San Miguel de Abona

When, on one occasion, W.H. Davies met with Walter de la Mare, de La Mare asked him how he wrote his poems. ‘A plain and simple question’ thought Davies, to which he responded: ‘First an idea comes to me.’

‘What do you mean by “an idea comes to you”?’ replied de La Mare.*

Not such a simple question, it seems. Process never is.

Were I asked how I write my poems, I would probably lie — lying not out of a desire to deceive but as a result of the fact that when people talk about how they do things they simplify and totalise. Poems often come to me when I’m walking, but not all poems, and not every time that I’m walking. There has to be something in the air for them to come. Something that is at the back (or the fore) of the mind, and something that stimulates a bubble of thought to words: a wave, the flight of a bird, an association that words in their own strange way latch onto.

Poems also arrive in hushed places: the bath, the bed. And they latch in the same way, on the back of a thought. A phrase comes, two phrases, a few lines that I repeat over and over so as not to lose them as the ‘poem’ builds. It is only when I have more lines than I can hold in my head that I jump from the bath for a pen or scribble the lines down in the Notes app on my phone. The words that are sung in the head are generally recognisable in the final poem and they lend it its rhythm; quite often though, what is first scribbled down is clumsy and would blush to call itself a poem.

Poems also come when I’m reading poems written by other people — San Miguel de Abona is one such poem. It is the first poem that I have written in a long while.

A month back, I was reading The Shadow of Sirius by W. S. Merwin. Like a good many of Merwin’s collections, it is full of the past. Reminiscence. I must’ve been thinking about that, and about what might have prompted Merwin to write, thinking about how perhaps for Merwin the past was both a haunting (good and bad) and a building block. You start with the past, think about the past, something concrete; words come and then words do what they are apt to do in a poem, that is they take on their own life. Beneath the poem there is, perhaps, some ‘truth’, an unspoken narrative, but mostly a poem is a poem. So, reading Merwin, I pictured something concrete from the past: the view from the roof of a house in which I once lived in San Miguel de Abona, Tenerife. Words came. What they left behind is fiction.

The poem was a month between coming to words and ‘completion’. A month during which largely I forgot it.

San Miguel de Abona

From the roof you can see
over the plaza the church
whose bell it seems is always
ringing to another island
asleep in its sea and hear
crickets thrum the hot night’s
song though they’re frogs
she declaims saying magic
like love has its moment
whilst downstairs there’s
that smell of someone
else’s summer the house
limewashed
crumpling its skin

* Davies recounts his meeting with de La Mare in Later Days, a follow-up of sorts to his book The Autobiography of a Super-tramp.

The Eye and the Hand

Sometimes one find oneself spoken through the words of other people
it is then one realises how universal is the particular.

In his autobiography, Graven Image, (which is at once both autobiography and treatise on wood engraving), John Farleigh reflects upon the first wood engraving that he made — a self-portrait ‘drawn’ (so to speak) not with pencil but directly into the wood with a graver. In the moment of that piece he realised that “the tool can be used as freely as a pencil” and that the act of engraving could be a creative process in its own right and not a mere “imitation of drawing.” It was an insight born of the freedom of the new, of abandon — a freedom that he lost when he found his subsequent work influenced by illustrations of woodcuts. “It took me” he writes, “a long time to recapture my first freedom.”

I am trying to recapture mine.

Over the past few months I have worked on a number of prints which I have not quite pulled off.  It has been a frustrating period.  I have thought carefully about design (though, and here’s the rub, at one and the same time too carefully and not carefully enough), made studies to explore the tones and textures that I can achieve with the gouge so as to realise what the mind’s eye sees, and pulled these studies together into ‘final’ pieces that were difficult to execute and which, to my mind, failed.

