For me, the most exciting poetic event of 2010 was the rediscovery of the superb Ennerdale poet, Tom Rawling (1916-1996).

Rawling, who spent most of his life as a teacher and died in Oxford, came from a family that had farmed in the Ennerdale valley, Cumbria, for centuries. He was the son of the village schoolmaster.

He left the valley early  but kept contact with his native region and his extended family, and returned often for fishing trips. He was an expert salmon fisherman, and worked with the naturalist and fishing-writer Hugh Falkus studying not merely the catching of sea-trout but their mysterious life-cycle.

Rawling only began writing poetry when he retired from teaching, but what poured out then was a rich and powerful flood of poems about his Ennerdale childhood, his memories of the farm and the village, and about fishing. The poems are vivid, sharp and close to the earth – and they bring to life a whole world, social and agricultural, much of which has vanished from the Lakes.

He had success with two books (Ghosts at my Back, 1982 and The Names of the Sea Trout, 1984) and got to know many of the leading poets of his time – Ted Hughes was a frequent fishing companion, Anne Stevenson encouraged his work, Seamus Heaney wrote friendly notes and comments on draft poems – but then somehow his work was forgotten.

But late last year, thanks to pioneering work by Cumbrian writer Michael Baron, the Lamplugh and District Heritage Society (not usually a major poetry publisher) issued How Hall: Poems and Memories – A Passion for Ennerdale (£7.50), together with a superb CD (£5.00) of Rawling’s passionate, hypnotic voice reading his own poems.

Anyone who loves poetry por Lakeland needs to know these poems. As Chris McCully and I wrote in the magazine Trout and Salmon (my first venture into a fishing magazine – I haven’t held a rod in 50 years! – )

“Rawling’s grip on the texture of rural Cumberland life was both sensory and philosophical. Writing of ‘Clipping Day’ he remembers

           the ewe’s flesh flinching

as shears neared the throat

for the first cut into the rise

where new wool pushes off its past

in order to repeat it.

Often the recollections have a richness that rises to celebration, the glimpse of a good world charged with benevolent power that hints at the Biblical:

                                                A good summer

            was a full barn. Carts came, turned back empty,

            came again, ironshod hooves struck cobbles,

            a mare snorted as she charged the rising causeway,

            winged shelvings swayed with the load,

            wheels rattled. Then thunder, the barn floor

            booming under fetlock-feathered Clydesdale feet.

A confirmed atheist, Rawling would have repudiated any religious overtones here but the sensory precision of his work (that ‘fetlock-feathered’ Clydesdale) would have earned respect from possibly the greatest nature-poet ever to have written in English, Gerard Manley Hopkins. And always there’s the accuracy. Architecture-buffs reading the last excerpt would recognise that ‘causeway’ as the stone ramp up to a raised Lakeland granary…

“[And Rawling's fishing experience] bore fruit in poems like ‘Night Fisherman’, where sight is extinguished and the world slips all the more sharply into relief:

            Now touch is master, blindman fingering

            of reel and rod, the hook’s keen point.

            Feet shuffle-feel the ground,

            delicately crunch gravel;

            body poised ready to reach

            beneath the mirror of the pool…”

Here’s one more poem, in full:

Sloe Gin

for Seamus Heaney

Let the first hard frost
expose the spiny twigs
reveal the bare-black fruit.
Reach through jutting thorns
for the blue-hazed sloes,
ignore the blood on your wrist.
Needle-prick to the hard stone,
watch their transfusion seep
through the gin. Each day
an agitation of the jar,
and after many days of alchemy,
decant this ruby in your glass
to taste silk-sliding fire
of frost and thorns
and bitter fruit.

