Category: Poetry

Norwegian wood 

And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown/ So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, norwegian wood? (Norwegian Wood, The Beatles, Rubber Soul)

One surprise Christmas bestselling book in the UK has been ‘Norwegian Wood’, which has the great virtue of being exactly what it says on the tin, or the book cover, ‘chopping, stacking and drying wood the Scandinavian way’, and more particularly, the Norwegian way.

I knew I must have a copy. Why? In my partner Hazel’s Cotswold home there’s a woodburning stove, and a stack of wood outside, under cover, partly seasoned – that is, partly dried, and I have the regular and rather enjoyable task of bringing it inside and keeping the log basket by the lounge fire well-filled. Sometimes the wood – I believe it’s all local beech (though we have some old indeterminate wood recycled from the rebuilding of the house next door) – flames up and lights the room, and we damp it down, and the room warms quickly, other times it’s slow and we open the vents and still it’s reluctant to flame. It has a mind of its own. But then of course  – it doesn’t.

Read Lars Mytting’s book and all will be revealed. Wood as a highly practical activity, but also pastime, mindset, lifestyle, craft and (check out some of the woodpiles illustrated in the book) art form.

‘Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.’ (Henry Thoreau, by Walden Pond, in the 1850s.)

I remember my step-mother’s father, in his 70s by the time I knew him, building his woodpile along a garden path facing south, several hundred feet above Lake Lucerne, where his family had lived for generations. The woodpile may also have been there for generations. I was 13 years old, and impressed. I watched a total lunar eclipse from the same path, the woodpile, maybe I should call it a woodpath, behind me, the lake below, the mountains reaching up beyond, and the moon a deepening shade of red above.

‘The ideal way to dry wood is to stack it as loosely as possible.’ 

Keep the surface exposed to wind and sunlight. ‘Logs dry best when the surface contact between them is minimal.’ And I love this quote:

‘In Norway, discussions about the vexed question of whether logs should be stacked with the bark facing up or down have marred many a christening and spoiled many a wedding when wood enthusiasts are among the guests.’

There’s the sun-wall woodpile, the firewood wall, the round stack, cord stacking, the closed square pile – just a few of the stacking options.  There’s a wonderful photo in the book of a stack in the shape of a fish.

‘Splitting the wood is the part of the job Arne enjoys most.’ (Arne Fjeld, quoted by Mytting.)

And there’s sawing and chopping and splitting, though all are pretty much denied me. I don’t have a chainsaw, or a trailer, and that’s what you need in the Norwegian birch woods. But I do have memories of hand- and felling-axes from my Boy Scout days. How did we get away then with wielding such dangerous items? I loved the big felling-axe, lifting it up and bringing it down from well above my head, sliding my hand down the shaft, the smooth and mighty downstroke.

‘I don’t think people in the old days had a particularly personal or romantic attitude toward wood.’ (Arne Fjeld again)

These days it’s different, in England as well as Norway. Wood is a source of comfort, where once it was simply a matter of life and death over the long winter months. Piling and chopping and feeding the flames are these days recreation as well as necessity.

‘Wood is best when dried quickly.’

Drying gets conversations going. Cut trees down in the winter or spring, before the sap rises (and fungus and mould can’t get established in the cold) and let the wood dry during the summer for next winter use. And keep the leaves on! Strip the bark in two or three places and let the logs breathe. All apparently arcane but in reality hard, practical and close-to-the earth advice. (But not too close to earth – stack your wood off the ground.)

But many argue that you should leave it two summers. I guess it has much to do with space and time (a touch of relativity here): if you’re well set up, as a Norwegian farmer would be, then one summer’s drying may be enough.

‘Wood is the simplest form of bioenergy there is.’

Each wood burns in its own way, but what matters in the end is the density. An oak log will generate 60% more heart than an alder log of the same size, but ‘pound for pound (they) produce the same amount of heat’. The hardest wood makes the best firewood, but quick-burning woods may well be better for chilly early or late winter days.  Mix them with a harder wood of beech or oak.  For kindling use pinewood or twigs from deciduous trees. And there’s coppicing: ‘birch can have a rotation period of fifteen to twenty years and more.’

