PALMA LUNA

From the terrace of this hotel on a hill,

We see it appear behind the cathedral

Like some new crimson planet:

The Blood Moon.

Over the tall white masts of the rich

In the bay, late bathers on the beach

And Lycra-bikers riding home,

Fading soon

To pink, then gold, then ordinary silver

As the firework foliage blackens over

And the green mountains darken,

A full moon

Robed in rags and ribbons of cloudy grey,

Rises as night again recaptures the day,

Leaving the last traces of a Blood

Moon now gone.

(2015)

We were having a drink one evening in the bar of our hotel, where we were on holiday in Palma, Majorca, when we gradually became aware of a man taking pictures at a doorway. Looking out from the window, we suddenly became aware of this huge, red moon rising over the harbour. I took the picture above on Lisa's camera, but by the time I'd raced up in the lift to our room to collect my own camera, the moon had lost much of its colour. Such moons are comparatively rare and a few months later I missed another on a clear night back home in Leicester. Oh, well...

EDWARD HOPPER (1882-1967)

Blink and you could miss them:

The detached clapperboard houses

By the rail tracks, the lighthouses,

An occasional blue flash of sea,

The sunlit meadows and rooftops,

Gas stations and lonely roads,

The drug-stores and diners,

Theatres, offices and hotel rooms

Where figures gaze into space or read.

You glimpse them caught between

The shadows and light that fall

In an implacable geometry

Around the heavy angles

Of half-shuttered windows,

And empty sunbeaten streets.

And the women on beds and balconies:

You will note them there, waiting

In various states of dress and undress,

In doorways, at windows and on trains,

Where the light finds them out,

But you can only guess at their stories.

The skies are always bright and blue

In a world forever poised and dreaming;

Except for a rare breeze on a curtain,

Stillness presides over everything,

Inside and outside, in town and country,

And a certain echoing silence prevails,

Whilst the deep woodlands wait

At the edge of everyday things,

Dark and patient and mysterious.

(2012)

Inspired by a visit to a Hopper exhibition at the London Tate Gallery. As with all of these poems about painters, it was hard to settle on a single image to go with the text, there being so many that I like. This one is called 'Cape Cod Morning'.

VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853-90)

See the painter on his way to work al fresco,

Toting bags with an easel under his arm,

His straw hat gold as the cobbled road in sunlight,

And that dark, constant companion, his shadow.

He passes the peasants reaping or sowing in fields,

Bent dark over their tools from daybreak to sunset

Before finding his place and the day’s way to work.

When his feet stop walking, his hands start to paint,

For it is his way to work, work, work:

Presto, stroke, dab, smear, swirl, impasto,

In perpetual motion at one with his eye;

Work, work, work and the pictures come:

Presto, stroke, dab, smear, swirl, impasto,

As the world rolls and turns around him,

The wheat and clouds and windmills,

Rocks and trees and furrows

Radiate through sunlight to twilight,

Past long shadows and low crows

Whose black wings bring the storm

Into the world’s changing form,

Through moonlight to starlight,

Dusk to dawnlight.

(2012)

The painting above is called 'The Painter On His Way To Work'. Like its creator, it came to an unfortunate end, being destroyed in a fire during World War 2. it was the main inspiration for the poem although I'd always wanted to write one about Van Gogh since visiting  the Amsterdam gallery where so many of his works are on show.

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912-56)

Jack The Dripper, doomed Action Man of the art world,

Prances around the canvas-covered floor of his barn

In a trance of creativity, here a flick, there a flick,

The colours dance beyond beginning or ending

In paintings where the centre simply will not hold.

Lost in the image, the painter dances out his dream

As the pattern revolves and advances below his feet,

Gliding where the chances and mischances lead him

Through new land and seascapes into a changed world.

