Poet of the Week – 18: Adrian Blamires

TWO RIVERS PRESS POET OF THE WEEK—18: ADRIAN BLAMIRES

Adrian Blamires was born in Cornwall in 1964, near the Culdrose naval base where his father was stationed with the Fleet Air Arm. He spent his first ten years in various towns in the south of England before a move north to Lancashire. He now lives in Reading with his wife and son. His main career has been as an English teacher in sixth form colleges; he currently works at The Henley College. In 2017 he completed a PhD in Renaissance drama at the University of Reading, where he also taught on the English and Creative Writing programmes. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Effect of Coastal Processes (2005) and The Pang Valley (2010), both from Two Rivers Press. Eliza’s Entertainments, a Tudor-themed pamphlet produced in collaboration with the artist, Robert Fitzmaurice, was published in 2015.

Adrian Blamires writes:

My mum recently discovered a poem I wrote when I was about ten years old, a rhyming squib on the school Sports Day. I have no recollection of it and haven’t yet been reacquainted with anything other than an unfortunate line about ‘girls’ behinds’ which amused my mum. This poem pre-dates by two or three years my earliest memory of actually writing a poem, a homework task I found excruciating, having nothing to say and no facility for saying it. In the end I decided, for no good reason, to describe a floating bubble. I wrote in free verse – I’d evidently been told that poems don’t have to rhyme – and produced several lines of ‘waft’ and ‘iridescence’ before ending with the word ‘POP!’ in capital letters. It prompted a succinct critique in red biro: 6/10. Sad.

I’m intrigued by my mother’s discovery because most of the poems I’ve written as an adult rhyme. I don’t have any ‘new formalist’ agenda, no sense that rhyme is integral to poetry; I simply struggle (still) to write in free verse. No spire without a scaffold. Out of the initiatory babble and doodle (Northrop Frye’s terms) it’s nearly always a rhyme which catches my ear, my eye, and about which a poem starts to take shape. It’s a choice of instrument, I guess – a period-instrument, perhaps, but one that I hope still lends itself to lyricism in the here and now.

Juvenilia might be on my mind because I’m starting to write poems again after several fallow years. Intensive farming leaches the land, of course, and I’ve been happy enough to wander uncultivated fields, admiring lady’s smock and milk-thistle, only occasionally visiting those marshy spots where old, failed poems despondently lie. But after this phase of mental rewilding, I’m learning anew the pleasure of planting, and even trying out different ways of doing things. Almost inevitably though, the first few shoots have leaves that rhyme.

INTRODUCTION TO VIRGIL

in memory of Gerry Nussbaum

As Gerry read from The Aeneid, Book VI,
His quick fingers hesitated over the braille
(The skiff yet to leave the margins of the Styx),
Having sensed a shift in the lecture theatre,
Always alert to a flaw, a faltering metre.
All eyes followed a paper plane’s slow trail.
Someone stifled a laugh. I still feel the smart,
Each time it descends, that poison-tipped dart.

There’s something more I summon from that hour,
As he continued with his passage – And this is how
It sounds in Latin – a conjuring of vatic power,
The changed voice, an ancient otherworldly boom,
A sonorous authority that held the room:
Virgil himself presenting a shield, a golden bough,
To the boy from Köln, eight years old, whose eyesight fades,
Passing through a throng of six million shades.

[From The Pang Valley]

OS EXPLORER DRESS

Her degree-show dress,
…….never-before-worn,
…was based on a map
……….of where she was born.

Green-sewn woodlands,
…….streams of blue thread,
…a permitted bridleway
……….in long-stitch red.

‘I was christened here
…….by the River Frome.’
…A church with a spire
……….in the contoured combe.

[uncollected]