I’ll be reading some poems along with incredible poets including my very good friends Rhian Elizabeth and Bob Walton. Come along, it’s usually a great night!

At 3pm on Saturday 17th of February, I’ll be reading with Richard Gwyn as part of the Seren/Cornertson Poetry Festival. We will be reading from the anthology of Latin American poetry,  The Other Tiger 

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
~ from ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’ Langston Hughes

I’ve begun my month as Wales Arts Review‘s Artist in Residence where I’m exploring the two rivers I grew up between: the Rhymney and Sirhowy. I’ve been interviewing people who are connected in various ways to these rivers, walking with them along their favourite stretches. I’ve been otter spotting with Jeff Chard, listened to my father talk about coal and river song, and learned much about the fluidity of language from Dr. Elin Jones, one of the last speakers of Gwenhwyseg, a Welsh dialect of Gwent.

Here’s a link to my first piece introducing the residency.

This Thursday, I’ll be performing in the Velvet Coalmine Festival for the third time. I’ll be sharing the stage with the incredible Tongue Fu and Africa Writes poets at Blackwood Little Theatre.

Tongue Fu poets. See more here

Africa Writes poets include Belinda Zhawi, Rachel Long, Victoria Adukwei Bulley

On Wednesday, I read poems at the Welsh Assembly to launch the Weeping Window poppy exhibition to mark the national centenary of remembrance of those who sacrificed in World War One.

I was commissioned by the Welsh government to write a poem in response to the exhibition. I sat in the foyer watching the poppies being assembled; it was quite moving, observing the care with which they were handled and placed.

There were so many poems I wanted to share with the audience on Monday, but time allowed for only three. I read Hedd Wyn’s ‘Y Blotyn Du’ and Ifor ap Glyn’s ‘Reading his shirt’ which is what soldiers in the trenches called picking the lice from their clothing. I remembered my grandmother’s book of Whittier’s poetry, given to her in 1918 to commemorate those who served in the war. Her brother George Hunt, one of these men. The poem I wrote was in response to Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s poem which because of its simplicity, its human-ness really impacted me:

The Question

Here’s a link to the video of my reading.

August 13th, I’ll be reading at the Solva Edge Festival

A month since I’ve been to Llwyn Celyn. Much of the scaffolding is off, coming off, the roof is beautiful. First time I’ve seen the chimney. It looks ready for a fire. Stories get told around a fire, heart of the home.

To the left, the corrugated sheets are being removed from the beast house now that the walls have been reinforced. There’s a symmetry here: roof on, roof off but the thread uniting that doing and undoing is the necessary exposure of the inner.

Today carpenter, Gareth Irwin was on site with a Welsh stick chair he was commissioned to make:

This beautiful piece of furniture demanded to be touched. But it was more than furniture, it was the passing down of history both in its ‘genre’ (the kind of chair tenth century king Hywel Dda had once owned) but also in the traditional way Gareth had made it, with some ancient tools and also tools he’d created. It caused me pause: making the tools in which to make your art. To be that connected. Gareth is a greenwood carpenter, goes into the forest, finds the tree, sees it in its tree-essence and after cutting it down, gives it another shape, form, longevity. ‘It’s not just timber’ he said, ‘it’s tree wood.’

I asked if it’s true trees heal themselves:

When there is an abrasion, fire damage, an animal gash to the bark of a tree, all its senses set to closing that part of the tree off, sealing it over to stop bacteria seeping in through the open wound. Much like us, I suppose, except these scars are only seen when the tree is cut. No necessary exposure of the inner, here then.  Gareth told me, the self-healing of a tree is so intelligent that the scars from young shoots-that the tree kills off as they become unnecessary-actually lie dormant. If the tree’s crown is cut, these scars, these once-twigs, will be resurrected. Imagine what might grow from our scars if they were called back into opening.

At lunch, one of the volunteer’s Jack Russel, Todd, darts past and emerges from under the digger with a baby rabbit in its mouth. We try to get him to drop his squealing catch but there’s no way he’ll comply. With a few swift shakes of his head, the kit’s neck is broken and it lies jaw-clamped, limp. Todd pads off and deposits the lifeless creature right inside the beast house.

I took myself to the waste tump for quiet, away from the murder of rabbits and the bang of hammer, slide of corrugated sheets and blare of radio. I sat amongst muck and robin song and the sight of a red kite hungry for something.

Amongst all the debris from the house,  I find three random objects, try to force myself to write a poem connecting them (I often ask students to do this, why not try it myself?)