From The Names of the Sea-Trout (Littlewood Arc, 1993)

Besides the new collection, How Hall and the excellent CD (both available from stanandmarina@aol.com or bobnet.64@btopenworld.com) several of Rawling’s original books and pamphlets are still just about available, new or second-hand, so I’ll add the links here. If you want to catch up with possibly the finest 20th century Cumbrian poet (and yes, he stands at least equal to Norman Nicholson) then you need to read them. For me, they helped to make 2010 a memorable year for English poetry.

And now, here’s to creativity – yours, mine, everyone’s – in 2011! Happy New Year.

 

As I’ll be speaking and reading poems at this year’s Maryport Literary festival, I’m delighted to bring you the following news item:

“The Venus Stone, focal point of this year’s innovative literary Festival in Maryport at the end of November, has just undergone a historical facelift. It seems she may be a true Venus after all!

Always interpreted as a representation of a ‘lady of the night’, the Venus was thought to be hanging about outside the fort gateway, with more than literature on her mind, and was possibly a sign for a brothel in the fort. However, new insights into the greater significance of the Venus Stone have recently come to light.

The figure next to the gateway is probably a true statue of Venus standing in a substantial temple dedicated to her, says stone expert Dr. Peter Hill. Dr Hill, in a Review of the collections at the Museum, has pointed out that the sculpture itself is of high-quality workmanship with the gateway shown with pillared arches. The temple has finely carved columns with capitals supporting an arch.

The stone itself would have been part of a major gateway within the fort. The gateway, the only contemporary representation of a gateway to a Roman fort, is the pattern used for reconstructions on Roman sites and films.

Archaeologist Lindsay Allason-Jones has further interpreted the sculpture as representing Venus in her role as a protector of men, but this year’s LitFest, the third to be based around a stone in the Roman collection, will be exploring every aspect of the Goddess of Love!”
Maryport LitFest
25-28th November
Read all about it at www.senhousemuseum.co.uk
or contact Jane Laskey at the Museum on 01900 816168

Just back from the opening of an excellent new exhibition of paintings by Peter Roebuck at the Arison Gallery in Chorlton, Manchester.

Peter has I think made a unique and very distinctive contribution to the English vision of landscape – though he also paints still life, people and many other subjects. But to me, landscape is the heart of his work and he has worked with enormous dedication and integrity over many years to refine a most unusual way of seeing, and showing, the world.

The hallmark of Roebuck’s work is a combination of radiant intensity of light with a quality of visual softness, created sometimes by mist, sometimes by frost, sometimes by distance or sunset light, but always conveying a sense of stillness and fascination. Perhaps that’s the outcome of the very close and long-continued observation which you sense has gone into these paintings.

Working in both oil and watercolour, Peter Roebuck returns often to certain favourite subjects: the waters, and the shores, of Morecambe Bay, the lesser-known areas of Lakeland, and the Mersey Valley, centring on Chorlton Meadows not far from where he lives. The radiance of his colours and the intriguing simplifications of landscape forms, which make the places portrayed appear more, not less, fascinating, mean that these paintings are haunting and, in their way, inimitably strange as well as beautiful. The longer you look at them the more interesting they get. 

If you’re in South Manchester between now and 9 October, and have even a few minutes to spare, do go and take a look, to see fine work by a greatly underrated and totally individual artist.

 The Arison Gallery is at 512 Wilbraham Road, Chorlton, Manchester M21 9AW  (0161 881 6734).

Just back from a wonderful couple of days in Cumbria. The excuse was that Jeannie Pasley from Carlilse City Council had asked Cumbrian novelist and poet Angela Locke and me to go up and read poems for something called ‘Love Parks Week’.

I’d never heard of  Love Parks Week, but apparently it happens in lots of places around the country and puts on events in parks and other green spaces to entice people to come out and enjoy them more in the summer.

Our venue was the lawn right under the vast east window of Carlisle Cathedral, but it wasn’t daunting: everyone was very friendly, there was a great PA system that actually worked with a mic you could actually adjust, and Jeannie was there to greet us and get everything set up. Amazingly, the weather was perfect – cool but dry, turning (at times) warm and sunny. And we got a wonderful audience – people drifted in and out but the maximum was up to around 40, and many people stayed for the whole hour-and-a-half.

