Editor’s Choice 9

 

Martyn Halsall has been described as having ‘a great gift for language that is both allusive and elegant’. The poems in Coronach are distinctive and atmospheric, largely focusing on the landscape of the north west, both of Scotland and England. However, a poem I’ve always been particularly taken by is about Iceland, or at least about a painting of Iceland.

Migrating Birds
(from a painting by Eirikur Smith)

Imagine you are the woman pictured at the end
of the lava track, at the aftermath of Iceland,
her gaze hardened with glacier lines, her outlook
shingle, back-lit by an open wound of sunset.

Last light catches the ribbing down her hut,
cream corrugated iron, sanded rust;
something of a splintering in the concrete cast,
steps leading up beyond sand’s overlap;
the beach spread to the emptiness of ocean.

Suppose you had just returned there, and you shared
realisations in the night map of her face,
her vision of year ending; deepening sky overcast
spreading its blue dyes further through calm tide;
a shaken pepper pot flock moving away,
south, into migration.
Consider the painter’s hand
leaving her to winter, having prepared the storm
by layering thunder through eclipsing oils.

He might glance back, regret abandoning her there,
turning from the sea, that last flock now far out.
Imagine, instead, he stayed; stood waiting with her.

What I enjoy so much about this is the atmospheric description. It’s based on a painting, but actually creates its own separate sense of a particular place by describing elements in the flat plane of the picture so as to evoke in my mind somewhere three dimensional and emotionally vibrant.

The first stanza, which invites the reader to imagine being the figure in the picture, has ‘the aftermath of Iceland’ and ‘an open wound of sunset’ which sets a certain ominous tone. This is followed in the next stanza by more vivid description, doing with words what an artist does with paint before, in the third stanza, placing ‘you’ the reader more firmly there in ‘her vision of year ending’.

When I’m asked to ‘Consider the painter’s hand’, this takes me out of the picture and into the person of the artist and the paradox of creativity, being immersed in the created object yet separate from it. All summed up in that beautiful last stanza in which loneliness, separation and regret intermingle.

This seems to me to be a poem with many layers of meaning, itself a metaphor I can enter and explore both emotionally and cerebrally.

 

 

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