This week our Friday Poem is from Christine Evans’ sensitive collection, Growth Rings, which was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2007.
This collection from Christine Evans follows well-received ’Selected Poems’. Hers is a persuasive voice, highly attuned to the vagries of the seasons, to the landscapes and inhabitants of the beautiful Llyn Peninsula in North Wales where the author has made her home.
As well as vibrant short lyrics on everything from ’Bluebells in Nanhoron’ to jets flying over Wales, there are a series of tender elegiac pieces on relatives, meditations on the last moments of Shelley and the fates of the Brontes, and a number of poems featuring the mysterious Island of Bardsey.
Talking In the Dark
Now the air is indigo with evening
together by the boathouse where we’ve sprawled
an hour or more, felt earth’s breath cooling,
we wake mind-echoes of ‘the real world’.
Night prompts us all to visions of tomorrow.
A subtle fullness, like a ripening field
contains us, names and knowledge weightless now.
The biosphere, Helen thinks, might still have the power
to heal pillage, maiming, poison. Protests fly:
excuse for doing nothing, weak, evasion.
Although we can’t agree what should be done
a tribal dignity begins to hover.
Shadows with eyes that hold the light, we are
communicators, not just talking faces.
First stars beckon in a deepening sky.
The universe accepts our hopeful voices
but sea demurs with one slow-hushing sigh.
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