A case in point

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My recent print The Book of Good Things, Verse 25, acts as memorial — in the sense both that it is a reminder of ‘good’ things and a record of things which, given the parlous state of our planet, may not be long for this world.  Having first conceived of the poem and cast it (biblically) in stone, my aim was then to accent the fragility of the natural world through creating a linocut that sited the stone not in a garden, but beneath a rising sea.  To do so, I felt the need to explore what I could acheive through different techniques.  The pictures above represent some of my attempts to realise my vision.  Reading left to right they show: a study of light falling through kelp; two studies in lettering; a rough proof of a ‘finished’ piece which pulls the other studies together.

Whilst the finished piece is reasonably well executed in terms of its cuts, it is a disappointment in many ways.  It fails as a composition (the stone needs a larger, less mean border or no border at all, and would be better sited left, not right, and angled rather than straight); it lacks movement (the bubbles and, perhaps, the kelp being the little that carry a sense of flow); finally, it is, all in all, too grey — a state which could perhaps be redeemed by working in more light, though that is a process which, for the moment I have little heart to engage in.  Better to leave it lie and call it learning.

Farleigh has something interesting to say on this too.

Artistic vision and technique, the eye and the hand, work at times in unison, and at other times the one outpaces the other.  Artists begin, Farleigh writes, in a state wherein “the craft ability” (what one can achieve technically) is greater than “the mental vision”.  This is a happy state in that what one wants to achieve is easily acheivable.  He demonstrates this with an illustration in which the hand represents technical ability and the eye, artistic vision.

Over time, artistic vision develops (guided in part by the hand) and a point is reached when what the artist sees and feels and wants to achieve, is in balance with the technical ability to realise the vision (shown in Farleigh’s illustration as the intersect of the two lines).  Everything goes swimmingly and the artist is endowed with fluency and a sense of power.  But then power inevitably begets inspiration, and as the vision continues to develop it “leaps ahead” of the artist’s technical ability such that technique acts as a drag upon progress (the shaded area in the illustration).  There follows, observes Farleigh, a “period of time, well known to most artists, of despair and difficulty. … technique can, from being more than adequate, become useless.”

Too true.

Like Farleigh, whose study of woodcuts turned him from his initial naive freedom, I have been drawn to the technique of others — primarily that of wood engravers of the 1930s such as Agnes Miller Parker, Claire Leighton, and Gwenda Morgan — and whilst I have gained much from their wonderful work, like Farleigh before me, I feel I have lost my initial freedom.

Through studying technique, I am able now to portray greys and a range of textures that were beyond me a year ago, but on the down side I have been drawn into a world of aching deliberation — a world far removed from It would make you weep, my first work. Carved from the barest of outlines and with no idea whatsoever of how I would manage the islands and sky in the piece, It would make you weep was poetic act.  An absorption in the moment.  I approached the block with abandon, in a spirit of experimentation, and had no real care over whether or not I would succeed in pulling a print, nor whether, in the end, the print would be worth pulling.  Doing what I could with limited technique, the eye and the hand met in a print that is stark black, naked white, bold movement.

I am unsure whether, in studying technique, my vision has (following Farleigh) now outpaced my hand, or whether my hand has outpaced and blinded my eye.  Technique is a means to an end, but it can also determine the end. It is perhaps for this reason that, in concluding his thoughts on the dance between vision and technique, Farleigh writes:

A new technique has to be developed by every artist for every phase of his mental progress.  The more personal the vision, the more personal the craft must become. 

And this is where I find myself now, seeking to make personal my craft.  Having read Farleigh, I realise that whilst the doubts that I have about my work are within me, they are also without. The particular — the personal — is, in its way, universal and the process that I find myself working through, rather than being unique to me, is one which art makes inevitable. I can only hope that, if I come to rework my sea swept stone, it is the hand’s sweep, its kiss and caress, the loose sketch and abandon that drives the gouge next.

