Noah Front Cover
Noah can be purchased at this link:
https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/penelope-shuttle-noah
Bio and Links
Penelope Shuttle
lives in Cornwall. Lyonesse, her thirteenth collection, appeared from Bloodaxe Books, June 2021, and was longlisted for the Laurel Prize. Covid/Corvid, in collaboration with Alyson Hallett, was published by Broken Sleep Books, September 2021. Noah, a pamphlet, appeared from Broken Sleep Books in September 2023. A new collection, History of the Child, is in preparation. Shuttle is a founder member and President of the Falmouth Poetry Group. A selection of her poems can be heard on the Poetry Archive website.
website: http://www.penelopeshuttle.co.uk
http://www.brokensleepbooks .com
The Interview
Q:1. How did you decide on the order of the poems in your book?
The first Noah poem I wrote was deluge; I thought it was a standalone poem. But about a year later I wrote a poem about animals, leaning towards their mythical and imaginal properties. I asked myself, why these animals, and why this expression of deep feeling about these animals? And a voice somewhere deep in me said, these animals are in Noah’s domain, and I realised that the deluge poem had been working away in my mind, and had engendered, maybe, the poem that I then called Noah’s notes (preliminary). Here I imagine the animals marching into the Ark, as Noah stands by the doorway, ticking them off a list.
At this early stage I thought of writing a short sequence of Noah poems. A third poem turned out to be a second animal poem, called Noah’s Domain, or Zooming-in on the Ark.
By now, out in the world, the pandemic had hit, and we were in lock-down. Lock-down is a kind of Ark, and I’m sure the stresses of lock-down were alleviated, for me, by the writing of more Noah poems.
I have, over the past ten years, become very involved with and engaged-by thematic projects in poetry: Heath (with John Greening), Lzrd (with Alyson Hallett), Covid/Corvid: Pandemic Sonnets (with Alyson Hallett), Lyonesse… And I’m currently working on a long suite of poems titled History of the Child. So I’ve developed, if you like, a poetics for the longish haul, liking to use the muscles of language and the overall theme’s gift of constantly-renewing energies.
So after three Noah poems I recognised the signs, and began to explore the whole legend of Noah, and write my way into and around it,
Timeline? I’ve had to go back and look this up. Deluge was written in 2015, and then the two animal poems in 2016. I continued to write Noah poems, as and when they arrived, i.e, of their own volition, though I had tuned myself to their possibility, and I found, by 2020, that I had 50 pages of Noah poems. Some of these were edited out, others had their titles changed, all this taking me up to 2021, and then I began to sketch out a running order. I decided to go for chronological order, opening with Captain Noah informing his community that the Flood is on its way. The original deluge poem came in as the third poem in the pamphlet.
My friend and colleague Katrina Naomi did a peer-review of the poems, and she made the insightful comment that the pamphlet might benefit from a closing poem to show when the Flood recedes and the Ark makes landfall on Ararat. I had not written such a poem. Katrina’s comment was inspiring and I wrote two closing poems, An Sorrowfulle Acount, and exodus. Once I had these closing poems the running order slotted into place pretty much organically, and so the pamphlet had its shape.
Q:2. Most poets seem to enjoy writing about animals in the third person, at a distance. What do you enjoy about writing from the first person, animal point of view?
Over the five years I was working on Lyonesse I took breaks from it and worked on other things. This process refreshes my senses and my writing energies for the main project. It’s really freeing to have a change of poetic scene; to feel able to let your hair down and play with language, which is what you can do with work at an early stage. That was where the animals in Noah came from but, as you said, Paul, I do have a project (it has been lying a bit dormant of late) where I’m working on a bestiary, an alphabet of animals which pre-dates Noah. I hope to get it finished one day!
But my interest in writing about animals came from very far back; first of all as a reader. I read Marianne Moore when I was in my teens. She writes wonderfully about animals and she gives you lots of contextual footnotes. She employs a wry yet totally realistic approach in her poems, which are generous and wise poems. Denise Levertov has been a huge influence on me from early days, likewise, and she often writes about animals, mostly domestic animals.
