Selected Works, Elisabeth Bletsoe

 

I.

Unnamed, identified as Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis)

for Suzanne

 

Days of brief transparency, viewed through a window of ice, lifted. Powdered across the lane. Having a porous cuttle texture as if drawn “using a thin & rather scratchy nib”. A stricter regimen being currently observed, blood temporarily withdraws. Lenthay copse smokily obscure. Brittle scrapiness of reeds, bones packed tight with ar. Fish-spine delicate. A tenebrous rustle, like the breathing of books. Fields growing nothing but stones, bone white, buff white, ivory white, carved by the river Yeo, formerly the Gifle or forked one. Abounding in small flocks among the alders; a c’irm or charm indicating a tinnitus of small bells, blended, a continual weaving of waters. Angel speaks with a multitudinous voice. “Thistle-tweaker”, a conflation of thorns with the scarlet forehead becomes the iconography of crucifixion myth, ousting earlier fertile goddess affinities. Its nest a vaginal metaphor; a labyrinth of tender intricacies. Lucina, caged by the fingers of holy infants.

 

 

                               sparkling up from

                                the dried burdock heads, “a shrill

                                piping of plenty”

VII.

Sparwe, Sparrow (Passer domesticus)

for Michell

 

Waiting for Sylvia, who never arrived. In back of The Plume of Feathers, a narrow sanctum in hibernal state, graced by the fluttering of small lives. Mimosa racemes. Roof-angles, at variance, drawn by the impetus of the abbey tower against ever finer & finer grindings of lapis & azurite. Into depthless sky. An insistent cheeping surpasses the bells’ doxology; illicit couplings betrayed in a tremor of ivy. Naked stems of the winterstruck clematis proximate to the red bench; a simple narrative that becomes more complex; there is you, myself & many others like fingerprints among the lichen, staining. Faces that open & close. Things half-buried, annealed by frost. The inn a former mortuary, museum of autoptic secrets; no random event the disclosure of a statue of the risen Christ hidden within its walls. Sparrows gather, conductors of souls; only one human pair of eyes witnesses the child riding her trike across the flagstones. Back & forth, back & forth.

 

 

                                       high gothic letters

                                       blown by the wind; let sparrows

                                       make a nest of them

XIII.

Fesaunt, Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus)

 

A needle does not yet exist to drill these bone-ends for threading; this amulet in remembrance of the dead. Pain accepted as an explication of growth, slivers & thorns a means of securing paper-thin sections of secondary calligraphy, wetly unfolding. In leaves of hedge-maple. Flesh stutters & fails, allows ingress. Violets take root within a lattice of barbules, elegant self-assemblages of optical nanostructures. Light: as a feather. Remiges & rectrices. She waits by the blood in silence, welded to a complex geology, the inclusive hills. Dark Lane, Pink Knoll Hollow, Horse Scratch Field, everywhere a map for somewhere else, textually enriched by silts & marls, pleistocene clays. Pollarded, the countryside engineered to near riot; stirred for a bird, the lie of the land. Lawless laws.  A socket, enucleate; splanchnic cavity plangent as the recess of an ancient rebec. Tersely set aside. The spurred feet of a fallen crusader, deo non fortuna. At the foot of the page, three kings pursue their journey through a delicate landscape occupied by a dog hunting a hare. Celandine pollen, caught in the creases of the herepath, the military road.

 

 

                                          gules, a cross

                                          argent & crosier in pale

                                                                  or debruised

XIV.

Larke, Skylark (Alauda arvensis)

for Luke

 

Was once animal. Weight of a new-born calf, living inks perfused throughout its skin. Mirabile dictu. In winter season, the wether being not to owtragios, dothe waxe wonderus fatte. Sprung out from under this weight of words, the great singing heart tore right out of it, pinned against sky. Turning a blind eye to. Sumped in ranunculus, claws of clutched light. Fugitive moments of response amongst predators & prey leave stigmata on flesh, on instinct. Quiet, quiet. Occluded memories of feint & double-bluff nest unharmed within celebrations for decayed fallstreaks of ice, hypothetically plotted. Cirrus intortus. At the perihelion, light bleeds into black, darkness widens under sparkle of whatever joy. Head over heels, nothing holds but in small things, enshrined in nitrogen, agricultural dust. Imbricate; the overlapping of leaves, of roof-tiles, a late the Abbate of Shirburne maner place, boundaries endorsed by badger latrines. Rumours of ancient deerparks recede into mythic dissolve, a “dry & sinuous valley”, a king’s grace invested in soil. Messaging via the contraplex: someone told me it was #fossilfriday @ dawn how do you sing a cluster on #dictionaryofstone. Profuse, unpremeditated, delivered soaring. Released unto the day. Echo, echo lalia la la la

 

 

 

                                    from yesterday’s footprint, a

                                              seed                    sprouts pale,

                                                          cotelydonous

XV.