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A sketch reimagining flow within The Book of Good Things

John Farleigh’s Graven Image: an auto-biographical textbook (1940), Macmillan and Co. Ltd, London. A wonderful book to hold in the hand and one that can also be read online at the Internet Archive. His discussion of vision and technique can be found on pages 60-62, and his reflection on his first wood engraving on page 72.

An unlikely poem

From A Dictionary for One, Uncertain Press (2023)

Stigmata n. Moments that brand, and as a consequence of which
the remainder of life is spent wondering why. colloq. Self-spectre.
Those commonly affected by stigmata (stigmatists, n. uncertain)
think to return to the place and moment of their mark
but (improbable) few actually do.

We are fabulists at heart, no? Telling our tales, writing our histories, weaving what we remember with what we think we remember — constructing, reconstructing, daily, the narrative we call ourselves. We are all fictions, living half-in, half-out of other people’s heads, and sometimes our fiction outlasts ourselves. Politicians figured this one out years ago.

We navigate the world on the quicksand of ‘truth’ — accepting in conversation the ‘truth’ of what we each say. We would not call someone out and say ‘you’re lying’ were this not so. The world operates upon sincerity. You will be good, be truthful with me, as I am truthful and good with you. Pact.

Enter politics. O and poetry too: that which the puritan Stephen Gosson in his work, ‘The School of Abuse’, called ‘the mother of lies’ and ‘the nurse of abuse’.

In as much as ‘there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition’ (Jorge Luis Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni), there is a kind of lazy pleasure in the invention of truth. It’s what poets and writers do and in so doing they get beneath the skin of words, of things. My poem ‘From A Dictionary of One, Uncertain Press, 2023’, plays with this notion. I have a linocut in mind which does likewise, taking a landscape and underscoring it with a fabulous ‘definition’ of the word Poet. Who knows, I might make a book of it.

Notes:

• The photo which accompanies the poem in this piece is a digitised version of a photo I took on Christmas Day, 1996, in Bolu, Turkey, using a small Pentax camera. Honestly.

• Stephen Gosson (1579) ‘The School of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters and such like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth; setting up the Flag of Defiance to their mischievous exercise and overthrowing their Bulwarks by Profane Writers, Natural reason and common experience; a discourse as pleasant for Gentleman that favour learning, as profitable for all that will follow virtue’.

• Jorge Luis Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni (1974) ‘Preface’ in Jorge Luis Borges ‘The Book of Imaginary Beings’ (trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni).

Maeni Hirion, Penmaenmawr

Would you come here on days of winter, cold
like this, crossing the haunch of Tal y Fan
from the shade of your valley
to watch the sky burn itself to sleep—
or was this only ever a place for dead people?

I count tonight the nights, like stars in millions
between us, imagining how you took your turn to turn
eyes closed, thrice three within the stones
hoping perhaps for warmth, some ease
a peace from endless fighting

all the usual things people wish for down the years—
an honest, less self-serving chieftain.

Maeni Hirion is a Bronze Age embanked stone circle that sits on the northern flank of the Carneddau mountains in North Wales. Known in English as The Druids’ Circle (literal translation from the Welsh, the long stones), the circle is one of a group of monuments which, according to CADW, may in the Bronze Age have been inter-related: tumuli, ring cairns, and two parallel lines of closely spaced stones that may or may not have formed the entrance to a sanctuary.

To the north of the circle, the town of Penmaenmawr and the sea; to the west, the Neolithic axe factory of Graig Llwyd and the massive hill fort of Braich y Dinas (later destroyed to make way for a quarry); to the east, the hill fort of Caer Lleion; to the south, Tal y Fan (one of the many peaks that form the waveline that is the Carneddau), and over the ridge the Conwy valley.

People have walked the hills above the circle for millennia. When the Romans came and laid a road from Caerhun and across the hills to Caernarfon, they found a ready path. Fifteen hundred years later, so too did the Central Energy Board — threading its pylons valley to valley — and now, so too, do I.

