It's that time again. A lot has happened in Frynwys since the last installment, although in Frynwys terms "a lot" is often what other towns and cities would call "nothing much". This time around there is more news from across the village; at the ponds, on the roads, in the fields and not too far beyond.
The first thing of note is the sudden increase in the number of people repairing fences in the area. This in itself isn't uncommon; homes need maintenance all the time and so to hear someone repairing a bit of woodwork in their garden isn't a strange occurrence. However it's become such a regular occurrence that I'm beginning to wonder if there's a club somewhere encouraging it. Is there a local group which organises Sunday afternoon meetings in someone's front room, filled with china-laden cupboards and linen-clothed tables? This isn't so much a news item as it a personal grievance, but if I hear another hammer hitting the back of a fence or a shed, I might have to start investigating this phenomenon further.
In other news of the slightly less infuriating variety, it appears that someone did not take the nature warden's warning about releasing fish into the pond seriously. Somebody in the village recently noticed up to thirty enormous goldfish swimming around in it, big enough to qualify as small koi carp. The last time this happened the local wildlife which inhabit the pond took a major blow, especially the frogs which use the pond to nurture their frogspawn. That was just a few small fish. After about a week it seems that these fish are not only thriving in the pond, but multiplying. I don't know if the wardens have spotted them yet, but I've spoken to a few people who live near the pond and they certainly have. What sort of measures the wardens will put in place this time remains to be seen, but if they put up another sign I suspect they might need to rethink their deterrence strategy.
With regards to the local animal population, a few new dogs have been spotted in the area. Not strays but dogs with owners attached, and in particular a black pug has caught my attention. He appears to be less than a year old, and is quite hyperactive from what I've seen of him. He runs around the fields to the south of the village in search of other friendly dogs. Most of the other dogs take little notice of him, but if he meets another puppy then an impromptu greyhound race will certainly take place. He's only run up to me once, and I haven't seen much of him since, but hopefully I'll catch sight of him again in the near future.
And last but by no means least, it appears that a few ravens are making their home in the nearby forests. It's not often that you see a raven (at least as I've found), and they're fairly distinctive compared to jackdaws and crows, not by any subtle difference in their plumage, but in their size. They are as big as seagulls, and seeing them foraging in the fields next to smaller birds really highlights this. Also the characteristic rattling call they make is now becoming a semi-regular feature in the skies above Frynwys. Why I never noticed them before is slightly baffling, but alongside the resident jays, crows, jackdaws, magpies and other birds, they make a nice addition to the local ecosystem.
That's all for this installment of Frynwys Features, with my home village more than living up to its reputation. Hopefully by next time something more interesting will have happened, but until then the wait continues.
Sunday, 1 October 2017
Thursday, 28 September 2017
Happy National Poetry Day!
Hi guys. So it's National Poetry Day once again, and to mark it this year I haven't got much in the way of poetry. At the moment I'm still working on getting the next installment of Frynwys Features and the first installment of Slam Poetry on the Spot finished. Hopefully those will be with you within the next week. However, I can't really mark today without something made of verse, so here's a short poem about that most universal of subjects, a mole trying to find his way home.
Underground Junction
A mole burrows home,
side to side like a hairy lizard.
He approaches a junction,
dank soil and worms.
Light is unknown to him,
whiskers are his guide.
They hit a worm on the left,
chilled soil on the right.
The mole scurries down the left tunnel,
the promise of a banquet awaits.
Underground Junction
A mole burrows home,
side to side like a hairy lizard.
He approaches a junction,
dank soil and worms.
Light is unknown to him,
whiskers are his guide.
They hit a worm on the left,
chilled soil on the right.
The mole scurries down the left tunnel,
the promise of a banquet awaits.
Friday, 22 September 2017
Wildfowl
On a Wednesday, bleak and drizzly,
the pond surface hardly sizzly,
ducks dabble and watch as the world
goes by with the speed of a snail.
Not a single thing disturbs them,
yet the dawn of night rouses them
to prepare for the evening's rave,
for the evening's great pond rave,
a rave all the wildfowl crave.
They line the waters in their droves,
led by the Mute Swan Club of Stow,
with geese, grebes and moorhens galore.
A moulting mallard emerges from reeds
to begin his set intended to please
birds from Cardiff to Tennessee
who gather near the shallow shore
to hear what tunes the duck has in store,
sounds not heard on the pond before.
The mixer rises from the depths
where the sticklebacks would have slept
had it not been a Wednesday night.