Animals as a subject are intertwined with my life when I was mother of a young child. We would go out on family visits to wildlife parks, animal sanctuaries, zoos. Animals begin to appear in my my third and fourth collections; The Lion from Rio in 1986 and Adventures with My Horse in 1988. In The Lion from Rio there’s a poem about a water-snake called The Hellbender and in Adventures with my Horse there’s a poem called Horse of the Month, and other animal poems.
Not far from where we live in Falmouth, there used to be a place called Killiow House. This had been a big estate, and when Zoe was young it had turned itself into a kind of mini-Longleat but with no lions. But there were donkeys, chickens and, most importantly, pigs. At Killiow House there were some lovely pigs and as a family we became very fond of them. I wrote a poem called Killiow Pigs (Adventures with my Horse) and two other poems , Alice, and Alice’s husband, where I imagine the private lives of Alice, mother of 15 piglets, and her views on her husband.
It is a strange thing, to me, but two of my animal poems have been on the exam syllabus in England and Scotland for over twenty years, they’re still on the syllabus; Killiow Pigs, and Zoo Morning.
Zoo Morning was written after a family visit to London Zoo when Zoe became perturbed by the caging of the animals. In order to allay her fears her father (Peter Redgrove) made up a story in which all the animals regard being in the zoo as a form of show-biz. But in the evening, when they are off-duty, they have interesting lives: elephants party all night, bears indulge in politics, monkeys are scholars. This poem appears in Taxing the Rain.
After these collections, and as our daughter grew up, animals as a theme goes into the background, mostly, in the collections that follow.
Why then do animals as a theme suddenly come back in the Noah poems? I think one answer is television! My late mother lived to the age of 100, and retained her memory and cognition till the very last weeks of her life. I spent a lot of time with Mum over the last two decades of her life. We were both widowed in the same year, 2003. And when for many years I travelled for work, my mum’s house just outside London was a great travel hub! Among the programmes Mum liked to watch were animal documentaries, David Attenborough, Monkey World, various animal sanctuary programmes. These programmes were often rich in detail and amazing visuals and they made their way into my poems, but for me they are woven in with all the emotions around the good times I spent with Mum, who was a lovely easy person to be with. The subject material of animals is not solely about animals, then, but my connection to animals through Mum.
Writing about animals is a privilege; I try to give personhood to animals, and to speak for their right to exist in their animal kingdom, which as we know is being destroyed around them. I’ve learned a lot through writing about the creatures with whom we share our planet. Animal energies are good energies to translate into language-energy. I find these creaturely beings fascinating, poignant, threatened, and wiser, often, than humans. Animals live very structured lives, instinctual lives, but often with a wide margin for innovation and for mischief. Who wouldn’t wish to write about animals?
I think we often write from information and impulses from far back in our lives. Peter Redgrove’s non-fiction book, The Black Goddess deals with non-human senses, and proposes that there are many degrees of perception and sensory organisation of their environment possessed by animals which we, human animals, have lost. Peter’s book opened my perceptions to and erased stereotypes of the ways in which animals experience the world.
When Peter was working on drafts of The Black Goddess we had many conversations about his research; we discussed how he would shape the chapters, so there’s a bit of me on the sidelines of that book!
We owe respect to animals who live on this planet with deeper wiser and more profound sensory experience than ours. Humankind has blocked out a many of our primal senses; when I write about animals in the third person I’m trying to explore their senses.
By using the first person I’m hoping to make a profound identification, as far as I can, with the particular animal and without exploiting that animal. I’ve tried to keep open a channel in my imaginative writing where a particular animal can have its own say. It’s very close, this first person stance, to a shamanic process, the opening of the self to a possession or a very close identification with the animal.
When I’m writing in the voice of Alice the pig at Killiow, or when at the present moment I’m writing from the perspective of a female giraffe, that writing has elements of a shamanic saturation in animal-experience and may enable me to find a vital pathway back to those too-successfully repressed animal senses.
Humans have created a very sophisticated but limited life experience, we have made a deal with the devil. We’ve agreed to give up many of our senses, and these buried senses come back to haunt us, as repressed material always does. I’m trying to find lost things for myself and in myself in these animal-voiced poems.
Anything you write involves paradox. There’s a question that’s there for me: how much of my own personhood is human and how much is animal? I’m attracted to whatever modulates who I think I am.
