Exploring space

I want to start this essay with a quote by the great Hungarian poet Attila Josezf from the poem a pure heart, I was in Hungary for 4 weeks in Szegked, Solnock, Paz and Budapest there was poetry echoing from every pour of the country.  I had a wonderful time arranged by Szegked university and the British council thanks to Andrea and Gabriella for making my trip so memorable. We travelled by train to lake Balaton and I was inspired by the scenery. There's a painting beside me I just finished it's a self-portrait but it reminds me of looking at the statue of Attila Jozesf in Szeged.

From with a pure heart
I am fatherless, motherless,
Godless and countryless,
have no cradle, no funeral shroud. 
and no lover to kiss me proud.

Poetry and painting come from the same place one is silent, mute while the other one whispers in your ear or yells at the top of its voice, they are both tiny snippets that come right out of the blue. I hope my poetry shows a subtle tinge of light from it like my favourite painting is Van Gogh “the potato eaters” even in its stark reality there is a tiny flicker of light just enough to show the expression of the family especially the little girl who's back is to us I bet she is beautiful with a pure heart. The light he captures is amazing.

Poetry is written in their eyes, in the thoughts of others they say always see the other persons perscptive this painting is a great example of this it's as if Van Gogh was telling us to wise up and put yourself in their shoes, if we'd had done that we wouldn't be living with a thirty year war, all the wasted blood that has been spilt..

Anna Akmatova wrote, the clean wind lulls in the fir trees, the clean snow sweeps the fields, my land is at rest and no longer hears the tramp of enemy boots. My favourite poem of all time is Robert Lowell's, Epilogue for me it captures the same essence as the potato eaters.

Robert Lowell - Epilogue
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make 
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice: 
The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. 
But sometimes everything I write 
with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life, 
yet paralysed by fact. 
All's misalliance. 
Yet why not say what happened? 
Pray for the grace of accuracy 
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination 
stealing like the tide across a map 
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts, 
warned by that to give 
each figure in the photograph 
his living name.

This poem represents all forms of art I hope you see it among what you have created. Hopefully one day I will be able to create something as beautiful as this. This essay seems to reflect what I have to say about words so I'll just ramble on about my love of poetry and art.

Good writing comes from the heart and informs you what you want to hear everything relates to you the reader I see myself sitting at the table eating potatoes. I endeavour my whole life that one day I will capture the true light that Van Gogh caught in that painting he was a true master.

When your flat on your back in intensive care and only able to move your eyes you, death knocking on your door you have time to put things away and deal with the proper issues, I'm very lucky that I'm still here writing imagine Raymond Carver after he was told by the doctor that he had tumours on the brain.

What The Doctor Said

He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact, real bad he
said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before 
I quit counting them 
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know 
about any more being there than that 
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down 
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help 
when you come to a waterfall 
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments 
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said 
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do 
and not wanting him to have to repeat it and me to have to fully digest it 
I just looked at him 
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong 
- Raymond Carver

Look at Norman I have to mention my friend Norman who is in a nursing home, he was in hospital with me he will be in a wheelchair the rest of his life for trying to stop a car from being stolen, poor Norman my thoughts are always with you, Patricia his sister and Gavin his brother-in-law,it's not until something like this happens that you realise your life has some purpose some meaning.

Music was a big influence on my life when I was younger I wanted to write a good lyric then I came across poetry James and Janice Simmons pointed me in the right direction, before that day that Jimmy sat me down at his computer to show me how to edit a poem, I had the story but it was all jumbled up in my head. Thanks for un-cluttering my system.

Poems appear right out of the blue, I don't want to know where come from, keep the mystery alive then I can put the book of poetry back on the shelf and read it another day, I can read and re-read again and again.  I have always been an observer ever since I saw my reflection when I was a child in that tiny puddle of water on the street, I wanted to let my mother's hand go and drown in it and this is my drowning.

