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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775582427 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 72 |
| File size: | 441 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Wild
By Anne French
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2004 Anne FrenchAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-310-2
CHAPTER 1
Seeking the wild
He mihimihi
Ko Chicheley Hill te maunga.
Ko te Ouse te awa.
Ko te Wash te moana.
Ko te Duke of Bedford te tangata.
No Ingarangi oku matua.
Ko Rakaia te waka.
Ko Piri toku matua,
ko Oriwa toku whaea.
I whanau au kei Te Upoko o te Ika.
Kei Pauatahanui taku kainga.)
Tihe mauri ora!
Coldrum Long Barrow
A slope below a wooded hill on the North Downs
with a bitter wind rising out of the east.
It is so small a mound, after all. The standing
stones have mostly fallen or been taken, but the stone
doorway is still as it was built. Beneath us,
under the hill, their bones: 'strongly made,
with long heads, showing a family resemblance,
perhaps a noble family'. (Class evident even here.)
The bodies of the dead were placed on a shelf,
then cleaned and gathered into an ossuary.
More than three thousand years ago
they were laid here, the ancestors, the ancient ones.
So little remains of everything they knew.
I greet them in a foreign tongue, invoking
no gods but those of the mountain above us
and the river below. 'Ki nga mate, noho mai,
noho mai kei waho i te arai.' We whakanoa ourselves
with a little water, to leave things as they belong.
Seeking the wild
1: IN PETTS WOOD
Woodhurst Avenue, Nightingale Road,
Lakewood Road, Haslemere, Birchwood,
Woodland Way, Greencourt, Westholm,
Riverwood, Pine Road, Wood Ride –
as though you all lived in the forest still,
not in this sylvan grove of tiled semis,
as though Petts Wood were in a clearing
and Grendel could storm in at any time,
as though Sir Gawain rides still:
Into a forest ful depe, that ferly was wilde,
High hilles on uche a half, and holtwoods under,
Of hore okes ful huge a hundred togeder;
The hasel and the haghthorne were harled al samen
With rugh ragged mosse railed aywhere
And so I go by way of Crestview, Tent Peg Lane,
and Thornet Wood, across three bridges
and seven sets of tracks, across Great Thrift
to the top of Petts Wood and St Paul's Cray
Common, across the A208 and into Park Wood
in search of wildness and the ancient forest.
But find dozens of dogs walking their people;
and a Cornishman with curly hair and a lurcher,
wearing moleskin trousers, mending a fence,
who recommends that I try Cornwall or Wales –
and a flock of sheep grazing
in a field on Hawkwood Estate where no one
may set foot; and a sequence of molehills;
with London a distant haze, and all the houses
and roads and railway lines dropped out of sight,
with wooded hills as far as the eye can see
through the thickening morning air.
O, let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!
But the people out walking avert their gaze
and stare sightlessly to one side or the other
like polar bears in the zoo on hot Saturdays
rocking from side to side, longing for
impossible ice, and white-green distance,
trying to make the crowds disappear
in the sun's dazzle, and their cries and chatter
turn into seals barking and the creaking of ice.
I am a foreigner here in my father's country.
I know the true meanings of wind, mountain, wild.
2: CASCADE
Up Cascade track in summer. The air
in the forest is heavy. You sweat just
standing still. Fill your bottle and drink.
Start climbing. Through red beech,
over fallen logs, moss, leaf-litter.
Silver beech. Black. Thinner. Stunted.
Into grassy glades, valleys hanging
to the side of the mountain. Water tumbles
like a noisy teenager over rocks.
At the end of the second hour you leave
the trees behind. Still climbing steadily
though not so fast. Steeper. Steep.
Hand over hand in places, hauling yourself
over rocks. The sky is paler. A bare hour
till nightfall. Another narrow pinch –
a thousand feet an hour seems ambitious –
cramp gets you here, pins you to the rock
in a private spasm of pain. Pass the salt.
Light is draining from the sky as you haul
yourself over the lip, stand upright,
and look across the Travers Valley
to the mountains on the other side,
the marks of glaciation, the high-tide
line of beech along their flanks. The light
is fading. Night falls. Faster now.
