‘The closely recorded detail of the natural world is allowed to speak for itself, until it achieves an extraordinary level of ecstatic celebration of love and nature.’
Jo Shapcott
‘The build-up of events, and the poem's denouement, so well achieved, owes much to the poet's sense of the dramatic, and her close, sympathetic observation of life in another culture… a formidable poem.’
Penelope Shuttle
‘The details carry a vivid, sensual, almost erotic charge, the whole poem being life-enhancing as well as saying something in its subtext about the momentous nature of chance meetings.’
Keith Chandler
When it came to finding contributors to a series of poetry evenings called Say the Word at Idea Store Bow, Caroline was an obvious choice. She lead one of the sessions, reading a selection of her writing in a voice that is measured and musical. She writes with great insight of events from her own life in verse so clean it makes your mouth tingle. Lovely stuff.'
Barbara Stretch, Idea Store, Bow, East London
My collection, Yes, published by Hawthorn Press, won the award for the best poetry book in the East Anglian Book Awards in October 2010. Vaila Revels, the first poem, below, is taken from that book, and is one of a group about the Shetland Isles. The second poem, Young Samuel Pepys, won the Poetry-next-the-Sea competition in May 2011, and will appear in my new collection to be published in September 2012.
On February 28th at 8.00 pm I’ll be reading for Wivenhoe Poets, and am much looking forward to heading off to Essex. The reading will be held at the Royal British Legion Wivenhoe. www.poetrywivenhoe.org gives more information.
I’ve done readings at Poetry-next-the-Sea, Welborne Arts Festival, Sudbury Café Poets, Lancaster LitFest, Speakeasy Poetry and Music club, and Norwich CafeWriters, among others. If you’d like to invite me to read at an event, please contact me.
We chugged round Vaila’s waist
looking down through the lace
of her petticoats, at crags
jewelled with silverish sprats,
trailing ribbons of green and brown.
At the prow stood
your patron with breasts of oak,
speaking tin-tacks
and nails. Sun entered our mouths;
bedded down in our hair. Your hand
warmed the small of my back.
Later, Vaila roared feverish rage,
rent clouds, spread their innards over the sky,
concealing a cowering sun.
In spit-spatters we crossed the seething voe,
then boarded a landrover
that shook our bones until their marrow was sore.
All day rain slapped at us
like a wet towel. In Fetlar cove
sad-eyed seals bobbed welcome
from a sea that steamed like broth.
Yet, returning, we found Vaila’s fever
had died to a sneeze. In our
lemon room we undressed, cradled
shoulder-blades in palms, pulling
chill from those shaking wings.
Beside our croft the big house hummed.
Sorting the huge gilt bowls your patron
planned her revels, placing you up
in the minstrels’ gallery, your straw hair brushed
into a jester’s crest. And when a breeze
crept under our door with her
weasel plans in its mouth, I stirred.
Outside, dusk hovered like a bird.
Young Samuel Pepys
He scrambled on to the Thursday carrier at Cripplegate,
the horses shaking their bridles, snorting strings of warm phlegm.
A whip crack and a click from the driver’s tongue started the team
on the plod through Kingsland village and up the long rise
to the scuffed towns of Enfield and Ware, through ruts and bogs,
sucks and splashes, along a muddy Roman road
the auxilia built while centurions yelled orders and shivered,
homesick for a sun that licks you clean as a new coin.
Beside Pepys’ seat on the creaking coach, dabchicks
split the surface of pond after pond crowned in veils of gnats
until, two days later, Sam reached the ditches of black soil fens
patrolled by swans. At Huntingdon he slid down from his hard seat
and walked through gold-pennied water meadows to a house
overlooking the Ouse. In the grammar school the hot breath
of the forum blew through his hair, as Cicero defended
decrepit Rabirius, and Horace advised dawdlers to carpe diem.
He was beaten if he gossiped or brawled in English: only
the stiff declensions and conjugations of Latin were allowed.
The language grew in him like winter wheat. It sprouted, seeded,
bore tough, floury grain that would sustain him year on year,
while in his diary he would lift the skirts of English, enjoying the salt
taste on his fingertips, the codes and curls drawn in slippery ink.
Caroline Gilfillan