(2012)

Without ever having been a fan as such, I suddenly and briefly became fascinated with the originality and limitations of his method. This poem quickly led me on to two others about painters with whom I was more familiar and fond of. But oddly, it took Pollock to get me going and soon Van Gogh and Hopper had arrived. A couple of years later Turner, Dore, Magritte and Keifer similarly all turned up in a bunch.

LUCERNE

Through the meandering afternoon park  

That trickles by the river and boatyards

Down to the lovely, illustrious lake,

Passing statues, jetties and picnickers,

Sleepers, children’s playgrounds and a juggler,

We amble along shaded sylvan paths

Until, after a warm but well-spent hour,

We reach a white mansion with green shutters.

The Wagner House at Tribschen stands august,

Raised on a landscaped mound overlooking

A wooden boathouse, shrubs and cypresses

With red seats of readers and view-finders.

A single white sailboat drifts lazily

Through gaps in the tall trees by the lakeside,

Barely rippling the tranquil blue water, 

As it floats from one frame to another,

Foregrounding the green forests and white clouds

Which crest the blue Alps, clear in the distance,

As sunlight catches the meadow flowers

Sloping down away from the flawless lawn.

Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll here -

And an idyllic place, it truly is,   

But then we remember what a fascist  

The old, long gone genius was at heart…

Before we leave, we decide, however,  

To trust - rather than the artist - the art.

We depart by way of an outbuilding

That houses an ultra-modern toilet,

All clean stainless steel with push button seat

And whirlpool flush. On the wall, a small hole

Opens a chute, above which a graphic

Of a syringe minds us that the word ‘idyll’

Means idealized, unsustainable…

Then we slowly walk back out of this world

To the world of inconvenient fact,

But with our digital pictures intact.

(2014)

This came out of our first visit to Switzerland. England has become a country cursed by graffiti and litter, with my hometown of Leicester an increasingly bad example. Zurich and Lucerne, by way of contrast, were spotless but, even there, amidst so much apparent perfection, little flaws would appear at the edge of your memory and vision…

KEIFER (1945-)

Born into a blitzed Fatherland,

He grows with a restless intellect full

Of Goethe, Wagner and Nietzsche,

Agitating at the edges of national amnesia,

Sieg heiling Hitler and the Holocaust

Out of the bunker and back into the landscape;

Reclaiming and reminding Germany to remember.

‘We don’t why we are here and we don’t know

Where we go’ becomes his mantra;

The cosmic cycle of construction and destruction

His method and obsession, his mania.

His colours are black, brown and grey,

With a flash of silver and gold, a splash of red;

His materials ash, concrete, paint, straw and lead.

His process is damp, rust and decay

With the petrified flowers sprouting

Through the wreckage of his work

Echoing Nature’s ongoing reclamation.

In France, he raises up ruins

Over some two hundred acres

Like some twisted Portmeirion;

A concentration of towers and tunnels

Barracks and ovens and batteries;

Strip-lit interiors with only occasional

Daylight leaking through cracks

Into corners and on to rubble.

Elsewhere, in another French studio

Housed in a massive warehouse,

The artist directs his artisans

With their power-tools and hydraulics

In the setting out of his installations

And their disassembling and reassembling;

Lifting the vast paintings on rollers

Aboard trucks and planes and ships

And into the galleries of the world.

And Keifer hacks away at the pictures,

Sometimes stacking them like the strata

Of his own personal geology,

Saving and cataloguing every last scrap

In his great library of debris and leftovers,

With his hoards of multifarious crap

In yards of industrial containers,

Waiting for him to work his alchemy.

Nothing ever finished –

Until it is sold and turned into gold.

(2015)

I'd never heard of Keifer until I saw a TV documentary which fascinated me sufficiently to jot down some notes at the time. It was, however, the best part of a year before the notes became the basis for this poem - another of the group about artists which all arrived within a few days in what had been an otherwise rather fallow year for poetry. 

The photo is of one of his stacks of  past canvases - alluded to in Verse 4 - which were installed as a work in themselves for an exhibition. Also evident are the 'petrified flowers' mentioned  at the end of Verse 2.