You can calculate how many kilowatt-hours of energy a tree can produce, and put a financial value on it.

Birch is ‘queen of the Norwegian forest’, not least because it grows tall and straight, with obvious advantages for felling and stacking. Ash is tough and strong, and ‘regenerates from the stool, and therefore is ideally suited for coppicing’. It’s also, for many cultures, Yggdrasil, the tree of life, so the symbolism as well as the reality of the threat from ash dieback is powerful. Green pine is almost impossible to burn.

I remember as a Boy Scout going on many a ‘woodfag’, and building fires for cooking that sometimes flourished and sometimes struggled. And with them the evening stew, and the immediate welfare of the small patrol of four boys in my charge. I’d have done well to know more about the kinds of wood I was collecting. But I do remember – we didn’t starve. The main criterion then as now is – collect dry wood. If you can break it with your hands, or it breaks easily under the axe, that’s what matters.

‘… thick woollen socks hung up to dry dripped and hissed onto the woodstove.’

Back to Gersau on Lake Lucerne, and my Swiss step-grandparents’ house on the hillside. Everything was wood-fired and there was a fine traditional stove in the sitting-room. (The earth closet extended a long way down into the ground, and was regularly emptied into a neighbouring field. But that’s another story!)

Modern clean-burning stoves compared to old-fashioned stoves have an extra supply of heated air. There are different kinds of stove: closed iron, soapstone, kitchen, tiered, tiled …. each with its own story. In so many areas of life we have lost touch with story, or we have story without history. Wood in Mytting’s hands, beneath his axe, is all about story, all about history.

‘Even in oil-rich Norway an astonishing 25% of the energy used to heat private homes comes from wood.’

Here in the UK woodstoves will never be a way of life as they are in Scandinavia. We’ll never have stacks of wood decorating our landscape. But as one source within an energy mix of renewables, with renewables part of wider mix of oil, gas, coal, nuclear, with the former growing as the latter diminish, wood could have a big future. Time is on its side, as stoves become more efficient, and if we take on board all the wisdom in Mytting’s book renewable woods might be more part of our own landscape, and carefully planned they wouldn’t need to be the scars on the landscape that pine forests have been.

And finally, there’s a poem I wrote a poem (The Woodman) two years ago, inspired by the sound of someone chopping one early morning, and that’s how I’ll end:

Across the field the woodman drags/ The log he would reduce with axe/ Raised high above his head it falls/ A wrench of sound breaks the still/ Of morning and there’s a rhythm/ As each repeated stroke is given/ A little extra force or thrust 

For he who cuts alone would still be best/ Of all the woodmen, though no-one knows/ But he how so sharp blade so cold/ Could cut to such design/ Or how he to such contracted space/ Could aim his axe and lay to waste/ In single moments a century of time 

A winter’s day in a deep and dark December

Paul Simon’s opening lines to ‘I am a rock’.

And there’s the fourth verse:

‘I have my books and my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor, hiding in my room, safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me …’

I began the day in the Cotswolds.

The wind howled all night. The depressions keep rolling in. It’s way too warm, and the seasonal outbreaks of frozen hands and chilblains are in abeyance. We’ve still, though, got our winter fuel allowance, being over 65. Motorways are a mass of muck and spray, and trains are no doubt already overloaded. Christmas four days away.

First thing I ran down to the Painswick Stream, and up again across the common. I didn’t see a soul, only a few cows, to whom of course I said hello. The southerly wind was strong enough to feel chill, but tucked between hedgerows all was still, and as I began the climb back I could see the sun, just risen below the hill, touching the clouds a gentle pink and red. And yes, there was blue sky.

By mid-morning the storm was raging, and the trees bending before the wind. And I had the motorway ahead of me.

Back in my London flat another kind of peace, the steady hum of traffic on the main road below. Enough, I thought, and put on a new album of Bob Dylan songs recorded by other artists.

‘I am a rock/I am an island,’ is the refrain of Paul Simon’s song.

But the ocean, and the rain, is Bob Dylan’s:

‘Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall’

 

Shadow – four poems

See the links below for four poems inspired by the Camino.