The path skirts the black lake.
Angelus!
You dine on wine and fruitcake in the dark.
3: THE ANCESTORS
Peasants, every last one of them, mired
in the fen country, or tilling the upland fields
of Warwickshire rolling to the horizon.
They owned nothing – no headstone,
no pew. Their existence in the world
was a temporary lease on earth and air.
It was so flat, their landscape. The sea
voyage released them to verticals. Anna
Osborne learned to write at sea, at leisure
for the first and last time; in Harry
it kindled a political spark: Canterbury's
fat acres made him a firebrand.
Seeking the ancestors, we find only remnants.
Illiterates marry, christen their children,
and die, leaving no comment. Their country
is a tame place, wealthy enough. The great forest
has gone. No one remembers them: sketches
in the record, their names and histories
gone with the greenwood. Seeking the ancestors,
I go to the places they never knew: the barrows
of the North Downs, ditch-and-bank forts
in Wiltshire, the Neolithic camps buried
in birches, because I understand them. The wild
places, conducting rods to my own country.
4: A LIGHT LUNCH AT THE END OF THE CENTURY
Pull the calyx from a 'vine-ripened tomato'
and all the sweet particularity of summer fills
your nostrils, hot clay under your bare feet
and the warm tomatoes in your hand,
mint and peas and new potatoes, things now
you'd gladly pay extra for, with no pesticides
except derris dust and no artificial fertilisers
but compost, that homely stinking midden.
How casual we are, the half mango rotted
before anyone could be bothered eating it;
the glorious array of winter fruits arranged
on a blue glass platter in case Cézanne calls –
dull green-gold kiwis and persimmons glowing
red-orange, another mango ripening from green
to red, dark red tamarillos, little sweet mandarins,
Californian nectarines gloriously out of season.
More fruit than my parents grew up with, more
kinds than their parents knew. But I remember
the fridgeless childhood, jellies put outside to set,
mutton and butter in the meat safe, ice-cream
sold in cardboard by the pint, 'a loaf of brown
bread and a barracouta'; those unfashionable meals
from their childhoods: cheese and pickle, bread
and dripping, Welsh rarebit, bubble and squeak.
BSE, salmonella, irradiation, additives, gene-splicing.
Ah, the concerns of the too-well-fed. Pass the butter,
call the Halal slaughterman, wrap the frozen bodies
in muslin, the dear wee lambs, their eager trotters
stretched towards Home! Lightly toast your piece
of bio-gro high-protein cornmeal bread, slice
the vegetarian cheese, top it with vine-ripened
tomato and sprinkle with Maldon salt. Enjoy!
5: WHAT THE EYE SEES
A placid morning at Pauatahanui. The water a mirror,
punctuated by fish rising, making their concentric Os
of desire. Still as a mill-pond, whatever that may be,
reflecting trees, hills, clouds. Smoke from the farmhouses
up the valley indicate light airs from the south east.
It could be the Lake District, it could be Scotland
but the unremarkable hills would be fells or moor
and that brown creek thou darksome burn
rollrock brown. 'What is the name of those mountains?'
you once asked, pointing northwards.
But here they are not mountains, and have
no name.
landscape with too few lovers
A zephyr burnishes the mudbacked mirror to shiny green
and matte titanium. There is rain in those bruised clouds.
Pathetic fallacy! Burnish. Bruised. The eye sees
only as it is instructed. Plenty of room here,
room to burn and sow, enough for Jack to own
his acres, to hunt like gentry; room for red deer,
ducks, rabbits, chamois, 40 million sheep
an eye for country and still they come: starlings, rats,
wasps, stoats, blackbirds, the innocent killers.
South east is where you live: rich, polluted; a tyranny
of cars; the M25 in spate, boulders knocking. Road-builders
and estate agents will reign as long as progress;
Binsey's poplars all cut down and no one to lament
them, the elms dead, your hedgerows destroyed to make
a lake of rapeseed oil, a butter mountain, a dream of wheat.
