The gateway to another country

I have often felt that it was possible to know the day autumn arrived. Something different in the air, as though the earth had tilted in the night. Something different about the light; something that could not be explained or written down or fully understood. Perhaps sometimes poems are there for those places where there is nothing else, no other way of explaining. They are meditations on places which have not been explored or explained before.

Of course this is just my corner of that experience in Highland Scotland. Inevitably it would be different in however many other corners of the world. Yet that doesn't lessen the experience; somehow it almost makes it the more special, the more precious. Which comes back anyway to all that poetry means - surely.


PEARS

I think of that house in early evening
Somewhere at the end of summer

All the doors and windows open
Filled with the afterglow of sun

And the whole house heavy with the scent of pears.
There in the lawn that ancient tree

A hundred summers old, and maybe more,
Around it a deep, dark ring of pears.

I picked them hour after long hour
To thud into baskets, heavy and melting -

Leaving only the broken ones,
All drizzled and wandering with wasps,

And it was as if the house became some strange ship
I was filling for a long voyage

That the rest of our lives might be made of pears.





The poem comes from Kenneth Steven's collection Coracle, published by SPCK in London

Summer

I have decided to return from silence! I am still new to the world of blogging, and I felt for a time that it was rather akin to knocking gently against a wall and receiving no answer. I look forward to hearing from those who do read new work, especially poems, and who want to be in touch. My email address, via my website, is: info@kennethsteven.co.uk. This is a short message on a summer evening: yesterday evening when coming back from my writing cabin in Highland Perthshire a poem came to me. Of course it had to be scribbled on the bus, and on the back of a scrap of paper, but I suppose that often the strongest things are. They tend always to come from nowhere - poems especially - and that arrival from silence is hugely special. So here is the poem:

Twelve

The way once upon a time it was:
when nights lay empty with their birdsong,
and the sun all swollen red went down,
and you among the boys went running
a whole hill upwards into dusk -
where the badger setts lay shadowed
and stillness danced with midges all around.

Then you knew there might be magic -
perhaps a falling star, or fox cubs,
or the finding of a cave that no-one else had seen.
Most of all it was the thrill of this -
the being twelve years old and knowing sure
that all the summer lay ahead and many more,
that it was yours like wild fruit heavy, ready -

in fields and fields and fields far out of sight.

Kindle

This is a brief message after too long a silence. The days have been out of this world here in Highland Perthshire: it has been the sort of winter I most love. Not deep snow around the house: bare ground and bitter frost. The crackling of every star from early evening: that bang of cold when the back door is opened after dark and the night, silent and huge, reveals itself. Impossible to go out for a bucket of coal and not stop to listen to the hugeness of the night. And there, last night, a deer only yards from the house. I felt that sense of awe and wonder I have felt so many times over the years: this privilege at being on the threshold of another kingdom. The deer waited and watched; I waited and watched, the pail hanging useless and pointless at my knee. It's often the kind of moment when poems come to the heart: they are out of time moments, sudden exits from the real, everydayness of the world into somewhere timeless, somewhere precious beyond words. But I didn't write any poem last night: I have visited and re-visited such moments here in Highland Perthshire, and it is difficult to go back and tread old ground in a new way.

What are there on Kindle is a volume of my selected poems especially put together for North American readers. Second Nature comprises much of my best-known work, but it's very much intended for an international readership. If you find it, pass on word of it. And look out for the deer.

New Year

I have never understood why I can almost hear the Atlantic coming into the rooms of my little world here at the heart of Highland Perthshire each early spring. There's no explanation for it, yet as far back as I can remember it has happened (or seemed so). There is something quite wonderful about the west coast of Scotland in the first days of the year: when light comes (and seldom it does) it seems to blow into the whole of the heart and sweep all else aside. There is a magnificence and a wonder that takes away your breath. The cold is the worst I have ever encountered (far worse than the Arctic cold which I have lived through; far easier because it is a dry, still cold). On the western edges of Scotland the cold is being swept against you as if by chariots and horses: it is relentless, hurting, fierce beyond words.
And then suddenly there is light: for one moment, and all is clear and beautiful: each rocky outcrop, each hillside, each shoreline.