The setting for three poems is the landscape between Puente La Reina and Estella. Bright mid-morning sunshine, with a shimmer already on the path, but shadows still sharp.

For he fourth, Doom Bar, the setting is across the the river Camel from Padstow, near the beginning of the Saints’s Way across Cornwall.

Shadow   Fuente   Shell   Doom Bar

All entirely imagined I should add!!

 

 

The Camino and the poem

I didn’t carry a book of poems with me on the Camino. I thought about it. But I wanted all my responses to be my own, and not guided by the insights of others. Now I’m back, and I’m reading, and writing.

Antonio Machado has a reminder of another way of walking:

I have walked many roads, / I have found many paths; / I have sailed a hundred seas, / and landed on a hundred shores…

And in all places I have seen/ people who dance and play, / when they can, and work / their four spans of land.

Never when they come to a place / do they ask where to go. / When they make their way, they ride / on the back of an old mule / and do not know to hurry /not even on the days of the fiesta…

We’re privileged to walk the Camino. Countless others have travelled before us, and they’ve travelled wisely, and slowly. (Walking slowly is something I’m not always too good at, as my Camino friends will testify!)

Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken reminds us of chance and serendipity:

…Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the road less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference.

There is of course only one route westward (and a few diversions) on the Camino. But is there? Depending on when you start, the month, the season, the weather, the clouds, the shadows – there are a thousand routes.

Rudyard Kipling’s The Way through the Woods catches the sense of those who’ve travelled a path before us:

…Yet, if you enter the woods / Of a summer evening late… / You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet, / and the swish of a skirt in the dew / Steadily cantering through / The misty solitudes

This is a corner of England, not Spain, and it’s woodland, and the path is no more… but the resonance is still there. And that sense of impermanence: the Camino hasn’t always been there, and won’t always be there.  We are our own moment in time.

I was always conscious on the Camino of those who’d walked before me, maybe a thousand years ago. St James never walked the way, but as Santiago Matamoros he led the Spanish army against the Moors, so legend would have it. He could also be my companion, and to see what I mean by that check out another post, with two poems of my own, under the heading ‘Shadow – four poems’.

On another tack, there’s Pablo Neruda:

And that’s why I have to go back / to so many places in the future / there to find myself… / with no task but to live / with no family but the road

I love Neruda but there’s a Rilke poem I can’t find that captures the idea of the future, of a light ahead we never reach, even  better.

[Rilke poem, The Walk, now found, thanks to my friend, Sarah, my companion for three days on the Camino.

Already my eyes touch the sunlit hill/Far ahead of the road I have just begun/ So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;/We see its light even from a distance –

And it changes us, even if we do not reach it,/Into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;/A gesture seems to wave us on, answering our own wave,/But what we feel is the wind in our faces.]

Finally, another, and famous, Machado:

Walker, your footsteps / are the road, and nothing more.

Walker, there is no road, / the road is made by walking.

Walking you make the road, / and turning to look behind / you see the path you never / again will step upon.

Walker there is no road, / only foam trails on the seas.

We experience highs and the lows, joys and sorrows, we walk in company and alone, we laugh and we keep silence. There’s a poem somewhere which captures every mood.

Or almost does, which is why we keep writing our own poems. No-one quite captures a moment or a mood as we do ourselves. We only need the pen, and the silence.

 

With Dante on the Camino

Back in June, my first week on the Camino, I met up with Daniel and Gabriel, 18 and 17-years-old, both strong walkers, one Czech, the other Italian. Daniel told me that his friend loved to talk about Dante, and they’d renamed him ‘Dante’.  I remember well a conversation with Dante in the main plaza in Pamplona when he explained as best he could, in English, the poet’s terza rima rhyme scheme – aba, bcb, cdc.  He the 17-year-old, me in my 60s. I resolved to read the Divine Comedy over the summer and before I resumed on the Camino in October – and I did.

A quote from Osip Mandelstam, sent to me by Graham Fawcett, has sent me back to the poet.

