JANE GRIFFITHS
SILENT IN FINISTERRE
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
The houses and landscapes of childhood exert a strong presence in Silent in Finisterre. Recalled by name, in incantation, or described in ways that recapture their irreducible reality to a child for whom they are the totality of the world, they become a kind of memory theatre: for Jane Griffiths physical things are remembered both for their own sake and to explore how they continue to shape the self.
Style impresses as much as content in her resonantly evocative poems, with sentences played against line breaks to create constant small disruptions of the expected sense, while predictable phrases and forms of words are summoned only to be rewritten. Here language is not a transparent means of conveying a message but a medium that – no less than charcoal or oil paint – materially affects what is expressed through it. Form and subject are as inextricably entwined as ‘the echo of port in the night’s starboard, / the terra firma that is silent in Finisterre’.
‘Jane Griffiths is a poet attracted to the cross-hatchings of matter and spirit; inner and outer; air and water; foreignness and a sense of home…she has something of the Dutch still-life painter’s eye: the comprehension of solid form as nothing, finally, but the effect of light. Sensuously wrought and even, at times, subtly erotic, her poems simultaneously evoke another level of pure abstraction, with words in place of coils of paint.’ – Adam Thorpe, Guardian
‘A major achievement… outstanding…complex and subtle in thought, supple of tone and piercing in its observation.’ – Sarah Broom, Times Literary Supplement
Cover painting: Leaving the House (1994) by Andrew Litten
JANE GRIFFITHS
Silent in Finisterre
Let a man get up and say, ‘Behold, this is the truth,’ and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, The Waves
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications, in which some of these poems have appeared: The Alhambra Poetry Calendar, The Golden Hour, The Oxford Magazine, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, The Poetry Review, The Rialto, and The Same.
‘Anonymous’ was commissioned by Ian Starsmore as part of his installation of artworks involving ladders in Cambridge University Library in 2007.
I should also like to thank Polly Clark and Esther Morgan for reading earlier drafts of several of these poems and for their astute suggestions
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Lessons from My First Giraffe
In the beginning
Perspective
Exe
Geography for Beginners
Song of Childhood
Night Drive
Black Swans
The Museum of Childhood
Revenant
Anecdote
Forecast
Ferryman
Child at a Museum
Juxtaposition
Night-watch
Tremolo
There’s a road
Natural History
Like Truth
Translations
My Grandmother’s Mirrors
Troy
Gone to Ground
This low tide
The Weather in St Just
The Nightships
At Sea
Thesaurus
Anonymous
Riddle
Losing It
What the poet is trying to say is
Lifelines
Five-finger Exercise
Still Here
The Pond
Treehouse
Sneyd Park Sketchbook
An Unwritten Novel
Still Life
Snapshot of a Marriage
Instead of a Mirror
Domestic Science
Spital Square
Object Lesson
Initialisation
The Question of Things Not Happening
About the Author
Copyright
Lessons from My First Giraffe
(for Nigel and Hilary)
The habits of camouflage.
How to approach a mezzanine.
How to articulate at the knee delicately as a lady
stepping down from her carriage.
A preference for what’s out of reach.
How to trust the improbable.
Vertigo, or a warped sense of perspective.
How to wink, slowly.
How to curl my lip to the shape of a leaf.
How to keep my feet on the ground in Gandy Street
while stretching my neck languidly to graze the long
slopes round Rougemont Castle where goldfish swim
star-like in the bowl of the hill.
A fondness for Marmite.
The fissure between the parts and the whole.
In the beginning
(for Peter)
In the beginning was the tree,
the hooked silhouette of it, the swing,
the inedible apples.
In the beginning was the train,
the rumour of it, its reverberations
quick between the branches.
In the beginning was the sun,
kaleidoscopic, held up for inspection
between finger and thumb.
And beyond the tree the world
was a solid circumference, a perfect
round of hills
where north was up the road
and the sea was down. There were three
gates to the garden
in the beginning, before the sun
set above the station and the tree blacked
into a sky
where at night the trains kept running
on and on and a voice called home
all the possible destinations.
Perspective
Her first view was buddleia and Bramley.
The sky was silk-skein and a long way off.
Its grass-and-dust smell blew with the wind,
which came and went. It was true north.
Her second was river, broad and industrious,
strong-arming barges and container freight.
It was here she dropped a small gold coin:
knew it lost, but lost somewhere in the world.
In her mind’s eye it was centred, like a pupil.
Her third view was building site, a dream
of brick repeating brick. It was treelessness
and puddle. Its smell of mud persisted.
She could make head nor tail of it,
though there was skating, some months,
and each spring, marbles: hoards of them,
circled on their still-stopped lava flows,
lost and won in pockets of the earth.
She took a slingful for compass the day
she left to hunt a sky recognisably itself –
which would be north, she thought, across
the river. Sometimes when the wind changed
she could see it, almost, as through the eye of –
Exe
It takes shape sometimes, the idea of a river –
that is, the memory of it, and the places
it runs together: Topsham, Double Locks,
Countess Wear. Its potteries by the quay,
their slips and vessels, the men whose
tongues turned those terms as matter
of course. Its maritime museum: a name
and an echoing room of photographs,
behind glass, of the swan-shaped Swan
; that was lost at sea by burning, leaving just
its dinghy Cygnet salvaged and roped off
on a plinth with white wooden plumage
so alien and inviting to the fingertips
the child that lies alongside to draw the ship
in flames in the air that billows dark above
the water has a feel for metamorphosis
without the word for it. Outside, the town
on its hills is roundabouts in palisades
of light blue railings, flood plains where men
plot the bed of the new canal and the shell
of a church, sandstone, open to the sky
to walk about in, whose plaque says war
and destroyed by fire. Outside, swans
double-cross their reflections on the river
running past the shed where earth’s fired
to earthenware and on through the world
all around the page the child turns to mark
X for her place at the centre of things that are
beyond her and for the river that’s somewhere
between its source and what it’s the makings of.