And of course for me the tiny island of Iona is at the centre of it all. Often it is cut of for days at a time in January (and long beyond). But it is in my mind; I am back there, fighting my way to St Columba's Bay in the hope of finding green stones, or struggling over the last headland to the finest bay in the west, Port Ban.

out of that battered coast
and all the winter can throw

the days of flurrying snow
and the wind searching

the long and starless nights
high seas and the power gone

the spring comes suddenly
in the twirling of a lark

a torn blue sky and the light
here and there in fragments

the jewellery of flowers
reds and blues and golds

rising from among the rocks
year after faithful year

Can anyone dare to say
they do not believe in miracles?

(From Iona The Other Island, Kenneth Steven - Saint Andrew Press)

A Christmas Child

It is wet in Highland Perthshire. Carols are being sung in every church and hall, but the days simply rain and rain. Behind where I live here in this corner of inland Scotland the woods are full of deer. On the cold winter nights in previous years up to a hundred deer have come to sleep in among the birch trees on the frost nights. Even though I shouldn't have done so, I have gone out to feed them. They were so hungry they even took food right from my hand. My house is called Little Narnia: it is a magical location, and there is a path leading through a wicker gate at the back of the house up into the deeper woods. Somehow the wood is Narnia. I often think of that late at night: under cover of darkness the certainties of the world change and remoteness is restored to places that are nothing during hours of daylight. I know I would have loved this place as a child: I would have been fascinated by the night woods and the owl that calls and the deer gathering silently to sleep beyond the fence. A magic is restored, but most of all on the frost nights: it's harder to find make-believe in the rain.

Late November

I have always found the days at the end of November difficult to bear; the skies seem leaden and low, and the rain relentless. Many years ago I invented a mythical season called Alumbria: it lasted between the falling of the first horse chestnut and the first snowflake. Now we are right in the middle of Alumbria and, as ever, I find the days long and melancholic.

All that having been said, I find it a very rich time from the perspective of ideas and the imagination. I am almost completely surrounded by woodland here at the heart of Highland Perthshire in the very middle of the only land-locked part of Scotland. When I go for walks up behind my house, whatever time of day, it's as though the world has ended and no-one is left but me.

The paths are misty and still left with a last coppery gold from the melted leaves. All I see, if I'm quiet enough, are one or two or three roe deer leaping away on moss hooves into the grey silence of the trees. All I hear, if I am lucky, will be the scrawling voice of a jay. Otherwise, the silence is complete, and so is the mystery of the woods. Anything could happen.

It's this part of the world, and these places, that inspired my short story 'The Ice' which was nominated for a Pushcart in the States. The story tied together all my impressions of the woods and their secrets, and my own memories of secondary school and bullying here in Highland Perthshire. Very little of it feels invented. The story's to be found on Kindle.

Fetcham

Over recent days I have been down in London. I was there first and foremost to give a reading for the charity Kids for Kids. They help struggling villages in the Darfur region to support themselves; each year they adopt more and more communities. The reading was what I like to call an inter-melding of music and words: I was joined by a professional violinist and pianist and our performance was at Leatherhead School.

Over the days I stayed with friends in Fetcham close to Leatherhead. During the time that I was there Bonfire Night was celebrated. Where I live at the heart of Highland Perthshire not much is made of this; traditionally Hallowe'en has been of far greater importance, though during recent years that has been changing. Of course both are equally exciting to children.

The other thing I'm not used to here in Highland Perthshire is the fox. That may sound almost extraordinary; I am surrounded by high hills, glens and open fields - it's country that was almost tailor-made for foxes. But the estates have a ruthless grip on the population; I've very seldom seen a red-coated gentleman in all the years I've lived here. Paradoxically enough, they're two a penny in the London area.

This poem was written through the night. I was roused out of sleep by a fox; by the barking of a fox that continued for perhaps five minutes. During that time the first draft of the poem was written. It's the best possible time to write: you're unselfconscious about the process, and somehow the words are able to flow more freely. This is dedicated to Sylvia and Richard, my good hosts over my days in England.

Fetcham

November 5th and the whole night huge;
I woke and a fox's voice was rasping
over the gardens and the sculpted woods,
at two in the morning and the world asleep.

That night the skies had bloomed with fireworks,
burst and fluttered till they fell back dark;
the parties over and the lights put out,
the doors all clicked and the streets left still.

When I woke up the night was full,
a silver brilliance with the moon's ship high;
the great sky shining and the stars red fires,
and the rasp and the rasp of a fox's bark.