Human understanding is a constant quest to impose pattern and form over chaos; this is expressed through McCabe’s rhythmic play with the potentially infinite combinations of the finite: ten figures and twenty-six letters. His skilful permutations transform numbers into flesh. He roots the abstraction of figures into a personal and graspable reality, ‘as a dream put into words,/ a notion put into dogma’.

Divided into three sections - ‘Counters’, ‘Perspectives’ and ‘Zero’, the collection runs the gamut of whole and irrational numbers, twin primes and fractions. It explores the unexpected charm of ciphers, the geometry of the body, John Lennon’s favourite numeral and the illogicality of Chaos. The infinity of a meadow is shown to defeat the men who are attempting to mow it - mockingly inscrutable, zero always appears in the grass. It provides an intimate gallery of poems about historical and anonymous figures, where we encounter such luminaries as Pythagoras, Möbius and Turing; among the unnamed are those who secretly long for the taste of ‘the thinness of 1′, students asked to ‘reinvent/ the computer from first principles’, and the child learning figures through a diverse arrangement of dots that disobediently ‘hatch into commas/ and grow legs to catapult them/ over the next page’.

The final section, ‘Zero’, consists of a single poem devoted to ‘the unnumber’, ‘nameless in its nothingness’. The poetic voice returns to the ‘the primal womb of all things/ before light before life before number’ and zero, that had ‘remained unseeable, uncountable, unacceptable’, is given its names and its forms, then enters into common usage, although retaining a stubbornly elusive nature: ‘appearing then disappearing’. This encapsulates one of the collection’s main leitmotifs: that experience resists absolute categorisation, and that all languages - ciphers and letters, doctrines and beliefs - refuse definite and stable meaning.

This collection of the memorably arcane and the memorably mischievous left me musing on the square root of a bunch of minus five bananas, the longing of the lines of a quadrilateral and the hypnotic powers of nine.

© Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen 2009

For more about Brian McCabe and to purchase ‘Zero’, visit: http://polygon.birlinn.co.uk/author/details/Brian-McCabe-1360/
 
Zero
ISBN:9781846971174
Publication Date: June 2009
Price: £9.99

A man sits at his table i da street,
lifts a haevy iron fae a sunbaked tile.

Lasses crubbit in a rickshaa,
der saris eclipse da bougainvillea.

I da haert o a roondaboot, twartree tents;
women hing oot washin, day laaberers.

A midder traivels wi her bairns, peeriewyes;
a airm o a tree balanced apön her heid.

Anidder with a lod o laeves:
her urban goat has a short tedder.

Bruck bi da roadside is waeled trowe;
recycled bi a stray dog, a antrin coo.

 ****

(Translated into English)

A man sits at his table in the street,
lifts a heavy iron from a tile sunbaked.

A brisk huddle of girls in a rickshaw,
their saris eclipse the bougainvillea.

A few tents in the middle of a roundabout;
women hang out washing, day labourers.

A mother walks with a child, steadies
an arm of a tree on her head.

Another balances a load of leaves:
her urban goat is kept on a short rope.

Garbage on the pavement is recycled
by an evening cow, a cat, a stray dog.

Almost carbon neutral

Shetland 1909

Aye a penny for a Sabbath collar:
da rest o da week, a sark fae da pulley.

Pony an trap maybe, or jöst traivellin;
bairns in bricht gansies - red, yalloo, blue.

A antrin boady bade ootadaeks:
neebirs browt a egg, blaand, butter.

Gyaain hame fae a day at da hill:
blue clods i da kishie, wires fleein.

A maeshie o hay fae da mödow;
milk for da caddies, closs-cringed.

Brucks tae da grice, da hens, da dug;
whit’s unkirsen da maas ‘ll glunsh.

 ****

(Translated into English)

 
Always a penny for a Sabbath collar:
the rest of the week, a shirt from the pulley.

Pony and trap maybe, or just on foot;
children in bright jumpers - red, yellow, blue.

An occasional soul lived beyond the hill dyke:
neighbours brought an egg, whey, butter.

Going home from a day at working peats:
blue clods in the basket, speedy knitting needles.

A load of hay from the meadow;
milk for the orphan lambs, tethered together.

Left-overs for the pig, the hens, the dog;
what’s uneatable the seagulls will scoff.

© Christine de Luca 2009

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Da first notes

A göd paet bank is een                                A göd hoose has
wi deep moor, a third paet                           aroond da door,  
plenty blue at da boddom,                           twartree buffalo
nae horse-fleysh ta speak o,                       for lassi, for mylk
a dry hill for kerryin,                                       an for sharn.  Forbye,
an a loch tae guddle in.                                dey’ll poo da ploo.