A totem animal can also be a poet’s muse. I’m thinking, for example, of Jo Shapcott’s Mad Cow poems from a few years ago. Her powers of poetic articulation reach out to the creatures who suffered in the foot and mouth epidemic, and these poems also break new ground for voicing individual and collective female perspectives, using that voice of apparent madness which has reason at its core.
A while ago, in an email from my friend and collaborator, poet and essayist Alison Hallett, Alyson wrote of poetry as writing the spells that have not been written yet. To get closer to the reality of Alice the mother pig, to bring animal energies into the language, to enter the animal energies as a writing space, to merge with Alice, is to engage with shamanic process and to participate in a spell-casting, spell- writing.
Wordplay is active in these poems; by playing with language I play with what it might be to live Alice’s life, the life of any animal; to wear their skin, to know the richness of their senses, have access to different ways of experiencing the world; to retrieve an innocence which is grounded in lived experience.
Further Reading: An Immense World: A Journey Through the Animal Kingdom’s Extraordinary Senses (2022), by Ed Yong. He leads the reader through the vast and eclectic sensory experiences of animals. Exploring the concept of umwelt – or ‘the sensory bubble that each species exists in’, Yong examines everything from the smell and sight experience of dogs to the electrically powered navigation abilities of the black ghost knifefish.
Q:3. How important is form in Noah?
Pound famously said that the image causes form to come into being. For me, the poem comes to life when form and content have found perfect equilibrium. Each poem has to find the form it needs; the poet’s task is to elicit that balance from language, experience, chance, and a deal of hard work.
I rarely start out with a particular form in mind. Most of my initial drafts will arrive in one long unbroken stanza. I live with that for a while. Gradually, as I rework and reflect on drafts, the poem will shape-shift into the form it needs. I like couplets, and use them quite a lot in Noah.
I like sequences of short poems, and I also like, sometimes, to vary line length and the length of stanzas. I dislike poems that look ‘blocky’ or over-dense on the page, or poems whose shape on the page feels willed rather than organic. I work to give the poem a sense of light and space and depth; spatial value. I think working with language is similar to the way in which a potter works clay on a wheel. I feel the texture and tone and the impact of the poem in my hands as a malleable element; I’m shaping living language into a form that has purpose, coherence, wit, beauty.
Throughout Noah I’ve used a variety of forms and registers; there’s the couplet form, already noted. In firebird I’ve cast the poem as a mini-playlet, a conversation between Noah guarding the door of the Ark, and the phoenix, asking to be allowed in. In God and Noah there is a snappy dialogue between these two venerable characters, where they riff competitively on the symbolic value of animals. The subject of Noah, full of drama and known narrative, offers great scope to draw widely on different forms.
In although the text of the play is lost I have created a found poem from the records of the Trinity House Guild of Master Mariners and Pilots at Hull. This is to be found in Medieval Stage, vol.ii., Chambers. Historic texts are a great resource for the poet, and I have experimented with them in various collections.
Varying form in a book or pamphlet offers the possibility of creating many different atmospheres and types of speculation and imaginal reach. It is a vital part of the coherence and magic of poetry. It is a process involving pleasure! As D H Lawrence says of writing, if it’s no fun don’t do it!
In several Noah poems I have employed the open field technique, opening poems up by using a lot of the white space of the page, escaping the restraint of that lefthand margin. In the poems scenes from the ark i and scenes from the ark ii I have put the stanzas on alternating left and the right hand margins. I inset three lines in the middle of a longer stanza, in Madame Spider’s diary (extract), and varied the length of the stanzas to make sure that quite long poem did not collapse under its own weight, to let it have an aerial quality.
I am very sparing with punctuation; for me, this enables the poem to flow, and to engage with ways of modulation and musicality without the interruption of punctuation. When you choose to avoid punctuation you will need to take great care with the line breaks, as they will be doing much of the work of punctuation. I think it is best to put information in the title and/or in a footnote, so the poem is not burdened with excess information.
In that she hadde a shipe hirselfe alone, I use the dramatic monologue to allow Emzara, Noah’s wife, to speak: she was reluctant to enter the ark; she says: I want another ark…
At a late stage I wrote two last poems. The penultimate poem, An Sorrowfulle Account, takes the form of a mock-heroic ballad, written in rhythming quatrains. This came out of left field, a form I’d never tried to make work, nor ever been attracted to. The poem is about an Ape, a scholarly ape, who has loved the solitude of his cabin on the Ark. He grieves when the Ark comes to the end of its voyage. Writing this poem reminded me that we should never rule out working in any form, even though it seems uncongenial, and very far from our natural voice. There will always be discoveries, new ways of weaving form and content together.