Whitireia, with its ancient garden terraces and stone rows
reminds you of Cornwall, though wilder. (Te Rauparaha,
scourge of Te Upoko, the lord of Tintagel, whose stronghold
is now a sanctuary, whose ghost haunts Transmission Gully.)
a pair of pied stilts wade at the head of the inlet
two pouaka fish the shallows in Brady's Bay
These precious remnants – birds, fish, air, trees, water.
On Motukaraka the rich have built on the sacred grove.
These grassy slopes will not survive an earthquake.
I have seen the creeks run paint-green into the sea.
Whitby's cats have left us a few grey warblers, fantails, silvereyes.
The eye is more or less satisfied with seeing
6: TROUT
for Harold Marshall
At six o'clock on a cool Southland evening
we go stalking. Just like old times –
one light rod, all your special gear, a certain
knowledge of fishy behaviour. They rise
and rise, mouthing at the water's thick
surface, biding their time in the pool below the riffle,
feeding on whatever hatches over a slow river
around six pm in a Southland summer –
but not your nymph, perfectly placed, drifting
to them down the current. This is how I first learned
the habits of fish, watching you. We sneaked up
on snapper at Bradshaw Cove, cast flies to kahawai,
trolled kingy lures, netted piper. How I learned
many other things, not well: boat handling,
crew handling, weather, the Gulf, sailing
at night, being the skipper. All the words
to 'The Road to Mandalay'. Up on the bank,
tucked out of sight behind my willow, I can see
they're not eating what you're offering.
I head back to the warm house and the cricket.
One lesson learned. 'You'll have to stop
calling me "Skip",' you say next morning.
It's hot and still. I think about the trout,
hanging like shadows in the brown pool.
Down House
He chose Downe because it was close to the railway,
close enough to London, and the perfect place
to raise a family. All those unutterable thoughts
slowly building up, year after year, as he paced
the Sand Path, or took his billiard cue down
from the rack in the next-door room to play, or
inspected his worm experiment in the back lawn.
He hadn't meant to see what he'd seen,
the finches, when he was a young man in the Pacific,
or the tangled bank right here in his own garden.
But they were there. He could explain so much.
If only people could come to it gradually, as he had.
He wrote in the mornings. He walked again
before lunch. In the afternoons he read,
answered letters. Another walk. Late in the day
they would read aloud together in her parlour:
Trollope, Dickens, Mrs Gaskell, worse.
Her knitting, chairs with antimacassars;
a cosy domesticity. Sufficient to explain
his famous 'reluctance to publish'?
He loved her, loved the children tumbling
out of the nursery and into their own lives –
that they should not be harmed. But worms
cannot crawl back to restart the experiment.
We look at everything, the notebooks,
the pictures of the Beagle. Skulls and beetles.
'Man is but a worm.' I quarrel with the labels
('that's not what "survival of the fittest" means').
As we walk, I explain the Red Queen, the problem
of the Peacock's Tail, point out the tangled bank.
There is golden yarrow in the kitchen garden,
carnivorous plants in the hot-house.
From the thinking path I pick up a piece of flint.
Afterwards there is only one plant to give you.
Cordyline australis. The garden centre at Keston Mark
can oblige, but only var. Torbay Red. Also
a Pittosporum tenuifolium var. Silver Queen. I know
they were raised here, but I do worry.
How will they manage the winters?
Next spring you will send me photographs,
the pittosporum mobbed by daffodils, the elegant
spiky cabbage tree in its blue pot. Right now
I fear the cold, separation, distance; these
unnatural shapes we twist ourselves into.
The loneliness of it, the fear, the reluctance. A modest
plain honest man, curious and thorough, asking himself
about everything, freed by the Wedgwood money to ask,
freed by privilege to take his stick and coat, and walk it through,
big enough to knock the age off its foundations, deep
enough to keep us thinking hard for a couple of centuries.
The sustaining myths
for Matt McGlone
They are all around us. They are the air
we cannot see but fill our lungs with,
that lights the fire in every cell. We ignore
them as the fish ignores the water
that is its matrix and chalice and grave.
They sustain our thoughts. They shape
the images that fall on the retina, that enter
the brain. They are the ground under our feet
and the view through the large windows.
