AnnPilling.co.uk

Haytiming

Sunday, 20 November 2011 17:48 | E-mail

Last Sunday was Remembrance Day. In the Dales this is marked by the usual church services, outdoor services round village war memorials,brass bands; and the slow reading aloud of the names of all the dead who fell in the two world wars. In Wensleydale the names are so familiar, Iveson, Fawcett, Dinsdale, Cockett, Whaley. The Whaleys lived in my house for four generations and two of them walked across our threshhold to their deaths. My poem 'Haytiming' recalls their sacrifice:

Haytiming

Through closed car windows all the way home
I smelt hay, its thin sweet fragrance.
They worked all yesterday

and some already lies in long green bricks
on bristly fields, the rest like swathes of hair
still waits for the machine.

I step across our threshold
'Virtute not verbis' spelt in tiles
and think of old Julys

of men who walked out of this house
to the Somme, to Caen;
up this lane a boy brought telegrams.

I climb steadily, going west,
to a shaved meadow where the dog
careers about, tossing the loose hay.

Below, the quilted land thrums with mowing
while a horse big enough to pull gun carriages
sleeps in the shade.

Ann Pilling

This poem appears in my new collection, 'The Dancing Sailors' which is published tomorrow (November 21st) by Indigo Dreams Publishing.

For information go to www.indigodreamsbookshop.com and go to 'our authors' and to Ann Pilling. The book can be ordered from them or from any bookshop.

When you 'say goodbye' to a book and it is published at last it is like giving birth. You have to 'let go' of the thing that has been growing inside you for so long. One can feel rather flat until the 'feedback' comes in..but I have loved putting this book together.

Enjoy!

Where is the summer?

Friday, 22 July 2011 11:19 | E-mail

I keep waiting for summer to happen. Up here in Wensleydale the weather has been manic for three months, (we had summer in April). Since then it's been wind, rain, floods, storms et al with just the (very) occasional hot day. Well, we must have had a few of those because the farmers have been able to cut their grass. The verb used round here for doing that is 'to haytime'. Lovely isn't it?

Some time ago I heard the poet Danny Abse give advice about writing a poem. He talked about steeping yourself in your chosen subject, viewing it from every angle, saturating yourself in its 'thisness'. I tried to do that with my poem 'Rain'. 'Summer' is about storing precious memories up, to return to them later for consolation, something Wordworth understood so completely when he wrote in 'Tintern Abbey'.

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.’

William Wordsworth from 'Tintern Abbey'

Rain

This rain has swilled all colour out of field and sky
grey sheep, grey grass,a new spring spews
grey foam up through a crumbling hole, the views
from our window are dull etchings en grisaille.
The river sizzles black, the beck boils brown,
trees litter the banks , a wall
of water smashes a bridge down stream,
leats thin as hair carve lines in the cheek of the fell.
I lie awake loving this rain, the print
of its hands on belly and thigh, the supreme
wet of it, the insistent beat. I want
only rain to enter me now, no warmth
of sun or moon or snow cover bedding me down
only rain and the fall of the rain.

Ann Pilling

Summer

Pulling weeds out after rain is lovely, the earth
opens like lips receiving a kiss and the stalks
do not struggle as I ease them from the ground. This grave summer
was full of rain.

Now swallows notch the wires like paper bows.
I must remember
that one great sunset, its red drops
heavy as mercury draining the sky, its imprint
intense as perfume on a cotton square.
I must breathe deep and pcoket it for winter, stuff
my hamster pouches full
of summer, and the smell of grass.

Ann Pilling.

Winter has come early

Wednesday, 01 December 2010 13:30 | E-mail

The first snow fell here in Upper Wensleydale on November 25^th, earlier even than last year, and that first fall was the beginning of the longest and hardest winter for thirty years. Doing my bird table this morning, fresh water, seeds of all kinds, peanuts, I wonder where all the birds have gone? I do not see them 'brooding in the snow'. A sparrow appeared first when I had gone inside again, then a blackbird. Soon my pair of collared doves will show up. And Daisy, our cocker spaniel, is driven wild with joy by snow, and galumphs about in it, barking deliriously.