The final poem is Noah is exodus; the animals rush out of the ark. The form of this short poem is a sestude. A sestude is a poem comprising 62 words only , excluding title and footnote. The sestude was devised by John Simmons for projects written by the TwentySix Collective. It has something of the discipline of the sonnet about it. After writing a number of them you get a sense of what 62 words feels like, in your mind, your inner hearing, your memory, your senses. Like the sonnet it is an intuitional machine, and likewise its brevity is a wondrous resource.
Having said all this, it sounds as if I sat down and worked out all the forms beforehand. But of course I didn’t. I’m constantly surprised by where the poem takes me. This is an integral part of the buzz. I love how a poem will suddenly flip from margin to margin, tense to tense, shape to shape. I love the tightrope-walk of keeping the exhilaration of the first draft alive right through to the final version. I love working with the poem, asking the poem what form it wishes to take. The poem is the expert, not the poet.
Recently I found a phrase I’d scribbled in an old notebook, from a visit to a Surrealist Painters Exhibition: creating new meanings through bizarre juxtapositions. I’m often struck by how, when editing and just doodling about the poem, two words collide or embrace, as if of their own accord, and make a new meaning, forge a new way for the poem to resolve and to shine.
Conversely, to keep the balance, all is mediated by the crafting; the poem begins with the instinctual, is moved forward by juxtapositions and chance, and the poet’s track record; but the closing stages of making a poem involve close and ruthless scrutiny. I often cut opening stanzas, lines that over-explain. I often cut closing lines, that give too neat and pat a closure. Imagine that the poem is The Ancient Mariner, and the Passerby is your reader. You must hook your reader in with immediacy and purpose.
Curiously, it is only, as I’ve written this third answer, that I realise the seed of these Noah poems may well have been Peter Redgrove’s 1977 collection, From Every Chink of the Ark!
Coda:
Both as a young poet and as a poet today I have benefited from the influence of Denise Levertov. I love her work. Like Levertov I don’t write ‘free verse’ but as she defines it, poetry that employs organic form. Organic form, she says: ‘’is a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man’s creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories.’
She has been a great influence on me, and I go back to her all the time, so it may be worth quoting at length from her seminal 1965 essay Some Notes On Organic Form.
(Today’s readers will observe that Levertov uses the locutions man/he to cover poets of all genders; though this may read oddly to us today she is merely following the mode of her historic moment. This should not lead us to retroactively downgrade her status as a leading poet of her day, who was also an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and an activist across a wide and radical spectrum.
Levertov writes: (from Some Notes On Organic Form)
For me, back of the idea of organic form is the concept that there is a form in all things (and in our experience) which the poet can discover and reveal. There are no doubt temperamental differences between poets who use prescribed forms and those who look for new ones—people who need a tight schedule to get anything done, and people who have to have a free hand—but the difference in their conception of “content” or “reality” is functionally more important. On the one hand is the idea that content, reality, experience, is essentially fluid and must be given form; on the other, this sense of seeking out inherent, though not immediately apparent, form. Gerard Manley Hopkins invented the word “inscape” to denote intrinsic form, the pattern of essential characteristics both in single objects and (what is more interesting) in objects in a state of relation to each other, and the word “instress” to denote the experiencing of the perception of inscape, the apperception of inscape. In thinking of the process of poetry as I know it, I extend the use of these words, which he seems to have used mainly in reference to sensory phenomena, to include intellectual and emotional experience as well; I would speak of the inscape of an experience (which might be composed of any and all of these elements, including the sensory) or of the inscape of a sequence or constellation of experiences.
A partial definition, then, of organic poetry might be that it is a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man’s creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories. Such poetry is exploratory.
