Description
Book SynopsisEvoking childhood memories and lifelong relationships with humour, poignancy, and preternatural clarity, What Possessed Me also explores the natural world and landscapes in various parts of England, Wales, France, and Greece. Another theme is the work of teaching and other professions seen from the vantage points of provider, recipient, and witness. There are salutes to writers like Edward Thomas, Dannie Abse and Jack Gilbert who, we are told, 'put his life into poetry.' Separate sequences celebrate years of occasional visits to Llandaff Cathedral and its surrounding landscape, and the delights and political revelations of a stay in Athens. This is a book diverse in its moods and subjects but unified by an infectious openness to the moment and to life's joys and sorrows, and an unfolding sense of accumulating experience and insight. It is illuminated by a recurrent sense of inspiration, of 'what possessed me.'
Table of ContentsI Me and the Gatepost Interior With Red Linoleum Making A Meal Of It Poupard's Chiffchaff Eliminating the Diphthong What Possessed Me Friend of Truth My Grandfather's Hat Goodbye, House Brought to Mind The Bluebell Leaves Peasant Girl Hanging Clothes to Dry New Year's Eva In Apple Blossom Time Botham's Ashes A Man I used to Know Message to a Priest It Was Us The Exchange by the Stile My Father Swimming II Swallows Wimpole Hall Sunset on the River A Walk at Mawgan Porth To Southerndown and Back Blackbird and Magpies Summer Solstice, Cornwall Gulls Playing Sea Air Gardener's Friend What we Have in Late November November Christmas Journey of the Magi Ice Cream On A Beach Space Travellers Don's Present The Pond in the Fields Of Chalk and Gold A First Visit to Steep May Morning in Trerhyngyll Multiverse on the Seine The High Garonne Churches in Toulouse Morning in the Parc Lefevre Biometric III Flowers in a Terracotta Vase Woodwork Lesson Casting the Poem On the Field of Battle The Nest on the Ledge The Mug in the Common Room Giving Up The Keys The Real Thing The Gold Band A Good Home Phil Says Prisoners Witness Dannie The Land Has Its Say Letter to Jack Gilbert The Last Hamlet of Words IV: Visons of Llandaff 1: Words Inside a Birthday Card 2: A Lost View 3: Visions of Llandaff V: Attic Interlude 1: Homage To Clio 2: Finding Our Way 3: The Erechtheion 4: The Changing Of The Guard 5: Good Faith In Athens 6: Vision On the Muses' Hill 7: The Temple of Hephaestus 8: Selfie As An Ancient Ruin 9: What We Shall Take With Us 10: Fly Away Home