My mother never once said Adrian you can't do that like other mothers do, and to this day I have a problem with authority, it's almost a year since my stroke. A year of people telling me what to do, It's time for breakfast you get washed at this time you go to the toilet even if you're not in the mood. The body has to make way for all these changes you go from being a happy go lucky free spirit to a control freak it's hard not to be the person they have controlled. Poems come from a spring a source take a sip of the pure stuff that falls from high up and you will also fall in love with words. Patrick Kavanagh was right when he said, “poetry is the birth of young life and the cry of elemental beings”.

To understand what I mean I have included a verse of his.

Patrick Kavanagh-- Canal Bank Walk
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do 
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, 
Grow with nature again as before I grew. 
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third 
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat, 
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word 
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web 
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib 
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech 
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be prove.

This is a beautiful poem a man truly in love with the world, I'm en-captured in his web of poetry thank you Patrick he snares me in his web of thought, I hope his poetry captures you.  They become images in my head I can see him and Dublin in 1940s and 1950s my mother grew up not far from there so the poem holds a certain magic for me.  I can't write this essay without the inclusion of Wilfred Owens  poem. This is Wilfred Owen's regeneration it will live on and on reminding us that this can't happen again someone once said you have to be in touch with the past to know the future Wilfred Owen knew his future in this poem Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918) Dulce Et Decorum Est 
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs 
And towards our distant rest began to trudge. 
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots 
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots 
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. 
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace 
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; 
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, - 
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory, 
The old Lie:

Cherry

I'll incluDulce et decorum est 
Pro patria mori.

I have to begin this new day with an e-mail from my beautiful friend/poet Cherry Smyth she captures what I am trying to say in this essay that's why I love her very much she is more than just a friend she is my soul mate .

Dear Adrian,

I was staying in bed to read and write the other morning and re-read 'Prose on Poetry' by Raymond Carver about the morning he discovered there was such a thing as a poetry journal. It made me weep. It made me remember that unique charge that being part of poetry gives me and it's not about prizes and the intellect or being flavour of the month - it's about soul. It's about the beauty of the page with space around words and a glimpse into someone else's heart, something that moves where you expected stillness or even death. His work so reminds me of you: your robustness, your vulnerability, your beauty, your dogged honesty. Do keep writing. Keep to what's around you.

Tell me about your day. Are you getting out enough? Are you reading much? Painting? I love this time of year because I work till about 5.30pm and then see it's 6.30pm and I didn't realise the light was going later. It's like looking up and seeing a face you love at the window. The light.

Love as always

Here is one of her poems to let you know how good and how original she is with words. I love this poem.

The Funnel
The time of the sparrows, their ratchet of sound 
an unoiled mechanical panic. “Hurry home,” 
they say. Kiss quick. Drink. Dance. What
a calamity. Its too late. All the days undoing 
in their beaks, closing in as the land throws peaches
into the sky and a Turner unfolds overhead 
in gold and baby blue and a pink she couldn't wear.
Clouds build a Sahara sand rivers and ridges
no foot will ever touch. Are we compelled to watch
eye to eye with one great art to practice dying?

Litter scatters over the mountain, an open torso 
dried out and bloodless. Three lights spring up
on a bungalow. Taillights pick out the road 
I followed, a red ball rolling down a gutter.
Her face after the dance performance, 
bodies in tableaux of every human pain, 
grotesque and gullible on that ledge of love. 
She looked blasted as this landscape and pretty 
and I was glad to have her, uncopied, not as a picture 
or as the image I have of her face at the edge 
of the earth, after too much consciousness, her eyes
shut, lips baring the night song she's worked 
from the days without colour, coming back alive
for those who have found sense in grey.


CHERRY SMYTH

I will end this essay by saying thank you for my friends and family you know who you are and to all the staff at the Royal, Forster Green and the Joss Carwell centre for re-hab my painting rests on the wall of the new unit at Musgrave park thanks to Duncan for having faith in me. I would also like to thank everyone at Cheshire mews for looking after me. I will end this essay with this a quote from Attila Jozsef the same quote I started with. may every art form be inspired by this.

From you should read my poems



For silence in your dreams 
Has taken on a human form.