How does one go about such a poetry? I think it’s like this: first there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech. Suppose there’s the sight of the sky through a dusty window, birds and clouds and bits of paper flying through the sky, the sound of music from his radio, feelings of anger and love and amusement roused by a letter just received, the memory of some long-past thought or event associated with what’s seen or heard or felt, and an idea, a concept, he has been pondering, each qualifying the other; together with what he knows about history; and what he has been dreaming—whether or not he remembers it—working in him. This is only a rough outline of a possible moment in a life. But the condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross section, or constellation, of experiences (in which one or another element may predominate) demands, or wakes in him this demand: the poem. The beginning of the fulfillment of this demand is to contemplate, to meditate; words which connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect. To contemplate comes from “templum, temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the augur.” It means, not simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to meditate is “to keep the mind in a state of contemplation”; its synonym is “to muse,” and to muse comes from a word meaning “to stand with open mouth”—not so comical if we think of “inspiration”—to breathe in.
So—as the poet stands open-mouthed in the temple of life, contemplating his experience, there come to him the first words of the poem: the words which are to be his way in to the poem, if there is to be a poem. The pressure of demand and the meditation on its elements culminate in a moment of vision, of crystallization, in which some inkling of the correspondence between those elements occurs; and it occurs in words. If he forces a beginning before this point, it won’t work. These words sometimes remain the first, sometimes in the completed poem their eventual place may be elsewhere, or they may turn out to have been only forerunners, which fulfilled their function in bringing him to the words which are the actual beginning of the poem. It is faithful attention to the experience from the first moment of crystallization that allows those first or those forerunning words to rise to the surface: and with that same fidelity of attention the poet, from that moment of being let in to the possibility of the poem, must follow through, letting the experience lead him through the world of the poem, its unique inscape revealing itself as he goes.
During the writing of the poem the various elements of the poet’s being are in communion with each other, and heightened. Ear and eye, intellect and passion, interrelate more subtly than at other times; and the “checking for accuracy,” for precision of language, that must take place throughout the writing is not a matter of one element supervising the others but of intuitive interaction between all the elements involved.
In the same way, content and form are in a state of dynamic interaction; the understanding of whether an experience is a linear sequence or a constellation raying out from and into a central focus or axis, for instance, is discoverable only in the work, not before it.
Rhyme, chime, echo, reiteration: they not only serve to knit the elements of an experience but often are the very means, the sole means, by which the density of texture and the returning or circling of perception can be transmuted into language, apperceived….
The complete essay can be found on the website of The Poetry Foundation.
Q:4. How did you create and develop your characters in the dramatic theatrical parts of Noah?
I think the creation and development of the characters in the drama of my Noah poems are deeply inspired by my love of the old mediaeval or Guild plays; and so much of the work of development had already been done for me there. In those plays the language is very vigorous and the characters are presented with remarkable living vehemence, so that was my starting point.
Then I followed my usual practise, which is to improvise around a theme or a character, to bounce images and depictions about to see what happens, and to play with the speech of one character or another, to find out where it leads me.
It’s always difficult to put yourself back into that initial fiery creative space of the writing. You’re there in that vortex of energies, of verbal and linguistic adventure, and it is more akin to play than to anything else. Serious play! So much of what I write involves delight and self-surprise in language.
I’m always curious about what will happen if I put this particular kind of language pressure on, say, the character of Noah. Let’s think about the fact that he was the inventor of alcohol. According to the Bible, he discovered how to grow grapes, and to make wine from the grapes. Noah is found drunk, sometimes, and I used this part of the bible story, and the old plays, where his sons have to restore him to respectable order when they find him flat out blind drunk.
But, to return to the difficulty of putting yourself back into the place of the poem’s initial making; for me it is like a place outside time and space, yet, paradoxically, the most real place of all. The imaginal freedom and the pleasure and demands of invention, of making everything in the poem resolve to a core concentration; this is exhilarating, and profoundly engaging to me. I 1 hope the poems have absorbed that energy; and that it survives all through the editing process, and the refining-down into shape. There is a particular need to discipline the exhilarating wildness of that original imaginal outburst.
There are coherences to be found, resistances to teased-out and resolved. There is another pleasure in the honing, and of making sure the research is correct.
I feel that human nature doesn’t change radically, and that the people appearing in the Noah story are both from ancient times and yet also very close to being our contemporaries.
I also enjoyed writing about the character of some of the animal kingdom creatures on-board, Madame Spider, and the complaint of the Ape who does not want the voyage to end, and, of course, that phoenix. Every one of them surprised me, made me want to explore their character and voice further.
