Black Combe crest
over ridges shale spit line
pale marram dunes (their small sea-bright
trefoils and succulents) ...
- from 'Outcrops at Haverrig', by Harriet Tarlo
...between loss and consolidation
in the hollow of the dune slack
- from the second short poem in Thomas A. Clark's sequence 'The Grey Fold'
... the new salt marsh
no more freshwater
the salt line
grey grass
bleached trees
byre useless ...
- from the April section of 'Myne' by Frances Presley, on a walk from Greenaleigh to Porlock Bay
... I hear mud rustle
ducks come in to land
tide recedes in intensity
blood filled hands
I mean lands
the duck glides
and lands
- from 'lights' by Ian Davidson, whose afterword to his collection At a Stretch worries that 'there may be too much landscape' in his poetry...
... At Kingwater the stream plashes
kingcups over the green ironbridge, pupae to dust wedges
and rust coloured reflections of trees in water.
Flag irises, rhododendrons. Out of focus pine trees, lacking their bitmap,
alive only in geological time. ...
- from 'The Stars Have Broken in Pieces' in which Nicholas Johnson passes through the landscape of northern England, from Derbyshire to Cumbria
through white trees nothing said
the edges grow sharper the hills
farther away with each degree
- from 'Gwydyr Forest' by Zoë Skoulding
...This is a wood you increase by coming-out-of-it -
out into the snow with a sawing motion of it -
bear-lope muskrat-ramble badger-trundle marten-amble...
- from 'Carcajou' by Colin Simms, poet and naturalist who was the subject of an earlier post here
Trees pale in knot but nowhere in cooped flux of them, not-bending swivels a sky foldlessly relenting. Leaning skyward can't suffer on the slant, only drawn off slope by the unholdable intimacy of vertical separation.
- from 'Lean Earth Off Trees Unaslant, 3' by Peter Larkin
... a little light at dusk by which to sit and read the blanched white ash-stems reaching sky
ward the steep woody tangle above the tumbling stream each stem gleams in the January dull ...
- from Wendy Mulford's 'Alltud: 'exile'', part of a description of the Wye valley at Erwood in Powys
Snow has settled in the lines
Of an old ridge-and-furrow system
Striping the gently sloping dark
Green fields, engrossed script
Of duration, repetition, authority...
- from 'Prelude' by Peter Riley
the feeding of one into the landscape results
in a climbing to infinity this opens the labour of a day
the task is to find a distribution of fields
and from these the truth of this place ...
- the first lines of Carol Watts' Zeta Landscape, which the author has described as "lyric nature poetry put under pressure"
scarp along Don's arc shall ow hanging
loops of pow er-line pylons dull silvery
frames holding dead space live to shock oak
leaves pat drips & drop rain through fractal
cascades...
- from 'Rurban Membrane, A Sheffield Rim, North East' by Mark Goodwin
... Eyes
pull on
contours held in common:
plough through brick, steel, steads
under cooling towers, the soils
worn thin for nitrogen ...
- from 'aurals' by Tony Baker, a landscape seen on 'the journey toward Mansfield'
... seductive flowertrails
penetrate the hills where we confront
the ambiguity of wayposts &
clouds that distil a thin
gleet ...
- from 'Lady's Bedstraw (Gallium verum) / Quantocks' by Elisabeth Bletsoe, who, as reported here, I saw at the second Re-Enchantment event last year
The storm runs forth on several seas whose manner is
the hard edge of a clamber down gneiss...
- the opening words of 'Dale' by Helen Macdonald
Ripples take
mackerel from
con-
trail
imbues dew.
Dew jewels more
obviously ground.
no shadow but
wisp-
errs
the arc
amongst crystals
of
ice.
- from the 'High clouds base >20,000 feet' column of a tabular poem, one of a sequence called The Speed of Clouds by Mark Dickinson
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