“Both the Inferno and, in particular, the Purgatorio, glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the footstep and its form. The step, linked with breathing and saturated with thought, Dante understood as the beginning of prosody. To indicate walking, he utilizes a multitude of varied and charming turns of phrase. In Dante, philosophy and poetry are constantly on the go, perpetually on their feet. Even a stop is but a variety of accumulated movement: a platform for conversations is created by Alpine conditions. The metrical foot is the inhalation and exhalation of the step”. (Osip Mandelstam, Conversation about Dante)

To which my first response was ‘wow!’ I read Graham’s note two days out from Santiago, too late for me to practise ‘the step, linked with breathing and saturated with thought’. Maybe just as well.

You do think about walking and all it entails when you’re walking over 500 miles.

I walked the Camino with mind empty, with mind and senses open to the landscape, sounds and smells, with mind and feet in meditative step with each other – and with mind ‘saturated’ with thought. I found rhythm in songs and hymns, and had I a better memory for poetry I’d have been speaking out loud more of my favourite verse, to the occasional consternation of fellow-walkers.

But I have yet to master linking my step with thought!

Frederic Gros in his book A Philosophy of Walking points out that for thinkers such as Nietzsche and Thoreau walking was key to their work. And in earlier times, when walking was the normal mode for getting from A to B, thinking your best thoughts while walking would have been normal practice.

What levels of thought and imagination were achieved by pilgrims to Santiago in the 11th,12th, 13th centuries? In an age when most couldn’t read or write. Our obsession with conveying our thoughts in written form, fed by this computer age of ours – and by blogs! – has downgraded walking as prime time for thinking. We are now overwhelmed with the thoughts of others.

In our city lives, too often when we walk we rush, and when we rush we don’t think. Gros has a better understanding: walking “is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found”.

Time for a walk.

Content (George Herbert)

I’ve an old edition of George Herbert’s poems. It belonged to a great-aunt and she marked this poem – was it seventy or eighty years ago? So this is a mark of remembrance, as well as a poem for today….

It’s a cold and frosty morning, just one day of the old year left beyond today, when the winter has imposed its frozen quiet on the landscape, and you would wish to be at peace within as the world is without. George Herbert’s poem, Content, is one for this morning. The muttering thoughts are there, and maybe they won’t go away. For bed, read chair as we look out on a wintry land, or we may take a well-wrapped walk passing hoar-frosted hedgerows, en route to no destination. We till our own ground, follow our own path, no longer do we  ‘importune’ our friends, or ourselves.

Peace mutt’ring thoughts, and do not grudge to keep
    Within the walls of your own breast:
Who cannot on his own bed sweetly sleep,
   Can on anothers hardly rest.

**

Then cease discoursing soul, till thine own ground,
   Do not thy self or friends importune.
He that by seeking hath himself once found,
   Hath ever found a happie fortune.

**


	


	


			
				


			

			
Reasons to be cheerful
		
	
	

		
Two reasons to be cheerful:


1] Finding a poem which distills meaning in a moment, which stops the onward rush of events, and holds you still. You return to the fray a little bit calmer, and a little bit wiser.


2] Walking… I recently returned from four days on the South West Coast Path. Walking on a perfect early September morning down from Zennor to the coast and then with rapt concentration climbing and scrambling, gazing back across the headlands or out to sea, watching and listening for seals, a curlew calling, the early morning clarity, the play of light on water, and at that early stage of the day the complete absence of other people. Just me and a granite fastness on one side and the sea wide-stretching on the other. The mind didn’t wander or reflect on a world beyond, it stayed with the rough ground and the old stones and the bright sky and the big sea.

	


	


			
				


			

			
Robin Williams – in memoriam
		
	
	

		


A brief time-out while I remember Robin Williams. He was Mrs Doubtfire, the voice of the genie in Aladdin, John Keating in Dead Poets’ Society. In the 90s, when my children were small, he was the finest and funniest actor of them all. To mark his passing and in memoriam tonight we watched Mrs Doubtfire. The last word, his last word, in the movie, is ‘goodbye’.


Two quotes I found on the BBC website, both John Keating (Robin Williams) in Dead Poets’ Society. I can recall the passion with which he said them.


“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” –


“Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”


Carpe diem – that’s for all our lives.


