Passing Through, Indigo Dreams 2018

"I .... am always glad

to touch the living rock again" (John Muir)

Enjoying a beach comb,  Merlin's Cave, Tintagel beach Cornwall 

photo by Geoff Green 2007

"In her ‘love letter to Cumbria’, Geraldine Green weaves together strands of auto-biography, living depictions both of landscape and of inward journeying, moments of revelation always grounded in the actual and the observed, and brings all these qualities together in one sweeping compass to create a volume rich in sensory and meditative experience.  We hear the shining voices of earth, air, fire and water.  This is writing that re-interprets modern pastoral, elemental and contemporary in all its facets.  Using language that is nuanced and open enables this poet to catch, as if on the wing, glimpse after heart-glad glimpse of her part of this beautiful vulnerable planet." - Penelope Shuttle

Stone Renga

What do I know of stones?

Flat, mud-grey ones

on Foulney Island. Layer upon layer

heaped up for feet to scramble and slide on.

What do I know of stones?

Those at Aldingham, dark grey

round as a bird’s egg

shot through with milky quartz

in circles and crosses that lie

warm and smooth in my palm.

What do I know of stones?

Limestone dragons on Birkrigg

dinosaur-shapes glint white

fissures on ancient pavements.

What do I know of stones, their secret

of fossils: ammonites, ferns, feathers

spiralled, whorled worlds imprinted within them

ready  to take flight

when their old stone-bodies

crack open.

Delighted to have this poem in Stone Renga  an anthology written, produced and birthed by a love of stones, ed. Alan Berecka and Tom Murphy, Tale Feathers Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico

  south Walney nature reserve (photo by Geraldine Green copyright)

"Geraldine Green’s poems are alert to landscape, seasons, rootedness that draws from deep aquifers of language, change that flits like cloud shadows across the page. Some seemed light as thistle heads but proved enduringly strong, rich with seed. As I read, I almost expected goldfinches to feed alongside me with their otherworldly attentiveness. But that attentiveness was all hers."

Graham Mort

Burns Beck Moss 16.9.2017 (photo by Geraldine Green copyright)

I recall our walk in Burns Beck Moss,

the softness of ground, the softness of feet, the hush of bodies, the quiet chat and the moss cushioning us, our feet, our chat, our bodies, our thoughts, the frogs’ stretched balletic legs, their crouched sanctuary among the sphagnum, speeding away from boots and trainers, our feet on cushioned silence, crushing their territory.

Geraldine Green, Passing Through, pub, Indigo Dreams 2018

South Walney Nature Reserve, photo by Geraldine Green copyright

At home on the Bay

Its light, its silver, its mud-tanged-tangle-tongued

salt-licked presence and the birds, dunlins, perhaps,

or knot?

too far out for us to catch what they were

without binocs. How they swoop and mimic

the murmurations of starlings, but

are not, these wide-winged verses of song

these wing-spread low-tide flit-flight light-tilted

blown along froth

of feather-mimicked pebbles and foam

interpretations of mud and sky

these birds that rise and fall with the incoming tide

this late afternoon beneath the crescent moon

that rises above shavings of licked-clean shells

and bones.

Geraldine Green (copyright Passing Through pub. Indigo Dreams 2018)

Geraldine at Aldingham, photo by Geoff Green copyright

Whaup

"I take my gladness in the… sound of the curlew instead of the laughter of men”

- ‘The Seafarer’ Anon. Anglo-Saxon poet

In the absence of curlew I must attempt

to call it down, to call it back to fell and shore

call it back to sing the moor alive once more.

In the absence of curlew clouds must learn

to bring back spring, to lay cloud eggs on upland soil

to curve cloud bodies into curlew-grace

into speckled feathers that mimic mica-sand and

mottled stones, the guarding of eggs, slow beating

of wing, curved-down bill that probes the earth

for worms, the shore for crabs, its long wail

the cry of the dead waiting to be re-born.

I must again recall the great whaup’s warning

the dead’s return from dreaming. Listen

to what the night is saying through the piercing

cry of cur leee, of cur-lee.

pub. in Curlew Calling anthology, ed. Karen Lloyd
Geraldine Green (copyright Passing Through IDP 2018)


Thank you Dawn Bauling, co-editor of  Indigo Dreams Pubs. for your kind words:

Passing Through, by Geraldine Green

It is indeed a love letter to Cumbria - like walking through its parts with a lyrical David Attenborough - nothing gets missed, all the history, all the beauty, all the unpredictable wonder of it - from the way the waves lap on Coniston to the history in the old stones on Foulney Island, its minutiae and its grandeur. You want to wander with Geraldine and see with her eyes, her real eyes and her mind's eye. Forget the tourist information guides - if you want to know what the lakes and fells are all about read this. 

Looking forward to reading from Passing Through, to be published in 2018 by Indigo Dreams  at a venue near you! 

Here's and extract from my introduction to Salt Road on the Poems & Poetics website by Jerome Rothenberg 

me, reading in nature, Eycott Hill, 22.7.2017, on the 'Write in Nature' outdoor creative writing workshop I led for Cumbria Wildlife Trust, photo by Jane Moss-Luffram (copyright)

"I .... am always glad
to touch the living rock again
and dip my hand in the high mountain sky"

(Wolf, Unpublished Journals, 221)"

taken from website:

'Knights of Nothingness'

Poems in my new collection Passing Through Indigo Dreams Pubs. 2018 have appeared in the following anthologies and publications:

Poems in this collection have been accepted for publication or have appeared in: Stone Renga, Tail Feathers Press, Santa Fe, NM in 2017; accepted for Waymaking, ed. Helen Mort (due to be published in 2018); Qualia, ed. Roselle Angwin; My Dear Watson, ed. Rebecca Bilkau; The Bees Knees, ed. Rebecca Bilkau, Beautiful Dragons Press; ‘Curlew Calling’ Numenious Press, ed. Karen Lloyd; The Raspberry and the Rowan, Cumbria Wildlife Trust; The City Zine, ed. Kathy Smith, Ohio, USA; Haiku Calendar 2017 ed. Walter E. Harris III Long Island, USA;  SpeakEasy Magazine, Vol.1 ed. Nick Pemberton; Watershed – an anthology in response to Storm Desmond, eds. Nick Pemberton, Ann Wilson, Geraldine Green; Poetry Bay Long Island Quarterly USA; Bright Hill Press 25th anniversary anthology, ed. Bertha Rogers, Catskills USA