Powys Society Newsletter 88

of building portraits of others, including artists such as Ray Klimek (‘For Ray Klimek:
Photographer’) who Out of the dust brings to light / tyre tracks, footprints, cloud, /
landscapes in flux ... — then he captures ... a wheelbarrow / beside a drainage channel,
/ dull red, but an ember against dust-grey slopes. I welcomed what I took to be William
Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow making an unforeseen appearance here.
Gerard Casey is the subject of ‘An Unfinished Portrait’ ... with the presence / of
the family around you. // Will and Gertrude in their paintings ... Theodore and John
Cowper in their books. // Mary and Lucy everywhere ... Gerard comes over as a
strong but quiet man ... suddenly, stunning the room / with a sermon ... and also as
the thoughtful man walking on Chesil Beach / scattering ashes ...
Among the poems of the Scattered Light section are brief encounters with the
natural world. In ‘Butterfly Extravaganza’ we read that when the day begins / to turn,
spinning / scattering light / red pearl brimstone green ... it is all ... a blur, illegible.
And poems here often have as much to do with wind and rain as light – e.g. witness
the effects of ‘Barleyfield Wind’ as Ripple, / current, eddies, / whirlpool, a pattern
created / and in one movement unmade ... There are also shifts of emphases which
lead to unexpected encounters – this for instance is where we find the poet’s unique
interpretation of the Orpheus myth:
The truth is,
after the bold descent,
the song calling,
echoing,
he was absorbed
into the ground.
Eurydice,
tendrils twined
around him,
climbed up
the ladder of his bones.
(‘Orpheus’)
In God’s Houses Powysians will discover (if they didn’t already know) that Jeremy
Hooker has sat where Theodore sat in St Peter and St Paul, Mappowder — A place
where a man / might hide himself from the world and where His tomb is a stone book,
/ the last enigmatic page / given over to grass. For me, however, the most moving of
the God’s Houses poems is ‘Holy Rood, Southampton’ destroyed by enemy bombing
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