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Authors: Helen Dunmore

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In the tea house the usual

customers sit with their cooling

tea glasses

and new pastries

sealed at the edge

with sticky droplets.

The waitress walks off,

calves solid and shapely as vases,

leaving a juicy baba

before her favourite.

Each table has bronze or white chrysanthemums

and the copper glass-stands imperceptibly

brush each other like crickets

suddenly focussed at dusk,

but the daily newspapers

dampened by steam

don’t rustle.

The tea house still has its blinds out

even though the sun is now amiably

yellow as butter

and people hurrying by raise up their faces

without abandon, briskly

talking to their companions;

no one sits out at the tables

except a travel-stained couple

thumbing a map.

The waitress reckons her cloths

watching the proprietor

while he, dark-suited, buoyant,

pauses before a customer.

Her gaze breaks upon the tea-house

like incoming water

joining sandbanks swiftly and

softly moving the pebbles,

moving the coloured sugar and coffee

to better places,

counting the pastries. 

Cold pinches the hills around Florence.

It roots out vines, truffles for lemon trees

painfully heated by charcoal

to three degrees above freezing.

A bristling fir forest

moves forward over Tuscany.

A secret wood

riddled with worm and lifeless

dust-covered branches

stings the grass and makes it flowerless,

freezing the long-closed eyelids of Romans.

They sleep entrusted to darkness

in the perpetual, placid, waveless

music of darkness.

The forest ramps over frontiers and plains

and swallows voluble Customs men

in slow ash. A wind sound

scrapes its thatching of sticks.

Blind thrushes in the wood blunder

and drop onto the brown needles.

There are no nests or singing-places.

A forest of matchwood and cheap furniture

marches in rows. Nobody harvests

its spongey woods and makes the trunks sigh

like toy soldiers giving up life.

All over Italy and northward

from fair Florence to München

and the cold city of Potsdam

the forest spreads like a pelt

on meadows, terraces, riverbanks

and the shards of brick houses.

It hides everywhere from everywhere

as each point of perspective

is gained by herds of resinous firs.

There may be human creatures

at nest in the root sockets.

They whicker words to each other

against the soughing of evergreens

while the great faces of reindeer

come grazing beside the Arno.

The soft fields part in hedges, each

binds each, copse pleats

rib up the hillside.

Darkness is coming and grass

bends downward.

The cattle out all night

eat, knee-deep, invisible

unless a headlight arcs on their mild faces.

The night’s damp fastens, droplet by droplet,

onto the animals.

They vibrate to the passing of a missile launcher

and stir

their patient eyelashes.

A blackbird

startled by floodlights

reproduces morning.

Cattle grids tremble and clang,

boots scrape

holly bursts against wet walls

lost at the moment of happening.

The Raw Garden
is a collection of closely-related poems, which are intended to speak to, through, and even over each other. The poems draw their full effect from their setting; they feed from each other, even when the link is as mild as an echo of phrasing or cadence.

It is now possible to insert new genes into a chromosomal pattern. It is possible to feed in new genetic material, or to remove what is seen as faulty or damaged material. The basic genetic code is contained in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), and its molecular structure is the famous double helix, so called because it consists of two complementary spirals which match each other like the halves of a zip. Naturally-occurring enzymes can be used to split the double strand, and to insert new material. The separate strands are then recombined to form the complete DNA helix. By this process of gene-splicing a new piece of genetic information can be inserted into a living organism, and can be transmitted to the descendants of the organism.

It seems to me that there is an echo of this new and revolutionary scientific process in the way each poet feeds from the material drawn together in a long poetic tradition, “breaks” it with his or her individual creative voice, and
recombines
it through new poems.

One thing I have tried to do in these poems is to explore the effect which these new possibilities of genetic manipulation may have on our concept of what is natural and what is unnatural. If we can not follow Romantic poets in their assumption of a massive, unmalleable landscape which moulds the human creatures living upon it and provides them with a constant, stable frame of reference, then how do we look at landscape and at the “natural”? We are used to living in a profoundly human-made landscape. As I grew up I realised that even such apparently wild places as moors and commons were the product of human decisions and work: people had cut down trees, grazed animals, acquired legal rights. But still this knowledge did not interfere with my sense that these places were natural.

The question might be, what does it take to disturb the sense of naturalness held by the human being in his or her, landscape? Is there a threshold beyond which a person revolts at a feeling that changedness has gone too far? Many of these poems focus on highly manipulated landscapes and outcrops of “nature”, and on the harmonies and revulsions formed between them and the people living among them.

