. Durham Miner’s Granddaughter’s Farewell to the Harlan County Miner’s Grandson

The Co. Durham Miner’s Granddaughter’s Farewell to the Harlan County Miner’s Grandson by Kit Fryatt . Published 2013 Knives Forks and Spoons Press Pages 61

---

New Words to the Tailor’s Air Rome, you barely inveigh when governments settle traders’ gaming debts with money stolen from the sick and children. Instead you spew sermons on the evils of condoms to AIDS victims: better die holy, Joe Slim than fill a rubber with a drachm of sperm. Rome, your hypocrites cant their pro-life spiel (what touching pride in avoiding homicide!) but they’ll skewer any born soul ever. Life is a fig-leaf Rome, for your kink: convincing people their desires & bodies stink as bad as your shit (…) Rome, if I thought you’d got a tithe of your due, I’d lay off you poison pit, werewolf in faux-lambskin black widow of a viper I’d not take your pardon if it came baked in all your dough. Go home, Rome, seek consolation where the devil knows his own. Excerpt from New Words to the Tailor’s Air © Kit Fryatt A loose adaptation of Guilhem Figuera’s ‘D’un sirventes far composed in 1229, during the siege of Toulouse by papal crusaders. Guilhem’s original attacks not just the recent crusade but clerical corruption and the avaricious imperialism of the papacy.

In The Co. Durham Miner’s Granddaughter’s Farewell & Kit Fryatt is a musical Ariadne who weaves her learning into her coat. She jauntily engages her reader with her major themes of exile, loss, camaraderie, and she throws in some linguistic cardiovascular workouts for good measure too. The basic structure of The Co. Durham Miner’s Granddaughter’s Farewell & is conveniently bipartite. The poems are read aloud for the most part, and you can hear some of them performed here.   Here or there in Section I glints a word originating in the Anglo-Saxon. Fryatt eventually and wholeheartedly gives way and devotes the entire of Section II to an exploration of her themes through adaptations of medieval, Early Irish, and Anglo-Saxon poetic forms. Fryatt uses lament, polemic, and subtly provocative pieces on contemporaneous corruption remodelled on 13th century texts, as in New Words to the Tailor’s Air adapted from Guilhem Figuera’s ‘D’un sirventes far‘. I suppose that corrupt practice and its effect has  an unchanging quality.   Fryatt weaves the universal themes of camaraderie and exile into Sections I and II of The Co. Durham Miner’s Granddaughter’s Farewell &. Exile is written as a full and complete isolation from a former life, a season in hell. Be the protagonist the wife of The Wife’s Lament (here written as a youth), or even The Wanderer. To lose one’s thane (or lord) who functioned as the hierarchical leader of a group, is to lose one’s very life and the meaning derived therefrom. These themes are borne lightly into our modern consciousness by Fryatt’s subtle approach to her writing, and no academic sense of the era is necessary to the understanding of the general reader. The Wife’s Lament is a well know text from The Exeter Book. Its author is unidentified , but the exile is likely written from the perspective of the sinning woman. She may or not be speaking from the realms of death, lamenting her earthly loss and her exile.  from The Wife’s Lament  While at dawn, alone, I crawl miserably down Under the oak growing out of my cave. There I must squat the summer-long day, There I can water the earth with weeping For exile and sorrow, for sadness that can never Find rest from grief nor from the famished Desires that leap at unquenched life. by Unidentified Three From The Exeter Book (ii) Coneycote As I was told I stay in this brakebrush holt bunkered beneath an oak old earthwork. I am taken up with longing. Shadow valley unswept moor bitter pale of briars my houseless home.’ Coneycote is © Kit Fryatt Fryatt writes coneycote as a boy or youth who is honouring the wishes of his thane. There is a type of equality inherent in Fryatts treatment of the theme which she achieves by reducing the high-tone of the language in the original (Exeter Book) to a more robust vernacular. This poem is a jewel in the book.  It sits well in Section II,  whilst picking up and re-threading the theme of exile  inherent in the language of Section I. I have excerpted a small section of Three From The Exeter book above, and I  refer the  interested reader to Burton Raffel’s Poems And Prose From The Old English. Fryatt well knows how to use her symbols,  Vis her reference  to the use of the oak  as symbol of a place of exile or punishment. The tree was associated with death, in the very least it was associated with societal disgrace, and a rabbit hole image refers to the disgrace of adultery. Interestingly the symbol play also ties in with the story of the women in the wall , or to the burial of women alive in regeneration myths such as in Sophocles Antigone or the story of Demeter. One supposes the pain of exile, or indeed the death of the individual to be necessary to their symbolic rejuvenation. The voice of  lamenting is present in this book , yet one feels a powerful energy in Fryatt’s use  of  words that belie any sense of weakness. The preview section of KFS Press includes an excerpt of the first section of the book. The eponymous title-poem of The Co. Durham Miner’s Granddaughter’s Farewell & sets the tone for the entire text, which is playfully vicious. Fryatt doesn’t seem interested in the issue of gendering,  she inhabits a poetic world of boyish and delighted charm along with a unique acerbically infused sweetness. from, The Co. Durham Miner’s Granddaughter’s Farewell to the Harlan County Miner’s Grandson Swiftly, my chancer, to the temple they danced you dead leaves in your pocket and a mouthful of vine. I thought I should slight you, but go where you might you will come back to green grass, air and sunshine. . Darling, my hazard boy, I thought to have you your body as straight and keen as a blade, your mouth soft as eiderdown, stay you or hie you, you’re bloodsworn to Fortune’s helpless parade. Nanna Slut’s Long Close Summer KFS Press

