A visitation

Poem for the week, 27 November 2022

A visitation
Talgarth, Powys, Wales, United Kingdom

In a house near a hamlet near a village near here,
the White Lady walks, they say.

Even amid the braggadocio of drunk tongues,
voices hush for the tale in reverence,
in melancholy, in deference.

There is talk of a fire in a cellar
and a deliberately locked door.

There is talk of a miscreant cursed
with the head of a giant bull.

Stories hop across my synapses
as I lodge in the shadows of Lord Hereford’s Knob.

My imagination shifts the spirit
from lady to daughter to serving girl,
until a library clock lullaby of a dozen tiny bells.

In the noiseless night, the house inhales
the hamlet’s restless air.

Without waking or dreaming, I find attention upon me,
held in the power of an impartial curiosity.
Without seeing or hearing, I observe the observer,
bathed in the pale aura of a subconscious whisper.
Without moving, without feeling,
I am returned to my sleep, not permitted my senses.

Night drifts on.

After days after hours locals chat in the pubs,
pausing at cook’s clatter and caterwaul.

In a house near a hamlet near a village near here,
the White Lady walks, they say.

from Those Footsteps Behind (buy here)

The awkward geometry of a warming oblate spheroid

 

My latest poetry pamphlet is available now.

 

Get some words and ideas for a climate protest or a climate rally!  

The awkward geometry of a warming oblate spheroid is about climate change. The oblate spheroid is, of course, the Planet Earth. 

 

 

The movement through the various forms in this sequence of poems can be interpreted to echo the disruption caused by catastrophic climate events, as the shape changes from the formal and lyrical, to free verse, concrete poetry, and ultimately a parody of all that has been lost.

Click here for details.

Author website

 "Quomondo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited 

Maybe this quotation should be at the top of every author website.

Nevertheless, every author training course everywhere says every author should have a website, so at last, A Bit of Bruce proudly presents ... The Author Website!

For the manually inclined, just type brucemarsland.com into that bar at the top of your screen, and press enter.

For the mousers, click the image.  You know the drill.

We are a writer

It's nice to be noticed, and this week sees yours truly given a profile piece, including an interview and a selection of poetry, as the featured Monday Writer in Sentinel Literary Quarterly.

Publishing a book is often compared to giving creative birth, so receiving just a little recognition of one's bookbabies ... well, it gives one just a slightly warm glow inside.

Read the full profile piece here.

Get copies of the poetry books here.

Quarantining: Poems in the Time of Corona

Those Footsteps Behind: Around the World in 50 Poems

Magnetic Resonance Imaging 

A post about a feed about a blog

A bit of a bit of Bruce's poetry is for sale!

Yes, there are now two ways to own your very own bit of a bit of Bruce.

Option 1: Amazon

My very own piece of Amazon virtual real estate, in the form of an author page, is up and running.  It includes a feed from this blog, so don't get lost in the ol' click to infinity there.  Just choose a book and buy it.  Simple.

Option 2: Lulu

Or, if you're more of a kind of indy type of person who prefers to go to the authentic source, the alternative kicks involve heading over to my *other* author page on Lulu.  Get the feed direct from the horse's mouth, so to speak.  Hipster heaven.

Either way.  Hey.  Go crazy.

Quarantining: Poems in the Time of Corona

A collection of Poems in the Time of Corona, from this blog, is now available in a printed collector's edition.

Order and find out more at Lulu:
Quarantining: Poems in the Time of Corona

Support a poet. Buy a book.
Quarantining: poems in the time of Corona
Magnetic Resonance Imaging: lyrics of love and loss
Those Footsteps Behind: around the world in 50 poems

Waiting to reread Beckett

Poems in the time of Corona

Waiting to reread Beckett

The news is in quarantine.

That sneezing fit
that surely had my neighbour dive for cover
yesterday
is not the Bogeybug du jour

but dust from disturbed authors
as I rearrange my bookshelf.

Killing days,

I imagine gloved, gowned Doc Quixote
challenge beckoning crowds of crowned virions
as Sancho disinfects his lances,

or Doctor Ahab, unprotected,
grapple to the last with the spikes
on a spherical proteinaceous foe.

Heroes in the mould of Bolingbroke
for a realm grown tired of Hamlet;

Covid's Metamorphoses –
let's not go there.

Still, eh,

stacked at the back,
glimmering brighter
as times turn rough,

as well they might,
as well they will,

breathes Samuel,
wordless, unmoving,
ready.

For now, though,
he can wait.




Support a poet. Buy a book.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging: lyrics of love and loss
Those Footsteps Behind: around the world in 50 poems

Time travellers

Poems in the time of Corona

An extract from Those Footsteps Behind: Around the World in 50 Poems


Time travellers
Lyme Regis, Dorset, England

They did not come here to die. Who does?
These stony time-travellers
sunbaking along the shoreline.