As for the ‘poetry is cute’ quote: that is, I guess, is for me. It is how I see the world. Summed up in one quote.





	


	


			
				


			

			
Spring is very much sprung
		
	
	

		
Some wonderful descriptions of spring.


Check out the earthbound Roger Deakin in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm: (7th May)


‘Everywhere this morning in the May sunshine I notice the sudden, magical growth of trees. The mulberry has just come into leaf overnight…yesterday there was no sign of anything more than the tiniest buds. The ash tree is sending out shoots. The laid hedge of the wood is bursting into fresh leaf. The coppiced hazels…’


Or the more heavenbound Thomas Merton: (12th March), in Kentucky:


‘The sun was warm. I stood by the wall and watched the lambs, I had not known of their arrival. Little black-eyed things, jumping like toys on the green grass. I thought: ‘Feed my lambs.’ There is certainly something very touching about lambs, until they find their way into holy pictures and become unpleasant.’


I would agree with him there.


Some of our own recent spring days have been days simply to live in and not to describe. Hopkins nobly attempts to describe the indescribable…


Nothing is so beautiful as spring—/ When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;/ Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush/  Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring/  The ear…


And finally, illustrating how even the high heavens can be brought down to earth,  compare Hopkin’s wonderfully elevated Windhover


I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-/ dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air,…


with the this-time-earthbound Thomas Merton’s dental chair:


‘The dentist came from Cincinnati and I spent three-quarters of an hour in the chair watching the buzzards circling in the grey sky over the old sheep barn while he drilled a wisdom tooth.’


Merton would seem to have had a very superior out-of-doors dentist.

	


	


			
				


			

			
Wildwood
		
	
	

		
In a previous blog I mentioned Roger Deakin’s Wildwood…


He makes habitable the Tudor farmhouse he buys by keeping out the wind and rain but still allowing at least partial free passage for the animal and insect life who had been its previous owners. He sleeps in a caravan to listen to the rooks, he’s part of the moth-makers circle as they cluster round the bright lights that draw the moths in, he recounts the stories of willow-men and the basket-and bat-makers who work the willow.


His is a wonderful but all too little known counter-balance to all the damage we do to our world, to our climate, to our landscape. I wonder at times whether we could impose a back-to-nature requirement on all road-builders, all architects and town-planners, anyone who would spread bricks and especially concrete over the landscape without a thought for future generations who will be left with it when lifestyles and domiciles and transport have moved on. Where once we felled trees in Britain at least we now have open pasture and hedges and copses which hide and nurture their own wildlife. Where we put down concrete nothing can grow, save after decades in the slow-wearing interstices where weeds find a scraggy home.


It would be good to have a long-term damage assessment built into every new project, with a minimum threshold in terms of decay or decomposition, to remind ourselves of the duty we owe not just our children, but to many generations hence.


It seems that the Environment Agency haven’t a clue when it comes to considerations of this kind. Deakin quotes their indifference to the withy (willow) growing tradition in the Somerset Levels. Floods brought poisoned water which ruined the crop one year, and no-one from the agency visited, and now it seems they have plans to flood the withy beds permanently. When I’ve heard stories about the agency in other flood situations I’ve always put it down to shortages of staff, or local misunderstandings, but it seems that it goes deeper, to an institutional level.


On a lighter note, Deakin notes that cricket bat willow only grows really well in England, to the frustration of Australians who must import English willow wherewith to thrash, they hope, the Poms.  Louis MacNeice writes of the drunkenness of things being various. Here we have the singular, the co-incidence of place and time to play which led to a game where the spring of willow and the resilience of cork and leather make for a game perfectly matched to human strength and capabilities. A more stolid bat would propel the ball much less far, and vibrate the hand, a softer bat and the ball would die before it left the square. Without willow where would we be, without the game that’s an antidote to all the frenetic activity which characterises most popular sports. With maybe the exception of snooker, but that’s about paralysis rather than relaxation of mind. But I digress.


20:20 cricket is another game altogether, although it still requires the magic of the willow wand, which however brandished remains something it seems modern materials can’t replicate. Long may it remain so.