Poems from In Between Angels and Animals, by Emily Cullen

EMBODIMENT   1. Maternal   I lie on the bed in darkness, wary of sudden toddler jerks (your innocent, erratic strength). Instead, you lay your head upon my cheek and in that momentary tenderness, a universe of visceral wisdom. I am held by this intuition: love free of all condition.   2. Marital   We grasp each other. Words surrender to spoor of pore. You kiss my collarbone. Sacred contours underscore quibbles and stresses. Our limbs recall a geography of catharsis; the lee of my back, the lie of your land.   Embodiment is © Emily Cullen   GALWAY MOULD   We take the damp for granted here. Blinds draw back to reveal colonies of galaxies: tiny black holes in our new collective space.   ‘It’s only condensation,’ Next Door concedes, ‘the weather’s too wintry to open the windows.’ My wooden bangle by the sill slips into a mildewed coat of green.   For fun, I bought you mouldy cheese. Last night, it took revenge on me, inducing a vivid dream of a white chandelier of mould that slowly lowered through our kitchen ceiling: a lichen lantern, till its lattices became milky spores, mouths that started to open and close.   Then I awoke, vowing to spray our wall of condensation, diffuse for good my fascination with Galway mould.   Galway Mould is © Emily Cullen   INCENSE   Wisps of opium: boa constrictors curl into curtains of late afternoon. Milky ribbons tantalise like the soft, deliberate motion of the belly dancer you admired in Turkish solitude. I remember you burning sandalwood in Illinois to set the mood. Now smoky arabesques tease then evanesce while broken trails of ash, like fossilized worms announce seduction as but a crumbling dream: brittle, grey, ephemeral.   Incense is © Emily Cullen Incense’ was published in No Vague Utopia (Ainnir Publishing, 2003) ‘Galway Mould’, ‘Embodiment’ and ‘Playing House’ were published in Emily Cullen’s second collection, In Between Angels and Animals (Arlen House, 2013).

Dr. Emily Cullen is an Irish writer, scholar, harpist and arts manager. Her first poetry collection, entitled No Vague Utopia was published by Ainnir in 2003. In 2004 she was the national Programme Director of the Patrick Kavanagh Centenary celebrations and was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series. Emily was awarded an IRCHSS Government of Ireland fellowship for her doctoral study on the Irish harp. She is a qualified teacher of the harp who has performed throughout Europe, Australia and the United States. A former member of the Belfast Harp Orchestra, she has recorded on a number of albums and also as a solo artist. In addition to writing poetry, short stories and feature articles, she publishes widely on aspects of Irish cultural history and music.

