The following poems have all been published, either in magazines or in book form, as acknowledged below each poem or section. To use any of these poems in a publication or online, please email Jane for copyright permission and fees (where applicable): j.holland442 @ btinternet.com * NEW POEMS: FLOOD AT BOSCASTLE Ten steps down, through Sargasso weeds green as the felt walls of a fish tank, is a door through which only haruspices may pass, bearded and with credit cards, to buy sacred books and strange instruments for scrying so they might peer inside the living heart and say which house survives, which doesn’t. Portal invulnerable, they cry, to the left-hand of the rising river, thy charmed walls shall not be blowholes for the unclenched well of the waters, no spiraculum mirabile breathing mud into the underworld. Later, stripped to the waist, men dig blackened books from the whale ribs of a cottage, then stamp up through mud to the Cobweb for a finger or two of whisky, predicting more rain on the print of a wetted thumb. This poem first appeared in Poetry Review ALMOST ICELAND The house was a standing stone on the edge of annihilation. It sat there uncomplaining while acres of wind pummelled and rattled windows and floorboards. The sea birds shunned it. The bees rarely came so far north. The sheep called out to it to move but it didn't. It just sat there. Its single chimney grinned up at the sky like a maniac. For miles around, whole islands lay down and withered. Stones stunted themselves in its shadow. And always the wind hammering for the house to be absent. Finally, its inhabitants packed up and left. The house remained, folding its arms and gritting black teeth. It had no intention of surrender. The wind blew on battering its ram's head repeatedly against lintels and uprights its high battle-cry prising tiles from the roof imploding the senseless resistance of doorways. First published in ACUMEN IT WAS COOL INSIDE THE CHAPEL It was cool inside the chapel. Blue torpor had hung over us for months, cyanising the pale edge of morning. Here, even the kids marvelled at Matisse, adored him. If you thought anything of that astonishing patina cast over white walls by stained glass in sunlight, you never communicated it; turned away, smoking your ubiquitous cigarette. Later, we sat contemplating the blue mosaic of fish in one of Braque's ceramics. Nothing had happened. One person had simply severed from the other, side by side in the brilliant aftermath. First published in UNDER THE HILL EVENING'S SHUTTLE (about the River Sherbourne, Coventry) Brackish in the mouth, the river flattens here to a modest clinker, black aftermath of rain over tarmac and the city rising above it, vast stone-shod angler damming the detritus of waters to an uncertain trickle, moon-flow of the menopausal, screech of an owl in the nightlight glow of ever-dusk darkness over industry and high-rise, tenement and bypass. Cars glisten on its new river, borne sheer on the traffic tide, silver on silver, flowing up or under these cumbersome stone arches of bridge and fly-over weaving in and out of the city like evening’s shuttle – now silent, now whistling, now swollen, now empty. Commissioned 2006 by Heaventree Press for SHERB, an anthology of poems about the urban-rural Sherbourne River. HOT DAYS IN THE EIGHTIES On hot days in the eighties, you stopped for ices at Taunton Services. Little did you know then, twenty-something in the white Ford Escort Estate - radio on full, heater too, blasting out to keep the engine cool - the traffic jams from Portishead to Liverpool. That was the decade of the motorway. You chopped your locks in the back of the car one day, dyke-short. Kept dental dams in the glove box, grew the hair under your arms to a mousey fuzz. Purchased a map of the highways, went native. You wore a suede jacket and a crucifix in the 'V' of your chest, strode like a man (and the rest). Drove a Lancia Delta into the dirt. Years later it was a Mercedes camper van, seven berth, and beads, hippy skirts, needing to get close to the earth. These days you don't get out much, stuck in with a husband and kids. But the road's strong, it hauls on you like a blackbird on the worm, and you find excuses - friends ill, time alone - for the grip of the wheel, a licence to roam. A SELECTION from the BOUDICCA sequence: RED STAR They say when I was born a red star flamed in the east but it was either torchlight or the glint of my mother's hair. They say my first breath brought the wild geese back but it was late spring and the waters were warmer. They say the great oak split at the hour of my birth but it was only lightning trying to reach earth there. I saw none of these things but I've heard them all. I believe the world trembled when I started to crawl. THE WHOLE OF BRITAIN Out of Verulamium, we came to the height of a hill. I stood and looked down, light like a weight on my shoulders and the whole of Britain glinting before us like a coin tossed in the sun, blunt-edged, foreign. WAR PAINT Some of the men went naked into battle except for their war paint - it was like watching gods fight, blue-thighed, hanging like horses, like a dog after a bitch, with their own blood in their eyes, sweat on their hands, mud past their ankles, their knees, flies on their shoulders and the crow in full sun afterwards unspooling their innards. PURIFICATION It had been raining for weeks - or that's how it felt to us, rain like a sluice through the trees bright-gold under it - the sun hefting up afterwards as it used to do in my childhood prickly and golden over the drowned black drub of a thicket, a spinney where we stood by steaming horses and make-shift tents, impatient for the rain to finish rinsing the blood off, to purge us for death and be done with it. The above poems appear in Jane Holland's second collection, BOUDICCA & CO. (Salt Publishing 2006). EARLY POEMS * SLEEP The green arch of the bridge says sleep The low slope of the field says sleep The vole, lowering its head in the hedgerow, says sleep The evening smoke says sleep The white wall and the white fence say sleep The canal, turning and wending, says sleep The grim army of pylons says sleep The dream of the cows, dreaming, says sleep The leaf, midway between green and gold, says sleep The flat shock of the horizon says sleep The red tiles of the station say sleep The fierce heart, unbending, says sleep and sleep again. But the coiled snake of the soul, hissing, retreating, slipping its leash and beating its tail at the door of the heart says 'wake, wake!' and 'the fall is forever'. SPIN-CYCLE (for Becky) You've been blackberrying again. I take your blouse and watch it turn through the white suds in the drum, rinse-hold, spinning slowly through the cycle. I hear you up above, bouncing on the bed to reach the oval mirror, see the purple stains around your mouth and chin, blackness under nails and in your hair. Soon, like your swan-necked sister, you will not have to stretch on tiptoe for the sink or grip the rail when coming down the stairs. You say 'When?' I do not have the answers. Just the slow loop of your blouse growing heavy with water, as one cycle ends and waits upon another. FORGETTING TO REMEMBER (for my artist grandmother, Christiana Evelyn Beatrice Holland, 1903 - 1997) You turned your face to the wall a year ago, waiting for this. Not a word, not a whisper passed your lips. In your eyes, not a flicker when they came and went, those ghosts dressed like your children, but unknown, older. And your son was not your husband, though you must have thought so, trying his name. The nurse came by, with something to help you sleep, but you didn't. Sat there as though for a portrait, erasing the canvas with cataracts, your glasses deep bottle-green. A few years shy of the century, you were still in that sunny front room at Maison Dieu, preparing to paint, though they'd sold it to pay the home fees ten years before. I was almost as tall as you at eleven, sunlight glinting off that shade you wore, one eye patched like a pirate's. And after the guns at Arromanches, he could never hear the racing results so you had to repeat, repeat yourself until he too was gone; memory evaporating too swiftly then, like turps you'd left in the sun. The above poems first appeared in THE BRIEF HISTORY OF A DISREPUTABLE WOMAN (Bloodaxe 1997). Email Jane to buy a signed copy (£5): j.holland 442 @ btinternet.com (no spaces)