The past, even the far-off biblical past, is always, for the imagination, present in our present. Peter and I once owned a book (which I now can’t find, alas) titled The Bible as Literature, and this is my approach with the Noah story. I’m approaching it as story, as legend, and not a particularly theological matter, though in my sequence Noah and God do have a somewhat competitive relationship.
I am often guided in my writing by Denise Levertov’s observation that ‘the poet sees, and reveals in language what is present but hidden – what Goethe called the open secret…’
The more I wrote about Noah, the more I was able to discover new things in these characters, field mice take refuge in Noah’s sleeve, small dinosaurs enter the ark, Mrs Noah’s character became clearer to me. Poetry is always discovery, a pilgrimage through language.
To quote Levertov again: she advises poets to use ‘the gift of the senses, the gifts of memory and language and intellectual discernment, and the gift of intuition which transcends the limits of deductive reasoning.’ She also speaks, often, of ‘the responsive imagination.’
The dramatic force of the characters is deeply addressed through the editing process. I edit a lot, and I edit over quite a long period of time. Through this time the characters are modulated and crafted, they come into focus over long shifts of time, and this, I hope, has enabled a deep reshaping of the characters; it took time for me to discern the extent of Mrs Noah’s discontents, and her very real sense of injustice, and to voice them. I loved weaving her voice into language so that she becomes present and very real to the reader, but also I was making sure that none of this carried the taint of polemic. The taunt from Noah to his wife, that he supposes she wants an ark of her own, was a key entry-point into the poem where she voices this desire, and articulates her resentment in being forced away from her beloved home and into the ark Noah has built.
To sum up: I write headlong from instinct and intuition, and then in the editing and crafting phrase, I try to avoid the over-directional nature of narrative, but rather to inhabit individual facets of the story and to shed light on some of the humans and creatures who people the story.
Q:5. Why did you consciously decide to mix modern references in with mediaeval language construction?
I’ve always been really interested in where our modern English tongue has come from, its roots, the words that lie beneath contemporary speech. I’m interested as a poet but also as someone interested in the emotional history of how our ancestors experienced the world, and their lives in the world.
I’ve always liked browsing my way through dictionaries and glossaries and exploring linguistics but in a kind of very relaxed and poet-centred way. I’ve recently written a poem about this, called written on a linden leaf. This poem looks at how writing poetry is as much an organic process as it is for a tree to put out leaves. I chose the linden tree because of the mythology surrounding it and the human stories that have been drawn from the Linden tree from time immemorial.
Following your question I’ve really been having a deep think about when drawing on mediaeval language came into my writing.
In 2017 I was invited by poet and anthologiser, Michael McKimm to write a poem for an anthology called The Tree Line. This anthology celebrated the 800th anniversary of the sealing of the Charter of the Forest in 1217. This Charter is equivalent to the Magna Carta and it returned to ordinary people the rights they had within the forests of the British Isles, which rights had been eroded over many years. (Bad King John, etc.)
We were sent a copy of the Charter. I found the language there very exciting and inviting. I came across words such as – ayries, chimmage, brushment, greenhue, justicers, verderers, catellan…
So, I was asked to write a poem celebrating trees. My poem is called Forest Diptych, and the first part is written in the voice of a forester’s wife, and the second in the voice of the forester. They celebrate their love, and the rights restored to them, very essential as their living depends upon the forest. I used these words such as brushment, greenhue cloth, purlieu, chines, vassal, panage, fee-farms etc, because these ancient words made these people more real to me, and made me re-value our language, both ancient and modern.
Here is the first half of the diptych:
Charter of the Forest Wife
I’ll have honey out of his forests,
my bed soft-made from feathers of his falcons,
eagles, herons. I’ll have the brushment borne on his back
for my fires, spin greenhue cloth to fashion
his ranger’s garb fifteen days before the hunting of deer begins
at the time of the year’s third Swanimote.
I’ll have the bride’s pannage, fee-farms and asserts.
I’ll lie with my verderer in the forest.
No abbot, prior, earl, baron, justice, sheriff,
or bailiff a better man than he.
Married law of the forest joins us.
Give me the Honour of Lancaster,
it would not outshine our realm of oak and ash,
holy as where we were joined at the church door,
forest customs being our liberty and state,
as the far-away king,
who makes legal bridges over legal rivers,
has said in the book of this land’s fate.
