Clearing the Distance: Poems 1974-1978. Leamington: Arts Co-operative, 1978.
This was my first book of poems and is now unavailable, unless the well-known rare book dealer Rick Gekoski still has copies. I think he bought six copies from me at the time.
The symbols on the cover (taken from Jerome Rothenburg’s Technicians of the
Sacred) represent signs from the Ekoi tribe, Nigeria. From top to bottom they signify:
A man who stand a long way off and says have nothing to do with the case. A prisoner who has the reputation of being constantly in love.
A Judge’s house.
A comet which has lately been seen by the townspeople.
I reproduce one poem here.
Lincoln Cathedral
sits as
mantling falcon wings
tremor cathedral whose
rocked drilled walls
multiply
invisible action
discontinuous
to descry stone for
sky penetration
to bolt still
moving eyes
on rigid spines
still working
the folk fields of a salt marsh sun.
against tremor
buttresses
cold hammered
of breath shadows
halt slipping
tower
upward
pull
to let light through
to rest earth labour
heavy on October sky horizon.
against tremor
piers invent music
trefoil cusps quartrefoil
random light dances through crafted branches
black stems
ride through many colours to deny
circumference
centre abandoned
so no imps here
celtic laughter
proofs of old gods
multiplying life
as translations
taking the tremor
taking terror
taking memory to be used not hoarded
into green shade laughter of delight
((refusing the red leaf
under the child’s foot
in English beechwoods
where aeons turn all to coal
where fossils cold in
melancholy county handsÂ
ensure continuance
in a thousand years of
partially responding eyes
our sweet faces
are driven
in the freeway
our eyes defiant
to recognize
to inherit
the earth of our making
as Darwin recording the tremor in Valdivia
February 20 1838
an earthquake like this
moves to destroyÂ
the oldest associations
it moves
beneath our feet
like crust over a fluid
to cry out these stones
to shape dispersal
of Faustian moments
in an exact resistance