Da wye gifts lie aroond wir feet,
maistlins we foryet ta luik.

Finnin da harmony 

Ripper an flayer,                                             Hent aa da sharn,
rhythm o tushkar,                                           tagelia head-high,
pattern o paetbank;                                        mix hit wi strae,
wind wark an sun wark.                                 flatsh da uple;
Raise dem an roug dem,                              lay dem ta dry,
borrow foo, kishie foo,                                   raise dem an roug dem;
hurl dem, rin wi dem,                                     lift dem an kerry dem,
a saeson’s wark half dön.                             a saeson’s wark half dön.

Da wye wark sings i wir blöd,
but we dunna lik hit’s tön.

Makkin da sang

Da wye da steid is set,                                   Da steid set richt, uple biggit,
da waa biggit, clods shöled,                         raa apön raa, dis wye an dat wye,
haert bluest an best,                                       peerie roond biggins, shooder heich,
trim tae da tap; a faelly röf.                            da taps graftit aff.  Fine an dry.

Da wye a faemly is beelt,
shapit, shaltered, luikit tae.

Completin da sang cycle

I da greff, faels                                                Twartree uple for da fire,
an skyumpies laid                                          da ess for cleanin, dan
sae dey can bed doon                                   whit’s owre höved back
inta new laand;                                                tae da göd aert.

Da wye we come inta dis wirld,
ös hit an, tipperin, laeve hit.

lassi - yoghurt
tagelia (plural of tageli): multi-purpose metal basins usually carried on the head
uple: (plural of upla): fuel pats made from dung and straw

Fire  - Sang Cycle (English version)

Shetland and Rajastan

The first notes

A good peat bank is one                                A good house has
with deep moor, a third layer,                        around the door,  
plenty blue at the bottom,                              a few buffalo
no rough woody bits to speak of,                 for lassi, for milk,
a dry hill for carrying,                                      and for manure.  Besides that,
and a loch to guddle in.                                 they’ll pull the plough.

The way gifts lie around our feet,
mostly we forget to look.

Finding the harmony

Ripper and flayer,                                            Gather all the dung,
rhythm of tushkar,                                            tagelia head-high,
pattern of peatbank;                                        mix it with straw,
wind work and sun work.                               flatten the uple;
Raise them and mound them,                      lay them to dry,
barrow full, basket full,                                    raise them and mound them;
trundle them, run with them,                          lift them and carry them,
a season’s work half done.                           a season’s work half done.

The way it sings in our blood,
but we don’t like its tune.

Making the song

The way the foundation is set,                      The foundation set well, uple built,
The wall built, clods shovelled,                     row on row, this way and that way,
heart bluest and best,                                     little round structures, shoulder high,
trim to the to; a thick turf roof.                         the tops grafted off.  Fine and dry.

The way a family is built,
shaped, sheltered, looked after.

Completing the cycle

In the basal ditch, turfs                                  A few uple for the fire,
and end pieces laid                                       ash for cleaning, then
so they can bed down                                    what’s over heaved back
into new land.                                                  to the good earth.

The way we come into this world,
use it and, tip-toeing, leave it.

© Christine de Luca 2009

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It all started last summer, with our golden retriever’s belly swelling up - a phantom pregnancy, the vet said. Then there was the smell of rotting wood in our toilet - a leaking joint along the cistern pipe, my husband said. Then my blood test came back - a slight anomaly, my GP said. Nothing serious.

No, nothing serious, except for that shaky feeling in the pit of my stomach. Like I was waiting for a train to hit me, but so far all I could hear was its whistle in the distance.

Our dog had to be put down because her abdomen turned out to be full of blood from a ruptured liver tumour. The toilet bowl needed replacing; it was leaking and balanced on nothing but a cracked waste pipe, no flooring, with potentially lethal consequences for our downstairs neighbour. And I was diagnosed with bowel cancer.

I had been hit at last. I felt almost - and rather perversely - a sense of relief.

When, barely a week later, we heard from Edinburgh City Council that the three-year-old statutory notice for building repairs on our tenement (back and front stone replacement and roof work) was finally going to be enforced, it couldn’t have happened at a better time. Everything was up for renewal: me, the family, the house.

We fetched our new puppy on 1^st August, the Swiss National Day, three days before I started my five-week course of combined radio- and chemotherapy.

The only other ray of light, which was to help me cope (and retain my sense of being a writer, in spite of everything) during the bleak days and months ahead, had come while everything else around me was beginning to fall apart: Two Ravens Press had accepted my collection of stories, called aptly (if coincidentally) ‘Fighting It’.

