ABOUT FENLIGHT
Fenlight started as occasional poems in a poetry notebook, written after taking long walks through the fields and across the tracks around Meldreth in south Cambridgeshire where I live. One morning after a long time of only seeing grass and wide acres of enormous farms like prairies a hare jumped up in front of me so close I could almost touch him. He became the subject of the first poem.
Having recently moved from Cumbria in the North of England, the walks along hedges and ditches in late winter and early spring, were a way of discovering the place I had moved to, and continuing to expose myself to the elements. I wanted to stay open to the beauty of the natural world and to discover those people, places, myths that were indigenous and remaining in the countryside/landscape on the flatness of East Anglia.
Mountains can create darkness, flat lands create light and I was waking up in a new place, letting go of an old one, hence the title. I also knew that John Clare had walked out ‘botanising’ as he described it 40 miles North of here. My feeling was that if I carried on walking eventually I would reach the sea quite easily, a journey of the imagination and spirit back towards water the wildness that seems to dominate this area, the sky, the waterways and the land almost asking us to go there.
The natural world has always informed my writing. The Romantic tradition in Cumbria was a cradle and an inspiration, but how does high romanticism translate into a more urban densely populated environment, where habitats and lives are being destroyed, green spaces created artificially and it seems sometimes that the whole infrastructure of the earth is creaking? Not to mention global warming, the change in the pattern of the seasons, and the number of notices saying’ ‘Private Keep out.’ I wanted to see what a quest for beauty, and connection; the power of nature, feeling, folk tradition stories of the marvellous or supernatural, observations of the lives of ordinary people would yield in this place Were they there underneath the surface, did they secretly remain? Initially the poems were going to be an alphabet one for each letter and in that sense I saw them as a naming, as the aborigines, refer to the invisible pathways all over Australia as the Dreaming tracks or song lines. And tell in their myths of beings that wandered over the land in Dreamtime singing out the name of everything that crossed their path and so singing everything in the world into existence.
The desire to re look at wild places in a different light did yield connections, transformations which I could never have guessed at on some of those cold mornings: Mysteriously just beyond the long hedges there was one singer song writer, and serious acoustic guitar player who himself had walked inner city streets looking for the human, the power in ordinary lives. Richard Newman saw in the poems a legacy of the folk tradition a musical world he worked in for a great part of his life, and also an echo of a similar spiritual journey questioning the materialism we live with and wondering about the relationship of the ordinary person to the natural world, a quest to find the mysteries, the essences that remain. I gave Richard the freedom to interpret any of the poems that spoke to him as freely as he wished, and translate them into songs lyrically and musically From an initial 26 poems came 12 songs and 19 poems, 3 linking cinquains. They fall into three sections:
What is hidden, The places found at the heart of fields, and in the final section ‘WATER HELD ME’ what is timeless and remains
The link between poetry and music has always been there since the earliest times perhaps because the cadence and movement of language is much the same as that of music and music can give that a deeper resonance and a fresh perspective on the meaning of words. A musician will hear the cadences and then the strength of the rhythm of the words.
Ezra Pound reiterated this in his essay ‘The Art of Poetry’
‘Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause. In short behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art, which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern and you are bound by no others’
We hope we have created in this poem ballad, a sequence of poetry and songs, which reflect a spiritual and emotional journey, through natural world for others to enjoy as a poet and musicians particular response to this place, in the early 21st century.
I hope now that the sequence which forms the basis for this song cycle, celebrates the state of the natural world where it is still present, asks questions about its absences, lament passings and hold onto the imaginative power of universal truths about our humanity and our relationship to nature that are held in this landscape.