Dungeness



Here's something I wrote after visiting Dungeness on 8th February last year to mark the Centenary of Elizabeth Bishop's birth.

Dungeness

I think the people live here because the stone has managed to flower, and the way the land and sea and sky form a continuum vaster than the eye can encompass, must allow them to see themselves and each other more clearly. If one were Elizabeth Bishop, one would probably think of the line ‘awful but cheerful’.

Scattered over the treeless pebbly flat are dozens of hammered-together temporary-looking bungalows, shell-coloured, hugging the ground, with washing-lines flapping bright loads, and the odd stoved-in, upturned hull.

Perhaps as a gesture of solidarity, there are no walls or fences or boundary marks of any sort: only patches of strange, tenacious flora growing against the odds in shingle stretching from door to door: sea kale and sea cabbage, dwarf broom and dwarf hawthorn, twisted and stunted by the unrelenting wind.

Above the steep shore ridge, bony fishing-boats blister, waiting for the waves below to cease white-cresting in every direction. Around them, the litter from previous expeditions: smacked- off fish heads, crab legs, scraped-empty crustaceans, broken winches, frayed rope, yards of tar-sticky net, punctured buoys, unpaired shoes, a disemboweled mattress, a gaping fridge digesting cartons printed in another language.

Under the stern of the Emma Jayne, a charred hollow of black and red pebbles shows how the earliest rising fisherman thought to warm himself and his crew. Further along, yellow toy diggers attempt to redistribute ever-accumulating deposits of long shore-drift in a Sisyphean cycle of toil. Sometimes a matchstick couple can be seen bending their will against the sky-line, oversize gulls wheeling hungrily overhead in the bruised light.

On the hazy horizon the ominously mute power station, the size of a small city, steams in its warm emissions. From there, long, drooping cables radiate like the lines of a railway junction, throbbing above the reedy, disused gravel pits.

Silence has descended on everyone here like radioactive fallout: a contagious reticence. After a short stay you feel it enter and explode softly like a depth charge, its disturbance travelling outward with you when you go: alive and sometimes flourishing, like the beautiful outbursts of lichen rooted in the scarred rocks.


©2012 Dan Wyke

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

List of UK Poetry Magazines Accepting Email Submissions

Well, it's a start. I'll add others as and when I hear about them. Check back from time to time and please send me the names of any literary/poetry magazines and journals that accept email submissions that you know about. Many magazines still prefer postal submissions and will get pretty pissed off if you email them so check before. Some magazines on the list that accept email contributions also operate submission windows. Ambit Envoi Magma New Walk Magazine New Welsh Review Other Poetry Shearsman The Wolf Agenda (trial period) Weyfarers The Cadaverine (under 30) If you're submitting to U.S. journals, Blogalicious has an extensive list that accepts online submissions.
Read more

Where Have You Been?

Image
Festschrifts and translations of Gottfried Benn are all well and good, but I can't help thinking this absence in my life isn't going to be filled until Michael Hofmann publishes another collection of his own poetry. In the meantime, here's this appropriately titled book of essays to look forward to. Published by Norton later this year, it looks like being a reprint of his prose selection ' Behind the Lines ' (Faber, 2001) for a U.S. readership. The original volume didn't go to a second edition, and with the spread of Hofmania in the U.K. in recent years, it's been difficult to get hold of a copy at a reasonable price. In a way its publication is reassuring since it means Hofmann hasn't yet completely 'done a Rimbaud', but his long poetic silence, if not a repudiation of poetry, still haunts and fascinates other poets in equal measure. Readers of Hofmann's poetry naturally hope he will publish more again one day. Dig a bit further, espec...
Read more

Carl Rogers: A Theory of Therapy

A THEORY OF THERAPY, PERSONALITY, AND INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS, AS DEVELOPED IN THE CLIENT-CENTERED FRAMEWORK CARL R. ROGERS University of Wisconsin Introduction 2 The soil of the theory 2 Some basic attitudes 4 The General Structure of Our Systematic Thinking 7 Definitions of constructs 9 A digression on the case history of a construct 14 I. A Theory of Therapy and Personality Change 22 Conditions of the therapeutic process. 22 The process of therapy 25 Outcomes in personality and behavior 27 Comments on the theory of therapy 28 Specification of functional relationships 29 Some conclusions regarding the nature of the individual 29 II. A Theory of Personality 30 Postulated characteristics of the human infant 30 The development of the self 31 The need for positive regard 31 The development of the need for self-regard 32 The development of conditions of worth 32 The development of incongruence between self and experienc...
Read more