Chris Waters
We’re especially delighted this month to bring you a poet from outside the borders of the U.S. Chris Waters, of Devon, U.K., is a free-lance poet/tutor/storyteller who has worked extensively across southwest England with young and adult groups and audiences. Although performance is his forte, he is equally good on the page, as you will see below. His poetry has won several national prizes, including the Bridport, which he won twice. He was also a finalist for the Plough Prize, Devon, and for Poetry Wivenhoe. In 2010 he was Writer-in-Residence at the Appledore Book Festival.
Chris Waters’ first collection, Arisaig, was published in 2010 by Mudlark Press, and a new collection, Through a Glass Lately, also published by Mudlark, will appear next month. A new project for Autumn 2014 will be a touring poetry performance with old friend and fellow poet Chris Fogg, who was featured on
Poetry Monday for October 3, 2011.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Three Poems by Chris Waters
My Father’s Tools
Which I did not inherit, must be floating
debris in some Universe of Lost Things.
Such weights in a boy’s hands – the great grappling
Stillsons, and his ponderous mallets,
cones and balls in turned wood forced down into
lead pipes, making python-like extrusions.
The gleam and sweat of copper! And the arcane
heart of it all, his blow-lamp, brass-crafted,
roaring into cobalt spears of melding
flame, scorching as he tallowed the flux
around the burnished joint, the pad smoking.
Lost things will persist in being lost,
yet as I write to meld and torque these lines,
it’s strange, this late, to feel his hands in mine.
Mothers
Day by day now
the mothers are leaving:
paper-light on the draught
of a wing-beat,
casting off the incalculable
weight of their stories,
they rise and scatter
into the illegible dark:
their pages flutter
beyond our outstretched hands.
Dutch Honey
For Seamus Heaney
You’d be sure to feel at home here
in this low-lying Zealand farm,
open to an impasto sky
of pigeon-blues: its fields are trim
and the orchards shapely from years
of skilful graft: only the arching,
loaded, walnut tree could tip
the equilibrium.
The bee-master, eighty if a day,
is frail, frugal in speech,
reluctant to say over-much
to our translated questions;
his eyes track the tipsy traffic
of the bees, clamorous at the skeps.
He has out-wintered them from near collapse,
nurtured them through dark, cold days,
so that now, in the cool penumbra
of the barn, the honey jars are set –
composed, clarified, gleaming.