A steep climb from my house and I’m in the hills. The empty hills. These days we live in the valleys or on the sliver of land that separates mountains from sea and we leave the hills to sheep, to mountain bikers, and to walkers. During the Bronze Age life was lived in the sky — on the peaks, in the round huts that pepper the high landscape. Altitude aside though, I’m not sure that much separates we of the third millennium CE and those of the millennia before. That much is the substance of Maeni Hirion, Penmaenmawr. For all time’s ruptures, our concerns are human ones; we are no more and no less human than those who came before us and our concerns, I’d hazard, remain much the same.

Julian Brasington (2020) A double line of stones on the approach to Maeni Hirion

Maeni Hirion, Penmaenmawr, was first published in the anthology Christmas / Winter, Volume 3, Black Bough Poetry (2022).

CADW have responsibility for ancient monuments in Wales. Their series A Guide to the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales is a mine of information on archeological and architectural sites in Wales, from the prehistoric through to the medieval period. I have drawn on the Gwynedd volume in this post and also upon the resources available through Coflein.

Three poems

Rewriting the Triads of the Island of Britain

 After the medieval Trioedd Ynys Prydein

April, end of, blue sky, a chill in the air
one of the Fortunate Men of the Island of Prydein
sitting in a garden overlooking the sea
listening to blackbirds, the far-off shut of a door
I am rewriting the Triads, remembering
Rosa, Marie, Julia Long Golden Hair,
Three Women who Received the Beauty of Eve
and how like the sea they slipped from me
too easily—a litany of waves falls and
overwrites its moment.  O, how the sun silvers
the sea’s hand in the evening, it draws me back
to the Three Great Enchantments
and my work, listing—Capital,
the Solace of Purchase, its Pleasant Green—
and though the blackbirds sing, the Three
Steeds of Burden, Three Horses of Plunder
lumber onto my tongue and I wonder
what is it about Britain that names surfeit
like floods in spring for the Three Arrogant Men,
the Three Men of Shame, the Three Hard Slaps
that fell on the Island of Prydein
in the Year of our Lord, 2021.

Interlude

The middle of May, a mile off
traffic competes in the garden with birds
where I sit, wind in my hair
watching leaves repeat their dancing.

Over Garreg Fawr clouds hurry
in search of their ending — I close my eyes
put for a moment the day behind me
try to hear beyond the road’s rumble

a blackbird’s song, it’s simple cheer
delight when she comes near me.

Above Llanfairfechan

October, middle of, a slight chill in the air,
I’m sitting in the garden listening to a dog yelp
on the far hill, the year gathering its short clothes
for today’s last hurrah.  Tomorrow, I hear,
in the butcher’s, the plastic-free shop, on the street
it will turn cold, and doom lies heavy upon us,
so I let the sun play on me soft fireside warmth,
watch the last breeze of summer drag its heels
through the oak leaves, the Menai slowly empty
and in its way, were this all it would be perfect
but for the ins, the outs, of a left-behind wasp
wondering—here
here
no, there.

here
here
no, there.

Ego, id, super ego;
Father, Son, Holy Ghost.
You’d think things come in threes.

Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva,
the Hindu Trimurti;
the three Zoroastrian virtues—

‘good thoughts’
‘good words’
‘good deeds’.

Perhaps they do.

Tawhid, Nabuwwa, Imama, the three core principles of the Shia tradition;
Maiden, Mother, Crone, the Triple Goddess of Wicca;
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob — the three Jewish patriarchs.

Zeus, Poseidon, Hades — the three sons of Cronos;
the three treasures of Taoism
compassion, frugality, humility;

the three graces — Algaea, Euphrosyne, Thalia;
the sword, the mirror, the jewel — the three regalia of imperial Japan;
the three primes of alchemy

salt
sulphur
mercury

hunger, wounding, hanging, the three hardships endured by Odin;
the three sides, three vertices of a triangle;
thesis, antithesis, synthesis;

the three parts of a haiku;
codons - the nucleotide triplets in DNA sequences;
youth, maturity, old age;

count, one, two, three
go, the three sections of a triptych;
the lion, the witch, the wardrobe;

the good
the bad
and the ugly.