But it didn’t seem like I was fighting anything. Not yet. My first act after being diagnosed was to sift through the food stocks and spices in the kitchen cupboards, throwing out past-sell-by-dates, then refilling and labelling the jars - a bit like editing a text that has grown stale over time. My clothes were next. Some went to charity shops. A bellflower blue-green-and-white silk dress seemed made for a French artist friend. And then I was ready for a visit to Maggie’s Centre - such an uplifting place, in stark contrast to the Cancer Centre nearby.

Perhaps being a writer with an over-active imagination helped me picture (and prepare for) what lay ahead. I joined a young women’s group at Maggie’s and signed up for workshops: managing hair loss (the thought of losing my long hair was unimaginable); how to look good (and feel better); and Relaxation/Visualisation. With a girlfriend I went to a wig shop where I selected a couple of wigs - one with flowing long hair, the other cropped boyishly short. The latter was going to be my ‘real hair’, newly styled. The former my ‘real wig’, for glamour. That’s how I planned to keep my baldness a secret - with a story of reinvention.

On the first few days of my treatment I had to give two readings with my husband Ron Butlin, Edinburgh’s Poet Laureate (at Word Power Books to open the Edinburgh Fringe Book Festival, and at the National Library of Scotland). It felt good to stand there in front of packed audiences, pretending for those short moments that everything was fine. Ten days later I had another gig (at the Edinburgh International Book Festival). By this time, though, the strain of the treatment was beginning to tell and I had to fight exhaustion. I felt dissociated from my surroundings, as if I was in three places at once: performing in the bookshop tent with a cameraman filming me for a promo for Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature, popping chemo tablets labelled ‘cytotoxic’ (use gloves when handling) at our kitchen table, and lying immobile, half-naked, on the hard surface of the hospital’s radiotherapy machine, counting down the seconds as I visualised those bastard cancer cells being laser-blasted to kingdom come. Yes, visualisation was me at my most creative in those first weeks of hell.

Eventually I became too weak to catch the daily bus to hospital and had to be chauffeured like a decrepit old lady by friends (we’d sold our car years ago). When my weight dropped below forty kilos, I stopped checking. Into the fourth week I got so sick I had to be hospitalised, ending up in a cancer ward where I hid my pain and myself behind the curtains. I was taken to the radiotherapy department in a wheelchair - and I couldn’t have cared less. The books I had brought stayed in my bag. The writing notebook remained unopened. Nothing but my pain was real now. And my not being able to eat. But then, the food wasn’t exactly tempting - the only meal I remember enjoying even slightly was a plateful of cauliflower cheese… The night before I was allowed home, one of the nurses suggested I go and see the Edinburgh Fireworks from the ward balcony. I shivered as I watched the display in the company of two other patients, one of them an intrepid smoker emaciated to stick thinness, the other attached to several tubes on wheels. Transience and mortality had never been brought home to me more poignantly.

The treatment left me near-debilitated. Just as it finished, the builders’ scaffolding went up, shrouding the house. Workmen began drilling and banging away - and it felt eerily right, the building being attacked on all sides. I was bedridden for over a month, unable to sleep, unable to read, to listen to music, or even to watch TV. Unable to write. My body was on fire from the effects of the radiotherapy - I had an unnatural tan and my skin began flaking off. Ron was frantic with worry and exhaustion. Friends brought food, lent us their car, vaccinated Leila-puppy, telephoned, sent flowers, gifts, cards and emails to cheer me up. Eventually, Ron couldn’t cope with the added stress of Leila’s friskiness any longer - friends took her in for days at a time, then weeks. My mother flew over from Switzerland to look after us. We both needed her desperately; poor Ron was close to collapse. When she left, I was able to go for short walks again. And we got Leila back. Friends gave us their bijoux gatehouse to stay in because the tenement stairs were too much for me. Soon afterwards, my sister and her family arrived to help.

Thanks to the treatment, the tumour had shrunk to near-nothing. I now had exactly two months before the operation in early December. Two months that I spent training and playing with Leila and revising the stories in Fighting It one last time. My publisher visited to show me a mock-up of the cover - it was to become my talisman in hospital. I also took part in the launch of an anthology which contained a reprint of my story ‘The Death Queue’ - my only ‘cancer story’ and written several years before I myself was diagnosed. It felt incredibly life-affirming and therapeutic to re-engage with the outside world as well as with my identity as a writer, tinkering with work that was very nearly finished.