Things Being Various Out now! Emily Cullen In Between Angels and Animals (Arlen House, 2013)  ISBN: 9781851320790  Paperback 96 pp 12 EURO Available from Kennys Bookshop, The Book Depository and many good book stores. More Information: The Book Depository: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Between-Angels-Animals-Emily-Cullen/9781851320790 Kennys: http://www.bookshop.kennys.ie/book/IE/9781851320790/In_Between_Angels_and_Animals

Poems by Christine Broe

Breakfasting with Dreams Birdsong. Scraps of dreams remembered. I place one foot, then the other, on the floor. Outside in the first light of breaking day dew lies on the discarded squashed remains of suppers bought from greasy chipper vans, and mist will blend with fumes of car exhausts as workers crawl from sleepy dormer towns. But dew and mist are genes of water words like drip and drop and rain and flood and sea so comforted I make some toast and tea humming words like seed and sow and yellow wheat and grind and flour and bake and break and eat. I slipper round the kitchen with these words and on the window sill leave crumbs for birds, carbohydrates to augment the early worms. Then as the sun shines through the marmalade I butter toast with golden spreads of dreams, image fragments I have salvaged from the night so I can go and face the world once more, put one foot, then the other, out the door. Breakfasting with Dreams is © Christine Broe A Decent Full Stop There are enough words in the world, more than enough, when all that is necessary communicates itself in silence. Should the sparkle of a sapphire speak Or be some window in your eye that tells of love? The script is done. You have said all you will say. I listen to the pregnant silence for sudden intakes of breath. Sighs. Silent mother I am learning to live with the absence with a language beyond even that between the lines. We walk together, I synchronise my steps to yours, From garden gate to garden gate Sealed with cobwebs. You touch the locks. Scents of flowers caress us, sitting in the sun when your hand unbidden reaches out, catches mine and we are joined to everything. A Decent Full Stop is © Christine Broe

Christine Broe, born and still lives in Dublin. She has worked as an art teacher, arts facilitator, and art therapist while looking after family of seven. She has been writing poetry since the 1990’s winning the inaugural Brendan Kennelly Award in 2001 and gained international recognition when awarded the Premio Cittá di Olbia prize in 2002. Swan Press published her debut collection Solas Sólás in 2003. She is a long time member of Rathmines Writer’s Workshop and has facilitated creative writing workshops using art media as inspiration for generating work.

Crinoline and sans, recent publications by C. Murray

crinoline   The grief synesthete bears her horsehair dress heavy as the rose haw throbs its orange glow   Through forest or stream, each time a visit to the griefscape is necessitated (and it will be) dress gathers a little more. Contracting centimetre-slow, she   begins to weight in her gathering-to of: brocades as web-work / a tatter of lace / a smear of pollen (gold) and, yes sequined embonpoint (tears too, always).   That throbbing orange (big as a head) is a flower that will not sit in its bed. Her train drags past load-bearing its leaf and moss/ its loamy grain/ its fray/   its thread(ing).   The only response is wonder, the only way is still     and still -   Crinoline is © C. Murray   Crinoline was first published at When Women Waken, Fall 2013, from a forthcoming book called She. sans   I.   it is all ceremony it is all the cloths all gathered-in   it is white tailor’s chalk in a neat triangle it is the blanket-stitch before the machine   it is the neighbour woman with her bone-pick pulling stitches one by one from the curtain lining   the [bone-pick] is ivory coloured a little larger than a [tooth-pick] nubbed to cradle under the silks   and lift them up so she can snip it at the ties   II.   the little knot hidden in back of the material stretched out across her knees is silver the thread is doubled-to   the material is some floral-stuff on white laid onto a cream skirting she will rinse it out in cold water later   and hang it on the monday line the blue-blue rope of the monday line the length of material   is clean / sweaty from her handiwork she will hang it over the gauze of her nets which are always immaculate   her effort is blind/ she does not need eyes to feel her work her gathering-to of the pleats   ©2013 Christine Murray   sans Published Winter 2013 at  The Southword Journal . The poem is from The Blind, published Oneiros Books 2013

 

• An Index of Publications by C. Murray