The first unique prime number, threes are everywhere, and perhaps no more so than in early Welsh poetry, which is replete with events and characters grouped together into threes by virtue of some shared good, bad, and sometimes downright ugly association. These are the trioedd of Welsh poetry.

In her book, Trioedd Ynys Prydein: the Triads of the Island of Britain (University of Wales Press), Rachel Bromwich draws together close on one hundred triads from those which have come down to us from medieval Welsh literature. Early Welsh poetry was oral in nature and little of the earliest survives today (Aneirin and Taliesin being rare 6th century exceptions). The bardic tradition was one of praise poetry. Great deeds were sung, princes and warriors remembered, lineage (both blood and lore) passed by word down. Poets (who more often than not fought in the battles they describe) would extemporise in the hall and it is generally held that they would in part learn their trade through memorising the triads. In this way, whenever their silken tongues required, they could call up any such as the three brave men of the island of Britain (trioedd 22), the three unfortunate hatchet blows (trioedd 34), and the three lively ladies (trioedd 79).

My poem, Rewriting the Triads of the Island of Britain, draws inspiration from the trioedd (or triads) in an act of personal and cultural remembrance and links both past and present by borrowing directly from some of the epithets in Rachel Bromwich’s collation of Trioedd Ynys Prydein. I happened to be sitting in the garden when I began the poem — not, in fact in 2021, but at the end of April 2020. Peak pandemic in the UK. Incompetence, arrogance, callousness. The poem was not published that year and, given that the habits of the powerful never change, I was able to change 2020 to 2021 with no real loss. The sentiment would apply equally to 2022. Pick your year. They are manifold. The poem was published PN Review (issue 266), alongside Above Llanfairfechan, another poem penned whilst sitting in the garden and one which intentionally plays upon the other. Interlude was written following the publication of both poems and it feels right to me that it sits between the two and forms with them a triptych of sorts. My own little triad.

The Cherry Trees

April

All the month long
the cherry trees have been readying boughs
with their bob and curtsey petticoats
wedding the chalk-blue, blackbird fluted air—
and when at night the wind comes,
singing its caresses through the branches,
I hear it woo the long chimney
and wake to the trees’ stripped tips,
green and bristling over the petal-strewn lawn.

I am fortunate to be surrounded by trees.

In the morning, I wake to a cherry tree that grows from the garden opposite mine. I spend ages gazing at it — skeletal against the grey skies of winter, blossomed in spring, brim full of blackbirds, pigeons, jackdaws, tits in June, gorging on the reddening fruit. Through the summer, its green flags bend to the wind that blows in off the sea, and then autumn comes—russeting.

In the kitchen, a cherry tree leans against the window. It sheds itself endlessly through the seasons, resting around the back door and I talk to it as a transient thing might:

First blossom
then stalks

cheeries
stones

now leaves—
I find you

forever walking into the house
reclaiming your ground

‘April’ is an homage of sorts to these trees. Too lyrical perhaps, too tender, to find its way into a contemporary magazine, I send it out periodically and each time it returns, a little weary, a little sorry for itself. So I thought I would give it a home here. I hope you enjoy it.

Tales

What if I do not leave a mark
an act, a monument, a book
that someone would want to make
a book of me, a thing and say
he thought these thoughts
did these things, was not altogether
good—might I then escape
clean away, hold myself half true
until perhaps some passing trowel
should raise my bones upon a table
two thousand years hence and say
he was a man who lived on meat
and did not suffer wounds.

Published in PN Review, Volume 48, No.6, 2022.