With a week to go until my operation, we moved back into our flat - to find the boiler leaking and beyond repair. First the toilet, now this! As if the house was playing a grim joke on us, imitating my body’s faulty ‘plumbing’.

In hospital the night before my operation, I jotted down various ideas for stories, projecting myself into a happier future. Later on as I lay in the semi-darkness, I fantasised about waking from the operation without the temporary ileostomy bag; I bargained, made promises, implored my body to be strong. Reality, of course, caught up with me. It always does. Recovering in the High Dependency Ward the following afternoon, I was presented with a vanity stoma kit. And that was that. Fighting it was no use; I was too weak, anyway - until the ketamine used in the anaesthetic kicked in, making me believe that the hospital staff were plotting to kill me, which rallied my spirits. But that’s another story…

Due to a minor complication that led to my abdomen being filled with blood (an eerie parallel to what had happened to Amber, our retriever), I needed another operation, and another general anaesthetic, without ketamine this time. Just before being wheeled off to the operating theatre, late on a Saturday night, I touched up my make-up. Ron thought I was mad. ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked, tersely. ‘You should worry when I don’t do this anymore.’

While Ron sat waiting for me outside the operating theatre, anxious and worn-out, he tried to lose himself in a new poem he had been commissioned to write for the Lord Provost’s Banquet - about ‘vibrant Edinburgh’. Imagination really does have the power to relieve, and release, us.

Christmas was only a week away when I checked myself out of hospital, ‘against doctors’ advice’. Although the operations and my response to the treatment had been a complete success (I never even lost my hair), my salt levels were dangerously low, probably due to my ‘bag’ and the fact I hadn’t been able to keep any food down. The vomiting stopped the instant I got home. A cheerful little Christmas tree had been set up next to my camp bed in the living room, my new sleeping quarters.

I had the best carers in the world: Ron answered get-well cards, calls and emails, organised my daily trips to the surgery for blood tests, the shopping etc, while my parents, having prolonged their stay in Scotland, cooked, cleaned, mended and fixed things in the flat and helped with Leila. I made a fast recovery - despite the hateful bag, which cramped my style, forcing me to wear loose clothing. Soon, I was well enough to proofread Fighting It and to take Leila for longer and longer walks. By the end of February I was back ‘on stage’ - at a fundraiser for Gaza. And a few days later, at the Glasgow Homoeopathic Hospital, I learnt how to inject myself with Iscador, a mistletoe extract to boost the immune system.

I have just returned from another stint in hospital and am once again, and very gratefully so, ‘bagfree’. Maybe it really is third time lucky: the operation went smoothly; I was given a room of my own, and I found that the menu had been changed, apparently in the past month. I was able to eat, enjoy, and thrive.

The scaffolding came down in March, after seven months of dust and darkness. The new slabs of stone are pale gold in the sunlight; the roof is now watertight; the birds have reclaimed the garden. Fighting It will be launched on 18 June, our wedding anniversary. It feels like a cloud has lifted. And I am ready to start afresh.

© Regi Claire 2009

Fighting It by Regi Claire is published by Two Ravens Press £9.99
ISBN: 978 1 906120 41 2
Publication date: June 2009

Buy from Two Ravens Press for £7.99: http://www.tworavenspress.com/HTML-Pages/Fighting-It.htm

It all started fairly well for me that day:
Akber praised me for my loyalty, my quiet step;
he was tired from audiences with nobles.
The sun dropped quickly over Fatehpur Sikri,
its sandstone pinker in the evening light.
A slight breeze riffled flowers and pools.
Akber had started his evening work: the getting
of a son.  A mighty kingdom needs an heir.
Three wives and still no child.  I think he would
have emptied half his treasury for this.

 
I bore his perfumed note to Miriam’s handmaid.
She whispered I should tell my master her mistress
is unclean, her auspicious time has passed, her stars
not in the ascendant.  I scurried back.
Those passages are dark and labyrinthine, but
it is my job.  ‘Bring me my first wife then,
my Jahanara.  I need a Muslim son.’ 
Even the nights are warm now.  He’s put aside
his fur-lined chauga, donned his airy one,
the one that shows his manhood.