Wrinkled features peering towards the waves,
they sit coiled side by side
as if trapped in a laboratory show-case.

Deck-chair ammonites, escaping
oil wells, gas fields, tar sands,
make this coast a permanent vacation.

They've been this way so long
they're too petrified to move: decades pass in familiar
scents and salts, the same view of the Cobb.

Grayscale glass plates and climate change histograms,
past and future,
old bones become ancient shells on the beach.



Support a poet. Buy a book.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging: lyrics of love and loss
Those Footsteps Behind: around the world in 50 poems

Cascading over the edge of reason

An illustrated reading of an extract from Those Footsteps Behind: Around the World in 50 Poems.

The route to the future lies through the past

A reading of an extract from Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

This poem was first performed in 2009 by Fabien Rapin as part of 'Poetry & Jazz' by the Finn-Brit Players, at Arkadia International Bookshop in Helsinki, Finland.

Chasing lions in our pyjamas

An illustrated reading of an extract from Those Footsteps Behind.

Now in print

Self-publishing seems to be a thing now.  Maybe 'twas ever thus.  It's vanity press, of course. ("Vanity of vanities, all is vanity", to quote Evelyn Waugh; although he had a publisher, so he was obviously talking about something else. Ah, "Quomodo sedet sola civitas".)

Nevertheless, we must keep up with the Joneses, even if the Waughs are out of reach.

Here's a brief update.

*New* Those Footsteps Behind: Illustrated Poems of Travel.
Available in print from Lulu.  Submitted for distribution through Amazon (forthcoming).

Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Poetry Collection.
Available in print from Amazon.

A Kick up the Balkans: A Diary of a Year of Change.  First published on this blog, and now available in print or for Kindle from Amazon.

Seeking John Thomas

Five weeks of sick leave gives one time to fiddle. To do some of those things that have been at the back of one's mind for a while.

Oh, stop it. You know what I mean.

My current project is genealogy. In the last few years, a good number of Internet search engines and databases have sprung up to make this easier than, say, ten years ago. With such assistance, so far I have been relatively successful [sic!], and in one case have got back as far as the 16th Century.

The good dude keltanen asked me yesterday what I get out of it. One thing, I said, was a sense of identity.

Let me reconsider that. What I mean, I think, is a sense of connection: with people, with history, with a culture.

For example, Charles Dickens published Nicholas Nickleby in 1838-1839. I now know with a high degree of probability that, at that time, my great-great grandfather James was a teenage woolsorter in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The genealogy gives me a personal context to a whole set of historical and literary images and allusions that I have accumulated over the years. I can now do this to some extent all the way back to Shakespeare.

Another bonus is being able to see how a cultural identity has developed over time, and to be able to get a personal reference point in that as well. For example, although I haven't yet found an actual John Thomas among my ancestors, it is certain that Thomas begat John and John begat Thomas. And with the amount of begetting that went on in those times, it becomes easy to see how certain expressions arose.

Hmph

Thanks for the link, Anna MR. Not quite what I was expecting, but remarkably apt.

After all, anyone at The Finn-Brit Players knows that I don't look good in hats. So the Blue Pyramid jury says:

You're Alice's Adventures in Wonderland!
by Lewis Carroll

After stumbling down the wrong turn in life, you've had your mind opened to a number of strange and curious things. As life grows curiouser and curiouser, you have to ask yourself what's real and what's the picture of illusion. Little is coming to your aid in discerning fantasy from fact, but the line between them is so blurry that it's starting not to matter. Be careful around rabbit holes and those who smile too much, and just avoid hat shops altogether.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Eat your greens

Although I have never considered myself to be a political activist, there are one or two things that occasionally go on in that area of my brain. The poll tax was one. The second Gulf War is another. Here's a third.

Books that have influenced my life, part the third: McLibel, Burger Culture on Trial, by John Vidal

It may sound hypocritical coming from someone who currently works for a global corporation, but this is the book that opened my eyes to the view that unquestioning belief in the rightness of market forces is an unsustainable madness, and that this madness is particularly grotesque when it hits the quality of the stuff that we put in our mouths.

The book describes what happened when one of the world's largest companies felt the itch of a couple of environmental activists handing out pamphlets outside its front door, and decided to scratch the itch with a libel case. The two protesters refused to shut up. The case initially lasted for seven years, and has been followed up plenty more since that. If you haven't read about the whole saga, it is fascinating stuff.

Of particular interest to me was a description of and partial transcript from a section of the court case in which the company defended a description of its product as "nutritious" on the grounds that it "contains nutrients". So can a glass of tap water.

These days, as far as food shopping is concerned, if there is an organic alternative easily available, I usually go for that. And although I do eat fast food in a number of places, including some burger "restaurants", I have not eaten at McDonald's since 1989.