Between words

In the space between words their intention

Seven words, two prepositions, one determiner, one pronoun, three nouns, each with their own dictionary entries and meaning.  Put them together and what do they mean?  That meaning is not the sum of the words used, but rather what is not said?  As a musician might have it, that the music is in the silence between the notes?  That words are what they are not?

Preposterous

no?

Laurie Lee writes, in ‘Cider with Rosie’, of how he came home from his first day at school in a foul mood.  ‘What’s the matter, Loll?’ ask his sister.  He explains that when he got to school he was asked ‘to sit there for the present’ and he sat there all day and there was no present.  ‘I ain’t going back there again!’ he cries and who could blame poor little old Loll.  He’d been done.  Tricked.  Passed over (though not in that way).  And not, as it turns out, and as he thought, by the teacher, but by language—

unreliable, slippery beast
ever changing its skin

which is a problem, because lord knows we need language.

Not having language can, as Primo Levi wrote when reflecting upon his experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz, be deadly.  To not know German in the concentration camps, to not ‘understand’ what was barked at you and to not respond accordingly, to not know through language that there were ways to secure clothes, shoes, a little extra ‘food’, led to a quicker murder, an earlier death.  In short, language saves.

And it does so by pointing to things. But when it points to things that do not exist in a concrete sense, to ideas, futures, histories, to the space between things, language greys.

As a poet, I play at the edge of words

In this print, I play with — what?

Words, broken, hard-set in monumental stone on a grey ground beneath the eye of a flaming sun.  To Barthes, and those of us who come after, the writer is dead.  It is the reader who speaks and makes meaning; the viewer who sees what they think is there.  And isn’t that the beauty of art: it has no meaning, only meanings.

A poem is not a room
it’s a door.

A 3-minute video on YouTube showing how the lettering of ‘Between words’ was carved.

In the shadow of the Great Strike of Penrhyn

Cold on the picket line
no brazier to keep hands warm
though students offer cups of tea

paying twice over.
We smile at colleagues driving in to work
apologetic

almost,
the word scab somehow too violent
too quite what—real?

And when lights go on and someone lectures
to a half empty room
is that murmuring

just the way the wind blows
or the ghosts of those who saved tuppence
and thruppence to build this university

and for whom tuppence,
thruppence became fortune—
enough to keep a family off Traitors’ Row.

Published in Gwrthryfel / Uprising: An anthology of radical poetry from contemporary Wales, Ed. Mike Jenkins, Culture Matters, 2022

Penrhyn slate quarry, near Bethesda, is some seven miles from the university town of Bangor in North Wales.  The university was founded in 1884, in large part as a result of a subscription set up by the families of local quarrymen.  Education, and Welsh language education as a preference, was seen as a way out of the terrible conditions suffered by workers in the quarry.

Twelve years on from paying towards the foundation of the university, the quarrymen were out on strike in defense of the newly formed North Wales Quarrymen’s Union and in the hope of securing minimum payment for their work.  The dispute lasted 11 months.  Three years later, they were out again — for what then was the longest strike in British history.

The Great Strike of Penrhyn (1900-03) began shortly after the quarry owner, Lord Penrhyn, dismissed 26 workers and took them to court.  The quarrymen marched to Bangor in support of their colleagues and were subsequently locked out of work for two weeks by Penrhyn.  When the men returned to the quarry after the lockout, 800 men found themselves without work and in a further display of solidarity those who did have work walked out.  It was late November 1900.  In the mountains, winter.

Penrhyn offered the quarrymen new terms a month into the strike.  Only 77 men accepted.  Six months further on, he again offered new terms — this time, a sovereign to each man and the promise of a five per cent pay increase.  400 men returned, and the community was divided.