 
Much of my life I spend in secret passageways.
At Queen Jahanara’s I glimpse her chamber,
see its mirrored splendour, gems embedded
in its walls.  Her handmaid says the mistress
has strained her back whilst arm-wrestling,
regretfully declines and offers an apology.
By now Akber has finished his ablutions,
climbed to his majestic plinth.  Impatient,
he shouts at me as if it’s all my fault.  ‘Surely,
I give them sport enough!  So that just leaves

 
my little Hindu, my sweet third wife,
my Jodhabai.  Take her this note.  There can be
no excuses.’  I hasten off, heart in my mouth:
I have a dreadful fear the rumour that she fell
whilst playing polo two nights ago is true.
I find her handmaid and confirm the worst.
Akber will take it out on me, his faithful servant
Sometimes I think a eunuch’s life is harder
than a king’s. I tell him they are all at prayer
to Durwa, for a son.  He sighs and says

‘Bring me a concubine then, that Persian one.’
No note this time.  Again I rush off underground,
come up like some nocturnal animal to find
the harem is festering with some disease. 
I get no further than the courtyard, but turn
and run for fear I too might be afflicted
and bear it to my king.  But when I reach
his chamber he is sound asleep.  I lower
the lamps, tiptoe to my post, think of all
his noble battles won, his conquests lost.

Fatehpur Sikri: palace of Akber, the Moghul king.
chauga: nightgown
Durwa: Hindu goddess of power and fertility

 
Court ladies were allowed to play polo, veiled, at night using a light fretwork puck. They were also encouraged to engage in such activities as arm wrestling.

© Christine de Luca 2009

Read the New Shetlander for the best of Shetland writing:
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Whoever is in charge of the public gardens
Has turned up the earth
For spring’s upheaval.
Entrenched clods, now exposed to breezy brightness,
Crust in the fresh air, becoming hard through.

Those small spindle legged creatures
With articulated shells
That had thrived in the moist dark
Scurry on the surface, smaller than the eye can tell.

They scrimmage, struck by the gentlest gust.
We had gone nowhere, half slept all morning.
Getting hotter,
Fought:
Overdue but unsure of the aim.
You had things to do. I left,
A wanting step, walked by the brown scape.
A dirt plot by the still lush slopes,
And stared at its honesty
At odds with its planned and pretty intent.
It would be just so, come summer.

Birds tweak out soil mites,
Their all-dark eyes like the curved backs of the creatures.

Healthy parasites, on our lashes, between the sheets
And in that dirt. Come summer,
Less filth, soil concealed.
Churned,
Compliant,
Ongoing.

On hard ground you thought of me
As made only of words
And nitpicked, time permitting;
Scratched the more than surface itch.

© Kate Charles 2009

I’ve heard your photographs described as intergalactic landscapes.

I used to imagine becoming a space traveller. As it turns out I have an incredible fear of flying, which is a bit of an impediment to becoming an astronaut. But in my work I’m always trying to find these imaginary landscapes I had in my mind’s eye from when I was a kid and people do often comment that my photographs look as if they’ve been taken from outer space.

But in fact they’re close-ups.

Yes, I joke that I’m a terrestrial cosmonaut. I’m hand-holding a camera, looking into the microcosm of the landscape, taking things out of context and playing around with depth of field. A lot of my subject material is rock, sand, lichen, and water, either water that’s non-reflective or water that’s reflective, depending on the light.

How small an area do you tend to focus on in your compositions, which often end up as very large images?

It’s not macro photography - maybe further down the line I’d like to get into that - I use a standard lens, but what I do is try to confuse the viewer, it’s a sort of beguilement. Sometimes I find I’ve thrown myself as well. Although the subject might only be thirty centimetres it has to become what I would call a vista, a mini landscape that will give no idea of its scale.

There are strange correspondences through different levels of nature. I’ve noticed that the rock of Salisbury Crags looks like a side of steak on a butcher’s slab.

It’s funny you should say that. I have some shots of rock that are so meat-like that one of my friends calls them ‘the meat photographs’! Things can look very different to what they actually are, and that’s what fascinates me. On a day out with my camera I can have the feeling there isn’t going to be much, then another world descends. I’m not a religious person but it’s almost like a religious experience, something is revealed. And because I work with traditional film - I don’t like the digital manipulation thing - when you send it to the developers, it’s like Christmas. I never look at the contact sheet of the images in the shop. I put them in my bag and bring them home, then let them lie for a couple of days and wait for the moment: I just sit on my little desk with a cup of tea, light a cigarette and then I start looking at them. I was never formally trained in photography. My camera is a tool for me. It’s a Canon AE1, very simple, no onboard computers. I got it in 1979, so it’s old, but it’s sturdy. I’ve dropped it down mountains and into water. I love taking photographs of coastal terrain and sometimes I slip and fall. Though I’ve taken a few knocks, the camera has always survived. It’s done better than I have, to be honest. A lovely little camera, it’s never let me down.

How do you feel about having some of your work in the Inspired Exhibition at the Mitchell Library?