Distorted honking and quacking,
with feathers ruffled and scratching,
the rave rages and rages all night
'till the return of the sunlight
and all the wildfowl take flight.
the pond surface hardly sizzly,
ducks dabble and watch as the world
goes by with the speed of a snail.
Not a single thing disturbs them,
yet the dawn of night rouses them
to prepare for the evening's rave,
for the evening's great pond rave,
a rave all the wildfowl crave.
They line the waters in their droves,
led by the Mute Swan Club of Stow,
with geese, grebes and moorhens galore.
A moulting mallard emerges from reeds
to begin his set intended to please
birds from Cardiff to Tennessee
who gather near the shallow shore
to hear what tunes the duck has in store,
sounds not heard on the pond before.
The mixer rises from the depths
where the sticklebacks would have slept
had it not been a Wednesday night.
Distorted honking and quacking,
with feathers ruffled and scratching,
the rave rages and rages all night
'till the return of the sunlight
and all the wildfowl take flight.
Monday, 18 September 2017
Opening Doors
Just two quid on the counter.
The key to elusive peace
and eternal happiness.
One pint please.
Beyond the gates of heaven
the rivers flow down the steps,
and you can swim in them forever.
Two pints please.
Armour forms around the feet and arms
as the fire erupts in the bowels.
The walls high, stout, unassailable.
Flames melt the stone into a broth,
the fire becomes an inferno.
The rigours of the day
melt on sight when the king
sits half-on-half-off his throne.
A golden glass is his sceptre,
white froth forms his dripping crown.
Not so much riding as staggering into town,
throwing the gates open, claiming them
as his own.
Bouncers descend on his grace,
the king of the world never backs down.
He ends it face down on the concrete,
his liquor spilling from his can
into the cold gutter underfoot.
The fire burns out,
leaves its cinders behind.
They smoulder in the morning
and the world goes up and down.
The key to elusive peace
and eternal happiness.
One pint please.
Beyond the gates of heaven
the rivers flow down the steps,
and you can swim in them forever.
Two pints please.
Armour forms around the feet and arms
as the fire erupts in the bowels.
The walls high, stout, unassailable.
Flames melt the stone into a broth,
the fire becomes an inferno.
The rigours of the day
melt on sight when the king
sits half-on-half-off his throne.
A golden glass is his sceptre,
white froth forms his dripping crown.
Not so much riding as staggering into town,
throwing the gates open, claiming them
as his own.
Bouncers descend on his grace,
the king of the world never backs down.
He ends it face down on the concrete,
his liquor spilling from his can
into the cold gutter underfoot.
The fire burns out,
leaves its cinders behind.
They smoulder in the morning
and the world goes up and down.
Monday, 28 August 2017
Therizinosaurus
'Scythe Lizard'
Twenty eight inch claws on enormous hands
dug up from the depths of the Gobi sands.
Flat, thin, like blades swung through fields of hay,
yet the beast they belonged to had no name.
A turtle perhaps would have need of these
claws to help sate its hunger for seaweed,
such a thing never seen on the earth before,
bigger than leatherbacks laying eggs ashore.
Then the arms emerged, as long as pythons,
what beast used them was undecided on.
Such weapons swordsmiths would envy,
such a brute would cause panic on entry.
Yet its teeth held a contradiction,
they proved the creature's valediction.
Not raptor knives like most expected,
but leaf-shaped pegs had the record corrected.
The neck of a swan, with a small deer-like head,
a pot-belly with the girth of a bulkhead,
and the scythes on its hands preceded it,
shredding leaves off branches in front of it.
Such was the nature of the strangest dinosaur,
an eccentric herbivore disguised as a carnivore.
Twenty eight inch claws on enormous hands
dug up from the depths of the Gobi sands.
Flat, thin, like blades swung through fields of hay,
yet the beast they belonged to had no name.
A turtle perhaps would have need of these
claws to help sate its hunger for seaweed,
such a thing never seen on the earth before,
bigger than leatherbacks laying eggs ashore.
Then the arms emerged, as long as pythons,
what beast used them was undecided on.
Such weapons swordsmiths would envy,
such a brute would cause panic on entry.
Yet its teeth held a contradiction,
they proved the creature's valediction.
Not raptor knives like most expected,
but leaf-shaped pegs had the record corrected.
The neck of a swan, with a small deer-like head,
a pot-belly with the girth of a bulkhead,
and the scythes on its hands preceded it,
shredding leaves off branches in front of it.
Such was the nature of the strangest dinosaur,
an eccentric herbivore disguised as a carnivore.