Those who returned to work and took the infamous Punt y Gynffon (or Tail Pound) were held as traitors, and to make that point clear, the families of those still on strike displayed notices in their houses — Nid oes bradwr yn y ty hwn (there is no traitor in this house).  Penrhyn softened the blow to the returning workers by building a row of houses in nearby Tregarth for them.  The street is known locally as Stryd y Gynffon (Traitor’s Row).  Left destitute by the strike, many families who refused Penrhyn’s terms moved away to find work elsewhere (mostly to the coalfields of South Wales).  Slowly, the strike lost momentum and in November 1903, three years after the strike had begun, those who remained were forced back to work.

Communities have long memories and to this day many Bethesda folk will not set foot in nearby Penrhyn Castle — the austere, battlemented ’home’ that Penrhyn built for himself and which is now owned by the National Trust.  Its gloomy exterior — complete with massive keep — chokes the mouth of the valley in which his quarry sat.  Circled mile upon mile by high stone walls and a gatehouse, the castle speaks volumes regarding Penrhyn and his attitude to the quarrymen.  Who, after all, would build themselves a castle for a home, in an area where castles mark the subjugation of a language and a people?

Whilst working at Bangor University, I recalled the Great Strike when, in November 2019, the university lecturer’s union, UCU, called a strike in defense of pay and pensions.  Wages had depreciated some 17 per cent over ten years, pensions had been slashed and pension contributions increased, and many staff were forced to work on casual contracts.  It was the first all-out strike in UCU’s history.  However as it turned out, unlike the Great Strike, it wasn’t, even at the outset, all-out.

Britain has a long tradition of rebellion: think the Peasants’ Revolt, the execution of King Charles I, the Chartists, the Rebecca Riots, the Suffragettes, Brixton, Toxteth, Extinction Rebellion.  British government has an equally long history of suppressing rights and those who seek to secure them: think the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Dic Penderyn, the Peterloo massacre, tanks on the Clyde, the ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2022’, and successive rounds of anti-trade union legislation.  When once it was possible to strike in support of a strike, it is now no longer possible.  Moreover, whilst governments are deemed legitimate having been elected only by a minority of those eligible to vote, a union cannot strike unless at least half of its members take part in a lengthy postal ballot (the 50 per cent threshold) and only then if the majority of those who voted also voted to strike.  With unions weakened, many people choose to save their pennies rather than pay to be in a union — albeit whilst continuing to derive benefit from the gains won through collective bargaining by unions (an irony which would not be lost on the Bethesda quarrymen).

Under UK legislation, unions can choose to ballot individual workplaces, or the membership as a whole.  Perhaps fearing that they wouldn’t be able to secure a yes vote across the whole sector, UCU executive decided to ballot individual workplaces.  Roughly half of the universities reached the 50 per cent threshold and came out on strike; the other half didn’t.  They were divided from the start and not all out.

On the picket line we would stand with our placards and watch colleagues driving into work.  Some were not in the union and said so; others were in the union, but maintained that they couldn’t afford to strike — a position which begs the question: who can?  Some staff avoided the strike altogether by quietly working from home and therein drawing the benefit of having neither to cross the picket line, nor lose money through telling the personnel department that they were on strike.

One particularly cold winter day, whilst shuffling my feet to keep warm on the picket line, I looked across the road towards the lecture rooms and saw a light go on.  The place looked empty of students, but someone had turned up to work. Watching them move around the room, I brooded upon the likely success or otherwise of the strike, upon its impact upon students, and the impact upon students if it failed.  The poem came to me then.

In a moment of absence

Walking down to the beach today, I was transported back to this time two years ago, when Wales, like much of the world, fell strangely quiet. Lockdown was in full force, and travel permitted only for essential purposes and only locally. Back then, I had walked home from the beach one day, stood on the overpass over the usually busy A55 and for a good five minutes not seen a single car. Not one car—and yet, just a few months before, whilst walking the same route at dusk and passing an Arts and Crafts cottage that gives to the hills and looks out to the sea, the road had troubled me. I drafted a poem with the lines, “where hills cosset a cottage / you might call home / but for the roar that spills / from a road’s red and white leaving”. The road ruptures — literally (cutting a barren trail through fields, shearing the hills from the sea) and metaphorically (the constant rip, rip of rubber drowning out thought) — I’m no fan of it. And then one day two years ago it fell silent.