When I was first asked to exhibit by Sheilagh Tennant, the curator, I said to her, hang on, I take pictures of rock and sand, how’s that going to tie in with a Robert Burns theme? (For that matter, I couldn’t see what Tracey Emin’s connection would be with Burns - maybe the unmade bed of Lothario Robert Burns.) Sheila encouraged me just to stick to my usual practice of photographing rocks and sand. She included two pictures: Homecoming Naturesque 1 - ‘Admiring Nature in her wildest grace,/ These northern scenes with weary feet I trace’ (‘Verses Written with a Pencil at the Inn at Kenmore’); and Homecoming Naturesque 2 - ‘Wildly here without control/ Nature reigns, and rules the whole;/ In that sober pensive mood,/ Dearest to the feeling soul’ (‘Castle Gordon’)

Your work has quite an affinity with Andy Goldsworthy’s landscape sculptures.

I bet Andy Goldsworthy was exactly the same as me when he was a kid, just playing around in the woods and making dens.

Weren’t you brought up in Leeds?

Yes, in a council estate called Seacroft, one of the roughest areas in Leeds.  But there were fields nearby, nothing like as manicured as they are now. There were cornflowers and lots of sparrows and skylarks. We spent all our time running around in these fields. When I was ten my family moved to an upmarket leafy suburb called Roundhay, which was close to some very wild woodlands. My love of nature came from my childhood experience of these places.

Has your imagination changed now you’re an adult?

No, and that makes me very happy. I’ve always found if you look at something carefully enough and long enough it undergoes a sort of metamorphosis. That’s always been the case for me. Proust once said, ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes.’ That idea is precious to me. Writers, poets, musicians and visual artists, they can all give you new eyes. It’s great that sometimes my own work does that for other people.

Has photography always been your main occupation?

I managed a band called Dominic Waxing Lyrical, then one day I realised I wanted to be out of doors, exploring coastlines. I had another look at some pictures I’d taken on the Outer Hebrides and saw a way forward. That was when I made the decision to take my photography seriously and pour my energies into that.

Who is your favourite writer?

Oh, I’m a Dylan Thomas man. One poem by him I absolutely love is called ‘Lament’. Each verse is for a different section of life. I can wake up in the morning and feel like I’m on verse five, the old man. But more often I wake up and I’m on verse one, the child.

www.simonnicholaswhite.com

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I found the self-portraits disturbing until I stopped trying to want them to be different, to conform to what I thought they should be. It was a precarious vision for me, a tightrope way of seeing, for baggage lurks on the edges of the eye’s mind, craving to turn it into something it is not, shuffling its rhetoric, its interpretative critical moulding and dissembling. It huffs and puffs and tries to be noticed, tries to intrude its perception - superior of course - into the eye’s vision. But there were blessed moments when I saw - or it seemed that I saw - what was in front of me.

Even harder for me, were his nudes. Reaction and emotion squabbled with my eyes and the objective interpreter was silenced.  But he was painting the nudes in the same way, I came to see, as he did his self-portraits - he was not trying to make his models beautiful, sensuous or erotic but was painting what he saw, with that extra shove, that emancipated detail that was not smeared or shaded out. And because detail was not elided into sidelines or suburbs, it was democratised, the result was unnerving, for we do not give the same credence in life to the marginal, the half-effaced, the timid; we worship the precocious, the declamatory, and here was someone who gave equal voice to what we usually submerge into peripheral vision.

At first glance you might say bold, assertive, but on longer contemplation I felt there was something much more tender and evocative in the democratic centrality of any part of the painting. There were no peripheries. The painting did not home in on this or that area, placing the rest in background. Yet it gained dimensionality from that, it did not lose it. What our eye or our thinking normally elided into background, was equally present which was why there was the feeling of the detail being pushed in front of our eyes.

Which I suppose was why his nude paintings, done in the early part of the 20th century, and in Austria, were originally seen as shocking. Anatomical details were not ignored or placed in shadow.  Because everything was included, because we saw what we had learned to efface from our seeing, it looked as if details of the body were given extra focus but they were not.  It was our cryptic way of seeing that was highlighted in the viewer and that must have been quite shocking to have one’s way of seeing - or not-seeing - made so apparent. But what was found shocking, rather than the ability to rearrange our perception through his art, was what was seen, in this new perception which hid nothing, imposed no ideals, left out no details, and because of that, eroticism flares out of the canvases.

Yet his other paintings show this same capacity, whether they depict fully or semi-clad figures, buildings or landscapes. The roofs of  buildings are intimately tiled. A thin tree squirms against a pink evening sky. There is an impression of lack of perspective but as you look closer, it is inclusion, not lack. By dismissing centrality and pulling in the margins, dimensions are multiplied.