Drunk, lonely, and utterly lost

This little blog series was not intended to be, and will not be, chronological. But I can't avoid this one. It's a novel that I studied for A-Level English.

Books that have influenced my life, part the second: Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry

I struggle to know where to begin, but here we go. In the summer of 1984, I was relatively happy for a teenager. Settled at a cosy Yorkshire comprehensive school, I was good at sport, good at books, and indescribably shy with girls. I had good O-Level grades in my pocket and life was sweet, if solo, sixteen. That summer my parents moved from Yorkshire to Somerset.

A year later, I was stranded in a middle-class boarding school that I detested, and that detested me in return. My abilities at sport and books declined. Any ability that I had had with girls disappeared completely. And we were studying Under the Volcano.

This whole entry could be subtitled 'How to pass an exam without knowing anything about the subject'. The novel tracks the last hours of a terminally alcoholic British ex-consul in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, as he drinks himself to death and simultaneously fails to cope with his adulterous wife and half-brother. On the other hand, I was 17, had never been drunk, had been abroad only twice (to Holland and Germany), and to my knowledge had never been in the same room as even a topless girl, never mind the full monty. The novel therefore took me well beyond my comfort zone. For the first time, I felt absolutely unable to comprehend literary material. It was not my world. Despairing drunken solitude in foreign countries was not on my compass, but it was the direction in which the novel was looking.

I passed the exam by falling back on tried-and-trusted O-Level methods of quotation and character analysis. It was another bump on the fall from innocence. I particularly remember that one passage in the novel decribes the British ex-consul's naked manhood in a rather unflattering manner. There was a collective 'urgh' from the girls in the class.

I learned, therefore, that men are not physically attractive, that it's shameful to be miserable, and that if you can't cope then it must be your own fault. Wrong-headed maybe, but that's what I learned.

For me, the novel generates loud echoes of a lonely life in unfriendly surroundings, where nobody really wants you around, and every step you take is false.

I have still never drunk mescal, but I do wonder if I should return to this book as an adult to see if the experience is somehow cathartic. If I do, please pull me out of my Mexican pit, away from the dead dogs and vomit.

It's easier to pin the blame on others

April is the cruelest month. Alright, it's still March (just), but I've been feeling gloomy and decided to come up with this.

Books that have influenced my life, part the first:
The Trumpet-Major, by Thomas Hardy

I didn't say that I had to like the book, although this isn't bad and I quite like Hardy's novels in general. But this is the novel that we had to study at school for O-Level English literature.

The hero loves the heroine, but the heroine loves the hero's brother. The hero therefore restrains his passions, and rescues the heroine from the local ruffian for the sake of the somewhat unfaithful brother. The brother marries the heroine, the ruffian marries someone else, and the hero goes off to be killed in Spain.

At the time I had a hopeless teenage crush on the girl with long brown hair who sat by the window. She had a sister called Anne, which is the name of the heroine in the book. It was not, therefore, a huge leap of the 15-year-old imagination to cast myself as the silent, unappreciated trumpet-major.

I actually plucked up the courage to send the girl with long brown hair who sat by the window a valentine card. It was anonymous, of course. That's a tradition that I find both touchingly sweet and terribly frustrating, depending on whether I am the perpetrator or the victim.

Anyway, the girl with long brown hair who sat by the window naturally wanted to know the identity of the admiring would-be Valentino, and set off round the class asking each boy if he had sent her the card. She had nearly reached me. My hands were trembling. And then the guy next to me told her that he had sent it. He claimed the credit and got the reward. The trumpet-major remained silent.

I learned that good guys suffer in silence. I learned that liars, scoundrels, and bits of rough prosper and get the girl every time. I learned, oh how I learned.

Thank you, Thomas Hardy.

Shameless self-promotion

Given the rather, shall we say, social nature of most of my diary narrative in A Kick up the Balkans, a couple of people have wondered what I was actually doing out there in Bulgaria at that time.

I thought it was obvious. I was teaching. English.

But don't expect lots of blogging on that part of my adventure. Oh no! Why should I give that away for free? People pay good money for that sort of stuff. You can get it all neatly packaged by Cambridge University Press under the title Lessons from Nothing.

Yes, that's my name on the cover. Sometimes I have received incredulous looks when I say that most of the hits for my name on Google refer to me. No, the looks suggest, it's this guy who wrote this book.

Erm, yeah! So work out the underlying logic, would you?

That means that I am officially listed as an author by Amazon. Oh, and because I'm looking for a casual way to name-drop it into a blog entry, an unrelated incident means that I'm also listed in IMDb, along with good pal taikataika, who really should get a blogger account, you know.

So maybe I do have some web presence after all.

Hype over. My only excuse is that it's my blog and, like everyone, my ego needs a little boost from time to time.