POETRY MONDAY OCTOBER 3rd, 2011
Chris Fogg
This month brings us our first poet from the U.K., Chris Fogg, whose book of poems and stories, Special Relationships, was published this year by Mudlark Press. Born in Manchester, he now lives in West Dorset with his wife, Amanda, a dance practitioner working with older people and those with Parkinson’s. It was through Amanda, when she was in the U.S. on a Winston Churchill Fellowship, that I met Chris and learned about his work in arts project development and management, as well as in theater, and first read some of his poems.
Chris’work has taken him to many exotic, far-flung places, and he uses these experiences to full advantage in his writing. The poems in his book recall his own northern working-class childhood, growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, and also look at more recent events from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as from “lost empires” in India and Africa. The “special relationships” of which he writes are both personal and political. “What ultimately emerges,” his editor says, “is a kind of hard-won innocence measured out across the years.”
What I said myself in a brief review of his book was this:
Chris Fogg takes us on a magical, whirlwind tale of his world
which means the world as a whole, through time and space.
We are in Mali, in India, on the streets of New York City – on foot
or roller-blade, plane, train or boat – and always with eyes and
ears open and heart at full throttle.
It was difficult to choose from among so many strong narrative poems, but ultimately it was those with unforgettable images that made the final cut. I hope you will find them interesting.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Chance Encounter
It is some moments before I see her,
picking my way through the rubbish
that runs through this country like a sore.
She covers her face as if to wish
either she or I might disappear.
For a second our eyes meet, fused
in a silent shriek of pain,
then the pupils cloud: they cast
me out as surely as she has been.
Reeling I stumble on and almost
miss them: four dead babies, each a clone
of the other, packed in a row
beneath her filth-stained sari,
their brown bodies now grey
in the stuffed street-sewer grime –
dead, discarded, untouchable.
A beggar tugs my clothes, I become
engulfed once more in the wall
of heat and noise that is Bombay –
“I change money?” “You want boy? Girl?” –
and as I turn char my way
across the teeming, grid-locked road
(taxis, rickshaws, bullock-carts;
the guttural cries from burning throats)
high above, a circling kite
selects, with the keen, sharp eye
of a predator, or God,
the stopped pulse, the shrivelled heart,
and swoops…
In the rubbish, privately,
the woman squats and coughs up blood.
It trickles through the dirt and mud
to where her four dead babies lie…
Fires are burning in doorways,
the acrid smell of charcoal,
incense, traffic fumes and
human ordure that drifts across
this city’s maggot sprawl.
She is a hariyan. The hand
of God is printed on her brow,
scheduled to gather the night-soil,
which tonight will be her pillow.
Family Trees
this is a story my granddad told me
it’s about his great granddad
who lived with his family on the Moss
every evening after work he’d go
to the family cow lie on its back
his head between its horns
and teach himself to read
my granddad’s father told this story
often like reciting catechism
it was what inspired him he’d say…
I don’t know whether that’s true or not
but there’s a plaque in the Wesleyan
chapel in his honour and a street
named after him – Albert Street –
(truly, not after Victoria’s
husband, but him, my great-great-granddad)
behind the printing works my granddad’s
mother set up when she was a widow
(before that she’d been a lacemaker)
all are there still – testimonials
to their endurance (except the cow
and the book) what book was it I wonder
framed by the huge sky of Cadishead Moss
that so made him want to read?
*
my uncle Stanley never learnt to read
never needed to, he said, he was what
we used to call a little simple
I remember him as a jolly man
with a red face and a high squeaky voice
a bit like Mr Punch he made me laugh
he used words like Jimmy Riddle and
he taught me how to play gin rummy
he never went to school he’d slip off
to the fields and bring home injured rabbits
dead voles live adders which my gran (his
sister) had to get rid of before their dad
(a miner) brought his temper home from work
but mostly what my uncle Stanley
studied were birds – he had a way with them
he ringed them nursed them later bred them
finches love-birds canaries – he became
something of an expert in them people
wrote to him from all over the world
to seek his advice my auntie Ruby
(Stan’s wife) would read the letters to him
he answered them all he was the first
person to breed a white budgerigar
after that he let his birds go free
I remember him at family funerals
sitting in the kitchen with the women
he’d take me on his knee and produce
pennies from behind my ear
*
all families have their characters
their stories – these are just a few of mine
I tell them to Tim I pass them on
in the hope that he will in his turn
pass them on to his own children
my stories make him laugh for they’re no more
real to him than the imaginary friends
he talks to when he’s climbing trees
which he does in the garden, making complex
routes among the branches which he tries
to follow but something always distracts
him he has to start again he makes up
new rules every time whistling as he
swings casually from the highest branch
the past does not concern him
I too follow complicated routes
of my own making I think I know
the way I want to go but always
something checks me nudging me towards
a path I meant to shun – a pair of horns
prodding me in the back a white
bird flying across the sun…
Potting On
There is a photograph I have
of Amanda in the garden;
so easy in her body she
kneels by the flowers, her busy
fingers thinning out weeds. She is
unaware I am watching her:
there is deep contentment in
the way she works. After a time
she notices me – there is mud
on her nose which she wrinkles as
she smiles. Come and look, she says, then
shows me what she’s done: poppies and
cornflowers nod in the breeze while
mallow and marigold wink back.
These have set themselves, she says, her
delight transparent as a child’s.
Sometimes seeds lie dormant for years,
becoming little more than a
memory of how the summers
used to be: a child’s picture book.
I flick the pages and I find
further reminders: Amanda
in her Sunday best for Whit Walks,
Amanda with an Easter egg,
Amanda with a doll’s house and,
last but not least, there’s Amanda
dancing – the same soulful, oval
face, the serious-sad eyes that
catch at pleasure like moths at night
who beat their wings against the glass.
I flick the pages further and
the years go rushing by me. It’s
a dizzy roller-coaster ride:
memories blur like old photographs,
colour fading to black and white,
reducing the image to a
simple basic composition –
a single face in focus, a
blue star of flax in the meadow
peeping from the darkness after
years of neglect lying buried…
I take the dust sheet off all these
memories and shake them in the sun.
One by one I examine them –
they all come down to this one face.
It’s the one photograph I’d keep,
yes, Amanda in the garden –
only now she’s in the greenhouse
sitting at a makeshift table
full of trays and seed-packets and
the remnants of last year’s cuttings.
She is singing as I watch her,
the past tumbling from her fingers
in tiny molecules of soil.
I hold my breath… she is potting
on the future… her hands open…