I confess to being unacquainted with Olivia Byard’s work before I was paired to read with her at last year’s Cheltenham Poetry Festival. We had both just had new books from the always enterprising Worple Press. I read with her again last week at Oxford’s Albion Beatnik Bookshop. I wanted to try to convey something of her methods and concerns in this blog.

In The Wilding Eye, Worple Press have gathered new poems and others selected from Byard’s previous two collections, From a Benediction (Peterloo, 1997) and Strange Horses (Flambard, 2011). Her work ranges from vivid evocations of childhood scenes, to mythic treatments of subterranean psychic hurt, sketches of domestic exchanges, more politically engaged poems and (recently) a more expansive concern with our relationship with nature. Her work is hard to pigeon-hole but acclaim from the likes of Les Murray and Bernard O’Donoghue is well deserved.

Some of those hyper-lit…

The artist was silenced when his tongue was taken

but his eyes worked the words into the earth

around his feet,

his arms signed and gestured, so they

tugged them behind his back and knotted

rough rope and iron chain, held them in place.

It wasn’t his limbs reflecting this story

still his thoughts stick out and speak.

He musters strength to stand,

they take his feet from under him,

punch his guts black and kick the ideas

from the nest in his head.

In darkness, with swollen eyes and mute lips

he stays still,

his brain keeps working,

whirling through the poetry of his heart.

He knows even after hearts are taken

words bleed out,

leak poetry into the lives of thousands

an army strong.

Published by Second Light Network of Women Poets, Parents, an anthology of poems by women writers (Enitharmon/Second Light, 2000) was the inspiration for this month’s theme. What a wonderful idea. Parents are after all universal, even when the one who parents is a surrogate. This month The Bardo Group Beguines and friends have taken on parenting as well as parents and  present an interesting blend of insights and experience.

BUDDHA AS PARENT

Young Prince Rāhula prompted by his mother to ask for his inheritance, left behind by the Buddha after His renunciation. Instead, the Buddha told Venerable Sariputta (Sariputra) to ordain Prince Rāhula, giving him a spiritual inheritance better than the one he asked for.

The lead feature, Buddha as Parent, is by Gil Fronsdal.  Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982. In 1995 he received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot…

Recollections lurk in side streets, pounce
at the small white bike, the wilted daisies
tied to rails at a pedestrian crossing.

Her voice, which talked about the little boy
who died, the same age as her daughter,
echoes in the rain. It haunts my wheels.

She left the run down library, her home
of books instead of betting slips and bottles,
took the bus to town. She found the groves
and terracotta quads of college, found
a world where words demanded a reply.

She only had to lose the battle once.
One day I may forget, but never this:
if someone says they want to die, talk on.

I push her smoke aside, refuse to think.
I know, as sure as words cannot be trusted,
driving through her life won’t change a thing.

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