They are corrupt but we must interrogate them
all the same. The primeval forest, home of birds,
unchanging for millennia. There is only flux.
The Golden Age, when we lived on the savannah
in a state of nature, before we invented cities
and wickedness. It was a time. It was a short,
hard life. It was not golden. Just as these islands
of ours are noisy with life? Heraclitus was right:
nothing is permanent, all is contingent.
'The great ikons fall down.' The myth of
the Fall; the myths of the natural, of green,
of balance; the myth of the noble scientist.
We are as innocent as we shall ever be,
as perfect as we can make ourselves. Foolish,
charming bipeds, blundering out of the cave.
Gone
The woods
The woods are x-rays of themselves,
their branches raised in supplication or defence
against winter. It will soon be spring.
Already the soft plants are springing up
around their feet: wood primroses, violets.
Soon, you tell me, not long from now,
the bracken and fern will be shoulder-high,
and the canopy will be full of leaves. But now
the woods reveal how the great storm broke
them, trunks and limbs thrown down by the wind.
The woods are what metaphors are made of: Dante's
dark wood of thought, the wood between the worlds,
the Wild Wood, the trackless woods, the greenwood,
down where the green willow grows, the oak and the ash,
and the bonny ivy tree, and the holly, all thorns.
And the woods themselves – silver birch, oak, beech,
larches, hazels, hawthorn, blackthorn, things I cannot name.
In the distance, rooks. Yet here the greenfinch may sit
on a bough and sing.
So it is the woods I think of
when you tell me these hard, true things.
Mutability canto
for Duncan
The nor'wester has been blowing all night
tossing the trees, sending the clouds racing
from west to east, piling the sea up into waves;
and tomorrow it will be doing the same thing
somewhere else, while here the light is falling
on things in a slightly different way, and trees
and sea and air will all have altered. New cells,
shifting molecules, changes in temperature
and pressure, and another day closer to the day
when the sun grows old and red and eats the world.
Like the wind, I make you no promises, rushing
on and on into the future, pushing material things
into different shapes, caressing or cajoling them
and moving on. Three years from now it will all
be different, I tell you. Like the wind, I can make
no promises. Only let my heart remain true and steady
and in not-waiting I will hold all things still; only let
my feet dance across the hillside and I shall still be here.
Gone
I
Now you have gone, I remember you, each part,
with a religious fervour, lest I should forget
your eyes, your face, your gaze, as you said
with a steady completeness, 'It won't
be easy.' 'Nothing worthwhile ever is,'
I replied, stout defender of my new religion,
articulating its first tenet. Then quibbled
over how long until we next will meet,
sacrilegiously wanting it to come soon,
before I have to be courageous.
And now you are gone, I fall asleep recalling
you, piece by piece, from head to toe, each
part so vivid and particular that words brown
eyes, smooth limbs, long fingers are approximations.
II
After you walked off through that door
into the future, I watched myself
for symptoms. Nothing. A blankness.
Slightly numb, perhaps? A little feverish?
If I hadn't seen you again, if I hadn't been forced
to remember, I'm sure I could have gone on
being stoical for years. You too, perhaps; we
are both too good at it. But now –
and all the unsaid, unsayable things
are welling up unshed, unshared, waiting
to be uttered, owned up to, handed
over. Here they are, my love, take them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wild by Anne French. Copyright © 2004 Anne French. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Seeking the wild,
He mihimihi,
Coldrum Long Barrow,
Seeking the wild,
Down House,
The sustaining myths,
Gone,
The woods,
Mutability canto,
Gone,
Holiday in Cornwall,
Mudbacked mirrors,
Evanescent,
Theorem,
Time and distance,
Honour, n., v.,
Evanescent,
Proof,
Datum/trend,
Heuristic,
Bruise,
Skip,
The meaning of the word,
New,
Ironic?,
Detritus,
What she left behind,
A hank of her hair,
The meaning of the word,
Salty,
So many days,
The succession of the few sweet months,
DELETE confirm DELETE,
Like this,
Woman skipper seeks,
After all,
Last meeting,
Acute,
Uncle Ron's last surprise,
Struck,
An explanation,
Copyright,