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)