MAGRITTE (1898-1967)

 Heads are shrouded like funeral urns,

A bowl of fruit becomes monumental,

Set in stone, as does a Stonehenge chair.

And pictures live within pictures, you see,

Anchored here by a cannonball

Or by a tuba which burns over there;

Another shatters as glass into shards of sky

And the sky recurs and recurs,

In an eyeball, in a tree, in a doorway, in a bird.

A woman in a forest, stately on horseback,

Moves through the lines, becomes one with a tree.

Seashores too, are everywhere -

On one lies a mermaid in reverse

And, out at sea, a schooner grows out of sea.

And you see the apple, the fish, the blood and the pipe.

 Over there it is raining umbrellas;

Here, men in bowler hats pour down.

You think this might be a joke –

An illusion or gimmick, perhaps,

But somehow you seem to know

This is not a hype.

Owls and doves grow as plants

On scenic mountain tops by a lake.

Trees of a single, gigantic leaf bloom,

A bird is turning into a flying bouquet

And a boulder floats beneath a sickle moon.

Look here: the artist is painting his reflection

Reversed in a wonderland looking glass

And photographing himself at the easel

As he paints himself again and again and again.

 Watch here as he paints Georgette into flesh;

There, another woman stands on a beach

Before a sky of bathroom tiles,

Lowering a robe with one hand,

Cupping a pebbled nipple in the other

As she turns her pearled neck

To lick the curve of a shoulder.

Elsewhere, other breasts and pudenda

Glow through otherwise disembodied gowns

And, in portraits, replace eyes and mouths.

Then a candle ejaculates flame

And wax in a dark nest of eggs.

And, sooner or later,

The head on your shoulders

Will burst into a radiant sphere.

 Now, see here:

In the desert beyond,

Lies the alabaster tomb

Beneath a day burning down.

The train pulls steaming into the fireplace

And a lion sits sphinx-like on a bridge

Where the man in a winged tuxedo

Leans patiently over the parapet.

Outside the house, a lamp is lit under a tree,

Is reflected in a pool left by rain.

And upstairs windows shine out

As night rises under a bright blue sky.

Unreflected, clouds and shadows gather.

Inside, Madame’s coffin reclines elegantly

On the chaise longue by the candelabra,

The hem of her dress hanging like a shroud.

(2015) 

Another of the flurry of poems about painters that came in the late summer of 2015. Since finishing this one, I've realised that I must have imagined a Magritte picture of raining umbrellas as mentioned in the second verse, because I can find no trace of such an image anywhere. I am, however, leaving it in the poem - in the interests of Surrealism, you understand. The picture is on of several from the early 1930s which Magritte - with typical inscrutability - titled 'The Human Condition',

GUSTAVE DORE` (1832-83)

No commission daunted him:

No book too long, no poem too epic,

No fairy tale or nursery rhyme

Too slight for his illustration,

No metropolis too sprawling

For him to work on to canvas

And into wood, with no time to waste

Or marry or move away from mother.

Yet drawn to nomads like Quixote,

The Ancient Mariner and The Wandering Jew.

Oblivious to Impressionism,

His formalism disguising

The speed of that deft precision,

As quick and free as any other.

And no multitude too many:

Under his hand, heavens and hells grew:

Metaphorical, spiritual and geographical,

Out of the Bible, out of Dante

Out of Milton and out of London.

Yet still he would draw for the journals

And though he later worked with stone

As well as paint, drawing was his love:

What had made him le gamin de genie;

So prodigious, prolific and prompt,

The pictures teeming out of him,

Making their own monochrome multitude.

(2015)

 I taught Coleridge's The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (from which the above illustration comes) at A' Level and was also familiar with The London Of Gustave Dore` book - but these, of course, were merely the tip of the iceberg. This was another which came in a rush after waiting many years to be written.