Publication of our New Poetries VII anthology is fast approaching and we hope you're getting to know our featured poets each week. Today we're pleased to hear from Andrew Wynn Owen, whose poem, 'Stonehenge', is printed below.
Andrew Wynn Owen is a Fellow by Examination at All Souls College, Oxford. He received the university's Newdigate Prize in 2014 and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2015. With the Emma Press, he has published pamphlets including a narrative poem, lyrics, and a collaboration (with John Fuller).
These poems are, broadly, about love of life and flexibility of perspective. 'The Mummies' Chorus' was prompted by Leopardi's 'Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e delle sue mummie'. The mummies wonder what life was and why it has been taken from them. 'The Kite' considers two different images of elation, flight and dance, concluding on the side of the latter. 'What Matters' explores some ideas about what is important in life and comes to see that even seemingly run-of-the-mill events, like sneezing, can matter very much. 'The Borderline' is quizzical: where is the dividing line between things? Often there isn't one in nature already, so humans impose one arbitrarily. 'The Ladder' is about the strange joy of sunsets, the 'fierce solace' of that calm. 'The Dolphins' stages the tussle of pessimism with optimism, and the mind's capacity, sometimes, for active self-redirection. 'April Shower' is again about joy in nature, this time ecstatic. Rain, so often grumbled at, can bring a change in pressure and a sense of relief. 'The Rowboat' charts celestial and earthly concerns, the difficulty of choosing between one and the other. 'The Multiverse' is the capstone of this sequence. With the idea of the multiverse as extended metaphor, it is a reminder of our duty to remember both happiness and sadness, not to neglect the prevalence of suffering or the real good that is in the world. Rationality missteps if it becomes reductive and emotionless: 'To notice this | Can change one's spin on life, if not the quantum spin.' The final poem, 'Till Next Time', takes its refrain 'How could it end in any other way?' from Robert Browning's 'Andrea del Sarto', a dramatic monologue by a painter whose skilful precision is not matched with human passion. This is a problem not just for artists, but for lots of people: as W. H. Auden writes, 'I learned why the learned are as despised as they are. | To discover how to be loving now | Is the reason I follow this star.' These poems are, together, a reflection on how wrong it would be to forget how to be loving. The mind is various and these are attempts to clarify the difficulties and delights that this can present.
The following poem, 'Stonehenge', contains a number of true details about the construction and purpose of Stonehenge - though some are clearly mythic, which does not mean untrue.
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Stonehenge
Stag-antler axe-picks carved this avenue,
Scratched ditches to the Avon,
And rummaged under hills:
Odd venue, fusing venerable and new,
Stark landmark for the roving wolf and raven.
Here stood the halls
Where heels
Dug in desiringly
And let impatience fly.
Here were
Blunt gods of war,
Bone-shafted truncheons, lightning-tinctured bronze.
Green mayhem in a magnifying mood,
No more content to wear
Dream-camouflaging fronds,
Fixed solstice-stones to loose its restless mind.
This site is graveyard of a long-ago
I cannot comprehend
Except by spinning globes
Or chucking hazardous flints beside the grey
And unresponsive hugeness of the henge.
Where are their gods,
Fierce goads
To herd uncertain cattle?
What pacified time’s clatter
Of staves
On boiling stoves,
Youth’s ravening clamour in the sacred wood?
Who knows the names of all who strived and died?
Only blank stone survives
To tell how bloodlines wade
Through quick eternities too strange to dread.
Did Merlin quit Tintagel in a rage,
Offended by some knight,
And lift these faceless rocks
With clumsy magic from a bludgeoned ridge
Simply to prove his prophecies of note?
Did creaky wrecks
And ricks
In Albion’s every bay
Feel torrents rushing by
Because
A wizard’s claws
Were drawn and would not sheathe till satisfied
At last by the incontrovertible
Instalment of these clues
That once an unafraid
Earth-shaker clanged the sullen landscape’s bell?
Tomorrow wrong-foots us, however eager.
Another Ark, a gleaming
Atlantic schooner home
To unicorn and wyvern, gnome and ogre,
Sank on the Flood’s first day, keeled in a gloaming
Before first hymn
And helm
Were wrought inside this circle
Where pleasing seasons cycle
Through love
To loss, and leave
Only a stain of what so shortly was.
Is this the end of our exacting forays,
A proof we are alive,
More than a passing wish
Welcomed then banished on the face of Freyja?
King James came here and championed excavations,
Determined he should know
Who held the land before
Those Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman visions
Swam in to reinvent an isle that now
Is stronger for
Life's fire
Fusing dream-studded strands
Of custom. Growth transcends
Quelled squabble
And battle's rabble,
Folding concession under each new wave.
Above lush hedgerows, tuft-expelling clods,
A motte-and-bailey's rubble,
Torrential vapours weave:
‘All megaliths must pass like us, the clouds.’
Nearby, at Silbury Hill, another mine
Of wonder, others worried
For mirrored light, and sent
A message to the goddess of the moon
So she should know, for sure, her orb was worshipped.
There, every sort
Of saint
And muddled sinner stood.
Much later, folklore said
Each henge
Secured a hinge
In time for giants who, the sylvans quelled,
Worked to commemorate their valiant dead.
Now moorless comets lunge
Over, geese squawk, and quilled
Hedgehogs unfurl where fur-hugged children dreamed.
My ancestors, Welsh nonconformist priests
Who claimed descent from druids
And patched ramshackle chapels,
Drew sense and spirit from these mythic pasts:
Stone circles, nervy elves, outlandish dryads.
Though systems topple
And ripples
Disrupt old balance, still
World-scramble cannot steal
The glory
That blazed so clearly
In their embrace of living’s messy luck.
I picture how they must have loved and laboured.
Like stick-shapes drawn by Lowry,
They're featureless. But look
Afresh: these stones show clefts they may have clambered.
Images rise as bubbles, rift and meld.
In the cathedral’s dome
This morning, songbirds wheeled.
First task of structure: quicken us, life-mad,
Taut with insistence for a driving dream,
Purposes walled
By wild
Legend-imaginings
That rasp within our lungs
And raise
A grizzly rose,
True love of seeking what our cravings must.
These stones still speak, still whisper to that clear
Intensely-riven craze
For mysteries cased in mist
Beyond the power plants, main roads, churning cars.
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New Poetries VII is available to pre-order here. Andrew's collection, The Multiverse, is also forthcoming from Carcanet and is available to pre-order here; both will be published in April 2018.
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