Not just the galleries and museums but the streets of Vienna too have their own art exhibits and performers. There is the silver man, who moves with an amazing gliding technique of  slow motion, who turns to look at people who approach him and follows them with facial expressions and gestures, miming that invisible energy that flows between people, defying the apparent boundaries of our bodies. There are people who stand on their hands and remain there, perfectly balanced. There is a golden Mozart, complete with golden wig and golden flared and deep-cuffed jacket, golden knee-length trousers, golden stockings and buckled shoes.  But he stands on his plinth looking uneasy, looks around him as if he’s lost something and is looking for it. After the fluidity of the anonymous silver man, he looks agitated and uncomfortable as if he doesn’t want to be there. And perhaps because people sense this, there is no circle of onlookers as there is around the silver man. Or they may doubt his authenticity - there are so many Mozarts in Vienna after all. They are on posters, they stand outside restaurants, they weave in and out of the crowds. There again, perhaps his unease is deliberate, and he’s looking around him as if trying to orientate himself, wondering who these people are, wearing such odd clothes, and what on earth he is doing there.

I walk back from the city centre, following Argentinier Strasse.

The last rays of sun are falling on the Keplerplatz. A flock of pigeons have flown onto the ledge that juts out above the second floor windows of the Hotel Kolbeck. It’s not quite the roof and all the better for that, being sheltered from the wind that has rummaged through the city today, stirring the few pieces of rubbish lying in the streets, making people pull their collars tightly around their necks. The pigeons line the ledge above the stonework. Each window has a narrow frame of salmon pink, before the busts - heads and shoulders, all identical - protrude in elegant plaster, on each side of every window.

The building next door is even more ornate. On either side of the doorway are two large handsome sculpted torsos, bearing the pillars - supporting a balcony - on their shoulders. Higher up, portraits of unknown faces are curled and licked with baroque ornamentation, with folds of sculpted stone curtains hanging from them. The top storey has a painted façade, in red, gold and orange, figures holding staffs, goblets, clad in draperies. One has a dog at his feet, beside what looks like a rolled-up carpet.

As the sun vanishes behind buildings, the lower sky glows with pink.  The centres of the few clouds are murky purple and they have halos of golden light around them. Behind them the sky flushes a deeper pink, as if it was absorbing colour, like damp paper.

This colour reminds me of one of the Egon Schiele paintings - a landscape with hills so thick and layered, terraced and embroidered, they looked like tapestries with sequins stuck on them.  Then there were the trees, slivers of darkness with skinny leaves - a strip of water, two rocks, and from the water outwards, everything was rosy, unforgettable. It was called simply Versinkende Sonne. The colour wrapped the landscape - and you knew that it would soon be gone. But because he had caught it, this marvel could be carried with us, out into the tree-lined Museum Quartier, across the street and along the road in front of the Hofburg, where the horse-drawn carriages line the street, the horses standing with their heads down, submissive, waiting, white horses, brown, some dappled grey, some with their ears covered in white or black cloth, with a little lace decorating their foreheads.

A dark bird flies across the sky, now the colour of rusted gold. It perches on an aerial, flicking open its wings from time to time. Another joins it and they sit on the two ends of the aerial like two black apostrophies, turning the immense pinkness of the sky into a quotation.

If we sometimes forget that pre-Christian societies had an awareness of the secret mysteries of life, hidden from the ordinary light of day, yet which can be accessed and revealed via an inner illumination, Tessa Ransford’s poetry will certainly remind us of this perennial hidden knowledge. In her writing, she talks of the megalithic peoples, with their stone circles and cairns, pointing to alignments with earth and sky, and of the Greek myths with their contemporary relevance to psychological truth and inner understanding, the Greek word ‘psyche’ meaning ’soul’. She writes of the Dogon, who knew of Sirius’ dark twin star before it was discovered by modern astronomers, of the Buddha’s illuminated awareness, of the Christian stories and myths, of the coded mediaeval wisdom of La Dame à la Licorne Tapestries, and of the secret processes of alchemy.

Of the megalithic, Tessa writes in ‘An Easter’:
‘We climb to the Holy Cairn up a muddy/track and stand in the bitter wind/ at an altar face of broken boulders’

Her Medusa Dozen poems examine the Medusa myth, as well as pointing to the esoteric number 13, the number of annual lunar cycles, and the number of disciples plus Jesus.