Geography for Beginners
Is it a matter of landscape or language?
the book asks. Where would you most like to live:
mountains? flatlands? rolling hills and rivers?
The child strokes the illustrations, considers
from the vantage of her bed, in her purple-curtained room
how much she knows of the world –
her high garden and the sky that touches down
like a tent, on all sides. She senses the spring of grass
under her hand, the leaves of the book – open,
showing trees dwarfed by new-build and roads signed
in the foreign tongue that will be her fortune.
They invite the wind that translates as sticks and stones.
She is learning that words and things are cause and effect,
surely as the Christmas tree on the roof that stands for luck
will call down lightning through its cracked spine.
She is sitting upright in bed, holding the book. She knows
the truth of the question how do you want to be?
The words for it are over the hill and beyond.
The words for it are ‘over the hill and – ’. Beyond
the truth of the question, how do you want to be,
she is sitting upright in bed, holding the book she knows
will call down lightning through its cracked spine
surely as the Christmas tree on the roof that stands for luck.
She is learning that words and things are cause and effect:
they invite the wind that translates as sticks and stones
in the foreign tongue that will be her fortune.
Showing trees dwarfed by new-build and roads signed
under her hand, the leaves of the book open
like a tent on all sides. She senses the spring of grass,
her high garden and the sky that touches down –
how much she knows of the world.
From the vantage of her bed, in her purple-curtained room,
the child strokes the illustrations, considers
mountains, flatlands, rolling hills and rivers.
The book asks, where would you most like to live?
Is it a matter of landscape or language?
Song of Childhood
The off-beat chink of a cowbell.
Exeter, Gilgarran, Lodge Hill.
The eucalyptus and the Bramley,
the new red and gold Raleigh
bicycle in the butterfly bush,
the tooth I lost at Dawlish
past the spinning dinghies of Topsham
and the wind scutting across the Warren.
The far north was Cowley Bridge;
west, the soporific cows of Exwick
high above the tadpoles of Taddyford
and the sleeping dogs of Stoke Wood
proudly bore the name Friesian –
the liquorice stretch of the word on the tongue
like bootleg Allsorts eaten after dark
when figures went dancing in the carpet,
the walls said this is the home service,
the station said this is Exeter St David’s,
and two by two the giddy cows and dogs
came out in between-time over Double Locks
to range the sky that was tall as a crane
all the way to Starcross, and back again.
Night Drive
You’ll have been here before.
The flesh and blood of you, the bone
conducting your car down its own
tunnel vision. The road open, then shut.
Somewhere ahead white lines will lift
off into the sky’s depth-charge as your radio
recites the constellations – Dogger, Fisher –
the way children down Taddyford, suggestible,
whispered toad-life into its cool brown stones.
In the valley the river echoed their soundings:
Old Match Factory, Quay and Countess Wear
where black swans feathered their reflections,
the ferryman chain-hauled passengers across.
Tonight the memory of it is buoyant as a boat
moored on the patch of sky in your headlights,
clear as the slip between a river and the name
for it: the echo of port in the night’s starboard,
the terra firma that is silent in Finisterre.
Black Swans
(for my mother)
Because you say there were no swans
by Countess Wear, we can’t have watched them
raised above eye-level where we stood on the path
and looking down on us as if we were the water
they trod in. Because there were none we
can’t have seen the dark cropped fleur-de-lys
of their necks, the way they muscled in
on their own reflections, bill to red bill,
or the casual kick of one webbed foot,
the other a shadowy, upturned parasol.
The river was purely swanless; there was just
its feather-white torrent of water and a siren
pitched somewhere high above the town.
There were no cygnets; there was no argument
whether you can tell black from white, so young.
But do you remember how in the drought last year
a fisherman in waders forked the current? Now
do you remember the fluent, non-existent swans?
The Museum of Childhood
(for Lottie)
I
When you ask how I remember the past, as narrative
or snapshot, I think of your Pollock’s-style perspective
box: the abrupt exits and entrances, the cardboard
scenery, small two-dimensional urns steadied
with a fingernail and the whole thing slightly
askew. How we each pressed an eye to the carpet
to take its measure and acclimatise to the colours
dashed in their inky outlines, their air of expectancy.
It was like that. Living outside and looking in
to England’s conservatory of ghosts and geraniums
as through a window on a place with more rooms
than I’d words for in my first, diminishing language
I saw raw material. And all the time abroad grey
as the edges of the room where we straightened
unsteadily on our life-sized feet and blinked
at the awkwardly solid bookcase and bedhead,
where there was nothing to work with,
nothing to get a purchase on, where living
was practising ghostdom, the way we argued
whether it’s the chair that passes through the hand
or the hand t
hat passes through the chair.
II
The parts of your house were primary –
its porch, larder and scullery royal, crimson,
gold and indivisible as the slim stained
lights in the door, their cornered star.
The brass door-handles, string and bone carpet
and boxed-in stairs were the only stairs, carpet
and handles to fit those words. They were cagey
as crinolines, suggesting more than themselves.
And the back bedroom, the solid chill of it,
as if the house wrapped silence like the thing
a word stands unassumingly in place of.
The Grey Lady silhouetted against the window.
And the two of us, shadowing her.
III
What was it we were looking for when we lit out
through the French windows after dark in
our dressing-gowns and gave the name trap-door
to a Victorian manhole cover?
The heavy ring to it,
as if the word could open a world.
Silent in Finisterre Page 1
