“the rocketing wind will blow…
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
Rage shattered waters kick
Dylan Thomas
Nature that once impelled past poets
to scratch and scribe the Wordsworthian way
is pock-pock-pock* apocalyptic versed.
Yet eco-poetry's just one strand
for there's Heaney, Hughes and Mackay Brown
Oliver too with a naturalist's knack
they drip impressions on the page
spattering simile, cooking up smells
pungent, rank, festering, foul
sweetness of rain, fresh fallen flower.
Intently they whaam! their readers
with visions, in tones much more graphic
than mere imitation. For Oliver hears
in a Halcyon's flash, pure happiness splash
and Heaney slobbers in frogspawn clots,
dreads the fearsome slap and plops.
There's a gale of psalms, a tumult of rooves
when Mackay Brown's father passed that day
whilst battle-shouts, death-cries sound around Hughes
there amongst the dragonflies
- title from Pliny’s poesia tacens, pictura loquens (‘painting is mute poetry, poetry a talking picture’),
- epigraph from “Poem on his birthday” -Dylan Thomas – that audio-visual master of poetry!
- pock-pock – Mary Oliver’s onomatopoeic oak trees flinging their fruit into pockets of earth in “Fall” –
- halcyon is a kingfisher – from old Roman
- poems cited: Mary Oliver ‘The Kingfisher’; Seamus Heaney ‘Death of a naturalist’; George Mackay Brown ‘Hamnavoe’; Ted Hughes ‘To paint a water-lily’
For Bjorn’s MTB prompt: Meet the bar soundly with Onomatopoeia, we are sounding out our poetry with such words and here I’ve considered how much sound there is in poetry and how even the mimicry of onomatopoeia can be, and has been used imaginatively
PoetryPix 