Do a talk they said.
Or do a question-and-answer session. Or make a video, perhaps.
All these sounded slightly fraught to me. Videos might not load on the night; a question-and-answer session would entail me writing the questions as well as answers to ensure I said what I want to say, and not get any embarrassing moments. So, I opted to do a short talk. But that created a problem.
As anyone knows, who saw my reading at the Cheltenham poetry Festival in March with the wonderful Claire Dyer, I rather like to talk in between reading my poems. So, what should or could I talk about in a talk?
Well, I can try to talk about when this book began; although I’m not strictly sure I know: a few of these poems were written a while ago, especially the ones about my father, but I had no concept of a collection or how they might fit into it.
There is no doubt in my mind that this book would never have come about without that first lockdown. That stopping of daily life was something that had a calming and soothing effect; was A Quietus. The stillness. The silence. The return of the wild to our door steps: foxes, badgers, deer, wild boar, sheep roaming the streets, and the birds: we had crows walking down our road. Smaller birds seemed to fly lower above our heads - you could feel the disturbance of the air as they passed, hear the sigh from feathered wings. You could almost smell quiet.
BUT in contrast, there was the horror of the dying, people dying alone. The nurses and doctors trapped behind masks and protective clothing. And people stuck in an urban sprawl, who didn’t have this luxury of nature on their doorstep. Each spring morning as I entered my personal paradise of the garden, I felt joy and guilt for I was privileged. I wrote Am I a Coward? and it happened to coincide with Ziggy, the poet Z D Dicks, calling for submissions to his Pandemic Poetry Anthology.
But, although there are a few poems written about the pandemic experience in the book, I don’t want this collection to be viewed as a Pandemic Poetry. It isn’t. It’s about time slowing, it’s about contemplation away from the distortions and distractions of modern life.
I began to think of civilization, modern man and our consumerist society, how we try to contain Nature (hence the poem Cotswold Life) and how distorted our perceptions of living and dying have become, when they are synonymous. How far civilisation has taken us from the beginning of things. How we are forced into a mold at birth – a mold that is almost impossible to break free from, Sewn Up. Last summer leaving my garden to grow wild at the edges brought a cloud of terra cotta butterflies, the Gatekeepers, Pyronia Tythonus.
But then I began to get obsessed with death. Everything I wrote seemed to be connected to that subject, in fact it became a bit of a joke in the workshops I was attending. I looked at my emotions around the demise of my own loved ones, and realized that not all my responses were dark or sad and that even sadness had a beauty of its own; I began to see that perhaps the trick for dealing with grief was not to push the feelings away but to embrace the memories, Take up the Newly Dead. To try and live with the pain, allow it to ferment into a sad wine that numbs distress.
Viewed from an altered perspective, Quietus is a release from life. As quoted at the start of the book, ‘it may be,’- Socrates said – ‘the greatest of all human blessings. Emily Dickenson viewed ‘Dying as a wild night and a new road.’
Naturally, I began to view my own demise. I am an agnostic. I don’t, personally, believe in a life beyond this one and we now live in a largely secular society so how then are we to view death when religion is left behind? It seems an almost a taboo subject. People mourn alone, they are expected to ‘move on’, and we talk of death euphemistically. Even in the midst of a pandemic, the large number of deaths are mostly spoken of, certainly in the media, in terms of statistics and not in terms of human suffering.
Last year the Autumn was glorious, I walked among the trees, the colours of the dying leaves were wedged in my brain and I wrote Abscission. That small poem said everything I’d been looking for and perhaps that was the pivot of this collection.
I hope, these poems will speak to those who’ve been isolated from family, lost parts of their life or who’ve been bereaved and prevented from mourning when that ritual is so important.
I hope the book gives a balm (what a lovely old word that is) a salve, an anodyne, A Quietus.
Josephine Lay
A Quietus by Josephine Lay
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(Also available from all major booksellers) ISBN: 978-1913195151