NIGHTINGALE by Gillian Southgate

 

In Hampstead, Keats lay listening, wondering from where

A song melodious charmed him. He  knew why

His soul cleaved to the singer’s joyous air,

Calling from beeches and a darkling sky.

Mortal, he knew that he was on the brink

Of death, his body thin, his youthful visage white,

That pain might ease with taking of strong drink,

The blushful Hippocrene, more purple than the night.

Out from the dark, scents of the flowers of earth

Set him to ponder on life’s transience, to find the words

To wish for dance and song and sun-burned mirth,

While sobbed the nightingale, most passionate of birds.

 

"Still Further" by Jonty Driver

 Jonty Driver has published this collection of eighty of his poems written over the past twenty years since he retired from teaching. They were selected by our June speaker, Douglas Reid Skinner (see below), who acted as editor and who helped to organise them for publication. A copy of the "flyer" will be attached to the next Winchelsea Literary Society newsletter. If you aren't yet on the mailing list, and would like to see this, which includes a summary of Jonty's life and career and details of how to obtain the book, please e-mail me at lawrenceyoulten@gmail.com 

Here is a review, written by Rosie Irvine, for the Ewhurst Parish Magazine, and reproduced here with her kind permission:

"Jonty Driver is a regular member of the congregation at St James’s. He moved to East Sussex with Ann after he retired from teaching in 2000. He was born in Cape Town in 1939 and was President of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students in 1963-4, and this led to him being detained in solitary confinement by the security police. He became stateless when the renewal of his passport was refused while he was studying at Oxford.

Eventually he became a British citizen, but he was not allowed back into South Africa until after apartheid had ended, many years later. His last collection of poetry was So Far: Selected Poems 1960-2004, and now we have Still Further: New Poems 2000-2020.

A large part of Jonty’s heart is still in South Africa where he grew up, and like other poets before him, such as Louis MacNeice, he is never wholly at home now in either his country of birth or in his adopted land. As he writes in ‘Sunset & After’,

"I’ve journeyed back from where I don’t belong

to where I also don’t belong."

In this book we travel with him to South Africa and across its vast expanses of veldt, and then suddenly we are back at Orchard Cottage with

"White wisteria

over an old oak door:

snowfall in midsummer."

It seems to me that the poems from South Africa are perhaps more anguished, because of the injustices and brutalities of its history, and because Jonty was forced to leave behind the country and his dear family and friends.

Many of the poems face up to old age and the ever-approaching prospect of death and the questions of faith that this gives rise to, and he says in ‘Rhyming Runes for Magical Dan’,

"About the final letting go

we can’t pretend to know."

They are searingly honest (and not for the faint-hearted!), revealing far more of the inner man than most of us perhaps choose to reveal.

‘Extracts from a Diary’ is a meditation on the poet’s mortality, written in hospital where he knows that

"The obituaries will tell those who read them a few partial truths"

But then we follow him on a slow recovery in ‘Walking Along New Road’, tucked away in this corner of East Sussex where our knowledge of the location is an added bonus for the local reader. And similarly there is a lovely sequence of poems about the Romney Marshes, including ‘Chorus’ which begins,

"Sing we our songs of the Romney marshlands

compost & leaf mould, silt, shingle & sand"

Interspersed through the collection are love poems for Ann, including ‘An Old Man & His Wife’ and ‘Song of the Sparrows’, written during lockdown ‘in the plague year, 2020’ which ends,

"I turn to you, as always, love,

who feeds the birds and knows each name;

we’re both aware what waits for us,

but tend the garden, just the same."

There is a poignant ‘Song for the Grandchildren’ that beautifully captures the fleetingness of childhood with its joyful, spontaneous play. And a poem ‘For My Dead Brother’ after the famous Catullus 101 (‘Atque in perpetuam, frater, ave atque vale’) that ends,

"I face the fact: I too must die

so greet you now: my last goodbye."

And there are many loving tributes in memory of old friends. So this is a collection that is wide-ranging in its geographical scope, but that is ultimately a tribute to the places where Jonty has lived and to all the people with whom he has shared his long and interesting life.

Rosie Irvine

Signed copies of Still Further can be obtained from Jonty. Please send a cheque for £7.50 (p&p inc) plus your postal address to him at Apple Yard Cottage, Mill Lane, Northiam, RYE, TN31 4JU

"In Time" by Douglas Reid Skinner: Literary Society Zoom Meeting 18 June 2021

 The Lit. Soc were pleased to welcome once again a man dubbed the poets’ poet, the well-travelled South African, Douglas Reid Skinner, whose vigorous audience engagement and sonorous recitations on his previous visit are still warmly remembered.  Would Zoom critically diminish that force field of personal magnetism?  The title In Time was to cover a miscellany of themes from his own oeuvre. He set the stage with musings on his collection The House in Pella District published in 1985.  Pella, a small village in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province, sits amid a landscape of desolate beauty and is deeply rooted in the past.  The Bushmen, very much yesterday’s men,  still live there along side modern, commercial mining interests who drill ever deeper into the area’s rich geological past in pursuit of minerals and semi-precious stones.  Ostensibly following in  the tracks of 18^th century explorers, Skinner is aware he is stalking himself.  He visits his birthplace, Upington, the fertility of whose farms’ soil benefits from the rich, alluvial silt of the Orange River.  After going to the hospital in which he was born, he recounts in The Visit his return to his now dilapidated and abandoned childhood home.  Approaching it in remorseless heat which melts the tar on the road, he studies the photo held in the palm of his hand;

it shows two people smiling at a child

at play on blankets spread beneath the trees 

the world seems made of found and fallen things.

    This was the first place where he lived.      

Having started on childhood, families and memory, Skinner  continued unpacking the theme of time in the 1980s by studying the ancient geology of the Cape with stone functioning as a book whose pages were the layers of botanical history i.e. deep time.  A complementary objective in this endeavour was the constant search for self, for a new vision emerging from the weighty complexity of the past.  The speaker admitted to conscious imitation of the Leakeys in Kenya and Richard’s transition from safari ranger to palaeontologist.  The poem On Time records how the hiatus created by an hour’s wait for a train presents the opportunity to study the raw, elemental geology of Glencoe during its first winter snowfall, after a short crow’s flight into a fast fading past  from his softer, coastal lunch stop.  The glacial pace of change in the surrounding rock formations contrasts sharply with a hawk striking ,,,,the hawk that suddenly falls down gravity’s steep wall.   Heaven was inspired by an exploration of Western Cape with a friend where they encountered more extraordinary rock formations on a particularly memorable stretch to Cape Point.  It was encouraging to learn of Hieronymus Bosch’s belief that death was not a prerequisite for admission to Heaven and to hear of the heritage left by the area’s Huguenot pioneers, who must have found the wine industry they established at Franschhoek mitigated the austerity of their Calvinism.   

An inveterate globetrotter, 1979 found Douglas in a tribe for whom stoned had an entirely different meaning as he commuted to work in a New York clearing bank via   the Staten Island ferry, but even adrift on a sea of financialised froth his Muse did not desert him as his moving rendition of December, New York Bay neatly illustrated. Heading West, a visit to Point Reyes National Park north of San Francisco, inspired Blue Dragon Flies  which had the poet ruminating on time frames of a completely different scale, of perennial fertility cycles and the budding of the notion that each thing has its own time.  

Even with the filter of Zoom in place, the music of our speaker’s finely measured lines and the X-ray clarity of his gaze still won over the audience while his thought provoking material provided plenty of philosophical biltong to chew over long afterwards.

 William Doherty