|
WILGILSLAND The homepage of Pete and Jan Crowther |
|
|
Robin Skelton |
|
|
In his lifetime Robin Skelton was the author of more than 100 books. These included not only collections of his poetry but also novels and short stories, anthologies of the work of other poets, studies in versification, numerous scholarly works of literary criticism, and, rather surprisingly, a number of works on the occult. He is best known, however, for his poetry which is as he would have wished. Although well known and respected as a poet in this country before he emigrated, he became less well known after taking up residence in Canada where he enjoyed a reputation as the country’s unofficial poet laureate, held office as Chairman of the Writers’ Union of Canada, and is still highly honoured today. Unfortunately he is now little known and but rarely anthologized this side of the Atlantic, which is a great pity as his poetry is powerful, haunting, and insightful and has a tremendous range of style and voices. Many of his poems show the strong influence of his boyhood in Easington and use the imagery of the sea, its tides and pebbled beaches, and the distant horizons across the Humber mudflats. Robin Skelton was an impressive yet eccentric figure whose appearance with long hair and flowing beard corresponded to the popular idea of how a poet ought to look! When he died in 1997 he was mourned by generations of Canadian students who felt they owed so much to this multi-talented, energetic, creative and most human of men.
|
|
|
Apple Tree This old apple tree has begun to be more than memory of more than days of climbing children, of silk-white blossom blessing the garden with snows of praise;
it's grown a creature older than Nature, a Truth whose stature we can't deny; though twisted and split with lopped branches, it is the whole spirit of earth and sky,
of water and fire, the mystical gyre that, doubling the spire of helix, brings our every face, our every space, our kindred, our race, our gatherings,
five seeds in a star that announces we are beyond near and far yet of the tree blessing time's garden with dropping blossom teaching the children eternity.
|
Land Without Customs My land had no customs. Habits, tricks of the slow tongue, leading beasts to grass, roads slape with rain, or answering weddings and deaths in a dry voice scurfy as dust in the village square, boys’ names carved into the old stocks;
these—but no customs. Unless you count the old men making one stretch of wall the place for their backs, spring sun blinking their eyes; or the way all was marbles one day, the next tops, in the road alongside the brick school.
Certain inevitables there were: the rub of hands on apron at house door to speak to strangers, the mild horse surging the plough at a harsh roar of ritual violence, the long silence before speech. And these were
known and unknown. The land stood somewhere inside them. A phrase missed, a nod too easy, and boots dragged at embarrassed cobbles. Two miles west it was shallower, lighter. I once saw a man there run for the town bus.
But no customs. In a way stronger for that, I think. There was no need to assert the place. It grew, changed; the electric came and a new road out to the south, and the telephone. The pump was condemned. But the past stood.
And I daresay still, in its own way, stands. Though a plaque by the old stocks set in the wall is a thought strange, there in the square are the old looks, the pause before speech, the drab men spitting in dust. Should I go back
these will have made me. The small fields are as small elsewhere, the sky as blue or just as grey with a thread of rain, the stacks as lumpish, but here grew something inalienable, a way of giving each least thing its due,
a rock to living. A land without customs, yes, but a land held hard on its course, unsparing, firm in its own ways. As I grow old time hardens into that sure face watching the foreign, shiftless world.
|