Cormerant, Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo)

for Kim B. Ashton

 

To kick off one’s shoes and throw them. Slipping between pleated histories at the lake’s surface, brilliant or dazzling, the coup de foudre.  Fortunately falling folded amongst these structures of unmaking, these collusions in perceptual paradox. Stunned by the flashover irrupting capillary walls in arborescent erythema; keraunographic markings reveal the pathologies of lightning, a dermal feathering. To covet the silk of your downpourings; calculations in drowning, weighed down by little stones:  I have called you by name, you are mine, when you pass through the waters I will be with you. Breathing our stories into each other’s mouths, reaffirming mutual tales of origin. Stuck in the craw. Bloodlines drawn across the lawns; a thumbnail splitting the stems of genealogical daisy-chains, she’s reading for the part of kate in the shrew (o mother); a screwing down of migrainous clouds, spreading stain of strawberry ice. Time’s passage in fond, undigested lumps. A hem of bindweed, woundwort & pendulous sedge, stitched into. Lap of a wave to the hand, and. No less liquid than.

 

 

                                  black rainbow dive: mercurial

                                       bubbles escape the murder-beak, dark

                                                                                     mucoid throat

XVI.

Wrenne, Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes)

for Chris T.

 

Slightly curved downwards, faintly marked wavy, narrow bars of wavy darker indistinctly spotted amongst wreckage. Rump reddish. Crevices & holes of rock, sprouting, lopped. Nimrod being lost in Orion & Osyris in the Doggestarre, within accidental collections of dead leaves, leaf-corbels. Four-fold equations of cryptic perspectives through; studded, fallen, scrolled off the wall of banded wavy. Ladymasse, lullen, luvely. Russeting surrounds a deep stem basin, depository of song. Resounds & cries out against. Epicuticular wax particles embedded, rephrasing the static of stretched light over wavy bars of ridge & furrow. White slipped medieval tiles. Brought down by sticks & stones, forks & knives; an arrow’s insert between leg bone & tendon. By the year’s wheel turning to manifold trickles. Legacies of overnight cloud, cyclone Eva unwinding the water’s chains. Wroth silver pays homage to the branched god, resplendent in deciduous velvet, commyth agayne from dethh to lyff in his whyght skynne. Trifoliate cusping & radiant outward in problematic scratches, deeply; though he be little, deeply reinscribed. Cutty, close-sitter, jarring jubilous.

 

                                    dark sparkles through

                                             tracery with small angelic

                                                             reset

                                                                       fragments

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I, VII Landscape from a Dream, by Elisabeth Bletsoe (Shearsman Books, Exeter, 2008); Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, ed. Carrie Etter (Shearsman Books, Exeter, 2010)

I Ornithology composed by Kim B. Ashton, piano Clare Hammond

XIII LPB Micro#6 illustrated by Frances Hatch, produced by Steven Hitchins, 2013; Molly Bloom 10, ed. Aidan Semmens

XIV The Lonely Crowd 7, guest poetry editor Chris Cornwell

XV, XVII The Fortnightly Review 06/2018, ed. Peter Riley

These works were published in Birds of the Sherborne Missal by Elisabeth Bletsoe (Shearsman Books Ltd., Swindon, 2021) to celebrate a unique landscape. They were inspired by a fifteenth century manuscript which contained the text and music with which to conduct the Christian Mass throughout the year at Sherborne Abbey, in Dorset. It is unique for its remarkable marginal series of naturalistic birds, most of which are native to the area and often given their dialect names. These are mainly to be found in the central pages, appropriately where there is also inscribed musical notation. The missal’s lavish scale and decoration served to emphasise the town’s spiritual pre-eminence.

In this poem-cycle, each bird was observed in its native habitat within the boundaries of the Sherborne diocese and then linked back to the missal by means of religious iconography, imagery relating to books, pigments or methods of illumination as well as bird mythology, the latter often subverting the original Christian intention.  The Japanese haibun was loosely employed as its form is well suited to nature-notes and the similar sized blocks of text were visually pleasing, echoing the blocks of heavy Gothic script. The accompanying haiku allowed for a brief word-sketch of the bird or its surroundings, which literally illuminated the whole.

BIOGRAPHY

Elisabeth Bletsoe is currently the curator of Sherborne Museum in her native county of Dorset, England. Her publications include Landscape from a Dream (Shearsman, 2008) and Pharmacopoeia & Early Selected Works (Shearsman, 2010).  She has featured in various anthologies including Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, ed. Carrie Etter (Shearsman Books, Exeter, 2010), The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, ed. Harriet Tarlo (Shearsman Books, Exeter, 2011) and more recently The Edge of Necessary: an Anthology of Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966-2018, eds. John Goodby and Lyndon Davies (Aquifer Books, 2018). Elisabeth is currently involved with the artist Frances Hatch, providing textual responses to her collages in the exhibition/publications Drawn to Antarctica and Chesil Moons. She has also collaborated with the Cambridge composer Kim B. Ashton who has set several poems from Pharmacopoeia and Birds of the Sherborne Missal to music for piano and full orchestra.

 

Rightly admired for her ingenious lexical device, she is skilled at blending dialectical vernacular with specialised terminologies from the natural sciences, historiography, folklore and taxonomy...her synthesis of heterogeneous glossaries lends a deeply nuanced interplay between laminate aesthetics in the bricolage, unlocking a range of associated impressions at the foundation of these resonant meditations. (Chris Cornwell, The Lonely Crowd, 2017)