Inking Bitterns on BBC Radio Bristol with Steve Yabsley

Deborah Harvey, John Terry and I were on Steve Yabsley's afternoon show on BBC Radio Bristol, talking about our book Inking Bitterns - poems and pictures for wild places. We talked for half an hour, and each read two of our poems. We also managed to discuss Morris Minors, skip-diving, seafaring, gender transitioning, and poetry in general. It was quite a wide-ranging discussion!

Radio has been described as a very visual medium, but even so, you would not have been able to see the pictures that went with the poems, just by listening to the interview - which you can hear as a podcast HERE (We are on about 30 minutes into the programme, just after the Beatles track!)

So here are the pictures and the poems that we read, together as they are in the book. Click on the images to see them larger. By the way, as I said on the programme, we are not selling through Amazon; but you can get it at Gert Macky, and all (well, some. Not many yet TBH) good book shops.

 

map reading for beginners

map reading for beginners, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

This picture's kept me occupied for the last few days. It's intended as the cover for Deborah's next poetry collection, a work in progress. The picture incorporates several elements in her poems, and develops some of the ideas behind my Partrishow picture. There's also a big nod in the direction of Kathleen Jamie's poem 'Meadowsweet', because it seemed to work so well with the picture and is such a good poem, in its turn referencing a tradition that 'suggests that certain of the Gaelic women poets were buried face down'.

Three Hares in Devon churches: a map

get a copy of this map here

(edit, added June 2020: I have updated my map, and you can see the newer version here)

The image of three hares sharing three ears can be found all the way from here to China, where the earliest examples are found. But Devon, and especially Dartmoor, is particularly rich in them.

I've been visiting the churches where the hares can be found; the search has taken me to some beautiful places. Deborah Harvey has written a poem about them, which you can read here. Some of her poem features on the map...

Here are places where you can find the hares in the churches, but do take a torch!

Ashreigney
Bradford
Broadclyst
Chagford
Cheriton Bishop
Iddesleigh
Ilsington
Kelly
Newton St Cyres
North Bovey
Paignton
Sampford Courtenay
South Tawton
Spreyton
Tavistock
Throwleigh
Widecombe

Here is photographer Chris Chapman's Three Hares Project, with lots of excellent pictures.

The map is available as an A5 print, over on my Etsy shop.

easter hares

 

 With Easter upon us, the moon waxing towards full and the celandines in bloom, here's a timely picture. (I just re-uploaded it because I realised that the version I had online was the unfinished one, without the Uffington White Horse....)

Here's Deborah Harvey's poem.

Full Circle

In ancient China
the moon is made of figured silk,
woven with the pattern of galloping hares,
three conjoined by a single ear,
together whole.

An eternal circle
embroidered on bolts of cloth,
carried by camel through singing sands,
the booming dunes of wind-whipped
Xhiang Sha Wan,

where Silk Road
frays to quick oasis, and
wondering artists paint three hares
on sacred temple cavern walls.
The Buddha’s wheel

of life and death
rolls through Persia’s burning plains,
eclipses sere, salt-desert suns: a brazen tray
engraved with hares, a stamped,
Islamic copper coin.

Crossing rivers, bridging rifts
in hidden groves of moss and stone,
these three hares chased on Jewish tombs
and makeshift tabernacle roofs,
the blackened beams

of Dartmoor churches
at the edges of the earth, bear
a trinity of hares, three in one, the risen son,
beneath a moon that pins
the universal oceans.

mapping

Dart map, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Here's a map of Dartmoor in the 14th century, at the time of the Black Death. It's for Deborah Harvey's novel Dart, due to be published this year. It was fun to draw, once I'd worked out how to go about it- something vaguely in the style of a mediaeval map, and those brightly coloured postcard maps that you used to get in the 60s.

A useful tool for getting the perspective right was Google Earth, and a fun by-product of using Google Earth is goofing around on the flight simulator that's available in the tools options. Flying under the Saltash Bridge in an F16 is great fun, and one unattended by the risk of a knock at the door from the CAA. Very unmediaeval!

Dart

I've just finished this picture, for the cover of Deborah Harvey's new novel, Dart. That's Hound Tor, on Dartmoor, in the background.

I quite like this picture. It would have been nice to have done it all on one piece of paper, but that would have been impossible, applying washes over the rather intricate foliage of the border, given the limitations of masking fluid. Still, Paint Shop Pro (which is what I use for digital manipulation) is as much a part of my toolbox as the paintbrushes, dip pens and assorted paraphernalia of a more traditional kind.

Here are the two components of the picture, before I layered them up on screen...

Ode for Ted

Border Collie - behavioural problems, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Ode for Ted (with apologies to Sylvia Plath)

I could do without the alarm that sounds

at the least provocation. .

The affronted expression on the faces

of harassed neighbourhood cats.

Lace curtains of collie snot

swagging the windows.

Pre-dawn chorusing in spring

while foxes rut.

Your fame amongst scooter-riding kids,

cyclists, and joggers in the park

verges on legend. ‘Hey Ted,’ they say,

as you whirl on your lead,

which means

‘Keep that crazed dog away from me!’

You’re black and white to them.

They miss the versatility

of my personal trainer

who brooks no slacking, my saviour-

dog in a manger, my angel

with healing kisses.

You would fetch the moon for me,

out-growl the roar of invisible seas.

My furry comforter, my guide.

The dark poet at my side.

Poem ©Deborah Harvey 2011

Earth Stars

From the chronicles of trees
she wants monsters:

baleful Destroying Angels,
stellar brides of hell,
all innocence and virulence
in petticoats and veil,
or troops of gleaming Death Caps,
goose-stepping through leaves,
marshalling for massacre
in copses, killing fields, as if
escape clutched in her hand might gift
illusory control.

In forests damp and warm,
in thickets blanketed by spores,
the Prince with Devil's Fingers
knows their secret, loamy holes.
He can smell them, see them, feel them swelling
opening the ground,
thrusting through the litter
with a hungry, crackling sound.
He finds her Velvet Shanks and Blushers,
puts an Amethyst Deceiver in her hand.

In the sultry, starless dark,
she'll settle for a zodiac
of flesh and pearls and earth.

Deborah Harvey

another collaboration; picture of the Cerne Giant and Stinkhorn by me, poem by Deborah.