I carried forward my love of these old and resonant words, in which so much life is contained and enshrined, but they are also available to the poet as a rich resource, so long as we can find a good balance between the words of now and then. When they weave and work together, they make a third reality. I went on drawing upon these words, in my reading of elder texts, and in drafting my poems for Noah.
I recommend The Tree Line to you; all the poems are marvellous and hugely varied.
The Tree Line, edited by Michael McKimm, The Worple Press, 2017.
Q:6. Why the title “Noah”?
I like one word titles. I’ve used them before: Unsent is the title of my Selected and New Poems, and Lyonesse came out in 2021.
To use a one word title you have to have a very strong theme.
Unsent is drawn from the title poem of that volume. It is a poem- letter which I wrote to Peter, inspired by a visit I paid to Saint Julitta’s Rectory at Boscastle in Cornwall. This was where Thomas Hardy met his first wife. St Julitta’s Church was a very special place for Peter and me. The poem Unsent constellated the themes of grief and bereavement, themes which preoccupied me from 2005-2012; and the poem sustained all of these emotions for me. Peter and I never visited St Julitta’s Rectory because for decades it was a private house. Now it is a bed and breakfast, and I went there for a day with a writing group, and it spoke so deeply to me, I wrote the first draft of the poem there.
The decision to use the title Lyonesse for my 2021 collection was a no-brainer. The legendary submerged land of Lyonesse off the coast of Cornwall has everything to do with loss, with how everything becomes submerged by time, by history. I was able to bring together my own sense of loss, and also to draw upon planetary bereavement at loss of habitat. I was able to draw upon the oceanic and upon the unconscious, bringing together personal and transpersonal experience.
There’s a good history of one word titles, isn’t there? There’s Crow by Ted Hughes, and also his River. There’s Ariel by Sylvia Plath, and more recently Poor by Caleb Femi, Migration by W S Merwin, Felt by Alice Fulton, and Fiere by Jacky Kaye.
The flood story and the making of the ark is an ancient and archetypal story; it appears in many cultures around the world. It seems that in ancient times there was a global inundation that left a huge scar on the psyche of the survivors, whose testimony has come down to us.
Noah is the myth of the flood and the ark; the perceptual possibilities in this story are very rich. Therefore, the unadorned title seemed to be my only option. The flood story has fascinated me in my last two books. It is a story invested with warning and yet with wonder, enabling a poet to render the familiar strange, to give it contemporary relevance. Though I will add here, my current work-in-progress has moved away from floods and bible stories!
Q:7. Once they have read your book what do you want the reader to leave with?
First off, I hope the reader has had fun reading the book. I’ve always felt that reading is an essential and sensuous pleasure. I hope the reader feels energised by the poems, will be intrigued to see Noah in a range of different aspects. A reader might disagree with me on certain Noah matters perhaps, but I hope that we can meet one another in an exchange of ideas in the way that we sometimes debate, in our heads, with the author of the book we’re reading.
I hope it opens a door into perception about how great figures from ancient biblical legends can be closely examined, critiqued, re-encountered, played with, and turned on their head. Poked-at, if you like, to see what jumps out.
Thinking and imagining about Noah takes us to a place of rootedness , the ground-base for patriarchal attitudes. I wanted to chivvy along the patriarchy, to show how frail and shallow that patriarchy is, yet how it represses matriarchal energies. That is why I showed the daughters-in-law of Noah treating him as a kind of big baby, cutting his toenails, and plaiting his beard with loom bands. There are many ways of circumventing the patriarchy.
I have this picture, in my mind, of Noah, as if he was played by John Huston in a Cecil DeMille movie. I hope the reader find a cinematic atmosphere in the Noah poems, the technicolour and shadow-play of movies caught in language.
I also hope that readers feel from their reading experience of Noah that now they want to write something (on any subject) themselves. That is what happens to me when I read wonderful poems by poets such as Denise Levertov, Paula Meehan, Charles Olson. Frances Horovitz, Jane Burn, Geraldine Clarkson; their work always makes me want to go and write my own poems. That’s because reading a good poem lifts your energy, extends your reach, a good poem enchants you, it dances through you with its wonderful energising force, and it gifts you your own voice, renewed.
So these are the some of the things I hope for.
The Wombwell Rainbow 