Looking upon its four empty lanes, I felt a strong urge to walk down the middle of it. It was so quiet, you could have put your ear to its white lines and felt the tremor from a blackbird’s song. I didn’t walk it, but I walked a lot. Every day. I was lucky—whilst in cities and towns, many people were shut out of parks and stuck indoors, I was able to walk the hills in what was the sunniest springtime in years. When I talk with local people of that strangely quiet and oh-so deadly spring, many of us share the same guilty pleasure. We were living in a peaceful and very small world, and despite the horror of all the deaths and the fear of death, it was in its way a heavenly time. And across the country, people were talking about what really matters in life (family, time, the environment, friends) and of the need to re-set the way we live our lives — to stop the treadmill, to consume less, to respect people and place more. To live in human time. This poem of mine, published in Ink Sweat & Tears in May 2021, speaks of that time.

In a moment of absence

The road whispers 
in a language not heard these seventy years

the sea eats only its pebbles 
and can be heard calling its kinfolk 

who listen can listen
now the sea can be heard

and all the candy floss falls strangely silent
hoping for some tongue some

lips to stir and noise 
the blue of this place

which insists once more in singing
the lapwing a curlew’s song

Mailing fine art prints

When I decided to sell my prints online, one of my first thoughts was ‘how am I going to send them?’  I spoke with artist friends about how they packaged their work, recalled prints that I had received through the post, and looked online at what other print-based artists do.  I had two main goals: firstly, to ensure that the prints arrive undamaged and, secondly, to use packaging that is, at bare minimum, recyclable, and preferably compostable.

As a general rule, most of the people I spoke with and surveyed send small prints flat, and larger prints rolled and then posted in tubes.  I’m not a fan of tubes because it is difficult to roll a print and also because they curl up when taken from the tube and then need flattening.  More an urgh-factor when you receive a print than a wow-factor.  So no tubes.

And then there’s rain.  Sending parcels ‘signed for’ is one way around that, but in Wales if not elsewhere, there’s no accounting for what a heavy shower will do between van and door.  So, plastic envelopes maybe?  They keep things dry, but they’re a no-no environmentally—so, no.  

I wrap my prints in glassine paper for storage as glassine is acid-free and won’t eat into the print.  Whilst not completely waterproof, glassine also protects from moisture and grease and that makes it preferable to tissue paper.   A glassine envelope would be great and Eco-craft make these, but unfortunately they’re too small for my prints.  They also sell cellophane envelopes which are made from plant-based material and are fully compostable (you can put them in your food recycling bin or in your compost bin if you have one).  So, the print gets wrapped in glassine and then placed inside a cellophane envelope.  They look good.  Fit to sell from a store or stall.

How then to make sure the prints doesn’t get bent or creased when it’s mailed?  Having decided to mail flat, I tried card-backed envelopes (not rigid enough and not deep enough to take additional card) and a range of carboard mailers.  Most of the mailers I tried struck me as flimsy, though they could be stiffened with carboard that is cut to size.  And then I stumbled on ParcelMax Mailers.  These are stout as it is and can be lined with pre-cut envelope stiffeners for extra strength.  They also come sized to ensure that they can be posted as small parcels and don’t therefore incur steep postage costs.  Perfect.  The result is this recipe (which I’ve tried).

The recipe

Take one print, wrap carefully in a sheet of glassine paper, place in a cellophane envelope, lay on a cardboard enevelope stiffener (pre-cut to fit the size of the mailer), place another cardboard stiffener on top, tape the stiffeners together to ensure the print doesn’t slip (use a paper-based recyclable packing tape such as sold by Eco-craft), place on the mailer and then fold over the sides and top, seal all around with packing tape.  Post with your preferred handler.