Tuesday, 15 August 2017
Ballad of the Coffee Bandits
There was a shop on the old town road
which sold nothing but coffee,
and many came to stop and behold
the wonders of cups of caffeine.
All that is except two cleaners,
tea drinkers through and through.
They both loathed all things coffee
and what its drinkers aspired to.
That coffee could eliminate falsehoods,
cure poverty and war,
that it held the font of all things good,
was what coffee stood for.
And so the tea maestros simmered,
their anger just about restrained
until some friends invited them to coffee
and they laughed through their pain.
So they went down to the coffee shop,
and raised it to the ground.
They fled with every bean in the place,
gone, never to be found.
which sold nothing but coffee,
and many came to stop and behold
the wonders of cups of caffeine.
All that is except two cleaners,
tea drinkers through and through.
They both loathed all things coffee
and what its drinkers aspired to.
That coffee could eliminate falsehoods,
cure poverty and war,
that it held the font of all things good,
was what coffee stood for.
And so the tea maestros simmered,
their anger just about restrained
until some friends invited them to coffee
and they laughed through their pain.
So they went down to the coffee shop,
and raised it to the ground.
They fled with every bean in the place,
gone, never to be found.
Saturday, 12 August 2017
The Tiger Poet vs. Owen Sheers - 'Mametz Wood'
For a long time, I've heard it said that Owen Sheers is a bit of a prodigy. He excelled at poetry at a young age, and his skills have only improved over time to the point where he is one of the strongest voices in Welsh poetry. His work tackles a variety of subjects, including love, farming life, landscapes, and the effects of war as demonstrated in his verse drama Pink Mist. For me though, Sheers will prove especially helpful as a source of inspiration in my attempt to tackle Mametz Wood, a defining moment for Welsh soldiers in the First World War.
Sheers is no stranger to Mametz, having written about the battle in verse and staged a play to mark the centenary of the action which took place during the Battle of the Somme. So now, in my own attempt to tackle the subject, let's see what Sheers makes of it in his eponymous poem 'Mametz Wood'. Written in 2005, the poem is comprised of seven tercets with a fairly regular pattern of ten to twelve syllables per line. Without making this sound too much like an A Level English Literature exam, this meter gives 'Mametz Wood' a similar feel to the poems of Shakespeare written in iambic pentameter. This structure gives the poem an almost elegiac feel, and it becomes very effective when it delves into the aftermath of the action at Mametz Wood.
The poem opens with Sheers describing farmers discovering the remains of fallen young soldiers as they plough their fields. The last line of the first stanza is particularly effective as it conjures up images of the devastation inflicted upon the landscape during the war, and conveys the struggle to return to normality for years afterwards. From this Sheers moves into describing the soldiers' remains, delivering some potent imagery by using alliteration, particularly with comparisons to china plate and how a damaged skull resembles a shattered bird's egg. Such remains are still being found at Mametz Wood today, and such discoveries highlight the senseless brutality of war.
The combination of human tragedy, precise metaphor and terrific imagery hammers home the true cost of the battle. Sheers momentarily describes how the Welsh soldiers were ordered to walk towards the wood while facing heavily fortified machine gun positions, conveying an accurate representation of the layout of the battle, before seguing into perhaps the poem's best metaphorical imagery. Here, Sheers describes a land still recovering reminders of what happened, which he compares to a foreign body being dredged up from a wound in human skin.
This one stanza encapsulates the aftermath of the First World War better than any epitaph I've read. Many thousands of soldiers perished or went missing in the chaos of the war, and every now and then skeletons are discovered on the old battlefields across France and Belgium. My own experiences travelling to Ypres in Belgium to visit the Tyne Cot Cemetery and the Menin Gate have given me a clear picture of the sheer scale of the casualties, and the sense of an entire generation being wiped out. While this seems more abstract in poetic form, Sheers gives us a concrete image to exemplify the reality of Mametz Wood.
He describes the discovery of twenty men buried together in a grave, which he describes as something similar to a 'dance macabre', as the skeletons have their arms interlinked. Such vivid imagery, coupled with the rhythmical meter of the poem, evokes paintings of the battle such as the famous one by Christopher Williams, which depict similar scenes of Welsh and German soldiers alike trapped in a strange, horrific death dance. This imagery, although somewhat abstract, conveys an eerie atmosphere, further reinforced in the following stanza, which adds to the previous description by including visceral detail. Sheers describes the remains of the soldiers boots, their skulls and in perhaps the most disturbing image in which he mentions that jaws are dropped open on the soldiers who still possess them.
