Sunday 23 April 2017

Lightkeepers by Elizabeth Burns

Elizabeth Burns’ last collection (Lightkeepers, Wayleave Press, 2016) was edited by her friends and fellow-poets Gerrie Fellows and Jane Routh; it puts together the poems she wrote during the last years of her life. She didn’t have the time to publish it but asked her friends to do it for her. A few of the poems appeared in poetry reviews and in anthologies but most of them were unpublished when she died of cancer in August 2015.


A new fresh voice emerges from the collection, the reader has the sense of meeting her personally while reading her lines, they have the authenticity that only unpublished poems sometimes have. Her capacity of observing and perceiving reality, of making the invisible visible (as she said speaking about women’s voice), and the ordinary relevant, is so acute, insightful and unique that it made me experience things in new ways.

When she writes about some duck eggs (ten dozen duck eggs she found on her doorstep one day):

..... I love their magnitude,
their plenty, the rows and rows of them,
the different ways of ordering and counting them.
Their ranks of sameness, and their slight differences.

She communicates the preciousness of the gift and also the innate beauty of the eggs so common and special, a work of nature and of art at the same time to admire and cherish:

.......I want to keep them
on this windowsill and gaze at them each day –
their lovely shapes, the oval clear and pure,

as if they were holy, made for ritual;
.....
and the way they are contained and unassuming,
holding inside themselves a freight of possibility.

A fruitful force emanates from these lines, they don’t seem to be written by a person at the end of her life, on the contrary they are vital, full of hope, compassion and care.

Her masterly use of enjambment in The Spool expresses the inner joy and mutual close communion in the act of sewing up some buttons with her daughter on the new dress the girl is going to wear in a school trip to an art gallery:

And here she is, early in the hot June morning, light on her feet
in her pretty shoes setting off with her camera, her sketchbook,
on the school trip to the gallery, the art college show; threading her way
down the street, heading out into the promise of this summer’s day.

In Clay, Plum and Lightkeepers, her last pamphlets and collection all published by Wayleave press, her poetry definitely develops in a deeply imaginative and free way, her poems are spare, tight and careless of what is inessential; instead she goes to the core of things. While her body was inevitably shrinking and her hair was falling, her poetry bloomed.

The intensity of everyday, strongly felt experiences is, for example, in the simple act of buying a second hand dresser in an antique shop:

a blue-painted dresser that was old and worn
and had six little drawers with knobs for handles,

a dresser that would fit exactly into my kitchen
........................................
The dresser is scratched and some of its paint
is wearing away, but its wood glows in the evening sun

and it holds a bowl of oranges, perhaps, or a jug of roses,
green candles, blown eggs, tulips, herbs, postcards;

The poem  Lightkeepers is about following the traces of R.L. Stevenson in the east coast of Scotland near Edinburgh. His presence is everywhere together with the memories of her daughters’ childhood at the seaside. The Isle of May and Fidra lighthouses remind her of the writer’s family and are ‘beacons in darkness’, but all the happiness she gathered is ‘fragile as glass’ and momentary, ‘a lantern-slide lit for a moment’. The complexity of this poem seems to be resolved in the lines: ‘We’re lightkeepers, making ready/for sundown, revealing that tiny glimmer and refracting it’, showing the value of ‘the gleam/that makes us human’ and its inevitable fickleness. A sense of transience is in the last line: ‘we take that light we can to keep us through the night.’

Going through the collection is like having a journey in an apparently ordinary world perceptively observed and deftly written. From the comfort of the first poem, The recovery room (‘the tests are clear − ...the winter in your skin’), to the last one, Spiral (which was chosen to be attached to the scaffolding covering the Poetry Library in Edinburgh in October 2015), one spiralling sentence in two verses celebrating our earthen roots but also our never ending aspiration to something more, a spiritual dimension, whirling up into the sky and beyond.


Monday 10 April 2017

Spring time: hot cross buns and PhD proposal

I had a very exciting early spring time working hard as an IB examiner, preparing my literature lessons and assessments for my students and above all digging deep for my PhD proposal. I had also time to try new recipes: I experimented new cakes and, being Easter near, hot cross buns.


The brighter, warmer days and the energy boost that comes naturally with spring time gave me the right trigger to work on my PhD proposal and submit it. The idea came to me after reading The Blind Assassin, a true masterpiece. So many connections came to my mind together with a total sincere admiration for what I consider a real work of art, that I started to study about a year ago, research and collect critical works on Margaret Atwood and link it to other books I read in the past. At first my ideas were generic and confused but then they took shape and focused on the role of female characters, how their identities developed and were influenced by previous female characters in western literature (but not only in literature, in visual art and music as well). An intertextual kind of research sprang from it! I repeatedly visited the British Library in search of texts to support my work. It is such a beautiful place to spend time in, there are exhibitions, bookshops and comfortable reading rooms that looked like pleasant lounges. I felt so deeply motivated and younger, going back to my university years when I used to spend hours and hours in the Biblioteca Nazionale (National Library) in Rome or in the Vatican Library.


Studying in a library adds concentration and cosiness to the research as well as a sort of solemn aura: it is the temple of knowledge and you are in it to accomplish a task of some importance. And there is the pleasure of reading and researching that goes with it, of course. An exciting process of studying, understanding more, solving problems hoping to reach your goal at the end. All my passion and commitment to Margaret Atwood finally has a goal and I can dedicate my next years to the study of her work. What a great electrifying adventure!

In a typical woman multi-task mood (and in accordance with an postmodern Atwoodian mixture of genres and registers), I also had time to experiment a hot cross buns recipe from a magazine, but I adapted it as usual. Here it is:

You need: 300 ml of milk, 60 g of butter, 250 g of strong white flour, 250 g of strong brown flour, 100 g of golden caster sugar, 7 g sachet of fast action bread yeast, 1 egg (lightly beaten), 100 g of sultanas, grated zest of one lemon, 1 apple (peeled and grated), 1 tsp of cinnamon; for the crosses you need: 150 g of plain flour and 100 ml of water; to glaze you need: 3 tbsp of warm apricot jam or marmalade.

Warm the milk and butter and let the butter melt. Mix the flours in a large bowl, add half a tsp of salt, sugar, yeast, then pour the warm milk and butter in. Mix it with a fork, then knead the dough by hand till smooth. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and let it rest in a warm place for at least two hours till it doubles in size. Remove the damp cloth and knead the dough adding sultanas, lemon zest, apple and cinnamon. Add some flour if it is too sticky. Divide the dough into round pieces and set them on an oiled oven tray. Prepare the dough for the crosses mixing the plain flour with water, roll it out and cut strips to arrange on top of the buns, securing them with water. Cover the tray with cling film and let the buns rest in a warm place for an hour. Bake the buns for 15-20 minutes at 200° C till golden. Finally brush the jam (or marmalade) on top when the buns are still hot. And enjoy!