{"id":452,"date":"2010-03-23T14:02:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-23T14:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=452"},"modified":"2025-02-03T11:53:42","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T11:53:42","slug":"from-the-editor-issue-66","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2010\/03\/23\/from-the-editor-issue-66\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Editor – Issue 66"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Two poems in Magma<\/em> and four in this issue of The Rialto<\/em> is perhaps not enough evidence to warrant announcing a startling new poet. Nevertheless Nadia Al Fazil Kareem\u2019s work is fresh and assured and has a voice of marvellous variety ranging from rage to laughter to romance. Read the magazine. Let us know what you think. We don\u2019t know anything more about Nadia than that she writes from London, is the only member of her family living in Britain and collects Indian miniatures.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an embarrassment of riches in this issue, two poems by Anna Crowe, two by Philip Gross, Lorraine Mariner, Les Murray, Elizabeth Smither and the same number from George Szirtes. But the poem I\u2019ve chosen to write about is \u2018Grey Eyes\u2019 by Gaye Farrow, who teaches in a primary school in Hertfordshire. This is an adventure into a world where Clarissa Estes\u2019 much loved Women Who Run With The Wolves<\/em> meets Catherine Cookson, or maybe the high fiction of 1950s Women\u2019s Own<\/em> magazine (\u2018She Was Just As High As His Heart\u2019). On-line blurb for Women Who<\/em> says \u2018Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. Her name is Wild Woman, but she is an endangered species…\u2019 Here is the poem.<\/p>\n

GREY EYES<\/h5>\n

If I had grey eyes
\nI would narrow them to splinters against the cold;
\nsee the world
\nthrough prisms of ice on my lashes.
\nI would watch the wolves
\nflicker from shadow to shadow among the dark pines
\naround my cabin; their eyes of yellow-gold
\nunblinking.<\/p>\n

The throb of hooves.
\nA horse, the colour of smoke, crashes into the clearing.
\nThe rider leans down, takes my hand –<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll not be leaving.<\/p>\n

If I had grey eyes,
\nflames would kindle in my irises
\nas I gazed into the peat fire burning
\nin the hearth of a stone croft.
\nI would sit at my loom
\nin a shawl of heather and soft green,
\nweaving the threads of a complicated story.<\/p>\n

I rise to stir the pot of carrots, onions, neeps.
\nThe night is pierced by spears of rain
\nand wind rattles in the chimney like a drum.
\nA footfall, then
\nthe door flings open; slams against the wall –<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll shelter him a while.<\/p>\n

If I had grey eyes
\nthey would reflect the colours of the sea;
\namethyst – turquoise.
\nI would shade them from the sun with a thin, brown hand.
\nMy skirt, wet-hemmed
\nwould be caught up on one side.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m running along the tide line,
\nbarefoot on shingle and green sea-glass
\nto a boat pulled up beside a breakwater
\nwhere nets are slung, waiting to be mended.
\nA man, face deeply lined,
\nwith salt-thick hair and roughened hands,
\nsmiles.
\nHis boat, blue as the sky with a rusty sail,
\npitches us through the surf –<\/p>\n

out, over the arc of the horizon.<\/p>\n

Gaye Farrow<\/em><\/p>\n

Grey eyes, relatively rare and therefore exotic, are typically found in people on the northern edge of Europe and in romantic heroines. I\u2019m prepared to bet that the crazy sightless mother of the mad villain in John Buchan\u2019s The Three Hostages<\/em> has grey eyes. Ever noticed, by the bye, how Buchan\u2019s heroines so often have \u2018slim boyish\u2019 bodies? Anything is possible in poetry so it could be useful to note that the Graiae in Greek mythology were the three crones, guardians of the road to the Gorgons\u2019 home, who shared an eye and a tooth and whose names translate as Horror, Dread and Alarm.<\/p>\n

The poem is in three sections (of twelve, thirteen and sixteen lines), each of which has the potential to be a novella and all beginning with the same announcement – \u2018If I had grey eyes.\u2019 In the first section we have a heroine who actually lives among wolves – I think it fair to assume that the \u2018I\u2019 is female because of the skirt in the last section. What so distinguishes this poem is the skilful choice of words; look for example at the short fiercely active verbs – \u2018flings,\u2019 \u2018slams,\u2019 \u2018slung,\u2019 \u2018pitches.\u2019 And it\u2019s very visual, we have colour and movement in each section: here Dr Zhivago<\/em>, the film version, meets Mills and Boon. I particularly love the horse, \u2018the colour of smoke\u2019 and how it \u2018crashes\u2019 into the clearing. Then there\u2019s the delicious twist: we expect a rescue – the rider \u2018leans down\u2019 – but the narrator is firm, and won\u2019t be leaving. Lovely.<\/p>\n

The second section repeats the story frame of the first one, the scene setting, Celtic this time, the \u2018stone croft\u2019, with, of course, a \u2018peat fire\u2019(note that it\u2019s not \u2018turf,\u2019 that would be too close to Seamus Heaney). And again there\u2019s the sudden arrival of a hero, but once more one who doesn\u2019t carry away the heroine. We\u2019ve had the rescuer, now it\u2019s the turn of the fugitive (recollections of Bonny Prince Charlie). The line \u2018Weaving the threads of a complicated story\u2019 – very neat in the way that it teeters on the edge of bathos – persuaded me on the first reading that the poet had had a great time writing this work. Ah the strength of these grey eyed women, she, \u2018shelters him awhile.\u2019<\/p>\n

Where to next? Of course, we go to the sea (how many beach scenes in romantic fiction and film?) It is a fact, by the way that grey eyes pick up colours from the environment. Again the details are lovingly re-created, the \u2018thin brown hand\u2019, the skirt, wet at the hem and \u2018caught up at one side\u2019 – the height of permitted eroticism in the 1950s, as was any woman running barefoot along a beach. The heroine (finally) finds a man to share (at least for a time) her life\u2019s journey. As befits the genre he is one of those lucky older men, with a lived in body and hands that know what to do.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no getting away from the fact that Classic literature started off, in The Iliad<\/em>, with a woman being carried off in a boat. And here the boat is blue, the colour of the seducer\u2019s boat in Brian Friel\u2019s Dancing at Lughnasa<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This is a poem about the power of imagination and the ability it gives us to free ourselves. Escapist fiction is, of course, a recreation, play, but it does remind us that there is the possibility of change. I\u2019m reading myself to sleep with Ian Rankin\u2019s Rebus novels at the moment and, after writing most of this piece, I came across the following:<\/p>\n

Johnny had shown her another road she might have taken, and in doing so had opened up the possibility of all the other roads left untravelled, all the places she\u2019d never been. Places like Emotion and High and Elation. Places like Myself and Free and Aware. She knew she\u2019d never say these things to anyone; they sounded too much like stuff from the magazines. Born and bred in the town, lived most of her days there: did she really want to die there? ………………..
\nShe wanted more.
\nShe wanted out.<\/p>\n

Ian Rankin, Dead Souls<\/em>, Orion 1999, page 283.<\/p>\n

Interesting to reflect on the thought that Self Help articles and books, with their transformative case histories, have taken over much of the ground occupied by light fiction.<\/p>\n

Anyway, \u2018Grey Eyes\u2019 is an invigorating, deliciously funny poem.<\/p>\n

Michael<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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