Having maintained the rhythm and structure of the poem, filled with a balanced mixture of abstract and concrete imagery, with a clear metaphorical line running through it, Sheers ends by finding poignant meaning in the open jaws of the soldiers' skeletons. He posits that it is as if notes sung by the soldiers are only now slipping from their tongues after having been buried for so long. It strikes a beautiful abstract image against the visceral horror of the mass grave. It drives home the tragedy of the First World War in a relatively simple yet effective way, in how the mass slaughter of industrialised warfare destroyed millions of lives and the potential within them.
All in all, it's safe to say that now having analysed 'Mametz Wood' from beginning to end, Sheers more than lives up to his reputation. As a poem encapsulating the battle, it's a terrific piece of work, and there's a lot I can learn from it in my attempt to write my own Mametz Wood poem. If it will be anywhere near as good as Sheers' effort, we shall wait and see, but if you want to read the entirety of Mametz Wood, go and check it out.
Sheers is no stranger to Mametz, having written about the battle in verse and staged a play to mark the centenary of the action which took place during the Battle of the Somme. So now, in my own attempt to tackle the subject, let's see what Sheers makes of it in his eponymous poem 'Mametz Wood'. Written in 2005, the poem is comprised of seven tercets with a fairly regular pattern of ten to twelve syllables per line. Without making this sound too much like an A Level English Literature exam, this meter gives 'Mametz Wood' a similar feel to the poems of Shakespeare written in iambic pentameter. This structure gives the poem an almost elegiac feel, and it becomes very effective when it delves into the aftermath of the action at Mametz Wood.
The poem opens with Sheers describing farmers discovering the remains of fallen young soldiers as they plough their fields. The last line of the first stanza is particularly effective as it conjures up images of the devastation inflicted upon the landscape during the war, and conveys the struggle to return to normality for years afterwards. From this Sheers moves into describing the soldiers' remains, delivering some potent imagery by using alliteration, particularly with comparisons to china plate and how a damaged skull resembles a shattered bird's egg. Such remains are still being found at Mametz Wood today, and such discoveries highlight the senseless brutality of war.
The combination of human tragedy, precise metaphor and terrific imagery hammers home the true cost of the battle. Sheers momentarily describes how the Welsh soldiers were ordered to walk towards the wood while facing heavily fortified machine gun positions, conveying an accurate representation of the layout of the battle, before seguing into perhaps the poem's best metaphorical imagery. Here, Sheers describes a land still recovering reminders of what happened, which he compares to a foreign body being dredged up from a wound in human skin.
This one stanza encapsulates the aftermath of the First World War better than any epitaph I've read. Many thousands of soldiers perished or went missing in the chaos of the war, and every now and then skeletons are discovered on the old battlefields across France and Belgium. My own experiences travelling to Ypres in Belgium to visit the Tyne Cot Cemetery and the Menin Gate have given me a clear picture of the sheer scale of the casualties, and the sense of an entire generation being wiped out. While this seems more abstract in poetic form, Sheers gives us a concrete image to exemplify the reality of Mametz Wood.
He describes the discovery of twenty men buried together in a grave, which he describes as something similar to a 'dance macabre', as the skeletons have their arms interlinked. Such vivid imagery, coupled with the rhythmical meter of the poem, evokes paintings of the battle such as the famous one by Christopher Williams, which depict similar scenes of Welsh and German soldiers alike trapped in a strange, horrific death dance. This imagery, although somewhat abstract, conveys an eerie atmosphere, further reinforced in the following stanza, which adds to the previous description by including visceral detail. Sheers describes the remains of the soldiers boots, their skulls and in perhaps the most disturbing image in which he mentions that jaws are dropped open on the soldiers who still possess them.
Having maintained the rhythm and structure of the poem, filled with a balanced mixture of abstract and concrete imagery, with a clear metaphorical line running through it, Sheers ends by finding poignant meaning in the open jaws of the soldiers' skeletons. He posits that it is as if notes sung by the soldiers are only now slipping from their tongues after having been buried for so long. It strikes a beautiful abstract image against the visceral horror of the mass grave. It drives home the tragedy of the First World War in a relatively simple yet effective way, in how the mass slaughter of industrialised warfare destroyed millions of lives and the potential within them.
All in all, it's safe to say that now having analysed 'Mametz Wood' from beginning to end, Sheers more than lives up to his reputation. As a poem encapsulating the battle, it's a terrific piece of work, and there's a lot I can learn from it in my attempt to write my own Mametz Wood poem. If it will be anywhere near as good as Sheers' effort, we shall wait and see, but if you want to read the entirety of Mametz Wood, go and check it out.
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