This Sunday was Advent Sunday, the day that ushers in a time of mysterious waiting. The Christian waits for the coming of God (venire means to come). In the secular world too preparation are being made for the great December feast, presents bought and hidden, puddings stirred, cards written. I like this time of year.

One of my most enduring memories is my first Christmas in the Yorkshire Dales (1987) when the village band played carols on Christmas Eve outside our cottage door, and the sheep came to listen. Many years later I wrote 'One Christmas', a genuine example of Wordsworth’s 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'.

'The New Mat' is an Advent poem about the expected birth of my first grandchild and 'Thaw' is about, well, a thaw. No promise of that for days and days yet.

Happy Christmas!

This Field

Tuesday, 21 September 2010 12:30 | E-mail

It feels like a long time since Simon Armitage walked the Pennine Way and did a reading in my sitting room. Autumn is coming quickly now, quicker than I can ever remember and my son in Suffolk says it’s coming fast there too, so it’s not just Up North. I opened my bedroom curtain the other day and looked at ‘my field’ down which lovely trees sort of ‘march’, along a dry stone wall and I said aloud ‘The trees are in their autumn beauty’ the opening lines of Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’’ I love that poem, especially how they ‘paddle in the cold companionable streams..’ How can Yeats get away with ‘paddle’? But he does.

So many poems about Autumn, Keats springs first to mind but I love Binyon’s ‘The Burning of the Leaves’ and that poem which starts ‘Now it is Autumn and the falling fruit..’. I have forgotten who wrote it now.

I have decided to plant an apple tree in my garden, there are many wonderful trees here but no apple tree. A neighbour suggests a variety called ‘Katy’, sweet and tangy and it grows well in this climate. Katy is the name of my six year old grand daughter so yes, I’ll go for that.

I keep writing poems about ‘my field’ though it isn’t mine, it belongs to John next door.

This Field

I like this field, the way wind
fingers each blade
then ripples them up to the skyline in a single square.

I like the way
the lambs sit on their mothers’ heads
and mob John when he turns up with their feed.

I like his even-handedness, tip sack, spread pellets.
From where I sit he’s in a sea
foamed up by winds from Wetherfell.

I like it when Kath says
the trees are budding up, shows me
green pinpricks on a twig, with May half gone.

Here the becks blether,
Ewes get tupped. Bap, sup, clowt, nowt,
words solid as Whernside.

When cold bites it’s backendish and this field
will curl at the edges, fold in on itself,
wombing me in for the long sleep.

Ann Pilling

Simon Armitage's poetry reading

Monday, 12 July 2010 09:00 | E-mail

Next Monday night Simon Armitage, who is walking the Pennine Way, is giving a poetry reading in my sitting room. Our house is actually ON the Pennine Way so he would have been walking past in any case. It was not always on this popular walkers’ route, that went slightly east of us, but somebody bought the house in the 1970’s and turned it into a ( very) small hotel. The story goes that he changed the route slightly, I hope legally, so that walkers passed his very door, scope for cream teas, beds for the night, a Full English breakfast…

Anyhow, I have to fit 44 people into my sitting room. I keep measuring the church chairs which a kind neighbour is going to bring up the night before in his tractor trailer. My main concern is the carpet, an old, thick rug which sits on top of another carpet. This rug has a life of its own and has always been subject to carpet creep. However often we pull it straight (it is a two if not three man job) it eventually sets off across the room to go somewhere else. At the moment it is making a serious bid to get up the chimney. The long edge furthest away from the door is already lapping at the hearth.

The Life of Objects

This carpet
is determined to get into the next room.
We straighten it most weeks and line it up with the fireplace
taking a corner each; it’s like making a bed.
It’s happy for about a day then it starts creeping
towards the bookcase making rich waves,
ink blue, the red of ox blood specked with white
where weavers cut their threads. It must know
that freedom’s on the other side of the wall
and sunshine, it was made
in a hot room overlooking a baked street
heavy with spice smells.

Ann Pilling
(first published in Smiths Knoll)