She writes of the Dogon, in ‘In Praise of Libraries’:
‘In the street of Canopus east to west/where the Dogon walked, their heads in the stars/From gate of the Sun to gate of the Moon/the world’s wisdom was scrolled and shelved’

And of the Buddha, in ‘Buddha in Europe’:
‘The Buddha of healing has come to the centre of Europe’; in Meditation ‘I sit beside Lord     Buddha in the plane./He keeps his balanced pose/ upright, and can sleep there,/hands in the lotus position’; in Kamakura - ‘Earthquakes cannot touch him but a flower can/or a bowl of oranges… He is now. He is present. He is a house,/a mountain, an emptiness, a completion.’

From Christian imagery she writes, in ‘Rose Window, Vincennes’ - ‘The form of the rose is fire/wreaths of flame like tendrils/grow from the coiled heart’.

The esoteric, the inner, is inseparable from the earth, nature and the elements, as was known in pre-Christian times. The word ‘pagan’ is from the Latin pagus meaning  the country, and this meaning is retained in the French pays, paysage and paysan.

Tessa’s poetry is imbued with the imagery of nature, and the inhabitants of the nature kingdoms and with an intense awareness of the seasons. Trees in particular, figure in her poetry. The tree, Ygdrassil, the Axis Mundi, that which holds the worlds together - is a symbol of cosmic wholeness, the reflection of inner wisdom.

From ‘Parable’:  ‘Autumn came. The tree was lightsome,/shed a profusion of brilliant ideas./But the farmer was no fool:/”useless” he decided, and felled her.’ From Three Trees:  ‘Three trees grow in the wilderness,/ sturdy, straight and high, apart and far from Paradise/with roots and spreading branches,/ that meet in the starspun sky.’ From Roundabout Tree: ‘I stopped by two months later/sheltering from April showers,/looked up and saw a dazzling/canopy… of flowers’. From Future Now: ‘Trees are exceptional people/… Belonging fully to earth but living also in sky/They have no death but only transformations.’

Another symbol of inner wisdom is the snake. Although maligned in Christian mythology, in Eastern teachings the snake represents the kundalini, the serpent power coiled  at the base of the spine, with its  possibility of rising up the spinal column into the pineal gland in the brain, bringing enlightenment or illumination. As the Serpent Ouroboros, it circles the earth, tail in its mouth, the circle being a symbol both of recurring cycles and of wholeness. The coiling or spiralling serpent was the symbol of Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing dreams, and  it can still be seen today in the Caduceus, the staff of Hermes, representing medicine, and in the snake encircling the bowl or container, a symbol still used by pharmacists. This coiling, upward spiralling around a container reminds us too of alchemical symbolism and the transformation of heavy, dull lead (untransformed material consciousness) into bright gold (enlightened, illuminated consciousness).

There are many references to snakes  in Tessa’s work.
From ‘Set Loose’: ‘It was a ritual:snakes must be killed/even while they sleep, innocently coiled… Now I take up/the coiled serpent with its crushed head/and set it loose to ripple through the fields.’ From Letter Written from Greece: ‘The slain python/coils slowly to life again./Despite his lyricism/sober Apollo would have us slay and slay it/time and again/for reason’s sake… /But the earth is moving on her inward tide.’ From ‘Shadows from the Greater Hill (March 17th’): ‘I call in vigil/on whichever god or goddess/can take hold of     serpents/and win their beneficence.’

So we have the images of wholeness - tree, snake, rose window; and the processes of alchemy which result in the transformation into gold or light, as in ‘Alchemical Sonnet’: ‘Such ores refined in pain may lastly prove/Gold - in the alembic of our love.’

In her more recent work, Tessa’s deep affinity with nature’s seasons, elements and creatures is shown in such poems as ‘The Hunter’s Moon’, ‘Gravity and Grace’,  ‘Waxwings in the Park’ and ‘The Wishing Tree’. Her deep concern for the earth reveals itself in ‘Carbon Trading’, ‘Eco-house Speaks’, ‘Quiet Nature’, ‘Earth is not Mocked’.

Tessa’s poetry is also concerned with applied light - which means taking care of nature, of the environment and of other created beings - in other words, with the love that results from the soul processes of transformation. With applied light it would seem that wounds are healed, trees are nurtured rather than cut down, snakes are respected rather than killed and the ancient wisdom that reveals our cosmic and earthly interconnectedness reveals too that love, not dominion, is the natural law.

From ‘The Wishing Tree’: The wind was keening the tree was silent/clouds were luminous shoots were greening/blossoms were budding from every coin.

Not Just Moonshine, New and Selected Poems by Tessa Ransford. Luath Press, £12.99.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Markings 27.

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© Robert Louis Abrahamson 2009