I get as far as the thick willow crockery, a bowl perhaps that once offered apples from the orchard behind me. The breaking of the pattern renders the story indecipherable (didn’t I used to know it off by heart? My grandmother-who told it to me over and over-did). But I get stuck on the chunk of rusted metal in all its autumn bleed. What was it a part of? The blade from a plough? An old oil drum or a coal bucket. A coal bucket filled with coal and carried in all weathers and all conditions (pregnant, unwell, young or old) the never-ending heaving of coal. But in reality, coal was probably not used here, it was wood that lit the heart of this house, surely? No matter, my mind is thinking of the grandmother I never met who on carrying a bucket of coal lost the boy she was almost-ready to birth. Grandmothers and stories, labouring, crockery-and-hearts broken. Hard hats, protection. Irony.

As I set off down the hill, I see the field is wool-scattered.

The sheep are shedding unnecessary coating, lightening themselves of that which got them through winter but no longer serves a purpose. Apparently, the tree sheds its bark too, Gareth told me. We shed skin. Medieval dust fell onto my book when I sat in the hall of the house, remnants of centuries of wood, grain, jackdaw nests, skin flakes of generations who lived and worked here. It’s instinctive this moulting. It’s both the letting go and evidence of renewal.

When I get home I find a poem in my inbox ‘Rimwalkers’ by Lesley Wheeler, the first line about the finding of a dying baby rabbit.

And I’m surprised/not surprised when I open Facebook to receive a notification of one of Mandy Lane’s latest sculptures:

I don’t know what to say about that: these connections, inner thoughts which manifest synchronistically or the fact that I could not make a poem, could not make the tools in which to capture those connections. The roof on, roof off =the coming and going of ideas which allows ideas, thoughts, to intersect. Sometimes, they reveal themselves to us with such precision there is no poem that will serve the encounter (at least none I could write).

No poem today to revive the beating heart of that rabbit; just an indication that things are being made, that there is an intelligence at work and that we/I do not always have to try to pin that down in a poem, that I can just acknowledge and let go.

This evening I will be on BBC One’s The Wales Report talking to Bethan Rhys Roberts about what it means to be Welsh. Is there a Welsh National Identity? What does identity mean in a world where, increasingly, we become more connected to other cultures and countries.

I keep journals for my children; when they were born, I wrote religiously as if the laying down of their little (and big) experiences somehow validated those events (or me as a mother). Keeping a record became key. Sometimes I spent such a great deal of time recording (in pictures, journal entries, poems) that I ceased to be in the experience, with the kids. I was at the edge monitoring, evaluating, proving.

My aim at Llwyn Celyn is to use the residency to thwart that need to shape experience with words. What I have promised myself is to go to the house and (woolly as it sounds) just ‘be’. To become receptive rather than detective. To be so open that a more profound awareness might emerge. And then (the bit that I find hard) trust that something will become known, some story about the house, its grounds, its renovation, the people who lived there, and that I will know how to present that.

When I approached the valley-bowl that the house sits in, mist had settled. For the first time, the top of the Skirrid was invisible:

Nothing to see at a distance. I had to look more closely at my surroundings. I had to look at an angle.

Each time the drills, hammers, dumping of waste went on inside the house, the water in the wheelbarrow shuddered, distorting the reflection of the house, the scaffolding, the sky. All was movement. I decided to sit in the hall for a couple of hours. It was not easy to sit still with craftsmen walking by, medieval dust and debris falling from the roof onto my lap, Kylie on the radio/s. I wanted to reach after something, be in charge. Pin my ears or eyes onto something tangible.

After some time, James, one of the craftsmen showed me an old hob nailed boot that he’d found in the rafters, a common practice to ward off evil spirits. The sight of the boot set me to walking. And listening . . .intently to the robin who joined me on my walk (or had I joined him?). Two sheepdogs barked on Strawberry Hill, the farmer’s bike droned; a landscape making a soundscape. I visited the plum tree I’d helped to plant, and then, behind the house I was able, for the first time, to identify a raven from a crow.

The raven guarking across the valley

answered itself

–did it know its own voice?

I heard someone shout ‘More sheep’s wool!’ They are using it to insulate the roof, packing it into the roof voids. It allows moisture to find its way out, enables the house to breathe. I need to be more permeable, to be more woollen, to know what to hold onto and when and what to release.

The last image I was given as I wondered on the roof, this:

The stonemason picking his stones carefully by weight and width, shape, intuition. The satisfying shlunk of mortar on trowel; it moved like a living breathing entity, the lime mortar is as liquid, it wants to find the cracks, wants to settle in between spaces. I must remember this for the laying down of words: which word holds its weight and space, how to massage it in place, and what will hold each to the other.

But there I go again with words. Habits are hard to break . . .