It was lovely to read with Angela, a well-known local poet who has also just published a beautifully-written and deeply engaging travel book, On Juniper Mountain, about her travels in Nepal and how she came to found the charity Juniper Trust.

Afterwards I was able to spend some time with Angela and her husband Colin at their fine old house under the slopes of Bowscale Fell at Mosedale, near Penrith. We did some walking in the Mosedale Valley with the dogs and I was able to enjoy the gorgeous garden they’ve made in front of this beautiful traditional cottage – which was once painted by Sheila Fell, with L.S. Lowry in attendance. I have to say Lowry isn’t my favourite artist and even Fell gets pretty depressing, so the reality, with the warm evening light falling across the drifts of honeysuckle, was idyllic in a way that I definitely prefer, though neither artist would have countenanced it in their work!

Anyway, a big Thank You to Carlisle City Council, and please invite me back! And thank you also to Angela and Colin, the perfect friends.

Oh, and for more about Love Parks Week and what might be on near you, go to http://www.loveparksweek.org.uk/

While we’re all buried in snow, let’s catch up on some of the things I’ve wanted to write about while my internet connection has been down!

 First place definitely goes to ‘Mother Lode’, the magnificent exhibition of landscape paintings by Julian Cooper, currently showing at Brantwood, Ruskin’s house overlooking Coniston Water in Cumbria. No chance of getting there through the snow at present, but I’d very strongly recommend a visit once the roads are clear.

 Julian Cooper is probably Britain’s most original and accomplished landscape painter. His particular interest is in mountains and rock surfaces (naturally enough, since he’s a keen climber), and over recent years he has developed increasingly brilliant and intense techniques for painting the patterns, textures and – if I can put it like this – the meanings of rock, the way it communicates itself to the hand, the eye and the memory.

From open-air painting in the high Andes, he moved on in the 1990s to superb semi-abstract and highly-textured paintings of the Himalayas, often focusing not on the summits and profiles of mountains (which have been endlessly explored by previous artists) but rather on rock and snow faces, their textures, patterning and forms.

 He’s now taken this a step further, to paint industrially-worked rockfaces which are literally the interface between man and nature. The Brantwood exhibition shows paintings from two such arenas: Cumbrian slate quarries from the Langdale and Coniston areas, and the Carrara marble quarries – the historic quarries from which Michelangelo took his marble and which are now quarried on a terrifyingly industrial scale.

 

Julian’s paintings are exhilarating and massively impressive. No one has ever painted rock like this before: the huge clefts and portals of vast stained marble surfaces, dwarfing tiny, insect-like industrial plant; the angled, many-coloured slate blocks, with angular light from a cave-mouth dripping over them. Julian’s work can look like realism, but compare it to any photograph and you see a miraculous added depth, an extra dimension of radiant experience. Looking at ‘Sawyers Wood’for example I can feel my own lifetime’s experience of scrambling around in and on such places, somehow embodied and singing out from the canvas.

 

The rock in these pictures speaks to us in its own strange language and asks us what we’re making of it – sensuously, industrially, envrionmentally. It has an ominous and seductive beauty.

This is a whole new take on landscape and if you love the Lakes, or nature, or painting, you should go over to Brantwood as soon as the snow clears and enjoy some of the best landscape painting of our time. Not to mention Brantwood’s excellent restaurant, and the fascinating memorabilia of Ruskin himself, the great Victorian artist, social activist, prophet of climate change and a deep thinker about the interconnections between geology and art.

The exhibition has been arranged in collaboration with Michael Richardson, director of Art Space Gallery, London, who represent Julian Cooper and where the exhibition can be seen during September, 2010. For further details contact mail@artspacegallery.co.uk  or visit www.artspacegallery.co.uk