But I wanted to be that

I am sorry to have to report that Mr P. Oram has beaten me to the achievement of an ambition I have cherished for many years. Reviewing our book Orchards in PN Review Volume 38 Number 4, Mr +Andrew Shanks makes the matter clear:

'To translate poetry is necessarily to accord the poems in question a degree of slowed-down close attention that is hard to replicate with poems written in one's own language. The seductively persuasive essay with which +Peter Oram accompanies his and Alex Barr's joint translations of +Rilke's French-language collection Vergers is a prime case of what one might call resultant 'translator's obsession'. Indeed, Oram writes here almost as if he were a character in one of +Jorge Luis Borges' fantastical short stories . . .'

Well! As if being a character in a Borges story wasn't something I deserve much more! (As long as it isn't +Dahlman.)

Mr Shanks goes on to say 'the effect of the essay is uncannily beautiful.'  Easy for a Borges character I suppose. 'And, what is more important, the translations themselves are also fine.' (Oh good.) 'There is a lot of rhyme in the French; always, surely, the biggest problem in poetry translation. Yet the English versions reproduce a good deal of it in remarkably natural-seeming fashion.'

Oh well. Maybe I'm a character in some other author's story. Maybe even, Mr Oram is created from my imagination, as in 'Las Ruinas Circulares'. But I don't think so - my imagination has its limits. 

Ash Tree Revisited

I felt a need to revisit my poem 'Ash Tree' in my collection Letting In The Carnival. Reading The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck, and the introduction to The Poem Itself  (ed. Stanley Burnshaw) made it seem like (a) a responsibility and (b) a possibility. Here it is:

Ash Tree Revisited

Limbs hewn for light, hung with weights,
or espaliered. More air, less grace.

The canopy a disfigured surface.

Too late.

The dryad gone, he mourns no longer broad
and balanced branches more than her sad flight,

and what he said was love, bright

and flawed.

And here are two more . . .

Here's a preview of one of the Triangle Ted books I've been working on in collaboration with Peter Oram of Starborn Books and Dave Parkin. More to come so keep tuned in!

A new poem

In a vain attempt to emulate the hospital sonnets of Mr Peter Oram, I wrote the following while recovering from having my hernia fiixed.

Ward 3

Who knows where the time
goes? Into the dark
den of Side Room 3?

Up that half-awake
patient’s nostrils? Does
it infiltrate the grille
of that steel ceiling vent?

I watch. Perhaps it fills

(tangled among levers)
the space beneath my bed
until it overflows
down to where the dead
lie in that basement room
one enters with muted tread.