anthonyhowelljournal

photo by Dilys Bidewell

Many of my Indian readers (and others) may enjoy my most recent collection of poems – Songs of Realisation. These three long poems celebrate what is on the earth, what is below the earth and what is above the earth. At the time I wrote them I was immersed in Wendy Doniger’s book about Shiva.

The first poem is called Epping – the name of the forest close to where I live. The second is called Chauvet – after the prehistoric cave – and the third is called Hubble – after the telescope in orbit.

Shiva, the dancer, the epitome of equilibrium, is a leitmotif that threads through all of these poems. Here is the conclusion of Epping, as the sun goes down over a lake in the forest, and Epping forest becomes one with all forests at night:

…The underground exposed, the overhead submerged;

The living interred and the buried re-appearing.

Red ripples cross the black shallows. Beyond,

There’s a darker ink to the depths. The trees are arterial webs,

Delicate as coral in the enlarging glow. Again, there’s a violent

Beating – rapid approach from a neighbouring inlet.

The neck is spear or trumpet, sounding its attack.

x

As this aggression is acted out, the cover thickens

Into night while embers glow within the water.

Stains of lichen deepen ashore. Distant flocks wheel tighter

Then come banking into spray. Crested and be-ruffed,

The duck drift closer to the sluice. Branches dip into reflections.

The shadow of the wood is encroaching on the sunset.

And sunset striped with silhouettes engenders fearsome tigers:

x

Tigers that slide through a forest from which

The night never departs. Evergreen night below the Himalayas;

Utterest dark its natural pelt; its fastnesses like dungeons;

Its pines erect; each needled bough secreting a tart odour.

Those that are felled will be contested. Mountainous

Taiga is sacred; massed against the brink of crags;

Nourishing the cordyceps and shading the azalea.

Wild legions of spruce. Chir pine, laurel and juniper,

Stands of fir and widening sweeps of cedar.

All sorts of spiky Chinese conifer. Night woods,

Where we venture in to milk it of its turpentine –

The terebinth – bleeding the trunk, or at least,

Making it ejaculate. Or do people get high on it?

x

Scales compacted, ripening its male or female seeds,

Cone-like consciousness expands and opens to release these.

The shape of the pineal gland resembles both the clitoris

And a cone. Located at the centre of our brain,

This primal eye belongs to our earliest Self.

It opens in his trance, with his seed about to spill

As the civet cat its spray, as the terebinth its resin.

Holly as ever stiff in the leaf, waxed to its spikes,

Indomitable, and wound about his antlers by the shaman:

x

He who can cure the headaches of elephants, woader

Of spirals and whorls, crescents, worms and the eyes of wolves,

With din drums to beat out the trances that dream up

The universe in the heads of foxes: many paws go dangling

From his groin. Renewing his strength in the instant

That he spends it, yet with the force of a thwarted urge,

He loiters in the pinewoods, poaches the verderers’ wives,

And loses his lingam in order that it may become

A universal promise of fertility, priapic wand and axle

Of infinity. All generation and seeding comes to a stop

Then quickens in the winter’s heart. Stretched across zero,

His drum-skin vibrates – the universe being that membrane.

So he makes a ring of stars: his drum creates creation

With the same step as his flame reduces it to ashes.

x

The instant passes. “Now we are gamut and fulcrum

Joined in the clinch of space and time – game of a god

With his consort. Whenever we tremble with passion

The whole foundation trembles. Terrible omens arise –

A rain of bloody bones comes down, fierce winds blow,

Comets fall, and no one reads the Vedas. Once we created

Creatures prone to immortality: creatures like ourselves,

Blazing, blazing with energy, carrying skulls and drinking Soma,

Their seed drawn up in chastity, each having thousands of eyes,

Of such terrible gaze no one could look upon them:

Great tigers of great power – projecting endless desire.

Now, though, we undo desire by giving you the enjoyment:

Drink, and thirst is gone; spout, and spouting’s done.”

x

All over the earth, as the sun goes down,

Lakes and ponds turn gold. A flaming drop has entered them.

Molten water matches sky and the clouds like islands

Floating there, while islands nesting underneath

Are clouds adrift on flame. Rings where a duck has dived

Or a fish has leapt interconnect as a female sun

Tosses her last wild locks at the night. Then serpents

Writhe across silver. Deer come to drink. And a tiger

Crouches by the bank, lapping up the moonlight.

x

The book is available from the outlets below. It also contains poems about Tottenham, where I live, in London, and poems inspired by my childhood.

Click Link to High Window Press for sales details (by scrolling down for my books on the link High Window Press).  This title can also be purchased from Tangoshiva on Ebay.