Perhaps the Garden of Eden embodies some yearning to print down an idea of the static and the predictable over our knowledge that we have to accept perpetual changeability. The code of the Garden of Eden has been broken open an infinite number of times. Now we are faced with a still greater potential for change, since we have acquired knowledge of the double helix structure of DNA. If the Garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected
light off roadside snow. This Garden of Eden propagates itself in strange ways, some of which find parallels in far-fetched horticultural techniques such as air layering, or growing potatoes in a mulch of rotted seaweed on white sand. I hope that these poems do not seem to hanker back to a prelapsarian state of grace. If I want to celebrate anything, it is resilience, adaptability, and the power of improvisation.

The potatoes come out of the earth bright

as if waxed, shucking their compost,

and bob against the palm of my hand

like the blunt muzzles of seals swimming.

Slippy and pale in the washing-up bowl

they bask, playful, grown plump

in banks of seaweed on white sand,

seaweed hauled from brown circles

set in transparent waters off Easdale

all through the sun-fanned West Highland midnights

when the little potatoes are seeding there

to make necklaces under the mulch,

torques and amulets in their burial place.

 

The seals quiver, backstroking

for pure joy of it, down to the tidal

slim mouth of the loch,

they draw their lips back, their blunt whiskers

tingle at the inspout of salt water

then broaching the current they roll

off between islands and circles of oarweed.

 

At noon the sea-farmer

turns back his blanket of weed

and picks up potatoes like eggs

from their fly-swarming nest,

too fine for the sacks, so he puts them in boxes

and once there they smell earthy.

At noon the seals nose up the rocks

to pile there, sun-dazed,

back against belly, island on island.

and sleep, shivering like dogs

against the tug of the stream

flowing on south past Campbelltown.

 

The man’s hands rummage about still

to find what is full-grown there.

Masts on the opposite shore ring faintly

disturbing themselves, and make him look up.

Hands down and still moving

he works on, his fingers at play blinded,

his gaze roving the ripe sea-loch.

What I get I bring home to you:

a dark handful, sweet-edged,

dissolving in one mouthful.

I bother to bring them for you

though they’re so quickly over,

pulpless, sliding to juice,

a grainy rub on the tongue

and the taste’s gone. If you remember

we were in the woods at wild strawberry time

and I was making a basket of dockleaves

to hold what you’d picked,

but the cold leaves unplaited themselves

and slid apart, and again unplaited themselves

until I gave up and ate wild strawberries

out of your hands for sweetness.

I lipped at your palm –

the little salt edge there,

the tang of money you’d handled.

As we stayed in the wood, hidden,

we heard the sound system below us

calling the winners at Chepstow,

faint as the breeze turned.

The sun came out on us, the shade blotches

went hazel: we heard names

bubble like stock-doves over the woods

as jockeys in stained silks gentled

those sweat-dark, shuddering horses

down to the walk.

A pear tree stands in its own maze.

It does not close its blossom all night

but holds out branchfuls of cool

wide-open flowers. Its slim leaves look black

and stir like tongues in the lamp-light.

It was here before the houses were built.

The owner grew wasteland and waited for values to rise.

The builders swerved a boundary sideways

to cup the tree in a garden. When they piled rubble

it was a soft cairn mounting the bole.

The first owner of the raw garden

came out and walked on the clay clods.

There was the pear tree, bent down

with small blunt fruits, each wide where the flower was,

shaped like a medlar, but sweet.

The ground was dense with fermenting pears,

half trodden to pulp, half eaten.

She could not walk without slipping.

Slowly she walked in her own maze,

sleepy, feeling the blood seep

down her cold fingers, down the spread branch

of veins which trails to the heart,

and remembered how she’d stood under a tree

holding out arms, with two school-friends.

It was the fainting-game,

played in the dinner-hour from pure boredom,

never recalled since. For years this was growing

to meet her, and now she’s signed for her own

long mortgage over the pear tree

and is the gainer of its accrued beauty,

but when she goes into her bedroom

and draws her curtains against a spring night

the pear tree does not close its white blossom.

The flowers stay open with slim leaves flickering around them:

touched and used, they bear fruit.

Restless, the pæony truss tosses about

in a destructive spring wind.

Already its inner petals are white

without one moment of sun-warmed expansion.

The whole bunch of the thing looks poor

as a stout bare-legged woman in November

slopping her mules over the post office step

to cash a slip of her order book.

The wind rips round the announced site

for inner city conversion: this is the last tough

bit of the garden, with one lilac

half sheared-off and half blooming.

The
AIDS
ad is defaced and the Australian

lager-bright billboard smirks down

on wind-shrivelled passersby who stayed put

to vote in the third Thatcher election.

The porch of the Elim Pentecostal Church brightens

as a woman in crimson and white suit

steps out, pins her hat down

then grasps the hands of her wind-tugged grandchildren.

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