Glen Cavaliero

These pages have been created by Ray Russell at the Tartarus Press. Click here to email Tartarus Press. Click here to access Tartarus Press web pages

. . . . . . . . . . . . Ancestral Haunt Platt's Wood was down, the timber thrown to villas. How the place had spread! The little hub where the great-aunts kept their cuckoo clock and the horses used to drink was crammed, all motor cars and women in short frocks: the crush was fearful. I do not think I'll dream like that again if I can help it. Bring in the trolley, Sarah.   Sarah is down, six feet under, and the mistress followed two years later, regretful to the last. The town has grown as she predicted; like a view her life is framed and hangs beside the others still remembered. (Poor Ethel eventually got married and the lawyer's son absconded.) On Mondays the Museum is closed.   Now we're all windows and particular shrubs. The twiddly turret of the Primitive Methodist chapel whisks up, in a froth of catmint and old rose, pomander dust that counter-scents each moment. From the fields where the by-pass must not go we see Platt's Wood sprout through the tiles. This town inhabits us. We call that being at home.   From Ancestral Haunt, Poetry Salzburg, 2002     . . . . . . . . . . Arrest I would be quiet, in this privacy of snow ..crusted on a quagmire . . . would walk delicately . . . but without delight   haunting the quiet. A spectre fire . . cossets the palms boulders . . ..shrug off surfaces . . . glassed by rain   drumming on the quiet. Dead light . . lies low on the moor, . . . ice cracks on peat. . . . I stand to gather   my own quiet in case the dark . . makes me a white thing . . . frost-light as a spook . . . in warm black . . . . silence.   from Elegy for St Anne's, Warren House Press, 1982   return to main page   Page updated 8th October 2006